GOGBOT 2023

From 7 - 10 September 2023 the twentieth (!) edition of art & technology festival GOGBOT will take place in the center of Enschede, the Netherlands. This year's urgent - and controversial - theme is FEED YOUR HEAD / DRUGS & A.I.

There is an expansive - mostly free - program with a scientific symposium ("Yeah, Mr. White, yeah science!"), exhibitions, art in the public realm, performances, and a banging music program with live performances and afterparties.

The theme of GOGBOT 2023 is academically contextualized by the scientific GOGBOT Symposium, where keynote speakers shine their light on the world of drugs, from biotec party pills to drugs legalization, to the healing power of psychedelics and the shady world of Big Pharma. Speakers that will take the stage include Bogomir Doringer (curator-researcher), Machteld Busz (Poppi Drugs Museum) and Maartje Nevejan (filmmaker).

About the theme
Drugs are like technology or weapons: they are not neutral. They cannot be separated from the people who use, strategically deploy or fight them. The tension between technology and drugs - between "hard" tech and "soft" tech - is chaotic, ambivalent and paradoxical: are they redemption or imprisonment; remedy or poison; creativity or insanity?

With the theme of FEED YOUR HEAD / DRUGS & A.I. (a nod to the rebellious, psychdelic masterpiece White Rabbit (1967) by Jefferson Airplane), we extend a hallucinatory hand to our (soon-to-be) open-minded visitors by highlighting the world of bioengineered designer drugs, Big Pharma and the completely failed war on drugs. We zoom in on the possibilities and dangers of A.I. - as a tool of the expanding tech and control economy - in tomorrow's society. In both the world of drugs and A.I., big (financial) interests come into play and you can ask yourself: who is actually "in control?" And what if we need more soft tech to stay afloat in an information overload world dominated by Big Tech and A.I.?