Submission Guidelines

Interested individuals and teams should submit project proposals by March 31, 2023. We do not expect traditional art project proposals; rather, C/Change wants to see interdisciplinary individuals and teams envisioning online interventions, protocols, and tools that can scale up and effect change in the world. Accessible avenues by which online cultural exchange experiences can unfold should be central to each proposal’s vision. We welcome design sketches, process notes, mood boards, and other multimedia material that support the written portion of the application. A budget detailing anticipated use of the stipend (approximately $17,500) for materials, development, and personal honorarium should also be included with the application (see budget template here). Applicants are allowed to submit more than one proposal.

Project proposals should address at least one of the following focus areas:

• Feminist Technologies: In order for technology to facilitate the creation of a more just future, we need to instill new values into engineering practices that take a feminist approach to the design, development, and deployment of technology and prioritize the needs and experiences of marginalized communities. In the context of online cultural exchange, the principles of feminism, which emphasize intersectionality, decolonization, inclusivity, and empowerment, serve as guidelines for building safe spaces for cross-cultural connection and collaboration. What might it look like to build tools and experiences with these values, rather than those of wealth generation, attention gamification, and data harvesting?
• Planetary Futures: Collaboration and problem-solving are necessary for developing solutions that address the climate emergency that is just beginning to unfold. We can view sustainability, resilience, adaptation, and regenerative ecosystems that prioritize the well-being of both humanity and the planet through the lens of digital cultural exchange in order to imagine new ways for people to connect and collaborate towards a healthier planetary future.
• Digital Democracy: Building safe spaces for people to exercise their voices and influence in an increasingly multipolar world disrupted by digital innovation requires radically new approaches. Tools that bolster digital democracy can, for instance, enable people to negotiate and deliberate toward the collective good, open up more direct channels for participatory governance, and foster civic collaboration. Rather than working against democracies, technological advancement can serve to enhance the democratic process by making it more accessible, inclusive, and accountable, and to give citizens a greater voice in the way they are governed.

Additionally, proposals should leverage emerging technologies to actualize their forward-looking propositions. Below is a sampling of possible tools teams can utilize and some context around how we envision them supporting the prototyping process:

• Artificial Intelligence: The expansion of “intelligence” beyond its once exclusively human domain and into machines raises numerous philosophical, ethical, and social issues. As a “general purpose technology” that portends to impact virtually every sphere of human life, artificial intelligence is frequently talked about in terms of optimization or super intelligence. Perhaps, though, A.I. can also propagate a different set of values centered around inclusive dialogue and safe spaces for exchange.
• Extended Reality and Immersive Environments (VR/AR/XR, metaverse, etc.): Expanded computing power will allow designers, artists, and technologists to deliver increasingly more immersive and narratively rich experiences to our devices; in other words, our phones will allow us to travel across and through different worlds where we might encounter different people (or avatars). This shift will alter our traditional conceptions of society, or the places where humans interact with others and create shared meaning; how might we ensure that these virtual worlds make space for voices historically marginalized in society? How can we design virtual experiences that bring people into conversation, rather than further isolate them from one another?
• Big Data Applications and Visualizations: Ubiquitous sensing technologies around the world are exploding the amount of data collected every second. This reality of infinite data, of endless calculation of the world, portends to accelerate complexity beyond human comprehension. Here, data visualization might help us harness this information to not only produce knowledge, but to produce shared meaning and spark generative conversation.
• Decentralized Platforms and Protocols: The centralized internet platforms that have come to define our digital lives seem to no longer work; the data we produce become the property of a handful of corporations, our digital discourse becomes increasingly polarized and violent, and attention becomes the object of a game to put advertisements on as many screens as possible. The various applications of blockchain technology under the “web3” umbrella offer a different vision of the internet wherein the task of storing and exchanging data is distributed among users, rather than falling to the hands of private companies. Separating hype from practicality, how might we think through the possibilities afforded by decentralized internet architectures in order to imagine new modes of being, working, and learning together in the virtual world?