Digital Ecologies in Practice
Digital Ecologies in Practice
July 28 - 29 2022
University of Bonn
Following our inaugural conference in 2021 which took place online, it is wonderful to be able to greet you all in person in Bonn this year.
Digital Ecologies in Practice brings together scholars, researchers, designers, artists, and other practitioners from several disciplines and backgrounds to exhibit and explore practical and conceptual work concerning the digitisation of more-than-human worlds. Our aim is to collectively address the promises and pitfalls of digitisation for fostering multispecies conviviality from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Researchers and practitioners across multiple disciplines are increasingly experimenting with the affordances of digital technologies for producing novel human-nonhuman relations, inaugurating new modes of environmental governance, and being attentive to nonhuman perspectives. Digitisation offers novel opportunities for generating knowledges concerning the nonhuman world, enabling previously inaccessible ecological encounters, and fostering communities with shared eco-centric goals. However, digital technologies, and the data-driven approaches they enable, are not without their problems. They give rise to new avenues for exploitation and marginalisation, and can entrench relations of power embedded in market-based and technocratic responses to environmental issues.
With these concerns in mind, a series of questions has emerged. What kinds of methodological crossovers are possible between scholars, practitioners, and artists? How do digital technologies allow scholars, practitioners, and artists to experiment with novel modes of representation and participation, and creatively cross disciplinary and species boundaries? Which problems are solved, created, or exacerbated by the use of digital technologies in such research?
DAY 1
We are pleased to welcome a panel of artists and design practitioners who are exploring the potentials of digital technologies for producing sensitive and sensual encounters between humans and nonhumans. Mari Bastashevski’s Pending Xenophora is our keynote exhibit and day 1 keynote speaker.
DAY 2
We are pleased to host an interdisciplinary conference with several thematic sessions. Professor Ron Wakkary will deliver our day 2 keynote, and all talks will be simultaneously streamed online.
special issue