As PhD researchers, our raison d’etre is to contribute new knowledge to the world. Can creative methods help uncover or produce the new that is otherwise destined to be eroded by a digital society premised on predictability and risk aversion?

Can creative methods be used as a way to evade the predetermination of algorithmic society that threatens the possibility of an open future? How can we as PGRs begin incorporating creative methods into our wider research projects? In the final instalment of this event series, we will be getting hands-on with various creative methods whilst diving deeper into the questions posed in previous sessions. Join us for light lunch, discussions about our digital futures, and get creative with interactive activities that bridge the digital and analogue.

About the Art of Opening Up the Future:

That change can begin with art is repeated often by scholars of every persuasion, from Ursula K. Le Guin speaking about resistance to capitalist realism to Byung-Chul Han reflecting on how to regain the world-changing powers once possessed by philosophy. Harnessing this potential for change seems as pressing as ever, as we observe in real time what Mark Fisher and Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi have called the “slow cancellation of the future”, or what Bernard Stiegler has examined as the erosion of our common horizon of a shared future. Can art in its varied forms be an antidote to the data-driven collapse of social cohesion we witness at present, to preserve an open future not predetermined and narrowed by predictive digital mechanisms and algorithmic governmentalilty?

This event series taking place at the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab takes as its starting point the art created in response to the technological advancements of our digital present to explore creative digital methodologies, how culture and politics merge in digital environments, and the ways digital tools might be creatively deployed to generate and amplify modes of resistance against the enclosure of an open future.

The art of opening up the future: Creative Methods in Practice