Festival Fragile Solidarity / Fragile Connections

A Digital Solitude Festival in cooperation with Kunstverein Wagenhalle, Württembergischer Kunstverein and Merz Akademie

From May 10 – 14, 2022, Akademie Schloss Solitude will organize the festival “Fragile Solidarity / Fragile Connections”. Working with numerous artists and experts from the Digital Solitude community, and collaborating with our local partners in Stuttgart, the festival’s thematic orientation is dedicated to various forms of solidarity, connectivity, cohesion, and togetherness within off- and online spaces. “Fragile Solidarity / Fragile Connections« explores the mutual relations of solidarity, networks, and technologies as a means beyond the so-called digital divide and the technology’s exploitative histories.

The festival program consists of various online and offline workshops, an exhibition, and an accompanying program with screenings, artist talks, lectures and performances.

At Merz Akademie and online, the workshop “Expanding Solidarities in Interactive Digital Videogame Projects” with Grayson Earle, Peter Polack, Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga will take place on Thursday, May 12, 10 am – 1 pm.

This workshop gives participants the opportunity to present and discuss their interactive video game projects. Participants are given five to ten minutes to demonstrate their projects, followed by a collective discussion. Discussion topics can include the fragile solidarities that games and networked environments provide, especially during the pandemic. Together we will look at biased codes, the accessibility of these environments, who they appeal to, who these exemplary interactive videogame projects and technologies ultimately serve/address, their potential for facilitating organization in analogue spaces, as well as questions about specific projects.

Grayson Earle is an American contemporary artist and activist. He uses new media to make political statements. He is known for his guerilla video projections as a member of The Illuminator Art Collective and his co-creation of Bail Bloc, a computer program that bails people out of jail.

Peter Polack is a designer and Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Information Studies at the University of California (UCLA), Los Angeles, USA. His work and research address how technical systems are designed to inform our perception, and the role of art-making in illustrating what technology makes perceptible. This focus is informed by his background in game design and data visualization, and by his work with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, a grassroots organization that analyzes the social impacts of police surveillance systems.

Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga approaches art as a social practice that seeks to establish dialogue in public spaces. The ways that inequality and power manifest themselves in our lives are consistent threads in Ricardo’s work.

Registration required by May 9: register@akademie-solitude.de