As part of Paraflows 2010 Johannes Grenzfurthner decided to host a panel on technology. And failure.
Digital art and culture is embedded in the cultural framework of technological developments. In the study of technological development and creativity, focusing attention on the failure, the error, the breakdown, the malfunction means: opening the black box of technology. Studies have convincingly demonstrated that the widespread inability to understand technological artifacts as fabricated entities, as social and cultural phenomena, derives from the fact that in retrospect only those technologies that prove functional for a culture and can be integrated into everyday life are “left over.” However, the perception of what is functional, successful and useful is itself the product of social and cultural, and last but not least political and economic processes. Selection processes and abandoned products and product forms are usually not discussed.
I invited technologists, artists, designers, philosophers, namely Dmitry Kleiner (Canada/Germany), Adam Flynn (USA), Jane Tingley (Canada), Heather Kelley (USA/Canada)… and they are pretty enthusiastic to analyze and discuss techfuckup — the wonderful and magic world of abandoned products, developmental derailments, sobering intermediary results and useless prototypes.
Where, when? Well, the best place is – of course – a hackspace.
So let’s meet at Metalab (Rathausstrasse 6, 1010 Vienna) September 13, 2010; 8 PM.
Link (FM4)