Web Residencies No 18 »Magical Hackers or The Elasticity of Resilience«

In the framework of the project Magical Hackerism or The Elasticity of Resilience, SAVVY Contemporary and Akademie Schloss Solitude’s Digital program offer four web residencies to practitioners and communities within the tropical belt, exploring situated knowledges, forming local DIT (Do It Together) community networks, and/or connecting intertropically on a planetary level. Curated by Research Netting Group, Akademie Schloss Solitude in cooperation with SAVVY Contemporary.

You are invited to apply for a web residency and become part of the larger project Magical Hackerism or The Elasticity of Resilience, and host and become a rhizome/node of Futura Trōpica Netroots for a lateral exchange of situated knowledges.

During this six-week online residency, they will offer support to set up a local community network using a Raspberry Pi, where your situated knowledge exploration can be hosted. When connected to the Wi-Fi network provided by the Rhizome, visitors can visit a web relational garden (a more than linear web space) that will contain your research, content, and resources to be shared. Your rhizome will become part of the InterTropical P2P network communicating through the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) protocol. Through the network, it is possible to visit other relational gardens elsewhere and communicate with other practitioners.

Futura Trōpica Netroots is an InterTropical network of grassroots local networks connecting communities and networks of support in Bogotá/Colombia, Kinshasa/DR Congo, and Bengaluru/India. In 2022, Martinique, Kampala/Uganda and Manila/Philippines have joined the constellation. This call is led by Magical Hackerism’s Netting Group interfacing through Futura Trōpica. Forming a Netting Group is an attempt for lateral exchanges of knowledges among InterTropical practitioners. The Netting Group is composed of Immy Mali, Czar Kristoff, Neema Githere, Alejo Duque, Sahej Rahal, and Morehshin Allahyari.

About the project: Magical Hackerism refers to the essential hacking of reality and the rendering of a multiplicity of worlds. The etymology of the word »tropics« comes from the ancient belief that the sun turned back at the solstices, the tropikós, from the greek word τροπή (tropḗ, »a turn, turning, solstice, trope«), meaning the point at which things turn. Magical Hackerism is the manifestation of the tropical turn as a mindset.

In this collaborative and experimental project, SAVVY Contemporary, panke.gallery, and Akademie Schloss Solitude come together to examine forms of technologies from a tropikós perspective (both as a region and as a mindset), to diversify and redistribute the networks of technologies and cultural imaginaries toward pluriversal understandings of the planet. With this constellation, the aim is to complexify the dominant cosmology of modern binary divisions and systems of classification, disrupt the vertical sight in our relationship to natural and artificial environments and establish dialogues between a multiplicity of worlds and cosmologies that exist by themselves and not by opposing to a contrary.

The project unfolds as fifteen-month research and public program, reflecting on tools for the subversion of realities and for active world-making. It is punctuated with an exhibition in the two venues SAVVY Contemporary and panke.gallery, a discursive program composed of workshops, sound performances, experimental radio, video essays, and the restoration of two historical net culture experiments, as well a web residency call in cooperation with Akademie Schloss Solitude.

Format: Rather than requesting the formulation of a new project, the Magical Hackerism or The Elasticity of Resili web residency offers the means to sustain ongoing initiatives that would benefit from Akademie Schloss Solitude’s creative community, as well as the time and financial resources to continue moving ideas forward. They will offer support setting up a DIT Community Network using a Raspberry Pi that becomes a rhizome in Futura Trōpica Netroots. Within this network, you can share your research on situated knowledges and exchange intertropically with other practitioners.

For this call, the Netting Research Group (Immy Mali, Czar Kristoff, Neema Githere, Alejo Duque, Sahej Rahal, and Morehshin Allahyari) selects four project proposals, whose creators are rewarded with a six-week production residency and a 1200-euro grant.

Please send your application until September 23, 2022 (midnight IDLW / BIT) to [email protected] by submitting your project proposal in the form of:

• a headline
• short concept text in English (1,000–1,500 characters with spaces)
• a header image (high resolution, landscape format)
• a short bio in English (500 characters with spaces)
• a PDF portfolio
• additional link

Artists of all disciplines as well as former Solitude fellows may apply. There is no age limit.