It has indeed been quite some time since the last blog post, and understandably, a lot has happened. As much as I would love to write about the great play by Lena Kitsopoulou in Athens,1 or the brilliant retrospective by the artists Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau in Linz,2 or the 180+ hours I spent playing Elden Ring on my gaming PC3; (it overheats all the time but shall keep me warm enough to survive the winter energy crisis in the UK).
Yet, I think we would all agree that it would be most appropriate to write about our FEINART summer school, one of the major events of the programme, with nearly 100 participants from all over the globe.
Firstly, I am very grateful for all the positive feedback from the participants regarding a little funny algorithm, which I presented at the ‘little pieces’ presentations series (where each FEINART ESR presented their experience from their fieldwork…although technically speaking, I am not entirely sure if I have properly followed the given brief, anyway…). I have also received quite a few suggestions to further develop this little web application I built. Rest assured that YOU have been heard. I would like to improve a lot on the functionality (and humour 😉 ), such as building a much higher generative capacity (it is not AI-powered at the moment; I ‘hardcoded’ everything), or build a self-serving interface where users can upload their own data, IMAGINE THAT! —I will share and explain my code—but as I mentioned I have done it in a super-fast manner…let’s say the code is a bit ‘ugly’ right now. Who knows, I have been looking for a theme to expand on via this writing platform, so I may even devote the next few blogs to a kind of algorithm development series, sharing some research and progress etc.
(If you have not attended the summer school and would like to know what this app is exactly, I am afraid that I am just going to leave you hanging for now—please wait for the next blog post).
Secondly, of course, a big thanks to all the participants, particularly the speakers, the workshop hosts and all the representatives from the partner organisations. I was pleasantly surprised to see Carolina Rito referencing the work of Wendy Chun in her lecture, ‘The Infrastructures of the Exhibitionary: Re-Imagining the Epistemic and Aesthetic Functions of Art Spaces,’ illustrating the recursive logic underlying the technocratic, neo-liberal machine behind the global art market.
All the workshops were brilliantly inquisitive. I attended ‘Self-Governance & Commoning’ by Massimo de Angelis, Marina Naprushkina & Mi You. It was an incredibly dense, yet refreshing workshop, with a mix of games/simulations, lectures with conspiracy-inspired aesthetics (which is a personal favourite) and some collective art making, on which I would like to say a few words—but then on reflection I think it is best to mention instead how Massimo de Angelis responded to Angela and John’s closing remarks at the end of the conference with—‘Welcome to communing!’ It was exactly what this summer school was.
1 https://www.onassis.org/whats-on/frankenstein-lost-paradise-lena-kitsopoulou
2 https://www.ooekultur.at/exhibition-detail/the-artwork-as-a-living-system
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elden_Ring