This was an open call for participation in the second worksession around the theme of techno-disobedience, which took place from the 23 to the 28th of October 2023 in Graz (Austria) at esc medien kunst labor.

This worksession zoomed in on disobedient tactics as means for finding new pathways to circumvent, question, detour and resist the social and political expectations that come with the authoritarian turbo-capitalist frameworks of Big Tech. We seeked to reclaim technology in various ways, as we recognise this push to be about labour, care, anti-racism, queer life and trans*feminist techno-politics.

This session proposeed a focus on forms of collective care in face of technological dispossession: as corporate platforms expand their re-organisation of everything as-a-service, the domains of care and reproductive labour are threatened crucial areas which need active involvement to keep complexity at work and resist harmful disruption.

We wanted to try joyful abolitionary tactics and methodologies that allow us:

• ... to collectively learn how to process, heal, discuss, deal with the complexities of being ’together’, to care for, those we know and those we do not know.

• ... to connect to precarious works of feeding and providing for others.

• ... to be dreaming of doing away with structural oppression and violence.

We looked at multiple ways of doing, testing, trying: slowing down, jamming, reversing, future-speculating, feminist manoeuvres, joy and killjoy, being lazy and inefficient, nonsensical approaches, ’good enough’ tech, (k)notworkings and many others we don’t know of yet.

From mundane individual acts to collectively coordinated acts of refusal, techno-disobedience is multiple and pervasive. To be able to write our own ustopias (combined utopia and dystopia, as each contains a latent version of the other) we looked into the knowledges and practices of unruliness and misconduct, as means to deviate tech from its determinist and solutionist path.
This was a week of collective engagement in constructing intersectional, solidary futures.

Practical info
This worksession will take place from the 23rd til the 28th of October 2023 in Graz in the exhibition space esc medien kunst labor in Bürgergasse 5, 8010 Graz and at local partners such as Traumwerk, Spektral, mur.at and the Invisible Lab. Additionally to participants from esc and Constant, there will be space for about 12 people for the whole week. Participation is free of charge. Constant will cover costs of transportation, breakfast+lunch, and lodging for all participants.

Application
If you are interested in joining, please send us an email at: info@esc.mur.at with a short introduction of yourself. We also ask you to send us a description of a "first-aid kit", existing or imaginary, that relates to the questions and topics of the worksession.
Kits, and especially first-aid ones, often come with narratives and imaginaries of technical solutionism or post-apocalyptic prepping. We would like instead to stimulate a collection of situated issues that urge aid and care in face of continuous and distributed crises, and of technical objects or systems that could be useful for collective forms of support and healing. What are the damages that surround us for which we can imagine ways to heal, to support, to organize, to riot about?
The kit could contain devices and objects, but could also consist of or include a glossary, a methodology, a collection of texts, body movements...

Let’s come together to develop and try out these "care repair kits" as objects and practices to mutually care for.

The deadline for sending your application is Thursday 31st of August 2023.

Constant’s Collaboration Guidelines have been conceived in regard to all our activities. These guidelines will be brought up and activitated during this worksession too. Please read them carefully before applying:
> https://constantvzw.org/wefts/orientationspourcollaboration.en.html

About Constant & worksessions
Constant is a non-profit artistic organisation that investigates the relation and effects of media and technologies on our society and everyday life through the lens of feminisms, multiperspectivity and the values of F/LOSS culture.
Constant’s worksessions are transdisciplinary collective residencies. We create a temporary working environment where participants from different backgrounds come together to develop projects and research ideas. They offer a mix of presentations, workshops, hands-on moments, collective brainstormings and experimentations, and sometimes public moments such as visits, debates, screenings, etc...
This worksession is organised in the framework of Constant’s program that turns this year around ’techno-disobedience’. The worksession in October is organised by esc medien kunst lab: https://esc.mur.at/, and is a follow-up from the first one that took place in Brussels in June 2023.

About esc medien kunst labor
esc medien kunst labor is a non-profit association in Graz that focuses on art and art production in technological contexts. We want to understand the impact(s) technology has on individuals, groups, communities and society and think together with different practicioners.