Visit the Making and Doing Showcase for Virtual Prague!
“Ideas Trafficking”
Obviously, a virtual meeting will be limiting to the range of activities we have come to expect from the Making and Doing session, but it may open new opportunities as well.
Making & Doing has become an intriguing experimental arena exploring how STS can “make and do” by going beyond the standard (re)presentation formats. In Prague we want to continue with these explorations and invite STS experimenters, practitioners, assemblage thinkers, activists, artists to submit their ideas, objects, bodies for collective experimentation.
We invite proposals that will trace, in the critical and participative ways, the circuits and paths through which knowledge, including STS, has been moving, travelling and circulating. The 2020 Making & Doing program aims to take advantage of the location of the meeting, i.e. Prague, and explore how knowledges mutate, hybridize, transform and collapse on their ways from one place to another.
Second to Paris, Derek Sayer says, Prague was the capital of twentieth century Europe. Astonishingly vibrant and constantly changing human landscapes; being politically and geographically located at the epicentre of both WWI, WWII and the Cold War; being situated at the junction of struggles between democracy, fascism, Soviet communism – and their respective visions of the modernity; witnessing revolutions, liberations, coup d’états, military invasions, resistances, social anomies as well as periods of unprecedented artistic, intellectual, political upheavals, Prague – in of and itself – is an ideal location for exploring knowledge, science and technology traffic and its attendant politics.
There are established and newly emerging routes between the global centres of power and finance, there are touristic routes etc. What about knowledge routes and circuits? What are the ways to disturb the established academic routes that take place primarily in Global North and reconfigure knowledge geographies? What does it mean politically, epistemically and ontologically?
Using any (un)imaginable medium, we invite presenters to experiment, speculate, visualize, dramatize, organize tours in Prague (i.e. making and doing may be “unlocated” from the conference venue); the sessions might be interactive, involve bystanders and bypassers; they might include AI experiments, virtual and augmented reality experiments; they might take time, and use time as a factor of experiment – duration, acceleration, deceleration, waiting, rush, sequentiality, the right timing.
Questions on any aspects and details of Making & Doing should be addressed to Luděk Brož.