Social-eco-art-tech. Serbia and Croatia
This note is more of a journal-style list of web links, but I think it’s better to keep it public than have it as a draft in private notes.
Thanks to Andrew Paterson’s field trip to connect eco-art scenes in North Europe and the Balkans I’ve discovered research and artwork made by Vladan Joeler who is a professor at Novi Sad University (Serbia) at the Department of New Media.
I’ve visited Vladan and his spouse Olivia Solis in their family loft-like studio downtown Novi Sad. As they are a ‘people-hub’ here, I’ve got a few links to activities that look close to my interests in the region.
Klimerko — a citizen community and a network of over 450 devices for air quality monitoring with a focus on pollution, citizen health and environmental protection. This community has made and installed over 130 Climerko Pro devices in 45 schools in western Serbia, whose measurements are monitored through the platform „Children for Air”
Klimerko is a long-term story initiated in 2019 by Desiree Željka Milošević. and developed by activists of Serbian Internet Society and HackLab Belgrade through the series of events within the annual DesCon — a technology and climate change conference and hackathon.
More and more mentions I’ve got about Croatia. Vladan told me about the Island School of Social Autonomy (ISSA). ISSA is a place for imagining, experimenting with and cultivating forms of knowledge-production and knowledge-sharing for the “age of extinction”. They also work on the regeneration of their 3 hectares to grow a food forest, a seed bank, and a traditional water system collection. ISSA has numerous co-founders with a philosopher Srećko Horvat who is the first in that international list.
In 2023 The ISSA School of Autonomy did joint activities with Mokrin House — a coliving/coworking space in rural Serbia holding a series of lectures and workshops on human life in a world dominated by a deep and multi-layered crisis as well as dedicated Rurban days (Mokrin House is on my list to visit already for one year or so).
Another Croatia-based story is Green Academy, by the Institute for Political Ecology (IPE) located in Zagreb. It is a program of political education, that has been taking place on the Island of Vis since 2010. Its thematic focus is on the commons, degrowth and climate justice. Here is the Academy’s 2022 program.
I’m curious about the GREENPATHS project which IPE is a member. GREENPATHS mixed-method approach combines diverse academic disciplines and societal perspectives that will broaden and deepen previous and ongoing research efforts across Europe. The project’s consortium works to create a knowledge hub, which will contribute to the development of more inclusive and sustainable policy design and implementation.
And back to Vladan Joler (profile, LinkedIn). He is leading SHARE Lab, a research and data investigation lab for exploring different technical and social aspects of algorithmic transparency, digital labour exploitation, invisible infrastructures and many other contemporary phenomena on the intersection between technology and society.
I watched one of his latest (2022) talks on NEW Exctractivism
and read an earlier text about Facebook — Colonization with Love (2016).
In the early days of the EXIT music festival (when it was an initiative of peace-building within the post-war Balkan) Vladan was its program director.
Vladan is also a co-founder of SHARE Foundation (together with Đorđe Krivokapić Ph.D. LL.M., an Associate Professor of ICT Law at the Faculty of Organizational Sciences at the University of Belgrade and ??). The last year’s (2023) events co-created by SHARE foundation are:
- Digital Rights Summer School was held in Perast, Montenegro
- and The Digital | Green | Society — a two-day international conference dedicated to the consequences that the dizzying development of technology has on the environment, citizens and society. It was in Belgrade.
In the previous year, I co-orgainzed an event at Fruska Gora ‘eco-neighbourhood’ on cooperation between ecovillages like initiatives and universities with another artist-professor from Vladan’s department of the New Media —Suncčica Pasuljevic-Kandic (here is an intro of her practice and LinkedIn). She defines herself as an antidisciplinary practitioner, mixing and blurring the boundaries of art, qualitative researcher, pedagogy and curatorial practices. Her focus is on participatory and linguistic approaches to interconnectedness of techno-ecological realm. First time I’ve met Sunčica at a BioKod project event in Novi Sad.
Some of my other ‘Balkan reports’:
- Transformational Eco-Tourism and Art of Symbiocenic Living in Serbia
- Serbian Ecologists
- Interview with Nara Petrovic (Slovenia)
- Immersing in the Light of Albanian Nature and Culture
- Reflections on Tivat Tourism Think Tank 2022 — Regeneration for Montenegro and the Western Balkans. 2022 Montenegro.
- Unaware (Unconscious) Violence and Seeds of In-action. Deep Live Gathering 2022 in Montenegro.
- Social Slow Travel: Lowcost&Zerowaste (it’s a more general overview, but it’s heavily based on the latest experience in the Balkans)
