Monovacation (2013) is installed in the Designing Hope exhibition at Node Forum in Frankfurt from 26 June to 2 July 2017.
I will be giving a talk on data asymmetry and use of complex networks on Saturday July 1st 1:30pm at Mousonturm Karen Eliot Stage.
The talk will be followed up by a two-day Graph Commons Workshop: Mapping Civic Data Networks July 1st Saturday 2:30 pm – 5:30 pm and July 2nd Sunday 2:30 pm – 5:30 pm. Register for the workshop here.
Designing Hope
26 June – 2 July 2017
NODE17 Forum for Digital Arts
Hope fuels our actions to change the present and aspire for a better future. Hope bears transformative power and is in itself a creative and formative force. The hopeful mind does not give up but continues to invent solutions for problems it is faced with. It constantly imagines alternatives for the given, utopias that have the potential of becoming true. But this restless pursuit of the better is what makes hope a bittersweet pill, as it makes us endure the worst just for the sake of hoping that some day things might change, as long as we continue working and fighting for it. Hope is what’s left to humankind after Pandora opened her mythical box. The great evils escaped torturing us from then on – however, hope remained. The question raised is whether hope is the means to challenge all evils or, as German philosopher Nietzsche would put it, the greatest evil of them all? Either way: Hope is a mighty force.
This is what makes it so appealing to designers, politicians and advertisers. Hope can be used and abused by stirring up fears or amplifying confidence. The tools for this are the rhetorics of hope which manifest in images and imaginaries or in endless speeches peppered with the adequate keywords and delivered in the right tone. Technologies play a crucial part in this, as they are invented and used to maintain these rhetorics. At the same time they are also subject to our hopes. Although we don’t follow a modernist idea of technological progress leading to a brighter future anymore, we still engineer our world to tackle ecological, political and social deficits.
The exhibition “Designing Hope” gathers international artists who reflect on this ambiguity of hope and its making. Their works confront us with utopian and dystopian narrations, with investigations into the structures of designing hope, with ironic comments on simplistic promises and with promising eccentric hacks into our everyday life.
Artists:
Adam Harvey, Alacoque Ntome, Amelia Marzec, Amelie Hinrichsen, Awuor Onyango, Benedikt Gross, Benjamin Van Bebber, Burak Arikan, César Escudero Andaluz, Eden Mitsenmacher, Else Tunemyr, Felix Kosok, Florian Egermann, Golan Levin, Heath Bunting, Jared Onyango, Jeremy Bailey, Joey Lee, Kathia Von Roth, Lab[au], Lauren Mccarthy, Leo Hofmann, Lilian Nejatpour, Martín Nadal, Marshmallow Laser Feast, Melisa Allela, Mika Satomi And Hannah Perner-wilson (kobakant), Milad Forouzandeh, Mohsen Hazrati, Neue Dringlichkeit, Onformative, Pinar Yoldas, Shawn Sims, Simon Weckert, Tega Brain.
More information on Node Forum 2017
https://17.nodeforum.org