We are excited to announce the third edition of Baltan Academy - Make Technology Yours Again. Motivated by the fruitfulness of our Make Economy Yours Again learning trajectories (MEYA#1 and MEYA #2), we decided to enrich our year program Technologies Otherwise with its own educational trajectory. We will gather in an online learning community for 8 weeks, to create a knowledge base for new technological narratives. We will explore the implications of existing technologies and write new stories to help us rehearse the hopeful technological change we want.
Today's rapid technological developments leave us feeling that technological progress is an inevitable, autonomous force that we cannot stop or even control. We find ourselves passive observers of this process, which is very complex and results in opaque technologies we often use daily, needing to understand how they work. Our technologies and their algorithms understand us, while we do not understand them. These technologies are tightly entangled with corporate capital and capitalist profit-making and serve to maintain or even amplify the centralisation of power within the hands of the few tech companies.
Is your phone really yours, then? Can you make it yours?
What would happen if we decided to reclaim our agency in technology? And what knowledge and tools do we need for that? Throughout the trajectory, we will both collectively and individually explore how we think of these technologies, why we use them, how they came to be and for whom. Is technology the new religion? Is your phone making your life easier? Should we replace the old dishwashers with newer, more sustainable ones even before the old ones break down? Join us in our Make Technology Yours Again learning trajectory to explore such questions.
From September 19th to November 7th, each Thursday (18:00-21:00), we will delve into a set of readings/podcasts/movies prepared before the session through a discussion and an activity prepared by Baltan leading-learners and external contributors (to be announced soon).
During the trajectory, participants will have the chance to work on their short story, translating the knowledge shared into a narrative outcome that could potentially feed into Baltan's new book, A New Mythology of Technology (working title), which will be published in early 2025.
Content of the online gatherings
Week 0: Introduction session / September 19th, 18:00 - 19:30
Participants will introduce themselves. We collectively set the agreements for the learning community and propose the approach for the coming weeks.
Week 1: Assumptions and conventions / September 26th, 18:00 - 21:00
What is technology? Let us begin by ritually burning our assumptions about technology and innovation that do not serve us. We will then discuss how we want to think of technology to set the ground for building new technological narratives.
Week 2: Objects / October 3rd, 18:00 - 21:00
We will take a close look at iconic/symbolic technological objects (e.g., a phone, a washing machine). We will use these objects as prisms to explore what technologies are—raw materials, responses to societal needs, tools for designing power structures, etc.
Week 3: Resistance and agency / October 10th, 18:00 - 21:00
How can we reclaim our agency in using technology? Can we? What is in our power? In this session, we will explore the agency of big tech companies that hold a monopoly over technologies and how we can resist what is imposed on us as users (planned obsolescence, collection of our data, etc.).
Week 4: Green Transition in Technology / October 17th, 18:00 - 21:00
Is technological development the solution to the climate crisis? What is the current relationship between technological development and the economy? What would technological development look like if we radically lower our energy and natural resource consumption?
Week 5: Technologies for the community / October 24th, 18:00 - 21:00
What is a community in a world dominated by smooth and shiny screens? How do technologies redefine community - is an online community a real one or just a community of consumers? What about technological innovations that can help us build a real-life community by, for instance, giving us tools to live off-grid?
Week 6: Technology as more-than-human / October 30th, 18:00 - 21:00
What happens to our technological thinking if we think of a community as a community of all beings, humans and non-humans? Let us think together about what technology could be if it were to reflect non-human ways of looking at the world.
Week 7: Technology and magic / November 7th, 18:00 - 21:00
Does it not look like magic when the email you type on your laptop appears on somebody else's computer screen? Does it not look almost like a religious ritual when you sit in front of your TV to listen to the news reported by someone "on the other side" of your screen? Keeping in mind the symbolic figure of the alchemist, we will explore the magical, ritualistic, and irrational aspects of our technologies.
In this last session, we will also reflect on the trajectory, the intentions we started with and how we embodied them throughout the program.
Practical info
Language: English
Leading learners: Lorenzo Gerbi, Julia Kassyk
Dates: September 19th (introduction: 18:00 - 19:30), September 26th, October 3rd, October 10th, October 17th, October 24th, October 31st, November 7th
Time: 18:00 - 21:00 CET on Zoom (incl. 15 min break).
Workload: +/- 1.5 hours of homework per class
Fee:
Regular price (Deadline September 8th): €200 incl. 9% BTW
Early birds (Deadline August 20th) max 5, €110 incl. 9% BTW
Student price, €135 incl. 9% BTW
Registration
Please send your registration, using the Google form, by September 8th. For questions, please contact Julia Kassyk at julia@baltanlaboratories.org
Payment
We will send you an invoice after your registration.
Participation
We can host a minimum of 10 and a maximum of 20 participants.
N.B. You can only participate once you paid the fee. Unfortunately, we cannot offer a stipend or payment in instalments for this trajectory.
About Baltan Laboratories
Baltan Laboratories is a cultural indisciplinary lab based in Eindhoven. We focus on societal issues through a relational approach, creating spaces to rehearse living otherwise. We believe that the increasing complexity of our world and the challenges we have to face no longer allow for a strictly disciplinary, reductionist and Western-based approach. In a world full of uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, the interactions and exchanges between different disciplines are fundamental to achieving a relational approach that responds to the environmental, political, social, economic and technological issues we must address today.