A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest
This summer school aims to explore the friction between ludic imaginaries and the material realities of the postnatural. The participants are encouraged to unearth the less obvious entanglements of digital media, investigating how procedural and artistic literacy can expose the hidden dependencies between play, media culture history, and the various human and non-human beings—the trees, birds, wind, and soil—that sustain them.
The summer school invites us to put the traditional boundaries and concepts of the game as wel l as of Nature at play. Participants will engage in questioning how the distribution of resources like time (work), electricity, and computational power, but also the configuration of space dictates, constrains, or augments our artistic practices. They will get to know the local ecologies of the Volcanic Eifel, the extractive landscapes of open pit coal mines, as well as the resistant architectures that were built in the remaining forests.
We will get in touch with perspectives and methods of (artistic) resistance by thinking together, cooking together, making and playing together.
