[{"content":"We are wrapping up Critical Signals for 2025 with a party - you are all warmly invited to join on Saturday 27th from 6:00pm for reflections and conversation with drink and light snacks. Please join us as we celebrate and reflect on all of the connections, discoveries and understandings nurtured during this initial phase of Critical Signals, and dream together of what\u0026rsquo;s next.\n","date":"27 September 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/close-to-refresh/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Close to Referesh","type":"programme"},{"content":" Practising critical responses to disrupted futures. # Critical Signals invites you into a three-month public space for learning, imagining, and practising how sovereignty, resilience and collective care will shape our futures in times of rapid change.\nOpening 18 July at 115 Taranaki Street, Wellington, Critical Signals invites the public into a living research space for three months of workshops, installations, and conversations exploring the critical systems we rely on — from food to data, water to power — and how we build, own, and nurture them together.\nCritical Signals explores practical and visionary responses to an era of collapses, with a focus on kai sovereignty, data sovereignty, collective resilience, and adaptation strategies under a rapidly changing climate. With community at the project center, it asks what changes could we make to our infrastructure, food and energy systems to ensure we not just survive, but thrive, in the years ahead.\nPart artist lab, part civil defence rethink, part neighbourhood commons — Critical Signals offers a space to gather, experiment, and prepare. Open daily and free to all, it asks not just how we survive disruption, but how we create infrastructures for living — with care, agency, and creativity.\nRead Programme Stay Updated Get updates on workshops, events, and our 3-month exploration of critical systems:\nSign Up for Updates Please wait... Thanks! We'll keep you updated on our progress. Oops! Something went wrong, please try again ← Back We use Loops.so for our newsletter. View their privacy policy for details on how your email and associated data is handled. Or contact us directly: contact@criticalsignals.nz Help us to persist and grow! Make a donation ","date":"27 September 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/","section":"Critical Signals","summary":"","title":"Critical Signals","type":"page"},{"content":" Calendar View \u0026nbsp; | \u0026nbsp; List View Please note we are still growing this programme. Be sure to check back in for updates, or sign up on the home page.\n","date":"27 September 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Programme","type":"programme"},{"content":"Working in community and sharing responsibilty for common goals can be a way out of the bleakness of late stage capitalism. This workship is invitation to hear and share stories from collectivism, to meet others in the city walking these paths.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ll seed the dialogue with stories from Vogelmorn community, Protozoa Coop, Enspiral Services on themes such as income sharing, cooperative business, shared ownership, community assets. Please bring your stories of success, challenge, and growth \u0026lt;3\n","date":"23 September 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/refreshing-collectivism/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Refreshing Collectivism","type":"programme"},{"content":"Come along to hear five community members share 15 minute talks on things that light them up and activate our capacity for creative response to change!\nThis Monday night, we\u0026rsquo;ll be hearing from:\nOliver Thomas Paige Koedijk Jayn Verkerk Eleanor Pollard Luke Edwards \u0026hellip;and exploring the following themes (more information below):\nHow to be a Tree The Peninsula Envisioning an ethical, more caring internet through tangible craft and critical making Sheltering at the bottom of the world: Exploring prepping practices in Aotearoa How can technology bridge humans\u0026rsquo; relationship with the natural world? How to be a Tree\n“It’s simple,” they say, “and you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.” \\\nWhen I am among the Trees by Mary Oliver How do we nourish our wairuatanga, listening deeply to our own inner critical signals, when we\u0026rsquo;re seeing the natural world collapse and repair around us?\nThrough Qi Gong, Zen Buddhism and Deep Listening, how can this aliveness continue to be taken care of as the winds blow stronger?\nThe Peninsula\nPaige\u0026rsquo;s research contributes to the field of disaster risk reduction by utilising visual storytelling to emphasise the critical role of resilient communities in mitigating the impacts of climate-accelerated disasters, which disproportionately affect vulnerable populations. The Peninsula, a fictional pānui designed by Paige, explores the mātauranga Māori principle of whakawhanaungatanga through the depiction of ordinary members from the Miramar Peninsula community in tongue-in-cheek survival situations during an ongoing zombie catastrophe. Leveraging Wellingtonians\u0026rsquo; appreciation for b-horror/humour storytelling seen in productions such as What We Do in the Shadows and Wellington Paranormal, the use of humour and the spectacle of a zombie context is an engaging narrative experience for readers to consider their contributions within their community in an emergency.\nEnvisioning an ethical, more caring internet through tangible craft and critical making\nData surveillance, the costs of running data centres and streaming, the impacts of resourcing and e-waste of devices are some of the outcomes of the current centralised internet. Because we connect through screens to a largely invisible internet infrastructure housed in hidden locations we have little material form to help make sense of the technology. In response, craft making offers a way to investigate the immaterial internet through making the invisible visible and materialising our experience.\nCraft making and doing is tethered to lived experience and the insights gained through the physical engagement with materials. As humans we live with and through things and mould them around ourselves, in turn we understand ourselves through doing this.\nThis talk shares the \u0026lsquo;Care label\u0026rsquo; workshop in which we provided space to raise issues and reimagine a more humane internet, from the ground up. Craft making as a method may work for opening up discussions on other complex, abstract systems through raising awareness and empowering conversations.\nSheltering at the bottom of the world: Exploring prepping practices in Aotearoa\nI am a current master’s student in Anthropology at Te Herenga Waka. My thesis focuses on ‘preppers’; people who take preparatory measures to mitigate the personal impact of a perceived crisis or disaster. I am interested in how prepping functions as a response to crisis in Aotearoa, and have been using anthropological fieldwork to examine the forces that motivate preppers living here. In this talk I will discuss initial finding and themes from my fieldwork and interviews with New Zealand-based preppers, as well as looking at anthropologies of the future, crisis, and the state and how my research hopes to contribute to these discussions.\nHow can technology bridge humans\u0026rsquo; relationship with the natural world?\nMuch of human lived experience of nature is now mediated through technology. Using the example of listening to the soil, we will discuss technologies as mediators of human-nature relations, and how this may influence perceptions of the natural world and reflect co-evolved landscapes.\n","date":"22 September 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/lightning-talks/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Lightning talks on Disaster Preparation, Community, Food / Tech Sovereignty","type":"programme"},{"content":"","date":"19 September 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/categories/","section":"Categories","summary":"","title":"Categories","type":"categories"},{"content":"","date":"19 September 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/categories/seminar/","section":"Categories","summary":"","title":"Seminar","type":"categories"},{"content":"We\u0026rsquo;re told \u0026lsquo;AI\u0026rsquo; is Progress, progress that cannot be stopped, that it will change the way we work and live, from business to education and the commons. But who says? Whose progress and whose AI is it anyway? Is societal progress really bound to technological innovation, or are there other ways of reading - and even shaping - positive social change?\nTechnological Determinism is described as the belief system that social progress is driven by technological innovation, which in turn follows an \u0026ldquo;inevitable\u0026rdquo; course.\u0026quot; This panel will take a good hard look at this \u0026lsquo;inevitabilism\u0026rsquo; - its forces and politics - with a view to our shared future in Aotearoa and the Pacific.\nJoin us for a rigorous evening of discussion with a view to how we might gain more understanding - and more say - as to the reach and influence new technologies have over our autonomy, dignity, communities and cultures.\n","date":"19 September 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/inevitabilism-panel/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"The Inevitabilism Panel","type":"programme"},{"content":"When we think about acute and chronic disasters, who are we relying on to drive change? In the face of institutional gaps and uncertainty \u0026ndash; what can we do for ourselves, together? This korero is rooted in exploring what community care looks like in the face of disaster and ongoing polycrises, and what each of us can do to organise collectively around our needs. We will walk through tangible examples from Monica\u0026rsquo;s experiences of mutual aid organizing for different crisis contexts in Chicago (USA), dispelling disaster myths, what anarchist approaches to community care look like, and brainstorming around what we can do together around what we face as community members in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Zines and kai will be shared.\n","date":"18 September 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/care-anarchy-aid/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Care, anarchy, and mutual aid: responses to crisis and disaster by the community, for the community","type":"programme"},{"content":"","date":"18 September 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/seminar/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Seminar","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"18 September 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Tags","type":"tags"},{"content":"“One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of the mind.” \u0026ndash; Arthur C Clarke\nMatt Boyd develops evidence-based foresight scenarios on global catastrophic risks and responses, providing foundations for role-playing, storytelling, and resilience planning. In his work, Matt asks what might enable island societies like Aotearoa to endure a collapse?\nDr Doug Van Belle is a published science fiction author, exploring the politics of extreme resource scarcity in his latest novel. As a university researcher, he analyses the role of science fiction in society, and the role of media in disaster risk reduction.\nBoth will share insights they have gleaned from the practice of imagining a future that is radically different to the past, discussing how fictional accounts can help communities to prepare for rapid change\n","date":"17 September 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/practising-the-future-through-science-fiction/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Practising the future through Science Fiction","type":"programme"},{"content":"The thought of an imminent disaster weighing you down? Current world politics leaving you despondent? This workshop will explore how critical hope can be practiced through the process of collective letter writing. Critical (as opposed to passive) hope is grounded in reality and is an action driven practice. Using letter making as a creative method that allows for imagination, this practice of hope will promote engagement, rather than distancing from current and future political, climate and justice problems. This workshop aims to reground participants in a non-digital world, as well as foster collaboration, imagination, and optimism for the future.\n","date":"16 September 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/disperse-your-dispair-with-critical-hope/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Disperse your Despair with Critical Hope","type":"programme"},{"content":"The warming climate is delivering increasingly extreme floods, droughts, heat waves, and fires around the world and in New Zealand. The globe is also approaching a range of tipping points that could be very challenging to adapt to. This talk will review where we’re at with climate change, the context for recent extremes in Aotearoa and internationally, and what we might expect over the coming few decades. It will end with a review of the actions we need to take to lead us to a brighter future.\n","date":"15 September 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/climte-change-impacts/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Climate change impacts, now and over coming decades (postponed from August)","type":"programme"},{"content":"","date":"11 September 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Collaborators","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"Doug Van Belle is a Senior Lecturer in the School of English, Film, Theatre, Media and Communication, and Art History at Victoria University. He is currently examining how science fiction as thought experiment shapes its in the conceptual space between science and society. The diversity of his expertise is driven by his creative works, including several science fiction novels, as well has his introduction to politics textbook, A Novel Approach to Politics, which will soon go into its 7th edition. His latest novel, A World Adrift, is set in the skies of Venus, 800 years after it was first colonized, and explores the human impact of the politics of extreme resource scarcity.\n","date":"11 September 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/doug/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Doug Van Belle","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"Matt Boyd is a phiosopher and researcher who founded Adapt Research in 2015 and more recently the Aotearoa NZ Catastrophe Resilience Project (NZCat).\nCurrently he is analysing and developing mitigating options for global catastrophic and existential risks, such as extreme pandemics, nuclear war, and other cross-border risks.\n","date":"11 September 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/matt/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Matt Boyd","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"“Crashes, fires and floods may simply be entropy in action, but systemically concentrated and risky infrastructures are choices made manifest — and we can make better ones.” Maria Farrell, Rewilding the Internet What if we looked at the Internet not with helpless horror of its current controllers, but with compassion, constructiveness and hope? Technologists are great at incremental fixes, but we can learn from ecologists who take a whole-systems view. Ecologists also know how to keep going when others first ignore you and then say it’s too late, how to mobilize and work collectively, and how to build pockets of diversity and resilience that will outlast them, creating possibilities for an abundant future they can imagine but never control. We don’t need to repair the internet’s infrastructure. We need to rewild it. ","date":"11 September 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/rewilding-resilience/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Rewilding the Internet for Resilience  (in conjunction with Internet Infrastructure Climate Resilience in Aotearoa)","type":"programme"},{"content":"Bring your old laptops, PCs and Android devices and we’ll breathe new, free, open source life into them in this all-day install party. We’ll set up productivity suites, privacy and anonymity tools, and lock those devices down.\n","date":"10 September 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/bigtech-unplug-install-party/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"BigTech Unplug Install Party","type":"programme"},{"content":"Capitalism’s drive for continuous growth fuels resource depletion and inequality across the built and natural environment. In this talk, Melbourne-based architect and academic Jacqui Alexander presents a series of critical and creative works that reimagine the agency and politics of design in the face of the dual crises of climate and capital.\nThrough architectural and cultural projects that respond to the impacts of capitalism’s extractive digital and material technologies, Jacqui explores what it means to design for coexistence. Her practice centres collaboration across disciplines, audiences, and communities – building a “common sense” of spatial and climate injustice as a foundation for collective action.\nSensing the Quarry (2024-25) by architect Jacqui Alexander, artist Polly Stanton and designer Paul Mylecharane is on show at Critical Signals 9-21 September.\n","date":"10 September 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/common-crises/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Common Crises: On Housing and Climate Justice in the Age of Extraction","type":"programme"},{"content":"","date":"10 September 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/categories/workshop/","section":"Categories","summary":"","title":"Workshop","type":"categories"},{"content":"Before we ease out of Critical Signals 2025, we have promised ourselves, and you, a book crammed full of \u0026ldquo;Recipes for Disaster\u0026rdquo;.\nWe have many Recipes, but maybe not yours \u0026hellip; yet. Some are Recipes that tell how we got so messed up, how people cooked up this climate on the edge, this teetering society, this extractive nightmare. What we need more of are Recipes of hope, of rising, of gathering and of recovery - Recipes for our communities and for our Future. Please feel free to join us for a drop-in writing workshop. Stay as long or as little as you want. Write as much, or as little as your heart desires.\nWe will have coffee, edible treats and we will have four writing spaces. Feel free to bring your preferred writing device - we will have paper and pens, if you are travelling light :)\nThe Spaces:\nSpring: share a table, share ideas, be excited, be convivial, be bold, be rambunctious.\nSummer: feel the warmth - even the heat of creativity. Go new places, take a holiday from the day-to-day, imagine new sights. Attend - or even offer - a 15 minute \u0026lsquo;writing summer school\u0026rsquo;.\nAutumn - relax in the ideas you harvested in the other season spaces. Or, hangout and get in the writing mood before launching into your preferred writing space. First rest, and chat outside with a coffee, biscuits, chocolate and among other writers in the space. Let the leaves fall gently.\nWinter - hunker down in the quietest of the spaces with your thoughts, your words and your softly emerging ideas. Just sit and write. Enjoy a space for making words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs and metaphors into tools to build a better Aotearoa.\n","date":"6 September 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/recipes-for-disaster/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Recipes for Repair, Resilience and Restoration: a four-spaces writing workshop","type":"programme"},{"content":"This presentation examines how the principles of participatory, circular, and open design can transform construction by bringing human and ecological values into the heart of how we build.\nDrawing from both ancient timber framing traditions and modern innovations, it demonstrates how modularity and standardisation unlock flexibility, efficiency, and customisation while supporting sustainable, locally-rooted solutions.\nA key focus is placed on design for disassembly and reassembly, enabling buildings and their components to be reused and adapted over time—reducing waste, lowering environmental impact, and fostering resilience for current and future communities.\n","date":"5 September 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/reimagining-construction/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Reimagining Construction: Participatory, Circular, and Open by Design","type":"programme"},{"content":"Aotearoa faces multiple natural hazard risks, both seismic and weather-related. Partly for this reason, the cost of residential property insurance is relatively high, certainly by European standards. Moreover, average premiums have risen dramatically in recent decades. According to StatsNZ, the average cost of house insurance has increased by over 900% since the year 2000, with a substantial proportion of this increase occurring since 2022. As a result, insurance affordability issues are escalating. Additionally, over the coming decades, the impacts of climate change, including more severe flooding and sea level rise, are bound to reduce the availability of residential property insurance in high-risk locations. But reduced insurance affordability and availability will likely harm societal resilience.\nDrawing on various overseas policy approaches, this presentation will explore the longer-term policy options for residential property insurance, and especially natural disaster insurance, in the context of increasing climate-related risks. The options include extending the role of the Natural Hazards Commission to include the full range of climate-related perils, replacing the Commission’s role as the first-loss insurer of specified perils with different cover arrangements, and expanding the current regime of means-tested insurance subsidies. Every option has disadvantages.\n","date":"3 September 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/insuring-the-future-and-the-future-of-insurance/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Insuring the future and the future of insurance","type":"programme"},{"content":"Cally O\u0026rsquo;Neill (pākehā) is one of the founders of Te Reo Ngā Tāngata/The People Speak, who have worked with Ngati Toa over several years on Te Tiriti-based deliberative processes to strengthen democracy and improve outcomes for people and place, recently holding an Assembly on Climate for the Porirua region. She will talk about the assembly process and on a tool kit that is being rolled out for communities to become more involved in their environmental futures.\n","date":"1 September 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/porirua-assembly-on-climate/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Porirua Assembly on Climate","type":"programme"},{"content":"Vita Jerram is a third year Cultural Anthropology student at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington. She is particularly interested in the liberatory possibilities of Anthropology and how creative and physical practices can be used to mobilise individuals and collectives.\n","date":"1 September 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/vita/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Vita Jerram","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"Jacqui Alexander is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Monash Art Design and Architecture, and a Director of Alexander \u0026amp; Sheridan Architecture. Her research explores practices of resistance against the financialisation of the built environment via extractive technologies. She is interested in interdisciplinary and intersectional forms of creative practice as a means to develop new understandings, tools and coalitions in responding to these structural challenges.\n","date":"30 August 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/jacqui/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Jacqui Alexander","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"Generative AI is everywhere. Each campaign presents it as an efficiency fix, often for problems it invented. Yet efficiency collapses in fields that thrive on the very search for problems. In the creative arts, including music, the goal usually is not to solve problems; it’s to seek them, wrestle with them and forge novel, unexpected forms of expression. That clash between algorithmic speed, and the creative value of exploration sets the stage for this session. In this lecture, composer and AI researcher Misagh Azimi will showcase headline systems created to generating music and discuss the politics and carbon costs embedded in their creation, training, and data use. We’ll then trace the economic cracks beneath copyright, royalty streams, and cultural value, before outlining ways to intervene through personal fine-tuning, transparent datasets, and collaborative, human-centered workflows.\n","date":"27 August 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/songs-for-my-chatbot/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Songs for my Chatbot: How Generative AI is Impacting Music","type":"programme"},{"content":"In a time of ecological crisis and accelerating uncertainty, how we show up internally matters more than ever.\nThis 90-minute session invites you into a deeper inquiry: what if the most critical signals aren\u0026rsquo;t just out there, but within us?\nBlending insights from yoga, nervous system science, and psychology, this workshop explores how cultivating somatic awareness, emotional integration, and nervous system literacy can help us meet this moment with resilience and relational wisdom.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ll look at:\nHow (\u0026amp; why it matters) to expand our bandwidth of intelligence beyond the mind—into the body, breath, and felt experience Simple practices to regulate our nervous systems and stay connected in the face of discomfort, conflict or overwhelm The power of transmuting difficult emotions (like fear, grief or anger) into clarity and compassionate action How mindset, perception and bias shape the stories we tell ourselves, and how those stories shape the world we build Why the relational field we create may matter more than the facts we present or the causes we champion.\nThis is an invitation to slow down, tune in, and build inner infrastructure for a more resilient, connected, and intentional future.\nCome as you are - this session will be gentle, experiential, and open to all levels of awareness or practice.\nAs Rumi reminds us: “Yesterday I was clever and tried to change the world; today I am wise and am changing myself.” ","date":"26 August 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/inner-infrastructure-for-outer-resilience/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Inner Infrastructure for Outer Resilience","type":"programme"},{"content":"An introduction to Coshop, a new open source platform connecting communities directly to local farmers that is being trialled in Wellington with Kaibosh and Wesley Community Action.\nThis talk will also look at existing models of community engagement in food systems, some problems with the existing models and how tech could enable communities and small farmers to regain power in the food system.\n","date":"25 August 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/building-community-led-food-systems/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Coshop: Supporting Community-led Food Systems","type":"programme"},{"content":"Climate and Community Activist Tuhi-ao Bailey will talk about Parihaka’s steps towards kai sovereignty, their award winning māra kai and planning a papakāinga to be resilient in the face of Climate Change.\nThis will be followed by an action-focused discussion led by chef and grower Mara Masarotti on how to connect urban growers with spaces to grow kai at scale.\nTamariki friendly.\nFollowed by an action-focused discussion led by chef and grower Mara Masarotti on how to connect urban growers with spaces to grow kai at scale.\n","date":"23 August 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/parihaka/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Parihaka's Maara Kai - Food Sovereignty and Growing for Communities","type":"programme"},{"content":"Freda is a curator, engagement practitioner, and connector, who works at the intersection of social change, community-building, and inner development. She is the Founder of the Goodlife Collective, which curates spaces that build connection, wellbeing and collective wisdom.\nDrawing on yoga teaching, somatic practices and adult development, Freda is interested in how we build our inner infrastructure - the capacity to work through discomfort, reconnect with our agency, and bring greater presence to relationships. Her background is in psychology, environmental-science and design, and she loves nerding out on ideas and conversations about unlocking our collective potential.\n","date":"22 August 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/freda/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Freda Wells","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"Wellington owes much of its natural beauty to the tectonic plate boundary beneath our feet, one which also brings the reality of geological hazards. Finn will show how these geological events have shaped our region in the past, and what we might expect in the future. There will always be uncertainty about these future hazards, but scientists and historians can combine to better prepare us for what is coming.\n","date":"21 August 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/city-on-the-edge/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"City on the Edge","type":"programme"},{"content":"Climate change, loss of biodiversity, migration, plastic in our blood and brains – it is only a short step towards the belief that we are utterly f%$#\u0026amp;…\nUnderstanding how these global crises are interlinked, and how people cope with these is part of this evening. It brings together two researchers from two quite distinct fields – computer science and psychological science – who will talk about their perspectives on how to handle complex and systemic crises. Markus looks at the world as a giant heap of information across many and diverse scales, and seeks to analytically understand this through the means of information and network theory. Gerhard addresses our cognitive and emotional responses to these crises, and how they shape our mental health and ultimately, action. We look forward for a fruit- and hopeful evening in the face of planetary doom.\n","date":"20 August 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/community-agency-a-conversation/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Community Agency - a conversation","type":"programme"},{"content":"Our existing food system in Aotearoa contains deep inequities, meaning that not everyone is able to enjoy food security or to have reliable access to quality healthy food. In time of disaster these inequities are significantly heightened, but it doesn’t have to be this way. In this panel session we will explore existing initiatives and approaches that offer a different way of doing things.\nThe speakers engage with a community economy approach that focuses on how to build economies that prioritise the wellbeing of communities and the planet, rather than focusing on profit. There are plentiful examples of community economies already in action in Aotearoa and this panel focuses on examples of how they have been mobilised to address concerns with food supply. We review the lessons from community-based responses to food insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic, consider the ongoing role of food rescue for disaster risk reduction, and explore how these examples show how community food economies can help to build more equitable and resilient food systems, and foster more resilient communities during peace-time and disasters. The session will end with facilitated discussion around what other examples of community food economies exist locally and how these can be harnessed so that our communities not only survive, but are able to thrive through disaster.\n","date":"19 August 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/eating-through-disaster-building-community-food-economies/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Eating Through Disaster: Building Food Economies","type":"programme"},{"content":"For most current technology, it is assumed that the user is always online and has access to unlimited data. But this assumption is only valid for regions with the infrastructure to support the internet. As more vital communications and services transition into websites, how do we make sure that these services are still usable in areas with only low bandwidth internet or during natural disasters? In this event we will start a discussion about developing smaller websites for accessibility in Aotearoa.\n","date":"15 August 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/its-the-little-websites-that-count/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"It's the Little Websites that Count","type":"programme"},{"content":"This talk, \u0026ldquo;Economic Modeling of Climate Change\u0026rdquo; is in place of the one by James Renwick that has had to be postponed. We want to express our heartfelt appreciation to Dr. Cathrine Dyer for bringing her talk forward.\nIntegrated assessment models combine climate science with economics to evaluate climate policies. However, it is argued that they systematically underestimate risk and promote complacency. This undermines attempts to inform the public and to generate appropriate climate action. Join us for a quick tour of what these models do, where some of the issues lie and what recommendations are being made for assessing climate risk using different approaches.\n","date":"13 August 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/economic-modeling-of-climate-change/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Economic Modeling of Climate Change","type":"programme"},{"content":"This light-hearted talk will introduce some old, some new and some eccentric ideas for keeping computers and their software running for as long as we can. Come and learn some tricks to fight planned obsolescence and also build new things that might survive the onslaught of corporate capture. We\u0026rsquo;ll be streaming this talk from aboard a little sailboat adrift somewhere in the Pacific! No prior knowledge of computing required.\n","date":"12 August 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/permacomputing-101/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Permacomputing 101","type":"programme"},{"content":" Week Four reflection from visitor to the space Melissa Pearce - thank you! # hello from the ground up. A disaster is looming, we can all feel it in our bones, whether its muscle memory has passed down from the epochs, or the news cycle. It would be easy to switch off and dopamine out, but the team at Critical Signals are trying to keep their outlooks above the horizon. With a call to community and pooling of individual talents.\nThe pilot pop-up along Taranaki St in te Aro, Central Wellington looks like a gallery but has multiple layers.\nSpearheaded by curator Sophie Jerram and supported by (today\u0026rsquo;s) stewards of the space, Helen Kirlew Smith and Ollie Hutton, Critical Signals is an incubator, resource, events spot and landing strip for creative and politically engaged Wellington residents, visitors and friends of the harbour city, but particularly those with a concern about future natural disasters. And how communities and individuals will handle them, not just logistically but interpersonally.\nJerram and Kirlew Smith come to the initiative from their work on Urgent Moments (Letting Space) series of events in vacant space. But this time it is less about activating buildings and unorthodox locations,than fostering an ideas hub and community venue. “It’s partly a place to harness different people’s skills but it is also important for people who are different from each other to be able to come together and communicate” says Jerram.\nOn a spontaneous drop in you might find a local politician, geologist, urban planner, chef, AI developer and internet travel editor sharing homemade soup that a volunteer has brought in.\nNeurodiversity finds a warm welcome while the academics in the mix add to the unexpected connections and converse in friendly corners. Landlines for landslides and emotional rafts for the likely tsunami, Critical Signals is in prepping good speed.\n\u0026ndash; Melissa Pearce / Journalist \u0026amp; Writer, Sydney\nSculpt the City: Explore Risk and Resilience in Clay # Saturday 9th August led by Mairéad de Róiste\nTE WĀHI INSTALLATION # Emerging from Te Wahi o Papa Whakāta, a project seeded in 2022 with Tanya Ruka, new video works are being shown from Tuesday 12th August, curated by Oliver Hutton. He writes:\nFlickering to life every Tuesday to Sunday, Noon to Nine (or there abouts), we have a humble offering of three delectable incantations to marvel at for a moment in time right there on the blustery streets. You could sit at the bus stop on Taranaki St just around the corner from Vivian, or even have a little snuggle in the Briscoes bed - bring binoculars to view through the windows and navigate around the cars . . . [can recommend].\nAs a karakia to the space we have the timeless wonder \u0026lsquo;Come for a walk\u0026rsquo; by Tanya Ruka. God bless the gannets. Come feel the morning awe yourself, as a portal, for an exclusive few days.\nThen we have a poignant ever gracious blessing by a living choir from the natural world. ‘This is a choir’ is a beautiful documentation of an experimental performance by a High School choir and the multi-dimensional inter-disciplinary artist Sam Hamilton.\nWe then have the all-embracing deeply rooted gem that is the ten year anniversary of \u0026lsquo;Aotearoa Now\u0026rsquo; by Ryan Fielding. To round up and connect these threads in harmony to the Critical Signals space we have an absolutely fresh and vibrant new film work from Tanya Ruka, a modern masterpiece named ‘Roropito’ - Neuralis Kōrero AI’s creative code visualising her own whakapapa . . . Deeply intriguing and vital.\nWelcome back to the campfire of urban dreams. We are here to help light you from the inside out on these cold winter nights. Bless you for your kind attention and huge mihi to these life-giving warriors breathing the warmth of wairua into moving image.\nTihei Mauri Ora. Ngā mihi nui kia koutou\n☆☆☆☆☆\nSupport # To support the project, we are seeking $9,000 to be able to steward the physical space, but any further Pledges will greatly help us to get Critical Signals up and running. Your Pledges will cover the lease of the building, and enable the team to deliver a series of seminars and workshops.\nThe success of Critical Signals depends on community support. The space will be a hub for learning, kōrero, and creative experimentation—offering opportunities to simply connect or dive into hands-on activities.\nCLICK HERE Please give generously here to support the collaborators of the project to look after the space, provide sessions and help to facilitate the project!\nCritical Signals is a hub for Coshop! # A local food cooperative with pickup locations throughout the Wellington Region - click here to get your orders in by 5pm Monday to collect from 115 Taranaki Street on Thursday!\nThe food coop is managed by two nonprofits, Wesley Community Action and Te Toi Mahana and run by volunteers. The produce comes directly from a producers cooperative the same morning so is very fresh 🥬\nCOMING UP\u0026hellip; # Check out the Calendar\nThank you to our sponsors and collaborating organisations # ","date":"10 August 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/newsletters/05/","section":"Newsletters","summary":"","title":"Critical Signals #5","type":"newsletters"},{"content":"Gerhard Reese works as Associate Professor for Climate Change at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University Wellington in Aotearoa / New Zealand. Before, he was Professor and head of the Environmental Psychology Research Unit at the University Kaiserslautern-Landau in Germany since 2016. He got his PhD in Psychology from Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany, in February 2010. His research focuses on individual, social and systemic catalysts and barriers of pro-environmental behaviour and the nature-health nexus. He attempts and sometimes succeeds to spend more time outdoors than indoors and he still is a serious competitor in Super Mario Kart.\n","date":"10 August 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/gerhard/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Gerhard Reese","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"Markus Luczak-Roesch is Professor of Informatics and the inaugural Chair in Complexity Science at Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Information Management. He is also one of two Co-Directors of Te Pūnaha Matatini, Aotearoa New Zealand’s Centre of Research Excellence in Complex Systems. He founded and leads the Complexity \u0026amp; Connection Science Lab, an interdisciplinary group developing theories and computational tools to understand how complex systems unfold over time. His research investigates how structure and meaning emerge in systems - from language and brain activity to online communities and the environment - using models that reveal meaningful coincidences and unexpected system-level behaviors.\n","date":"10 August 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/markus/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Markus Luczak-Roesch","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"","date":"10 August 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/newsletters/","section":"Newsletters","summary":"","title":"Newsletters","type":"newsletters"},{"content":"The Playful Revolution is seeking up to 10 collaborative, open-minded creators who will explore, the potential impact of a major natural hazard event in the heart of Wellington’s Central City and work together to create an educational video to help others prepare.\nThis 2-day workshop will be led by Alex Bonham and Sophie Jerram, with experience in community generation, music, social practice, performance, and local government. This comes from a piece created a year ago with Vogelmorn Community - see https://vimeo.com/1068659998\nWe are looking for willing community actors, those with a specific interest and knowledge of emergency preparedness and Wellington apartment residents. Preference will be given to people who can come both days.\nNatural Hazards specialist Finn Ilsey-Kemp from Victoria University will speak to the group about what we face geologically - on Friday 12.30-2:00pm - as part of the workshop programme.\n","date":"9 August 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/disaster-on-taranaki-street-day-two/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Disaster On Taranaki Street! [Day 2]","type":"programme"},{"content":"Get hands-on with air-dry clay as we reimagine Wellington’s CBD at scale. In this collaborative workshop, we’ll explore how we think about natural hazard risk and resilience—through shape, texture, and place.\nBy treating the city as a model we can mold, you’ll gain new insights into scale, design, and the ways we interpret our shared environment. No experience is needed—just bring your curiosity, your observational eye, and a willingness to work with others.\nThe clay city model of the Wellington CBD you help create will be a central reference point throughout the Critical Signals series.\nWe suggest making a koha of around $5 to cover materials used in this event.\nWhat to bring # Your curiosity Your hands Koha ","date":"9 August 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/sculpt-the-city/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Sculpt the City: Explore Risk and Resilience in Clay","type":"programme"},{"content":"The Playful Revolution is seeking up to 10 collaborative, open-minded creators who will explore, the potential impact of a major natural hazard event in the heart of Wellington’s Central City and work together to create an educational video to help others prepare.\nThis 2-day workshop will be led by Alex Bonham and Sophie Jerram, with experience in community generation, music, social practice, performance, and local government. This comes from a piece created a year ago with Vogelmorn Community - see https://vimeo.com/1068659998\nWe are looking for willing community actors, those with a specific interest and knowledge of emergency preparedness and Wellington apartment residents. Preference will be given to people who can come both days.\nNatural Hazards specialist Finn Ilsey-Kemp from Victoria University will speak to the group about what we face geologically - on Friday 12.30-2:00pm - as part of the workshop programme.\nSee also Day 2\n","date":"8 August 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/disaster-on-taranaki-street-day-one/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Disaster On Taranaki Street! [Day 1]","type":"programme"},{"content":"This lecture by Julian Oliver positions the deployment of self-hosted, community-owned sovereign server infrastructure as a radical act of infrastructural resistance in an age of polluting and pervasive digital imperialism.\nIn doing so, Julian will look closely as to what it really means to run one\u0026rsquo;s own server, from potentials to pitfalls, whether that be an old PC turned-server hosted at home, studio or office, or on a machine rented at a datacenter.\nStarting points for self-hosting will be covered, with an introduction to system administration in the context of digital caretaker, guardian and gardener.\nThe talk will also assess free and open source platform alternatives to Big Tech platforms, from sovereign cloud, webmail, forum, team chat, and more. Each will be discussed such that participants can better get a sense of the what awaits them on their self-hosting journey.\n","date":"7 August 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/server-gardening/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Server Gardening","type":"programme"},{"content":"The Japanese government’s Moonshot Goal 8 project aims to create a society safe from extreme winds and rains by controlling the weather by 2050. As a core part of Moonshot Goal 8, the Heavy Rainfall Control project led by Kosei Yamaguchi (Kyoto University) is developing devices like turbines, curtains, and cloud seeding to calm extreme rain. Within this project the Weather Commons Research Group, led by Tsuyoshi Hatori (Ehime University), is developing and exploring ‘weather commoning’. This involves the exploration of symbiotic relationships with weather patterns and disasters, non-normative ethics based on local community practices, and citizen participation in technological development.\nPlease join weather commons group leader Tsuyoshi Hatori and member Chris Berthelsen (originally from Tāmaki Makaurau) for an introduction to the state of weather control, calming, and commoning research and activity in Japan. This is a space for open discussion, but you are also free to sit back and listen.\nSynopsis: An intro to weather control, calming, and commoning research and activity in Japan, where the government aims to have some control over severe weather by 2050.\n","date":"6 August 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/weather-commoning/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Weather Commoning: Critical Signals from the Japanese Government's Moonshot Goal 8 Project","type":"programme"},{"content":" Week Three reflection from core team collaborator Julian Oliver # It was a busy week for the data and digital infrastructure track of Critical Signals. Offline Aotearoa!, a half-day workshop on digital infrastructure sovereignty, led by me, Julian Oliver. Participants command line learn tools to dig behind the surface of Aotearoa New Zealand’s digital infrastructure to find where the services of our government and public sector are geographically and jurisdictionally located. It is clear that many of the server we consider ‘our own’ are in fact on privately owned datacenters far away, and often on US-owned and controlled property. While we Aotearoa New Zealanders might think of ourselves as politically, culturally and economically sovereign, we are very much not so when it comes to the digital infrastructure we use everyday. Week Three reflection from core team collaborator Julian Oliver\nWhena Owen, from TVNZ’s Q\u0026amp;A spent time at Critical Signals (115 Taranaki St) to chat about these themes, resulting in a story airing on Sunday morning.\nOn Thursday a talk was held in the space introducing the post-Internet offline communications platform Meshtastic, for which an already thriving community-owned-and-operated network in the Lower North Island already exists. Meshtastic is a resilient ‘mesh-networking’ technology allowing users to stay in touch with text messages from their smartphones even in a total power and Internet blackout. Rather than pushed as a complete ‘techno-fix’ for disaster-tolerant communications, Meshtastic was discussed as meeting needs not covered by traditional AM radio emergency broadcasts from authorities, rather empowering communities to organise and meet their own needs in a crisis.\nOn Saturday, participants of this talk met to identify ‘blind spots’ in the CBD, with a view to placing new mesh ‘nodes’ in the city to increase coverage. From this session, several new locations for nodes were identified, with one large blind spot found through live testing at the wharf. For this the team proved a node at the top of Taranaki street would open up connectivity for not just all of Taranaki street, but much of the harbour itself.\n\u0026ndash; Julian Oliver\nJulian Oliver on TVNZ\u0026rsquo;s Q+A discussing his work in infrastructure activism and the politics of digital infrastructure.\nView Here + RNZ Story Location Identification # Our new low tech highly responsive location identification system created by Ollie Hutton - a signal that Critical Signals is in through the glass doors rather than the grey 115 door [that\u0026rsquo;s home to our beautiful friends Supergood]\nApologies to Ed Strafford who we erroneously referred to as Ed Burn in last weeks signal!\nSupport # To support the project, we are seeking $9,000 to be able to steward the physical space, but any further Pledges will greatly help us to get Critical Signals up and running. Your Pledges will cover the lease of the building, and enable the team to deliver a series of seminars and workshops.\nThe success of Critical Signals depends on community support. The space will be a hub for learning, kōrero, and creative experimentation—offering opportunities to simply connect or dive into hands-on activities.\nCLICK HERE Please give generously here to support the collaborators of the project to look after the space, provide sessions and help to facilitate the project!\nOpen Call For Recipes # Recipes for Disaster is an open exhibition and publication in progress as part of the Critical Signals programme.\nCollaboratively cooking up ceremonies of creativity in times of collapse and repair - Open Call for recipes!\nWe are calling for recipes of any nature; whether they are card games to play when the power is out, a bread recipe for an open fire, or leaving the tap on and heading to Dannevirke for a viking conference. Use of imagination is strongly encouraged. All recipes considered.\nSome may be read out by the ‘Disaster Chef’ (a fictional reality tv show host). Recipes for [use within] disaster (a bestiary of things to call upon in emergencies) AND Recipes for disaster (things that will most certainly not end well).\nDeadline for entries is August 18th Email recipes to recipes@criticalsignals.nz OR drop into 115 Taranaki Street and write one out on paper OR mail physical entries to 115 Taranaki Street\nExhibition runs Aug 19th - Sep 5th 2025. Publication printed thereafter.\nCritical Signals is a hub for Coshop! # A local food cooperative with pickup locations throughout the Wellington Region - click here to get your orders in by 5pm Monday to collect from 115 Taranaki Street on Thursday!\nThe food coop is managed by two nonprofits, Wesley Community Action and Te Toi Mahana and run by volunteers. The produce comes directly from a producers cooperative the same morning so is very fresh 🥬\nCOMING UP\u0026hellip; # See Programme\nThank you to our sponsors and collaborating organisations # Open 12pm - 7pm,\nTuesday - Saturday\n","date":"3 August 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/newsletters/04/","section":"Newsletters","summary":"","title":"Critical Signals #4","type":"newsletters"},{"content":"This one day event will involve getting out and about around Wellington CBD in an attempt to map it for radio shadows (communication blindspots) within the Lower North Island Meshtastic network. Meshtastic allows for sending messages even in a total blackout, right from your phone. The outcome will be a map which identifies areas where we need to install nodes to give coverage across the CBD. These could become mission-critical to reaching loved ones in the event of an earthquake or blackout event. We will meet at Critical Signals, 115 Taranaki Street, then head out into the city, rain or shine.\n","date":"2 August 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/radio-cartography/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Radio Cartography","type":"programme"},{"content":"As the Christchurch Earthquake and Cyclone Gabrielle have shown, in an environmental disaster, Internet infrastructure and mobile communications are unreliable at best.\nThis 2 hour session will introduce participants to the Meshtastic platform, a post-internet mesh network in broad use in Pōneke/Wellington. Meshtastic allows for sending messages even in a total blackout, right from your phone. The Lower North Island already enjoys a very populous and active Meshtastic mesh, with many members focused on preparedness. Come and learn how you can help strengthen and grow the community! ","date":"31 July 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/introduction-to-meshtastic/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Introduction to Meshtastic","type":"programme"},{"content":"Misagh Azimi is a composer, researcher, and interdisciplinary artist based in Aotearoa New Zealand. His compositional work centers on music for the stage and visual media. In his research, he explores the creative potential of artificial intelligence, the development of new technologies for music-making, and a critical engagement with the role of technology in musical practice – examining questions of labor, authorship, and technofeudalism.\n","date":"31 July 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/misagh/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Misagh Azimi","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"Finn is a Senior Research Fellow in natural hazards at Te Herenga Waka –Victoria University of Wellington. He combines geological studies of the past with modern physical observations to better understanding the fundamental processes controlling the earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis of Aotearoa New Zealand.\n","date":"28 July 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/finn/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Finn Illsey-Kemp","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"Jonathan Boston, ONZM, is Emeritus Professor of Public Policy in the School of Government at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington. His research interests include: climate change policy (both mitigation and adaptation); child poverty; governance (especially anticipatory governance); public management; tertiary education funding (especially research funding); and welfare state design. Recent books and major reports include: Transforming the Welfare State: Towards a New Social Contract (2019); Funding Managed Retreat: Designing a Public Compensation Scheme for Private Property Losses: Policy Issues and Options (2023); and A Radically Different Planet: Preparing for Climate Change (2024). He is the co-editor of Policy Quarterly.\n","date":"28 July 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/jonathon/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Jonathon Boston","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"This half-day session builds upon a simple thought experiment: Aotearoa wakes up one day disconnected from the Internet, and the rest of the world, yet all the while local communications infrastructure - from cell towers, to datacentres and fibre networks - remain unscathed.\nWhat could (or couldn\u0026rsquo;t) we do with what we have? What of our current network and communications infrastructure, our most used sites and services, would continue to function if we were cut off from the rest of human civilisation?\nJoin us in a playful lab environment helping build the first ‘map’ of what our digital experience would look like if it was just us - from healthcare, to education, banking and the big socials. In doing so, we’ll get a sense of just how infrastructurally independent and resilient we are as a nation.\nParticipants will learn how to use network probing and website analysis tools to pull websites and networks apart, looking under the hood at just how much of our digital reality is hosted overseas.\nThis is a team effort, with no prior knowledge required. Participants should bring a laptop.\n","date":"26 July 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/offline-aotearoa/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Offline Aotearoa!","type":"programme"},{"content":"Chris is great. We look forward to reading his bio once the information has been compressed into data and sent across the ocean from Nippon to Aotearoa.\n","date":"24 July 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/chris/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Chris Berthelsen","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"Evan Henshaw-Plath, known as \u0026ldquo;rabble,\u0026rdquo; is an activist and technologist passionate about building commons-based social media apps that prioritize equity and sustainability. As the head of the tech team at Odeo when Twitter was created, rabble has unique insights into how social media platforms evolve and the values that shape them. Rabble will discuss how social media should support democratic processes rather than be a business model for surveillance.\n","date":"24 July 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/social-media-as-an-infrascructure-for-democracy/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Social media as an infrastructure for democracy","type":"programme"},{"content":"Stay tuned for information about Tsuyoshi! We are thrilled to welcome them to share their work on the space.\n","date":"24 July 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/tsuyoshi/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Tsuyoshi Hatori","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"Join us to create and map together our shared knowledge and assets to build collective community resilience. No prior knowledge needed!\nAnna Brown is a research co-lead of the project Ngā Ngaru Wakapuke; a climate and disaster research project. As part of this mapping exercise she will share her work with several communities in Tairāwhiti, Wairarapa and Ōtautahi/Christchurch around mapping, disaster resilience and storytelling. She describes maps as more than locational tools; as a way to build a common understanding of shared assets.\nAnna will lead us through an exercise to record Wellington CBD’s community points of interest, that will be added to over the course of Critical Signals.\n","date":"23 July 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/mapping-local-assets-for-disaster/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Mapping local assets for disaster","type":"programme"},{"content":"James is a climate researcher who studies Southern Hemisphere climate variability, and the impacts of climate change on the Pacific, New Zealand and the Antarctic. He was a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for 20 years, contributing to the 4th, 5th, and 6th Assessment Reports. James was awarded the Prime Minister’s 2018 prize for Science Communication and was part of the team that won the Prime Minister’s Science Prize in 2019. He was a Commissioner on the New Zealand Climate Change Commission from 2019 to 2024.\n","date":"20 July 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/james/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"James Renwick","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"Dr Jessica Hutchings has been leading and researching Indigenous food systems for decades, working from Papawhakaritorito, the farm she shares with Jo Smith at Kaitoke. Jo and Jessica teach hua parakore, a kaupapa Māori system and framework for growing Kai Atua (Māori organic kai) and in November 2024 they published the book Pātaka Kai, which celebrates abundant food communities throughout Aotearoa. In October 2024, Jess and Jo led mana wahine to Vandana Shiva’s Navdanya centre in India to present a Mana Wāhine Declaration on Seed and Soil.\nJessica will talk about the three pillars of seed, soil sovereignty and kai sovereignty as key food food futures as well as what it means to be in right relationship with our soil, seed and food systems.\n","date":"19 July 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/seeing-hope-rebuilding-our-broken-food-system/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Seeding Hope - Rebuilding our Broken Food System","type":"programme"},{"content":"","date":"18 July 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/categories/event/","section":"Categories","summary":"","title":"Event","type":"categories"},{"content":"You are invited to join us for the launch of Critical Signals, a three-month public space for learning, imagining, and practising how sovereignty, resilience and collective care will shape our futures in times of rapid change.\nPlease join us for karakia, talks, kai, wai and connection as we celebrate the launch of the project.\n","date":"18 July 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/programme/project-launch/","section":"Programme","summary":"","title":"Project Launch Party","type":"programme"},{"content":"From LinkedIn:\nInternet and ICT policy: Researcher, consultant, director, advocate.\nFrom brainbox.institute:\nEllen brings almost two decades of global experience on Internet policy and digital governance issues to the Brainbox Institute. She is known as a passionate champion for collaborative, informed approaches to technology related policy and practice. Ellen has worked on a broad spectrum of issues and processes, from infrastructure development to digital inclusion to content moderation, and she has engaged from across sectors, including as a technical community leader, academic, civil society advocate, government official, and company founder. Ellen holds a PhD from the University of Queensland, which focused on Pacific Islands multilateral digital policy. She also has received a Masters in Communications from Victoria University Wellington and a Masters in International Development, specialising in research methods, from the University of Manchester.\n","date":"16 July 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/ellen/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Ellen Strickland","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"Gradon Diprose is a Senior Researcher - Environmental Social Science at Manaaki Whenua - Landcare Research. His research focuses on the social dimensions of the circular economy and managing waste, food systems and climate adaptation.\n","date":"16 July 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/gradon/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Gradon Diprose","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"Katharine McKinnon is Professor in Human Geography and Development Studies at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington and founding Director of the Community Economies Institute. Her work is about understanding the diverse ways that ordinary people across the Asia-Pacific weave together livelihoods while supporting community wellbeing and caring for whenua, and exploring how ‘development’ can be shaped by these insights.\n","date":"16 July 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/katherine/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Katharine McKinnon","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"Kelly Dombroski is Professor of Geography at Massey University, President of the New Zealand Geographical Society and a member of the Community Economies Institute. Her research focuses on community development and diverse economies in the Asia-Pacific region. She works with communities to design and deliver research projects that meet their aspirations, particularly for economic, environmental and social transformation.\n","date":"16 July 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/kelly/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Kelly Dombroski","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"Maria Farrell will share new work, being developed for a book to be published in 2026 on imagining and creating an Internet infrastructure that is robust, resilient, and thriving, through this lens of ecology exploring issues important in Aotearoa including data sovereignty and climate change impacts on Internet infrastructure. A panel from Aotearoa will join Maria in discussion, sharing their views and insights. This online event is in collaboration with the Internet Infrastructure Climate Resilience in Aotearoa project being led from The Brainbox Institute. Maria Farrell is an Irish writer and keynote speaker on technology and the future. She has worked on technology policy at the International Chamber of Commerce, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and the World Bank.\n","date":"16 July 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/maria/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Maria Farrell","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"Monica/Mo Dix (she/they) is a Fulbright Scholar and disaster resilience and adaptation practitioner focused on critical infrastructure in Aotearoa, born out of cooperative and mutual aid organizing in the American Midwest. They believe deeply in cross-pollinating resilience and political theory with grassroots community building to foster preparedness and interconnectedness in the face of uncertain futures.\n","date":"16 July 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/monica/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Monica Dix","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"Vic Roberts is a computer vision scientist who works with machine learning in medical imaging. In her spare time, she likes to ponder about how to tackle the digital divide.\n","date":"10 July 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/vic/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Vic Roberts","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"a.k.a. Evan Henshaw-Plath\n","date":"9 July 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/rabble/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Rabble","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"Mairéad de Róiste is an Associate Professor at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, specialising in geospatial science. Her work uses maps, spatial data, and hands-on crafting methods to help people understand places, make decisions, and communicate complex ideas clearly. She is passionate about creative, accessible approaches to sharing and understanding geographic information. She also shares her work and that of her collaborators and students in the SpatialThink Lab on Instagram.\n","date":"1 July 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/mairead/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Mairéad de Róiste","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"Vagabond, lifelong student and co-founder of Hundred Rabbits. Currently drifting somewhere along the foggy coast of the Pacific North West. I enjoy living on the water, moving with the seasons, growing food in far flung places, and reading by the woodstove when it rains.\n","date":"24 June 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/devine/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Devine Lu Linvega","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"__ Mouthfull is an arts organisation and online radio station experimenting with sound, space, and connectivity.\nhttps://Mouthfull.live\n","date":"20 June 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/mouthfull/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Mouthfull","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"","date":"20 June 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/organisation/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Organisation","type":"tags"},{"content":"Anna Brown is a designer, researcher and educator. She is Professor of Design and Public Good at Massey University’s College of Creative Arts. She founded and leads Toi Āria: Design for Public Good . She uses design to create positive change by bringing together organisations, government, and communities — especially making sure the people most affected by decisions have a say in shaping them.\n","date":"16 June 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/anna/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Anna Brown","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"Dr. Cathrine Dyer is a Lecturer in Climate Change at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. She teaches environmental poltiics and international climate change policy. Her PhD research examined government underreactions to climate change, leading to an interest in commons expansion and collective responses. Cathrine is a regular guest on The Hoon podcast, covering current climate change issues with journalists Bernard Hickey (The Kākā) and Peter Bale.\n","date":"16 June 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/cathrine/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Cathrine Dyer","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"","date":"16 June 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/core-team/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Core-Team","type":"tags"},{"content":"A content writer and researcher/evaluator. Experiences include Public Service, Adult Education, IT Strategy/Policy, Māori-Crown Relationships, Curriculum Development, Assessment Design, and Classroom Teaching.\n","date":"16 June 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/ed/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Ed Strafford","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"Jack is a designer, musician, and co-founder of Mouthfull - a collective working with physical and digital spaces.\n","date":"16 June 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/jack/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Jack Gittings","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"A multidisciplinary myth-making artist, a self described \u0026lsquo;polymath peace pilgrim\u0026rsquo; recently returned home to the harbour, and now nestling in the wing of his co-founded arts collective Mouthfull. With film, music, dance and poetry as ongoing plays; meditations and space-making embody most of Ollie’s practice.\n","date":"16 June 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/ollie/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Ollie Hutton","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"Susan is a catalyst and transformation accompaniest. Working with progressive founders, organisations, and projects worldwide, Susan aims to increase coherence between the what and the how of participatory and dynamic leadership and governance. She is obsessed with the human interface and relational field. Her practices include Greaterthan, Generous Ventures, Enspiral, and lots of other zones of conscious collaboration.\n","date":"16 June 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/susan/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Susan Basterfield","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"","date":"10 June 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/cally/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Cally O'Neill","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"Clay is a culture scout and local music lover from Te Whanganui-a-Tara who believes that community and knowledge are too important to be gatekept by profit-driven, unelected power hoarders. Moved by their dream of community-owned spaces that spark our commitments and feed our spirits, their multidisciplinary work seeks to stitch our contextual fabrics into collective power, providing alternative narratives to rising techno-tyrannies. With a background including hospitality, event production, permaculture and software-oriented product management, they are now focused on creating conditions for experimentation, play, and learning - especially together.\n","date":"10 June 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/clay/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Clay Joy Smith","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"[Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa and Gujarati] Nationally and internationally recognised as a leader in Indigenous food systems and Māori food and soil sovereignty, Dr. Hutchings also holds a range of governance and leadership roles in the science sector. She is a founding Trustee of the Papawhakaritorito Charitable Trust, working to uplift Māori kai and soil sovereignty and hua parakore. Jessica is the host of Hua Parakore, currently showing on Whakaata Māori.\n","date":"10 June 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/jessica/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Dr. Jessica Hutchings","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"Mix Irving is a programmer, former teacher, and gardener of community. Has been building peer-2-peer tech for 10 years, and working in and on community-first organisations for longer (Ao Tawhiti, Loomio, Enspiral, Secure Scuttlebutt). Part of Mātou, Protozoa Coop, and contracting on Socket Security.\n","date":"10 June 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/mix/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Mix Irving","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"Ash is a design activist creating places through community ownership and participation, prototyping ecosystems of functional care, and pushing the boundaries of sustainable design through the simple and complex social technology of sharing. Ash works under spacelamp and has co-founded two/fiftyseven, oneonethree, oneonesix, and Whare Bike. He also chairs Whakaora Kai and works collaboratively with CoLiberate.\n","date":"1 June 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/ash/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Ash Holwell","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"[Taranaki Whānui ki Te Upoko o Te Ika, Te Atiawa] An activist and tech entrepreneur with experience in fintech, platforms, security and cloud infrastructure, Ira has also worked with Indigenous communities in Australia. He is the founder of CoShop, an online platform to reconnect communities to local producers.\n","date":"1 June 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/ira/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Ira Bailey","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"Julian Oliver is a Critical Engineer, educator, artist, and infrastructure activist. His work has been exhibited at numerous museums, festivals and galleries worldwide, among them Transmediale, Ars Electronica, the Vienna Biennale, the Frankfurter Kunstverein, and the Japan Media Arts Festival. Lectures related to his work and ideas have been presented at many conferences and universities internationally, including The Chaos Communication Congress, Tate Modern, Princeton University, and the ZKM in Karlsruhe.\nJulian has received several awards, most notably the distinguished Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica 2011 for the project Newstweek (with Daniil Vasiliev). He is the co-author of the Critical Engineering Manifesto and member of the Critical Engineering Working Group.\nJulian has given numerous workshops and master classes in data forensics, creative hacking, computer networking, disaster-tolerant communications, counter-surveillance, software art, object-oriented programming, radio, UNIX/Linux, (and previously) augmented reality, virtual architecture, video-game development and information visualisation worldwide.\nAlongside, Julian Oliver is co-director of Nīkau, a global platform, information and operations security consultancy in service to NGOs, impact-driven organisations and grassroots movements.\n","date":"1 June 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/julian/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Julian Oliver","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"Paul Seiler is a strong advocate for Sovereign Cloud, Opensource approaches, and is a creative leader of innovation through collaboration.\nHe is CEO of Catalyst Cloud.\n","date":"1 June 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/paul/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Paul Seiler","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"Curator, researcher and social entrepreneur, Sophie is a co-founder of Letting Space and Urban Dream Brokerage. She is a Trustee of the Vogelmorn Community Trust which owns and runs Vogelmorn Bowling Club. She wrote her PhD on the practice of spatial commoning and continues to investigate tools of collectivity.\n","date":"1 May 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/collaborators/sophie/","section":"Collaborators","summary":"","title":"Sophie Jerram","type":"collaborators"},{"content":"","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/authors/","section":"Authors","summary":"","title":"Authors","type":"authors"},{"content":" Sensing the Quary (2025), Sept 9-20 # Audio and video, 20mins\nJacqui Alexander\nPaul Mylecharane\nPolly Stanton\nSensing the Quarry is a sound and video work exploring intersections between posthuman methods and Indigenous knowledges, developed as part of a research program led by philosopher Professor Rosi Braidotti (Utrecht) and Boonwurrung Elder N’arweet Professor Carolyn Briggs AM.\nThis work emerged from an eight-day laboratory situating posthuman methods at the Cape Otway Quarry on Gadubanad Country. The laboratory was based on transforming critical thought into collective action, in response to discussions about the urgent crises of climate and capital discussions. It concerned the interdependence of human, non-human, and more-than-human entities, and the profound ethical and technological shifts needed to remediate the planet. Building on the creators’ collaborative research into listening as a critical interdisciplinary method – the work melds future possibilities, present realities, and deep time through an embodied and augmented experience. This site-specific soundscape attuned participants to a conversation between hidden lifeworlds— both past and imagined. Using AI-generated voice and an interactive score, it guided listeners through a speculative sonic story set at the Quarry three thousand years into the future. Originally delivered via headphones and mobile devices, it prompted participants to develop new relationships through deep listening, resisting the extractive frameworks that reformulate “life worlds into future assets.”[1] In doing so, storied matter became both an ethical provocation and a sensory tool —decentering the human in the greater order of things, and reminding us of the possibility—and probability—of alternative planetary futures. The work exhibited as part of Critical Signals has been adapted to include a new generative visual component, simulating the environmental conditions of the Quarry.\nNeuralis / Rorohiko (2025), Tanya Ruka, 4:27 # Te Wāhi o Te Papa Whakāta // 8 August - 25 August 2025 Curated by Ollie Hutton\nEmerging from both mātauranga Māori and neural systems thinking, this digital form evokes the rorohiko: the electric brain that holds, senses, and remembers through connection. But more than a machine, Neuralis gestures toward the unseen architecture of consciousness, the dream realms, the spaces between thought and knowing. In this view, the rorohiko becomes a relational interface, a vessel of potential, not to replace human wairua, but to extend and honour it. It invites us to imagine new pathways of remembering, where Indigenous knowledge, spiritual intelligence, and computational patterning weave together across dimensions\nTanya Te Miringa Te Rorarangi Ruka is a Māori artist of Ngā Puhi, Ngati Pakau and Waitaha descent. The focus of Ruka’s arts-based research practice is the development of possible net positive futures from an indigenous perspective. Exploring the inherent need to connect to nature on a deeper level living in an urban environment, Ruka examines this innate relationship to nature as a Māori artist.\nAotearoa Now (2015), Ryan Fielding, 10:30 # Aotearoa Now is a meditative journey into the New Zealand landscape. An experimental mosaic of image and sound on it’s tenth year anniversary. Filming took place over a two month period in 2014, with locations spanning all over the country. A majority of the footage came from driving aimlessly down unknown roads, hoping for something perfectly mundane to reveal itself. Keen to discover \u0026ldquo;the real essence\u0026rdquo; of his country, filmmaker Ryan Fielding spent two months travelling around New Zealand with camera in hand.\nRyan Fielding is a film director and visual artist based with his family in Whakatū Nelson.\nThis is a choir (2019), Sam Hamilton, 10:44 # Performance work filmed at the Portland Art Museum, Oregon, so-called US. ‘This is a choir’ is a performance piece developed by Sam Hamilton in collaboration with the Camas High School Choir. The piece was developed through a series of acoustic ecology field workshops where the students were taken to various parts of their local watershed ecology to listen to the environment (rivers, wetlands, forests, etc), and then, once back in the classroom studio, creatively develop choral methods for replicating or interpreting what they had heard.\nSam Hamilton/Sam Tam Ham, is an independent interdisciplinary artist from Aotearoa New Zealand of Pākehā (English settler colonial) descent based in Portland, Oregon. Hamilton\u0026rsquo;s practice today operates more like an ecology than a discipline. A messy but verdant garden buttressed by deep subterranean continuities that, each season, support and give rise to new growth. It is a place where form - be that manifest as opera, painting, sound-works, photography, cinema, installation, writing, or social practice - is ultimately just a means to meaning. A year long song. A pregnant pause. An entrance and an exit.\n––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––\nWhere we are // 18 July - 2 August Curated by Sophie Jerram\nWhakahokia (2025), Mark Harvey, 13:55 # Whakahokia was a beachside restoration and performance event at Kuku beach, on Sat 8th March, 2025. Participants removed invasive maram grass off a beach dune and returned it to State Highway 1, 7km away.\nCurated by Huhana Smith, as part of Te Waituhi ā Nuku: Drawing Ecologies.With thanks to Ngāti Tukorehe iwi. Camera: Maija Stephens; Editing: Mark Harvey.\nMark Harvey is an artist working in performance and video. His practice tests out notions of endurance with constructions of idiocy, seriousness and deadpan humour, and draw from his visual arts and contemporary dance influences, in addition to ecology, social justice, te Tiriti and mātauranga Māori. He has presented in a range of contexts including Letting Space, NZ festival of the Arts, the Venice Biennale, and the Pain in the Class video art festival in Estonia. Thronging in Three Parts (2025), Trudy Lane, 8:33 # Filmed at the Robert Findlay Wildlife Reserve, Pūkorokoro, North Waikato Each year, thousands of migratory shorebirds arrive at Pūkorokoro Miranda from as far away as Alaska and Siberia to feed on the rich intertidal mudflats. Living by the rhythm of the tides, they move closer as the water rises and retreat across the flats as it recedes. Joining them in this tidal cycle is the dedicated team at the Pūkorokoro Shorebird Centre, who care for these birds in their southern habitat and advocate for them across the globe. Thronging in Three Parts is a meditation on these cyclical timeframes, composed from found footage captured by staff and volunteers while working at the Reserve — Chelsea Ralls, Trudy Lane, and 賴怡蒨 Emilia Lai.\nShorebirds visible in the work: Kuaka / Bar-tailed Godwit, Huahou / Red Knot, Poaka / Pied Stilt, Ngutu Parore / Wrybill, Tōrea / South Island Pied Oystercatcher, Tarāpuka / Black-billed Gull, Kōtuku Ngutupapa / Royal Spoonbill, Matuku Moana / White-faced Heron, Turnstone, White-fronted Tern, Taranu / Caspian Tern, Tōrea Pango / Variable Oystercatcher.\nTrudy Lane is a cultural producer and creator working at the intersection of science, art, and community. She co-chairs Intercreate.org and is interested in poetic-pragmatic approaches through which creativity can directly support local ecologies — deepening our relationships with place, with each other, and across the complex social and historical layers we inhabit. Ghosts (2018), Misagh Azimi, 13:33 # Ghosts explores the sonic response of a space to the composer’s music in the immediacy of the present. Originally composed in 2018 for the die digitale festival at Kunstraum Düsseldorf, the piece was composed to accompany contemporary dance and visual art. Through a slow, morphing development, Ghosts meditates on themes of time – bridging past and future. At moments it demands the listener’s full attention; at others, it invites introspection, drifting, and a heightened awareness of the surrounding space. In this shifting dynamic, the work summons the “ghosts” that linger – memories, anticipations, and echoes of what was and what might be.\nMisagh Azimi is a composer, researcher, and interdisciplinary artist based in Aotearoa New Zealand. His compositional work centers on music for the stage and visual media. In his research, he explores the creative potential of artificial intelligence, the development of new technologies for music-making, and a critical engagement with the role of technology in musical practice – examining questions of labor, authorship, and technofeudalism.\n","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/installations/","section":"Critical Signals","summary":"","title":"Installations","type":"page"},{"content":"","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/calendar/","section":"Critical Signals","summary":"","title":"Programme","type":"page"},{"content":"","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/series/","section":"Series","summary":"","title":"Series","type":"series"}]