Contested Circularities: A Collaborative Digital Exhibition on Socio-Technical Systems
Freyja van den Boom

This presentation proposes the creation of a collaborative digital exhibition platform designed to integrate artistic works and short research contributions from COST members. While circular economy frameworks increasingly shape European sustainability policy, recent scholarship warns against reductive or technocratic interpretations of circularity. Such narrow views often obscure critical social, ecological, and geopolitical asymmetries. To counter this, systems thinking gives essential conceptual tools to analyze feedback loops, leverage points, and unintended consequences across complex socio-technical systems. However this risks managerial abstraction if they are not deeply grounded in situated, embodied, and critical perspectives.
In this context, we propose that digital exhibitions can function as vital epistemic infrastructures for fostering alternative socio-technical imaginaries. Simultaneously, we must critically engage with the reality that digital infrastructures themselves pose significant sustainability challenges. These include issues of data extractivism and energy-intensive AI training challenges that increasingly intersect with contemporary regulatory developments, such as the European Artificial Intelligence Act.
By positioning circularity as a contested and systemic phenomenon, this proposed exhibition platform will explore the friction between policy, technology, and ecology. Specifically, it will address the following critical questions: How do material, digital, legal, and affective systems interact and conflict within circular transitions? Whose labor, resources, and territories remain externalized or rendered invisible in these frameworks? Finally, how can artistic practice serve to identify crucial leverage points for systemic, transformative change? Ultimately, this platform aims to bridge the gap between abstract systems theory and grounded, interdisciplinary critique.