MEDlab is proud to launch Excavations: Governance Archaeology for the Future of the Internet, an online art exhibition and discursive space, exploring the future of the Internet through the past and present of human self-governance. It has resulted from the collaboration spanning the last six months of an artist cohort exploring historical governance practices to inform the future of online community governance. Over the course of its meeting, this group across continents and disciplines met regularly, providing collective feedback for each project, exploring many aspects of governing communal spaces past, present, and future. The process has generated an interdisciplinary exhibition, which we are now happy to launch in the framework of the United Nations Internet Governance Forum, taking place this week in Poland. The online exhibition itself is publicly accessible, offering several pathways into the projects, including their relationship to past governance archaeology mechanisms, as part of a larger research project MEDlab has been developing with King’s College London.
Please join us for a guided tour December 10 at 15:45-16:05 CET (7:45-8:05 MST); register on Zoom here.
Excavations builds on earlier efforts to create a dialogue between multimedia artists and policy spaces such as the ART@IGF, an international exhibition on digital policy, conducted as part of IGF2017 in Geneva. As a further development of this initiative, Excavations: Governance Archaeology for the Future of the Internet explores specific digital policy issues around human rights and access. Its aim is to actively facilitate a conversation beyond familiar models to imagine new, more inclusive Internet governance policies, centering actors coming from underrepresented fields of arts and humanities.
By gathering a range of voices from internationally renowned artists, the exhibition brings perspectives such as intersectionality, indigenous practices, and media archaeology into conversation. The artists and researchers participating include: Barabar (Bhawna Parmar and Rubina Singh), Mateus Guzzo, Caroline Sinders, Şerife Wong, Eryk Salvaggio, Ioanna Thymianidis, Mara Karayanni, Mallory Knodel, Antonia Hernández, Lotte Louise de Jong, Amelia Winger-Bearskin, and Jenny Liu Zhang, Cat Chang, and Isaac Gilles (Plot Twisters).
Join our tour to hear more and visit the exhibition, where you can explore the projects, hear the artists guide you through them, and connect them to a long legacy of governance practices as together we rethink the future of the Internet.
Excavations: Governance Archaeology for the Future of the Internet is curated by Federica Carugati of (King’s College London), and Darija Medic and Nathan Schneider (Media Enterprise Design Lab, University of Colorado Boulder), with support from the Eutopia Foundation and the British Academy, in collaboration with DiploFoundation.