PRIMER19 Workshop by Becoming Co-Founders Grace Turtle & Andreu Belsunces:...
Event Information
Description
Join us for PRIMER19 Workshops Saturday, June 15, 2019!
All PRIMER19 workshops are open to the public as an extension of the PRIMER19 Conference programming occurring at Parsons, The New School on June 13-14, 2019*.
This year's PRIMER conference theme, FUTURES FOR ALL, highlights the wisdom and power of creating diverse spaces for interrogating the 'inevitable'. We intend to bring together participants from across industries and academia to share ideas, methods and projects that examine the reciprocal relationship between design, the world we live in, and the futures we want.
Workshop Info
Title: Automated Control Wars
Presenters: Grace Polifroni Turtle & Andreu Belsunces
Grace Polifroni Turtle; Queer Futurist, Cyberfeminist at Becoming & Experience Design Manager at Deloitte Digital
Grace is a post-disciplinary designer exploring futures, transitions and critical becoming’s produced through collaborative fiction, performance and play. Grace plays in two worlds, the first as an Experience Design Manager in Deloitte Digital, working across experimental futures research, strategy, service and experience design, and as a member of Becoming, an emerging scenario action-research collective based in Barcelona.
Her practice largely concerns the futuring of cities and organisations and the reimagining of how we occupy and experience situated contexts as complex sociotechnical, cultural and political spaces - creating the conditions for transformative, substantial and enduring change.
Andreu Belsunce; Sociologist of Design, Technology, and Fiction & Co-Founder Becoming
Andreu researches the intersections between the sociology of media, design and technology, the politics of fiction, and collaborative practices. He is currently an associate professor of critical thinking and speculative design at Escola Massana and Istituo Europo di Design.
In the field of art and culture, Andreu has collaborated with Sónar +D (Barcelona), STRP (Eindhoven), UNESCO (Montevideo), The Wrong Biennale (International) and Medialab Prado (Madrid) among others.
He writes in different media and his work has been published in books, such as Crossmedia Innovations (Peter Lang) andDesign Does (Elisava). Andreu works as a consultant for different companies and is co-founder of Becoming, an experimental research studio on emerging scenarios.
Workshop Overview
Automated Control Wars is a collaborative-fiction pop-up research space, exploring emerging scenarios pulsating on our present, where different ideological agendas and understanding of what technology, humans and nature could and should be, are confronted, in struggle to define their place in a possible future.
ACW adopts performative-fictions to unveil potential scenarios that may (or may not) become reality tomorrow. Furthermore, ACW is an attempt to decolonise future rewiring our imaginaries to project other worldly becomings.
Starting from a structure where four sociotechnical scenarios defended by different sectors of today’s society are opposed, participants will design strategies and look for the means to impose their ideas of the future to the rest of the teams. Each round, group actions will provoke reactions and responses to new unexpected events. As a result of conflicts and alliances, a recursive and collaborative worldbuilding will take place.
The PRIMER ACW workshop will stretch your imaginaries into the unknown, offering ways to achieve diverse futural outcomes beyond present realities. Through the collaborative, performative and recursive imagining of worlds, ACW will present ways for designers and kin to experiment with action-on-the-world, extend social imaginaries, mediate decisions and propose transitions by enacting and rehearsing fictive worlds.
As a means to explore the unknown, ACW will explore ways of using fiction as a technology and and imagination as tool of world-making. We invite you to explore possibilities beyond a rational understanding of the social-whole at a systems level and challenge contestational notions of democracy, nation states, regional authorities and many systems of living.
Key Workshop Takeaways
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A different posture and understanding of how to use design art, technology development, education, activism or public policy to influence worldbuilding decisions that lead to actual becomings.
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Strategic direction and agency for navigate change while coordinating actions, initiatives and influences to be able to transition towards different futures.
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Insight into how to use grounded, experiential learning in crafting textural analysis of social behaviour, posture and mindset in response to near futures from a post-anthropocentric point of view.
Special Notes
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PRIMER19 workshops are scheduled for A.M. and P.M. While this workshop is currently scheduled for the P.M. time slot, the final starting time may vary depending on scheduling needs. Workshop ticket holders will be notified accordingly.
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Attendees who purchase a PRIMER19 conference ticket receive a discount off of all PRIMER19 related workshops. Please check your confirmation email or contact theprimerconference@gmail.com for discount-related questions or problems.
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Student Tickers are available to purchase for individuals who (a) purchase using their official .edu email address AND (b) show a valid, current student ID/verification when checking into the conference and workshop.
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If you want to attend the PRIMER19 conference or affiliated workshops but are experiencing economic hardship, please visit the extenuating circumstances page on our website and we'd be happy to work with you!
Other PRIMER19 Workshops:
PRIMER19 Workshop by Andrés Valencia The Future is Human: A Toolkit for Progress
PRIMER19 Workshop by Frank Spencer: Wicked Opportunities: Innovation Through Foresight
PRIMER19 Workshop by Pierre Shaw & Kishan San: Platforms and Their Protagonists
PRIMER19 Workshop by Chirryl-Lee Ryan: Impact The World Isn't Ready For
PRIMER19 Workshop by Grace Turtle & Andreu Belsunces: Automated Control Wars
*What is PRIMER?
PRIMER conference was created to prepare you for the future and to equip you to help shape it. It is the annual conference (in the US and Europe) produced by the Design Futures Initiative, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in San Francisco, CA and the annual gathering for the Speculative Futures community with 20 (and growing) chapters worldwide.
We welcome anyone to join us! Conference attendees (and localized MeetUp members) span a wide array of designers, artists, technologists, makers, students, and organizations whose work focuses on questioning and rethinking our technologies, products, and systems, or proposes alternative narratives and future worlds.
Stay connected! For more information and updates, join our mailing list and follow us on social media.
