Nishant Shah

What can we do with stories so that they become prompts to build worlds that lead to collective action? 3 years since we started the project, first as a research project and then as a global residency and intensive under the title of ‘ Doing Things with Stories’, we have learned a lot about how narrative change can prompt a new way of seeing the futures. As we wrap up this project, I am pleased to announce that apart from the theoretical and research outputs, the training modules and the communiites of practice, we also have a wonderful showcase or artists, cultural producers, and researchers from around the world, showing us how they see, understand, and mobilise narrative change in their own contexts. The special curation of 17 different knowledge pieces, in ‘Doing Things with Stories’ published with the artistic research platform APRIA run by ArtEZ Press and ArtEZ studium generale, capture through poetry, visual essays, critical reflections, fictions, experimental writing, and speculative design, how we can think of new forms, formats, and functions of telling stories. Edited with Lukas Continue Reading …

And so, it is finally out. So proud (and excited, nervous, and anxious) to announce that our new book, that been in the making the last 3 years (or perhaps the last 20 years, can never be sure about when books begin), is finally out. Co-authored with Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Nafis Hasan, and with a foreward by Chinmayi Arun, ‘Overload, Creep, Excess: An Internet from India’ is out for open access download and Print on Demand services from the Institute of Network Cultures. Please do share, read, circulate, and join the conversations! The book tries to provide a techno-social account of the current state of the Internet and some of its biggest challenges in social, cultural, and political organisation, by following a time-line of digital developments in India as in the rest of the world. It is both an historical overview of the different ways in which digital policies and practices have been shaped to create challenges to subjectivity, agency, and citizenship. Three long essays read an archive of the development of the Internet to show both the pivotal moments Continue Reading …

Really Fake takes up story, poetry, and other human logics of care, intelligence, and dignity to explore sociotechnological and politico-aesthetic emergences in a world where information overload has become a new ontology of not-knowing. Open Access Copy Available from here: https://meson.press/books/reallyfake/

I can’t imagine any other conversation that I can be prouder of. David Theo Goldberg is not just an icon and a mentor but a friend and a philosopher I have admired over a decade. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is one of the most inspiring thinkers whose friendship and intellectual work bolsters and enriches me with every conversation and every read of her work. To be hosted by Wayne Modest, who is one of the most important voices in the Netherlands to talk about decolonisation in the arts and cultural organisations, and Rokhaya Diyalo’s journalism is what we need of more. I couldn’t still believe that this happened, but it was hands-down the shortest 2 hours, and I wish it had never ended. As we ended, talking about politics of care making, I hope that we get to continue doing this in person in futures to come. https://www.materialculture.nl/en/events/thinking-david-theo-goldberg-tracking-capitalism-and-technologies-racial

Building and supporting institutions that support communities and build people’s lives through creative, critical, and exciting intertwinings of technology, art, and education, is one of my biggest joys. I am so thrilled and honoured to be a part of the newly constituted and expanded board of supervisory board of Tetem, Enschede. Everything I have learned about the space and its people is inspiring, and I am delighted to engage with their ambitious plans of claiming and developing spaces of polyvocal humanity going forward.

The publication  Untranslatable Terms of Cultural Practices is published on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the international and transdisciplinary artist residency Akademie Schloss Solitude. The publication brings together 22 contributions by authors from the international network of Akademie Schloss Solitude. Untranslatable proposes a new vocabulary of terms that remain untranslated in their original language. These are words that convey cultural practices, attitudes and value systems and are explained from their respective language and word canon. Terms are presented that broaden perspectives, facilitate new perspectives, and thus enrich collective thinking as a global community. The Shared Vocabulary presents an expanded cultural and etymological understanding of the world and our cultural actions. This publication makes global knowledge systems visible and promotes the accessibility of valuable everyday practices. For this purpose, this anthology brings together texts by former fellows of the Akademie, authors, thinkers, scientists, journalists, poets, and visual artists who are connected to cultural practices in different ways. Untranslatable Terms of Cultural Practices addresses pressing questions with which both artists and scientists alike are confronted: Which value systems are necessary to sustain our living conditions on this Continue Reading …

More important than flagging things “really fake” is to understand why they are dismissed as fake Really Fake takes up story, poetry, and other human logics of care, intelligence, and dignity to explore sociotechnological and politico-aesthetic emergences in a world where information overload has become a new ontology of not-knowing.

A workshop, lecture, and conversation with Chihiro Geuzebroek & Nishant Shah.A new wave of activism has been sparked around the globe. While 2019 was one of the biggest years for climate protests, 2020 has proven to be an even more significant year for global protest and activism. New forms of digital and offline protest are emerging at rapid rates that ask us to reconsider the kinds of tactics that are used to dismantle oppressive systems. As a result, we have been forced to rethink how performance, art, and activism intersect.This multi-faceted event will explore the ways in which new instruments of communication have fundamentally shaped the way we orchestrate and stage protests on a revolutionary new global scale. The first portion of our event will be a guided workshop led by Chihiro Geuzebroek, a long-standing climate activist and filmmaker, which will explore the role and efficacy of performance art in contemporary climate activism. Following this workshop, Nishant Shah (VP Research & Acting Director at the ArtEZ University of the Arts, NL) will present his lecture “Flirting with Fakeness”, which will Continue Reading …

»Transformation – Unfolding the Future« Online lecture and workshop by Nishant ShahJuly 15, 2020: »Transformation – Unfolding the Future« Online lecture and workshop by Nishant Shah 16. July 2020 Now it’s your turn: Nishant Shah invites you to comment on his three-thesis lecture on »The Quantified Future Was Always Scarce: Constant Catastrophization & Computational Counting« using the digital environment PADLET. All questions and discussions will be moderated by the artist Mary Maggic and will be discussed live and online with Nishant Shah on September 2, 2020. Register now to get access to the digital environment of »Transformation – Unfolding the Future«:register@akademie-solitude.de Online lecture and workshop series »Transformation – Unfolding the Future« Akademie Schloss Solitude is delighted to present its new online lecture and workshop series »Transformation – Unfolding the Future«. The series brings together international scientists and artists who make significant contributions on the question of how we want to shape our society and our coexistence. In their research, they raise questions on new concepts for social transformations, political invention and solidarity. The role that artists and artistic production plays in the Continue Reading …

When Tay Tay (aka Taylor Swift) sang Haters gonna hate (hate, hate, hate, hate), eventually starting one of the most persistent hashtag and meme, she was on to something. Often celebrated as a disregard for what negative people say and think, and following your true bliss (you know, you be you bae), this anthem perhaps is a little bit more than that. It is also a stark reminder that the hater is not just one exceptional person who bullies, trolls, intimidates and abuses. No, if we were to take our social-media worlds seriously, we will have to accept that we are all haters. And we hate all the time. Because Web 3.0 is an entertainment-hate complex. It thrives on engineering ways of hating each other for the smallest of infractions and imagined insults, and it naturalises our participation in hating. The entire influencer brigade is incentivised to hate like there is no tomorrow, from how people cook rice to how people want temples; from how people want to wear masks to how people override consent. To be online is to hate Continue Reading …