October has been full of international encounters with new audiences for the team of Work Package 2…
It all started in Paris, where Sonia Fizek gave a keynote at the 25th International Conference in Entertainment Computing at Le Cnam (Le Conservatoire national des arts et métiers - National Conservatory for the Arts and Crafts). Sonia shared some of the most exciting data and developer stories that the team collected as part of the Strategies Horizon project, arguing for a planetary games industry. The conference is organized annually by the International Federation for Information Processing.
Two weeks later Ruth Dorothea Eggel and Sonia Fizek were participating as speakers in the 2-day-long Sustainable Futures at Play. Aesthetics, Ethics, and Ecologies of Sustainable Development in Games conference organized by the International Center for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities (IZEW) of the University of Tübingen. We were presenting some of our latest ideas on planetary game development based on interview data collected in 2025 amongst European game developers.
The month culminated in Athens, where Sonia Fizek co-authored a session at a grassroots "university" space Avtonomi Akadimia led by a Berlin and Athens-based artist and activist Joulia Strauss. As the founder herself describes it, Avtonomi Akadimia is “an intercultural and adisciplinary learning space that merges art, philosophy, environmental activism, and political healing”. The event took place in the historical Plato's Gardens in Athens and at the project’s venue near the Hill of the Muses.
The space allowed us to connect with a very different audience and think about our work within an eco-political context. We were exploring sharing knowledge and learning from one another, thinking and feeling with nature. We focused on some of the core ideas from project Strategies Horizon focused on the materiality of digital technology. We started our material musings with a minute of silence for Google's illegal falling of 250,000 trees and orphaning animals in Finland to make space for an upcoming data centre.
Let’s not forget, our digital lives are taking nature's lives.
