Open call for Technologies of Critical Conscientization presented by The Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research

Information session: January 15, 12–1pm
Application deadline: January 20
Residency dates: April 23–May 3

The Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research (CAD+SR) announces that proposals for visiting researchers at Conscientizações Crticas Tecnológicas (Technologies of Critical Conscientization, or Con/Crit/Tec), which will be held April 23-May 3, 2023, are currently being accepted. Artists, designers, technologists, activists, and other transdisciplinary researchers are encouraged to apply to CAD+SR. The application deadline is January 20, 2023, with notifications sent out on January 30. Con/Crit/Tec is open to 30 international participants and 30 Brazilian participants. On January 15, 2023, applicants are invited to an information session.

The importance of alternate geographies and ontologies of consciousness in relation to the digital, informational, and computational is emphasized in Con/Crit/Tec. It shifts technologies away from the laboratories, classrooms, and imaginaries of the Global North and toward their everyday reinventions and appropriations taking place everywhere – in the gambiarras, in the antagonistic activism of artists and other communities, in indigenous, anti-racist, and feminist on/offline technologies of resistance, in transnational human-machine translations, in alternative histories/pasts/presents of technological counter-hegemonies and archives, and in anarchic activism. The gathering will recall and develop technologies that prioritize planetarity and plurality, while resisting modernity/coloniality and extractivism.

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Silvana Bahia (Olabi/Pretalab), Rodrigo Ochigame (Leiden University), Carlos Oliveira (Vamoss/SuperUber/UFRJ), Fernanda Pitta (MAC-USP), and Naine Terena (Itaú Cultural/Unemat) will join as Faculty Fellows. The residency will also host numerous distinguished visiting artists and guest lecturers/facilitators, including Giselle Beiguelman, Joseph Kamaru/KMRU, Moisés Patrício, Rosana Paulino, Luciara Ribeiro, and others. Residency convenors: Dalida María Benfield (CAD+SR & Tierra Común), Christopher Bratton (CAD+SR & Aalto University), Bruno Moreschi (CAD+SR, GAIA/University of São Paulo & Tierra Común), and Gabriel Pereira (London School of Economics & Tierra Común).

Brazilian philosopher lvaro Vieira Pinto emphasizes the need to de-essentialize technology through a critical consciousness that emphasizes the multiplicity of contexts in which technologies are expressed and the always irreducible human labor that makes them material – even when they appear to be immaterial – in his book The Concept of Technology (2005). Similarly, educator Paulo Freire and geographer Milton Santos place a premium on critical consciousness when encountering the world and its instruments, whether they are already in place or still to be developed. This philosophical and political approach to the digital/technical/informational; one of conscientização—conscientization—informs the residency’s joint activity.

The residency will be organized around complementary research threads such as ancestral indigenous technologies, Brazilian digital art and technology, activist technologies through the lens of BIPOC and diasporic intellectual thought, building computers from non-rational computational approaches, and translations between machines, humans, and more-than-humans, with the goal of expanding, problematizing, and rethinking the communication tools we require.

Casa do Povo, a cultural center that revisits and reinvents conceptions of culture, community, and memory, will host the residence. Casa do Povo, which is home to a dozen various groups, movements, and collectives, broadens the concept of culture. Art is viewed as a key tool in an ongoing process of social transformation in its interdisciplinary, process-based programming and socially involved activities. Literally “The People’s House,” Casa do Povo’s work axes (memory; collective and socially engaged practices; conversation and connection with its surroundings) emerge from contemporary circumstances in direct relation to the historical, Jewish, and humanist underpinnings of the Casa do Povo. Tierra Comn, which brings together researchers and activists responding to data colonialism in Latin America and beyond, is another Con/Crit/Tec partner.