Luminous Green Workshop 2008

Reflecting on the role of the arts, design and technology in an environment of turbulence

Luminous Green is a series of gatherings about a possible future; about a human world, that is enlightened, imaginative, electrified and most importantly – living in a fertile symbiosis with the rest of the planet.

The workshop in Singapore is a part of the series of gatherings, initiated by FoAM (Belgium), calling on the creative sector to enrich the public debate around environmental sustainability, ethical living, eco-technology and design. The workshop encourages transdisciplinary discussions and collaborations between people from all walks of life. Artists, designers, academics, activists, social entrepreneurs economists and policy-makers whose practice incorporates ecological thinking as a core value, or as a major concern.

Rather than designing a flotilla of green products, services and technologies to clutter the world in new and unexpected ways, the workshop participants will think about the kind of future in which we want to live, work and play in. What lifestyles, what social and economic systems can we envisage beyond the status quo? Is there anything that we can learn from existing social experiments, or the fringes of the arts, design and technology, to help us make our economic and political systems less fragile and unstable? Or vice-versa – what can artists, designers and technologies learn from the way policy and business approach the global environmental turbulence? Collaborative creation, open source technology, distributed play and games, mixing realities, locating media and questioning borders could become tools to transform our wasteful consumer-society into more inclusive, entangled and participatory cultures.

If we believe that these tools and methods are a way forward, what can the electronic arts community do to propagate these tools and methods into everyday life? The objective of the Luminous Green workshop at ISEA is to attempt to explore these questions by spawning inspiring contacts and propositions, holistic methods and interventions, looking beyond conservation and sustainability. Using participatory facilitation techniques based on OST (Open Space Technology), the workshop is designed to encourage interaction and commitment between everyone involved.

Designed and facilitated by FoAM (Maja Kuzmanovic, Nik Gaffney, Maggie Buxton)

http://www.isea2008singapore.org/conference/conf_workshops.html#luminous