Local Techno Futures Introduction: Motivations, Approach & Outcomes
Local Techno Futures is a
- co-experimental
- hyperlocal
- contextual
- Creative visioning
- sustained engagement
exercise that Aruvu is undertaking in collaboration with various practitioners and young adults from Bidar, Channapatna and Kundapura.
Co-experimental: We want to co-experiment with two groups of people broadly
- Creative practitioners
- Young adults
to build future worlds that re-imagine current practices of creative labour for the future.
Hyperlocal: We want these visions of the future to be generated not from Silicon Valley ideas of the Technology. We believe that a local technological future needs to be built from and by the ground it is being used in. This includes
- understanding the ways that current mainstream technology
- was imagined
- was selected to be developed out of many alternatives
- was remixed and reused in different places in Karnataka
- Understanding how the current creative (the act of creating) practices came to be
- with creative practitioners in Bidar
- with health practitioners from Channapatna
- with practices of health education/communication
Contextual: This is where the experiments are sitting
- with the practices and lived experience of creative practitioners in Bidar
- with the practices and lived experience of health practitioners in Channapatna
- with the lived experience of understanding and working with their sexual and reproductive health of young adults in Kundapura, Channapatna, Bidar
These ‘contexts’ (worlds, environments, grounds) give the practitioners a rich collection of ideas to base their experiments on.
Creative visioning: We believe visioning in this case needs a few ingredients
- local and regional histories of practices
- lived experience of the practioners
- a collection of past stories of people who attempted to create a local and regional future
- a sustained and long-term engagement that focuses on production, prototyping and presenting these built future worlds
These 4 ingredients help us
- learn from specific pasts
- observe from specific presents
- to build for specific local futures
Sustained Engagement: The engagements we have designed to bring about these specific futures are in three broad forms
- A residency - a fixed set of invited participants with whom we co-build around their practices continuously for 3 months
- A workshop series - a floating set of participants invited to a workshop series to slowly and repeatedly build future worlds around their practices
- A continued living archive - with a set of local young adult archivists who build an archive of lived experiences around Sexual and reproductive health