Fest-Forward Workshops
Montréal, Amsterdam, Tokyo | 2022
The Fest-Forward series of speculative workshops is part of the MITACS-funded research project Festival as Methodology: Reenvisioning interdisciplinary encounters at the intersection of art, music, and technology. This research project explores the transforming role of the festival as a social actor, which beyond the display of artistic works, becomes a critical meeting space between artists, professionals, and the co-investigative public.
This research is rooted in an approach towards curation, which I coined Curatorial Practice as Research-Creation (CPasRC). CPasRC reimagines curation to go beyond putting things together for display, but curation as inherently concerned with facilitating interdisciplinary and cross-cultural encounters in joint meaning-making. In other words, this research reimagines the curatorial project, in this case the festival, as a space that is uniquely adapted to address the most pressing questions of our time through the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural encounters it facilitates.
The methodology for the Fest-Forward workshops was inspired by the Digital Democracy Workshop Kit by Michel Hohendanner and Chiara Ullstein, Liberating Structures and the techno-cultural workshop. Taking a speculative design approach these workshops are aimed at imagining future scenarios in which concrete tools, activities, and practices aid art in becoming an investigative tool for joint meaning-making between artists, professionals, and the wider public. The next step in the workshops evolution is aimed at incorporating critical material engagement with the emerging technologies that impact society, such as AI, XR, and web3.
Fest-Forward: Imagining Future Festivals
August 23, 2022 @ MUTEK with Meaghan Wester and Marek Blottiere
After two years of interrupted cultural activities, a long-awaited return to "normal" rightfully excites artists, organizers, and audiences alike. This excitement, however, threatens to mask the existential questions that the ongoing pandemic has been raising for the cultural sector and society at large: the fragility of human co-existence in times of rapid technological advancements, climate catastrophe, and global health crises.
COVID-19 has shown that the adaptability of festivals working in the digital creative realm makes them uniquely positioned to address these questions. This is not achieved through a false sense of "solutionism" but through shifting perceptions and generating new understandings. This session invites artists, curators, industry professionals, and the wider public to jointly imagine the changing role of the festival beyond a platform for artistic practice towards a vehicle for critical investigations of the existential questions of our time.
Fest-Forward: Governing the Smart Wall
September 16, 2022 @ Colours of Surveillance Europe Conference
The workshop "Fest-Forward: Governing the Smart Wall" was part of a series of experimental encounters, which reenvision curation from an act of putting things together in display towards the curatorial project in itself becoming a place of joint meaning making between artists, curators, affected communities, and the co-investigative public. In this workshop participants jointly speculate on how an exhibition could become a tool for not only commenting on but more so influencing policy making around the question of algorithmic immigration and border control.
Taking a speculative design approach the workshop is aimed at imagining future scenarios in which concrete tools, activities, and practices that could aid the investigative curatorial project in extending its influence towards the policy realm. Features of these tools need to consider the various challenges posed by the highly racialized application of AI in immigration and border control, the involvement of affected communities in the making of these tools and critical assessments of the work these tools do. By speculating about future scenarios, in which art+technology become a way of addressing issues algorithmic immigration and border, this workshop ultimately addresses the very present policy questions of discrimination, racialization, and algorithmic surveillance in a different light.
Fest-Forward: Soundscaping Future Festivals
December 7, 2022 @ MUTEK.JP
© Shigeo Gomi
The past 3 years have made incredible advances into the realm of hybrid realities transcending all the forms along the Mixed Reality Continuum. The question that lingers is what remains after 3 years of hybrid experiences. What place will XR play in guiding the future of festivals? How can festivals mobilize these hybrid spaces to critically address the social questions of our times? How can festivals mobilize these spaces to not further separate but to connect us?
Inspired by Japan’s environmental music movement of the 80s, the Fest-Forward: Soundscaping Future Festivals workshop explores these speculative questions through reimagining the festival’s auditory relationship with its urban environment. Employing the latest technologies for AR sound, which are location-based and spatialized, the workshop prompts its participants to imagine alternative futures, in which the festival, the urban environment, and ultimately people’s relationship to either are transformed.