Critical Engineering Working Group

Piksel is glad to announce a special collaboration program with the Critical Engineers Working Group within the next 3 years. As a result, Piksel will host several exhibitions, workshops, and presentations led by CE components. The program will be developed within the Piksel Festival and Piksel Fest Spill activities along the years 2021-2023. Starting in November with an exhibition and 2 workshops. Stay tuned!

In 2011, a group of artists and engineers published the “Critical Engineering Manifesto”, since translated into 18 languages. In true avant-garde fashion, the “Manifesto” launches by describing Engineering as “the most transformative language of our time, shaping the way we move, communicate and think”, thus, it is the work of the Critical Engineer “to study and exploit this language, exposing its influence”. Further, a Critical Engineer “recognises that each work of engineering engineers its user”, considering “any technology depended upon to be both a challenge and a threat”. And so the manifesto unfolds.

https://criticalengineering.org/

Nearly ten years later, the relevance of the “Critical Engineering Manifesto” has only become more evident, as an ever-growing public becomes aware of the techno-political implications of using – and depending upon – integrated systems and complex, networked technologies. Today, one can find its 11 points listed on the walls of hacklabs, museums, engineering and media-art academies, and in a great many texts, the world over.

Around the manifesto, originally written by Julian Oliver, Gordan Savičić and Danja Vasiliev, gathered a larger group – the Critical Engineering Working Group – now including also Sarah Grant, Bengt Sjölén and Joana Moll.

Piksel will start a series of works inviting some of the representatives of the group Critical Engineering Working Group to work in Bergen.