on Toshareproject.it - curated by Bruce Sterling
https://drha.tech/drha-2024/
Banal Devices: Everyday technology in globalized technocultures
Munich, Germany
8-10 Sep 2024
Hosted by the University of Music and Theatre Munich
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What systems and devices are relevant in people’s everyday lives, beyond the globalized dreams and universalising narratives professed by big tech and state bodies in the Global North? This question will be the starting point for DRHA 2024.
In critical scholarship and art, engagement with technologisation oftentimes occurs in response to hypes around state-of-the-art innovations. These hypes are in turn generated by tech corporations and government bodies. Thus, there is a tendency for critical practices in technology to focus on the spectacle of the new and extraordinary, while disregarding the lasting and far-going impact of what we might call the realm of the “technologically banal”. As a result, these practices become complicit in the propagation of the very “myth of progress” that underpins the techno-sphere they intend to critique.
In Syria, ChatGPT is hardly ever used, and quotidian debates on technology are shaped by challenges in basic electricity provision. In Ukraine, high-tech weapons don’t play the role that most contemporary conferences and exhibitions on the topic suggest (“Panic! The autonomous combat robots are coming!”). Instead, commonplace mobile phone cameras and toy drones are highly relevant on the battlefield. At media art exhibitions and technology conferences, one encounters countless artworks and discussions about Big Data, AI, interactions with microbes and virtual reality. Yet, highly relevant technologies in the realm of the seemingly ordinary, like washing machines, insect repellents and water purifiers, are rarely discussed.
DRHA 2024 will investigate the role of the seemingly banal, commonplace and boring in- and outside the world of high-technology.
Venue
The main conference venue will be the Reaktorhalle at Luisenstrasse 37a, the former Institute of Technical Physics, a listed Bauhaus building located in the Munich Museum District, designed in 1957 by Joseph von Wiedemann and Franz Hart
Organisers
Banal Devices is convened by Prof. Dr. Dani Ploeger, and hosted by the Professorship for Performance and Technology at the University of Music and Theatre Munich. The conference will be accompanied by an exhibition of artworks curated by Dr. Elena Papadaki (curator and researcher, councillor at the Royal Society of Arts).
Keynote Contributors
Alex Murray-Leslie (co-founder of Chicks on Speed; Professor of Digital Performance, Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
John Zerzan (author of Future Primitive (1994), Twilight of the Machine (2008) and Why Hope? The stand against civilization (2015))