Coping Strategies

Curator Sarah Grant will introduce us to the special program “Coping Strategies” and guest speakers on the first talks sessions of the festival.

Sarah Grant is an American artist and professor of new media based in Berlin at the Weise7 studio. Her teaching and art practice engages with the electromagnetic spectrum and computer networks as artistic material, social habitat, and political landscape. She holds a Bachelors of Arts in Fine Art from UC Davis and a Masters in Media Arts from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Since 2015, she has organized the Radical Networks conference in New York and Berlin, a community event and arts festival for critical investigations and creative experiments in telecommunications.

Coping Streategies Curatorial Statement

By now we begin to understand the extent to which our personal and professional interactions are mediated by the digital, from user interfaces to data harvesting networks of surveillance. As digital captives, we have little agency over our membership and the extent of our participation within these obfuscated systems.

Additionally, our dependency upon these systems leaves us vulnerable in a way that can lead to crisis, in the event of critical communications infrastructure or platforms becoming unavailable or unsafe to use.

How can we put some space between ourselves and these dominant structures? How can we push back and reclaim agency over the narrative that is written about ourselves and our communities by these intrusive technologies? How do we mitigate digital crisis?

Coping Strategies is a program of works, including presentations, workshops, and performances, that demonstrate artist-led approaches to recasting our role in the asymmetrical relationship between ourselves and the dominant providers of information technology. They exemplify:

Building infrastructure that centers community- versus profit-driven values

Creating datasets that seek to remove bias against marginalized communities

Reclaiming ownership over our digital selves

Restoring emotional intimacy to digitally mediated personal relationships

Creating new ways of encoding information in service to political activists

Prioritizing existing infrastructures that elevates knowledge and access above commodification and surveillance

By demonstrating concrete actions that we as individuals and as communities can take in response to these domineering information systems, Coping Strategies hopes to provoke excitement and reassurance that we don’t have to passively accept the default settings of our digital lives.