The International Image Festival is an event of electronic arts and digital culture organized by the Visual Design Department at the Universidad de Caldas in Colombia since 1997. This year, the Festival will host ISEA2017, one of the most important symposiums on Electronic Art in the world, and for the first time will be held in a Latin American country.
At the same time, the Festival will be part of selected cultural events in the ’Crusade Season France-Colombia’ initiative, led by the French Institute and the Ministry of Culture.
In this space, you’ll find the reunited programming for the 16th International Image Festival and ISEA 2017. This app enables you to create your own schedule for attending certain events during the Festival.
This design case includes two examples of design projects that look at digital literacy as a political act with the potential to empower people. The basic premise is that digital literacy is not an isolated educational and technical component for communities, but in order to be meaningful, it must derive from current social and cultural practices, and find scenarios where technology adds value. Therefore, digital literacy is an experience, and not an end-product.
The two projects were carried out in rural areas of the state of Karnataka, India, with two communities of women, who engaged in a pedagogical process using digital tools. During participatory sessions, we constantly relooked at how technology can be part of social arrangements where people have more control over their own lives individually.
This approach to digital literacy is informed by the principles of empowerment, citizenship and individual rights. It gives priority to cultural meanings, and poses digital devices as artifacts that are embodied by people and can extend their capacity of communication and transformation. The methodologies of ‘Ways of Knowing’ include participatory processes, the use of digital devices and experiential learning.
