between worlds — free workshop led by cada
27TH AND 28TH NOVEMBER 2025 > 10 AM/01 PM I ROOM 4.11
All organisms create internal models of their surroundings as they interact with the world. To ensure their survival, individual species connect to an underlying reality in radically different ways. Sensing their environments through their own particular sensoria, each organism experiences a self-centred world that is intrinsically subjective. At the same time, it’s equally true that, at a fundamental level, the unit of survival is neither the individual, nor the group, nor even species, but rather ‘organism plus environment’ (Bateson). Life can therefore be understood as a vast interconnected web where multiple worlds overlap.
At a time when AI is gaining increasing cultural weight, this workshop starts from the premise that human intelligence is part of larger ecological system and should not be separated from it. Network theory will be explored as a tool to conjoin the human and non-human, alongside an unorthodox, performative logic that demonstrates how binary oppositions are neither inherent nor fixed. Participants will devise novel approaches for their individual studio practice. Includes practical and theoretical modules.
This workshop is free but you must register in advance to attend.
To book your place please email sofiaoliveiraCADA@proton.me
Organized by CADA with the Communication Design Department and the Multimedia Arts Department.
About CADA: CADA is an art group that uses new media to activate a space for experience. Its work is playful and often inspired by what in everyday life and in nonhuman environments can be inferred through patterns and what might otherwise be uncomputable. The group’s approach is collaborative and experimental. It also organises Human Entities, an annual programme of public talks focused on technological change and its impacts, runs workshops to examine narratives of computation and the ANIMAIS residency to extend participation in media-based art.
Formed in Lisbon in 2007 by Sofia Oliveira and Jared Hawkey, CADA has exhibited across Europe and in Brazil. CADA has received public funding from the Directorate-General for the Arts (DGArtes) of the Portuguese Ministry of Culture, the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and Lisbon City Council.