In the face of multiple global-scale crises, what direction should we take as artists and thinkers? What can we do when all we have is a bag of bad ideas? What importance does art have when the earth is burning? There is a growing sense of paralysis: all available options seem inadequate, but we’re not about to give up.
While we feel compelled to hack, critique, or develop answers to the many man-made challenges in the world, the usual polemics of the art and tech sphere ring a bit futile. Idle criticism is useless without proposals for change, yet action without thinking is what got us here in the first place.
Speaking to this shared sense of analysis paralysis, Rosemary Lee and Sophie-Carolin Wagner discuss what art and theory have to offer a world on the brink. This conversion is a starting point for dialogue about cultural actors’ role in confronting real-world problems and the current state of interdisciplinary work with art and technology.
with Sophie-Carolin Wagner
16 June 2022, Art Meets Radical Openness, AFO, Linz
AMRO, Art Meets Radical Openness, is a biennial festival for art, hacktivism and open cultures, organized since 2008 by servus.at in cooperation with the Linz University of Art, Department of Time-Based Media.
The 2022 edition of Art Meets Radical Openness is dedicated to the rituals and the philosophies of debugging. As a gathering of communities with interests across arts and cultures, networked technologies and political action, AMRO offers space for sharing knowledge and practices, focusing on the potential of debugging both inside and outside of the purely technical realm.