Time couldn’t be more out of joint. As techno-fascism attempts to reshape global order, spaces of autonomy shrink both online and offline. What role is left to theory and art practice in this desolating landscape?
In this two-hour workshop, participants will engage in a three-part ritual process: collectively mapping the emotional landscapes of our online lives, enacting a ceremonial release of habitual patterns, and collaboratively imagining alternative spaces for connection.
In the last lecture of Baltan’s Technologies Otherwise programme, Alessandro Y. Longo will sketch a speculative framework to recognize and configure new modes of agency and desire in digital spaces. Summoning non-rational, lost forms of knowledge, Alessandro will embrace the possibility of chaos to re-enchant our perspective on reality. Through analysis of collective artistic interventions and examples of digital resistance, he will demonstrate how strategies of exodus and play can materialize these theoretical insights into tactical responses.
This half-hour lecture will start at 15:00 in our BlaBlaLab (2nd floor, Natlab, Kastanjelaan 500) and will be followed by the workshop below till 17:00. You can buy your ticket on Eventbrite at this link.
A Digital Ver Sacrum - Ritual for Collective Renewal
Our desires and daily rhythms flow through digital platforms. Despite their problematic nature, breaking free from these spaces remains a complex emotional and social challenge. Echoing Carnival’s promises of renewal, Alessandro Y. Longo invites us to a spring ritual, inspired by the ancient Latin tradition of the Ver Sacrum (Sacred Spring), to experience together a moment of passage for our online existences. Through collaborative sensemaking and imaginative practices, the workshop aims to explore and organize our collective desire toward alternative horizons.
Beware: like all transformations, something must be left behind to make way for new beginnings.
About the speaker
Alessandro Y. Longo is a philosopher, artist, and researcher based in Berlin. Alessandro’s research explores subversive uses of technology, cooperative economic models, andcultural mutations in the age of digital networks. His work is often crystallized in writing and, sometimes, in games and video.
He is the founder of REINCANTAMENTO, an independent research and publishing collective (based between Berlin and Italy) that mobilizes imaginative practices and critical game design methodologies as tools for investigating dominant techno-political architectures, aiming to create spaces of utopian possibility and enchanted desires. They embrace the precarious nature of cultural work and consider their project as an eternal Work-In-Progress. As a choir of plural voices, REINCANTAMENTO refuses the identity trap and considers itself part of a wider, common horizon for alternative, networked futures. Their projects have been featured at Serpentine Galleries & RadicalXChange, SAVVY Contemporary, NYU Design and Media, C/O Digital Festival and more.
Technologies Otherwise
This event concludes our Technologies Otherwise programme and its Lecture Series format.
The programme questions whether technology truly belongs to us, exploring how it often feels like an autonomous force beyond our control. It criticizes the monopolization of technology by corporate capital, leading to disillusionment, and proposes a hopeful approach—one rooted in radical change that is both political and connected to the earth. Technologies Otherwise calls for a more diverse technological landscape that resists corporate control and better serves human and ecological needs.
Technologies Otherwise is supported by Creative Industries Fund NL and Stichting Cultuur Eindhoven.