Featuring Jenny Faser, a Migunburri artist and curator; Susie Moloney, who works on community-led climate change adaptation at RMIT; Jade Ambrose of Merri-bek Tech; and Helen Addison, a retired chef and relational artist, the workshop approaches meaningful connectivity through First Nations cultural practice, community-led climate adaptation, neighbourhood software, and local food production.
Organised in a house-party style around the preparation of a shared dinner, the workshop invites participants to cook and eat a collaborative, hyper-local, open-source soup.
Through the cooking process, participants will collectively reflect on what meaningful connectivity means to them. They will join in the action, contemplate bushfood fusion, use paper cards to explore alternative modes of networking, and consider the personal and social energies required to relate and connect.
The workshop follows the Community Network Spotlight event, Indigenous Rights & Digital Sovereignty, taking place on 22 October. That event explores questions of self-determination within existing telecommunications infrastructures and regulatory systems.
This workshop dinner continues the conversation in a different register, asking what meaningful connectivity might mean socially, culturally, and ecologically as global warming moves beyond 1.5°C.
The Alliance for Affordable Internet defines meaningful connectivity in terms of access to and use of public utilities such as the internet. This workshop takes the concept further by shifting from utility to relationship, from individual access to collective resilience, and from a technical to a cultural and ecological register.
The relational workshop dinner format is a deliberate methodological choice. These questions are best explored through shared conversation in an extended, organic, and communal setting.
The evening will start with an artist presentation at 6 pm by Jenny Fraser.
This event is part of the Energy Futures events season presented by the RMIT Regenerative Futures Institute.
RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business - Artwork 'Sentient' by Hollie Johnson, Gunaikurnai and Monero Ngarigo.
Learn more about our commitment to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples
