.signals from the south

Geraldine Juárez is a self-taught artist from Mexico City. She creates objects and interventions using low-tech, waste, survival and alternative economy as frameworks, to spot and deface dominant modes of consumption, production and interaction. She also belongs to the art-duo Forays, focused on the modification of everyday infrastructure.

Annemie Maes has initiated Politics of Change, an ongoing artistic research project driven by grassroots activism, eco-technology and networks of women. PoC wants to research and build integrated and sustainable relationships between people, their environment and technology.

As artists, filmmakers, activists and policy-makers whose practice incorporates ecological thinking, we have to enrich the public debate around ethical living, environmental sustainability and eco-technology. We have to think about the kind of future in which we want to live and work. What lifestyles, what social and economic systems can we envisage beyond the usual? Is there anything that we can learn from existing (non-Western) social experiments to help us make our economic and political systems less fragile and unstable?

The case study of the Barefoot College project in India is a good example to start with. Their appropriate, distributed and DIY approach towards technology is worth the attention of a larger public. The target group (local and international) is a public that is aware of the actions and solutions needed to build on the construction of a more balanced society, contributing sustainable changes to social and ecological structures. A public with a critical view on the use of technology in our wasteful consumer-society, a public open to the sharing of knowledge.

Politics of Change wants to position itself as a platform for collaborations and partnerships. Collaborative knowledge building and transmission is at the core of the project. The research focuses on employing and deriving today’s and future’s technologies in a new and surprising way. The connection between art and science, between analog and digital media is explored continuously. The results of the research processes are made public through films, workshops, artistic interventions and presentations.

Annemie Maes, a media artist and an activist, holds a masters degree in fine arts and cultural studies. She is founder of SO-ON, a group of artists working with image, sound and technology. In their art projects they research the transversal field of installations, performances and audio-visual compositions. Most of the projects are linked to the problematization of new art in the public space, from a socio-cultural background. The focus is to identify innovation and change while developing artistic projects, and research new aesthetic presentation techniques. Annemie Maes is co-founder of OKNO (an artist-run organisation working with art & technology) and is responsible for OKNO’s day-to-day management.

In her personal artistic research she focuses on the behavior of language in its many appearances: textual, sonic and visual, as well as gestural or body language. How do these disparate elements relate to each other and how do they organize within a system, which includes human and computer as a sender and a receiver [and vice versa]?

Her artistic research and cultural activism projects are publicly presented as the ongoing project ‘politics of change’ - Daad (Do and act Differently), with a focus on the topics womenempowerment, ecology and public space. DaaD is about a bottom up approach for designing human environments that have the stability and diversity of natural ecosystems. Integration of renewable energy systems, energy efficiency, food/gardening systems, natural building, rainwater harvesting and urban planning along with the economic, political and social policies that make sustainable living possible and practical. How can these ecosystems be generated, controlled, enhanced or imagined in artworks? Is our environment programmable? How does the fusion of natural and artificial matter produce new organisms, new environments, new natures? How does technology animate nature and space, and how do users and programs animate matter?

More information:

• OKNO: www.okno.be
• Annemie Maes: thoughtsandtalks.so-on.be

Vanessa Gocksch  (in collaboration with Intermundos) (Colombia)
Poporo Luminoso