How can a proposal to co-create meanings for a new word, help to collectively imagine better worlds?
In this panel we will discuss how words can help us shape better worlds and become thinking tools to address the ongoing crisis of imagination by cultivating a shared sense of identity and belonging to Planet Earth. We’ll explore this idea through a set of hypothetical questions around the concept of intercitizenships – a term coined by the founders of The Billion Seconds Institute, a lifelong learning initiative by the creative research lab IAM – as part of a long-term plan to reimagine the ways that artists, designers, technologists and many other professionals can understand and shape the mental, social and environmental impacts of the digital economy.
Andres Colmenares (CO/ES): Andres Colmenares is the co-founder of IAM, the creative research lab helping citizens and organisations to anticipate, understand and address the socioecological challenges and opportunities emerging from the coevolution of digital technologies and internet cultures. He is also co-director of The Billion Seconds Institute, a lifelong learning initiative and IAM Weekend, the annual gathering for designers, researchers, strategists, artists, technologists, journalists, policy analysts, looking to collectively rethink the futures of the internet(s). As a strategist and creative foresight consultant he has developed projects and partnerships with organisations as Mobile World Capital Foundation, Tate, Red Bull and BBC, using futures as tools to help organisations grow their cultural relevance by designing alternative learning experiences, tools and programs. He also has contributed opinion articles and short fictions for publications as CRACK Magazine, The Site Magazine or LS:N Global and has been invited as guest lecturer at institutions such as University of Arts London, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, Merz Akademie, Berghs School of Communication and ELISAVA School of Design & Engineering of Barcelona.
Eliza Anyangwe (CM/UK): Eliza Anyangwe is editor of As Equals, CNN’s ongoing series on gender inequality. Prior to joining CNN in February 2021, she was managing editor of The Correspondent, and the founder of The Nzinga Effect, a media project focused on telling the stories of African and Afro-descendant women. Eliza was born in Cameroon, has lived in several countries across three continents, and after 17 years in the UK, moved to Amsterdam in 2019, where she’s currently based.
Felipe Castelblanco (CO/US): Felipe Castelblanco is a multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of socially engaged and Media Art. His work creates platforms for inter-epistemic dialogue and ventures out into new frontiers of publicness. In 2011, he initiated The Para-Site School, a parasitic project that infiltrates the university in order to serve artists-migrants excluded from the higher education system in the U.S. and Europe. Recent shows include the 2019 Quebec Biennial, Seasons of Media at ZKM in Karlsruhe, and the Queens Museum in New York, among others. Felipe holds an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University (USA) and is currently completing a Ph.D. at the Make/Sense Graduate School at Art and Design Academy in Basel and the Kunstuniversität Linz. His doctoral project, Cartographies of the Unseen, explores avenues for biocultural peace-building and territorial rights through participatory research and Media production in the Colombian Pan-Amazon region.
Pia Mancini (IT): Pia Mancini is co-founder & CEO at Open Collective, as well as Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation, a democracy activist, and an open source sustainer. She worked in politics in Argentina and developed technology for democracy around the world. She’s a YC Alum, YGL (World Economic Forum), globe-trotter, and Roma’s mum.
