Cyberpunk 2022
Trust in digital communication
How We Founded a Citizen Television StationUnser Weg zum portablen DNA-Synthesizer
US government demands direct police access to European biometric data
Kunst im UmbauK – Kulturarbeit Solidarisch essen, ackern, imkern und wohnenRaum für die schöne Welt Das Fediverse steht für Vielfalt nicht für Einfalt Das Mietshäuser Syndikat und das Neubauprojekt Görzer128Kunst und Kommerz, ein problematisches VerhältnisGeschlechtergerechtigkeit und MakingGit: Let’s f*ck up history, and then restore it«Thank you for your data» oder weshalb uns das Thema Data Analytics interessieren sollteReal citizens of Rheinfelden living in an AI painted model of Jakob Strassers hometownMetaverse und NFT
This showcase performance is a vibrant and diverse showcase of experimental work with motion capture in practices of remote choreographic collaboration, sharing the outputs of a six-month digital dance research residency. Six teams of both dancers and creative technologists – from India, Thailand, Malta, Brazil, the US and the UK, will present unique breakthrough work in their own dance style and aesthetic.The Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Goldsmiths Mocap Streamer project ‘Building an international network for virtual dance collaboration’ has developed work with six teams in a six-month artist residency(Opens in new window). This project showcase event will be a combination of live dance, immersive screen-based performance, and playful interactive installation. It is present in a hybrid in-person and live-streamed mode with remote dancers performing together within a virtual and interactive environment. The six project outputs will be presented within an afternoon programme of presentations and conversations – come for some, or all of these exciting team presentations.
Dow does the right thing / I have a bad case of diarrhea: the (other) Julian Assange Story
NoisyLeaks! is a moment combining an exhibition alongside a series of events which will take place from October 8th to October 30th, 2022. NoisyLeaks! aims to collectively expose and celebrate the historical and cultural heritage of WikiLeaks and its influence on world-wide practices – a space and moment to share knowledge, practical skills and encourage freedom of information.
A companion to the After Progress (2022) monograph, published by The Sociological Review, the After Progress Digital Exhibition is the result of a multiplicity of collective efforts to weave together collaborative and multimedia forms of storytelling that might help us envisage ways of living and dying well outside of the modern coordinates of progress, drawing inspiration from the “After Progress” symposium series held in 2019.The notion of “progress” is arguably the defining idea of modernity: a civilisational imagery of a boundless, linear, and upwards trajectory towards a future that, guided by reason and technology, will be “better” than the present. It was this notion that placed techno-science at the heart of modern political culture, and it was the global unevenness of “progress” that imagined European imperialism as a civilising mission inflicted upon “backward” others for their own sake. The colonial, rationalistic, and ecocidal consequences of the story of “progress” have been laid bare, yet progress remains a ruling idea capable of governing our imaginations today. At the same time, the ruins of progress are teeming with divergent worlds and collective experiments whose stories upend modern dreams, cultivating plural value-ecologies of living and dying with others on Earth. How to intensify them? How to make them felt?In 2020, amidst the profound upheavals brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic and the many public health responses to it, we issued an open call for storytelling proposals from groups and individuals from around the world, with stories that might help us envisage ways of living and dying well outside of the modern coordinates of progress. After over 175 initial proposals from every corner of the world (by artists, activists, academics, students, and many other people from different walks of life) and a long and collaborative process of development and curation, this exhibition of over 60 “stories” in a variety of genres, media, and styles, is one collective response to that call.But it is also more than that. Composed collectively by contributors, curators, designers, and collaborators alike, all navigating and negotiating lockdowns and social distancing measures and a plethora of other restrictions on our modes of sociality, this exhibition is also a living archive, a testimony of what happened and what can still happen in the interstices of such distances, when we insist in spite of all on thinking and being together (apart). And because any “after” to progress necessarily calls for the plural, what one will find here is a veritable cornucopia of experiments in storytelling that are speculative, ethnographic, poetic, drawing on or reinventing any and every genre: SF, nature writing, poetry, aphorisms, brief dramas, short films, interactive webpages, letters and epistolary forms, fictional encyclopaedia entries, instructions, auditory compositions, and many more. They each raise and pursue their own questions and their own possibilities, thickening the present through the many disparate yet interlaced threads they weave in their divergences and tensions.
Reflecting on human time-scales, alongside the deep time of the universe, this project explores possible inclusive futures via world-building and speculative art practices, while consciously avoiding the replication of colonial models. Ultimately, the project questions what kinds of new worlds can be created and what kind of rules these worlds will have to follow. Informed by Donna Haraway’s Speculative Fabulations this exhibition looks towards cosmologies and ecosystems for inspirations, answers, and prophecies. Exploring practices that are speculative rather than empirically scientific, it reflects on the limits of human knowledge of our own planet, alongside humankind’s increasing desire to extend itself to neighbouring planets and planetary systems.In very recent years on the human time-scale, we have witnessed multiple moon landings, frequent image flow from Mars and the neo-colonial ambitions of a small number of billionaires. This project shifts the perspective towards non-privileged humans, nonhumans, biomes and Martian life forms in order to reflect on space colonisation and planetary time.Looking back through millennia, the project imagines the births and deaths of planets, the creation of the cosmos, the universe, and our home the earth. Looking forward, the project speculates on how other worlds are being explored or created, and questions if space really is humankind’s final frontier.New and existing works – and the interaction between them – seek a deeper understanding of the origins of humankind in cosmological, geological and evolutionary terms that can serve to develop long-term evolutionary perspectives. Is humankind struggling in its capacity to face up to the existential crises it is facing? What can we learn from other life forms that have lived through similar extinction-threatening events? And will future generations be born into? The exhibition is curated by Antje Liemann, Margerita Pulè (Unfinished Art Space) and Letta Shtohryn (Whatdowedonow?) Website design : Letta Shtohryn Technical support: Andrew Pace Catalogue design: Christian Lorenz Communications : Manuela Zammit This project is supported by Arts Council Malta
What do algorithms see when they look at your social media profile? Are you a good provider of content? And what exactly is good? What does the algorithmic view on your social media profiles say about you?
Analyses of social media profiles are employed in an increasing number of real-world transactions. From border control to job applications, social media profiles are used to assess the threat-levels of a candidate and verify their suitability to enter a country or organisaton.
Many of these social media checks are done automatically by algorithmic entities. How and what do these algorithms assess exactly? And what do their assessments look like?
To find out, !Mediengruppe Bitnik used Ferretly, an automated online service used by Human Resources Professionals to evaluate candidates’ social media profiles. Ferretly uses algorithms trained on keywords and image recognition to sift through 7 years of social media history. The service evaluates candidates publically available social media posts on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, analyzing original posts, reposts, replies, and likes. Additionally, Ferretly will assess any news items they can find.
With their service, Ferretly promises to reduce the risk of letting a person displaying toxic behaviour into your organisation or country. Toxic behaviour is defined in 11 risk categories, from hate speech, political extremism, drug-related content to explicit images and toxic language. The publicly available posts are also used to look at the sub-text of each post: the candidate’s attitude towards the event or situation they are posting about is rated as positive, negative or neutral. Each candidate is judged according to these per-defined flags and sentiment points and given a social media score which rates them as fit or unfit for entry.
!Mediengruppe Bitnik ran the social media profiles of the leaders of each of the 27 EU member states through the service. Bitnik then interpreted the results of the analysis and used this as the basis to devise a customized sweatshirt for each of the 27 profiles.
Each shirt shows Bitnik’s interpretation and visualization of the Ferretly ratings. Besides their social media scores for different parameters, each of the shirts publicly displays a number of flagged posts which were rated by Ferretly as toxic and the reason for this rating. Depending on the report, the shirts contain more or less data. Usually more posts and data meant a worse social media rating by Ferretly.
Like the clothes we wear, our social media profiles have become the carrier of our identities. These online identities are used more and more by the gatekeepers of institutions, countries and organisations to verify that we are worthy of access.
With their exploration of logistics infrastructures, !Mediengruppe Bitnik provides insights into systems that usually work invisibly. From the investigation of algorithms that evaluate our social media profiles in their workFlagged for Political Speech to interference with the greatly automated mail system in Decisions Decisions Decisions the artistic duo observes the anatomy of these fully optimized automated systems that assist our daily lives and reveals their gaps and flaws.
Now it’s time for you tojoin the workshop with !Mediengruppe Bitnik and explore the hidden, unmapped networks of the world around you. Using five mini GPS trackers as tactical tools we will explore the service networks, waste management, transport networks of the city while the position data generated by the trackers will allow us to make visible movements as maps.
The two-day workshop in the form of a presentation and planning on the first day, and practical work on the second, will take place via Zoom. All participants will be able to follow the movement of devices on the map online for a continuous period of 5 to 10 days. Participants will work in teams of 3 and can either enroll as a group or individually. No special skills are required, however all partakers should have access to an end device and a good internet connection.
Ado Ato’s new story room platform Bemmbé Immersive
Creative Director and Immersive Artist Tamara Shogaolu will discuss the role of sound in her immersive storytelling process. In a medium often focused on visual achievement, Shogaolu will speak to the potential of pushing the boundaries of sound. Although varying in theme and form her recent projects are all connected by the centrality of sound. Her transmedia series Queer in a Time of Forced Migration is based on oral histories of LGBTQ refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. Her full dome experience, Echoes of Silence, is told entirely using archival audio from world cinema set in space. Sound is also a vital ingredient in her upcoming immersive experience, Anouschka which is to be voiced in spoken word. As an animated, interactive experience — designed for Ado Ato’s new story room platform Bemmbé Immersive™ — ANOUSCHKA invites the audience to play an active role in the storytelling through the use of immersive audio and different interactive lyrical components. The same is true for her soon to premiere collaboration with Frontline PBS, Un(re)solved. Shogaolu’s studio is working in tandem with the legacy news organization to further champion their mission to innovate storytelling. Un(re)solved will examine the FBI’s efforts to investigate over 100 potentially racist killings, while illuminating stories of those still seeking justice. In her talk, Shogaolu will discuss what follows when you allow the sound to shape the world of story.
Tamara Shogaolu is the founder and creative director of Ado Ato Pictures. She has worked for Sony Pictures Animation. The Tribeca Film Festival, Museum of Modern Art in New York and National Gallery of Indonesia have featured her work. The Guardian, Forbes Magazine and Vogue have named her as a leader in the field of new and immersive media. She was a 2018 Sundance Fellow, a 2019 Gouden Kalf Nominee, a 2020 Creative Capital Award Recipient, and a 2020 Sundance Grantee.
The work DECISIONS DECISIONS DECISIONS seeks out the imperfections in the logistic systems in which nowadays computers calculate nearly all necessary decisions. To do so, 27 packages were shipped out from Berlin via the logistics services provider DHL. Each package was, however, given two delivery addresses: one for Aksioma in Ljubljana and one for Drugo More in Rijeka. One address on each side of the parcel.
The resulting installation at the two exhibition spaces is formed from the letters that randomly arrive at each location, leaving the authorship of work as much to the artists as the postal machines.
Before reaching their final destinations, many of the parcels travel back and forth between different postal facilities. Depending on which side is scanned, they change directions multiple times. A TV screen in the gallery shows the recordings of the movements for each parcel, documenting the surrealist journey of the piece.
The now-empty boxes are presented in the gallery as the remaining envelope of the work and skeletons of the process. The work experiments with forcing a decision-making process on the postal system which does not usually decide – only routes. The work reinterprets The Postman’s Choice by Ben Vautier from the year 1965 in which a postal worker decides where a postcard that has two delivery addresses is finally to be sent. As it was back then, the standard rule in digital shipping operations is that for every shipping unit there must be one sender and one clear recipient. In today’s fully automated logistics systems, it is no longer the postman’s choice, but rather a question of which side of a parcel is “up” for the automated scanning process to read. The logistics system works mechanically by means of barcodes, scanners and programmed directives. Until the human supervisor spots and corrects the anomaly of the undecided recipient.
A 1500-page ‘Black Book’ that documents the horrific violence suffered by over 12,000 people at the hands of authorities on the EU’s external borders has been released today – International Migrants Day – by The Left in the European Parliament. Compiled by BVMN and printed over two volumes, the ‘Black Book of Pushbacks’ is a collection of hundreds of testimonies of migrants and asylum seekers who have experienced human rights violations at external borders.
