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Title: Surgencies – A Personal Protest Statement Subtitle: Workshop by NXS Date: 17 May 2019
Remix of the intro text and a debris of tweets, photos, and a poem, complemented with a dispersed editor's note.
How do we consume? How do we get influenced? How do we protest?
NXS – standing for nexus (a connection or bond) – is an Amsterdam based research collective that explores ‘the self’ in the age of digital technology. At its core is a biannual publication that extends to exhibitions, art works, public events, and a working lab. NXS searches for personal viewpoints, experiences, and stories.
The Surgencies workshop by NXS was aimed at creating a collective lexicon of personal viewpoints on ubiquitous technology, by drawing attention to the implementations that are so vowed into our daily lives that they normally go unnoticed. The intangibility and unclarity of where and how exactly digital technology works and affects us, evokes the uncanny feeling of a loss of control, a sense of frustration and anxiety. By investigating and collectively mapping emotional responses to technology and their behavioral implications participants extract inspiration for a personal protest statement that was published in the direct surroundings.
The collective ‘research through making’ approach mixes speed and visual and textual assignments with performative elements that require quick responses. They do not allow over-rationalization or over-explanation of implicit constructs but promote the production of associative and subconscious ideas. By exposing the seemingly trivial daily urgencies in life, we can stop asking questions and make strong and profound statements to counter them.
###Lovesick Poem to a Chat Bot That Has Fallen Silent
Go and rot.
You have disappeared.
But I have not.
Nikola Richter
Dispersed editor’s note: Speedy publishing has a bad ring to it: it leaves no time for line-editing, fact-checking, or conspicuous design. What happens if you lay aside these formal objections and ask what speed may have to tell us? This doesn’t mean we have to blurt out everything as it comes to our minds, adding to the pile of braindumps that is too gigantic already and polluting the info-sphere even further. This workshop poses the question what happens when you take another inroad into what you might want to express. Not the rational but rather the emotional one. Not aiming for the unidirectional argument but for a multi-path walk in the woods. While the associations we might have with ‘personal’, ‘protest’, and ‘statement’ in an era of post-truth politics are probably not the best, they can also propose an open and involved manner of thinking, writing, and publishing.