Reclaiming Digital Infrastructures is a research collaboration with KASK School of Arts in Gent taking serious the question how to understand digital networks and communication tools as an integral part of the art education. In this first issue, Monday Readings invites you to an online active and reflective session.

Monday Readings: Screen No Deal
Monday Readings are a series of convivial situations to research our technological and infrastructural inter-dependencies. They bring our everyday technical encounters in conversation with theoretical and political thinking, by close-reading technologies as if they were texts, and vice versa.

This session will create a moment to unfold the different layers of the collective experience of a "Screen New Deal", a term proposed by Naomi Klein to describe the recent period in which videoconferencing and rectangularised communication became the new norm for all aspects of everyday life. In particular we will discuss what this meant and means for the realm of education, how certain software platforms silently creep in new forms of pedagogy, what critiques and potential alternatives were brought as forms of resistance to this new problematic default.

The session is subdivided in two parts: first a practical exercise that will take place in and on video-conferencing platforms, then a reading of short texts that explore the same techno-political densities that have been experienced hands-on in the first part of the day.

Timing
Wednesday 03 February
11.00 - 13.00 part 1
14.00 - 16.00 part 2

Address
This online session can be joined at:
https://bbb.constantvzw.org/b/mar-gkt-ueh-7wq

Bio’s
Martino Morandi wrote this bio text on a QWERTY keyboard on a Lenovo laptop on a seat of a Trenord train moving on the italian RFI rails, running on electricity from state hydro-electric power plants on the Alps. He researches the tangle of and our entanglements with these elements and is interested in the politics of our interactions with technology at different scales, from power plants to bio texts.

Jara Rocha works through the situated and complex forms of distribution of the technological with a trans*feminist sensibility. With a curious confidence in transtextual logistics and a clear tendency to profanate modes, tends to be found in tasks of remediation, action-research and in(ter)dependent curatorship. Main areas of study have to do with the semiotic materialities of political urgencies. Always together with companions, they work on projects like The Underground Division: an emerging research on the co-constitution of 3D imaginations and the so-called body of the earth, Volumetric Regimes on patriarchocolonial
turbocapitalist volumetrics, Naturoculturas son disturbios (a monthly program at a community radio in Barcelona) or Vibes & Leaks on mediated embodiments of voices.
http://jararocha.blogspot.com/

Monday Readings has been supported with a project subsidy by the Department of Culture, Youth and Media of the Government of Flanders