Smart phones, smart tickets, smart cities, smart buildings, smart living, smart economies, smart moves...
Smart abounds in the market-speak of today's technologically sophisticated conditions. The ever-growing inflation of smartness, fostered in large part by the pervasiveness of digital technologies, hails us from all directions. Smart appears as a strategic device that qualifies all sorts of acts and objects under the hegemony of the economy-political logic of consumption, profit and control. New and ever-smarter products of all kinds pop-up regularly and one risks being left behind by not heeding the call, the constant invitation to try out and to consume the latest.
While smartness is praised and suggested as a sort of power to be possessed, foolishness becomes those moments and spaces in which we encounter with critical interrogation, creative thinking and deconstruction. We suggest foolishness as a category of thought and a tactical positioning to bring out the subversive potential of smart technologies.
We invite artworks and papers that rethink, open up and resist foolishness in this year’s festival entitled, “Did you plug it in?”
