4th Renewable Futures Conference

Against the grain of the metaphorical overall ‘greening’ of activities, be it in commerce, the arts or academia, the notion of ‘prismatic ecology’ has emerged to rebuke the colour green and its cultural construction. How can new discourses overcome binary ideas of the other-than-human world as an idealized nature? While greenness as a superficial metaphor needs to be disentangled from terms— both putatively non-technological—such as ‘life’ and ‘nature’, how do artists and designers use and question technologies beyond anthropocentrism within a larger biosemiotic web ? How can media help to interact with ecologies understood as a shared ‘oikos’ (household) beyond anthropocentric ethics interested in ‘our’ environment only as a beneficial milieu for humans?

Practices of communication and co-creation with living organisms – such as microorganisms, plants or animals – might involve working with technologically complex systems as well as agriculture or indigenous knowledges and traditions. To rethink interspecies relations in the framework of a climate emergency moment can be a way to form entangled multispecies alliances

By the term living technology we think of the complex structures and functions of living organisms which have entered the hybrid and synthetic technologies. By including critical perspectives on the merging of technology and areas involving emotions, sensing and empathy, we question possible and speculative convergences of machine technology, artificial life, artificial intelligence and human bodies. We invite perspectives on the implications of future integration and communication between the machine and the living as well as speculative or applied.

Sensorium – how we experience, interpret, develop applied aesthetics today in order to reconnect with the environment, expanding the senses technologically inside and outside of institutions. Technologies continously provide new ways of filtering our experiences and different means of relating to the living environment. Aesthetics today are also affected by perceptual complexity, relating to experiences that transcend art and include a vast array of both natural and constructed environments. Human perceptions and sensory modalities are influenced and affected by the way we interact with our digital tools, and their presence is becoming characteristically transparent. Can the sensorium as an expanded aesthetics provide new modalities for connecting with natural resources? What new opportunities exist for interaction and how do technologies extend and provide explorative possibilities within sensations ? And, in what way do institutions understand and relate to this sensory complexity as a sustainable choice?