Hardcare / Softcare – Carefree caring? Careless. Care less. In care. Who cares? Care-full!

We: Helen Varley Jamieson (Munich), Suzon Fuks (Brisbane), Igor Štromajer (Frankfurt) and Annie Abrahams (Montpellier) will join in an online research project. We will use streaming technologies, sound recordings, collective writing pads, performative exercises, interviews and search engines … to challenge each other through an attentive confrontation of visions and practices related to care. From safe-keeping to protection and worries, concerning ageing, animals, planets and ourselves. Can diffractive thinking and awareness of entanglements engender res-ponsibility? How to attend to what will be left out? Something is always forgotten. How to be with … ? We are not specialists in robotics, design or code but we care and tinker, think and make, talk and interrupt, disrupt. We will read a lot.

A series of 8 day-long sessions to learn together through experience, doing and making about the (im)possibilities for future care and the role that machines can (not) have. Our process, inspired by the Constallations Methodology*, based on challenges, surprises, trust and collaboration, will be anarchived on a website. Each session of Hardcare / Softcare will be initiated and guided by one of the artists. Our different approaches will guarantee diversity.

We will have to decolonize our unconsciousness and be open to all aspects and implications. We will need critical imagination. Care on all scales. Probing care. Extreme care.