CONFERENCE’S SCHEDULE

4pm 
Welcome by Alexia Mathieu, Head of Master Media Design  

4pm – 4.30pm 
Alexandre Monnin, Inheriting infrastructures and shutting down innovations: steps towards a livable future with The Closings Worlds Initiative

Born at the crossroads of contemporary art, design, ethnography, engineering or philosophy, the Closing Worlds Initiative mixes ethnography of CEOs and top managers facing the irruption of the Anthropocene in their organizations with the design of new levers meant to help re-direct ("dis-assign" and reassign) unsustainable legacy elements such as our current infrastructures, technology(ies), organizations, business models, etc. In addition to inheriting and re-directing, shutting down yet-unborn-questionable-innovations (aka, innovation) is also strongly advised. We will present some of our proposals such as reclaiming and planning obsolescence, designing negative commons, "destauring" innovation through dark ANT, optimizing the financial losses of organizations til they shut down, dismantling infrastructures though reverse design or giving legal rights to objects. 

4.30pm – 5pm
Xandra Van Der Eijk, The landscape of unintended consequences

Scientists pushing to name the current era the Anthropocene, claim it is a unique and unprecedented age in the history of the earth. Describing first and foremost how the human species has become a geological force, the term Anthropocene as coined by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen takes the manufacturing of hazardous chemical compounds, land-use changes, deforestation and fossil fuel burning as the reasons for claiming that humans are outcompeting and dominating natural processes. This definition feeds into the thought that humans are capable of creating large-scale change, and leads to thinking that human-invented technology will be able to find solutions to planetary problems. Yet if the Anthropocene is truly valid, it actually teaches us that the large-scale applicability and effectiveness of our technologies have created more problems than solutions. Can we really design the future? Should we want to? 

5pm – 5.30pm
Irene Stracuzzi, The Legal Status of Ice

The current border dispute over the Arctic Ocean does not only concern geopolitical power structures but poses a more ontological question on the human right to declare sovereignty by means of a thin line. By tracking the history of cartography and deploying it to the Arctic context, the installation The Legal Status of Ice sheds new light on the origin of the dispute and reflects on the importance of mapping and visualising its complexity. Irene Stracuzzi (b. 1992, Italy) is a graphic designer working on commissions in the fields of information design, editorial design and visual identity design, while also developing independent research projects. With an interest in geopolitics, earth sciences and cartography, her work investigates how to turn abstract scientific data and complex journalistic topics into visual formats that allow for an easier understanding of information. 

5.30pm – 5.45pm
Break 

5.45pm – 6.15pm
Gaulthier Roussilhe, Framing digital practices into planetary limits
Digital industry evolved through the 20th century and the beginning of the 21th century with a discourse embodying two concepts: dematerialization and the global village. Today we can demonstrate that these two concepts are mostly invalid and should be contested. This talk will present the environmental impacts of digital industry in 2019 and compare it with transition goals. Secondly several sustainable digital practices will be showed and explained to demonstrate how we can stir digital practices away from their unsustainable origins. 

6.15pm – 6.45pm
Vanessa Lorenzo, Hybrid(s) 
Hybrid(s) is a contribution about hybrid media ecologies, speculative futures and more-than-human centered design. The session will go through different steps of a diffractive, non-solution oriented approach related to a speculative and critically oriented practice. The examples are interwoven with hands-on experiments in DIY-biology, field research, rapid prototyping and new media assemblages with mainly open sourcemtechnologies. The design process is an assemblage of design methodologies to conceive dream devices that would plunge us into a world inhabited by a multiplicity of agencies (to which we are so intimately interdependent). Besides, it requires the collaboration with other institutions and practitioners such as scientific laboratories, art and science research programs, bio-hackerspaces, fablabs, etc., to grant the supervision of the forthcoming biological and design experiments. This practice-based research and design process seeks to set up a ground for a more-than-human centered design methodology. Equally, it requiresman ecological thought, a more-than-human noticing, and a notion of new materialism (mainly emerged from the front lines of feminism). How can media intertwine the triad more-than-human– human–technology enabling meaningful multiespecies entanglements that would influence and evolve our mutual perception? 

6.45pm – 7pm 
Nicolas Nova, Documenting the Alpine Technosphere 
Current debates about the Anthropocene and the environmental crisis recently highlighted how "nature", human culture and technology seem to combine in increasingly disorienting ways, as animals, plants, geologies and landscape and machines become increasingly hybridized. This talk will describe the design brief of a workshop we are putting together with Media Design students, a workshop that will consists in documenting this hybridized technosphere in the context of the Chamonix Valley, in the French Alps. Rather than denouncing the presence of technical objects in an environment often thought of as "natural", I'll argue that grasping this hybridization of technologies of different dimensions brings to light primordial issues in our relationship with the environment.