• Akademie der Künste / Hanseatenweg / Salon
Doing Things With Crisis

with Clusterduck Collective, Nishant Shah, Yehwan Song

  • Workshop
Registration

Our digital informational lives are engineered, curated, and designed to be constantly in a state of crisis. Fueled by the viral marketing trends of engagement through incitement, the news keeps on replaying gloom, doom, and despair. In contemporary digital storytelling, stories also tend to become unanchored from their contextual values and intentions of origin, instead often used as attacks. And the stories produced by disenfranchised communities, often place themselves at risk and are sometimes, in fact, used against them.

In this workshop, Nishant Shah will share lessons learned through his research on narrative change practice, bringing to light patterns that we have naturalised in our contemporary state of digital crises. Guided by Yehwan Song and Tomato from Clusterduck Collective, participants will engage in visual and narrative brainstorming processes aimed at plotting against or destroying the dominant narrative structures of collapse by playing with found materials and building a tiny visual social medium, a creative digital communal space where other intentions and visions of agency and hope will thrive.

Clusterduck Collective Tomato is a product designer and a co-founder of Clusterduck, a collective working in the fields of new media studies and design, investigating processes and actors behind the creation of Internet-based content. Clusterduck is currently developing Meme Manifesto, a transmedia project that collectively explores the meanings and potentials of memetic symbology.
Nishant Shah is the Director of Research & Outreach and Professor of Aesthetics and Cultures of Technology, at ArtEZ University of the Arts, The Netherlands.
Yehwan Song is a web artist and designer. Yehwan's work centers on finding the discomfort hidden in the excessively comfortable web environments in order to address systemic inequality.