Digital Manufacturing

We are an official partner of the Digital Workshops / Digital Manufacturing project, which intends to promote the training and action of under 35 artists from all over Europe to work in contact with entrepreneurial realities in the Friuli Venezia Giulia region. In this summer school we will be presenting an overview of our work on experiential futures, physical narratives, processes of speculation. “No one actually knows how a sustainable, modern society looks like.” (Welzer, 2014) And although we cannot claim to know, we can try and imagine possibilities what it might look like. He goes on to say that “Instead of a technological transformation, we need a socio-cultural one” which reminds us that “There's no App for that” where the “that” in question is the dilemma of contemporary society. Time’s Up continues to deepen an arts-based cultural investigation into raising awareness and allowing contemplation of ways in which we might and want to live. We do this by collaboratively imagining and building possible and preferred futures, instigating as well as encouraging public discourse about individual and collective futures. We invite the public to investigate possible and preferable futures by walking through a built environment that makes a possible future experienceable and thus able to be immersively explored. We offer staged space, a scenography that invites deeper investigation. By creating immersive experiences, the public is encouraged to explore speculative cultures as well as possible, plausible, probable and preferable ways of being. As a society, we are in constant contact with media and knowledge now, we cannot not know (Donna Haraway) and it is no longer our job (as artists) to raise awareness, because there is no longer an excuse for not being aware. In the midst of a postfactual world, there are also actual facts and with an appropriate level of reflection, as we require in a Redactional Society we can and are aware of enough; the drowning of migrants, the avoidance of fair taxation and the imbalance in society are not hidden in any way any more. As Matthew Fuller says, our job (as artists) is “not about representation and communication, but about putting action in the world.” And we do this by building experiencable possibilities that begin to deal with these issues of which we (all) cannot not be aware. We will talk about our work with experiential futures, physical narratives and futuring workshops, artists and others working in similar veins and the value of speculative design for a post normal world.