Call for Participation — Learning in Island Ecologies

While we are all apart, we wonder: How does our collective isolation affect our capacity for learning? Learning in Island Ecologies seeks to answer. We invite you to become one of 12 participants in our experiment. The 12 of you will be split up into groups of four researchers and set upon tasks of our devising: tasks of modelling ideal communities, tasks of narrating isolated and archipelagic stories, tasks of scientific modelling in an age of runaway contagion.

The whole experiment is submerged into the online world — in part the nostalgic RPG Island Forge, a visually obsolete, but somehow still running, online game made of player-created virtual islands. Our avatars and we will visit three topical islands: scientific modelling, archipelagic storytelling, and idealised social design. From the problems we find there, we will develop concepts, proposals, and ideas under these conditions of artificial isolation, before being reintroduced to each other to circulate what we have learned and discovered. This oscillation between isolated islands and connected archipelagos, this alternation between quarantine and exchange, will, we hope, produce novel conditions of learning and thinking. A public-facing online stream of content and an archival website will cap the project, although anything you wish to keep secret, safe, isolated, can be.

The selected participants will not be bounded to a single discipline or expertise, but a community of diverse learners will be prioritised. Each participant will receive a participation fee of 100CHF. The experiment will be on Saturday 27th June. We will also digitally meet on Island Forge roughly four weeks before the experiment. Here, we will provide participants with a short reading list to generate discussion during the journey.

E-mail islandecologies@protonmail.com with a brief biography and a statement of interest in which you specify which topical island you would like to contribute the most to and why. Submission until May 3.

For those without reliable computer access, we can arrange solutions with the School of Commons at Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, the supporting institution.

Find us on instagram: @islandecologies.