How can architects and other designers reclaim digital tools to build worlds that matter to them and the communities in which they work? Who builds these digital tools and makes them common? What alternative platforms might designers imagine and create?

The Canadian Centre for Architecture’s The Digital Now: Architecture and Intersectionality, a Multidisciplinary Research Project funded by the Mellon Foundation, brings together a group of transdisciplinary researchers from Colombia, Ethiopia, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States to address the urgent need to collaboratively create digital technologies and build more critical sites and spatial imaginaries. The CCA conceives of the digital as a shared space of critique that can engage new media technologies to intervene in everyday realities and the projection of futures.

Organized in collaboration with La Línea de Arte, Ciencia y Tecnología, IDARTES, this event will bring together Miriam Abraham, Xavi Laida Aguirre, Moa Carlsson, Shelby Doyle, Orit Halpern, Pedro Aparicio Llorente, Thandi Loewenson, and Simone Niquille and their collective explorations in documenting, generating, and projecting digital worlds.

These visions will highlight the group’s engagement with the Festival of Migration in Nuqui, and Pedro Aparicio Llorente’s efforts, along with community leader Josefina Klinger, in using a communication platform such as WhatsApp to collaboratively create a centre for environmental leadership and knowledge. The event will serve as a medium of conceptual projection, where the researchers will describe how the digital demands attention to Indigenous knowledges, the effects of material waste, gender bias, and Black emancipation.

The Digital Now researchers will also enter into conversation with La Línea de Arte, Ciencia y Tecnología symposium convenors to consider how practices of radical transformation through digital design depend on the worlds that can not only be imagined but experienced and built through relationships between people, places, and platforms. This event is thought of as part of An Archaeology of Media colloquium convened by IDARTES.

This event takes place at Sala Gaitán of Teatro Jorge Eliecer Gaitán, Instituto Distrital de las Artes in Bogotá (Cra. 7 #22-47, Santa Fé, Bogotá, Cundinamarca, Colombia).

To attend please RSVP to studium@cca.qc.ca.