#DNL30 · June 23–25 · 2023

ARTIVISM

The Art of Subverting Power

THE 30TH CONFERENCE OF THE DISRUPTION NETWORK LAB

KUNSTQUARTIER BETHANIEN - BERLIN & STREAMING

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ARTIVISM · Videos

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How can art and activism be combined to tackle burning social issues, surveillance, unethical corporations and corrupt governments?

30th conference of the Disruption Network Lab. Curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli.

LOCATION: STUDIO 1, KUNSTQUARTIER BETHANIEN, MARIANNENPLATZ 2, 10997 BERLIN

STREAMED FOR FREE

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Schedule

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Friday June 23, 2023

16:30 · Doors open

17:00 – 17:15 · OPENING & INTRODUCTION

Tatiana Bazzichelli (Artistic Director, Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE).

17:15 – 18:45 · KEYNOTE · Inverted Gaze: Watching the Watchers in a Well-Watched World

Manu Luksch (Artist, Filmmaker, Researcher, AT/UK). Lauri Love (Computer Scientist, UK). Moderator: Tatiana Bazzichelli (Artistic Director, Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE).

19:30 ­– 21:30 · PANEL · Fighting Technologies & Systems of Domination

Derek Curry & Jennifer Gradecki (Artists, US), Yasmine Boudiaf (Artist, DZ/UK), Tobaron Waxman (Artist & Curator, CA/US/PL). Moderated by Magdalena Tyzlik-Carver (Associate Professor of Digital Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, PL/UK/DK).

Saturday June 24, 2023

15:00 · Doors open

15:30 – 16:10 · VIDEO · Giacomo Verde: The Little Diary of Ailments

Il piccolo diario dei malanni · Video performance in homage to Giacomo Verde, 36 min, IT, 2019.

16:15 – 17:00 · PANEL · Hacktivism, R(Ǝ)O Dada & Resistance

Discussion with Superazione Collective & Dada Boom Collective (Murat Önol, Virginia Orrico, Alessandro Giannetti, IT), Guido Segni (Artist & Hacktivist, IT).

17:30 ­– 19:00 · KEYNOTE · Unmasking Power as Art: Sharing Tactics & Practice

Mike Bonanno & Jeff Walburn / The Yes Men (Artists & Activists, US), Cornelia Sollfrank (Artist, DE). Moderated by Klara Hobza (Visual Artist, CZ/DE).

19:30 ­– 21:30 · PANEL · Breaking Evil: Artistic Actions for Justice

Steal This Poster (Subvertising Collective IT/UK), Michelle Tylicki (Artist & Actvist, PL/US/UK), WeiterSo! Collective (Activist Art Collective, DE). Moderated by Natalia Ivanova Mount (Curator & Activist, BGR/US).

Sunday June 25

11:30 – 14:00 · WORKSHOP 1: Investigative Tactics To Dismantle Supremacist Cuteness

Noura Tafeche (Artist & Scholar, IT)

14:30 – 17:00 · WORKSHOP 2: It Doesn’t Work Anyway: Measuring the Impact of Political Art Actions

WeiterSo! Collective (Activist Art Collective, DE)

15:00 ­– 17:00 · WORKSHOP 3: Listening Structures: A Collective Process for Big Tech’s Interrogation

Yasmine Boudiaf (Artist, DZ/UK)

Please notice that you cannot participate in both workshops 2 and 3, as they overlap timewise.

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Pre-Events & Meetups

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Introduction

ARTIVISM: The Art of Subverting Power

How can art and activism be combined to tackle burning social issues, surveillance, unethical corporations and corrupt governments?

A programme of panels, workshops, and artistic productionS curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli.

From June 23-25, 2023, ARTIVISM: The Art of Subverting Power analyses how art and activism can be combined to shift media attention onto important social issues, targeting unethical corporations and corrupt governments working against the public good. The programme presents distributed techniques and methods of provoking social and political justice using digital technologies for social awareness and political criticism. Invited speakers range from artists, political activists and developers to human rights advocates and truth-tellers.

Artivism, a practice that combines art and activism, is configured through the actions of artists and collectives, to generate social and political disruption (Bazzichelli 2006; 2013). Throughout June 2023, Disruption Network Lab celebrates its 30th conference anniversary with a programme of meetups, workshops, keynotes, panel discussions and artistic productions, which focuses on the importance of building networks of trust to expose systems of power and injustice. The scope of the events is to reflect on the impact of technology and media on the broader society by connecting projects of art and networking that investigate power asymmetries and civil rights violations. 


Since the time of the Avant-Gardes art has been a means of understanding our society. The history of Artivism in relation to digital culture dates to the early 1990s, connecting projects of hacktivism and network culture. However, the point of inception of this concept can be identified in the 1980s, when artists experimented with different art forms, from performance, media art, video art, street art and culture jamming, to denounce power abuses and criticise consumerism.

The history of this approach is long and involves a variety of practices (the list is partial): from Avant-Gardes artistic projects to the Fluxus movement; grassroots art subcultures in the 1980s-1990s from mail art, The Church of the SubGenius, Neoism and Luther Blissett to 1990s net art projects; hacktivist interventions from the early cypherpunk and cyberfeminism (i.e. VNS Matrix, Old Boys Network, Cornelia Sollfrank) to today; the first adbusting, culture jamming and subvertising actions by the Billboard Liberation Front, the Guerrilla Girls and The Yes Men; the Virtual Sit-in and other interventions by the Electronic Disturbance Theater (Ricardo Dominguez, 1997); the Netstrikes, telestreets, Indymedia, Candida Tv, and other media activism projects and grassroots collectives in Italy and internationally in the early 2000s; the AHA: Activism-Hacking-Artivism project (mailing list and exhibition events on media activism) by Tatiana Bazzichelli (2002) and her book Networking: The Art as Artwork (2006); the analysis by Matteo Pasquinelli in the book Media Activism (2002); the monographic essay on Artivism in the field of performing art by the Slovenian scholar Aldo Milohnić (2005); the autobiographical monograph by Italian artist Giacomo Verde Artivismo tecnologico (2007); a decade of critical interventions on the Internet and in social media before and after the middle of 2000s (see: Tatiana Bazzichelli, Networked Disruption, 2013); distributed interventions of Anonymous and LulzSec (Gabriella Coleman, 2014; Marco Deseriis, 2015); the recent debate on whistleblowing, privacy and data surveillance after the Snowden disclosures.

The conference ARTIVISM: The Art of Subverting Power analyses the political impact of today’s forms of art and activism (artivism) in the field of social networking, hacking, whistleblowing and leaking, artificial intelligence and machine learning. The aim is to provide a lively platform of debate and exchange analysing the current transformation in political and technological criticism, as well as reflecting on the need of artistic practices today to reveal inner structures and logics of political, economic and technological systems. Do we still need artivism, and what does it mean today to combine art and activism?

The curatorial approach is developed comparing projects that deal with different forms of artivism and their political impact on our society. By inviting experts from different areas to analyse the invisible side of technology in shaping our lives, the aim is to create an interdisciplinary atmosphere of sharing and understanding, as well as to address the group of actors active in this field in Berlin and internationally.

This programme is following a series of publications and events held in Italy after the death of artivist Giacomo Verde, whose work is remembered during the conference with a homage screening of his last 2019 performance “Il piccolo diario dei malanni” (The Little Diary of Ailments).

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Full Programme

Friday June 23, 2023 · Get tickets

16:30 · Doors open

17:00 – 17:15 · OPENING & INTRODUCTION

Tatiana Bazzichelli (Artistic Director, Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE).

17:15 – 18:45 · KEYNOTE

Inverted Gaze: Watching the Watchers in a Well-Watched World

Manu Luksch (Artist, Filmmaker, Researcher, AT/UK). Lauri Love (Computer Scientist, UK). Moderator: Tatiana Bazzichelli (Artistic Director, Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE).

As surveillance tends towards omnipresence yet invisibility, art, activism, and hacking intersect to highlight, critique, disrupt and counter the encroachments of the surveillance state and extractive personalised data economy.

Our information environment is subject to extraordinary interference. As both traditional and user-driven social media landscapes fall vulnerable to automated surveillance, disruption and trolling, and as the datasphere more broadly becomes a target and product of machine analysis and management, so the distinctions between democracies and authoritarian regimes are becoming blurred. This is further fuelled by growing influence in the sports, culture and education sectors bought by nations and corporations engaged in reputation management.

Under these circumstances, Manu Luksch seeks to carve out new niches for action and engagement by inhabiting the space between art, film, academia and activism. Straddling disciplinary boundaries with hybrid forms opens up diverse information cultures and distribution channels. She will present ongoing initiative that focuses on the case of Emirati blogger, poet, engineer and father-of-four Ahmed Mansoor. In 2017, Mansoor was jailed for 10 years for a tweet that allegedly insulted the 'status and prestige of the UAE’. A few months prior, he had exposed his government’s purchase of spyware to exploit an insecurity on his iPhone.

Behind Mansoor’s personal tragedy lie power struggles within the sheikhdom and the region, the scramble for a post-oil tech-utopia, and a foreign investment strategy that implicates the UK government and affects football fans in the stadium. Alongside the development of a feature documentary, this project has resulted in academic publications, posters, a translation of Mansoor’s poetry, a graffiti campaign, gallery installations, and witness statements to a UK Parliamentary Seminar.  

Lauri Love will focus on how art and hacking enable critical discourse on the erosions of unwatched spaces and uncommodified selves, reclaiming technology to enable creative expression, agency and praxis, unobscuring, averting and inverting the gaze through "sousveillance" – strategies for empowerment via monitoring and vigilance from below. He will discuss how artists and hackers employ sousveillance, both to reverse the gaze onto power structures and challenge the status quo, question normative boundaries of privacy, and reimagine agency in our data-saturated society.

This keynote addresses artivism and artistic practices in the age of surveillance and sousveillance, reflecting on critique and empowerment at the frontiers where future unfurls. Can dialogue displace defeatism? Can aesthetics embrace artifice? Can the umwelt of the underseers uphold digital rights, privacy, and democratic engagement?

19:30 – 21:30 · PANEL

Fighting Technologies & Systems of Domination

Derek Curry & Jennifer Gradecki (Artists, US), Yasmine Boudiaf (Artist, DZ/UK), Tobaron Waxman (Artist & Curator, CA/US/PL). Moderated by Magdalena Tyzlik-Carver (Associate Professor of Digital Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, PL/UK/DK).

This panel connects three different experiences of the role of art in fighting systems of control and exploring technologies and bureaucracies of domination. The line-up conceptually combines Derek Curry and Jennifer Gradecki’s artistic works dealing with financial instruments, facial recognition, dataveillance technologies, social media misinformation and disinformation; Yasmine Boudiaf’s artistic research and practice on AI and algorithms of domination, and how technological biases are targeting minorities in the UK; Tobaron Waxman’s project "Gender Diasporist”, which traces his complex experience through Polish bureaucracy in the context of gender transitioning, examining ways in which the state determines the parameters of our bodies.

Derek Curry and Jennifer Gradecki will discuss several research-based artworks that address and intervene in the socio-technical dimensions of technological power structures. These projects expand debates beyond a limited group of technocratic experts and reflect on the broad social impacts of these systems, from false positives in mass surveillance systems, to the algorithmic spread of misinformation and disinformation through content aggregation filters. By creating interactive artworks that replicate corporate and governmental technical systems, including the errors they produce, they allow the public to experience what are typically hidden or inaccessible systems while foregrounding the capitalist or governmental agendas that produced the technologies.

Through a performative lecture, Yasmine Boudiaf will offer an insight into her artistic approach, situating the influence on public life of the entanglement between state and corporate tech actors as part of a wider pattern of behaviour that replays across history and geographies in different forms. Focusing on the UK context, she interrogates power, society and technology and explores these themes through a series of case studies.

‘Gender Diasporist’ is an interdisciplinary project combining video, photo, vocal performance, historic documents and artifacts, using what Tobaron Waxman calls ‘transsexual knowledge’ to interrogate how borders and concepts of citizenship make moral and ethical claims on our bodies. The project outlines the theocratic ‘gender recognition’ law in Poland regarding transsexuality and citizenship that Tobaron experienced when he applied for Polish citizenship as an out transsexual person of Polish-Jewish heritage. This was both a decolonial gesture, a refusal of the ‘right of return’ and an act of solidarity with feminists and LGBTQ+ allies and activists in Poland. This ongoing project is an interdisciplinary artwork that examines this legal process and its socio political and cultural implications in relation to issues of migration, inhabitance and border.

Saturday June 24, 2023

15:00 · Doors open

15:30 – 16:10 · VIDEO

Giacomo Verde: The Little Diary of Ailments

Il piccolo diario dei malanni, a video performance in homage to Giacomo Verde, 36 min, IT, 2019.

"I don't feel like a technological optimist, much less a fetishist. My cultural background has led me to share the cyberpunk point of view: the democratic and creative use of technologies is the result of a constant battle. Even if the digital gives great possibilities, there are economic interests (of the few) that do everything to put brakes and cages in place."  – Giacomo Verde

The Little Diary of Ailments (Il piccolo diario dei malanni) is the last performance by Giacomo Verde, an Italian pioneer of video experimentation bridging theatre performance, activism and net art, who passed away in early May 2020. The performance is a sort of artistic testament of an author who always crossed trans-disciplinary research with a focus on artivism, DIY technology, popular theater, storytelling, and poetry.

In 2019 Giacomo Verde opened at SPAM! the Aldes Company's theatre space in Capannori, in the province of Lucca, northern Tuscany, a truly touching, personal and precious show, "The Little Diary of Ailments” (Il piccolo diario dei malanni). It is a tale of an illness that comes to you unexpectedly one day just as you are writing a diary, "a little diary of ailments," those of lifelong friends, those of your mother and those of society. And then at a certain date, you also add your own, a bloody invisible, unpredictable, and unpreventable cancer. The play is made up of a journey through colourful drawings and short notes written down on a diary, where daily life, art and resistance intertwine. The tale began in 2012, the year of his mother's death, which caught Giacomo Verde while he was on a train, headed for one of the thousand far-off destinations where this world whips you to survive. It is the dark side of self-employed and independent work that forces you into a condition of self-exploitation, it is the cut-off of the much applauded "gig economy".

16:15 – 17:00 · PANEL DISCUSSION

Hacktivism, R(Ǝ)O Dada & Resistance

Superazione Collective & Dada Boom Collective (Murat Önol, Virginia Orrico, Alessandro Giannetti, IT), Guido Segni (Artist & Hacktivist, IT).

Following the screening of “The Little Diary of Ailments” by Italian artist and activist Giacomo Verde, this discussion with Superazione Collective & Dada Boom Collective (Murat Önol, Virginia Orrico, Alessandro Giannetti) and Guido Segni reflects on the impact of artivism from hacktivism to r(Ǝ)o dada, presenting artistic interventions and tactics of resistance in the grassroot scene of Italy.

A group of researchers, activists, artists, and performers has been active since Giacomo Verde passed away in May 2020, organising distributed events in his memory, including the creation of the Artivism conference in Viareggio last December 2022. During this series of events, art and activism were connected to bring important social issues to light, focusing on different areas of action, from anti-war campaigns to climate justice interventions, to new strategies of activism in the age of big data and the connections between art and whistleblowing (see artivism.today).

Giacomo Verde worked for many decades on developing an ethical and political use of technology, from the early 1980s until he passed away in 2020. His artistic practice can be described as "technological artivism", applying a DIY approach to technology to denounce misconducts embedded in society. He was one of the first Italian artists to create interactive art works, combining different art genres. His book Artivismo Tecnologico (Technological Artivism, 2007) describes the practice of artivism within the cultural and artistic scene of Italy. The book includes many contributions such as the collective piece For a New Cartography of Reality, that can be considered the first manifesto of the virtual era in Italy, and interlinks experiences shaped in the Italian grassroots media scene from the 1980s until the middle of 2000s. The artistic practice of Guido Segni, together with the one of many other Italian hacktivists, developed within this context.

Giacomo Verde was among the initiators of the r(Ǝ)o dada experience, which started in 2019 in Italy with the redaction of a manifesto by the Dada Boom Collective, which was signed by the Superazione Collective the same year. r(Ǝ)o dada is a political and cultural practice that takes shape through operActions, ongoing interventions that develop as an artistic and activist process. It is the expression of a melting pot of actions, artworks, sharing and connections of different people, activists, groups, associations. r(Ǝ)o dada aims to bring to light social problems or conflicts. The artistic process implies to criticize such conflicts, to fight against burning issues of our society and to express dissent and political positions about them. The result is to create open encounters where different people can express their ideas and can approach practices they had never explored before.

17:30 – 19:00 · KEYNOTE

Unmasking Power as Art: Sharing Tactics & Practice

Mike Bonanno & Jeff Walburn / The Yes Men (Artists & Activists, US), Cornelia Sollfrank (Artist, DE). Moderated by Klara Hobza (Visual Artist, CZ/DE).

How can artists use their special expertise to draw attention to political grievances and contribute to their redress? And what does it do to art when artists get politically involved? This keynote panel brings together three artists that have been working in the field or critical technology and political awareness since more than three decades, Mike Bonanno & Jeff Walburn, from the culture jamming and activist group The Yes Men, and Cornelia Sollfrank, one of the pioneers of net art and cyberfeminism.

In the realm of Artivism, where the boundaries between art and activism blur, The Yes Men have been working as provocateurs who delight in unmasking the puppeteers of power through their collectively orchestrated interventions. Combining media-hacking and social-engineering tactics, they challenge corporate malevolence while simultaneously amplifying the voices of activists. Their social-engineering tactics steal media space from commercial interests, questioning the motives of those who wield authority.

The Yes Men have participated in many attempts to ignite a network of truth-seekers, activists, and makers of meaningful mischief. Mike and Jeff of the Yes Men join the ARTIVISM conference with the hopes that they can swap stories and tactics of wit, creativity, and defiance: teaching and learning how to challenge the systems that bind us in today's tumultuous social and political landscape.

They will share some funny videos of their interventions and break down how they are designed to plague corporate evildoers, amplify activist campaigns. and expose the flaws of established power structures. Along the way, they discuss the importance of tricksters in subverting power, and explore how these media-hacking and social-engineering tactics can be stolen and remixed by anyone.

Alongside, Cornelia Sollfrank has accumulated a manifold oeuvre in which she is challenging traditional aesthetic categories by confronting them with the potential of digital networked technology. Based on the assumption that there is no place outside the political, she, for example, extends her concept of material into the social and experiments with new forms of organization as aesthetic practice.

True to the motto "the mode is the message," she strives to create space for the quiet, the minor, the difference – for what happens in the cracks and in-between spaces, for the cement that holds the social together by activating individual agency within a collective structure while never losing sight of the symbolic power of art.

As the initiator of the campaign TammTamm – Artists Informing Politicians (2005/06), she created a form of protest that involved several hundred actors. At the same time, the protest was based on private conversations between one politician and one artist in each case. In this way, a massive political confrontation over a controversial museum project and 30 million euros of public funding was broken down to an encounter between two people. Eventually, the action developed its political impact by gathering the reports on the individual encounters on a joint website, which allowed to create attention and support also beyond the local.

Although this campaign deals with a very specific situation in a local context with a clearly defined goal, it will be presented through an artistic production at the Artivism conference, and it will serve as a basis for this keynote discussion of the core questions regarding the relation of art and politics.

19:30 – 21:30 · PANEL

Breaking Evil: Artistic Actions for Justice

Steal This Poster (Subvertising Collective IT/UK), Michelle Tylicki (Artist & Activist, PL/US/UK), WeiterSo! Collective (Activist Art Collective, DE). Moderated by Natalia Ivanova Mount (Curator & Activist, BGR/US).

This panel brings together artivists challenging corporations, systemic powers and social injustice and fighting for the public good. Their tactics aim to empower people touching issues of political and social relevance in the field of corporate copyright laws, greenwashing in advertising, and the power of gas lobby. They organise artistic actions and generate collective projects that span from subvertising, adbusting to awareness campaigns, showing how art and activism can contribute to imagine a better world and do it collectively.

StealThisPoster, a network of subvertisers based in the UK and Italy, presents the project stealthisposter.org, an online archive of subversive posters. They will discuss different examples of artivist actions organised by the stealthisposter’s network: how this public domain archive of posters helped its authors in hacking the laws of copyright and how they subverted the logo of the petrol company Shell into Hell; the protest of the squatted women house Lucha y Siesta in Rome and the action of “Linea Fuxia”, a fake pink washing campaign run by the company who wanted to evict their premises; the short mockumentary “Blasphemy from the world”, presented at the Post Porn Film Festival in Warsaw from June 12-19, 2023 (and now available through their website).

Multidisciplinary artist and activist Michelle Tylicki takes us through her creative practice across media, exploring the notion of benevolent vandalism, solidarity not charity, squatting as a career choice, and how doom, anger and despair can be utilised and transformed creatively through humour and mischief. In a violent world Tylicki responds creatively by building functioning mediaeval weapons against the arms fair or staging theatrical combat for the climate. She will tell stories of how to call out greenwashing in advertising through ad busting / ad hacking, collaborative performance in occupied coal mines, to creating subversive installations of a fridge full of ‘humanely slaughtered’ human meat. In the difficult struggle for a better world, enjoying the process and having fun is her key to a sustainable activism. More: brandalism.ch

WeiterSo! Collective will talk about their current campaign, which aims to make visible the ways in which the gas lobby manipulates public discourse. What makes the gas lobby so powerful and successful? And how can we cut them off? As always in politics, this struggle is about knowledge and information as levers and tools of power. When government ministries withhold relevant information, there may be courageous employees who are willing to make this information public via anonymous mailboxes. If companies with public shareholdings conceal financial flows, perhaps press law can help. There are many ways into the backroom, people just must find them. In this presentation, WeiterSo! will look at some of their attempts and explain their understanding of impact orientation in political campaigning. How do we make change measurable and how do we ensure that our activism does not dissipate? Visit zukunft-gasfrei.de, the current WeiterSo! campaign against the German gas lobby.

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Workshops

Sunday June 25, 2023 · Not Streamed

Please notice that you cannot participate in both workshops 2 and 3, as they overlap timewise.

11:30 – 14:00 · WORKSHOP #1 · Register

Investigative Tactics To Dismantle Supremacist Cuteness

Noura Tafeche (Artist & Scholar, IT)

STUDIO 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin

Max 25 participants

Workshop suitable for an 18+ audience

Given the disturbing nature of the workshop’s main topics, participants are advised of permanent trigger alerts.

The workshop takes inspiration from The Kawayoku Inception, a project delving into the political-artistic value of cuteness and the permanent status of performativity and hypersexualization on social media, as agents of a growing trend of aestheticization of violence. The project aims to shape under new taxonomies contemporary digital evanescence, visual reformulation of violence, unconventional recruiting strategies and militarized entertainment. Areas of research explore Israeli and US military propaganda and recruiting strategies translated into dance choreographies and challenges, weeb alt-right incel imaginary intertwined with cute manga fan-art and gaming and 2nd Amendment, pro-gun, war enthusiasts or armies employing anime and kawaii aesthetics.

Out of this research, accomplished over three years on popular social media and remote online micro communities, an ongoing archive was built to catalogue nearly 30.000 files (screenshots, memes, posts, videos, etc) with a “geographic map” of digital platforms where the phenomenon proliferates. The workshop aims to provide a strategic toolbox to investigate and analyse fringe internet communities that are involved, in different ways and to different extents, in the production and reproduction of online violence. The workshop exposes participants to a wide array of investigative methods including digital geography and participant observation of such online communities, and qualitative interviews to their members (e.g. channel admins, etc.).

Case studies will include the cute imaginary of Israeli Defence Force’s soldiers micro-celebrities and hypersexualized Zionist propaganda’s influencers on major digital platforms, the case of former Military police officer awarded certificate for promoting the reputation of the IDF on TikTok, or the intertwining weapons glorification and anime body pillows, as a hyper-niche fetish that visually and culturally convey suprematist values such as female submission, 2nd amendment magnification and rape culture.

Noura Tafeche will guide the participants through an intricate net of a variety of social media like hyper niche telegram channels, discord servers, popular subreddits, official and bogus accounts and user base. The workshop aims to create collaborative strategies for a net of journalists, artists, researchers to share knowledge and methods of analysis to bring to light issues related to the depths of the Internet and directly interface with its community and its pathway to a radicalized ecosystem, with a subversive/investigative slant.

This workshop is for activists, students, teachers, mixed teams of students and teachers, investigative journalists, researchers, emergent artists, art collectives, cyber-flaneurs and groups of people who are joining forces for the occasion.

• Individuals with any kind of background are welcome to join as well.

• Number of participants: 20–25

• Participants are kindly asked to bring their laptops.

• To facilitate introductory stages before the workshop, a dedicated discord server is employed, but joining is not mandatory.

  
  

14:30 – 17:00 · WORKSHOP #2 · Register
Overlaps with Workshop #3

It Doesn’t Work Anyway: Measuring the Impact of Political Art Actions

WeiterSo! Collective (Activist Art Collective, DE)

SUPERRR Lab · Oranienstraße 58A, 10969 Berlin

max 15 participants

No previous experience is needed, laptops are practical but not necessary.

Since 2020, WeiterSo! Collective has been concerned with the question of how the turbulence created by political art actions can be translated into actual change. What needs to be planned and how to not only "attract" media attention for a short period of time but to shift the focus of coverage and discourse in a sustainable way? How can our target, be it a gas lobbying association or a political party, be prevented from sitting out the criticism and then carrying on as before? What could be the means not only to strip the emperor of his clothes, but take them away for good?

How to root a stunt in lasting change by impact oriented strategizing? WeiterSo! Collective has some concrete ideas and wants to exchange practical strategies with you. Therefore we are interested in the contexts in which you are working and the tactics you use to reach your goal. In the workshop we will discuss our concept of impact-measuring and apply it together with you to different targets. We want to put our heads together and learn from you! By the end, our campaign planning toolboxes will be filled with new ideas ready to be tested in reality. And we'll be even better thorns in the eye.

15:00 – 17:00 · WORKSHOP #3 · Register
Overlaps with Workshop #2

Listening Structures: A Collective Process for Big Tech’s Interrogation

Yasmine Boudiaf (Artist, DZ/UK)

STUDIO 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin

max 20 participants

Challenging, undermining and distributing power is not easily done. Participation in discourse, let alone influencing systemic change requires resources; some material and some more symbolic – signalling to all the undeniable legitimacy of the agent. In undermining this process (a process that has become democracy in practice), new constellations of participation and outcomes are necessary. 

Listening Structures provide a 2-dimensional environment to capture and orient thoughts on a given technological conundrum. A series of geometric shapes that are gradually populated with words, the process asks: what would listening look like when assigned roles were no longer visible, and participants were not confined by conventional conversational dynamics (such as waiting for your turn to speak)? 

The listening becomes detached from any person yet, everyone becomes the listener, as each participant is presented with the output at the same time. This distributed listening becomes active distributed listening when participants have access to the platform where contributions are collected and are able to manipulate them. These contributions, or thoughts, take on a life of their own; they are picked up and moved around by anyone, built on, manipulated and challenged. Half-formed ideas can manifest and be made whole by someone else.

As ideas travel through these structures during this in-person interactive workshop, the nature of these ideas changes, with the output determined in the commons.

We will collectively interrogate case studies where big tech and the public sector become entangled, assessing their impact on public life and minoritsied communities. We will pick up and run with each other’s ideas to collectively speculate on alternative figurations for what such relationships could be, if power was distributed and decisions were made in the commons.

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Artistic Productions

TammTamm: Artists informing Politicians

Cornelia Sollfrank (Artist, DE).

The campaign “Tamm-Tamm – Artists Inform Politicians” took place in Hamburg in 2005/06 and was a protest against the newly planned Maritime Museum. In order to complement the ongoing HafenCity urban development project with a cultural “attraction”, the Hamburg City Parliament had offered the controversial private collector Peter Tamm a large historic building and 30 million euros to transfer his private “maritime” collection into a museum.

The organizers of the protest assumed that the collection did not meet the scientific standards of a public museum and that the notorious right-wing collector would use the premises to celebrate his authoritarianism. The campaign took the political leaders into responsibility. For each elected member of Hamburg’s parliament, an artist acted as godfather/ godmother and engaged in a personal dialogue with the politicians in order to provide background information on the project.  

Documentation of each encounter was collected on a website, which proved to be an effective tool against the opportunism of the local media. The original website is only partially preserved. Fragments as well as supporting material have been included in the documentation.

D A Z Z L E

Lauri Love (Computer Scientist, UK) & Michelle Tylicki (Artist & Activist, PL/US/UK)

An interactive tool to teach computer vision dazzle – anti-surveillance makeup. Designed to break machine vision systems, this subversively placed art installation satirises the beauty industry and reveals a critique of surveillance capitalism in advertising. For activists planning to take direct action, with D A Z Z L E one can create a custom template of camouflage applicable against modern advances in police surveillance tech.

D A Z Z L E is the facelessness of the resistance.

Cameras proliferate as surveillance becomes ubiquitous, data is invasively collected and commodified without consent. The human face is tracked, profiled, herded. Enter D A Z Z L E, an interactive tool for the reclamation of agency. Designed to break machine-learning facial recognition models, this subversive salon experience satirises the beauty industry to reveal a critique of surveillance as a tool of capitalism and the state. Observe, frustrate and defeat realistic facial detection and recognition systems. Emerge as a certified enigma with a camoflagued look analysis report giving quantitative data that empowers you to reclaim your own.

Through a boutique salon experience, clients have their facial features detected and displayed within a closed system, learn how the technology works, then follow tips on effective methods to defeat it as they customise their camoflagued style, apply dazzling modifications and accessories, and emerge rewarded with a tailored look analysis report to certify their fabulous mystique against eight of the most commonly used detection models.

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Press

Press Release, Press Kit & Accreditation

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Speakers & Participants

Manu Luksch

Artist, Filmmaker, Researcher, AT/UK

Through her films and art works, Manu Luksch researches the effects of emerging technologies on social relations, urban space, and political structures. Her current focus is on corporate-governmental relationships and their hidden agendas for the algorithmic city. Films include FACELESS (2007), produced by probing data protection legislation; DREAMS REWIRED (2015) traces the desires and anxieties of today’s hyper-connected world back more than a hundred years; and ALGO-RHYTHM (2019), a hip-hop musical about electioneering. Manu is currently Honorary Fellow at the University of Exeter, artist researcher at Radical Matter (Die Angewandte Wien and RCA), and Senior Research Associate at the AiDesign, Royal College of Art. Website: manuluksch.com

Lauri Love

Computer Scientist, UK

Lauri Love is a Security Engineer and activist based in the UK. In 2018, he successfully fended off the prospect of 100 years in the US prison system for his alleged involvement in the online activism of Anonymous. That landmark appeal ruling has proven a critical precedent in subsequent high profile extradition cases. He played a prominent role in the student and Occupy movements in Glasgow during 2011-12. Love is being recognised as an expert on hacking, surveillance and privacy issues in the UK and has made a principled stand against the country’s forced decryption laws.

The Yes Men

Mike Bonanno & Jeff Walburn, Artists & Activists, US

The Yes Men are a culture jamming activist group and network of supporters, who for decades have been creating meaningful mischievous actions combining humour, horror, and tricksterism to antagonize systems of power. Through “identity correction”/impersonation and media hacks, they skewer corporations and governments to advance environmental and social justice campaigns, targeting everything from Adidas’ sweatshops, NRA’s racism, Blackrock’s fossil-fuel finance, Enbridge’s pipeline hypocrisy, to Total’s imperialism. Website: theyesmen.org

Cornelia Sollfrank

Artist, DE

Cornelia Sollfrank is an artist, researcher and author, living in Berlin (Germany). Since the early days of the World Wide Web she has explored the potential of the digital for rethinking traditional aesthetic categories while also searching for innovative forms for aesthetic and political transformation. Recurring subjects in her artistic and academic work in and about digital cultures are artistic infrastructures, new forms of (political) self-organization, critical authorship, aesthetics of the commons, and techno-feminist practice and theory. Her experiments with the basic principles of aesthetic modernism implied conflicts with its institutional and legal framework and inspired her academic research on copyright, commons and the performativity of data. Recent publications include The beautiful Warriors. Technofeminist Practice in the 21st Century (minorcompositions.org), Aesthetics of the Commons (diaphanes.net) and Fix My Code (with Winnie Soon) (eeclectic.de) – all open access. Website: https://artwarez.org

Klara Hobza

Visual Artist, CZ/DE

Klara Hobza is a visual artist born 1975 in Pilsen (CZ). Hobza’s mediums span from miniature drawing and various forms of storytelling to creating experiences through performative and sculptural encounters and large scale endeavors recorded on video. Her themes are reflections on being in the world as an artist, the scientific process, migration, transportation, disappearance-reappearance and breathing. Regularly, she collaborates with people and institutions from the fields of science and technology. She lives and works in Berlin and wherever she can.

Jennifer Gradecki

Artist, US

Jennifer Gradecki is an artist-theorist who investigates secretive and specialized socio-technical systems, including financial instruments, dataveillance technologies, social media misinformation and disinformation. Gradecki has presented and exhibited at venues including Ars Electronica (Linz), ISEA (Barcelona), National Gallery X (London), NeMe (Cypress), Athens Digital Arts Festival, International Symposium on Computational Media Art (Hong Kong), and Piksel Festival (Bergen). Her research has been published in Leonardo, Big Data & Society, Visual Resources, and Leuven University Press. Her artwork has been funded by Science Gallery, NEoN Digital Arts Festival, and MediaFutures. Website: jennifergradecki.com

Derek Curry

Artist, US

Derek Curry (US) is an artist-researcher whose work critiques technological power structures using an approach that combines academic research with critical artmaking. His artworks often reverse-engineer or replicate technologies of control. His academic research draws from media theory and the social sciences, while his artistic practice is grounded in tactical media and institutional critique. Curry has exhibited at venues such as Ars Electronica, ISEA, National Gallery X (London), NeMe (Cypress), Athens Digital Arts Festival, International Symposium on Computational Media Art (Hong Kong), and Piksel Festival (Bergen) and published in Leonardo, Big Data & Society, Visual Resources, and Digital Culture & Society. He holds a PhD in Media Study from the State University of New York at Buffalo and an MFA in New Genres from UCLA. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University in Boston. Website: derekcurry.com

Yasmine Boudiaf

Artist, DZ/UK

Yasmine is an Algerian creative technologist and researcher based in London. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Ada Lovelace Institute and was recognised as one of '100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics 2022'. Her projects interrogate the impact of new technologies on cultural life using anti-colonial approaches. She has received funding and commissions for her projects from Arts Council England, the Alan Turing Institute, universities and the private sector to develop engaging experiences. Her work has been featured in the Times and the Evening Standard, as well as at international conferences. Website: yasmine-boudiaf.com

Tobaron Waxman

Artist & Curator, CA/US/PL

Tobaron Waxman is a visual artist who sings. Tobaron composes performances for photograph, video and site specific installation, and is also a trained vocalist in Jewish liturgical music. Up to today, Tobaron has collected numerous series of curatorial, relational/live art, and sociopolitical projects and exhibited in prestigious venues worldwide. In 2013, Tobaron founded The Intergenerational LGBT Artist Residency, as a combined curatorial, relational/live art, and sociopolitical praxis. Since 2017 Tobaron has developed the Trans Collections at Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, as part of a collaborative team at the largest independent LGBTQ archive in the world. Website: tobaron.com

Magdalena Tyzlik-Carver

Associate Professor of Digital Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, (PL/UK/DK)

Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver is curator, researcher and theorist who engages the concept of posthuman curating to inquire into how computational culture and data impact daily practices of living. Her current research in the project Fermenting Data focuses on developing participatory methods for data practices beyond BigTech extractivism and expansive infrastructural politics. In her teaching and research she draws on trans*feminist values and approaches to address who has access to technology and data and on what conditions. Her recent curatorial projects include exhibitions Fermenting Data: Aarhus8000-8220 (2021) and Screenshots: Desire and Automated Image (2019). Magdalena is an Associate Professor of Digital Communication and Culture in the Dept. of Digital Design and Information Studies at Aarhus University and Associate Researcher in the Centre for the Study of the Network Image in London South Bank University.

Superazione Collective

with Murat Önol, Translator & Artist, TR/IT

Superazione Collective was founded in 2016 to organize an international performance festival in Tuscany. It then became a nonprofit cultural association founded by six people with different artistic backgrounds and knowledge who have been working for years with the arts for the advancement of culture and the improvement of human conditions. Superazione wants to promote culture in all its forms as a constructive act of social and personal emancipation and liberation. The founders share the idea that contemporary art must overcome obsolete technical or critical parameters that reduce it to a pastime or pure marketplace in order to restore to it the proper cognitive, critical and ultimately political value it deserves. Superazione's purposes are the creation, realization and enhancement of initiatives and services in favor of culture, the arts in general and the performing arts in particular.

Dada Boom Collective

with Virginia Orrico & Alessandro Giannetti, Artivists, IT

Dada Boom Collective was founded in Viareggio in 2014 within Officina Dada Boom, a grassroot cultural space with the ambition of culturally “shake” a country lacking in cultural initiatives. The collective uses happenings as a mean for free expression and experimentation, strategies of overcoming exclusive places of art, and utilizes the actions and the tactics of grassroots movements. Virigina Orrico is an artivist in the Viareggio grassroots movement, currently involved in the management of Ri.Cre.Azione, a new-born space of cultural agitation in Viareggio (LU, Italy). Alessandro Giannetti investigates the link between participatory and relational art, politics and social issues. Through his numerous pseudonyms he intervenes on the theme of anonymity and copyright in the contemporary art scene, too often tailored to big names and aspiring protagonists. Facebook: facebook.com/officinadadaboom

Guido Segni

Artist & Hacktivist, IT

Guido Segni — also known as Luther Blissett — has a background in hacktivism, net art and video art. He lives and works somewhere, online and offline, playing with art, internet culture and data hallucinations. Mainly focused on the daily (ab)use of the Internet, his work is characterized by minimal gestures on technology which combines conceptual approaches with a traditional hacker attitude in making things odd, useless and dysfunctional. Co-founder of Les Liens Invisibles, he exhibited in galleries, museums (MAXXI Rome, New School of New York, KUMU Art Museum of Talinn) and art & media-art international festivals (International Venice Biennale, Piemonte SHARE Festival, transmediale). Recently he has been shortlisted for the art division of the 20th Japan Media Arts Festival (2017), was a finalist at Prize Arte Laguna (2016) and got an honorary mention at transmediale (2011) with Les Liens Invisibles. Currently he's in the middle of his laziness five-year plan. In his spare time he co-directs the Green Cube Gallery, teaches at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Carrara and directs the imaginary REFRAMED lab. Website: guidosegni.com

Steal This Poster

Subvertising Collective IT/UK

Steal This Poster is an online archive of subversive posters and a network of subvertisers based in the UK and Italy. It’s made up by professional pirates of the outdoor advertising, providing free guerrilla communication and design services for radical groups around the globe. If you are looking for a poster to spread your subversive campaign, you might find some useful designs in our archive free for re-use. Website: stealthisposter.org

Michelle Tylicki

Artist & Activist, PL/US/UK

Born in NYC, USA, 1985 to Polish immigrants, Michelle Tylicki is an artist and activist based between the UK and Portugal. She studied experimental film at FAMU in Prague, Czech Republic (2007) and graduated with a Master of Arts degree from ASP Gdańsk, Poland (2010). Since her thesis on ‘Art and Activism’, she has contributed to local, national and international campaigns focusing on radical system change. Her work promotes climate justice, animal rights, anticapitalism, sex workers’ rights, ending blasphemy laws, and reshaping the world as an anarchist utopia. She often takes part in creative direct action on the frontlines of these activist movements. In her art, Tylicki creates subversive graphic design to critique advertising (subvertising), utopian illustration for grassroots collectives, and short films about creative direct actions. She also explores physical theatre, producing and directing a climate clown wrestling troupe, and installation work, like the antifascist catapult and fridge full of 'humanely slaughtered' human meat. She lectures subvertising history and skill shares DIY aspects of ad-hacking. Website: michelletylicki.info, brandalism.ch

WeiterSo! Collective

Activist Art Collective, DE

WeiterSo! is a young activist collective that is dedicated to ending political cowardice, operating by subversive campaigns and actions of civil disobedience. WeiterSo! has taken it upon itself to defend democracy against the influence of the fossil fuel industry and its lobbyists. The representation of the interests of fossil fuel companies intentionally undermines and prevents compliance with international climate agreements and emission reduction goals. The first campaign by WeiterSo! in 2021 was directed against the ‘Economic Council of the CDU’ (Wirtschaftsrat der CDU) and its illegitimate seat on the CDU executive committee. Currently, the collective is primarily focused on exposing and curbing the influence of the gas lobby on German politics. The campaign began in December 2022 with a whistleblowing call to expose the gas lobby's influence on political decisions. Currently, the collective is focusing their actions on urging municipal energy suppliers to quit their membership in gas lobby groups. Website: weiterso.org

Noura Tafeche

Artist & Scholar, IT

Noura Tafeche is a visual artist and independent researcher. She graduated in New Technologies for Art at Accademia di Brera with a particular interest in net.art and radical entertainment and continued her university studies in Philosophy. Her artistic path develops through installations, neologisms, and miniature drawings. Her academic background originates from post-human and critical studies, hybridized with a strong influence from net.art and radical humor, developing in the current research areas deepen the study of phenomena related to online visual cultures, the aestheticization of violence on digital platforms, linguistic experimentation and the visual representation of speculative theories. Website: nouratafeche.com

Natalia Ivanova Mount

Curator & Activist, BGR/US

Natalia Ivanova Mount is a dynamic cultural organizer, curator, and published author with extensive experience in the expanded field of art and nonprofit leadership. In her organizing and writing work, Natalie is an executive leader, curator, educator, and a published author on topics exploring the intersection between art, law, and economics. Originally from Bulgaria, Natalia lived in New York, where in the early 2000s she co-founded FLUX Art Space – a pioneering art organization that commissioned and produced long-term art projects, claiming the intersection of art, technology, and civic engagement. In the beginning of her career, Natalia worked at MoMA PS1 and Clocktower, both located in NYC. Her leadership practice reflects her social justice background and her commitment to building alternative spaces and platforms that create new opportunities for artists, and arts organizers to build autonomy, agency, and community. Website: dualityisoverrated.com

Tatiana Bazzichelli

Artistic Director & Founder, Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE

Tatiana Bazzichelli is founder and director at Disruption Network Lab. Her focus of work is whistleblowing, network culture, art, and hacktivism. She is author of the books Whistleblowing for Change (2021), Networked Disruption (2013), Disrupting Business (2013), and Networking (2006). In 2011-2014 she was programme curator at transmediale festival in Berlin. She received a PhD degree in Information and Media Studies at the Faculty of Arts of Aarhus University in Denmark in 2011. Her PhD research, Networked Disruption: Rethinking Oppositions in Art, Hacktivism and the Business of Social Networking, was the result of her 2009 visiting scholarship at the H-STAR Institute of Stanford University. In 2019-2021 she was appointed jury member for the Capital Cultural Fund by the German Federal Government and the city of Berlin, and in 2020-2023 jury member for the Kulturlichter prize, a new award for digital cultural education in Germany.

Giacomo Verde (✝2020) · Video contribution

Technoartist and Activist, IT

Italian artist Giacomo Verde worked for many decades on developing an ethical and political use of technology. His activity can be identified as “technological artivism”, where the democratic and creative use of technology becomes the result of a critical approach on society. Since the 1980s Giacomo Verde produced works through the creative use of ‘low’ technology. He was one of the first Italian artists to create interactive art works and net art, building bridges between different art genres. His book Artivismo Tecnologico (Technological Artivism) describes the practice of Artivism within the cultural and artistic scene of Italy. The book includes many contributions such as the collective document For a New Cartography of Reality, that can be considered the first manifesto of the virtual era in Italy, and interlinks experiences shaped in the Italian media scene from the 1980s until the middle of 2000s.

Disruption Network Lab is part of New Perspectives for Action (2023-2027). A project by Re-Imagine Europe, a collaboration between Paradiso and Sonic Acts (NL), Elevate Festival (Austria), A4 (SK), INA GRM (FR), Borealis (NO), KONTEJNER (HR), RUPERT (LT), Semibreve (PT), Parco d’Arte Vivente (IT), Disruption Network Lab (DE), BEK (NO), Kontrapunkt (MK) and Radio Web MACBA (ES).

Co-funded by the European Union.