Panel 2 _(Un)Sustainable Perspectives

8.10 | 16:00 - 17:30 online online English
What is the role of art, design and technology in the context of environmental awareness, climate crisis and our relationship with nature? Can art, design and technology help us engage with ecosystems in different ways and/or cultivate new relationships with nature, the planet and non-humans species?
Patchlab Festival, in partnership with FutureEverything, presents a series of online conversations sharing creative and innovative practices responding to environmental futures and reframing our relationships with ecosystems and the planet.  In this programme, leading artists, designers, scholars and researchers share work and methodologies that challenge and move beyond existing power structures, and fixed ways of thinking; from extraction and exploitation to new possibilities, kinships and visions for the future.


(Un)Sustainable Perspectives
Curated and hosted by Irini Mirena Papadimitriou – Creative Director of the FutureEverything.

What does a sustainable world look like? Is sustainability even possible if our capitalist society relies on fast and endless production, supply chains and extractivism? Can we build things differently or produce less? In this conversation, we explore possibilities – and impossibilities – of reframing planetary relationships and shifting our focus to interconnected ecosystems and economies. We are also reflecting on the role of art, design and technology in how these might be shaping our environmental understanding and where we go next.

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Jay Springett

Jay is a writer, theorist, and a strategist for hybrid environments. His concerns are with culture, humans, technology and infrastructure. He is recognised as an articulate voice in the emerging speculative genre of Solarpunk. A movement that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilisation look like, and how can we get there?”. He has described Solarpunk as a memetic engine – a tool to power the ‘refuturing’ of our collective imagination. His Solarpunk 2020 short story ‘In The Storm, A Fire’ was long listed for the BSFA Award for Short Fiction and Chanticleer International Book Awards Short Story Award Semifinalist. Jay is currently an instructor at The New Centre and guest lectures on worldbuilding and futures at various universities around the world. His work has taken him to events such as: Unsound Festival (PL), Sonar+D (ES), Fiber Festival (NL), Theorising the Web (US), and Transmediale (DE). In 2019 Jay Springett was selected as one of WeAreEurope’s 64 Faces of Europe. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He co-founded the decentralised creative exchange Guild.is and is a member of the Global Regeneration CoLab. Jay hosts a weekly podcast 301 seconds in length, which can be found at Permanentlymoved.online and describes himself as an artist without art. He has been writing online under the handle @thejaymo since 2001.

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Nick Laessing

Nick is an artist working with environmental storytelling through 3D animation, spatial sound and enveloping installations. He creates poetic interpretations about overlooked natural phenomena through collaborations with field biologists, composers and writers. Projects are based on extensive fieldwork. Key collaborators include Musician ARCA, Composer and Musical Director for the Philip Glass Ensemble Michael Riesman, Ornithologist and author Dr. Douglas H. Pratt, Architect Sir David Adjaye OBE RA, BTS, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and the Natural History Museum Berlin, among others.
Jakob has recently exhibited with his major solo exhibition Berl-Berl at ARoS Museum of Art in Aarhus, originally commissioned by LAS andshown in Berlin at Halle am Berghain. Additionally, his work Liminal Landswas exhibited at Luma Arles for the Preludeexhibition. He was a finalist for the Future Generation Art Prize at the 2019 Venice Biennale. He received the Serpentine Augmented Architecture commission in 2019 to create his work The Deep Listener with Google Arts and Culture. He is the recipient of the best VR graphics for RE-ANIMATED (2019) at the Cinequest Festival for Technology and Cinema, the Prix du Jury (2019) at Les RencontresArles, the Webby Award -People’s Choice VR (2018), and the Games for Change Award -Most Innovative (2018), among others.

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Giulia Bellinetti

Giulia Bellinetti is a researcher and cultural programmer, interested in the power/knowledge relays and political ecologies of contemporary art institutions. She is coordinator of the Nature Research Department and of the Future Materials programme at the Jan van Eyck Academie, in The Netherlands. Her institutional practice is supported by a theoretical investigation on the epistemic function of art institutions in the age of ecological crisis, pursued in the form of a PhD project at ASCA – Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (UvA). Previously Giulia was coordinator of the Production Department at the M HKA, Museum of Contemporary art of Antwerp, Belgium.

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Irini Mirena Papadimitriou  _UK
Irini is a digital culture curator and currently Creative Director at FutureEverything. She was previously Digital Programmes Manager at the V&A and Head of New Media Arts Development at Watermans. Her display, Artificially Intelligent, was exhibited at the V&A in 2018 and in 2021 she curated You and AI for Onassis Foundation in Athens, followed by Plásmata: Bodies, Dreams, and Data in 2022. Irini is a co-founder of Maker Assembly, a critical gathering about maker culture, and has been a co-curator for the Arts & Culture experience at Mozilla Festival, including the 2019 exhibition Trustworthy AI. She has been a recipient of curatorial research programmes including MOBIUS (Finnish Institute), Art Fund and Mondriaan Fonds, and she has served as a jury member for Prix Ars Electronica, D&AD Awards, Lumen Prize, EU STARTS and ACM Siggraph.
FutureEverything is an award-winning innovation lab and cultural organisation that has helped shape the emergence of digital culture in Europe. Established in Manchester in 1995,  acts through a curated programme of events, art commissions, critical conversations, collaborative projects and prototyping, FutureEverything pushes creative boundaries and stimulates new ways of thinking, across a diverse range of sectors, disciplines and audiences. Taking an action-research, artist-led and human-centred approach, FutureEverything is passionate about bringing people together to discover, share and experience new ideas for the future, creating opportunities to question and reflect on the world around us.