projects

Posted on by admin Events, projects, reports

Altofest

Altofest is a project that explores experimental sociality through contemporary live art. Citizens host international artists in their houses, which then become venues that welcome audiences for diverse performances. Altofest will take place across four different regions in Malta, over four consecutive weekends. “Legendary People” is the theme behind Altofest Malta 2018.

ON THE DUST ISLAND from teatringestazione on Vimeo.

How can art emerge from the community as its distinctive expression, becoming in the meantime an instrument of social growth, fostering the formation of a future cultural legacy? The narration of a place, of its inhabitants and of its possible future lives, needs to be inspired by the evocative power of myth and legends. The bright image of the democratic Athens is a mix of mythology and reality of historical documents. A new mythology to be founded needs heroes and legends. A cultural project inserting itself in the life of the city, directly involving its community, creates a new mythology where heroes are among its citizens, deeply immersed in the landscape.

The hero we are referring to is the so-called “cultural hero”, according to anthropologists. He is the one who influences customs and traditions of his people inaugurating new rituals, bringing innovation and establishing a new collective identity.  In this sense, Altofest Malta is a unique opportunity, the act of foundation of a new way of perceiving and living in the relationship between citizens and arts, especially live arts contemporary language. As it will originate a new condition, Altofest Malta 2018 will be the beginning of a new epic of the “cultural hero” citizen. He will accept the challenge of blending his/her everyday life with the revelation of artistic creation. 20 citizens in 4 different areas of the island will be the pioneers of an experience that will leave a cultural heritage.

The schedule for Altofest Malta is as follows:
13th April 2018 – Opening in Strait Street, Valletta
20 – 22 April 2018 – Performances in Rabat, Manikata & Majjistral Park
27 – 29 April – Performances in Qormi, Ħamrun & Santa Venera
4 – 6 May 2018 – Performances in Żejtun
11 – 13 May 2018 – Performances in Bormla, Birgu, Valletta, Gżira & Sliema

To discover what’s in store for Altofest Malta, follow this link for more detailed information. To book, kindly follow this link.

Created and organised by TeatrInGestAzione with Artistic Direction by Anna Gesualdi and Giovanni Trono and with the participation of diverse space doors in Malta. 

If you would like to find out more about Altofest, check out their website for information about past editions in Naples, Italy. Visit www.altofest.net.

AltoFest

A documentary film crossing by Altofest Malta 2018

Documenting the Altofest 2018 for Valletta 2018, the director Giuseppe Valentino tried to experience the festival from the Maltese point of view. The impact of Altofest that mixes with the Maltese culture. It is a clash? An invasion? What do these people want on our island? The documentary tries avoid answers.

Altofest Malta 2018, is a project that explored experimental sociality through contemporary live art. During Altofest, Maltese citizens hosted international artists in their houses, which then became venues that welcomed audiences to see diverse performances. The theme behind Altofest Malta 2018 was ‘Legendary People’. Altofest creates a unique opportunity for perceiving and living the relationship between citizens and the arts. The project deals with how art emerges from the community as a distinctive expression and becomes an instrument of social growth. A cultural project which inserts itself in the life of the city, directly involving its community, creates a new mythology where heroes are among its citizens. These heroes become ‘cultural heroes’, according to anthropologists, who influence the customs and traditions of the other citizens, and who bring innovation to the community while establishing a cultural identity.

Teatru Triptiku, b’direzzjoni u produzzjoni ta’ Jacob Piccinino, kien serje ta’ interventi artistiċi qosra madwar it-toroq tal-Belt Valletta. Dawn kienu marbuta mill-qrib man-narrattiva ta’ Valletta 2018 – European Capital of Culture għas-sena, u b’hekk iservu ta’ introduzzjoni għall-Programm Kulturali fejn il-ftuħ tiegħu sar fl-20 ta’ Jannar li għadda.

Posted on by admin projects, research

Deep Shelter

The conceptual basis for Deep Shelter Project Project (DSP), a project by Pamela Baldacchino, is based on a simple framework – that of reflection, relation and revelation (of meaning). This allows one to analyse the experience of illness, hospitalisation and care, as well as, relate this to the visual art process.

The Deep Shelter Project brings together research within the Psychological Support Services at Sir Anthony Mamo Oncology Centre, sensory workshops with cancer survivors and artist workshops for the creation and donation of artworks to clinical hospital spaces.

The Deep Shelter Project is supported through the Malta Arts Fund managed by Arts Council Malta.

Posted on by admin Events, projects, publications, relevant projects, reports

Dal-Ba’ar Madwarha: Valletta 2018’s major visual arts exhibition

Valletta 2018’s major multi-site exhibition, “Dal-Baħar Madwarha”, opens its doors to curious visitors across the Islands starting from the 10th of March. Curated by Maren Richter, large installations, performances and public interventions are taking place in both traditional and unexpected locations across Malta, exploring the idea of “islandness” in playful and critical ways.

Ibrahim Mahama’s work for the Pixkerija, Valletta’s Old Fish Market, will be directly connected to the fabric of the building of the Pixkerija. Mahama’s large scale intervention – a physical line made of meshes – intends to highlight the working history of the old fish market, its uncertain future and the Mediterranean Sea as a symbol of trading between Africa an Europe.

Only a week from now – 10th of March – the first projects of Dal Bahar Madwarha will start to appear. Kultura paid a visit to Manaf Halbouni: “Uprooted“: What if you are forced to live in a space of 1qm? The Syrian-German artist invites us to imagine ourselves without a home – What if ‚our car‘, a symbol of freedom of mobility, became home due to misfortune or war?

Valletta 2018 – European Capital of Culture’s major multi-site exhibition, “Dal-Baħar Madwarha”, opened its doors to curious visitors across the Islands from 10th of March. Curated by Maren Richter, large installations, performances and public interventions are taking place in both traditional and unexpected locations across Malta, exploring the idea of “islandness” in playful and critical ways. The projects range from design objects to architecture and complex issues of urban development and society with a focus on “research through practice”.

Heba Y Amin – OPERATION SUNKEN SEA
A fictive office that explores colonial omnipotentia by initiating a large-scale infrastructural intervention through the draining and rerouting of the Mediterranean Sea to converge Africa and Europe into one supercontinent. Heba Y Amin is an Egyptian visual artist, researcher and lecturer based in Berlin, whose work engages with narratives of national sovereignty, often in contested territories and questions methodological assumptions embedded within Western historiography.

Dal-Baħar Madwarha – Giraffa: James Micallef Grimaud’s intervention refers to the fact that the Maltese Archipelago are close to both Africa and Europe. Today Africa and Europe seem to further away from each other than ever. New borders and new forms of migration have been established. A transformed crane painted as a giraffe welcomes the travellers when entering the harbour, or those in search for the iconic view over the Grand Harbour and remind us of tolerance and diversity of cultures.

James Micallef Grimaud has directed several artistic projects including the first large scale mural in Malta. He is the founder of the Troglodyte crew, a street art collective working on several projects around Malta. He defines himself as an artist, who maintains critical but positive and witty approach to life on the Island.

This event is on till 1st July at the Marsa/Grand Harbour Docks.

Between spring and summer 2018, curator Maren Richter brings Valletta 2018’s major visual arts exhibition to our European Capital of Culture, with large installations, performances and public interventions taking place in both traditional and unexpected locales across the country. Among the exhibition’s star sites is the Pixkerija at Barriera Wharf, a Grade 2 scheduled building that was built in the 1930’s.

Richter is working with more than twenty-five established and emerging artists from fifteen countries –including Malta, France, Austria, Egypt, Germany, Syria, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Ghana, Spain, and Palestine – who are collaborating with local partners around the Islands.

The title Dal-Baħar Madwarha is inspired by a quote from the work of philosopher Gilles Deleuze, ‘The island is what the sea surrounds’. This sets the tone for newly commissioned and existing pieces that explore the idea of “islandness” in playful and critical ways. It’s an artistic journey through the contemporary realities of the Maltese Islands, placing at their helm the Islands’ relationship with their closest neighbour – the Mediterranean Sea.

The exhibition re-traces borders, imagining new geographies that view the sea as fluid and transformable rather than another physical barrier between people, places and culture.

In Richter’s words: “The multi-site programme invites international and Maltese artists to recast and respond to current and past urgencies and challenges, in which the Mediterranean Sea plays a significant role […] The island is a mode of pausing, familiarised by a certain romanticism. Whereas the sea looms large in the language of our imaginations; it is a site of reflection, voyage, and volatile freedom.”

In the light of such thought-provoking inquiries, the exhibition explores the identity of our Islands within a wider global context, bringing creative, social and political visions of the Mediterranean to light through the region’s most iconic and enduring image: the deep blue sea.

Posted on by admin news, projects, research

BLOCKCHAIN FOR SOCIAL GOOD

On December 15th Open Incet will be the place where to talk about cybersecurity and validity of data at the BLOCKCHAIN FOR SOCIAL GOOD, an event that will bring together policymakers, startups, researchers and other representatives of academia, and anyone else interested in the space of blockchain and its potential.

The event will open with the launch of the €5m European Commission Prize: “Blockchains for social good”. The prize has been designed by the European Commission to promote scalable, efficient and high-impact decentralized solutions to social innovation challenges leveraging the technology used in blockchain.

The presentation of the prize will be followed by the panel ‘Uncovering the potential of blockchain’ with the participation of Andrea Bracciali (Lecturer, University of Stirling), Marcella Atzori (Blockchain Advisor and International Coordinator, TrustedChain) and Massimiliano Sala (Professor and Director of the Laboratory of Cryptography (CryptoLabTN), University of Trento). Leonardo Camiciotti, Executive Director at TOP-IX Consortium will moderate the discussion.

​Among others, Alessandro Lombardi, Microsoft’s Digital Transformation Advisor, will also participate.

Francesca Bria (Chief Technology and Digital Innovation Officer, Barcelona City Council), Paola Pisano (Deputy Mayor for Innovation and Smart City, City of Turin), Cristina Tajani (Deputy Mayor, Municipality of Milan) and Fabrizio Sestini, Senior Expert for Social Digital Innovation, DG will present the ‘Benefits of blockchain in cities’, a panel chaired by Marco Zappalorto, Director, Nesta Italia.

Throughout the event, a few successful examples of blockchain applications will be showcased by corporates, startups and universities.

The event will close with a networking reception until 16:00 followed by a pitching session about the social goods security aspects introduced by the blockchain, moderated by TOP-IX Consortium.

The event is organized by City of Turin, University of Turin and Nesta Italia in collaboration with the European Commission, City of Milan, UK Government Science and Innovation Network in Italy, Open Incet and Top-ix Consortium.

https://p2pmodels.eu/
https://samer.hassan.name/
https://cyber.harvard.edu/people/shassan

Posted on by d.tv Deptford.TV, mazi, news, presentations, projects, regeneration, Report, reports, research, ReSynced

Creeknet XF Symposium

Its been a very hectic few weeks at SPC as we bring focus onto DIY networks of Deptford Creek at the first Creeknet Symposium on 20th and 21st June.

The poster here for you to print and put up in your window, outlines event details which can be found in full on the SPC event listings and at http://deptfordcreek.net

The Creeknet friends have been meeting regularly at venues up and down the creek. We have been exploring the fast changing environment and revisiting access points onto the river, crossing bridges and improving an understanding of local concerns and ambitions. The last of these before summer takes hold is on Monday 12th June at noon, in the Undercurrents gallery inside the Birdsnest pub on Deptford Church Street. We will be collecting together images and stories to publish at the local network Anchorholds, a trail of information points along the creek, so please do come along to contribute your experiences !

Rapid progress was made by the very energetic Hoy Steps clear-up group on Monday 5th June. The huge overgrowth of Buddleia clogging views, was cut down and disposed of in a flurry of action and enthusiasm. The vigorous roots of this plant have got deep into and have damaged the sea wall and will continue to regrow unless more drastic measures to remove remnants are adopted soon, even then they are likely to return!

Wooden pallets stored at street level have been sorted and stacked ready for re-use or removal and the rubbish sheet materials, plastic wrappers and polystyrene are bagged ready for disposal. We return early on Tuesday 13th to complete the clean-up process in preparation for a public viewing during Creeknet Symposium the following week.

Friends of Deptford Creek is a community group set up to support, represent and protect the human, natural and built environment of Deptford Creek, London. How do these two different groups work together? How does the changing landscape affect them? What technologies can help?

Find out by joining us over an exciting two days of public meet ups and workshops to exchange ideas and explore the DIY networks of Deptford Creek<http://deptfordcreek.net/>.

Meet MAZI<http://mazizone.eu/> partners from around Europe, Chat to local community groups, and play with our technology that support local networks and discuss what’s next for Deptford. You can attend all or parts of these events over the two days by registering with Eventbrite here:

Tuesday 21st June 2017
Wednesday 22nd June 2017

For further information please visit this website.

This week starting Monday 12 June, we have a busy schedule to install equipment, complete work and do last minute promotion. (really!). Today we are meeting at the Undercurrents Gallery in the Birdsnest pub to update the mazizone prototype there and meet with local mariners and artists to discuss their network systems. On Tuesday it’s an early Lowtide and 10AM return to the Hoysteps to complete clearup work and prepare for a visit the following week, refreshments provided. After lunch we will be installing bluetooth beacons along the creek to mark out the Anchorhold locations

Wireless Wednesday at http://bit.spc.org this week is dedicated to preparation of print materials for distribution during the Creeknet Symposium so please come along and help out, but please hold off on the broken PC’s for a couple of weeks! On Thursday and Friday, We will be testing the Creeknet Anchoholds app, a guide to the DIY networks of Deptford Creek. If you would like to help out please call for more details as we will be working along the length of the tidal creek from Brookmill Park to the Swing bridge.

http://friends.deptfordcreek.net

Don’t forget to tell us you are attending Creeknet Symposium, not least so we can arrange catering! Please register.

Creeknet meet-up @ Hoy

The MAZI Project is working on an alternative technology, Do-It-Yourself networking, a combination of wireless technology, low-cost hardware, and free/libre/open source software (FLOSS) applications, for building local networks, known as community wireless networks.

Posted on by d.tv Deptford.TV, mazi, news, projects, Report, reports, research, ReSynced

Hoy Meet-ups

This coming Monday 23rd January we will again meet up with Creeknet friends to continue some great conversations and push on with DIY network research. Our host for the last few Mazi Mondays has been the Hoy Kitchen on Creek Road at the Deptford and Greenwich border by Creek Bridge. We have been starting with teas/lunch at noon and drifting on in discussion till 4pm.

Claire is the proprietor of Hoy and grew up in the Hoy Inn as it was previously known. Her family moved into the area from Belfast in the 70’s at a time when SE8 was comparatively naked, few street lights, road signs and empty buildings in a very industrial maritime landscape. The pub was a notorious social hub and she has many stories about these earlier times to tell!  Her great familiarity with local history, society and current wave of transformation is proving most entertaining and illuminating.

When Quayside redevelopment took off in the streets all around them  during the 90’s her family faced fresh and unexpected challenges. Land which had always been linked to the Hoy was assumed part of the property development package. It triggered a fight to hold on to access and the infamous Hoy Steps. Successful but lengthy resistance has meant that the steps have been retained but a road wraps around the building to the new build properties adjacent.

Perhaps as a consequence, Claire has good contacts with local business including Millenium Quay who have responsibility for the recently installed swing bridge. She has also suggested making historical steps accessible for the first time since the dispute!

The illustrious privateer Sir Francis Drake may well have been knighted by Queen Elisabeth by the Hoy Steps, his ship ‘The Golden Hind’ certainly ended it’s days in the creek, scrapped to shore up the sea wall of the creek. Today the replica boat is a popular tourist destination in Clink Street by London Bridge very close to our very own Backspace which prevailed till turn of the last century!

Please join us in February when we will meet-up at Stephen Lawrence Centre for a further three weeks of more practical workshops At these events we will work with low-cost technologies to host and promote a range of DIY neighbourhood publishing tools, discover more about the options for OWN mesh access meet its resident groups and friends from that area of the river by Brookmill Park.

Cast in this light and with rising sense of expectation from those around us,  we set out on the second phase of neighbourhood engagement and activity around our Mazi pilot – Creeknet. It explores use of DIY networking methods and promotion of ‘offline‘ information systems, that express awareness, sustainability and determination for greater data autonomy.

To date, we have met with a wide range of local people living and working alongside Deptford Creek, each with a view on local issues and an intensity to shape outcomes in whatever form of public campaign or personal agenda they may fix on. Help us identify the tools for success in such situations and to foster the development of home grown options to introduce into the MAZI toolkit.

We begin a series of weekly meetings and workshops at venues up and down the creek this month, to channel some energies into discovery, discussion and expression on subjects closest to heart. The quality of lived environment tops that chart, as any local resident, worker or student will assert. Unbridled property speculation, deteriorating air quality and wealth disparity, contribute to the sense of dis-empowerment, isolation and anxiety for the future.

Much we have learned, as the storm of chaos around us builds, reminds us that we can never again take personal freedoms and privacy for granted. As of 30th December, the Investigatory Powers Act permits targeted interception of communications, bulk collection and interception of communications data by UK government and intelligence agencies.

Educating and informing ourselves on conditions of change are now critical steps for us to take for future health of communities, cultures and capital. Our faith in each other, open collaboration and social justice are at stake. Your insight, inventiveness and expertise are key to unlocking neighbourhood value and identifying solutions to act on locally.

During February, we are hosting Creeknet meet-ups at Stephen Lawrence Centre where friends of Brookmill Park and Deptford Creek will gather to share stories and publish reports.

As part of the MAZI pilot we are all working together to install interactive beacons along the creek where significant points of interest and DIY network activity coincide.

We have booked three weekly meetings in this riverside lecture room, starting Monday 13th Feb so please join us there between 12 and 4pm. Please register so we know how may to expect at lunch!

Our emphasis is to support the many local groups along the creek as they promote their respective activities and publish to their networks. In preparation, we have been resetting some of their legacy, corrupted and entangled WordPress installations, so a clean start is possible!

Friends of Brookmill Park are now ready to bring their designs into effect to feature the nature and diversity of the park, planting plan and to begin animal species monitoring.

Terry Edwards is a local musician and model gardener who leads the Crossfields Estate community garden project Wonky Prong and has begun posting and planting again in time for spring. He may well join Karen Barnes on Wednesday’s open mic event at the Birdsnest.

She has been very busy scanning some of the many pinhole camera prints she has made in situ around Deptford as well as on occasional trips to Westminster. They feature at thearmed909 alongside accounts of living and working in the area.  The Undercurrents gallery in the back room of the Birdsnest has been showing Minesweeper art and photographs of the boat that survived the devastating fire in January. Karen recently added a Piratebox to collect up some memorabilia and share donated audio recordings and artwork. Next time you pop in for a pint, try logging on to check the collection.

Friends of Deptford Creek, started by those living on house boats in the creek also have a refreshed website to voice their current concerns not least in light of redevelopment plans effecting their mooring and land access at 2 Creekside. John Cierach is also the owner of 3 Creekside where we recently reviewed the plans for development to feature stacked shipping containers and reworked mooring strategy that won’t include all the current boats!

A Kumu map of working relationships between interested parties along Deptford Creek is emerging form the mud of our interaction. Further interventions and activity will continue to extend these impressions, your comments and contributions are most welcome.

What are the shitboats you may well ask

Posted on by adnan Events, news, presentations, projects, publications, Report, reports, research

after.video @ LibreGraphics

Adnan presented the after.video project at the LibreGraphics conference.

after.video is a new online service which will be making available a series of variably aged video presentations which cover a collection of topics. What it represents then is a repackaging (Assemblages) of material from a variety of sources, presumably professionally edited and augmented. If you visit their website, you see they are not quite operational, and that this is a paid subscription service.

Now in its 11th year, the international Libre Graphics Meeting turns its focus for 2016 to the theme “Other Dimensions”, encompassing time-based media and the third dimension, new additions to LGM’s established focus on graphics.

From its first edition in 2006, held in Lyon, France, Libre Graphics Meeting has been a locus for software contributors, artists, designers, and users to come together and share their knowledge and to experience camaraderie. This year will see four days of presentations, talks, hacking sessions, workshops, and meetings.

Prominent software projects such as GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, GNOME, and others will come together to demonstrate the progress on their projects and to discuss them within the context of the larger Libre Graphics community. LGM 2016 will play host to animators, architects, artists, book designers, cartographers, developers, documenters, educators, engravers, graphic designers, git visualizers, hackers, photographers, rasterizers, reverse engineers, tool makers, type designers, and video archivers (among others!).

The 2016 edition of LGM will have a full program of workshops, presentations and talks across the entire spectrum of Free/Libre and Open Source graphics projects and communities. The full program can be found online http://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2016/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/LGM2016program.pdf

With a great after party: Autonomous Tech Fetish & also check out Lara’s project dataunion.

The next LibreGraphics meeting will be in Rio De Jaineiro.

Posted on by adnan Events, news, presentations, projects

Nervous Systems

!Mediengruppe Bitnik exhibits the Assange Room at HKW.

Can our inner thoughts be transmitted by our eye movements? Can our future actions be predicted by our current behavior? Julien Prévieux’s film Patterns of Life enacts more than a century of evolving technologies in tracking human behavior, from reorganizing the factory floor to today’s “activity-based intelligence” in the “war on terror.” This is but one example from over 30 works tracing the inversions that mark the relationship between man and machine. Co-curated by Stephanie Hankey and Marek Tuszynski from the Tactical Technology Collective and Anselm Franke the exhibition showcases a range of reflections on our quantified society and the processes of self-quantification. Historical artworks call for a reinterpretation of early conceptual art’s concern with quantification, its “aesthetics of bureaucracy,” and the deconstruction of the self in light of current data- collection. The exhibition includes contributions by media historians and writers, reconstructing the history and the present rise of data-technologies and portraying the world they bring about. A live installation—conceived by Tactical Tech—offers an active space in which visitors can explore their own digital traces. This White Room combines selected artworks, digital products, investigations, and activist projects with discussions, consultations, and demos exploring the devices we use every day, and how we can regain some control over our data.

Posted on by adnan ideas, presentations, projects, publications, Report, reports, research

after.video @ Transmediale

We held a reception for our soon to be published video book: after.video at the Transmediale Festival.

Seeing Power—What About That?
with: 2/5BZ + after.video collective
Reception/Presentation + Performance
Sat, 06.02.2016 | 20:00 – 21:30 | Cafe Global Stage
part of Stream: Anxious to Act
see here for event-link


New global power complexes demand new multi-sensory ways of seeing power and sensing one’s own position in it: new sets of sensory politics. Following the concept of “altered states”—a geopolitics spectralized by sensory overload and dispossession and by the relocation of power in the post-democratic or post-digital era—the performance GEZILLA DESTROYS ISISTANBUL will reconsider what is (or was) referred to as Europe. It will also engage the Golden Age Global Hologram Doctrine, Isistanbul, and Anxt Hase States, and feature modern isolation tanks as part of the new inventory of “hardcore ultra modernism.” Isistanbul is also the title of a video-essay by Serhat Köksal, included in the upcoming after.video/assemblages, which is the first issue of a new hybrid “video-book” series by Open Humanities Press.
– The transmediale performance of 2/5BZ will be preceded by an open reception by the after.video collective.

This year’s topic of the Transmediale festival was Conversations. The format of transmediale/conversationpiece is not like past festivals: instead of a singular theme with static exhibition and program structures, artistic and research practice will unfold live through a variety of talks, discussions, lectures, workshops, and experimental hybrid formats. Due to the exchange-based nature of the events, many will be registration-only, allowing for a limited number of participants to engage in rigorous discussion and collaboration. Four thematic streams serve as an organizing principle for the conversations and presentations: Anxious to Act, Anxious to Make, Anxious to Share, and Anxious to Secure.

As Deckspace Medialab & former Resync.UG members James & Adnan took part in the Off Network series. Furtherfield has a nice writeup here, plus a blog post on speculating the Smart Metropolis.

I took a note of the following conversations.

Thursday:

Re-examining Global.Ports

Acknowledging a critical moment for diverse port authorities worldwide and at a new global juncture—in Berlin, the EU, and many other international ports—this gathering will be focused specifically on reviewing traditional ports, gathering concrete engagements with their inherent and continuing political-logistical promise of connecting people, places, and important matters. With a mandate to re-establish a communal quality of ports, the Global Port Authority will ask: what docking points could in these moving times provide reliable anchorage, refuge, or sanctuary to a globally distributed ecology of commoning initiatives and people anxious for open interplanetary connectivity? What are the criteria, methods, and practices for attaining open ports?

Infrastructural Violence

Communication and travel networks that open the world to us are the characteristics of globalization. At the same time we feel increasingly isolated, controlled, and threatened by those global systems. How can we react to or modify our dependence upon them? The term “structural power” is used in political theory to analyze the systematic exclusion and repression of minorities. In reference to that concept, this seminar will trace how “infrastructural power” shapes and structures today’s communicative and social foundations.

Snowden Archives 1 & 2

Today, WikiLeaks is building an unprecedented library consisting of millions of leaked documents, thereby advancing a seminal world heritage form. Its immediate prehistory as well as its latest offspring will be investigated in the Tacit Futures dialogues. Participants will explore Cryptome.org, which is widely considered the precursor of digital leaking platforms, and which has been the first organization to start systematically collecting Snowden documents. Moreover the discussion will dive into projects building Snowden archives such as the Snowden Document Search, the Snowden Digital Surveillance Archive, and the Snowden Archive-in-a-Box. Bringing together pioneering archivists of the files leaked by Snowden, this round table is a culturally significant world premiere, aiming to reflect the motivations and challenges experienced by each initiative.

Tactical Media & the Archive

Tactical media were identified in the 1990s as a distinct cluster of critical practices at the intersection of art, political activism, and technological experimentation. Tactical media are participatory forms of politicized self-mediation that give voice to the marginalized and excluded. There has always been a deeply troubling, uneasy and strenuous relationship between tactical media and archives. Archives, which are traditionally conceived as capturing living moments and turn them into historical events, as such would constitute the very opposite of tactical media’s dynamic nature. As a result of their resistance to archiving, the proponents of tactical media have succumbed to a severe form of memory loss, making critical reflection difficult. This is a high price to pay.

Friday

Reprogramming the Internet of Things

This panel critically addresses the prevailing vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) as a top-down mega-infrastructure of interconnected every-things, in an attempt to articulate viable bottom-up alternatives. Practices and methodologies for tweaking, disrupting, and appropriating existing infrastructures will be discussed, bringing to the foreground smaller-scale systems and networks of sensing devices, computational artifacts, and humans, to address issues of importance for the everyday life of the user and the local community. The panelists will ask whether such systems and interventions can become sustainable through enhancing citizens’ literacy on the use and appropriation of IoT technologies and sensor networks.

The Pirate Book

The Pirate Book offers a broad view on media piracy as well as a variety of perspectives on recent issues and historical facts on the topic. It contains a compilation of texts on grassroots strategies to share, distribute, and experience cultural content outside of the confines of local economies, politics, or laws. These stories recount the experiences of individuals from India, Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, Mali, and China. The book is structured in four parts, beginning with a historical piracy stories dating back to the invention of the printing press and then expanding to broader issues, such as modern anti-piracy technologies, geographically specific issues, and the rules of the Warez scene (distribution of copyrighted works for free), along with its charters, structure, and visual culture.

Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution by Benjamin H. Bratton

Please join Benjamin H. Bratton and e-flux journal editor Julieta Aranda for the launch of Bratton’s new work of theory-fiction, Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution. The title also marks the tenth book in the e-flux journal Series with Sternberg Press. Benjamin H. Bratton’s kaleidoscopic theory-fiction links the utopian fantasies of political violence with the equally utopian programs of security and control. Both rely on all manner of doubles, models, gimmicks, ruses, prototypes, and shock-and-awe campaigns to realize their propagandas of the deed, threat, and image. Blurring reality and delusion, they collaborate on a literally psychotic politics of architecture. In this mosaic we glimpse a future city built with designed violence and the violence of design. As one ratifies the other, the exception becomes the ruler. Presented in cooperation with e-flux.

Saturday

Book Launch: Networked – A Media Genealogy of the Network Society by Clemens Apprich

Many technologies and practices that have shaped today’s Web 2.0 date back to the 1990s—and so do the ideas of social media, user-generated content, and participatory platforms. From a media-historical perspective, a lot of the ideas from that period about the future of the internet have indeed been implemented, albeit without fulfilling the envisioned socio-political utopias. In his new book, Clemens Apprich explores the history of an alternative web discourse and develops a media genealogical understanding that is necessary to think beyond today’s predominant concept of socio-technical networks and to intervene in current debates about the Internet.

Five Years After

“In case you hadn’t noticed, these days a lot of the world is in some form of rebellion, insurrection, or protest,” wrote Rebecca Solnit in 2012, a year after a barrage of movements symbolically grouped around the Arab Spring erupted. These “post-2011” events challenged the sometimes simplistic narratives of the “post-911” world. What linked the events in this cycle of struggles was not organizational coherence but rather a shared global sentiment mediated by a new form of global sensorium. Social energies headed “back to the streets,” bringing up questions about the consequences of physical exposure, organization, strategy, fragmentation, and violence. New media became double-edged weapons, used for and against emancipation. While after 2011 there were some attempts to decipher these “signs from the future,” as Žižek has put it, now in 2015 it seems that the “global moment” has ended.

Off-the-cloud Zone

The choice to go “off the cloud” stems from current disillusionment with networked connectivity, reaching instead for the potential of emerging user-owned and user-controlled infrastructures. Over the last decade a growing scene of artists, hackers, and network practitioners has been actively working on creating community networks, ad-hoc connectivity, and autonomous systems of sensing and data collecting. But how feasible are the changes these groups want to see? Following last year’s offline networks unite! panel at transmediale and several specially organised workshops, Off-the-Cloud Zone brings together various actors to discuss the challenges, barriers, and possibilities of the field. With open conversation formats and hands-on demonstrations, the event seeks new strategies of joining forces and building common tools to take users beyond the sovereignty of the cloud. Organized in collaboration with the MAZI project.

Translating the Hyper-visible and the Invisible

Within the last year the artist Alona Rodeh has published Safe and Sound, a collection of texts by invited authors on the audiovisual methods of safety and security, from which Rodeh created a series of visual responses. In the same year, Mario de Vega, Victor Mazón Gardoqui, and Daniela Silvestrin have published the book LIMEN, which invited a series of authors to write about the electromagnetic spectrum in response to de Vega’s sound work on invisibility and his collaborations with Gardoqui. Taking these two publications as starting points, this conversation between the authors and the curator and designer Carsten Stabenow will reflect on artist-led publications and research processes and the aesthetics of print media as a means to communicate ideas on sound, visual art, and contemporary social issues.

Seeing Power—What About That?

New global power complexes demand new multi-sensory ways of seeing power and sensing one’s own position in it: new sets of sensory politics. Following the concept of “altered states”—a geopolitics spectralized by sensory overload and dispossession and by the relocation of power in the post-democratic or post-digital era—the performance GEZILLA DESTROYS ISISTANBUL will reconsider what is (or was) referred to as Europe. It will also engage the Golden Age Global Hologram Doctrine, Isistanbul, and Anxt Hase States, and feature modern isolation tanks as part of the new inventory of “hardcore ultra modernism.” Isistanbul is also the title of a video-essay by Serhat Köksal, included in the upcoming after.video/assemblages, which is the first issue of a new hybrid “video-book” series by Open Humanities Press.

Still Be Here

Still Be Here is a unique collaborative performance that draws us into the multiplying realities of a 21st Century pop star, and traces the dynamics at play between fans, corporations, and social desires. Since her 2007 launch in Japan, Hatsune Miku (whose name means “first sound of the future”) has become the ultimate pop star, developed from a vocal synthesizer product into a globally adored and collaboratively constructed cyber celebrity with a growing user community, countless stadium performances as a virtual 3D projection, and more than 100,000 songs released worldwide.

Sunday

Re-examining Global.Ports

Acknowledging a critical moment for diverse port authorities worldwide and at a new global juncture—in Berlin, the EU, and many other international ports—this gathering will be focused specifically on reviewing traditional ports, gathering concrete engagements with their inherent and continuing political-logistical promise of connecting people, places, and important matters. With a mandate to re-establish a communal quality of ports, the Global Port Authority will ask: what docking points could in these moving times provide reliable anchorage, refuge, or sanctuary to a globally distributed ecology of commoning initiatives and people anxious for open interplanetary connectivity? What are the criteria, methods, and practices for attaining open ports?

Archive, Curate, Educate: Active Media Arts

The archive is unbound, no longer restricted to a space of storage or a logic of cultural memory. Today the archive is also a site of sharing, distribution, education, critique, imagination, and artistic activity. This panel brings together curatorial, artistic, and academic perspectives on media art in order to discuss the role archives can play in curation, spatial design, and technology-based art practice. The panelists will discuss examples such as Erkki Kurenniemi’s archival and technological art, artistic projects with the Asger Jorn Archive, and other innovative examples of ways the archive continues to be reimagined. Also at stake are how archives can feed into (media arts) education. How does the archive shift when it becomes an active online environment that can work against reification of knowledge?

Tele_Trust

How do we trust each other online? Do we need to see each other’s eyes? Or do we need to touch? Tele_Trust is a performance-installation for an intimate networking body experience. The presentation creates an engaging agora, researching new parameters for online trust. It presents participants with a paradox: while in our changing social ecosystem we increasingly demand transparency, we cover our bodies with personal communication technology. Participants will meet in a wearable DataVeil, a tangible body interface functioning as a second skin and membrane for “scanning” online trust.

Unmaking: 5 Anxieties

In our mad rush to 3D-print the world (again), we have ignored a few important things: the necessity of physical traction and engagement with materials in creative processes, the realities of material resource chains, and the homogenization and functionalization of once-radical grassroots subcultures and communities. We are all now, somewhat paradoxically, makers and hackers, using kits (prescribed solutions) to develop supposed novelties, using off-the-shelf DIY to do battle with a hegemony that continuously chips away at our laser-cut armor. As part of an afternoon discussion session, participants and the general public are invited to an open conversation about the birth, death, and reconstitution of maker and hacker cultures. Should we all just stop making—or start unmaking? Unmaking as breaking, unmaking as refusal, unmaking as…? Following the event, a summary publication (as a “kit”) will be issued, presenting results.

Posted on by adnan news, presentations, projects, Report, research, ReSynced

Contact workshop during Hybrid City III conference

SPC took part in the CONTACT workshop during the Hybrid City III conference, meeting collaborators of the MAZI project.

diversity

An indoors/outdoors workshop which explores citizen engagement in the smart city toward more conviviality and human interactions, shifting the perspective from sensors to senses, from Internet-based locative media to offline DIY networks, from algorithmic matching to genuine serendipity, from powerful mediators to local actors.

CONTACT wishes to explore the advantages of offline networks and smart city concepts for the design of technology that can serve face-to-face meetings and local communities. We will first provide a short introduction to certain important concepts that help us guide the workshop participants through a collaborative process of hybrid space design: Do-It-Yourself networking, urban interaction design, field research methodologies, and the role of the stranger. Then we will go out to the streets of Athens to explore the surroundings of the conference’s venue, to analyze the spatial and social aspects of different places, and to identify locations that are candidates for hybrid urban interventions toward our objectives of conviviality and human interactions. After our collective walk, we will gather in a public space to think together about possible applications and possible processes to design them, including software, hardware, surrounding artifacts and performance. We will focus on ways to take advantage of the special characteristics of DIY networking — ownership, de facto physical proximity, anonymity, and inclusive access — to facilitate contact between strangers, in t,his specific part of the city. The next day, building on the number and competencies of the participants, we will develop a few prototypes of selected applications and organize an urban intervention in some of the selected locations.