Learn more about Natacha and Jose below.

Natacha Poggio
Assistant Professor of Graphic Design
University of Houston Downtown (uhd.edu), USA
PoggioN@uhd.edu

Natacha Poggio is a social impact educator, TEDx speaker, and advocate of design for social change. In her teaching at the University of Houston-Downtown, she concentrates on the role nature plays in our lives and encourages students to find solutions that will inspire positive change in society. She is the founding director of Design Global Change (2008), a creative collaborative designing planet-centered solutions to address global health, environmental, and social justice problems. She has over two decades of professional practice, and her work has reached hundreds of communities in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, garnering recognition as a two-time recipient of the Sappi “Ideas that Matter” award. Since 2011, she has been on the Winterhouse Institute Advisory Council (working on the teaching and practice of social innovation in higher education). When not teaching, Natacha is judging competitions; contributing to books and publications on social design, global health, and sustainability; and volunteering for AIGA –the professional association of design. Natacha earned a B.F.A. in Graphic Design from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and an M.F.A. in Experience Design from The University of Texas at Austin, United States. She is a native of Buenos Aires, Argentina but considers herself a citizen of the world.

José Ignacio López Ramírez Gastón
Director of Innovation and Technology Transfer
Universidad Nacional de Musica, Lima – Peru
https://www.unm.edu.pe/
https://www.unm.edu.pe/ditec/
jlopezr@unm.edu.pe

José Ignacio López Ramírez Gastón holds a PhD in Computer Music from the University of
California San Diego (UCSD) where he studied under the supervision of Miller Puckette. He is
currently a lecturer at the Universidad Nacional de Música (ex Conservatorio Nacional de
Música), where he is in charge of the music and technology courses, coordinates the Laboratorio
de Música Electroacústica y Arte Sonoro and is Director de Innovación y Transferencia
Tecnológica. He also lectures on Sound Arts and Popular Music at the Pontificia Universidad
Católica del Perú. In 2019 he published the book La Guardia Nueva. Visiones Sobre la Música
Electrónica en el Perú.

Overview of the program
The Cumulus Plus Grant Program is a unique opportunity for researchers, academic and administrative staff to receive a scholarship to attend a Cumulus Conference and benefit from the knowledge exchange and community-building that results from meeting the diversity of our Cumulus members. The program is intended to assist colleagues in a country and/or region of the world typically underrepresented within the Cumulus network, opening the door for mutual learning and future collaboration.

Please learn more about Jamely and Joao and follow our social media channels for their contributions and impressions. You will find our accounts in the header.

Jamely Esmeralda
UArtes, Ecuador
jamely.esmeralda@uartes.edu.ec

Literature student at the University of Arts of Guayaquil. She has been published at Ruta Colectiva maganize. Mention of honor at LibreLibro Literary Contest, category: narrative (2018). She has colaborated with local NGO´s for the development of political, cultural and artistic projects for women and LGBTQ community. She gives virtual workshops of decolonial studies and class, gender and race critical theory (2020-nowadays). She translates texts and gives translation workshops for the AWTC (Academic Writing and Translation Center) in colaboration with the International Relationships Department at the University of Arts. She will represent the University of Arts as Ambassador for the Cumulus Guayaquil 2021 Conference.

Joao Jiménez
UArtes, Ecuador
joao.jimenez@uartes.edu.ec

Music production student with experience in audio editing and mixing for new media. Passionate about the artistic sector that is born from innovation and technological vanguards. With a view to generating innovative musical and sound projects, he has entered the world of programming. In addition, he has participated in cultural projects to vindicate independent art in cities like Loja, Saraguro, Otavalo and Guayaquil. He will represent the University of Arts as Ambassador for the Cumulus Guayaquil 2021 Conference.

ABOUT THE PROGRAM:
The Cumulus Student Ambassador Program is a special student award and merit-based initiative of the Cumulus that recognizes exceptional student leaders from the universities and institutions hosting the Cumulus Association Annual Conferences. Each year, Cumulus invites a total of four Student Ambassadors (two per annual conference) to contribute their singular voices to the Association’s Conferences and the Cumulus community overall.

Through the Cumulus Student Ambassador Program, the Cumulus Association is committed to bringing the perspectives and voices of exceptionally talented and articulate students to the forefront, with the goal of highlighting the changes that the next generation of artists and designers are shaping in an increasingly complex and interconnected global marketplace for art and design.
#cumulusstudentambassadors

The Cumulus Green 2022: Nurturing Our Planet competition invites students from all Cumulus member institutions to consider submissions that advance the United Nations’ Sustainable Goals (SDG).

For the 2022 edition, Cumulus is choosing to bring the talent and creativity of its global community to focus on SDG2: Zero Hunger.

Under the umbrella of zero hunger, SDG2 is not only about ending hunger, but also achieving food security and improved nutrition and promoting sustainable agriculture.

The competition will reward the best work with 3 different categories of prizes as well as with honorary mentions. The prize pool is 20.000 EUR.

The judging process is led by jury co-chairs and Cumulus Executive Board representatives, Anne Pikkov and Jose Allard, and international experts in design, cultural diplomacy, sustainability and circular economy including Rahul Bhattacharya, Erik Ciravegna, Dolly Daou, Lynda Deakin, Daniel Grushkin, Philipp Heidkamp, Soojin Jun, Silvana Juri, Anna Meroni, Pedro Reissig, Vishnu Swaminathan, John Thackara, Xiao Yong and Francesca Zampollo.

Cumulus has partnered with the One Club for Creativity to host the submission platform and the jury room of the Cumulus Green 2022 competition. The competition prize pool has been doubled thanks to the sponsorship of BE OPEN Foundation.

Deadline for submissions has been moved to March 15, 2022.

More information available and the entry submission platform open soon at cumulusgreen.org. Stay tuned!

For any further questions, please contact the Cumulus Secretariat at cumulusgreencompetition@aalto.fi.

Read the whole text of the Call for Entries here CumulusGreen2022call

Conference information:

Cumulus virtual conference Guayaquil 2021: Arts Imagining Communities to Come
November 8-11, 2021 hosted by the Universidad de las Artes, Ecuador

The Conference will explore four research tracks: Crisis, criticism, and creation (Keywords: Global crisis, counter-hegemony, design thinking, social engagement in arts, imagination-creation.), Production Design in the Arts (Key words: DJ, transdisciplinary design, rent, influencers, co-creation, digital strategies.), Art, nature, biology and technology (Key words: Smartification, World design and worlding, cosmopolitics, artivism, southern epistemologies.) and Urban art and redesigning cities (Key words: Urban art, city, public space, laser tag, graffiti, design.).

The keynotes for each track include a performance theorist, media creator Jon Mckenzie (USA), visual artist Delma Rodríguez (Uruguay), scientist and theorist in New Media José-Carlos Mariátegui (Perú) and visual methods scholar, specialising in street art, graffiti and forms of urban creativity Susan Hansen (UK).
Full program information will be introduced on the conference website.

Conference host
Universidad de las Artes del Ecuador (UArtes), founded in 2013, is one of the four public universities devoted solely to the arts in Latin America. As a public higher education institution in the arts it has five schools: Film, Sound Arts, Literature, Visual Arts and Performing Arts. UArtes offers 7 bachelors within their schools; and four master programmes.

Overview
The Cumulus Plus Grant Program is a unique opportunity for researchers, academic and administrative staff to receive a scholarship to attend a Cumulus Conference and benefit from the knowledge exchange and community-building that results from meeting the diversity of our Cumulus members. The program is intended to assist colleagues in a country and/or region of the world typically underrepresented within the Cumulus network, opening the door for mutual learning and future collaboration.

Eligibility
– Cumulus Plus awards are directed to individuals who have an academic or administrative role, who hold a full-time position in a higher education institution with a college, school or department in the fields of art and design.
– Applicants must belong to an institution outside the Cumulus Association membership at the time of application. (Before applying, please refer to our current membership list).

Selection Process
A review panel from the Cumulus Executive Board and a prior Cumulus Plus grantee reviews all applications and selects the grantees. The panel takes into consideration individual candidates’ academic/professional achievements, their motivation to attend the conference, and evidence of alignment between candidates’ participation with the overall objectives of the program to promote access and knowledge exchange between the Cumulus membership community and colleagues outside the network in underrepresented countries and regions of the world.

Terms of the Grant
Candidates should review these terms before considering an application. Grantees must be able to comply with the following requirements if they accept the award:

Before the Conference
Return an award confirmation letter with your acceptance.

During the Conference
Cumulus Plus Grantees will be announced to all conference delegates at the start of the conference. They are expected to ensure enough time and good internet connection to follow most of the conference closely. Grantees shall agree separately with the Cumulus secretariat about their involvement in the virtual conference; it might be a short introduction, active joining a session, activity in social media, etc.

After the Conference
Grantees agree to submit a “first person”, reflective contribution about their learnings and any relevant highlights of their experience as Cumulus Plus grantees of the conference. This submission will be credited and published on the Cumulus website and promoted through other channels of the association. The submission may take the form of a short essay (between 500 and 100 words) and/or visual narrative (video testimonial, short film, photo or visual essay). We highly value staying in contact with the grantees after the conference.

Application Guidelines
Applications should be submitted by e-mail with the subject title ʺCumulus Plus Grantʺ to the Cumulus Secretariat, please contact Coordinator Justyna Molik at justyna.molik(at)aalto.fi. The submission deadline is October 29 (final deadline). Five (5) grants offered.

The application consists of the following components, which must be submitted in English:
– A letter of intent providing an explanation for your motivation to participate in the Conference and the overall significance attending the event may have in the development of your academic/professional trajectory and/or positive impact for your institution
– A nomination letter indicating institutional endorsement of your candidacy from an administrative officer in your institution (i.e., senior administrator, provost, dean, department chair or program director).
– Short biography and for academic applicants, an additional Curriculum vitae
– Your photo (JPEG or PNG maximum file size is 8 MB; pixel size between 400 x 400 at a minimum)
– Contact information including full name, position title, home institution address, institution website and contact details (email, mobile and social media handles).

DISCLAIMER: Cumulus keeps the right to reduce the number of grants admitted or to withdraw from granting any for a specific call. The grant cannot be exchanged into money. The registration cannot be moved to another person.

Publication information:
Digital Culture(s). Cumulus Conference Proceedings Roma 2021, Volume #2
Cumulus Conference Proceedings Series 07/2021 Rome

Edited by: Loredana Di Lucchio, Lorenzo Imbesi, Angela Giambattista, Viktor Malakuczi

ISBN 978-952-64-9004-5
ISSN 2490-046X

DOWNLOAD FULL PDF, 450 MB:

DesignCulture(s)_PROCEEDINGS

As Cumulus celebrates its 30th anniversary and continues to grow as a global association with increasing demands to operate effectively in the digital ecosystem that characterizes our work serving you all- our 360 member institutions across 63 countries around the world- our board determined that it was time to refresh the organization’s visual identity.

The new identity replaces the esteemed and highly celebrated design of Ranko Novak, Professor Emeritus at the University of Ljubljana who created the original visual identity and honors its legacy. Designed by California based award-winning designer Karen Davison, an alumna of ArtCenter College of Design specializing in non-profit international work and a contributor to Cumulus for the past two years, the project was led by our Cumulus Vice President, Professor Rachel Troye with the strategic support of Cumulus VP Philipp Heidkamp and the rest of the board.

As Rachel articulated in her GA presentation, the new identity has been conceived with the goals of ease of application. We trust you will appreciate the dynamic and inclusive nature, global versatility, and contemporary aesthetic of the refreshed institutional identity of Cumulus. The aim was to acknowledge the legacy and heritage of Cumulus, align the revised identity with our overall strategic plan, and position Cumulus as a forward-thinking contemporary association – we believe that the task was fulfilled with flying colors!

Along with the new logo, we have simplified the naming reference for Cumulus. The following reference protocol and tag can be used: Cumulus Association; tag: “The leading global association to serve art and design education and research.”

Learn more about the rebranding process as introduced by Prof. Rachel Troye.

As a reminder you may also follow us via our social media channels at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram @cumulusassociation.

This report highlights key activities and accomplishments for Cumulus for June 2020 through June 2021, as we continue to grapple with the prolonged emergency of the COVID-19 pandemic and the cascading disruptions it has brought to our institutions and the enterprise of teaching and learning in our creative disciplines.

Read the Progress Report here CumulusStrategicPlan_ProgressReport

“World upon us, we hear more and more about the concept of the “great reset”. This is a process of transformation necessary for recovery to occur as we emerge from a once-in-a-century crisis that has exposed the fragile state of our planet and the profound interdependence and inequities of our societies. This is a reset that an association like ours can, and must, contribute to in potent and holistic ways. The stakes have never been higher for our creative community to enact change towards a more sustainable future by design.”

Mariana Amatullo, PhD
President, Cumulus Association

The team behind the call “Building the Future” wants to declare that the gestures of the lifeguards as well as all the gestures of hospitality, care, benevolence, friendship, joy that are deployed on the path of migrants, are of a priceless beauty and significance. This is why the call is
conducted upon the request to UNESCO aiming to inscribe them on the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

To take part in this call and clarify its content with us, please send us an email before the end of June 2021 to:
contact@perou-paris.org. Please see the Building the future PDF for more information on the call.

More information in English: Building the future

More information in French: Construire l’avenir

More information in Spanish: Construir el futuro

The individual actors behind this call are VPLPdesign, Civic City, Atelier Marc Ferrand, Charlotte Cauwer, Marielle Macé and PEROU Paris.

illustrations: sketches for a ship for the Mediterranean Sea, VPLPdesign, April 2021

The Cumulus Conference Guayaquil 2021: Arts imagining communities to come seeks to promote academic reflections and artistic performances focusing on different ways of working with local communities. The conference would like to invite artists, scholars, professors, and researchers to share their experiences and reflections on this matter, pre, during and after the pandemic. Research tracks can be found below. Please consider the proposals can be submitted as theoretical, performative and/or document-artistic presentations that contribute to address the questions below.

For UArtes is important to focus on inter-learning experiences that connect communities over outreach programmes and projects. We create community projects that, through arts education, enable collective construction of knowledge, encourage know-how exchanges, and promote participation for social transformation.

In our outreach programs we seek, from the arts perspective, to provide solutions to: interculturality, gender and diversity, memory, ancestral languages, public space, cultural rights, inclusion or identity and environmental related problems. To do so, UArtes works with priority targeted groups particularly: children and adolescents, indigenous populations and nationalities, people affected by violence, people with disabilities, migrant populations, communities sitting on defenceless territories, and people deprived of liberty. We build working networks with government institutions, educational system establishments, community, and international cooperation organisations. These projects have resulted in an outstanding creative production in/from/with the communities themselves, which fortify the sense of public education in the arts as a right.

TRACKS

Track 1: Crisis, criticism, and creation

Our present has emerged as a time of crises: economic, geopolitical, epistemological, sanitarian, and climate. Such crises are so dramatically intertwined that it becomes difficult to imagine concrete alternatives. However, a crisis is not the end of the world, but rather an opportunity to critically reflect on it and the genealogy that has led us to our current state. And, because the best defence is a good offense, criticism, therefore, should be first of all a way of rethinking and redesigning the Age in which we live, radically changing our point of view and our outlook with respect to the future. If design is intended to make visible the invisible, to design the future is to make visible what will happen after the crisis, creating the social and cultural conditions for its completion. In this sense, it is particularly important to identify those crucial agents or issues that could be addressed in order to begin the process of re-imagining the world. We ask, then, starting from a local perspective, is it possible to establish the South as a strategical place of enunciation to reconcile critical analysis of the present with acts of creation? Which social experiences, artistic practices and activist projects seem to embody, within the crisis, this effort? Which theoretical and artistic trajectories are committed to a counter-hegemonic critique of the present that could also be considered a creation?

Keywords: Global crisis, counter-hegemony, design thinking, social engagement in arts, imagination-creation.

Track 2: Production Design in the Arts

In a global atmosphere oscillating between confinement and fears of new COVID-19 outbreaks, an emphasis has been drawn on the aestheticized and fictional forms of products exhibited and distributed on social media and digital platforms. However, in the face of the permanent presence of virtuality, the doubt arises about whether the use of technological tools traversing artistic production diffuses the breach between art buffs, emergent artists, and professionals. This problem remarks the way friendly and open software, apps or interfaces resolved the needs of creators once they reach technological competences in artistic design, reflection and composition.

Since creative processes’ times and freedoms have been altered as a result of the lack of physical exchanging and conviviality, our challenge is to project ourselves towards a sustainable popular economy or a self-income generation model through fairs, garage sales or auctions, amongst other actions/strategies, that could result in partnership affiliation and cooperative movement, that could enable regional networks activation.
This call invites DJs; artistic producers; sound, stage or animation designers; and visual artists in general to share their archives and proposals in regard to self-publishing, understanding of algorithms, marketing logics in order to position an inclusive brand that, in some occasions, turns out even profitable thanks to the support of endorsers that legitimize inside a complex and saturated market.

Key words: DJ, transdisciplinary design, rent, influencers, co-creation, digital strategies.

Track 3: Art, nature, biology and technology

If the decade beginning in 2010 can be thought as the crucial period of smartification, of social media dominance, and the awareness of the Anthropocene-Capitalocene, then 2020 and the pandemic has in turn obligated us to reorient our attention towards biology and its direct effects on our physical health. At the same time, technology has totally reconfigured our social and individual environment. We live in a new era of the screens or, as Naomi Klein defines it in “Screen New Deal”. During quarantine and the forced lockdown caused by the sanitary emergency, we came towards a social and painful atomization; we are still far from comprehending its long-term effects, but it immediately makes us more aware than ever before of a simultaneously yearned-for and avoided otherness. In this framework, the arts and design are driven to rethink the relations between technology, the environment and biology. In this context of a Damaged Planet (Haraway), the ambition of passing from the expression of one’s own cosmovision and the self, to the concrete design of a pluriversal (McKenzie, Mignolo), multi-specific (Margulis) and perspectivist (Viveiros de Castro) world becomes strategic. In this respect, and given that it would be a political error to reduce the role of the arts merely to its aesthetic dimension, we find ourselves moving towards a great cosmopolitical question: How should we think bioethically and biopolitically about the relations between life/lives, technologies and creation? Besides, and turning back to more general aspects, we ask ourselves what sense is there in making art in a «Damaged Planet»? How should we handle, politically and artistically, the possibilities of designing worlds provided by the digital, while, at the same time, fighting against its totalitarian tendencies of control? Which opportunities for a world to come arise from artistic practices, Latin American “artivism” and the epistemologies of the Global South?

Key words: Smartification, World design and worlding, cosmopolitics, artivism, southern epistemologies.

Track 4: Urban art and redesigning cities

For several decades, the urban landscape has become a territory of disputes and a place for the articulation of relationships which range from the political and emotional to the aesthetic. To this extent, the resonance of creative expressions on the streets are ever more deserving of a profound and careful analysis. In this sense, visual phenomena like the ‘Ganchos’ from Monterrey, the ‘Pichação’ in Sao Paulo and the ‘Chapeteo’ in Guayaquil Ecuador, amongst others, provide proof of organic and regional cultural processes that, albeit stemming from the Bronxs’ boom in New York (Castleman), configure a regional graffiti typology, framed within a specific socio-political context.

Taking into account the current state of urban design and how this has impacted on the way art is produced, it is now relevant to review the ways in which this intervention has impacted on the production; this includes amongst others graffiti and urban art as part of the contemporary repertoire shown on street walls.

Graffiti is an unstoppable cultural process that maintains an open and direct dialogue with the physical and social architecture of its territories. It presents itself as a strategy and methodology for diverse processes of creative exploration. Different types of graffiti such as; ‘Caligraffiti’, ‘Laser Tag’, ‘Led Throwie’ and ‘Electrograf’ are the result of these primary inquiries, which include the use of new technologies.

Therefore, we must ask ourselves, to what extent is design inserted into these forms of creative production? To what extent are urban art and graffiti configured as a space for graphic resistance? To what extent are they a means of exploration of new ways of creative intervention in the urban landscape?

Key words: Urban art, city, public space, laser tag, graffiti, design

Read the whole text of the call and submission details at the conference website: http://cumulusguayaquil2021.org

At the General Assembly of Cumulus, which gathered on June 10 in Rome, Italy and virtually, the Association welcomed new Full and Associate Members from Chile, China, Cyprus, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Oman, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, UK, Ukraine and the US.

Cumulus members are now to be found in three new countries: Cyprus, Oman and Ukraine.

Welcome to learn more about the new member institutions!

1. San Sebastián University, Faculty of Digital Design and Creative Industries, Chile
2. Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University Design School; School of Cultural Technology, XJTLU Entrepreneur College (Taicang), China
3. Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, School of Art & Design, China
4. Arkin University of Creative Arts and Design (ARUCAD), Cyprus
5. Bahçeşehir Cyprus University, Department of Architecture, Cyprus (Associate Member)
6. Eastern Mediterranean University, Department of Visual Arts & Visual Communication Design, Cyprus

7. CY Cergy Paris Université CY school of design, France (Associate Member)
8. De Vinci IIM Institute for Internet and Multimedia, France
9. National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts (Cnam) French Graduate School of Video Games and Interactive Media (Cnam-Enjmin), France
10. Hochschule Fresenius University of Applied Sciences AMD Akademie Mode & Design, Germany
11. HTW Berlin / School of Culture and Design, Faculty 5 School of Design and Culture, Germany
12. Weissensee Kunsthochschule Berlin, futures studios, Germany

13. Avantika University, Ujjain, India
14. JD Educational Trust – JD Institute of Fashion Technology, India
15. Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Jerusalem, Israel
16. Accademia Italiana arte moda e design, Italy
17. Tama Art University (Tamabi), Japan
18. Sunway University Department of Art Design & Media, Malaysia

19. Scientific College of Design, Oman
20. Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design Industrial design department, Russia
21. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore School of Art, Design and Media, Singapore
22. Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Faculty of Architecture and Design, Slovakia
23. Centro Superior de Diseño y Arte Digital CES, Spain (Associate Member)
24. IE School of Architecture and Design, Spain

25. Universitat Politècnica de València School of Design Engineering, Spain
26. KNUTD Kyiv National University of Technologies and Design, Faculty of Design, Ukraine
27. Anglia Ruskin University, Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, UK
28. Lancaster University, School of Design, UK
29. Ulster University, Belfast School of Art, UK
30. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh College of Art, UK

31. University of Lincoln, Lincoln School of Design, UK
32. Drexel University Westphal College of Media Arts and Design, USA
33. University of Texas at Austin School of Design and Creative Technologies (SDCT), USA