The students describe the show as follows: (EN) For many of us, the digital platforms became a life-line during the stay home order. With many using their time in lockdown to de-clutter their living spaces, the platform eBay Kleinanzeigen became a place to hang out and see what neighbors were getting rid of. The exhibition Odds Without Ends uses eBay Kleinanzeigen, the largest online platform for classified ads in Germany, as an exhibition space for site-specific works.
Using eBay Kleinanzeigen as an exhibition space brings art directly to bargain hunter’s homes, invading their screens and grabbing their attention. This series of works uses the ad-space as its medium and networked space as its show room. The works unfold over 60 days – the maximum runtime of an ad on eBay Kleinanzeigen – each with its specific mode of exchange and participation.
Odds Without Ends presents works produced specifically for eBay Kleinanzeigen by students of Klasse Brenner/Bitnik @ ABK Stuttgart. Organized by !Mediengruppe Bitnik.
A group show on eBay Kleinanzeigen 17 July — 19 September 2020
One of our themes for the now-postponed i-Docs conference back in March this year was ‘climate and ecological emergency’, and we had a number of excellent presentations lined up on this topic. To offer an alternate outlet for some of these presentations, we first hosted two climate conversations on Immerse – the first between Lizzie Warren and Michaela French which you can read here, and the second (to be published soon) between Bronwin Patrickson and Tom White. Now, we have invited three more i-Docs speakers for this online panel discussion about i-docs practice and climate crisis, each with an immersive media project to share – Elizabeth Miller, Lena Dobrowolska and Mitch Turnbull.
Elizabeth Miller, Professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University, will present her project Swampscapes: a VR and multi-platform exploration of Florida’s most endangered ecosystem, the Everglades. It aims to reconnect viewers to the beauty of swamps and the vital role they play in filtering water, fostering life, and buffering storms. Through passionate local guides, immersive landscapes, and an interactive Swamp Symphony, the documentary project leads users into the depths of Florida’s swamps and to the people who care about them.
Still image from Imperfect Meshes: Stories from the Hurricane
Artist Lena Dobrowolska will share her project Imperfect Meshes: Stories from the Hurricane, in which she explores the aftermath of Hurricane Michael – a climate intensified category 5 hurricane that made landfall on the Florida panhandle in October 2018. Through a combination of photogrammetry models, field recordings, oral testimonies and a hurricane simulation placed within a VR environment, Imperfect Meshes narrates complex, invisible and long-lasting climate trauma of the hurricane.
EarthSongs
Documentary filmmaker Mitch Turnbull will present her mixed reality experience EarthSongs. Delivered via the Magic Leap One headset, EarthSongs presents an immersive exploration of natural, wild soundscapes utilising spatial computing technology, object based audio and abstract 3D interactive digital imagery. EarthSongs offers an alternative route to understand and connect with nature by deconstructing wild soundscapes and delivering a playful and artistic immersive experience. It utilises the affordances of interactive mixed reality technology to deliver a personal and intimate encounter that taps into an intuitive link with the natural world.
More on our speakers:
Professor Liz Miller
Elizabeth (Liz) Miller is a documentary maker and professor who uses collaboration and interactivity as a way to connect personal stories to larger social concerns. Her films and interactive multi-platform projects on timely issues such as water privatization, refugee rights, gender issues and environmental justice have won awards and influenced decision makers. Her work has been broadcast on international television, streamed on Netflix and featured in galleries, climate conferences and at festivals including Hot Docs and SXSX.edu. Liz is a Full Professor in Communications Studies at Concordia University in Montreal and her book “Going Public: The Art of Participatory Practice (2017) has been integrated into educational curricula. She has partnered with organizations including UNESCO, International Association with Women and Radio and Television, Witness and Wapikoni on human rights, new media and advocacy training.
Lena Dobrowolska
Lena Dobrowolska is an artist working with a combination of documentary photography, artist film, installation, room size virtual reality experiences and research. Since 2012, she has been working in collaboration with Teo Ormond-Skeaping on projects relating to climate change and the Anthropocene or what she prefers to call the Capitalocene. Her works document vulnerability to, and responsibility for climate change as well as the resilience and adaptation efforts of marginalised communities in an attempt to imagine and make possible a climate just future. Her recent research has investigated the link between climate change and displacement, non-economic Loss & Damage and the moral and climate leadership of the Global South. Lena is the recipient of the 2019 Coalition for Art and Sustainable Development Prize (COAL) and the 2016 Culture and Climate Change: Future Scenarios Networked Residency prize. In 2019 she presented her work at UNFCCC COP25 in Madrid to climate negotiators and displacement experts.
Mitch TurnbullMitch Turnbull is a multi-nominated and award-winning natural history and conservation documentary filmmaker and XR creator with over twenty years experience in the UK & US. She has made films, live shows, media and XR content for a variety of broadcasters, studios and organisations including, BBC Studios, Oculus, Disneynature, Discovery, National Geographic, UN, RYOT and The Royal Foundation. Mitch has acted as a BAFTA VR Advisory Associate, contributed to UK Digital Catapult industry papers and is a South West Creative Technology Network Immersion Fellow with a research focus on how immersive technology can influence opinion and change behaviour.
Common Bond Society is a web-based digital artwork that takes the form of a series of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) rooms, built in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The project explores the implications of our increased dependence on the Internet as public space and investigates the Internet’s potential to offer safe spaces to discuss, disseminate and carry out acts of mutual aid. It is brought to you by artist Larisa Blazic for UP Project’s digital commissioning strand, This is Public Space.
Common Bond Society takes as its starting point the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the effects of which have been felt simultaneously on a global and intensely local scale. Almost overnight the pandemic resulted in a dramatic shift away from real world interactions to an increased reliance and dependence upon the digital realm as our predominant public space for dialogue and exchange. At the same time, a proliferation of mutual aid groups sprung up world-wide – set up to help those most vulnerable in this time of uncertainty. Chat groups and websites were created, phones were distributed, and posters emerged in the streets.
“The delayed beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown in the UK brought about an amazing wave of community organising, a sort of self-assembly for the protection of self and others, a beautiful act of solidarity where neighbours reached out to each other for help and support.” – Larisa Blazic
Through her artwork, Common Bond Society, artist Larisa Blazic reflects on the very origins of mutual aid as an act of solidarity not charity and suggests that understanding its political origins could lead us to rethink new ways of working post COVID-19. The work uses anarchist philosopher, Peter Kropotkin’s essay Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) as a starting point to spark debate about how acts of mutual aid carried out today could be harnessed to bring about longer-term changes in the way we as a society operate tomorrow and in the future both on and off line. Kropotkin suggests that charity “bears a character of inspiration from above, and, accordingly, implies a certain superiority of the giver upon the receiver.”
Common Bond Society is a virtual platform that questions how mutual aid groups can become sustainable in the long term. Are there ways of sustaining, supporting, encouraging or even rewarding acts of mutual aid? The platform invites audiences to engage in this conversation through three distinct chatrooms for exchange.
Common Bond Society is also inspired by the very foundations of the Internet as public space and its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee’s vision to create a place for the germination and proliferation of new ideas. Through the creation of “old school” IRC chat rooms, Blazic’s work reuses communication tools of the Internet before web 2.0 (see definition below) to provide safe and collaborative spaces for people to come together to formulate new ideas for how co-operative working can be harnessed and even institutionalised in order to ensure our “society’s safety, progress and existence” both in the real world and in the digital domain. Tim Berners-Lee once stated “Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.”
By using the IRC format Blazic invites us, the audience, to question the platforms we are currently using to carry out our interactions online and to think twice about our own safety and security when operating in the digital domain. Who owns the platforms we are using? What is happening to our data? And is anyone listening into the conversations we are having? Are we ever truly safe online?
We invite you to step inside the Common Bond Society IRC chat rooms to learn, reflect and discuss. Please read our code of conduct before entering.
Room 1: Mutual aid, it’s a political practice
Learn about the historical principles behind mutual aid by chatting with a Kropotkin-bot, where you can use key words associated with mutual aid to prompt relevant quotes from Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution.
Room 2: Solidarity not charity
Join us on 14 July at 18:30 BST for a curated IRC chat on mutual aid now and in the future, chaired by artist theorist and curator, Ruth Catlow. If you are unavailable to join the conversation we will present a live recording of the event in this chat room once it has happened.
Room 3: In this place of safety
This chat room is a platform to facilitate conversations around notions of safety within the digital realm, uncertainty and public space. A curated conversation on these topics will be hosted by UP Projects on 18 August at 18:30 BST. Further details coming soon.
Room 4: All things brighter future
This room provides a space for further reading through access to mutual aid related resources.
Join us for a curated conversation about the role mutual aid has played in these times of uncertainty and a discussion on how we can harness mutual aid practices as we move forward into tomorrow. The conversation will be chaired by artist theorist and curator, Ruth Catlow with participation from Larisa Blazic.
Agenda:
An Introduction to Mutual Aid
Now: mutual aid in an age of uncertainty
Next: mutual aid beyond moments of crisis
Event 2: In this Place of Safety
Date: 18 August 2020 Time: 18:30 – 20:00 BST
Join us for a curated discussion that explores safety within the digital realm, uncertainty and public space. Hosted by UP Projects, further details coming soon.
Definitions
About IRC
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a network of Internet servers through which individuals can hold real time online conversations via electronic devices. Internet Relay Chat facilitates conversation in the form of an online written chats. IRC operates on a client/server model where individuals use a client programme to connect to an IRC server.
About Web 2.0
Web 2.0 also commonly referred to as Participative and Social Web refers to websites that contain user-generated content, ease of use and foster a participatory culture and interoperability. It is a term to describe today’s interactive Internet.
Join dance artist Rochelle Gatt and musician Luc Houtkamp as they meet on a rooftop in Senglea in this challenge of artistic boundaries.
Credits:Video filmed and edited by Sam Chetcuti – Cyberspace AV Dancer and choreographer – Rochelle Gatt Live electronics, programming, composition – Luc Houtkamp Edwin Balzan – sound engineer Footage (Drone) – Ruben Zahra
Malta International Arts Festival 2020 – Online Edition other highlight: Aquasonic Aquasonic – an innovative and visually stunning underwater concert. Learn more about what inspired this spellbinding performance:Footage Credits: Roberto Sarcia
Adnan presented Algorithms, Ethics & Justice at the MAD conference. In order to lay the foundations for a discussion around the argument that the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies benefits the powerful few, focussing on their own existential concerns, the paper will narrow down the analysis of the argument to social justice and jurisprudence (i.e. the philosophy of law), considering also the historical context. The paper explores the notion of humanised artificial intelligence in order to discuss potential challenges society might face in the future. The paper does not discuss current forms and applications of artificial intelligence, as, so far, there is no AI technology, which is self-conscious and self-aware, being able to deal with emotional and social intelligence. It is a discussion around AI as a speculative hypothetical entity. One could the ask, if such a speculative self-conscious hardware/software system were created at what point could one talk of personhood? And what criteria could there be in order to say an AI system was capable of committing AI crimes?The paper will discuss the construction of the legal system through the lens of political involvement of what one may want to consider to be powerful elites. Before discussing these aspects the paper will clarify the notion of “powerful elites”. In doing so the paper will be demonstrating that it is difficult to prove that the adoption of AI technologies is undertaken in a way which mainly serves a powerful class in society. Nevertheless, analysing the culture around AI technologies with regard to the nature of law with a philosophical and sociological focus enables one to demonstrate a utilitarian and authoritarian trend in the adoption of AI technologiesThe paper will then look, in a more detailed manner, into theories analysing the historical and social systematisation, or one may say disposition, of laws, and the impingement of neo-liberal tendencies upon the adoption of AI technologies. The regulatory, self-governing potential of AI algorithms and the justification by authority of the current adoption of AI technologies within civil society will be analysed next. The paper will propose an alternative, some might say practically unattainable, approach to the current legal system by looking into restorative justice for AI crimes, and how the ethics of care, through social contracts, could be applied to AI technologies. In conclusion the paper will discuss affect and humanised artificial intelligence with regards to the emotion of shame, when dealing with AI crimes.
Righting victim participation in transitional justice (Tine Destrooper)
How do societies seek to come to terms with legacies of large-scale abuses in order to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation? And what role can victims play in this process? These are crucial questions for scholars and practitioners of transitional justice (TJ). Approaches to TJ are varied. Yet generally four pillars are emphasised: (criminal)justice, truth-seeking, reparations, and guarantees of non-recurrence. TJ practitioners and scholars alike have increasingly been turning to victim-centric,participatory approaches to increase the legitimacy and “efficacy” of TJ processes. By giving victims centre stage, stakeholders hope to better address victims’ needs,enhance local ownership and transform victims into agents of change who can carry forth processes of justice seeking after international actors leave.But what do we really know about how to best organize this victim participation, or what its long-term effects are?
This project studies the long-term and unforeseen effects of victim participation in transitional justice processes. It takes the cases of Tunisia, Guatemala, the DRC and Cambodia to map current and best practices, and to make recommendations for more victim-sensitive approaches to transitional justice. Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr. Tine Destrooper Researchers: Safa Belghith, Christian Cirhigiri, Elke Evrard, Brigitte Herremans (see also proposal of Brigitte related to arts/literature and displaced people), Gretel Mejía, Sangeetha Yogendran
Countering erasure (Brigitte Herremans)
Countering erasure: can the arts contribute to restoring justice in Syria?’ This project explores how artistic expressions can help to restore justice in situations of unabated violence where transitional justice (TJ) initiatives are being implemented. The main question is to what extent artistic practices, and literature in particular, can contribute to TJ efforts and counter the narrative silencing of victims.Syria is taken as a case study to examine this question. As the Syrian conflict is ongoing, there is no fully-fledged formal TJ process. Nevertheless, Syrian local activists and international actors are testing certain elements of the TJ toolkit on the ground, such as the documentation of violations of international law and criminal justice.Brigitte will tentatively argue that there is scope to strengthen the current TJ efforts in Syria. The implementation of TJ initiatives might need to be reconsidered in order to guarantee victims’ right to truth and justice, and better assimilate their voices in justice processes. One approach for doing so, is by looking at the ways in which artistic practices can play a role in the development of complementary and innovative avenues toward justice for Syrians beyond trials. She foregrounds artistic practices based on the hypothesis that they can help to rethink some of the existing TJ architecture by understanding and utilizing the evidence differently, including through truth-seeking initiatives, feeding the transitional imagination in ways that are more representative of the experiences of victims, in order to avoid erasure.
Privatised Push-Back of the Nivin (Charles Heller)
This report is an investigation into the Nivin case and new pattern of privatised push-back practice. In November 2018, five months after Matteo Salvini was made Italy’s Interior Minister, and began to close the country’s ports to rescued migrants, a group of 93 migrants was forcefully returned to Libya after they were ‘rescued’ by the Nivin, a merchant ship flying the Panamanian flag, in violation of their rights, and in breach of international refugee law. The migrants’ boat was first sighted in the Libyan Search and Rescue (SAR) Zone by a Spanish surveillance aircraft, part of Operation EUNAVFOR MED – Sophia, the EU’s anti-smuggling mission. The EUNAVFOR MED – Sophia Command passed information to the Italian and Libyan Coast Guards to facilitate the interception and ‘pull-back’ of the vessel to Libya. However, as the Libyan Coast Guard (LYCG) patrol vessels were unable to perform this task, the Italian Coast Guard (ICG) directly contacted the nearby Nivin ‘on behalf of the Libyan Coast Guard’, and tasked it with rescue. LYCG later assumed coordination of the operation, communicating from an Italian Navy ship moored in Tripoli, and, after the Nivin performed the rescue, directed it towards Libya. While the passengers were initially told they would be brought to Italy, when they realised they were being returned to Libya, they locked themselves in the hold of the ship.A standoff ensured in the port of Misrata which lasted ten days, until the captured passengers were violently removed from the vessel by Libyan security forces, detained, and subjected to multiple forms of ill-treatment, including torture.This case exemplifies a recurrent practice that we refer to as ‘privatised push-back’. This new strategy has been implemented by Italy, in collaboration with the LYCG, since mid-2018, as a new modality of delegated rescue, intended to enforce border control and contain the movement of migrants from the Global South seeking to reach Europe.
Digitalisation of Labour and Migration (Manuela Bojadžijev)
Digital technologies are transforming the world of work and have far-reaching consequences for mobility and migration. This project studies the reorganisation of labour through digital platforms, and it looks at how digital conditions are also simultaneously changing the forms, practices and our conceptions of labour migration.
Spheres: Journal for Digital Cultures, an open access and peer-reviewed web (Clemens Apprich)
We are witnessing an acceleration of the deployment of digital technologies in border regimes as well as in migratory practices. This does not necessarily make borders ‘smarter’, but it points to spiraling dynamics between border and migration practices to which digital technologies prove central. Technologies deployed by European countries to manage the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ – from fences to the Eurosur drone system – have their reverse side. While digital networks facilitate surveillance systems, they also foster mobility and challenge border regimes at the same time. Persisting migration in defiance of ever more sophisticated border technologies demonstrate the possible detour of control systems. In our fourth issue of spheres, we investigate the significance of digital technologies for migration and the relation between migratory regimes and practices on the one hand, and digital cultures and infrastructures on the other.As an online journal, spheres operates on the premise that already published issues are kept open for new content. Hence, the goal of the workshop is to discuss and develop ideas for further contributions.
The curators exhibition statement: If it were a sentence, this first online exhibition would have been conceived in future perfect tense, as an action started in the past and expected to be completed in the future. It is a caustic prelude, but it comes with hope. One of the most iconic and reproduced images of our time was taken on 7 December 1972 by the crew of Apollo 17 on their way to the Moon. It was the first photograph of the Earth as seen from 45,000 km away, a distance too far to distinguish human settlements or disruptive events, even though the Tamil Nadu cyclone is shown forming in the lower part of the image. In that same period, there was a significant surge in environmental activism in the U.S., and the image of our planet – one small, vulnerable entity floating in the giant Milky Way Galaxy – quickly became its symbol[1]. From up in space, the image also collectively inspired a mass sentiment to protect nature and humanity as a whole rather than focus on petty economic and political interests. Although this sentiment is often subjugated by systemic forces such as globalization and the belief in perpetual economic growth, many share it today and in particular now, as we contemplate the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak. NASA’s so-called Blue Marble photo shows us that everything is connected, yet we live in an imperfect world, which rewards competitive behavioral patterns and keeps us plugged in, diluting our survival instinct with solid fictional narratives. In fact, the presence of the Tamil Nadu cyclone has never prevented appreciation of the picture, despite the fact that it killed 80 people in South East Asia. Covid-19, by contrast, has affected everyone because of its highly infectious nature and global spread. In less than a few months, our routine has been collectively disrupted and the precarious architecture of our lives suddenly exposed, together with the imaginary structural strength we believed to be the base of our carefully calibrated plans and actions. Covid-19 does not make us equal – we can assume UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson accessed better health care than a random individual in a less wealthy country – but it rattles our desire for certainty and comfort more than anything in our lifetimes, more than a collision with an asteroid or the alarming signs of climate change. As we adjust to a state of emergency and contemplate the unknown that awaits us on the other side, switching on the life of yesterday at will seems deceptive. We should not be blind to the fact that things could be different. Myths as diverse as exponential growth, social equality and anthropocentrism have been exposed, and new narratives are emerging. In 1970, two years before the Blue Marble photo was taken, a founding myth of 20th century human society came into the spotlight – the escalating consumer society and the predatory behavior that it elicited. Two seminal books tackled this specific issue – Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life. Besides being the intellectual pillars of the Situationist International (SI) – a revolutionary organization of the European avant-garde active between 1957 and 1972 and critical of capitalism – the books championed the end of market exploitation and consumerism in order to allow a genuine human society to emerge. Will their claims reverberate as an effect of the Covid-19 pandemic? Could this be the time to reveal the glitches in our social, economic and environmental systems, and take action? The six invited artists and collectives – David Claerbout, Jonathas De Andrade, Elena Mazzi / Sara Tirelli, Aernout Mik, Laure Prouvost and Pilvi Takala – have animated the gist of the recent debate on art and society, with their contribution offering significant insights in different aspects of life: the cultural shifts of the digital world, our relations with others, techno-capitalism, and ecology and catastrophes. Their practices have something in common; they produce a distancing effect that makes us question the things which society would have us believe are inevitable, and natural. It is this distancing effect – achieved with storytelling, irony and new media technology – that engages the viewers and inspire them to judge critically, and The Eye of the Storm seems to be an apt metaphor for these undertakings. In spoken language, it has come to epitomize the risks of finding yourself stuck at the center of a difficult situation. Yet in meteorology the eye of the storm is the calmest zone of a cyclone, where skies are clear and wind milder. It is deceptively calm, but possibly the best place to be for a short time while processing the state of things. As the Covid-19 pandemic challenges the conventions of time, the very existence of public space and the social canons that regulate living together, science alone cannot address the flaws and prospects of a new society. Art will stay at the center of the storm, expose the fractures of the world and push for change. The chance is there. As put by philosopher Timothy Morton, who studies the ecologies of the Anthropocene: “Things are open. Open also in the sense of potential […]. Something happening in one specific place (say a feather falling on pavement) would mean the whole universe changes everywhere. Things are connected but in a kinda sorta subjunctive way. There is room for stuff to happen. Or, as the anarchist composer John Cage put it, “The world is teeming. Anything could happen.[2]” – Sara Dolfi Agostini, curator
Visiting the Invisible: A Berlin City Tour to Anonymous and Aggressive Real Estate Investors
Uncovering how ghostly shell companies and real estate speculation evict real people from their homes – and what to do about it.
EVICTED BY GREED investigates how speculative finance drives the global and local housing crisis, and gathers experts & activists from around the world to share and find counter-strategies.
The conference on May 29-30 highlights how speculators and real estate investors use strategic loopholes to disrupt housing in Germany and worldwide, as a follow up of the conference DARK HAVENS, which we organised in partnership with Transparency International in April 2019.
Inspired by the Süddeutsche Zeitung investigation on the Paradise Papers, the huge record that documents worldwide cases of tax avoidance and evasion, we decided to dig into the matter of tax heavens in the real estate business, broadening up the scope on how global investors fuel the rental market in Germany and internationally, and on the countermeasures adopted by the civic society.
The Paradise Papers investigation reported that the Phönix Spree offshore company, based in the British Channel Island of Jersey, controls about 2.000 apartments in Berlin extracting profits that are not taxed (2.392 units in 2018). One of the loopholes real estate investors use is acquiring shares in a company that owns the apartments rather than the apartments themselves. Through this one loophole the city of Berlin loses around 100 millions € of real estate transfer tax according to estimates. But they also lose control over who finally owns the city. As a consequence of such process, the real estate market in our cities is disrupted while the everyday lives of local neighbourhoods are negatively affected.
As pointed out by our keynote speaker Christoph Trautvetter, “Because the regional real estate registers don’t contain any information on beneficial owners and there is no good and reliable tool to link legal and beneficial owners both the city and its tenants know very little about who owns their homes. As a new study to be presented at the conference shows – nearly half of the investors remain anonymous and no one can tell how much dirty money hides behind their anonymous investments”.
Since some years, investors from the international capital market have heavily entered into Berlin’s residential and commercial property: Deutsche Wohnen owns 111.500 apartments in Berlin and Vonovia 41.943, via institutional investors such as BlackRock; Akelius, founded by a Swedish millionaire, owns 13.817 apartments having as shareholder a foundation in the Bahamas. Additionally, the Pears family owns 6.000 apartments and the investment fund Blackstone approx. 5.000; Carlyle, Optimum Evolution and Phönix own somewhere below 3.000 (source).
Are such investments an unstoppable wave or is it possible to reach better policy measures and greater transparency?
EVICTED BY GREED aims to raise awareness on the matter of real estate speculation, inviting experts to share data and investigations, as well as discuss best practices and concrete solutions that are possible in the context of tax avoidance of offshore companies in the real estate market.
“Housing is a human rights issue”, stated Leilani Farha, Global Director at The Shift and Former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing, our keynote on May 30. Inviting policy makers, activists and human rights advocates we aim to imagine possible interventions, actions and countermeasures to the influence of global finance on real estate, as well as produce literacy about housing eviction and wealth asymmetries.
“Data dust … used for algorithmic electioneering to enforce authoritarian, anti-democratic policies.” ZONTA Award – Jury Statement, 65th Kurzfilmfest Oberhausen A hip hop musical against automated propaganda, directed by Manu Luksch Starring: Gunman Xuman, Lady Zee, OMG Convenience, not choice. Efficiency, not freedom. Frictionless experience. In marketing and the retail sector, data analytics is widely used to profile and micro-target consumers and to predict behaviour. The ultimate goal, apparently, is for humans to be able to outsource all decision-making to machine intelligence (make Google do it!). What is at stake within the political realm? ALGO-RHYTHM , shot in Dakar with the participation of leading Senegalese musicians, poets and graffiti artists, probes the insidious but comprehensive threats to human rights and agency posed by the rise of the quantification and algorithmic management of daily life. Using hiphop, drama, street art and data-driven filmmaking, the work explores how our embrace of the convenience of machine intelligence, refracted through the slick interface of smartphone apps, makes us vulnerable to manipulation by political actors. Recognising the urgent need for a new visual language to illuminate this concern, Manu Luksch collaborated closely with Jack Wolf and Mukul Patel to develop a hybrid narrative form that unites photogrammetry and volumetric filmmaking with traditional approaches. Through its auratic and poetic use of computational imaging technologies, ALGO-RHYTHM scrutinizes the limitations, errors and abuses of algorithmic representations.
knowbotiq (Yvonne Wilhelm and Christian Hübler) in conversation with Nina Bandi.
Nina Bandi:‘Swiss Psychotropic Gold’ entailed intense research, in which you brought together different materials, actors, and forms of knowledge – collective and practical, in particular – and its materializations. Gold as raw material and commodity, but also as metabolism; gold as an entanglement of historical, material, and affective layers. Tell us more about these issues.
knowbotiq: Three issues come to mind immediately. The Psychotropic Refinery as a platform for postcolonial encounters, the critical relationship of our practice to “art as knowledge production”, and finally gold in its transforming and moving materiality. Let’s take up the last first because it was critical to the initiation of the project at hand. When Draft [i] invited us to develop a project on art in the context of current public debates in Switzerland, we started exploring for a subject that was specific to Switzerland, but not necessarily visible. Soon after, our attention was drawn to Switzerland’s close relationship and intertwinement with global finance and commodity trading. Add to that, the current debate over the legal responsibility of international corporations with headquarters in Switzerland, and commodity trade was suddenly a very compelling option. [ii] Our initial research revealed that in the colonial and postcolonial contexts of commodity trading only two raw materials have been imported to Switzerland for the purpose of refining, processing and finally exporting. One is cacao and the other gold. In Calvinist Switzerland, both commodities satisfy the desire for luxury. During our research we came across Stoffe in Bewegung [Matters in Motion] (2014), an anthology edited by Kijan Espahangizi and Barbara Orland. [iii] The book deals with extraction, circulation, alchemy, flows and transformation of materials. https://vimeo.com/394395331/8d4399e15e Gold and cacao are not only shipped across the globe but they also move through bodies and things, thereby introducing the molecular and affective into the discourse via metabolic processes. We call this transformational and affective understanding of materiality “Roh-stoffwechsel,” a concept that is hard to translate into English [iv]. With a bunch of research behind us, we finally decided to work on the “Roh-stoffwechsel/metabolism of gold” and the narratives of violence surrounding this conflictual metal, and to concentrate on the suppression and elimination – amnesia – of the (post)colonial legacy, which is apparent in many public spheres in Switzerland. We have tried to initiate a process in which the violence-ridden journeys of gold begin to “speak” physically, haptically, auditorily, and visually through its molecularizations, dispersals, diffractions, and derivatizations. At the same time, however, as artists we do not ignore our own involvement and complicity with systems we are engaging with. Through this project, we also examine our own responsibilities and reflect on what it means to inquire into prevailing imaginations, in order to generate accountabilities.
Nina Bandi: Could you explain “psychotropic” more at length?
knowbotiq: Let’s return to “Rohstoff-wechsel.” In his book My Cocaine Museum, Michael Taussig brilliantly elaborates on how the above-mentioned metabolic processes of gold are mostly libidinous by unfolding the close affinity of cocaine and gold. Nervous psychotropic desires and appetites surround the shiny, precious metal – “gold as a drug.” The psychotropic is so important because the psycho-active struggle and greed for gold interacts directly with the imaginary and an irrational production of the real. Gold and its political constitution arises out of collective and social imaginations whose effectiveness cannot be grasped by means of statistics, diagrams, and scientific reports, which in our age of digitalization, algorithmic access and optimization, often form the basis of the real. The release of endorphins and dopamine induced by greed, spike in testosterone as a result of trading in gold derivatives, spiritual experiences of meditating on bullions, or the libidinousness of patriarchal gold as jewelry, are excessive affective narrations, far beyond the simplistic stories often found around the metal. To quote a currently somewhat over-quoted Donna Haraway: “stretch the imagination and you [can] change the story.”
Nina Bandi: Is this approach also related to your stance on “art as knowledge production”?
knowbotiq: Our practice is not just about the production of knowledge. It is important for us to distance ourselves from the attempted neoliberal appropriation of art as knowledge production, which often implies an academization and depoliticization of artistic practice. We are much more concerned with exploring micro-sensory and micro-political investigations of perception, experience, speech, etc. within the existing western knowledge apparatus. The Psychotropic Refinery is not only a symbolic metaphor but more specifically a machine to open up encounters with ghosts and caretakers: a “critical fabulation” loosely borrowed from Saidiya Hartman, which Elke Bippus, with regard to our practice, refers to as “molecular fabulation.”
Swiss Psychotropic Gold- The virtualities of the Swiss refineries – PAMP , https://www.pamp.com/, wallpaper (detail), knowbotiq 2017
Nina Bandi: Within the project several exhibitions and performances of the Swiss Psychotropic Gold Refining took place already. To what extent can the Psychotropic Refinery be tracked down in these various formats?
knowbotiq: Well, there’s no straightforward answer to that question. In order to approach the Psychotropic Refinery, we tried to call on the social imaginations fed by a kind of a connective unconscious. That’s why there were visual, acoustic, olfactory, as well as haptic elements in different exhibitions and performances we did. We worked with mantra-like videos, with renmai [v] acupuncture using gold plated needles, we meditated and did awareness exercises on bullions and jewelry, and exposed ourselves to vaporized “Golden Viagra” pills, and minimal doses of henbane essences, a hallucinogen used in witchcraft to address unconscious. These activities were crisscrossed by the very slowly, micro-performing, abstracted body of a dancer. Visitors were invited to move barefoot through a summery exhibition space and, activated by acupuncture, to smell the ubiquitous molecular Swiss gold. In all the edifferent formats, it was important for us to facilitate encounters with the postcolonial affections of gold and to encourage visitors to deal physically with the latency of the structural violence of gold. It requires sensitivity, response-ability, and a willingness to confront and critically encounter oneself and the communities we live in. However, self-love, hedonistic life cultures and the moral superiority of the wealthy were strongly present in those places where we presented versions of the Psychotropic Refinery. During our research in Switzerland, people had told us that they meditate naked on gold bars in order to charge their bodies with specific frequencies and dissolve their blockages. One could call this and other such suspensions of disbelief the “ghosts of gold.” These ghosts might point the way to the dominant narratives of gold, the victims’ experiences of violence, the ruthlessness of environmental poisoners, the care of activists and to the caretakers actively protecting the metal in the geological strata.
Swiss Psychotropic Gold- Abstract Sex and Molecular Joy, Centre Culturel Suisse Paris, performance with Gabriel Flückiger, meditation on pure gold, knowbotiq 2017
Nina Bandi: How does your concept of “healing” relate to what you just described? How is it enacted in the “healing practices and techniques” in the exhibitions?
knowbotiq: Our concept of healing is not one of “healing from something,” which is anyway not possible, but refers to activation, to setting something in motion towards an undetermined direction. This can have sensitizing effects, but can also generate turbulence of all kinds. We were surprised at how numerous, and sometimes innocent, visitors to the exhibitions accepted these “treatments” and were willing to temporarily withdraw from the somewhat dominant “retinal” format of exhibitions. We see these engagements with other forms of corporeality in the exhibition space also as a form of criticism. Criticism here is not just about pointing out and exposing, as is done in many documentary practices, but about the possibility of participating in the performativity of the materialities and the stories of the objects, the sounds, the imaginations activated by gold plated needles. Criticism is not passing judgment but rather a practice of reflecting on the conditions of one’s own perception, and of knowing and “not-being-able-to-know.” And it became particularly interesting in those moments when the physical encounters with ‘Swiss Psychotropic Gold’ became an intensive confrontation with inhuman(e) materiality, opening up “non-enlightened” forms of critical experience.
Top image: Swiss Psychotropic Gold – The Molecular Ghost 2 – A ghost never dies. S/He remains always to come and to come back, knowbotiq 2017
References:[i] https://www.draftprojects.info/home.html [accessed December 2, 2019] [ii] https://corporatejustice.ch/ [accessed December 2, 2019] [iii] Kijan Malte Espahangizi and Barbara Orland, eds., Stoffe in Bewegung: Beiträge zu einer Wissensgeschichte der materiellen Welt (Zurich: Diaphanes 2014). [iv] “Roh-stoffwechsel” is a combination of “Rohstoff” = raw material and “Stoffwechsel” = metabolism. [v] The renmai (ren meridian) acupuncture technique is using drainages and different aspects of liquids and metal, fluidity and strength, as a process of cleaning and restoring.
