We run on echoes—signals bouncing back from the past, materials extracted elsewhere, labour rendered invisible. The future has already happened, but it is still used as an excuse to snub the present. AI makes us wonder where we are going, all the while we are here and now ignoring the intelligence of others - animals, plants, minerals, rarely wondering where they are going. Whether we deem them useful or useless too often steers our actions. We trade commodities as if fairness is built into the system or we’re just happy pretending it is.
So let’s dance: in the talk «Echo Disco Foxtrot», usefulness wobbles, agency gets distributed across clay and AI, trade gets redesigned, and we relish changing our minds.
Joëlle Bitton is an «undisciplined» artist. She currently teaches at the subject area in Interaction Design at Zurich University of the Arts where she experiments with pedagogy as an artistic practice. In her projects, Joëlle explores a sense of intimacy and drift with everyday machines and systems. Above all, she seeks to mix strangeness and familiarity, especially in material forms. As such, in her doctoral dissertation at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, she created interactive fabrication experiments, inviting personal data to control production machines.
Over the years, she has conducted research in various labs around the world and created interactive pieces about relationships between two cities, banality to counter stereotypes, bodies as interfaces, materialising messages into landscapes, etc. She also graduated in contemporary history from the University of Paris Sorbonne with a study on the rise of nations in the 19th century, in correlation with the development of networks and technologies.
Website:
freeradicals.io
interactiondesign.zhdk.ch
When?
6 March 2026
6:30 pm
Where?
Swissnex in San Francisco
Pier 17
