FIBER Festival

From urban myths of possessed Super Mario 64 games to people making a ritual cross sign when using their phone; Nicolas Nova does ethnographic research to all our curious rituals and digital superstitions.

Nicolas Nova practices peripheral ethnography – unconscious gestures and odd rituals are his field of research. In all our practices of digital superstitions, we can see the persistence of magical thinking in our daily life and we can discover something important about how people incorporate new technologies and media into their daily life and habits.

Nicolas Nova works as a Professor at the Geneva School of Arts and Design and as co-founder of the Near Future Laboratory, a research organisation that creates theories and design fictions about our (near) future. He was previously visiting professor at ENSCI – Les Ateliers (Paris), visiting researcher at the Art Center College of Design (Pasadena, CA), and a researcher at the Media and Design Lab (EPFL, Switzerland). Nicolas co-founded the Lift Conference, a series of international events about digital culture, design and innovation.