UROBOROS
Uroboros is an annual festival for artistic and design research inquiries into more-than-human co-existence. Attending to ‘more-than-human’ as involving both multispecies nature and algorithmic agencies, Uroboros provides a co-creative, transdisciplinary place for researchers and practitioners of diverse backgrounds — both human and others.
The festival activities are inspired by the symbol of Uroboros – a self-devouring serpent that changes its shape and form in an eternal cycle of re-creation, using its own body as fuel. The Uroboros embodies contemporary social, environmental, and political frustrations: it offers a promise of new beginnings as well as endless returns; a willingness to move forward as well as the inability to break out of the normative, extractivist business as usual.
The festival aims to serve as a common ground for collective experimentation rather than a showcase stage. Interested authors are invited to test new formats and methods, propose provocations, and bring forward ideas they might not have shared before. Instead of setting a fixed curatorial framing, the annual festival emerges from several streams of co-creative activities called Uroboros Loops organised with various contributors throughout the year. The 2024 festival and its theme Nesting across Difference emerged from a year of Looping organised with (more-than-)human partners and collaborators in Finland, Norway, and the Czech Republic. .
Snakestory
The Uroboros project was initiated in late 2019 by a group of friends based in Prague, Czech Republic and officially released in May 2020 along with the inaugural Uroboros festival. The first festival edition brought together over 600 designers, artists, researchers, and creative practitioners from around the world. Inspired by this interest, we decided to extend Uroboros from a one-off festival into a long-term process, re-imagining Uroboros as an ongoing festival series accompanied by diverse collateral events, including the Loops and various educational programmes organised with partner universities and education institutions.
The long-term Uroboros program aims to nurture a globally distributed network of contributors interested in exploring the possible shapes of artistic and design research inquiry into more-than-human relationalities: in the context of socio-technicality, multispecies nature, and everywhere in-between. The Uroboros circle is always open to new creative inputs and provocations.
The Uroboros has been kindly supported by various funders, partners and friends, including the City of Prague, Czech Ministry of Culture, Abakus Foundation, Aalto University, The Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO), Brno University of Technology – Faculty of Fine Arts (FaVu), Film and TV School of Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU), The Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague (UMPRUM), The Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (AVU), Czech Technical University in Prague (CVUT), Petrohradská collective, Ocean Archive, Fresh Eye, Fotograf Festival, CreaTures – Creative Practices for Transformational Futures project, HYB4, Kasarna Karlin, Tactical Tech, Fiber festival, .ZIP space, AIxDesign, and DOX Center for Contemporary Art.
Archive
Uroboros Snakecore
Markéta Dolejšová
Markéta is a practice-based researcher experimenting with co-creative, embodied and sensory experiences, often in multispecies contexts. Her recent work has focused on ferality and feral eco~systems, exploring what relations, intuitions, and ways of knowing can emerge in the liminal spaces between the wild and the domesticated, the familiar and unknown, the serendipitous and intentional. She is also an Assistant Professor at The Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where she acts as the Head of the Doctoral Research Department, and is finishing her postdoctoral research fellowship at Aalto University – School of Arts, Design and Architecture (2020-24). She co-founded several art & design research initiatives, including the Uroboros festival, the Open Forest Collective, the Feeding Food Futures network, and the Fermentation GutHub. In 2020-22, she worked with the CreaTures – Creative Practices for Transformational Futures, where she led the Laboratory of Experimental Productions and co-researched the role of the arts in fostering eco-social change.
Lenka Hámošová
Lenka Hámošová is a designer and researcher focusing on synthetic media and the use of artificial intelligence in creative practice. As part of her PhD at the Faculty of Art and Design at Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, she is specifically interested in design and visualization of the human-AI co-creative processes and workflows.
As the co-founder of the Uroboros Festival and organizer of Creative AI Meet-ups in Prague, Lenka cultivates a community passionate about the creative potentials of AI. She graduated from the Master’s programme in Design at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam and Visual Communication at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava.
Michal Kučerák
Michal Kučerák je výzkumník, lektor a kurátor který se své praxi zaměřuje na zprostředkování umění a digitální projekty. Spolupracuje s nadací pro současné umění TBA21, kde je součástí digitálního týmu. Specializuje se na digitální výzkum a projekty, konkrétně Ocean-Archive.org a Organismo (TBA21-Academy).
Spoluorganizuje festival sociálně angažovaného designu a uměleckých postupů Uroboros. Kromě toho pokračuje v doktorském studiu na Fakultě výtvarných umění VUT v Brně. Michal inicioval výzkumný výstavní projekt #DATAMAZE (Centrum současného umění DOX, Praha, 2018-2022), který tematizoval digitální a datové gramotnosti a byl zaměřen na vzdělávací aktivity a posilování naší digitální odolnosti. Působí ve svém ateliéru v rámci prostoru Petrohradská kolektiv v Praze (CZ).
EN
Michal Kučerák is a researcher, lecturer, and curator with a particular emphasis on art mediation and digital projects. He collaborates with a contemporary art foundation TBA21, where he contributes to their digital team, specializing in digital research and projects, specifically Ocean-Archive.org and Organismo (TBA21–Academy).
He takes part within the collective that co-organizes a festival of socially engaged design and artistic practices, Uroboros. Additionally, he is pursuing his PhD studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Technology in Brno. Michal initiated a research exhibition project #DATAMAZE (DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague, 2018-2022), which revolved around topics of digital and data literacy and was focused on educational activities and strengthening of our digital resilience. He is based in his studio at Petrohradská kolektiv in Prague (CZ).
Enrique Encinas
Enrique Encinas (they/he) is a design researcher exploring the patterns and textures formed by (other than) + humans and technologies through creative, critical and collaborative practices. He works as Associate Professor in Interaction Design at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO). They have co-lead projects involving governmental, artistic and educational institutions such as the European Union Policy Lab, the Centre for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona (CCCB) or SpeculativeEDU.
Chewie
Chewie is a forest guide living and thriving in Central Bohemia, in the protected landscape area Křivoklátsko. Since 2021, Chewie has been a core member of the Open Forest Collective where he contributes to feral explorations of more-than-human ecologies and leads a series of experimental walks in the Křivoklátsko forest. Through his kind guidance, Chewie helps other collective members and contributors to learn about diverse multispecies relationalities and spatiotemporalities of care that make up a forest. As part of the Uroboros Collective, Chewie helps to organise the annual festival, in 2023 with his own program section Chewroboros.