announcements 24/2025
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Open Call: School of Commons 2025
Open to: All
Registration opens Tuesday, 1 October till Sunday, 1 December 2024
School of Commons (SoC), a global learning community, is looking for individual and collective projects to form the SoC learning environment from April 2025 - February 2026.
For 2025 we will be selecting 16 Funded Projects: 8 ZHdK projects from currently enrolled or employed students and staff of ZHdK [Zürich University of the Arts], and 8 independent projects from proposals outside of ZHdK, including ZHdK alumni. The 8 independent projects can be from anywhere in the world, and do not have to be associated with an educational institution of any kind or have any specific level of education. For all the 16 projects we strongly encourage duos and collectives to apply, although we will be accepting projects submitted from individuals, duos, and collectives.
Each of the 16 projects will receive a total budget of 1,500CHF towards production and travel expenses, alongside access to publishing opportunities, accommodation in Zürich during the mid-year gathering, mentors/speakers, workshops on alternative ways and workings, peer learning, collaborations, and more.
A dedicated Q+A session for the Open Call will be held via Zoom on Wednesday, 16 October 17.30-19.00 CET which we encourage you to attend.
Click here for the full information pack and how to apply.
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Open Call: IdeaSquare (CERN) & School of Commons (ZHdK)
Open to: ZHdK and SoC only
Online Workshop & Guest Lecture
Thursday, 05 December & Thursday, 12 December 2024
18.00-20.00 CET, with a series of small-scale, online tasks during the interim days. All online.
How do we prepare for a future we don’t yet know? A future in which collaboration of different forms will be inevitable... What will these collaborations look like in our near and distant futures?
The tools and approaches we use today may become obsolete for the futures that lie ahead of us, so how can we prepare for these unknowns? Assuming that collaboration in different forms—such as blended intelligence, like human-AI collaboration, and multi-species exchange, like with mushrooms or ants—will become more and more relevant to our functioning and survival, this workshop will explore ‘the future of collaboration’ through a multitude of forms and perspectives. What will it feel like collaborating with the more-or-other-than human; with plants, food, objects, technologies, animals? What are the necessary tools, approaches and incentives required in order to create a desirable future collaboration?
CERN, where the Large Hadron Collider and World Wide Web was born, has a long and established history of anticipating and creating non-incremental ideas and technologies. In this workshop you will explore a collaborative framework for innovation that addresses and centers the unknown.
Register and reserve your place for ‘The Future of Collaboration’ workshop, developed together by CERNs Ideas Square and ZHdKs SoC by completing the following form.
*The deadline to reserve a place is e.o.d, 01 November 2024.
If you have any questions, please contact hello@schoolofcommons.org
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4. Open Call: 'Walking an Ontological Turn'
Open to: ZHdK and SoC only
Workshop led by Koenraad Hinnekint, LUCA School of Arts
Detailed information will be sent out after registration
When: Friday, 7 February 2025, 09.30-16.30 CET
Where: Zurich University of the Arts, Pfingstweidstrasse 96
Join us for the 'Walking an Ontological Turn' workshop, where we will explore new and speculative ideas to rethink art education from a non-human perspective. In this workshop, we will delve into forms of intelligence that exist outside of human-created environments and thought systems.
We will break away from the traditional separation between humans and nature. Instead, we will investigate the intricate relationships between living and non-living elements and human and non-human aspects.
Our aim is to examine how we can approach learning environments and curricula from an ecosystem (nature) perspective rather than solely from human (culture) approaches. Whether you are a student, teacher, or researcher, we will consider how these ideas can inspire and impact your work, opening new possibilities and perspectives.
We aim to create an Ecology of Justice Archive with ideas for a more sustainable and equitable approach to art education. It starts with the belief that in our increasingly complex educational world, new forms of injustice are emerging, and we can only address these if we are willing to set aside our human perspectives and embrace new ways of thinking.
To reserve your place, please email hello@schoolofcommons.org
Confirm or cancel by January 7th
Language: English
Groups can work in German and write their outcomes in German
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4. Save the Date: ‘How to Assemble’ - School of Commons Assembly, 2025
Open to: All ZHdK Student and Staff, as well as the General Public
Online or hybrid participation is available
When: Saturday and Sunday 8 & 9 February 2025, all day
Where: ZHdK, Multiple Locations
Language: English
The School of Commons (SoC) Assembly 2025 is a two-day facilitated space for gathering, exchange, and the reproduction and circulation of knowledge and experience that seeks to question, complicate, and contend with the question: ‘How to Assemble in our current social, political, economic, ecological times.’
In contrast to traditional symposium structures of knowledge ‘giving’ and ‘receiving’, the SoC Assembly borrows from commons-based models and formats of alternative knowledge production and circulation, to create an exchange space based upon a reciprocation economy of mutual support and mutual sharing.
For the SoC Assembly, we invite a series of guest facilitators from across geographies, specialisms, contexts, and disciplines who will each caretake for a working group, organised around core topics and issues that Assembly participants, and their communities, face in their daily work and life.
During the Assembly facilitators, participants, and current and former SoC cohort participants will be invited into an active exchange of transdisciplinary inquiry; sharing methods and frameworks, establishing environments for learning, raising questions and propositions, all unbounded from discipline or taxonomy.
The SoC Assembly encourages explorations into alternative ways and workings to produce, distribute, and make public alternative forms of knowledge, gathering, and exchanging, and to create new forms and scopes of ‘assembling’ in the broadest sense. In doing so, bridging theory with practice, and thinking with doing, to provide new frameworks for organising, practicing, and researching, and methods for transferring these approaches into differing environments, scales, and contexts.
Over the two-days, the SoC Assembly will be organised with dedicated working groups learning and exchanging, as well as a program of exhibitions, lectures, and workshops organised by the SoC Cohort 2025 as part of their end of year showcase as part of a networked structure. The event will culminate in a podium that brings the guest facilitators, SoC participants, and audience together to reflect upon and gather new means, modes, and forms of and for assembling.
Guest Facilitators will be announced Monday, 25 November 2024.
Detailed program published on Monday, 13 January 2025.
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5. Our new digital home has officially launched today!
This growing digital garden and directory of ecosystems serves as a shared space and resource for collectively exploring and enhancing the (infra) structures that support and facilitate peer learning and collaborative work. More on that soon!
Until then, we invite you to check it out at 🌐 schoolofcommons.org!
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