Evoke 2025

In cooperation with Grassroots of Digital Europe (GRADE)

Digital subcultures such as the demoscene are children of an almost utopian era in a peaceful region: The late 1980s and early 1990s in Northern and Western Europe, where these subcultures took form, were dominated by a discourse of benevolent globalisation, the triumph of liberal democracy, and the feeling that national borders and wars between states are a thing of the past. Today, this self-perception is clearly shattered. But were digital subcultures in Europe really sheltered from war, violence and permanent crisis until very recently? How did computer enthusiasts in Eastern Europe, where home computers had been circulating en masse already in the late 1980s, cope with the social ruptures caused by economic transformation in the 1990s? How did creative computing communities in Yugoslavia survive the bloody wars of the 1990s? How did the vibrant computer subcultures in the post-Soviet space position themselves regarding the increasing Russian neo-imperialist ambitions from the mid-1990s onwards, culminating in the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022? Did creative computing cultures simply break under pressure, did they sometimes even cave in to nationalist and imperialist currents of the time, or did they, to the contrary, draw strategies of resilience from their inherently cosmopolitan and transnationalist predispositions? In this GRADE discussion panel we invite academics and creative computing practitioners to discuss the history and present of digital subcultures facing war and crisis, focussing on the current war against Ukraine.