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  • Join our Air Collective

    Posted by Michael Degani on September 8, 2024 at 10:01 pm

    The Ecological Design Collective began to take shape in 2020, in the shadow of a pandemic that upended the design of everyday life and seemed to prefigure the climate breakdown. We felt a sense of urgency about growing a community of people interested in understanding the intersections of biological life, technology, politics, and art, and finding liberatory possibilities within them. Half tongue-in-cheek, we named ourselves Curators, tasked with assembling the right people and things into generative encounters. Our common frame of reference was Baltimore, where most of us were living: a segregated, postindustrial city that distributed environmental harms in the shape of black butterflies. Yet we also realized that we had to rely on digital infrastructures, and that said infrastructures could also tie us to friends and allies around the world, from Cambridge to Tirana to Goa.

    To that end, we built the EDC platform, a non-corporate possibility space for posting, sharing events, and just generally building community. One of its key principles is to provide an alternative to most of our digital existence. It doesn’t monetize our use, nor subject us to algorithmic recommendation, nor slide inevitably into enshittification. It is a throwback in some ways to a slower kind of online comportment, with less of the dopamine highs and lows you are going to get from the big flashing casinos downtown.

    Over time, a curatorial sub-group emerged, informally named Air Collective, designed to build up this communicative zone, and we are now looking for people to help us expand it. If you are interested in curating writing, news, scholarship, and/or events that touch on ecology and design in the broadest senses, and developing a public around those themes, consider joining us. Send an email to Anand Pandian and Mike Degani.

    pandian@jhu.edu

    md996@cam.ac.uk

    Michael Degani replied 1 month ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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