Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts

Providing speculative weather forecasts, diving into platform brutality, philosophising with gneiss, claiming the land, tracing the history of silk production, and dancing it all out, BEK invites you to join us in the November rain of Bergen for the symposium: The Only Lasting Truth is Change 2025.

BEK symposium
The Only Lasting Truth is Change: Voice, Seed, Brutality
21–23 November
Bergen, Norway

With contributions from: Shuruq Harb, Marwa Arsanios, Open-weather, Carol Stampone, Mihkkal Hætta, Geert Lovink, Touki & Rehana Zaman, Nasim Mashak, Omar Itani, Jenny Berger Myhre & Niklas Adam, DJ Daeva, Russell Haswell, Lesia Vasylchenko, soso brafield, Ameneh Solati.

Taking its title from Octavia Butler’s seminal sci-fi novel Parable of the Sower (1993), which has frightening similarities to the political realities of today, we are exploring aspects of change and alliances. These issues are portrayed in the novel through the experiences of protagonist Lauren Oya Olamina as she makes a dramatic escape to find new ways of living and creating communities.

The three symposium days in Bergen will present a programme looking into the potential of eco-social revolution through three notions: Voice, Seed, Brutality. We want to listen to voices that stand in support of Palestinian struggles for liberation. The fight against genocide, apartheid and colonialism connects to questions of what is change, who are the downtrodden, and what are the historical structures for the distribution of land and power. Voice holds storytelling and makes history heard; it is a medium that can transform isolation into connection, and thus can counter cultural extinction. The notion of Seed is inspired by Olamina’s “Earthseed” religion from Butler’s novel, a philosophy centred on the idea that ‘God is Change’. Here we aim to learn from indigenous storytelling, and the revolutionary potential in collective organising and alliance building connected to land use, cultivation and resistance. As people and culture migrate across borders, the experiences they carry become the seeds of future knowledge. And lastly, by critically reflecting on the Brutality of technofeudalism and platform economy, we want to address the need to reshuffle the power structures within internet technology. Brutality also reflects the violence of the polarised times we are living in, with increasing militarisation as a result of the ongoing war in Ukraine.

The Only Lasting Truth is Change aims to be a thinking-in-process symposium, investigating how artistic practice and its methodologies are constantly changing in response to the shifting political, technological and ecological landscapes we live in. 

The symposium is organised by BEK with support from Arts Council Norway, Fritt Ord Foundation, City of Bergen, Vestland County Council, KORO, Balansekunst and The Bergesen Foundation. This year will be the fourth edition of the symposium.

The project is part of New Perspectives for Action; a project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.

BEK—Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts—is an interdisciplinary production centre for art and technology, established in 2000 in Bergen, Norway. BEK develops, produces and showcases projects at the intersection of contemporary art, technology and social critique. BEK organises theoretical and hands-on workshops for creative practitioners and offers advice and development support to artists and art organisations. In its studios and labs, BEK hosts residencies for artists, focusing on research and experimentation. Through its discursive public programme, BEK explores the social and political dimensions of technology in the field of contemporary art.

Return to the detailed symposium programme.

1) Graphic design: Papa Kofi Yirrah 2) Image: Shuruq Harb, In the Presence of Absence, 2025.