BW Lab

_BW_Lab analyses the impact of new technologies on political, social, economic, ecological, cultural processes, and creates conditions for designing and exploring alternatives at the interface of art, technology, infrastructure, nature, science and society. We need such an organisation to tame the fear of the future – dominated by gloomy visions, dystopian narratives and catastrophic premonitions – and to reclaim agency, to learn how to use digital technologies wisely and consciously, so that they serve us as humans and planetary ecosystems, rather than killing our creativity and initiative, driving us into addictions, stealing our attention and contributing to environmental degradation. We combine art, research, theoretical and social activities with political activism. Our field of interest will include methodologies developed by political geography, strategic foresight, futures studies, technology assessment, speculative and systemic design, investigative art, OSINT, data science, anthropology and sociology of technology, forensics, art and technology, digital ecology. We attribute a particularly important role to post-forensic activities, which – abandoning the objectified aesthetic used, for example, by the Forensic Architecture group – make use of video, digital animation, deep fakes, artificial intelligence, emphasising the work’s own authorial character and personal relationship to the events that become the object of investigation. The _BW_Lab initiates artistic experiments, research endeavours and activist actions in which new technologies constitute (1) a creative medium, (2) a lens to clearly perceive the most important (not necessarily technological) challenges and phenomena of the present, and (3) an object of critical reflection.