Author: MK

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Art & Culture

2018

The year of PANTONE® 18-3838, Ultra Violet.
The International Year of nothing.
The Year of the Earth Dog in the Chinese Zodiac.
The Year of the Bird.
The European Year of Cultural Heritage.
The Scottish Year of Young People.
The Centenary of Nelson Mandela.
50 years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated; Tommie Smith and John Carlos made the Black Power salute on the Olympic medal podium; the US launched the Tet Offensive in Vietnam; Apollo 8 became the first manned spacecraft in orbit.
75 years ago, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising took place; Antoine de Saint-Exupéry published The Little Prince.
100 years ago, the Armistice to end World War I was declared; Poland returned to the world map and declared independence from the German, Austrian, and Russian empires.
200 years ago, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley published Frankenstein.
600 years ago, the archipelago of Madeira was discovered.

Categories
Art & Culture My Projects

Strategic Narratives of Technology and Africa

I’m pleased to be on the organizing committee of Strategic Narratives of Technology and Africa, a conference taking place in Funchal, Madeira, September 1 & 2.

The conference brings scholars, technologists, and cultural producers together on the island of Madeira: a European territory off the coast of Africa, a historical site of mutual entanglement between the Atlantic continents, and a point of departure for European expansion. Here we’ll strategize ways to revisit, reframe, and recode the future of technology on and for both continents.

What can African theorists, technologists, and cultural producers do to generate alternatives to the influx of neocolonial narratives of tech entrepreneurship? What are key epistemologies and ways of being which are endemic in Africa that should be offered to the world through new systems and processes? How can an African information economy avoid the dynamics of the resource curse, where connectivity is extractive and exercised upon African citizens rather than by and through them? What can Western technologists do differently, and what are the spaces for collaboration?

This conference aims to reinvestigate these relationships and more in order to engender dialog between African and Western audiences and participants, who should leave Madeira equipped with new strategies and new collaborative partnerships.

Keynotes include Achille Mbembe, Nanjira Sambuli, Ntone Edjabe and Sarah Nuttall.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Categories
Art & Culture My Projects

Future Flux Festival

Hot off the press #fff #futurefluxfestival @madeiraiti

A post shared by Michelle Kasprzak (@mkultra0000) on

Future Flux Festival is a new festival in the historic submarine wharf of Rotterdam. This spacious and atmospheric venue has a rich industrial history and is rapidly evolving into a prominent site where industry, creativity and innovation converge. The festival is a platform for new developments in the fields of technology, art and innovation. I’m excited to be involved with the festival as curator of the Playground.

In the Playground we invite you to make, hack, and create, led by our international group of artists and makers. Unlike a regular art exhibition or industry trade show, you will be confronted with many opportunities to get your hands dirty and participate. You can make a loudspeaker, a fake bomb detector, mobile phone noise music, and learn how to protect yourself from data leaks. We’re hosting the European premiere of Garnet Hertz’s new zine, Disobedient Electronics, and you can bring your own records to be played by James Auger’s turntable powered only by gravity. We’re also proud to debut brand new work by Georgina Voss, as well as exhibit the Osmo dome by Loop, and Parallel Suspended, a robot which makes large-scale drawings with sand by Gijs van Bon.

There’s also a day devoted to industry with some great keynotes such as Scott Smith and Maria Yablonina, and the FabCity programme where you can explore sustainability and food in the urban context, a music programme, and much more — see you at the Festival!

Playground artists: Georgina Voss, Gijs van Bon, Loop, Darsha Hewitt, Debbie Ding, Garnet Hertz, Peter Flemming, Dries Depoorter, Matthew Plummer-Fernandez and Julien Deswaef, Leanne Wijnsma, James Auger

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Personal

2017 is…

The year of PANTONE® 15-0343, Greenery.
The 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation.
The International Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development.
The Year of the Fire Rooster in the Chinese Zodiac.
The Centenary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge.
The 500th anniversary of The Reformation.
The Centenary of the Apparition of the Virgin Mary at Fatima.
The 200th anniversary of Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences.
The 50th anniversary of the first human heart transplant.
The Year of the Daffodil.
The Centenary of De Stijl.
The Centenary of the Russian Revolutions.
The 700th anniversary of the writing of Gulshan i-Raz by Mahmud Shabistari.

Go sweep out the chamber of your heart.
Make it ready to be the dwelling place of the Beloved.
When you depart out, He will enter in,
In you, void of yourself, will He display His beauties.
– Gulshan i-Raz, Mahmud Shabistari