Call for Web Residencies No 18 »Magical Hackerism or The Elasticity of Resilience«

In the framework of the project »Magical Hackerism or The Elasticity of Resilience«, SAVVY Contemporary and Akademie Schloss Solitude’s Digital program offer four web residencies to practitioners and communities within the tropical belt, exploring situated knowledges, forming local DIT (Do It Together) community networks, and/or connecting intertropically on a planetary level.

Curated by Research Netting Group, Akademie Schloss Solitude in cooperation with SAVVY Contemporary — Aug 24, 2022

Akademie Schloss Solitude - Call for Web Residencies No 18 »Magical Hackerism or The Elasticity of Resilience«

General Idea

With our eighteenth web residency call, together with SAVVY Contemporary and the Research Netting Group, we invite you to apply for a web residency and become part of the larger project Magical Hackerism or The Elasticity of Resilience, and host and become a rhizome/node of Futura Trōpica Netroots for a lateral exchange of situated knowledges.

During this six-week online residency, we will offer support to setup a local community network using a Raspberry Pi, where your situated knowledge exploration can be hosted. When connected to the Wi-Fi network provided by the Rhizome, visitors can visit a web relational garden (a more than linear web space) that will contain your research, content, and resources to be shared. Your rhizome will become part of our InterTropical P2P network communicating through the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) protocol. Through the network, it is possible to visit other relational gardens elsewhere and communicate with other practitioners.

Futura Trōpica Netroots is an InterTropical network of grassroots local networks connecting communities and networks of support in Bogotá/Colombia, Kinshasa/DR Congo, and Bengaluru/India. In 2022, Martinique, Kampala/Uganda and Manila/Philippines have joined the constellation.

This call is led by Magical Hackerism’s Netting Group interfacing through Futura Trōpica. Forming a Netting Group is an attempt for lateral exchanges of knowledges among InterTropical practitioners.

The Netting Group is composed of Immy Mali, Czar Kristoff, Neema Githere, Alejo Duque, Sahej Rahal, and Morehshin Allahyari.

About the Project 

Magical Hackerism refers to the essential hacking of reality and the rendering of a multiplicity of worlds.

The etymology of the word »tropics« comes from the ancient belief that the sun turned back at the solstices, the tropikós, from the greek word τροπή (tropḗ, »a turn, turning, solstice, trope«), meaning the point at which things turn. Magical Hackerism is the manifestation of the tropical turn as a mindset.

In this collaborative and experimental project, SAVVY Contemporary, panke.gallery, and Akademie Schloss Solitude come together to examine forms of technologies from a tropikós perspective (both as region and as a mindset), to diversify and redistribute the networks of technologies and cultural imaginaries toward pluriversal understandings of the planet. With this constellation, we aim to complexify the dominant cosmology of modern binary divisions and systems of classification, disrupt the vertical sight in our relationship to natural and artificial environments and establish dialogues between a multiplicity of worlds and cosmologies that exist by themselves and not by opposing to a contrary.

The project unfolds as a fifteen-month research and public program, reflecting on tools for the subversion of realities and for active world-making. It is punctuated with an exhibition in the two venues SAVVY Contemporary and panke.gallery, a discursive program composed of workshops, sound performances, experimental radio, video essays, and the restoration of two historical net culture experiments, as well a web residency call in cooperation with Akademie Schloss Solitude.

Find out more about the program here.

Format

Rather than requesting the formulation of a new project, the Magical Hackerism or The Elasticity of Resili web residency offers means to sustain ongoing initiatives that would benefit from Akademie Schloss Solitude’s creative community, as well as the time and financial resources to continue moving ideas forward. We will offer support setting up a DIT Community Network using a Raspberry Pi that becomes a rhizome in Futura Trōpica Netroots. Within this network, you can share your research on situated knowledges and exchange intertropically with other practitioners.

Notes

– Support collectives within the tropical belt that are building local/regional community networks or that are netting communities on a planetary level

– Support LANscapes within the tropical belt so they could gather repositories of situated knowledges

– Support with infrastructure so fellows can build a Futura Trōpica Rhizome that serves as a local community network

– Display situated knowledges as digital Relational Gardens

– Join the larger Futura Trōpica Netroots for InterTropical lateral exchange

Grant

For this call, the Netting Research Group (Immy Mali, Czar Kristoff, Neema Githere, Alejo Duque, Sahej Rahal, and Morehshin Allahyari) selects four project proposals, whose creators are rewarded with a six-week production residency and a 1200-euro grant.

Web Residency

If you are selected as a web resident, you will be required to make public the content of your proposal on the Akademie Schloss Solitude website and the Futura Trōpica Netroots. Your result may, of course, diverge from your proposal.

Timeline

Call release: August 23, 2022
Submission: until September 23, 2022 (midnight IDLW / BIT)
Announcement Web Residents: until October 2022
Web Residencies: November 1 – December 15, 2022

Web Residencies

In 2016, Akademie Schloss Solitude launched the Web Residencies to encourage young talents from the international digital scene and artists from all disciplines dealing with web-based practices. ZKM was the program partner from 2017 to 2019. For each call, the curator or collective selects project proposals whose creators receive a four-week residency and a mini-grant.

Artists, collectives, associations, and initiatives of all kinds are invited to experiment with digital technologies and new art forms, and reflect on the topics set by the curators. Web residencies are carried out  online, and the works are presented online.

FAQ

Is it possible to apply with more than one project?
No. We accept only one submission per applicant (individual artist or collectives) 

Do I have to be resident in the tropical belt?
No, but there should be a distinct connection with the the tropical belt as part of the project proposal.

How to Apply

Please send your application until September 23, 2022 (midnight IDLW / BIT) to webresidencies@akademie-solitude.de by submitting your project proposal in the form of:

– a headline

– a short concept text in English (1,000–1,500 characters with spaces)

– a header image (high resolution, landscape format)

– a short bio in English (500 characters with spaces)

– a PDF portfolio

–  additional link

Artists of all disciplines as well as former Solitude fellows may apply. There is no age limit.

Jurors/The Research Netting Group

Alejandro Duque, born 1970 (CO/CH), is an artist involved with collaborative/participatory arts that celebrate cultural agitation with a defined ethos and technosocial affects. His art practice is based on crossing video art and sound art with new, old and unstable media, aswell with open software and hardware. Alejandro is experienced on the network based art (net.art), streaming technologies and as a radio amateur with callsign -HK4ADJ- and a Phd in Media Philosophy (Switzerland). Founding member of networks such as Bricolabs, dorkbot, labSurlab, un\loquer and Pnode. Currently active on red.radiolibre.cc and Coomunarte.

Czar Kristoff, (Camarines Sur, Capricorn Earth Snake) is an artist, educator, designer, and publisher, interested in (re)construction of space and memory, through concepts of nesting and temporary architecture, for (pedagogical) occupation, using cottage industry publishing – blueprints, Xerox, and other low-fidelity printing methods – as his current media of interest. He has exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Showroom MAMA Rotterdam, Jogja National Museum, C3 Artspace Melbourne, Bangkok Arts and Culture Center, De Appel Amsterdam, Dansehallerne Copenhagen, and Vargas Museum Manila. Kristoff runs Temporary UnReLearning (URL) Academy, a school with no permanent address, interested in queering art and cultural production in the Philippines.

Neema Githere (they/she) is an artist and guerrilla theorist whose work explores love and indigeneity in a time of algorithmic debris. Having dreamt themselves into the world via the internet from an early age and subsequently traveled to more than twenty countries researching Black cultural production, Githere’s practice investigates digital Africanity through experiments that span public lectures, community organizing, curation, performance, and image-making.

Githere’s concept of Afropresentism – a term they coined in 2017 to explore diasporic embodiment in the age of Big Data – has influenced exhibitions from London to Lagos, and been profiled in BOMB magazine. Their experimental practice, data:healing, seeks to illuminate the links between technology, nature, and spirituality to investigate how working from this intersection can combat data trauma, a term coined by Olivia Ross.

In 2018, Githere left Yale University to pursue a path of unschooling, and has since lectured at cultural institutions and organizations across North America and Europe, including Studio Olafur Eliasson, Microsoft, and the Toronto Queer Film Festival.

Anderu Immaculate Mali a.k.a. Immy Mali lives and works in Kampala, Uganda. Using a variety of media including, text, video, sound, sculpture, installation, and animation, her work attempts to unpack the complexities and entanglements of memory and existence in a neo/postcolonial Uganda. Notions of presence and absence, personal memories of childhood growing up in Uganda juxtaposed with current personal and collective experiences of existence in shifting spaces and places also influence her work. Her ongoing project »Letters to my childhood« (2017–present) accords her the duality to engage with her past and present simultaneously.

She is a cofounder of Iraa The Granary, an experimental artist’s kitchen geared toward exploring the possibility of creating archival/memory systems of artists’ work relevant to the African context. In 2013, she obtained her BA in Industrial and Fine Arts from Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts, Makerere University, Kampala. She is an alumna of the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, Netherlands (2018–19). She has participated in exhibitions, residencies, and workshops online and in countries including Kenya, Netherlands, India, Ethiopia, Denmark, Germany, the United States, South Africa, Mozambique, Angola, and Uganda. Her work has been published in art magazines including African Arts 2019.

Sahej Rahal lives and works in Mumbai. In 2011 he graduated from the Rachana Sansad Academy of Fine Arts & Crafts in Mumbai, majoring in painting. Sahej Rahal has since expanded his practice to explore a burgeoning mythology through installations, films, and performances.

His work has been exhibited at the Kochi–Muziris Biennale 2014, the MACRO Museum in Rome/Italy, GALLERIA CONTINUA in Les Moulins/France, GASWORKS in London/Great Britain 2013, the Vancouver Biennale 2014, the Jewish Museum in New York, NY/USA, Art Stage Singapore, the Setouchi Triennale 2016 in Japan, and most recently as a part of the Liverpool Biennial 2016.

He is a recipient of Inlaks Fine Arts Award 2012, the IFA Critical Arts Practice grant 2014 and has been awarded the Forbes India Art Award 2014 for best debut show for his solo exhibition Forerunner at Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai, the Cove Park/Henry Moore Fellowship, 2017, Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship 2018, and most recently the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation Installation Art Grant, 2019, and Human Machine Fellowship, Akademie der Künste, 2020i

Morehshin Allahyari is an artist, activist, educator, and occasional curator. She is the recipient of the leading global thinkers of 2016 award by Foreign Policy magazine. Morehshin was born and raised in Iran and moved to the United States in 2007. Her work deals with the political, social, and cultural contradictions we face every day. She thinks about technology as a philosophical toolset to reflect on objects and as a poetic means to document our personal and collective lives struggles in the twenty-first century. Morehshin is the coauthor of the 3D Additivist Cookbook in collaboration with writer/artist Daniel Rourke (published on December 2016 online in 3D PDF format and in print by the Institute of Networked Cultures). Her modeled, 3D-printed sculptural reconstructions of ancient artifacts destroyed by ISIS, titled Material Speculation: ISIS, have received widespread curatorial and press attention and have been exhibited worldwide. For more information, see http://www.morehshin.com/

Graphic design by Juan Pablo García Sossa (@puntojpgs) for Futura Trōpica Netroots

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