’Explosions of Virtuality’ – Preliminary Program Updated



Virtuality explodes in different modes of being, performing, learning and managing ourselves and our interactions with others. Companies play with roles, structures, technologies and organizational boundaries to encourage innovation. Teachers and parents play games designed to enact the boundary between school/home trying to encourage parents to talk about their child from a school position. New architecture creates spaces for us to act and perform in ways we didn’t imagine possible. Music is played to patients in hospitals to transform their experience of treatments. Movies make us sense of ourselves as bodies able to expand time and space. Computer games engage us to play different identities that transcend to our actual world. Our engagement with the world is a constant interplay of the actual and the virtual. New spaces, acts, performances, organizations and movements are becoming possible. Creating innovation is being able to actualize these potential and infinitive worlds here and now in the actual world.

This workshop will address different explosions of virtuality by inviting researchers, managers, architects, designers and game designers and ask them to zig–‐zag between questions like: What are the conditions for becoming a subject in our companies, schools, institutions and in our own lives– are we performing ourselves as avatars? How does virtuality bridge the relationship between the actual and the potential world – and what are the consequences? How can we conceptualize learning in the tunnels between time, space and realities ‐ does it still make sense to talk about competences or should we begin to talk about how to remove our competencies in order to have the sensibility to observe the potential. How may feeling be transformed to distributed and non ‐ personalized affects and intensities?

Such questions should make us reflect on how the explosions of virtuality affect our welfare management? Do explosions of virtuality provide us with a hope of new spaces full of sensations, intensity and freedom or are we just observing advanced ways to manage people to manage themselves in relation to the market and/or the state?

Click here for the updated version of the preliminary program.