Hello everyone!
2021 has been a tough year for everyone with Covid and all of the other things that didn’t stop with it: other diseases, climate change, migrations, wars, poverty, difficult economies, problematic education patterns, jobs and our new lives all over the planet across cities, rurality, warzones, hospitals and all the diverse places and contexts of the world.
Our thoughts go out to all the human and non human life forms that have suffered during this very difficult year.
To end the year in the best of ways, and to start the new one with new, constructive energies, we at HER: She Loves Data and Nuovo Abitare wish to leave you with concepts that we hope may offer the support you will need in welcoming 2022:
the necessity of new rituals which use data and computation in new ways
the necessity of new, radically different imaginaries
Rituals
Data and computation are progressively becoming crucial in accessing our fundamental rights, freedoms and possibility to benefit from our relations, communicazion, information and knowledge. But we don’t have any sensibility to all of these data and computation and the rituals and practices that currentlly involve data and computation in our lives are all extractive and progressively transform all of our lives into some form of financially relevant transaction.
A more diverse set of actors must become able to participate to composing their own data-rituals and their social, informational, psychological, relational, economic contracts/implications.
For example, in 2020 and 2021 we invented a new ritual called Data Meditations. It started from addressing the fragilities that originated from the physical and social distancing during the pandemics, and whose effects we are experiencing now, with strong social polarization. We wanted to invent different ways for both humans and non humans to experience Others.
In 2021 we performed a new edition of Data Meditation with MAXXI museum in Rome on Climate Change, and new versions and models are starting to pop up for schools, hospitals, neighbourhoods, offices/companies, local/global communities, and even with non humans such as plants, animals, mountains etc: ever wondered how to meditate and get in touch with a forest or with the ocean? Now you can.
These below are some videos from the MAXXI edition of Data Meditation:
Imagination
The second concept we want to leave you with in this 2021 is directly connected to the first one: the one of the necessity of new/different imaginaries.
We live in a context which is strongly characterized in single directions, and this makes us fragile, as when, in nature, only one type of a plant survives: if something in climate or chemestry changes you become more exposed to fragility. (Bio)Diversity is key to the evolution of any ecosystem: mono is rarely good for any ecology.
Ideas and concepts are an ecosystem, and they live these ecological dynamics.
“Data” and “computation” are perfect examples of this: in the current ecostystem, they are strongly characterized as extractive phenomena. They are so much an “extractive phenomena” that its really difficult (when not impossible at all) to think about them in any other way.
But, instead, it is possible. Even if everything including schools, universities and jobs) take these mono-definitions for granted.
For example, at HER and Nuovo Abitare we think about data not in terms of “extraction”, but in terms of “self-representation”, of “autobiography”.
When you think about data and computation in these terms it becomes clear how computations (AI and algorithms) immediately change their role: from extractive phenomena they become translators, allies, interconnectors between different cultures and sensibilities – even non-human ones –, because anything-anyone can become expressinve through data/computation, which becomes a common ground.
To achieve this shift is not banal.
Companies, governments, schools, universities, professions, cities and the people who live in must change. They all must change in how they imagine things. This can only happen through culture and art, who are able to transgress: to go beyond what is perceived as normal (which derives from “norm”), to show other times, spaces and modalities of living are not only possible, but also desirable e preferable.
AIs, for example, have become Community AIs, Queer AIs, Weird AIs, Eerie AIs, to be able to transgress and to allow other, different people to experience how to live these possible tranformations.
Have a wonderful 2022 and get in touch!
These two are only a few of the things we are imagining for 2022 at HER and Nuovo Abitare, through the principles of Nuovo Abitare (here illustrated in practice through some of our projects).
We have published a new book (“Incuria” edited by Luca Sossella Editore, sorry, only in Italians for now, but get in touch if you’d like to translate it) which uses the city of Rome as an example of what using these innovation models in a city would mean. The book uses famous movies set in Rome (like Fellini’s “8 e 1/2” and Pasolini’s “Accattone”) to make it accessible and engaging to wide, also non-expert, audiences. By purchasing it you also contribute to the fundraising campaign for Nuovo Abitare. So you might want to keep this in mind.
We’d love to hear from you all.
You’re so many (almost 20k people receive this newsletter, directly though Substack of though our own dedicated mailings) and we thank you all for dedicating so much attention to our initiatives.
We’d love to receive feedbacks, advices, request for collaborations and anything you might want to come up with. Give us a shout!
We wish you a healthy, safe, happy and imaginative 2022.
:)