On 19 November, at 10:00, there will be a public dialogue on the current state of digitization and creativity between CARADT Professor Sebastian Olma and media theorist and director of Institute of Network Cultures (INC)
Geert Lovink at NIAS – the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Amsterdam.
Access: This session is open to the public. Registration is required via Letizia Chiappini (l.chiappini@utwente.nl)
This dialogue is part of the seminar Digitization and (Un)sustainability: Reclaiming Technologies for our Environment, hosted by NIAS – the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The seminar focuses on how technology can be reclaimed to serve environmental and social goals rather than undermining them. Participants will reflect on the ways digital infrastructures, data ecologies, and algorithmic systems intersect with the planet’s material and social realities.
Date(s) and time: 18 November (14:30 – 17:00 hrs) & 19 November 2025 (10:00 – 14:00 hrs)
Location: NIAS (Korte Spinhuissteeg 3, Amsterdam)
Digitization and (Un)sustainability: Reclaiming Technologies for our Environment is a two-day workshop that examines how digitalisation promises efficiency and innovation, yet often generates new forms of (un)sustainability.The structure of the event draws inspiration from community forums and participatory knowledge-sharing traditions. It seeks to foster exchange between artists and researchers, bridging speculative and practical approaches to sustainability in the digital age. The discussion explores how digital infrastructures underpin social, economic, and political systems, and how these entanglements relate to environmental degradation, data extraction, and unequal access to technological resources. Drawing from art, urbanism, sociology, and philosophy, speakers will explore how transdisciplinary thinking can contribute to reclaiming technologies for collective, sustainable futures.
Full programme and registration information: https://nias.knaw.nl/events/digitalisation-and-unsustainability
‘Our research group investigates the role artists, designers and cultural producers in general can play in developing the aesthetics and poetics of a desirable future.’
Sebastian Olma is professor Cultural and Creative Industries. He works for the Expertise Centre Art, Design and Technology.
The research group Cultural and Creative Industries investigates the role of artists and designers as creative innovators and drivers of social and economic change. Affiliated researchers analyse the cultural and creative industries from a critical point of view and examine the conditions under which timely forms of aesthetic expression and social connectedness can actually take place within the precarious reality of this field. What economic models are required by artists and designers to create a meaningful practice within the aesthetic, social, and economic intentions of the cultural and creative industries? What skills sets are required for those artists and designers who don’t just want to follow movements, but actually shape novel social and economic models of the future?
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