Flows of technopolitical realization. Portals, Venture Capitals and economy-fiction

Within the program Ficciones del des-orden, Andreu Belsunces presents the workshop Flows of technopolitical realization. Portals, Venture Capitals and economy-fiction.

Dates: 25 November, 2 and 9 December 2020
Schedule: 6 p.m. – 8: p.m.
Registration: 20 spots awarded through an open call by filling out this form before November 22, 2020
Registration fee: 10
Modality: online

Between 2008 and 2020, the industry of Venture Capitals, venture investment companies that finance business projects with great growth potential, has tripled in the United States.

During these twelve years, large North American technology corporations have consolidated their geopolitical and financial hegemony, operating today as the main engines of cultural and productive updating, and printing their visions of tomorrow in the contemporary eco-social network.

Considering the future as a context of political struggle where different agendas combine to shape the world to come, Venture Capitals can be understood as the gatekeepers, engineers and guardians of a portal between two dimensions: ours and that of the future technocapitalist.

Through financial operations, military and academic consortia, and through the deployment of a covert marketing apparatus, this conglomerate invokes organizations from the other dimension to install them in ours. To facilitate the stabilization of these xeno-organisms, their hosts activate processes of disruption in our natural, legal, labor, cognitive and governance systems, forcing a not-so-emergent struggle for survival.

In this workshop we will start from several works that link political economy and fiction in order to (1) build a conceptual scaffolding that allows us to map the dimension that is on the other side of the portal, (2) analyze some of the tools used by the entities on the other side to parasitize and modify our dimension, (3) and use speculative fiction to find and open relationships between financial speculation and corporate speculation that structure collective visions of the future.

Program: 

 November 25th. Introduction, seminar and presentation of tools

Intersession work: conceptualization

 December 2nd. Presentation and testing of concepts

Intersession work: analysis and speculation

December 9th. Presentation of results and debate

Andreu Belsunces 

Sociologist of design and technology. He researches the intersection between digital cultures, technopolitics, collaborative practices, epistemology and the semi-material agencies of fiction. He shares learning spaces at Escola Massana, Elisava, UOC, Istituto Europeo di Design and LCI, where he weaves relationships between media studies, critical thinking, social sciences, speculative theory and research in art and design. He is co-founder of Becoming, an experimental action-research study on emerging scenarios, and of Engineering Fiction, a research platform on socio-technical imaginaries. His work has been presented at MACBA, CCCB, The Influencers, Hangar, Sónar +D (Barcelona), Medialab Prado (Madrid), STRP (Eindhoven), The Wrong Biennale (International) and The New School (New York), among others. He writes in different media and his work has been published in books such as Crossmedia Innovations (Peter Lang, 2012) and Design Does (Elisava, 2018).