POP

POP is our uber-motto this year. Our new website design in green-screen-green already alludes to the direction we’re headed – even despite the inherent blank space: Squeaky clean, Seventeen cut-out popstar culture might come to mind. But, with its screeching guitars on plateau boots, POP was never really as harmless as it sometimes appeared. Instead, POP was and is an attitude that can reflect and expose the innermost mechanisms of society.

For us, POP also means PoP in the sense of depicting populations and crowds as data or information delivered through data-based curation. Likewise, it’s the construction of publicity and the much-needed bursting of filter bubbles in the widest sense: big data and information literacy. We’re referring to the PoP of Citizen Science, Journalism and Civic Tech, Investigative Collectives and Open Spaces. You might say that we’re aiming to bring the power of people back to the streets. From swarm behaviour to crowd-sourced journalism, from rapid response after environmental disasters to interdisciplinarity: What does "better together" mean to you?