LECTORAAT CHANGE MANAGEMENT – De Haagse Hogeschool

Ars Electronica Festival 2024
Fragments of reflection by Tamara Babik

First step at the Linz train station and I could already see a stream of people wearing their Ars Electronica Festival Pass running through the city. Between the Post-City, the Ars Electronica Center, the Mariendom, Lendos Museum and the JKU Med-Uni, the festival’s ambition to overwhelm mirrors the relentless pace of the digital industry it seeks to critique. It promises HOPE, while racing through information with 20-minute talks, cramming schedules to maximize content, and generated titles that barely scratch the surface- mimicking existing absurdities in the digital environment rather than challenging them. If  this HOPE  is then also in the interest of the system Ars Electronica voluntarily mimics, maybe what I am supposed to do is to NOPE? I picked few program points, and ignored the rest, fully surrendered to the biases of my own selection.

Room 1. Krater

There is a place surrounded by a wall, a nature living its life not declared as nature. It grows on the history of a construction site, where the Ministry of  Justice was supposed to rule the land, but where the only justice being felt is the one lived by the artists who are working there. In Slovenia, Ljubljana’s city center there is Krater, a space where the remnants of Topniška Barracks were razed to build a new urban landscape—a residential and commercial complex designed to replace the old with the new. Instead, what people were left with are two craters, deep pits born from excavation of gravel sold for paper money. A testament to the drive to exploit and consume. It is an unsettled space, where no one feels truly at home, where everything moves never settling down, where ownership papers have never been signed and where artist now rule just for a moment in time. They have created a community, they are organizing workshops, where wilderness in people and reborn nature collide, gathered from the ground and given to the world. More than anything they are protecting this abyss as reminder of what is being taken away and what stays behind. When I look down at this soil, I can see myself staring back. I see you; I see myself. A face, a place. Over- extracted, overcarved, overexploited, used as energy, a resource and an instrument. How long can I, can we, let them go before our craters become too deep?

Room 2. Repeat after me  

In Lviv, Ukraine there are people in a temporary camp repeating weapon sounds, mimicking terror with their mouth. Machines entering their bodies. Mechanical textures felt on their tongue. r-r-r-r-h , new words, new sounds, new thoughts are forming, entering them without a warning, buzzing through their blood. From the screen in the room, I hear zh-zh-zh-zh while sitting on a bench, writing an email with a bullet in my throat. Nothing sounds as good as when it comes from the Chat. I am trying to resist, let my broken words speak for themselves, but the promise of the GPT keeps me running back. What does it mean to speak in the wake of war and capitalist modernity? How can we escape the promised effectivity and devise a grammar of brokenness, a language that escapes the corp and honors the crop that we live among? 

Room 3. Not On Planet Earth Nightline

There are rooms that don’t understand you, and spaces where you feel completely understood. The nightclub at Stadtwerkstatt was the latter. Darkness entered; the reason disappeared.  We were dancing to the technosounds. Techno in, feelings out. Electronic beats, laser beams- even in this noise I felt the silence of the mind. The movement forced me, the music trapped me, yet I felt completely free. The room shared the energy, lack of space, pushing the limits, people touching without feeling the skin- answering the impulses from within. How do we stop merely reproducing what we expect and open up more to what escapes us?

Room 4. A fireside chat with Hito Steyerl

We raise them. We feed them with our data, we train them with our thoughts, we give them our creative hours- and wonder about their destruction in the afterhours. Embedded in the system we create a weapon, only to relentlessly search for ways to destroy it. While we are speculating about dream technologies, we are failing to give pragmatic solutions to existing problems: automated weapons being one of them. Is the idea of the Undercommons dead? How can I now be one foot in and one foot out, imagining stealing from the inside, believing in my ability to recognize without illusion what truly is and what appears to be, what is worth stealing in the rising complexity of the digital system that surrounds me? If AI is referencing what is already there, producing trash for further reference, enshittifying itself step by step, what is my role in this process of self-destruction and disruption? If I am to teach hope, does that mean preparing myself and others for the absurdities of the future or rebilling against the absurd that this future may involve?

Room 5. Hotel

Maybe what I need to imagine is the Žižek’s tunnel. Not the comforting light at the end of the tunnel, but the realization that there are two trains rushing toward each other, bound for collision?  Even if I know who will turn the tide, how are we going to stand up to the challenges and what lies beyond the façade of hope? Maybe there is not so much hope to cling on to anymore. If hope is just a false light keeping us complacent, should we instead brace for impact and confront the collision head-on? Is then the courage to face the wreckage and build something new from the aftermath? Should we even dream about building, or start valuing the power of destruction? What comes, when hope disappears?

I left with questions…

Read more about Ars Electronica 2024: https://ars.electronica.art/hope/en/
Read more about Krater Collective: https://krater.si/en/about
Read more about NOPE: https://stwst48x10.stwst.at/en/about