Open Call for CLOG Agents

Responding to our deepening dependence on accelerating data flows, liquid computing and evaporating infrastructures with CLOG Agency: a series of encounters for collective littering of online pipelines.  The process will chew through theories on different relations to technology, sticky entanglements of tools and politics, digital metabolisms and material residues of virtual economies.  The focus is then on different relations to technology rather than on different, alternative, better, technologies, “here and now and in little things,” against the ‘inevitability’ of techno-capitalism.

CLOG Agency will explore the suboptimal, the inefficient, the obsolete, the slow, the low-tech, the leaky, through an engagement with convivial, marginal, focal, situated, resisting, obstructing, tentative, collective practices. The program will irregularly punctuate the year with 6 sessions of discussions, hands-on workshops and sharing moments with invited-guests, with enough time in-between the sessions to poke, transmute, digest and sediment that which emerges.

These sessions are planned to take place online, but we will try to grasp any opportunity for in-person encounters. Each session will approach the question of techno-capitalism from a different angle, opening up multiple perspectives and possibilities for engagement during the program, while accumulating traces and detritus.  In the last session we scavenge the question of documentation and circulation, the potential for continuity and contamination, into the direction of a finale, an indigestible outcome, the grand clog.

Are you actively slowing yourself down or disentangling yourself from the logic of efficiency? Having patience with the doubts of others, or the skepticism of one’s own? Are you sick of the erected systems that postpone your rhythm for discovery? Clogging might be the activity for you!

Have you committed to cultivating questions and possibilities rather than extracting resources and results? Do you seek collective stirring against cybernetic steering? You are probably a clog agent already and you don’t even know it! Can you clog-in six Fridays  in 2021 in your monthly flows?

Then call the CLOG Agency!

The CLOG Agency welcomes all forms-of-life independently from their background and skills. It provides a testing ground for the collision of practices, tastes, concerns, experiences, vocabularies and sensitivities. The best clogs are made through the friction of heterogeneous materials and the amalgamation of consistencies. Participation is free, but to ensure active involvement, there is a bottleneck: places are limited and precious. CLOG agents will share their curiosities and concerns, contaminating the process with their artistic/research/working/living practices. The inverse is desired but not guaranteed.

– Our preference is to meet on the first Friday of the month, but dates and times will be agreed upon together with the participants.

– The 1st session is organised for the 7th May, 2021.

– The plan is to have a break in August, restart in September, and continue until December, perhaps on a modified schedule.

– We expect commitment: the idea is for each encounter to contribute to the form and/or content of the next session; the hope is for each session to leak out and affect our daily relation to technology; the ambition is for the clogging to endure beyond the space-time of the sessions.

To join the agency, send your urgent questions/former and ongoing attempts/modes of doing and undoing in the form of text and/or images by email to clog@riseup.net. The CLOG Agency does not take in consideration the bullet points of the curriculum vitae, but is interested in the thoughts and experiences that brought you here!  The DEADLINE  is the 15th of April 2021, 23:59.

Who/What is CLOG Agency? — Plumbers, but the opposite

CLOG Agency is facilitated by CLOG agency: a clog in the making. It currently consists of elements coming from artistic, activist, hacking and academic milieus and collectives. A porous collective name and entity, it speaks the language of plumbing and of viscous motions, reminding us of traditional wooden shoes and of sabotage while playing with the ambiguity of agency in business and politics. Its reports are collaborative and situated, and they have yet to be written.