Interactivos?'12 Ljubljana: Advisors' Approach

Approach by Chris Sugrue

"When considering the obsolete, I believe it is worthwhile to question how the latest technological advancements (which change at an almost incomprehensibly fast pace) fall short in some areas that previous ones might not have. An obsolete technology is not necessarily replaced with a  better one. As well, many platforms that may be considered  outdated or unfashionable in some parts of the world, may be important and thriving in others. Re-thinking, re-inventing or re-using the outdated may have relevancy outside of our own field of view. A project production workshop such as this has the potential to bring together many backgrounds and experience, offer unexpected ideas or alternatives and help us collectively reconsider the past and future. I believe a great asset of working in digital media is its flexibility to merge with other domains, traditions, crafts or philosophies and create new possibilities and works. Through hacking, experimenting with, and creating new uses of  technology we create the opportunity to live in the future we want rather than that which is constructed for us. Can we re-invent the past to build our futures?" by Chris Sugrue.

Approach by Yago Torroja

"I look at my mobile, the one I’ve had for five years, turning it over in my hands. What’s old about it? Yes, it’s obviously beat up on the surface—you can hardly read the keys… (Remember those?... Keys?) But what’s old about it? It’s small, you can make calls on it, the battery lasts for four or five days… Why does it seem so old to us? Are we running away from our own ageing? Maybe we think that if things age faster, we’ll live faster and wrinkle slower? We don’t measure time in seconds or days or months anymore. We use changes now. “I met you seven mobiles ago. Remember? Almost three years ago!” This dynamic of change, of the new, of the essential, this buying novelty to buy ourselves time, has become the leitmotif of most of our technology and economy. Make what’s obsolete useless; make the everyday obsolete; make the new the everyday. Breaking down this unsustainable pattern is a matter of more than just reusing waste, more than using one hand to put together what we break with the other. It is not just a question of reusing, because reusing something means admitting it’s no longer useful. Instead, we need to ask about the end of its usefulness: when does that time come? And propose other models with no place for the concept of waste...Where talking about what is obsolete is no longer common but rather something old-fashioned, out of date, obsolete... “I’m getting my new mobile today. Like the others I’ve had, it’s made of germinable plastic. I’m looking at the one I’ve got in my hands now... I’m fond of it (remember?... it’s been almost three years). I’d like to plant it. What will come up when I water it? I smile as I look around my terrace... the rose bush and bamboo look fantastic! They grew out of the other ones I planted.” by Yago Torroja.

Approach by  Ida Hiršenfelder

"The collaborative prototyping workshop is one of those unique opportunities for people from different professions to come together and explore the dynamics between the fascination over technology and the disbelieve in the technology as a great contributor to the human civilisation and the development of human mind. The technology we are using is constantly subjected to being deemed as obsolete, henceforth creating a rather unhealthy condition from a psychoanalytical point of view; the discarded and disposed functions like the civilisation's suppressed memory of an experience that might have been pleasant or not, but is nevertheless rejected in the premises of the new discoveries. The old is ridiculed by the next generation as something childish and immature, while it is the very obsolete technology of the past that construct the ways we perceive our own world in the very moment. It is a result of an evolutionary processes that not so much invents the new, but perpetuates the same systems of hierarchy and the power dominated drive that is inherent in the current technology. It would perhaps prove helpful to view the technology not only as a product of physical laws, but inherently a cultural phenomenon. The way to disrupt the existing cultural codes of the technology is not only to give way to the playful and the innovative or to artistic, but also to do away with the utilitarian demand for its usefulness or functionality? The question of possible applications of the results of the prototypes is perhaps not the best one in the sense of cultural critique. The machines that are strictly set to serve a purpose inhibit the invention of alternative energy sources and hinder a more open vision of technology that is not just an accumulation of algorithms but an incredible series of coincidences. The question for experimentation is not only how to artistically beautify errors but to make them an essential part of the system. The purpose is not just to demystify the machines in the do-it-yourself collaborative process and to make a human mind at ease with the machines but also to construct the machines in order to constantly challenge and trigger ways of thinking. To envisage what is going to be the obsolete technology of the future, inevitably sets us on a different and unpredictable path." by Ida Hiršenfelder