Artistic research within a lab of possibilities: exploring post-digital ignorance in “a’21 amberNetworkFestival”

Abstract

During COVID-19, the emergence of collective knowledge production networking, the development of common resource pools and resilient commoning practices were thoroughly weakened. In addition, such a paradigmatic crisis has made ignorance and its consequences more visible on a planetary scale. In this article, we asked what kind of research would enable us to explore the possibilities of co-learning and critically reflect on the various forms of ignorance production for the purposes of commoning in a range of settings. Based on laboratory studies in Science, Technology and Society (STS), we aim to explore the contemporary interventions of community building and commoning practices performed in artistic research. Becoming powerful creative forces in their own right, art and technology festivals have augmented the possibilities of how various actors relate to each other, express themselves to wider society, and self-organize in order to challenge current problems on a planetary scale. Our ethnographic study, which included interviews, document analysis, participant observations, case study, game design and online focus group meetings, was based on a hybrid mode of artistic research within a’21 amberNetworkFestival, a co-curated, decentralized and translocal art and technology festival. As a self-reflexive research outcome, the findings of our study reveal that artistic research merging scientific study, online applications, gamification, and performance can be developed for the examination of ignorance production and enhance translocal commoning, co-production and co-learning in various settings. Thus, artistic research within “a lab of possibilities” can allow different communities to collaborate on a common task by providing coordination without consensus.