Towards The Non-Extractive Art School

Against the background of the dependency on extractive technological tools and infrastructures in art, design and education, this workshop gathers a number of artists and researchers at the forefront of imagining and building alternatives that materially manifest sustainable, small- and - human scale technological worlds.

Bringing together areas such as degrowth, open-source publishing and EduTech alternatives, the workshop takes an intersectional approach to technology, which is not seen as simply a tool, but as a force of transformation with ethical, aesthetic and epistemological implications. By asking how intersectional artistic research can help envision more just and equitable futures, it is also aligned with decolonizing and norm-critical movements within research, education and knowledge production.

Following its title, the workshop explores the kinds of practices and infrastructures that a non-extractive art and design school could implicate, first, through roundtables focusing on the participants’ projects, and secondly, by collectively exploring ideas and possibilities for creating a shared resource on this topic.

Note: this is a registration only event with a limited number of places.
Please register at: https://tally.so/r/wQgp0Y (first come, first served)
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Program

10.00 – 10.30 Check-in coffee, Location: Verkstaden/The Workshop, Hofs Lifs

10.30 – 11.00 Introduction to The Non-Extractive Art School by Kristoffer Gansing, Prof. Department of Design, Linnaeus University.

11.00 – 12.00 Degrowth, permacomputing aesthetics, shadow libraries and collective practice with Dušan Barok (Monoskop) and a response by Eric Snodgrass (Department of Design, LNU).

12.00 – 13.00 Lunch (Disponentvillan, Hofs Lifs) 13.00 - 14.00 Critical pedagogies, imaginaries and alternatives to Big Tech and Generative AI with Lucas Cone & Magda Pischetola (Critical Tech Studies Collective, Copenhagen University) and a response by Zeenath Hasan (Department of Design, LNU).

14.00 – 14.45 Afternoon tea (& coffee) with pre-launch of “Sit-In!”: a tech strike tool developed in collaboration between former Facebook content moderators and Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter (Goldsmiths).

14.45 – 15.45 Experimental and computational publishing, feminist and collective servers and tools with Mara Karagianni & Winnie Soon (erg – école de recherche graphique/Slade School of Fine Art) and a response by Matilda Plöjel & Kristoffer Gansing (Department of Design, LNU).

15.45 – 17.00 Mapping & Discussion: collective documentation session of resources for Non-Extractive Art School.

Bios

Dušan Barok is founding editor of Monoskop, a wiki for arts and studies. He studied Networked Media, Media Studies and Heritage and Memory Studies in Rotterdam and Amsterdam and wrote his doctoral thesis on publishing as a conservation strategy for contemporary art. Recent collaborations involving exhibitions and publications include Katalog for kunstnerisk publisering (Torpedo), Read Write Run (Kunstraum Lakeside), Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc (Walker Art Center), Art Doc Web (TU Berlin), We Have Never Been Closer (tranzit.sk), New Media Museums (Olomouc Museum of Art), Vasulka Live Archive (Masaryk University) and Collecting and Preserving Research-based and Archive-based Art Projects (M+). (2025).

Eric Snodgrass is a teacher in the Department of Design at Linnaeus University. Together with Miranda Moss, Daniel Gustafsson and Helen Pritchard, he worked in the Regenerative Energy Communities project (https://regenerative-energy-communities.org/). His research and teaching is interested in practices that work to imagine, materialise and sustain forms of change.

Lucas Cone is Assistant Professor in Education at the University of Copenhagen. His research explores the intersections between educational politics and everyday life in schools and other institutional settings. His current work investigates how the involvement of digital technologies is fueling new forms of privatization and commercialization in public education. Lucas holds a PhD from the Danish School of Education (Aarhus University) and an MA in Comparative Education from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Magda Pischetola is a Tenure-track assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Communication. Former researcher at the IT-University of Copenhagen, Center for Computing Education Research (2020-2022). Former associate professor at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Department of Education (2013-2020). Teaching appointments and research in Teacher professional development, Digital culture. Research interests: STS and critical pedagogies; postcolonialism; feminist studies.

Zeenath Hasan is an erstwhile corporate ethnographer and social entrepreneur, currently senior lecturer head of department at the Design Department in Linnaeus University. In her artistic research, Zeenath has explored food as material for knowledge production, and led the development of Food + Change, a platform engaging food as pedagogy in a cross-sectoral interchange with society and economy.

Winnie Soon and Mara Karagianni are queer artists working critically with software and community based publishing. Their current projects are servpub, a collective computational publishing platform, and an artistic/tech manual circumventing gender bias in Free and Open Source Community (FOSS). They engage creatively with the computer terminal by writing and collecting love letters in Bash (a command line based programming language).

Matilda Plöjel is a senior lecturer and researcher at the Linnaeus University Department of Design and program coordinator of the BFA in Visual Communication + Change. She is a graphic designer with a critical bookmaking practice, founder of Sailor Press through which she explores the boundaries of art, research and design.

Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter is an artist researcher, who, through software-based tools and interventions, explores the hidden labour, systemic inequalities, and infrastructural politics that underpin digital technologies. Linda is currently a Lecturer in Computational Arts and Programme Leader for the BSc in Digital Arts Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Kristoffer Gansing is professor of Design, Visual Communication at Linnaeus University. They were artistic director of the transmediale festival for art and digital culture in Berlin (2012-2020) and professor of Artistic Research at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, where they directed The International Center for Knowledge in the Arts (2020-23). Through artistic and curatorial research, Kristoffer investigates the possibility of de-imagining the extractivist relations of art, society and technology.