How can we redesign the underlying algorithms of technological systems to address the social and ecological inequalities they propel and sustain?
The inequalities within human society and between humans and other beings in our shared ecosystem remain unresolved yet pressing issues of our past and present. The existing technological systems we (re-)create, be it machines, hardware, or money, discriminate against people of colour, support warfare and recognise non-humans only by the monetary value attached to them. It is difficult to speak of freedom when our Western culture has for centuries been relying on the oppression of the marginalised for the benefit of the privileged.

In the year program Technologies Otherwise, Baltan Laboratories attempts to disentangle the complex web of assumptions that inform our technological systems. For this STRP Scenario, Baltan introduces artists and researchers who propose alternatives to the dominant narratives in, for instance, machine learning and financial technologies, which have been saturated with racial and specific hierarchies. The artists intend to take us a step further, redesigning or hacking the structure and processes of our technological systems to enact alternative stories and make them experiential. The existing and ongoing projects of our speakers present how, for example, our financial system could be restructured to account for the environmental destruction caused by human activity or how we can hack the energy system to diverge from providing financial profits to warfare. The session will be moderated by Lorenzo Gerbi, co-director at Baltan Laboratories.

The event is co-organised with Baltan Laboratories and kindly supported by Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie as a part of Baltan’s year programme Technologies Otherwise and part of ARTeCHÓ, an initiative of five European institutions: SERN - Startup Europe Regions Network (Belgium), Baltan Laboratories (Netherlands), FZC-Etopia Center for Art & Technology (Spain), Frankfurt School Blockchain Center (Germany) and MEET Digital Cultural Center (Italy). Its main goal is to create a peer-to-peer learning community for artists to learn more about the technical side of the art-making process and its intersection with new technologies, Crypto Art, blockchain, and NFT marketplaces. ARTeCHÓ is a Creative Europe project funded by the European Commission.