We will be in Bucarest for the ICEEFest. ICEEfest stands for Interactive Central and Eastern Europe Festival and has been building itself into one of the largest Internet related festivals organized in the CEE and SE Europe region since 2012.

There we will give a talk and a workshop about La Cura, exploring the ways in which a transgressive action can be transformed into a participatory, inclusive method for radical, positive innovation.

Here is the event on La Cura.

Here is what we’ll do:

The talk

Title: “Innovation and Transgression”

Abstract:

In the digital era all organisations are cultural organisations. When everything tends to transform into data, information and interactivity there is only one product left: the possibility to define the perception of what is normal and expected in the present and the vision for the future. When this happens, the role of transgression, which is the attitude at going beyond norms and the existing boundaries, assumes extreme value. Since the emergence of Experience Economies (PInes and Gilmore) arts and creativity have started to become fundamental assets for business. Enzensberger called this process “the industrialization of the mind” and the paradox of cultural industries: they cannot create their product – culture, which is a social product –, but merely induce and reproduce it. This paradox forces the industry to learn how to deal with transgression (with the “troublemakers”, using the work adopted by Enzensberger), by coopting or hiring it, or by putting it on a stage, to be able to benefit from its capability to innovate radically and in original ways. Transgression becomes a space for innovation: Grosz calls it the “excess space”, Canevacci Ribeiro calls it “methodological indiscipline”.

By doing so, the industry also contributes to the progressive encoding of transgression and, thus, to its end, to the eviction of the “excess space”, leading to less innovation and less development.

This frame defines the importance of transgression and conflict (and, in general, the challenges to the status quo) in any innovation scenario.

Therefore it also highlights the need to create ecosystems in which transgression is not only possible, but also desired and valuable, providing for high degrees of diversity and possibilities for autonomous self-representation and self-determination.

This is a Third Space (Bhabha and Soja), in which (top down) strategies and (bottom-up) tactics come together, in a space for opportunities.

The keynote is a visual journey in “Innovation and Transgression”, highlighting the concept trough remarkable examples and conceptual representations based on data, facts and design fictions.

The talk for La Cura

When Salvatore Iaconesi was diagnosed with brain cancer he started a global participatory performance to redefine the word “cure”, bringing it outside of the hospital and of medicalisation, and into society, where everyone can actively participate to cure and be cured: he opened up his medical data and invited everyone to “cure” him, through arts, stories, design, technologies, medicine, sciences, food, poetry, architecture. Cancer is a metaphor of our condition as contemporary human beings: an extremely specialized, technical, fragmented society in which personal autonomy and the possibility for social construction are at minimal levels, and in which everything has become a service, leaving us in the role of mere consumers, technologically entities which are considered in their administrative, bureaucratic and economic form, loosing the capacity to construct shared, self-determined meanings. La Cura explores biopolitics of the digital era, from medical protocols, to algorithms, data and the quantified self, to produce a method: using the opportunities of networks and of their connective intelligence and desire to find the only real cure. There is no cure outside of society.