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When we named our organisation "Disruption Network Lab" we would have never imagined that disruption would turn out the way we experienced it during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the course of the past years we have invited people that disrupt and challenge closed systems from within. In a moment in which we experieced a deep closure, Disruptive Fridays became an opportunity to foster even more critical thinking. These live conversations address topics related to art, hacktivism, whistleblowing, social justice and collective care in times of corona. The series started in April 2020 and developed regularly throughout the following months..

Disruptive Fridays #1-24 were supported by the European Cultural Foundation - Culture of Solidarity fund.
Part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

Weaponised Disinformation in Regions of Hot and Cold Conflict · Disruptive Fridays #26

November 12 2021, 5pm CET

With: Tamar Kintsurashvili (Executive Director of Media Development Foundation, Associate Professor at Ilia State University, GE), Gisela Pérez de Acha (Journalist, Human Rights Lawyer, Researcher and Trainer, MX/US), Guli Bekurishvili (Young European Ambassador, Researcher and Communication Coordinator, GE) and Vasiko Khorava (Student at Tbilisi State University, GE), moderated by Alistair Alexander (Researcher, Trainer and Consultant, IE/DE)

In the programme series Facing Disinformation: Media Diversity from Georgia to Germany the Disruption Network Lab cooperates with the Georgian non-profit organization Regional Democratic Hub – Caucasus on encouraging and supporting media pluralism in Georgia, connecting experts such as journalists of traditional and non-traditional media, lawyers and researchers with professionals in Germany through online formats, including specialised online training courses and online conference sessions. Working with experts on disinformation and fake news in Georgia and Germany, the project offers important insights on how to face disinformation in social media and beyond.

In this Disruptive Fridays edition, we are joined by two of the trainers of the online training course ‘FACING DISINFORMATION: Insights and strategies to counter the online information pandemic’, which our project partner RDH-Caucasus is running during November 2021. The course explores in depth where disinformation comes from; how it spreads, who or what is behind it, and some effective strategies that be used to face disinformation down. In a conversation moderated by training lead Alistair Alexander, trainers Tamar Kintsurashvili and Gisela Pérez de Acha will discuss how to deal with weaponised disinformation in regions of hot and cold conflict. We’ll also hear from two training participants, Guli Bekurishvili and Vasiko Khorava, on their experiences.

Speakers

Tamar Kintsurashvili is Executive Director of Media Development Foundation - MDF since 2017. Priory, she served as a chairperson of the MDF’s board. Tamar is an author and co-author of numerous researches and publications on hate speech, disinformation and media literacy. She is an editor-in-chief of www.mythdetector.ge, third-party partner of facebook’s fact-checking program. Tamar is also a member of Deutsche Welle Akademie Media and Information Literacy Experts Network (MILEN) and associate professor at Ilia State University.

Gisela Pérez de Acha reports on extremism and other topics for the Investigative Reporting Program with a focus on digital forensics and network analysis. She is also a human rights lawyer, an open source researcher at Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center Investigations Lab, and a trainer at Amnesty International’s Digital Verification Corps, a global network of volunteers who fact-check social media posts about war crimes and human rights violations.

Guli Bekurishvili is a Young European Ambassador, Researcher and Communication Coordinator, and Vasiko Khorava is a Student at Tbilisi State University. They are both currently participating in the online training course FACING DISINFORMATION: Insights and strategies to counter the online information pandemic’, run by the Regional Democratic Hub - Caucasus.

Alistair Alexander is a researcher, trainer and consultant on technology, art, society and ecology. He has worked as a tech journalist, organised direct actions for climate or global justice, as well as tech projects and campaigns with NGOs worldwide. At Tactical Tech, he led the award-winning Glass Room project, displaying immersive art in pop-up spaces to explore data, privacy and misinformation.

The project ‘Facing Disinformation’ is undertaken with the financial support of the German Federal Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt) as part of the Expanding Cooperation with Civil Society in the Eastern Partnership Countries and Russia (Eastern Partnership Programme).

Investigating Illicit Money Flows · Disruptive Fridays #25

Investigating illicit money flows: From Panama Papers to Pandora Papers. How journalists uncover corruption, tax evasion and conflict of interest.

November 5 2021, 5pm CET:

Frederik Obermaier in conversation with Michael Hornsby.

With: Frederik Obermaier (Investigative Journalist, DE) in conversation with Michael Hornsby (Communications Consultant, Anti-Corruption Data Collective, UK/DE)

In 2015, an anonymous whistleblower leaked internal documents of the financial service provider Mossack Fonseca to the journalists Frederik Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer from Süddeutsche Zeitung. They launched with the help of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) a worldwide investigation into the secretive world of shell companies. Together with hundreds of colleagues from more than 80 countries they followed the money – the money of prime ministers and the super-rich elite, of organized crime groups, of crooks and of criminals. The Panama Papers exposé led to hundreds of investigations and more than $1.3 billion being recouped by authorities. In 2021, ICIJ released the Pandora Papers, the largest investigation in journalism history which exposes a shadow financial system that benefits the world’s most rich and powerful.

In this Disruptive Fridays edition, we’ll hear more on how to investigate illicit money flows, from the Panama Papers to the Pandora Papers, and discuss how journalists uncover corruption, tax evasion and conflict of interest. The conversation between Frederik Obermaier (Investigative Journalist, DE) and Michael Hornsby (Communications Consultant, Anti-Corruption Data Collective, UK/DE) forms part of our programme series Challenging Corruption: Empowering Future Voices.

Frederik Obermaier is a Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative reporter for the Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s leading broadsheet. He is one of the two reporters first contacted by the anonymous source of the Panama Papers, the leaked documents that prompted a global investigation involving hundreds of journalists. He also initiated the Paradise Papers-revelations. Obermaier is member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, ICIJ.org. Learn more: How the Rich and Powerful Hide Their Money

Michael Hornsby is a communications professional specialising in strategic communications to support sustainable development. Among other roles, he currently serves as a communications consultant to the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, an innovative project bringing together leading journalist, data analysts, academics and policy advocates to expose and undermine corruption. He previously worked for over three years at Transparency International, the global anti-corruption coalition, leading media relations and communications responses to fast-emerging threats to anti-corruption worldwide. He has worked in publishing, media and public relations since graduating from SOAS, University of London, in 2011.

In the programme series Challenging Corruption: Empowering Future Voices (2021-2022), the Disruption Network Lab hosts a series of online workshops connected to public online conversations as part of the Disruptive Fridays series. Together with workshop participants and invited speakers we will reflect on new ways of challenging corruption in our societies, and imagine new tools and solutions together. In the Disruptive Fridays conversations, we will hear more from experts working in four areas of anti-corruption work where we can all see and experience the impact of corruption: environmental damage and the climate crisis; economic inequality, between and within countries; damage to democracy and freedom of expression; and the undermining of public health care systems.

The project ‘Challenging Corruption: Empowering Future Voices’ is funded by GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit) as commissioned by the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Digital Futures · Disruptive Fridays #24

May 28, 2021 · With: Imogen Malpas, Julia Kloiber, Irem Kurt & Ana Filipa Maceira · Moderated by Nada Bakr

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With: Imogen Malpas (Environmental journalist and founder of spanner labs), Julia Kloiber (Managing Director at Superrr Lab and Partner at Ashoka Germany, DE), Irem Kurt (UI/UX designer and freelance illustrator) & Ana Filipa Maceira (Architect and Illustrator). Moderated by Nada Bakr (Disruption Network Lab)

Disruptive Fridays #24 “Digital Futures” will be featuring projects from The New New fellowship. The projects explore the multitude of possible digital futures where migrant, BIPOC, queer, trans and marginalized genders voices reclaim intersectional digital spaces. Julia Kloiber, Imogen Malpas, Irem Kurt and Ana Filipa Maceira will join Nada Bakr to bring and share their inclusive visions for a plural digital future. Together, they will reflect on methods of collective practices, participatory design, anonymity, community building & coming together at a space for experimentation, the New New fellowship.

The New New is a space to explore our digital futures, what they hold for us, and how we can shape them. It aims to be a place for exchange, exploration and creation where current systems and practices can be reimagined. Rather than focusing on techno-solutionist narratives or technology’s economic opportunities, social values are at the heart of the discussion.

OUSA is a collective of migrant, BIPOC and diaspora illustrators and social changers that are building an intersectional digital platform to bring awareness to inequity and discrimination by creating new forms of collaboration and creative exchange.

The Dark Matters Database is a collaborative online portal documenting under-publicised illness presentations in Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) and marginalised genders. It is built on crowdsourced symptom information in the form of text and/or images from anonymous submitters around the world, and will serve both as a diagnostic aid for clinicians and as a self-advocacy tool for these groups.

Speakers

Julia Kloiber is a founder and activist who spent the past 10 years enabling social digital innovation that serves all people. She’s an advocate for women’s rights and open knowledge. Through her work she explores just and fair digital futures. Julia is the founder of the Prototype Fund, the feminist technology think-tank Superrr and she is a partner at Ashoka. juliakloiber.com

Irem Kurt is an UI/UX designer and freelance illustrator based in Berlin with a BA in Digital Media and a Diploma in Design from University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt. Irem volunteered for several projects, worked for a scholarship program for young adults with migration background, and gave art workshops. Currently is a volunteer for Maviblau e. V. And the co-founder of OUSA collective.

Ana Filipa Maceira is a Portuguese Architect and Illustrator with an MA in Urbanism that focused on emergency settlements for societies with low resources from both ISCTE, Lisbon and TU Darmstadt. Filipa worked as a volunteer tutor for low income neighborhoods, and more recently for Ateliermob, an Architecture Studio that focuses on housing marginalized communities and conducting participatory projects. After that experience the need to work as an Art-Activist became obvious which led to the co-creation of OUSA collective in Berlin, 2020.

Imogen Malpas is an environmental journalist and founder of spanner labs, a creative science communication studio. She holds a BASc in neuroscience and literature and an MSc in medical anthropology.

The New New is a joint initiative by the Bertelsmann Stiftung’s “Ethics of Algorithms” project and Superrr Lab in collaboration with Allianz Kulturstiftung and Goethe-Institut.

Disruptive Fridays supported by the European Cultural Foundation - Culture of Solidarity fund. Part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

Previous editions

Expanding the Stream · Disruptive Fridays #23

May 21, 2021 · With: Alexandra Weltz-Rombach, Oliver Baurhenn, Klara Hobza · Moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli

With: Alexandra Weltz-Rombach (Filmmaker and Producer, DE), Oliver Baurhenn (Co-director of CTM – Festival for Adventurous Music and Art, DE), Klara Hobza (Cross-disciplinary Artist, CZ/DE). Moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli (Artistic Director, Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE).

The Disruptive Fridays series started in April 2020, reflecting on collective solutions to foster critical thinking and cultural experimentation despite the global interruption of cultural events caused by the pandemic. The pandemic is not over yet, and cultural venues, artists, curators and producers are still suffering its consequences. However, we will remember this time as a moment in which we also took a challenge by inventing new opportunities and contexts of cultural engagement, and by developing new tools of interaction to connect with our audience. On May 21 our artistic director Tatiana Bazzichelli meets for a conversation filmmaker and producer Alexandra Weltz-Rombach, the co-artistic director of CTM Festival Oliver Baurhenn, and cross-disciplinary visual artist Klara Hobza. Together, they will share ideas and practices on how to develop experimental online formats, expanding the potential of digital culture, for festivals, workshops and other events, and share experiences that had a positive cultural impact so far.

Alexandra Weltz-Rombach and Oliver Baurhenn will introduce Streamback, a tool that they developed with Timm Ringewaldt, Stefan Brunner and many others, created by a group of Berlin media artists and cultural workers. Streamback was successfully adopted at the 2021 edition of CTM Festival “Transformation”. The browser-based app for audience interaction allowed viewers to upload short videos to be shared at streamed events. It enabled viewers not only to watch events, but also to document their presence publicly. The audience’s videos were recorded in the browser and automatically uploaded to the server. All videos were collected, arranged and projected onto a screen on stage. This way the stream audience became a part of the performance and visible for public and performers.

Klara Hobza will share her ideas and experiences on how she applied and expanded upon methods of art production in order to make the best of the lockdown situation. She will present three examples that all embrace live social interaction, collaboration and transmission, describing the experience of the online Daily Drawing workshops (first lockdown, 2020), the current collaboration with Rwandan Records on two live performances, and the project Animaloculomat, dealing with selfie-culture and the isolation that goes along with it (since 2017).

Speakers

Oliver Baurhenn *1970 is one of the curators and organisers of the annual CTM – festival for adventurous music and art. He arrived in Berlin in the very early nineties, where he studied Comparative Literature and French followed by Cultural Studies. Before taking the step into sound, he was co-curator of the Dutch-German project space kunstruimte-berlin, where he oversaw a buoyant period of exhibitions and activities until 2000. He joined the CTM core team in 2000. He is one of the founding members of several associations including DISK - Initiative Bild & Ton e.V. (Sound and Image Initiative, 2006) and the General Public project space (2005-2014). From mid-2010 to 2015 he led the 5-year “ECAS — Networking Tomorrow’s Art for an Unknown Future” project that was funded by the European Commission – Culture Programme. During this time (2007) he co-founded the ICAS- International Cities of Advanced Sound network. In 2015 he was the interim managing director of Germany’s biggest art association nGbK – neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (New Society for the Arts), Berlin. Since 2013 he is a member of the Berlin Council for the Arts / Rat für die Künste and since 2018 he is one of its spokesmen together with Silvia Fehrmann (DAAD Berlin). Besides he is an active radio producer for the Berlin community radio reboot.fm and the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF).

Alexandra Weltz-Rombach (*1973) is a filmmaker and producer. She holds an MA in Cultural Studies, General and Comparative Literature and History from Humboldt and Freie Universität Berlin. She also studied Audio-Visual Production at Guildhall University, London. Since 2020 she is the curator and owner of the Window Gallery “Auslage” in Pücklerstrasse 17. In 2019, she taught the course "Media Activism" at Leuphana University Lüneburg together with Julia Lazarus. She is part of the Radical Film Network Meeting Berlin and BUFA Film Club, which aims to promote and enhance the visibility of experimental and documentary films in Berlin. As a writer and director, she has worked on the TV documentaries "Marx Reloaded" (2011) and "Antonio Negri. A revolt that never ends" (2004). Her camera work for the documentary "Casa Luz" was awarded the Silver Palm at the Mexico City International Film Festival. Other cinematography credits include the music film "Berlin - Symphony of Now" (2019). Since 2001, she has produced various online films and installations with social-political themes for the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR /2007-2015), Oxfam (2016), NABU (2018), Plus 1 - Refugees Welcome (2019/20), among others.

Klara Hobza, born 1975 in Pilsen (CZ), lives and works in Berlin. Her media include video, lectures, performance and sculpture, conceptually held together by narrations of transmission, migration and large-scale self-imposed endeavors. In counter balance to this extroverted, project based practice, Hobza’s solitary studio practice consists of immersive drawings expanding onto the tradition of nature study and topics of humans as animals. She collaborates with people and institutions from science, technology and performers from musical and dance theater. Hobza studied visual art at the Munich Academy of Visual Arts (with Olaf Metzel), at Columbia University, New York (MFA), and at the Rogue Film School, Los Angeles (with Werner Herzog). The artist has been exhibiting, lecturing, performing and screening internationally since 2005. Her solo exhibitions include Animaloculomat at the Naturhistorisches Museum, Basel (2019), Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin (2017), Museum für Tier und Mensch, Oldenburg, Kunstverein Oldenburg (2019), and Naturama, Aargau (2020-21), Animaloculomataurus at Soy Capitán (2018). Hobza has been awarded with grants and fellowships from Stiftung Kunstfonds (2012 and 2021), Recherche Stipendium des Berliner Senats (2017) ars viva/BDI (2010), DIVA (2009), NYFA (2007), the SculptureCenter Prize (2005), a.o.. She is working with the galleries Soy Capitán in Berlin, Galerie für Landschaftskunst in Hamburg and WaldbugerWouters in Brussels. More info.

Tatiana Bazzichelli is the founder and programme director at Disruption Network Lab. Her focus of work is hacktivism, network culture, art and whistleblowing. In 2011-2014 she was programme curator at transmediale art & digital culture festival, where she developed the year-round initiative reSource transmedial culture Berlin, and curated several conference events, workshops and installations. She is member of the Transparency International Anti-Corruption Award Committee 2020. In 2019 she has been appointed jury member for the Hauptstadtkulturfonds (Capital Cultural Fund) by the German federal government and Berlin, and in 2020 jury member for the Kulturlichter prize, a new award for digital cultural education by the German federal government.

Supported by the European Cultural Foundation - Culture of Solidarity fund.
Part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

Online Events: What Works? · Disruptive Fridays #22

April 30, 2021 · With: Serah Njambi Rono, Maja Durlik, Anna Kuliberda · Moderated by Lieke Ploeger

Online is not great. We all know this by now. A lot gets lost in translation - energy, some of the knowledge and most of the human contact. It feels different, it feels worse but no one knows how long it will take before we’re able to meet face to face and start complaining about having offline meetings again, so it’s all we’ve got right now. Today we bring together three speakers that have worked on different types of online events to share their tips, tricks & experiences.

With:
Serah Njambi Rono (The Carpentries, KE/EE), Maja Durlik (TechSoup Europe, PL) and Anna Kuliberda (Anna Kuliberda Coaching, PL/DE). Moderated by Lieke Ploeger (Disruption Network Lab, NL/DE).

Serah Rono’s talk will cover the dynamics and quick tips on making the shift from in-person to online events, and discuss why it is important to prioritise accessibility as you plan for your virtual community events. She will speak about the experience of organising csv,conf, a community conference for data makers everywhere, as well as from the 2020 edition of CarpentryCon, the 7-week online community conference that The Carpentries ran across different timezones.

Maja Durlik has organized a webinar series, trainings and online events for more than 1200 participants last year, including for example MEGAPHONE. She’ll go through the questions and doubts we had in March of 2020, as well as lessons learned from answering them. There will be everything from how to set your expectations, to by how much cut the material you have for online to ways of taking care of your audiences because we’re all struggling. There will be a lot of complaining but we’ll also talk about the upside e.g. how online stakes are so much lower so there’s more room for trial and error, experimentation and iteration of the formats/tools and just playing around with different ideas.

Working as an independent consultant & educator, Anna Kuliberda helps people make the swtich from offline to online events. She will speak about managing expectations in what is possible and how in the offline and online, especially when there is no other way than online to have the event. She will also address the importance of setting goals and having a good understanding of what we as organizers want to achieve, and only then think about the technology. Finally she will give tips on working with speakers and experts when preparing presentations and speeches.

Speakers

Serah Njambi Rono is a computer scientist and a writer. She has served as a technologist and Developer Advocate in the Open Data, Open Source, Open Science space for more than 8 years now, and has broad and valuable experience in listening to and steering communities, developing and implementing strategies for various technical projects, and around community building, outreach and the sustainability of existing, mature communities. Serah is currently the Director of Community Development and Engagement at The Carpentries.

Maja Durlik is a community manager and researcher. She designs, organizes and carries out community building events in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia (e.g. MEGAPHONE). She listens and talks to activists to find out what is it that they miss and need to make it easier for them to do their work and change the world and then searches for experts and practitioners who can give them knowledge skills and expertise to make that happen. She’s a sociology graduate and before joining TechSoup Europe she was working in various research and evaluation projects but also managing social innovation ventures. Outside of work, Maja listens to way too many podcasts, she loves going on smaller and bigger trips around Poland, and as generic as it sounds loves everything Italian.

Anna Kuliberda is a coach, educator and facilitator supporting activists and non-profit organizations in management, innovation and change with the “Human not Robots” perspective. She is the founder of “The Radical Act of Self-Care“, a community against activists’ burnout, and specialises in program curation for events with meaning. Read more at www.annakuliberda.com.

Lieke Ploeger is the community director and administration officer of the Disruption Network Lab. She is the co-founder of the independent project space SPEKTRUM art science community, where she worked as community builder from 2014 to 2018. Her core interest lies in building and developing both online and offline communities of interest, with a focus on sharing knowledge and expertise in an open way. She previously worked for the Open Knowledge Foundation and for the National Library of the Netherlands. She has a double master of arts from the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands and has been involved in various European research projects in the areas of open cultural data, open access and open science.

Supported by the European Cultural Foundation - Culture of Solidarity fund.
Part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

Legacy of Resistance - Rediscovering Yugoslavia’s Partisan History · Disruptive Fridays #21

April 16, 2021 · With: Marta Popivoda and Gal Kirn · Moderated by Elena Veljanovska

The Yugoslav Socialist project (1945 – 1992) was a unique visionary experiment. Built on the partisan struggle and legacy, it aimed at creating new political institutions, equal gender representation, massive modernisation and functional infrastructure, as well as introducing new forms of ownership and practiced worker’s self-management. Yet, the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia broke into seven different countries after nationalist bloodshed in the 1990’s. After the break of the federal state, much of this legacy was wiped out by the historical revisionism that followed in each of the independent countries, transitioning to narrow-minded nationalist narratives. Underneath the blanket of growing nationalisms, the shared memory and culture built on this legacy still pertain and thrives among both, older and younger generations long after Yugoslavia’s fall. Nowadays, this legacy serves as an anchor for a progressive political identity and shared values of anti-fascism, solidarity, and internationalism.

One of Gal Kirn’s latest book, “The Partisan Counter-Archive Retracing the Ruptures of Art and Memory in the Yugoslav People's Liberation Struggle” - “covers rich (counter-) archival material – from partisan poems, graphic works, and photography, to monuments and films – and ends by describing the recent revisionist un-doing of the partisan past.”

The latest movie by Marta Popivoda “Landscapes of resistance” is “a journey through Sonja’s life and memories of her revolutionary days. Sonja was one of the first female partisans in Serbia who helped lead the resistance in Auschwitz.” Marta Popivoda and Gal Kirn both research and embody different temporal and political notions of the partisan ideology in their work. In this edition, we will discuss the possibilities to translate and transform this revolutionary past and antifascist ideology to counter the political polarisation and growing fascism in our contemporary society.

Speakers

Marta Popivoda (Filmmaker and researcher, SRB/DE)
Marta Popivoda (Berlin/Belgrade) is a filmmaker, video artist, and researcher. Her work explores tensions between memory and history, collective and individual bodies, as well as ideology and everyday life, with a focus on antifascist and feminist potentialities of the Yugoslav socialist project. She cherishes collective practice in art-making and research, and for several years has been part of the TkH (Walking Theory) collective. Popivoda’s first feature documentary, Yugoslavia, How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body, premiered at the 63rd Berlinale and was later screened at many international film festivals. The film is part of the permanent collection of MoMA New York, and it’s featured in What Is Contemporary Art? MoMA’s online course about contemporary art from 1980 to the present. Her work has also featured in major art galleries, such as Tate Modern London, MoMA New York, M HKA Antwerp, Museum of Modern Art + MSUM Ljubljana, etc. Popivoda received the prestigious Berlin Art Prize for the visual arts by Akademie der Künste Berlin and Edith-Russ-Haus Award for Emerging Media Artist. Her new feature documentary Landscapes of Resistance premiered in the Tiger Competition of the IFFR 2021.

Gal Kirn (Cultural and political theorist, SLO/DE)
Gal Kirn was born in Slovenia, Ljubljana (1980). He holds a diploma in political theory of University of Ljubljana (2005) and a PhD in political philosophy from the University of Nova Gorica (2012), where he defended his thesis on socialist Yugoslavia and philosophy of Louis Althusser with summa cum laude. He was a researcher at the Theory department of the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (2008-2010), and a research fellow at ICI Berlin (2010-2012). He received a fellowship at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart (2015), and was a postdoctoral fellow of the Humboldt-Foundation (2013-2016). He was a visiting scholar at GWZO, Leipzig in 2013 and 2017. Finally, he has been teaching courses in film, philosophy, and contemporary political theory at the Freie Universität Berlin, at Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen and University of Primorska (Koper). He held a postdoctoral position at TU Dresden, and currently is a visiting fellow at ICI Berlin.

Elena Veljanovska is a senior project manager at the Disruption Network Lab. From 2012 to 2019 she was the executive director and programme curator at Kontrapunkt Skopje, where among other projects, with Iskra Geshoska she co-developed the Festival for Critical Culture - CRIC (founded in 2016). In 2006 she co-founded Line I+M Platform for New Media Art and Technology, where she was the artistic director until 2010. Veljanovska has worked as a curator and cultural manager with numerous organisations and artists.

Supported by the European Cultural Foundation - Culture of Solidarity fund.
Part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

Global Fallout: Covid-19 in Africa, Latin America & Beyond · Disruptive Fridays #20

March 26, 2021 · With: Jacqueline Klopp, Madlen Davies and Ido Vock · Moderated by Alannah Travers

In the follow-up Disruptive Fridays to our 23rd Conference, Behind the Mask: Whistleblowing During the Pandemic Alannah Travers will be joined by three speakers to discuss the impact of the pandemic and vaccine roll-out in the Global South: Jacqueline Klopp, Co-Director of the Center for Sustainable Urban Development at Columbia University, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism's Global Health Correspondent, Madlen Davies and the New Statesman's International Correspondent, Ido Vock.

We'll be taking a look at the global implications (and unintended consequences) of Covid-19 - with Jaqueline discussing her research as part of Global Integrity's Anti-Corruption Evidence Programme, exploring corruption, gender and small scale cross border trade due to covid restrictions in East Africa, and Madlen and Ido discussing their coverage of the pandemic this year and the geopolitical (and geo-strategic) implications of the vaccine roll-out.

More details to follow. Do join us - it should be a lively and important follow-up to our Behind the Mask conference!

Speakers

Dr. Jacqueline Klopp is Co-Director of the Center for Sustainable Urban Development and a Research Scholar who explores the intersection of sustainable transport, land use, accountability, air pollution, climate change, and data and technology. She is the author of numerous academic and popular articles on land and the politics of infrastructure with a focus on Africa, and is increasingly exploring the potential of new technologies to impact transportation and land-use in the 21st Century and has been experimenting with creative urban mapping projects for both analysis and advocacy. Jacqueline received her B.A. from Harvard University where she studied Physics and her Ph.D. in Political Science is from McGill University. Prior to joining CSUD, she was an Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) and Director of the Economic and Political Development Concentration.
Jacqueline has worked as a consultant for the World Bank, the United Nations and World Resources Institute. She currently teaches in the Sustainable Development undergraduate program at Columbia University and is engaged in a project of the Anti-Corruption Evidence Program of Global Integrity, exploring corruption, gender and small scale cross border trade.

Madlen Davies is an award-winning investigative journalist specialising in health. Her stories, short films and documentaries have appeared in The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph, Daily Mail, CNN, Al Jazeera, Sky news, Channel 4's Dispatches, The Lancet, The British Medical Journal and are widely syndicated abroad. Madlen won the Association of British Science Writers award for the best investigative journalism in 2019, the Press Gazette British Journalism award for best food and farming category in 2018 and has previously won the Medical Journalist Association’s Young Journalist of the Year award. She was asked to host the US Centre for Disease Prevention and Control’s event on superbugs at the United Nations General Assembly meetings in 2017 and 2018.

Ido Vock is International Correspondent at the New Statesman. He co-hosts their weekly global affairs podcast, World Review, and is currently based in Berlin.

Alannah Travers stumbled into the Disruption Network Lab office soon after moving to Berlin in October 2020 and has been here ever since. Since graduating from Durham University in 2018, she has worked for a variety of political communications agencies and social movements: cutting her teeth at more traditional advertising agencies (Breakthrough Media and M&C Saatchi), before spending six months working on media and messaging at Extinction Rebellion. Alannah is interested in the rights of refugees and asylum seekers and, more widely, broader public policy initiatives to tackle growing inequality.

Supported by the European Cultural Foundation - Culture of Solidarity fund.
Part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

THE Q IN QONSPIRACY: QAnon as a Paradigm for Future Social-media-driven Conspiracism· Disruptive Fridays #19

March 12, 2021 · With: Wu Ming 1 and Florian Cramer, moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli

In this conversation between Wu Ming 1 and Florian Cramer, QAnon is discussed as a template for contemporary social-media-driven conspiracy fantasies that work simultaneously as games and a new kind of cults. By focusing on the mutation of conspiracy myths from countercultural phenomena to contemporary meme and influencer culture, they will focus on three conspiracy narratives: "The Great Replacement" (from Renaud Camus to Charlottesville), QAnon (from Pizzagate to the Capitol storming) and "The Great Reset" (as a set of pandemic-inspired variations on the old New World Order trope).

The conversation is centered around Wu Ming 1’s forthcoming book La Q di Qomplotto [The Q in qonspiracy], to be published end of March by Edizioni Alegre, which describes how conspiracy fantasies help legitimise systems of control (find here the index in English).

For the Italian readers, the book is already available for pre-order at https://edizionialegre.it/product/la-q-di-qomplotto/

Conspiracies have always existed. It is not a matter of preemptively denying the existence of any conspiracy. We need to understand what distinguishes real conspiracy from the fantasized ones. And it isn't enough to demonstrate that a conspiracy fantasy is unfounded: conspiracism is not about logic and factual accuracy, it's, as Furio Jesi would put it, a "mythological machine". The only way out of this mess is to find a new way into it. We must accept the challenge of conspiracism. We need to isolate the kernel of truth that any conspiracy fantasy contains and perverts, to understand the needs that these fantasies meet and then work to meet them in a different way.

Since 2020 we have been experiencing two pandemics at once: Covid-19 and conspiracy fantasies about Covid-19. The pandemic emergency accelerated a process that had been going on for years: the rise of a new kind of hyper-charged, social-media-driven conspiracism. In this respect, QAnon is a paradigmatic case.

What is QAnon, or what was it? A political movement, a game, a cult, a terrorist threat? All that and more.

In October 2017 an anonymous user started to post enigmatic messages – most of them announcing the impending arrest of Hillary Clinton – on the 4chan imageboard, a well-known far-right hangout. The author posed as a federal government insider and signed his dispatches with the letter "Q". In the following days Q published more and more messages, seemingly based on allusions, mysteries and riddles. A community of riddle-solvers rapidly became a real online subculture, then "QAnon" became the name of a larger phenomenon, a mass cult that kept growing in the social media sphere until it made thousands, millions of proselytes in the U.S. and other countries.

Those who converted to QAnon discovered a terrible truth: the world is controlled by a secret society of pedophile, blood-sucking Satanists, the "Cabal". Hillary is a top member, as well George Soros and Tom Hanks. However, there was also good news: a hero was fighting those monsters, and he had a foolproof plan. His name was Trump. Donald Trump.

Nobody knows when the Sars-Cov-2 virus started its journey of mutations and spillovers from bats through some intermediating species – probably pangolins – to humans. We only know that the epidemic began in China at the end of 2019 and rapidly spread throughout the world in the early months of 2020. Since then our lives have been heavily affected by the Emergency, i.e. by the ways in which governments and multinational organizations reacted to the pandemic and administered our lives.

While staying at home, people were trapped in an infodemic crossfire, a bombardment of incoherent narratives. Many of the measures taken to tackle the spread of the virus were far from being evidence-based. Governments were eager to throw any responsibility on ordinary people, putting all the emphasis on individual behaviour and distracting public attention from the neoliberal policies that had weakened national health systems and left them unprepared to face the emergency.

As a consequence, many people concluded that the mainstream media were unreliable. This dissatisfaction was immediately intercepted by conspiracism: the virus was engineered in some secret lab and intentionally spread by this or that geopolitical enemy, or rather, by George Soros, nay, by Bill Gates. Gates maneuvers the World Health Organization in order to "control the world with vaccines". In fact, no, the virus spread because of 5G. It's all a plan. It's the Great Reset etc.

QAnon took advantage of this situation to expand tumultuously not only in the US but all over Europe... before a vast social media crackdown on QAnon profiles and Trump's defeat at the presidential election put the cult in disarray.

On January 6th, during the assault on Capitol Hill, QAnon signs and flags were waving, and it looked like a showdown, the spark that would ignite the civil war. At the end of the day, it was a will-o'-the-wisp. In the following weeks, QAnon disaggregated and experienced a meltdown, but don't rejoice too soon at our escape: the womb it crawled from is still going strong.
Womb? What womb? What allowed QAnon to form and grow? What needs and frustrations did QAnon exploit? How was all that possible?

Wu Ming 1's book La Q di Qomplotto [The Q in qonspiracy] starts from these questions. The author's main take is that conspiracism is a crucial problem for anyone who wants to criticize capitalism effectively, as its rhetorical device channels energies for potential change into diversionary narratives. And it moves real quick: whereas anticapitalism often walks like a tortoise, conspiracism runs like a hare.

In the first part of the book, while telling the story of QAnon, Wu Ming 1 makes a thorough inventory of useful and useless concepts, exposes how conspiracy fantasies work inside our head, and tries to understand the untold systemic function of conspiracism.

In the second part, he sequences QAnon's genome, tracing all the legends, tropes and images that came together into QAnon's great narrative. A process that lasted for decades, even centuries. The penultimate synthesis was Satanic Ritual Abuse, a conspiracy fantasy that caused a wave of moral panic in the 1980s and 1990s, first in the US and then in Europe.

Here's where the author recounts his personal experience: when he was a member of the Luther Blissett Project, he did investigative work on Satanic Panic and started a campaign in solidarity with three defendants, people who were in prison awaiting trial, charged with child rape and ritual murder. They eventually got acquitted. Twice.

It happened in Bologna in the 1990s. It happened while four members of the LBP, later to become the Wu Ming collective, were writing a novel entitled – well look at that – Q.

Speakers

Wu Ming 1
Author & Writer, Wu Ming Foundation, IT
Wu Ming 1 is a member of the Wu Ming writers collective created in 2000. He has translated into Italian works by Elmore Leonard and Stephen King. Since 2014 he has managed the Quinto Tipo series of the Italian publisher Edizioni Alegre.

With the Wu Ming collective he has written the novels Q (1999), Manituana (2007), Altai (2009) and L'armata dei sonnambuli (2014). As Wu Ming 1 he is the author of New thing (2004), Point lenana (2013) and Cent'anni a Nordest (2015). His latest book is Un viaggio che non promettiamo breve. Venticinque anni di lotte No Tav (Einaudi, 2016). His latest book is Proletkult (Einaudi, 2018).

Florian Cramer
Reader in 21st Century Visual Culture/Autonomous Practices at Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam, NL
Florian Cramer is reader in 21st Century Visual Culture/Autonomous Practices at Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, and he is teaching at the Piet Zwart Institute (part of Willem de Kooning Academy). He is currently co-supervising two research projects funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), Making Matters (bridging art, design and technology through Material Practices) and Autonomy Lab (investigates new meanings that artist/research/activist/interdisciplinary collectives give to autonomy). Cramer is a board member of De Player/De Layer, a space for sound/performance art, PrintRoom, a space for artists’ books and DIY publishing and MONO/Awak(e), an intersectional club, bar and venue for public debates.

Tatiana Bazzichelli
Founder and Programme Director, Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE
Tatiana Bazzichelli is founder and programme director at Disruption Network Lab, an organisation in Berlin examining the intersection of politics, technology, and society, and exposing the misconduct and wrongdoing of the powerful (disruptionlab.org). Her focus of work is hacktivism, network culture, art and whistleblowing. In 2011-2014 she was programme curator at transmediale art & digital culture festival, where she developed the year-round initiative reSource transmedial culture Berlin, and curated several conference events, workshops and installations. She is member of the Transparency International Anti-Corruption Award Committee 2020. In 2019 she has been appointed jury member for the Hauptstadtkulturfonds (Capital Cultural Fund) by the German federal government and Berlin, and in 2020 jury member for the Kulturlichter prize, a new award for digital cultural education by the German federal government.

Supported by the European Cultural Foundation - Culture of Solidarity fund.
Part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

ReImagine Community: Collective learning and creative mentoring · Disruptive Fridays #18

February 26, 2021 · With: Erin James and Scott Elliott · Moderated by Lieke Ploeger

Today we will speak about community engagement, collective learning and creative mentoring, with speakers connected to UK-based art charity Lighthouse and Landmark/Bergen Kunsthall from Norway, two organisations that we have been working together with since 2019 in the Re-Imagine Europe project. As part of this project, ten different cultural organisations have been working on new ways to open up and invite their audience in as participants, producers, co-curators or protagonists, to build and expand networks with new and existing communities. In this edition we will hear more on two inspiring examples.

Lighthouse (UK) is a Brighton-based arts charity, providing an accessible programme of talks, exhibitions, commissions, professional development and education initiatives, which aims to connect new developments in art, technology and society. Their Lighthouse Young Creatives programme is an acclaimed mentoring scheme assisting young people to pursue careers in the creative industries.

Erin James (Erin James Media, UK) will share more on how she has kick-started her career through the Young Creative programme in 2020. During the last year, while working from home, she has launched a small business, become a host for Brighton’s first next-gen Breakfast Show, and started a collaboration with a local art gallery.

“It has been a challenging and difficult time to be juggling so much, but I am grateful for the busyness. With this talk, I want to explore what it means to be creating and working during such a difficult time, and how art can be used as activism in a time where it’s needed more than ever. How can we disrupt the toxic system in which we live in, and uplift ourselves and others around us to challenge and change the world around us?”

Scott Elliott is joining from the Bergen Kunsthall (NO) centre for contemporary art. Bergen Kunsthall organises a broad range of learning activities and debates that are open to everyone. Landmark is their vibrant strand of live events that includes concerts and club nights. Scott will present the newly commissioned work of Nikima Jagudajev, entitled ‘Basically’ that is currently occupying Bergen Kunsthall’s gallery V space. The work, created together with numerous collaborators, invites visitors to experience the process of choreographing, rehearsing, discussing and staging the movement-based work as a way to share the moments of collective learning and making that lie at the heart of the work.

Jagudajev’s practice is concerned with the format of gatherings. Her works engage participants and audiences in open-ended situations which collectively make up space and deviate. Projects include formal dance sequences, but also food, divination, sorcery, music, clothing, and sound. These elements work as informal invitations to engage in different ways, shifting attention or offering agency. Her spaces propose strangeness and are interested in the voids of representation, in what is often left out from what is considered culturally valuable or desirable.

Speakers

Erin James (Media) is a published Photographer / Photojournalist, Writer / Poet, Radio Host, DJ, Curator and Founder of Tough Cookie Mag. She hopes to inspire others to speak out on difficult and stigmatized subjects through the medium of art, particularly with regards to her zine. Her work focuses on socially engaged topics and social justice issues; centered on championing and uplifting marginalised voices and stories through her work.

Scott Elliott is a Bergen and Athens based writer, publisher and curator, currently working as curator of the live program at Bergen Kunsthall. His first artist novel ‘The El Dorado Commission’, received the Scorpion and Felix Award for international artist fiction from Publication Studio Vancouver and was subsequently published through PSV. He is the founder and editor of Coda Press, and directs Weekend Server, an institutional model commissioning new works, residencies and gallery representation. Weekend Server colludes with other organisations, sometimes as host and sometimes as guest, often both at once.

Supported by the European Cultural Foundation - Culture of Solidarity fund.
Part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

Radical Health Care · Disruptive Fridays #17

February 12, 2021 · With: Feminist Health Care Research Group (Inga Zimprich & Julia Bonn) and Luiza Prado · Moderated by Elena Veljanovska

The global pandemic and the consequent focus on health in the past year emphasized the need for a better organized and more inclusive institutionalized health care system. Many social groups are underrepresented, and their specific needs are not recognised: specific women’s needs, the needs of displaced people, specific needs of trans and non-binary people, the emotional needs of sick people; to name a few. In this edition we will discuss radical feminist health practices, and how they tackle the power mechanisms over gender, race and class in the health sector.

The collective FHCRG and the artist Luzia Prado, have already done enormous empowering work in this field. With them we will discuss the boundaries of the current health care systems, as well as historical radical health care initiatives in Germany they have come upon through their work. Further on we will discuss how the health movement challenged classist and patriarchal medicine and proposed radical forms of medical and reproductive self-empowerment. Luiza Prado’s work focuses on the control over fertility and reproduction as a foundational biopolitical gesture for the establishment of the colonial/modern gender system. We will touch upon her vast research to tackle the topics of colonial domination through the lens of the birth control mechanisms, and the potential for resistance, disruption and empowerment. Overall in our talk we will shed more light into the various notions of care, as well as the potential for empowerment through actions and research.

Speakers

Feminist Health Care Research Group (Inga Zimprich and Julia Bonn)
Feminist Health Care Research Group (FHCRG) consists of artist, parent and care assistant Inga Zimprich and artist, parent, and body worker Julia Bonn. FHCRG develops exhibitions and workshops and publishes zines that aim to create space in which we can share vulnerability, center access needs, and help destigmatize mental health in cultural work. Feminist Health Care Research Group questions the ableist paradigm prevailing in the art field, which is determined by ideals of productivity, independence and rivalry. Their latest work "Practices of Radical Health Care" investigated the health movement that emerged in West-Germany during the 70s and 80s at the fringes of second-wave feminism and the squatting scene. In such varied formats as health centres, self-help groups, doctor’s collectives and self-organized clinics and therapy groups the health movement challenged classist and patriarchal medicine and proposed radical forms of medical and reproductive self-empowerment. In their most recent zine "Being in Crises Together" FHCRG assembles methods of mutual support in emotional crises. Feminist Health Care Research Group has been part of the 11th Berlin Biennale, Bergen Assembly, and Caring Structures (Kunstverein Hildesheim) amongst others.

Luiza Prado
Dr. Luiza Prado de O. Martins is an artist and researcher whose work examines themes around fertility, reproduction, coloniality, gender, and race. In her doctoral dissertation, she approaches the control over fertility and reproduction as a foundational biopolitical gesture for the establishment of the colonial/modern gender system, theorizing the emergence of ‘technoecologies of birth control’ as a framework for observing — and resisting, disrupting, troubling — colonial domination. Her ongoing artistic research project, “A Topography of Excesses,” looks into encounters between human and plant beings within the context of indigenous and folk reproductive medicine, approaching these practices as expressions of radical care. Throughout 2020, she will develop the long-term garden project “In Weaving Shared Soil” in collaboration with The Institute for Endotic Research. She is currently based in Berlin. She is a founding member of Decolonising Design.

Are Kleptocrats the big winners of Covid-19? · Disruptive Fridays #16

January 29, 2021: With Tom Burgis moderated by Alannah Travers

In our first Disruptive Fridays episode of the year, we'll be joined by award-winning investigative journalist and author Tom Burgis to discuss the opportunities that the pandemic has provided for kleptocracy to flourish. Across the world, we've seen dramatic increases in government spending, logistical obstacles for watchdogs monitoring kleptocratic financial flows, and a ready-made excuse for restrictions on freedom of movement... and political protest. In our conversation, Tom will share his wealth of experience on the topic (nodding to his recently published second book, 'Kleptopia: How dirty money is conquering the world"), on how the crisis has helped to break down defences against kleptocracy. What can we learn about the response to the pandemic and the structures that allow the transnational kleptocracy to thrive, what are our strategies to hold power to account and could the post-pandemic future look brighter?

Speakers

Tom Burgis is an award-winning investigative reporter. Based in London after years as a foreign correspondent in South America and Africa, he is a long-standing member of the Financial Times’ investigations team. He has exposed major corruption scandals, covered terrorist attacks, coups and forgotten conflicts, and traced dirty money from the Kremlin to Washington. His journalism has won awards in the US and Asia and he has twice been shortlisted at the British Press Awards, the British Journalism Awards and the European Press Prize.

His first book, The Looting Machine, was published in 2015. It revealed how the exploitation of Africa's vast natural resources condemns the continent to corruption, conflict and poverty. The New York Times called it a ‘brave, defiant book’. It won the Overseas Press Club of America's award for the year's best book on international affairs.
Kleptopia: How dirty money is conquering the world, his second book, was published in September 2020. It exposes the hidden connections that link a massacre on the Kazakh steppe and a stolen election in Zimbabwe to the City of London and, ultimately, the White House. Burgis reveals how the world's kleptocrats – those who rule through corruption – are uniting and threaten to overwhelm democracy.

Alannah Travers is a Digital communication manager at the Disruption Network Lab. She stumbled into the Disruption Network Lab office soon after moving to Berlin in October 2020 and has been managing the online communications ever since. After graduating from Durham University (UK) in 2018, she worked for a variety of political communications agencies and social movements. At university, she worked with recently resettled refugees to hold events, language classes, and the “Durham for Refugees” summer festival. In London, she cut her teeth at more traditional advertising agencies (Breakthrough Media and M&C Saatchi), before spending six months working on media and messaging at Extinction Rebellion. Alannah remains especially interested in the rights of refugees and asylum seekers and, more widely, broader public policy initiatives to tackle growing inequality and promote a sustainable future for all.

Supported by the European Cultural Foundation - Culture of Solidarity fund.
Part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

Colonial Borders & Counter Archives · Disruptive Fridays #15

December 4, 2020: Lauren Alexander, Ghalia Elsrakbi, Daniela Ortiz,moderated by Nada Bakr

On the 15th and last Disruptive Fridays episode of this year, we invited Lauren Alexander & Ghalia Elsrakbi of Foundland Collective and Daniela Ortiz in a follow up converstation for Disruption Network Lab's 21st conference BORDERS OF FEAR: Migration, Security and Control (on November 27-29).

In the conversation, Foundland collective will speak about their artistic practice in creating personal “Counter-archives” by means of alternative storytelling and documenting underrepresented narratives of migration, conflict, loss and memory. Daniela Ortiz will address her work with visual narratives on borders as a colonial discourse and crtically reflect on migration control systems and its legal structure.

With:

Lauren Alexander (Foundland Collective, SA, NL)
Ghalia Elsrakbi (Foundland Collective, SY/NL)
Daniela Ortiz (Artist, PE)
Nada Bakr (Disruption Network Lab, EG/DE)

Speakers

Lauren Alexander & Ghalia Elsrakbi
Foundland Collective was formed in 2009 by South African Lauren Alexander and Syrian Ghalia Elsrakbi and since 2014 the collective is based between Amsterdam and Cairo. The duo collaboration explores underrepresented political and historical narratives by working with archives via art, design, writing, educational formats, video making and storytelling. Throughout their development, the duo has critically reflected upon what it means to produce politically engaged work from their position as non-Western artists working between Europe and the Middle East. From their artist statement: “Increasingly, we find it important to continue highlighting marginalized perspectives and keep experimenting with slower, inclusive formats for collection, translation and interpretation. By generating and caring for ‘counter-archives’ as a mode of working, we aim to resist and stay critical towards hasty and manipulative modes of communication. In a world where media sadly functions as a way to provoke hate and xenophobia, we believe in making visible an understanding of our interconnected geopolitical responsibilities.”

Foundland Collective was awarded the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship for research in the largest Arab American archive in 2015, the outcome of which was presented as video installation at Centre Pompidou in Paris (2017) and their short video, “The New World, Episode One” premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival (2018). The duo have lectured and exhibited internationally including at ISPC, New York, Ars Electronica, Linz, Impakt Festival, BAK, Utrecht, London Art Fair, Beursschouwburg, Brussels, Fikra Biennial, Sharjah and Tashweesh Feminist Festival, Cairo and Brussels. They have been shortlisted for the Dutch Prix de Rome prize in 2015 and Dutch Design Awards in 2016. Foundland’s short video works are preserved and distributed by Dutch media art archive LIMA in Amsterdam.

Daniela Ortiz
Through her work, she aims to generate visual narratives in which the concepts of nationality, racialization, social class and genre are explored so as to critically understand structures of colonial, patriarchal and capitalist power. Her recent projects and research deal with the European migratory control system, its links to colonialism and the legal structure created by European institutions in order to inflict violence on racialized and migrant communities. She has also developed projects about the Peruvian upper class and its exploitative relationship with domestic workers. Recently, her artistic practice has reverted to visual and manual work, developing artworks in ceramic, collage and formats such as children’s books in order to shift away from the aesthetics of Eurocentric conceptual art.

Apart from her artistic practice, she is the mother of a three-year-old, she gives talks, holds workshops, carries out investigations and participates in discussions on Europe’s migratory control system and its ties to coloniality in various contexts.

Nada Bakr is an independent curator, researcher, and cultural manager. Her research-driven projects straddle the fields of visual arts, digital culture and networked activism, and unfold between Berlin and Cairo. Nada is Community and Project Manager at Disruption Network Lab, Berlin, and Managing Director and Co-Curator of Cairotronica.

Supported by the European Cultural Foundation - Culture of Solidarity fund.
Part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

Follow the Data: Corruption, Leaks & People vs. Power Disruptive Fridays #14

November 20, 2020: Natalie Sedletska, Denis “Jaromil” Roio, Friedrich Lindenberg, moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli

This Disruptive Fridays edition is a broadcast of the event held at the 4th CIJ Logan Symposium Collective Intelligence (16-19 November 2020)

In this special edition for the 4th CIJ Logan Symposium Collective Intelligence, we hold a panel discussion on how open-source intelligence tools and collective strategies reconfigure investigations. Moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli, this talk brings together investigative television journalist Natalie Sedletska, software artisan and ethical hacker Denis “Jaromil” Roio, and data team lead at OCCRP Friedrich Lindenberg. This panel focuses on the one hand on methods of making leaks and large datasets accessible to a wider public, on the other hand on models to avoid the exploitation of sensitive data by authorities or organised crime.

Natalie Sedletska will share the experience of the YanukovychLeaks National Project, concerning the nearly 200 folders of documents found in the lake at the residence of former president of Ukraine, thrown to destroy them as people were escaping the luxury residence. The documents were rescued by volunteer divers and systematised, investigated and published by a group of journalists and activists to make them available to citizens around the world.

Denis “Jaromil” Roio will speak about the importance of social movements challenging city policy on money speculation and hidden illicit cash flows, finding ways to have agency through collectivising big data controlled by financial and institutional powers.

Friedrich Lindenberg will present some of the recent work OCCRP’s data team has done analysing a large-scale dataset related to the murder investigation of Slovak journalist Jan Kuciak. He’ll also summarise some lessons learned about the use of data in investigative reporting, and the limitations of transparency as a method and an ideal, contributing another perspective coming from the context of investigating organised crime and corruption.

Natalie Sedletska
Investigative Reporter & TV Host, UA
Natalie Sedletska is a Ukrainian investigative television journalist and editor who works in the anticorruption field. At present, Natalie works as the chief editor and host of the investigative program “Schemes” – a television project that she founded in 2014 with the support of the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. “Schemes” project is broadcasted by the Ukrainian public TV on a weekly basis.

Denis "Jaromil" Roio
Digital Social Innovation Expert, Software Artisan & Ethical Hacker, IT
Denis Roio, better known by his hacker nickname Jaromil, is CTO of the DECODE EU flagship project on blockchain technologies and data ownership, involving pilots in cooperation with the municipalities of Barcelona and Amsterdam. Jaromil published his PhD on “Algorithmic Sovereignty” (AlgoSov.org) and received the Vilém Flusser Award at transmediale (Berlin, 2009) while leading for six years the R&D department of the Netherlands Media Art Institute (Montevideo/TBA). He has been a fellow of the “40 under 40” European Young Leaders programme since 2012 and was listed in the “Purpose Economy” list of the top 100 social entrepreneurs in the EU in 2014.

Friedrich Lindenberg
Data Team Lead, OCCRP, Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, DE
Friedrich Lindenberg leads the data team at OCCRP. He is responsible for the development of OCCRP Aleph and supports ongoing investigations where data analysis is needed. In 2014/2015, Friedrich was a Knight International journalism fellow with the International Center for Journalists, working with the African Network of Centers for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR), and in 2013 he was a Knight-Mozilla Open News fellow at Spiegel Online in Hamburg. Prior to that, Friedrich was an open data activist, and worked to promote the release of government information about public finance, lobbying, procurement and law making across the world.

Supported by the European Cultural Foundation - Culture of Solidarity fund.
Part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

ReImagine Culture
Learnings from Culture during COVID-19
Disruptive Fridays #13

October 16, 2020: Davorka Begović, Anna Ramos, Slavo Krekovic, moderated by Lieke Ploeger

We started our Disruptive Fridays series in April 2020 by asking: what are our strategies to keep working with art and culture when our contexts of sharing are so limited? Six months later, we re-visit this question with three speakers that have been trying out creative solutions for resistance to the isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and hear from them how they have worked on reimagining culture in times of corona.

With:
- Davorka Begović (KONTEJNER, HR)
- Anna Ramos (Radio Web MACBA, ES)
- Slavo Krekovic (A4 - Space for Contemporary Culture, SK).
Moderated by Lieke Ploeger (Disruption Network Lab, NL/DE).

Today’s speakers form part of a group of 10 cultural organisation from across Europe that work together in the Re-Imagine Europe project, addressing the social and political challenges we face today. They will share how they have found new ways to continue their cultural work over the past months, and we’ll discuss together how can we reimagine formats for cultural production.

Davorka Begović of KONTEJNER, an NGO engaged in curatorial work, the organization of art festivals and other public events, education and social theory, will speak about the challenges of festival production in times of corona. Despite the adjusted reality and programme changes because of different situations in different countries, they recently completed a successful edition of the Touch Me festival, dedicated to relations between technology, science and art.

Anna Ramos joins from Radio Web MACBA, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona's online radio. RWM is a radio-beyond-radio, operating at the intersection of art, philosophy, critical thinking, radiophonic practices, experimental music and orality; an online project that has amassed 14 years of collective learning and more than 800 files. She will share the paradox of gaining exposure and new attention, thanks to the digital nature of the project -ie. podcasts- during the lockdown, while experiencing a temporary paralysis, both in their methodology and in the small community of affects behind the RWM Working Group.

Slavo Krekovic will bring in the perspective of A4 - Space for Contemporary Culture, an independent cultural centre in Bratislava with daily public events (experimental music, new media art, contemporary dance, theatre, cinema, new media art) that has been facing challenges – as many others – since the first pandemic days in March 2020. The current governmental restrictions on public events in Slovakia are again going to be very radical and are forcing the independent cultural operators to rethink their approach, including setting up new kinds of educational and performance-oriented online events. He will also talk about the upcoming NEXT Festival of experimental music which is supposed to take place early December with the theme "Subject to change".

Speakers

Davorka Begović graduated in Musicology at the Academy of Music, University of Zagreb. For the last 15 years, she has been working in the field of culture and art as a selector and a producer, primarily of music, but also theatre, contemporary dance, multimedia and film projects. She was an associate from the very beginning of the Culture of Change Programme at the Student Centre Zagreb, where afterwards she held the position of the Music Programme Artistic Director. Currently, she works as a freelance musicologist and independent curator, specializing in the field of contemporary (experimental) music and related art forms and as a collaborator of KONTEJNER she runs the international project Re-Imagine Europe.

Anna Ramos runs the online radio project Radio Web MACBA and is the co-director of the label Alku, a multidisciplinary platform operating since 1997. She has background in journalism and develops projects, installations and programmes of different sorts, quite often related to sound and critical thinking. She lives and works in Barcelona.

Slavo Krekovic is a musician and sound artist, musicologist, contemporary music and new media art curator and cultural organizer/nonprofit activist. He is the organizer and curator of series of experimental music and multimedia events, including the annual NEXT Festival of Advanced Music (since 2000) and Multiplace new media culture network festival (since 2002). In 2004 co-founded independent cultural centre A4 – Space of Contemporary Culture in Bratislava, where he holds the position of Deputy Director and Music Curator.

Lieke Ploeger is the community director and administration officer of the Disruption Network Lab. She is the co-founder of the independent project space SPEKTRUM art science community, where she worked as community builder from 2014 to 2018. Her core interest lies in building and developing both online and offline communities of interest, with a focus on sharing knowledge and expertise in an open way. She previously worked for the Open Knowledge Foundation and for the National Library of the Netherlands, where she was involved in various European research projects in the areas of open cultural data, open access and open science.

Supported by the European Cultural Foundation - Culture of Solidarity fund.
Part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

Global Surveillance in the Data Society
Disruptive Fridays #12

September 11 2020: Sonia Kennebeck, Assia Boundaoui, Jer Thorp. Moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli, Mauro Mondello

On September 11, Disruption Network Lab is organising Disruptive Fridays 12#: Global Surveillance in the Data Society, a preview of the conference DATA CITIES: Smart Technologies, Tracking & Human Rights - which Tatiana Bazzichelli is curating together with investigative journalist Mauro Mondello (September 25-27, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin).

The conversation will reflect on the discourse of surveillance and human rights during the coronavirus crisis, and will reconnect it to another event that reshaped our society: 9/11. We decided to host it on 9/11 as a symbolic date, which signed unprecedented measures on the level of security and surveillance, compromising our privacy and freedom, and changing the way we perceived our society. To unfold the discussion we invited three speakers that have been dealing with the issues of data, tracking and human rights since long time.

With:
- Sonia Kennebeck (Film Director, MY/DE/US)
- Assia Boundaoui (Journalist, Filmmaker, Artists, DZA/US)
- Jer Thorp (Artist, Writer and Teacher, CA/US).
Moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli (Artistic Director, Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE), Mauro Mondello (Investigative Journalist, Filmmaker, IT).

Sonia Kennebeck will introduce her last film UNITED STATES VS. REALITY WINNER, currently in post-production. The film is the story of 25-year-old NSA contractor Reality Winner who disclosed a document about Russian election interference to the media and became the number one leak target of the Trump administration. In the framework of the discussion on post-9/11 surveillance and whistleblowing, she will trace a line that connects her three films: National Bird (the story of three whistleblowers who blow the whistle on the US drone war), Enemies of the State (about the case of hacker Matt DeHart), and United States vs. Reality Winner.

Assia Boundaoui will present her work combining community storytelling, visual arts, and artificial intelligence. Her work, The Inverse Surveillance Project, is an AI program analysing hundreds of thousands of documents collated by the FBI on people of colour over the past 100 years, revealing historic patterns on tactics it used during operations. An Algerian-American journalist and filmmaker based in Chicago, she directed the film The Feeling of Being Watched, a documentary investigating a decade of FBI surveillance in Boundaoui's Muslim-American community, which had its world premiere at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival.

Jer Thorp, a data artist that designed (with Jake Barton) an algorithm and a software tool to aid in the placement of the names on the 9/11 Memorial in Manhattan, will discuss his data artistic practice. His 9/11 Memorial Project allowed to arrange the names of those killed in the 9/11 attacks, respecting their familial, personal and business relationships with each other. He also collaborated with Mark Hansen, Ben Rubin, and Local Projects to create an interactive timeline of the attacks. Author of many data-inspired artworks, his forthcoming book Living in Data will be published in 2021.

We will discuss the issue of surveillance and human rights, reflecting on the transformation of our lives when security measures have been extensively implemented in the US and worldwide.
Tatiana Bazzichelli and Mauro Mondello will moderate the talk.

Sonia Kennebeck, Film Director, MY/DE/US
Sonia Kennebeck is an independent documentary filmmaker and investigative journalist with more than 15 years of directing and producing experience. She has directed eight television documentaries and more than 50 investigative reports. National Bird, her first feature-length film, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival 2016 and was also selected for Tribeca, Sheffield, and IDFA. In March 2017, National Bird received the prestigious Ridenhour Documentary Film Prize that is awarded to one documentary a year “that defends the public interest, advances or promotes social justice, or illuminates a more just vision of society.” Kennebeck received a master’s degree in international affairs from American University in Washington, D.C. She was born in Malacca, Malaysia, and lives in New York.

Assia Boundaoui, Journalist, Filmmaker, Artists, DZA/US
Assia Boundaoui is an Algerian-American journalist and filmmaker based in Chicago. She has reported for the BBC, NPR, PRI, Al Jazeera, VICE, and CNN. Her debut short film about hijabi hair salons for the HBO LENNY documentary series premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. Her feature length debut THE FEELING OF BEING WATCHED, a documentary investigating a decade of FBI surveillance in Assia's Muslim-American community, had its world premiere at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. She is currently a fellow with the Co-Creation Studio at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, where she is iterating her most recent work, the Inverse Surveillance Project. Assia has a Masters degree in journalism from New York University and is fluent in Arabic.

Jer Thorp, Artist, Writer and Teacher, CA/US
Jer Thorp is best known for designing the algorithm to place the nearly 3,000 names on the 9/11 Memorial in Manhattan. Jer was the New York Times' first Data Artist in Residence, is a National Geographic Explorer, and in 2017 and 2018 served as the Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress. Jer is a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow, and an alumnus of the World Economic Foundation’s Global Agenda Council on Design and Innovation. He is an adjunct Professor in New York University’s renowned Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), and is the Co-Founder of The Office for Creative Research. In 2015, Canadian Geographic named Jer one of Canada’s Greatest Explorers. Jer’s book 'Living in Data’ will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the spring of 2021.

Play or Get Played
Disruptive Fridays #11

August 28, 2020: Marloes de Valk, Chloê Langford, Gabriel Helfenstein, moderated by Jonas Frankki

In Play or Get Played we explored video game utopias and playable political satires with:

Marloes de Valk (Software Artist & Writer, NL)
Chloê Langford (Artist & Programmer, AAA Software Collective, AU/DE)
Gabriel Helfenstein (Transmedia Artist & Writer, AAA Software Collective, FR/DE)
Moderated by Jonas Frankki (Disruption Network Lab, SE/DE)

Games we referred to:

What Remains & Villains & Heroes by Marloes de Valk
Utopias - Navigating without Coordinates by AAA Software Collective

Marloes de Valk (NL) is a software artist and writer in the post-despair stage of coping with the threat of global warming and being spied on by the devices surrounding her. Surprised by the obsessive dedication with which we, even post-Snowden, share intimate details about ourselves to an often not too clearly defined group of others, astounded by the deafening noise we generate while socializing with the technology around us, she is looking to better understand why. She studied Sound and Image at the Royal Conservatory in the The Hague, specialising in abstract compositional computer games, HCI and crashing computers. She has participated in exhibitions internationally, teaches workshops, gives lectures (among others at Transmediale and Chaos Communication Congress) and has published articles on Free/Libre/Open Source Software, free culture, art and technology. She is a thesis supervisor in the Master’s Program in Experimental Publishing at Piet Zwart Institute and a fellow at V2_Lab for the Unstable Media.

Her latest projects include Naked on Pluto (VIDA award), with Aymeric Mansoux and Dave Griffiths, a playful yet disturbing online game world, developed with Free/Libre Open Source Software, which parodies the insidiously invasive traits of much “social software”. The SKOR Codex (Japan Media Arts Festival award), with La Société Anonyme, a limited edition of eight hand bound books inspired by NASA’s Golden Record, aiming at preserving the memory of Dutch art institution SKOR for the distant future after it was closed down in 2012 due to massive funding cuts in the arts. What Remains, with Iodyne Dynamics, a darkly humorous, authentic Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) 8-bit game based on how public opinion was, and still is, shaped to prevent the creation of government regulations needed to protect us from man-made environmental disasters. (2019)

AAA is a software art collective based in Berlin, with members from countries including Australia, Argentina, Russia, Germany, USA and France. We make video games, give lectures and performances, maintain a blog and run a public community event called aaartgames. Our collective cooperation has formed in response to the frustration we feel with the fine art and video game production industries. We use game engines to make art in the wilderness between these spaces and we hope that allows us to make work that does not have the same constraints. Rather than adopt traditional game studio models or work individually, we are attempting to produce games in a non-hierarchical environment where no one person’s creative or technical vision is more important than another’s. Working collectively and trying to create a space for divergent but co-existing ideas and ways of working is important to us - this tension is a huge source of creative energy that drives our work.

Jonas Frankki (Disruption Network Lab, SE/DE)
Since 2014 Jonas Frankki designs and animates the visual identity of the Disruption Network Lab and each conference, and additionally researches speakers, networks and topics for future events. Jonas was born in Sweden, studied Marketing, International Relations, Political Science and Cultural Management in Gothenburg. Since 2012 he is also an Art Director at sinnwerkstatt, a Berlin media agency for sustainability. He is a member of the Disruption Network Lab e. V..

Shadows of Control
Disruptive Fridays #10

August 21, 2020: Elena B. Stavrevska, Artan Sadiku, Filip Balunovic moderated by Elena Veljanovska

The way we experience politics has changed rapidly since the beginning of the pandemic. Globally, the pandemic has uncovered many weak spots in our societies, such as our health care systems, care facilities and solidarity practices. While governments are purportedly ‘doing everything’ to protect the population, in public life we also witness growing state intervention, exercise of control and use of combative language.

With:
Elena B. Stavrevska (political scientist, London School for Economics and Political Science, MK/UK),
Artan Sadiku (Philosopher and activist, MK),
Filip Balunovic (Political scientist, SRB)
moderated by Elena Veljanovska (Disruption Network Lab, MK/DE).

What are the effects of this on democracy? What measures are states taking to combat the pandemic and how do they affect citizens? How is the crisis communicated to citizens and how is this reflecting the culture of governing? What does growing state intervention mean for politics, conflict studies, human rights, solidarity and activism?

In this conversation we will focus on the response to the coronavirus outbreak in South Eastern European countries: North Macedonia, Serbia, Kosovo, Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina. We will examine and question the execution of some political decisions in the region, the different political styles, misinformation and the lack of dialogue with the citizens. By taking a critical approach, we will also talk about citizens’ response to the measures, and how these measures reflected the current state of democracy in the respective societies.

Elena B. Stavrevska is a peace scholar whose work has explored issues of gender, intersectionality, and political economy in post-war societies. She is currently a research officer at the Centre for Women, Peace and Security and an academic associate at the Latin America and Caribbean Centre at the London School for Economics and Political Science. During the 2018-2019 academic year she was a visiting research fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame, where she worked on her book manuscript with focus on gender provisions in peace agreements and the ways in which they are translated into laws and policies in an effort to address past injustices and violences. Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with Roma women in Bosnia and Herzegovina and indigenous women in Colombia, the book highlights the intersectional impact of those ‘translations’ and advances the concept of intersectional justice in peace processes. She holds a PhD in Political Science (2017) and an MA in International Relations and European Studies (2008) from Central European University (CEU). Beyond her academic work, she has been working closely with different civil society organisations and think tanks in the Balkans. As of 2017, she is a co-founder of Stella, which inter alia initiated the first mentorship programme for women and girls in higher education in Macedonia, aiming to build solidarity networks while taking into consideration concerns of first generation and minority female students in particular. She is also the initiator of the #WomenAlsoKnowBalkans list, in an effort to facilitate the inclusion of women in policy and media discussions in and about the region.

Filip Balunovic received a PhD from the department of Political Science and Sociology at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence. His research interest includes political economy, social movements, Marxism, political philosophy and political theory. He graduated from the Faculty of Political Science in Belgrade and received his MA degree in International Relations and European Studies from the European Institute in Nice. He received his second MA degree in Human Rights and Democracy from Universities of Sarajevo and Bologna. Balunovic is the executive editor of the Serbian edition of Le Monde Diplomatique and author of the book “Freedom Notebooks” (Mediteran, 2014) (Serbian “Beleske sa slobode”). He is lecturing at the Department of Politics, at the Faculty of Media and Communication in Belgrade. He is a research fellow at the CAS SEE in Rijeka.

Artan Sadiku is a researcher, theorist and activist and holds a PhD in philosophy. He has studied and researched at the universities in Amsterdam, Oslo, Munich and Baltimore. His primary theoretical interests are theories of the subject, feminism and radical practices in politics and arts. He has worked as a researcher in Skopje at the Institute for social studies and humanities where he led the School for politics and critique and is the founder of the Culture Club Syndicate and the activist movement Solidarnost. He was a prominent actor in protest movements such as Aman!, #protestiram and the Academic Plenum and currently is a member of the organizing board of the KRIK festival for critical culture. He is a regular contributor in regional and international journals such as Le Monde Dilomatique, Journal Identities and Bilten. His latest writings deal with the question of the space of art in the society and the aesthetic form of the workers.

Elena Veljanovska (Senior project manager, Disruption Network Lab, MK/DE)
Elena Veljanovska is a senior project manager at the Disruption Network Lab. From 2012 to 2019 she was the executive director and programme curator at Kontrapunkt Skopje, where among other projects, with Iskra Geshoska she co-developed the Festival for Critical Culture - CRIC (founded in 2016). In 2006 she co-founded Line I+M Platform for New Media Art and Technology, where she was the artistic director until 2010. Veljanovska has worked as a curator and cultural manager with numerous organisations and artists.

Crossing Borders: Sub-Saharan Communities of Care & Resistance
Disruptive Fridays #9

June 19 2020: Sharlotte Kigezo, Peter Nkanga, Jedi Ramalapa, moderated by Magnus Ag & Lieke Ploeger

Global. That is the definition and the reality of a pandemic. Yet, most attention and resources are confined by human made borders. Hosted in collaboration with Bridge Figures, Disruptive Fridays #9 connects with creative and activist communities in Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa to learn and share about responses relevant to local and global communities.

With:
• Sharlotte Kigezo (Psychologist, KY/UG)
• Peter Nkanga (Journalist & campaigner, NG)
• Jedi Ramalapa (Broadcast journalist, ZA)
• Moderated by Magnus Ag (Bridge Figures, DK) and Lieke Ploeger (Disruption Network Lab, NL/DE).

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, an overwhelming amount of news and data has been flooding us. The media coverage seems to focus on the national and hyperlocal situation – while we are dealing with a global pandemic. In this conversation we focus on the response of Sub-Saharan Africa to the coronavirus outbreak, and hear from some of the people that work on creating a conversation around COVID-19 – one that can contribute to a more global understanding of what we are all facing.

Jedi Ramalapa is a South African broadcast journalist. She is the current Editor-In-Chief of a non-profit podcasting organisation, Sound Africa; which aims to produce original narrative (audio) journalism which upends the stereotypes and cliches about Africa and Africans. She also hosts Sound Africa's newest weekly podcast series Covid-In-Africa, looking at the African response to COVID-19 and how it’s affecting people on the ground. She will address the impact of the pandemic on human rights.

Peter Nkanga is an independent multilingual investigative journalist based in Abuja, Nigeria . He is the former West Africa Representative of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and specializes in human rights and advocacy reporting. A fierce advocate for press freedom, Peter Nkanga has been at the forefront of the campaign for the rights of journalists in Nigeria and across sub-Saharan Africa. In 2019, he was awarded the “Jamal Khashoggi Award for Courageous Journalism” for his work. He will share more on how the virus outbreak has affected public procurement, the process of governments and state-owned corporations deciding which goods, services and works to spend public funds on.

Sharlotte Ainebyoona Kigezo is a psychologist, mental health advocate and spoken word artist based between Kenya and Uganda. She is passionate about mental health and community-based programs that build for a strong mental and physical foundation for the society. Sharlotte has been instrumental in facilitating trauma healing programs for refugee communities and art therapy programs for the creative and arts community. This being on the basis of mental health and factors that act as triggers to mental health like experiencing traumatic events (civil or cross-border wars, sexual assault, cyber bullying). She will discuss how we can best address mental health issues in these times, following her recent work with both refugee and artist communities on mental health awareness and forms of online therapy.

Magnus Ag is a human rights advocate, journalist, and researcher. He is the founder & director of Bridge Figures – a human rights organization that scales the potential of artists, activists, journalists & other agents of social change to build bridges and break walls in a data-driven world. Based between Hong Kong and Berlin, he previously worked with Copenhagen-based Freemuse — which defends the right to artistic freedom worldwide — and in New York as the Assistant Advocacy Director for the Committee to Protect Journalists. Magnus serves on Columbia University’s Committee on Global Thought’s advisory committee for the project The Politics of Visual Art in a Changing World, is an advisor to Avant-Garde Lawyers, and a proud member of PEN Hong Kong.

Lieke Ploeger is the community director and administration officer of the Disruption Network Lab. She is the co-founder of the independent project space SPEKTRUM art science community, where she worked as community builder from 2014 to 2018. Her core interest lies in building and developing both online and offline communities of interest, with a focus on sharing knowledge and expertise in an open way. She previously worked for the Open Knowledge Foundation and for the National Library of the Netherlands. She has a double master of arts from the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands and has been involved in various European research projects in the areas of open cultural data, open access and open science.

Empowerment vs Power - Strategies for Justice & Equality · Disruptive Fridays #8

June 12 2020: Mutale Nkonde, Melissa Segura, Marshall Trammell, moderated by Jonas Frankki

This week’s speakers all have specific experiences from the fight for justice & equality, against racism, poverty, marginalization, homelessness, criminalization and police brutality. What can we learn from their struggles & achievements, to inform our own fights around the world?

Mutale Nkonde (Expert in Tech & Race, CEO of AI For The People, Fellow, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University, US)
Twitter: @mutalenkonde
• Watch her talk from AI TRAPS - Racial Discrimination in the Age of AI.

Mutale Nkonde is a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center of Internet and Society at Harvard University where she is conducting an ethnographic study on how congressional staffers learn about the impact of technology on society. Nkonde works at the intersection of race, technology and policy and has been working as a Senior Tech Policy Advisory and Fellow at Data & Society Research Institute in New York City since 2016. Nkonde was part of the team that helped introduce the Algorithmic Accountability Act into the House of Representatives in April 2019, She is considering how facial recognition technologies and other surveillance technologies harm black and minoritized communities.

Melissa Segura (Investigative Reporter, BuzzFeed News, US)
Twitter: @MelissaDSegura
· Watch her talk from Citizens of Evidence - Latina Women uncovering police abuse in Chicago

Melissa Segura is an investigative reporter with BuzzFeed News and an Emerson fellow at the think tank New America. Her reporting focuses on the intersection of justice, class and race. In 2017 she authored a landmark investigation detailing how a group of predominantly working class, Latina women from Chicago uncovered evidence suggesting a police detective framed at least 51 of their sons, brothers, or husbands. Her series, “Broken Justice in Chicago,” has led to the exoneration of 10 men who had each spent decades behind bars. In 2018, the series earned her the George Polk Award in Journalism for local reporting and recognition as a finalist for Harvard's Goldsmith Award. She is at work on a book building on her Chicago story that examines the cracks in the criminal justice system and the hidden role that women play in correcting injustices. Before BuzzFeed News, Segura was a staff writer for Sports Illustrated. She received her B.A. in Spanish studies and communication from Santa Clara University.

Marshall Trammell (Music Research Strategist, US)
Marshall Trammell is a self-styled, Music Research Strategist and Common Knowledge Platform fellow at ProArts Commons based in Oakland, California. Deploying interculturally-situated technologies from the Underground Railroad, Trammell has created "Conduction (cc)", a Creative Commons and Critical Creative Music conduction system from reimagining fugitivity, "accompliceship" and self-determination from the era of chattel slavery the World. ProArts is committed to supporting the 22 unhoused artists arrested in front of City Hall for protest against gentrification and the displacement of Black and traditional working class residents.

Whistleblowing During COVID-19 · Disruptive Fridays #7

May 15 2020: Renata Avila, Joseph Farrell, Rima Sghaier, Tatiana Bazzichelli.

Disruptive Fridays #7 - Whistleblowing During COVID-19 focuses on the role of whistleblowers during COVID-19 and discusses the importance of exposing the truth during the pandemic.

With: Renata Avila (Executive Director of Ciudadanía Inteligente, GTM), Joseph Farrell (WikiLeaks Ambassador, UK), Rima Sghaier (Outreach & Research Fellow, Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights, TUN/IT), Tatiana Bazzichelli (Founder & Director, Disruption Network Lab, e. V., IT/DE).

Some weeks ago, a coalition of 95 public authorities, NGOs, and institutions has signed a letter proposed by The Good Lobby & Fibgar to protect those who report or expose the harms, abuses and wrongdoing that arise during the COVID-19 crisis.

"The COVID-19 pandemic brings into stark relief the importance of accountability and the need for regular and reliable information from our public institutions and our leaders. The people of every affected country need to know the truth about the spread of the disease both locally and internationally in order to respond effectively and help protect their communities. Fairness, transparency and cooperation are vital and never more so than during a pandemic."

The role of whistleblowers is crucial in times of crisis to expose wrongdoing and misconducts in private and public institutions, health systems, working environments, commercial and delivery markets, and to denounce abuses of personal privacy, both on the digital sphere and the everyday life. The work of whistleblowers is central to denounce power violations and to protect the most vulnerable sectors of our society, but also whistleblowers are people at risk. They are subjects of repression and opposition before and after blowing the whistle, and often confined in isolation, imprisoned or persecuted while their civil rights are suspended.

In a moment in which governments are entitle to use extraordinary powers without proper public oversight and transparency, we need to protect whistleblowers and discuss forms of collective participation to guarantee global safety and accountability, as well as to defend the human rights and freedoms of all people.

Read more here about whistleblowers around the world that got silenced or suffered persecution during COVID-19.

Renata Avila (Executive Director of Ciudadanía Inteligente, GTM)
Renata Avila, International Human Rights Lawyer, Technology Expert. Co-convener of the Progressive International, a global initiative launching in May 2020 with a mission to unite, organise, and mobilise progressive forces around the world. She has been a part of the legal and advocacy team of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks for over a decade. She writes regularly for El Diario (Spain) and Open Democracy.

Joseph Farrell (WikiLeaks Ambassador, UK)
Joseph A. Farrell is a WikiLeaks ambassador and a Centre for Investigative Journalism board member. He has been a section editor for many important WikiLeaks' publications including the Iraq and Afghan War Logs and Cablegate to name but a few. He was a member of the Civil Society Coalition at the WIPO diplomatic conference on a treaty for copyright exceptions for persons with disabilities in Marrakesh, Morocco. Farrell regularly appears on TV networks analysing the week's news headlines.

Rima Sghaier (Outreach & Research Fellow, Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights, TUN/IT)
Rima Sghaier is an international citizen born in Tunisia and currently based in Milan, where she leads outreach and localisation efforts at the Hermes Center, managing and contributing to projects to support NGOs, media, and investigative journalists to create secure whistleblowing platforms. She is the program manager of Digital Whistleblowing Fund, a small-grant project by the Hermes Center and Renewable Freedom Foundation that enables investigative journalism groups and human rights grassroots organisations to apply to receive financial, operational and strategic support in starting a secure digital whistleblowing initiative.

Tatiana Bazzichelli (Founder & Director, Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE)
Tatiana Bazzichelli is founder and artistic director of the Disruption Network Lab, an organisation in Berlin working on information technology, network culture, hacktivism and whistleblowing. In 2011-2014 she was programme curator at transmediale festival, where she developed the year-round initiative reSource transmedial culture berlin and curated several conference events, workshops and installations. She has been appointed jury member for the Hauptstadtkulturfonds (Capital Cultural Fund) by the German Federal Government and Berlin for the funding years 2019-2020).

Harm Reduction and Queer Care · Disruptive Fridays #6

May 8 2020: Pedro Marum, Mariana Cunha, Mariana Nobre V., Rafi, Nada Bakr

The sixth edition of Disruptive Fridays features a conversation with Pedro Marum (XenoEntities Network, Mina, Suspension, PT/DE), Mariana Nobre V. (Performer, choreographer, queer rave instigator, Emotional CPR - eCPR, Rabbit Hole and Lecken collectives, PT/DE), Mariana Cunha (Kosmicare, PT) and Rafi (Artist, Organizer, TS Raver, DE), moderated by Nada Bakr (Disruption Network Lab EG/DE).

During this conversation we will discuss harm reduction within queerfeminist self-organized communities that welcome queers, trans, POC and neurodivergent people to discuss, test and learn about psychoactive substances. For long they have operated with structures that not only provide moments of revelry but also much-needed care and acceptance for many, who often find in these communities their peers, their kin, forms of coping and resistance. In the current times of pandemic and isolation they are debating how to continue this work.

As the clubs and parties close, where does all this energy go now? What happens to all the bottled-up anxieties and loneliness? What happens to the people that struggle with addiction and, instead of understanding, find prejudice and discrimination? Who looks after those whose needs have always been overlooked or oppressed? What happens now that governments have (yet again) failed to protect, and these communities have become de-fragmented and even more precarious under isolation? How can we foster collective digital support, debates, talks and guidelines about harm reduction and emotional support in self-isolation times?

With Pedro Marum, Mariana Cunha, Mariana Nobre V. and Rafi we will speak about their ongoing projects and about “RAVELENGTH”, an upcoming project in which they collaborate to generate accessible tools for harm reduction, relief and empowerment within the queerfeminist electronic music scene and raver communities. By organizing online discussions, workshops and support groups in collaboration with artists, healthcare professionals and local community organizers, they call for a culture of solidarity across and beyond European borders.

Pedro Marum ( XenoEntities Network, Mina, Suspension, PT/DE)
Marum is one of the instigators of the collective party mina (Lisbon), co-founder of the label and artist platform suspension, and founder member of XenoEntities Network. mina and suspension have started a collaboration with harm reduction NGO Kosmicare, organising talks and exchange groups with the queer community, raising awareness and providing access to tools and knowledge on harm reduction. In response to the pandemic crisis, together with other collectives they initiated Ravelength.

Mariana Nobre V. (Performer, choreographer, queer rave instigator, Emotional CPR (eCPR), Rabbit Hole and Lecken collectives, PT/DE)
Emotional CPR is a practice based on values of mutual support and interpersonal communication for addressing personal and community moments of crisis and distress. Having its origins on a public health education program developed in the field of mental health, eCPR is now being integrated with somatic practices and informed by queer principles of consent, inclusion, collective action, access and solidarity. This work is being developed by a team of eCPR practitioners and artists with extensive experience in queer activism, movement research, queer nightlife production and harm reduction.

Mariana Cunha (Kosmicare, PT)
Mariana works with Kosmicare, an NGO that envisions a world where drugs are used with liberty and wisdom. She studied pharmacological and neurosciences and has been working in harm reduction since 2017. Currently, she runs a permanent drug checking laboratory in Lisbon. Her interests include psychopharmacology, raves, science fiction and everything in between.

Rafi (Artist, Organizer, TS Raver, DE)
Rafi is an organiser and artist based in Berlin. He organises with TS Raver, a queer nightlife project that positions peer led harm reduction teams as anchors for critical care.

Nada Bakr (Disruption Network Lab, EG/DE)
Nada Bakr is a curator, researcher and cultural manager based in Berlin. She holds a Master of Arts (MA) in Media Arts Cultures from Aalborg University. She works on different projects in Berlin and Cairo related to visual arts, digital culture, art and activism, digital rights and media art. Her work in the field of media art is developed through research and practice on the intersection between art and technology. Nada is the Managing Director and co-curator of Cairotronica - Cairo Electronic and New Media Art festival, where she curates and manages the biennial festival program. She works as project manager for the conference and community programme and is a member of the Disruption Network Lab e. V..

Lockdown or Crackdown? · Disruptive Fridays #5

May 1 2020: Stellan Vinthagen, Mauro Mondello, Jonas Frankki

Disruptive Fridays #5 - Lockdown or Crackdown? - features Stellan Vinthagen (Professor of Sociology, Scholar-Activist, US/SE) and Mauro Mondello (Investigative Journalist, IT/DE). Moderated by Jonas Frankki (Disruption Network Lab, SE/DE).

On this May Day 2020 the streets worldwide will largely be vacant. How can citizens fight for their rights during the pandemic? Both Vinthagen and Mondello have long experience on the ground and in the field, Vinthagen as a researcher and non-violent activist, Mondello as an investigative journalist covering the Middle East. During the ongoing COVID19 Pandemic, Mauro Mondello is covering the developments in Hungary and Poland, where civil liberties are under threat from leaders who are using the crisis to further extend their powers. Stellan Vinthagen has spent decades combining non-violent activism and civil disobediance with sociological research, to further the understanding and develop theories on how non-violent resistance movements function.

We will discuss what is happening at the moment in countries like Poland and Hungary, and discuss what effective activism and resistance might look like during lockdown.

Stellan Vinthagen (Professor of Sociology, Scholar-Activist, US/SE)
Stellan Vinthagen is inaugural endowed chair in the study of nonviolent direct action and civil resistance and professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is also a council member of War Resisters’ International, academic adviser to the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), co-founder of the Resistance Studies Network (www.resistancestudies.org) and editor of the Journal of Resistance Studies. Since 1980, he has been an educator, organiser and activist and has participated in more than thirty nonviolent civil disobedience actions, for which he has served in total more than one year in prison.

Mauro Mondello (Investigative Journalist, IT/DE)
Mauro Mondello is a freelance journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker based in Berlin. He works as a correspondent for la Repubblica, Avvenire, Radio Rai, Panorama, Rivista Studio, East, Zeit Magazine among others. In 2011 he followed the Arab Revolutions in Syria, Libya, Yemen, Tunisia and Egypt. His documentaries include Stateless (2012), in collaboration with videomaker Nunzio Gringeri, a study of Tunisia's Shousha refugee camp and Lampedusa in Berlin (2015), about the stories of the refugees’ protest camp in Berlin at Oranienplatz. He is the founder and editor in chief of Yanez Magazine.

Jonas Frankki (Disruption Network Lab, SE/DE)
Since 2014 Jonas Frankki designs and animates the visual identity of the Disruption Network Lab and each conference, and additionally researches speakers, networks and topics for future events. Jonas was born in Sweden, studied Marketing, International Relations, Political Science and Cultural Management in Gothenburg. Since 2012 he is also an Art Director at sinnwerkstatt, a Berlin media agency for sustainability. He is a member of the Disruption Network Lab e. V..

Virus Tracking & Surveillance · Disruptive Fridays #4

April 24 2020: Lauri Love, Joana Moll, Julian Finn, Tatiana Bazzichelli

The fourth edition of Disruptive Fridays features a conversation between: Lauri Love (Computer Scientist, UK), Joana Moll (Artist and Researcher, ES), Julian Finn (Hacker and Media Artist, DE) and Tatiana Bazzichelli (Director, Disruption Network Lab).

During "Virus Tracking & Surveillance" we'll discuss about the implications of tracking and data retention on everyday life, as well as the necessity to implement technology for collective care while respecting privacy and surveillance concerns.

A live conversation on the implication of citizen tracking during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Is tracking in public space becoming necessary to monitor individual health conditions, or do we need to protect our citizen rights to keep such data fully anonymous? In the last few weeks the necessity of developing Corona tracking apps has become part of a very crucial debate, but it is even more crucial to guarantee data protection.

As reported by Heise Online, one of more apps will be available in Germany from mid-April onwards, on the basis of the PEPP-PT (Pan European Privacy Protecting Proximity Tracing) project. This will enable users to use Bluetooth technology to determine whether they have been in contact with a Corona-infected person who also uses the system. But there are already some concerns related to IT security problems, connected to the use of Bluetooth technology, or about the possibility to provide such system without accessing the location information on the mobile phone. For example, Digitalcourage points out that under Android, the use of the Bluetooth interface is only permitted if the use of local services is enabled at the same time. On the other side, the more physical control we have over tracking devices, the more information these devices can extract. While tracking devices unfold as everyday objects, able to be run and operated by the average citizen, the information that they collect becomes increasingly undecipherable by the very same user that operates such device. Since the appearance of the Panopticon in the 18th century, tracking devices have gradually come closer to our bodies, yet COVID-19 crisis pushes social control one step further. It requires to control biological processes, and it requires to implement it fast.

Lauri Love (Computer Scientist, UK)
Lauri Love is a computer scientist from Stradishall in the UK who has a long history of involvement in political activism. He played a prominent role in the student and Occupy movements in Glasgow during 2011-12. Lauri faced potential extradition to the United States for his alleged involvement in #OpLastResort, the series of online protests that followed the persecution and untimely death of Aaron Swartz. Love is increasingly 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.

Joana Moll (Artist and Researcher, ES)
Joana Moll is an artist and researcher from Barcelona. Her main research topics include Internet materiality, surveillance, social profiling and interfaces. She has lectured, performed and exhibited her work in different museums, art centers, universities, festivals and publications around the world. Furthermore she is the co-founder of the Critical Interface Politics Research Group at HANGAR [Barcelona] and co-founder of The Institute for the Advancement of Popular Automatisms. She is currently a visiting lecturer at Universität Potsdam (DE), Escola Elisava (ES) and Escola Superior d'Art de Vic (ES). (https://www.janavirgin.com)

Julian Finn (Hacker and Media Artist, DE)
Julian Finn is a hacker and media artist. He has been part of the German hacker scene for almost two decades. Founder of Mautinoa, a company building digital banking solutions for developing countries and humanitarian crises, he has been working in the field of disaster relief and humanitarian aid for a few years. His specialty is in working with and creating products for non-classical user groups, cognitive impaired, and other vulnerable people.

Pirate Care · Disruptive Fridays #3

April 17 2020: Valeria Graziano, Natasha Falkov, Elena Veljanovska

The third edition of Disruption Network Lab’s new programme stream - DISRUPTIVE FRIDAYS (live every Friday at 5pm Berlin time) features a conversation between Valeria Graziano (Researcher, pirate.care.syllabus), Natasha Falkov (Berlin Collective Action) and Elena Veljanovska (Disruption Network Lab).

We will speak about self-organized care initiatives in times of Corona in North Italy and Berlin. pirate.care researches, gathers & nourishes initiatives which are taking risks by operating in the narrow grey zones left open between different care knowledges, institutions and laws. Flatten the curve, grow the care: What are we learning from Covid-19 is their curriculum that evolved with the Covid crisis. Berlin Collective Action started a fundraising to provide emergency financial aid to at-risk nightlife workers in Berlin — those whose livelihoods have been severely impacted by COVID-19, and especially those who do not have access to other support systems. With Valeria Graziano and Natasha Falkov, we will speak about using piracy as a political tool for care and focus on the solidarity initiatives that are serving as active caretakers since the outbreak of the crisis. We will also talk about the current societal reorganization and how the crisis is affecting the health and livelihoods of women, BIPOC, queer, trans- and non-binary people, sex workers, non-EU migrants, and other marginalised groups who are all part of the at-risk communities in this crisis.

Valeria Graziano (Researcher, pirate.care, IT/UK) Valeria Graziano is a research fellow at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University (UK). Her work focuses on organisational practices and tecnopolitical tools that foster the refusal of work, a creativere distribution of social reproduction and the politicization of pleasure. Together with Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak, she is a convenor of Pirate Care (https://pirate.care), a research project focusing on forms of political activism at the intersection of “care” and “piracy”, which are trying to intervene in the current crisis of care in all its multiple and interconnected dimensions. The Pirate Care Syllabus is a tool for supporting and activating collective processes of learning from these practices (https://syllabus.pirate.care).

Natasha Falkov (Berlin Collective Action, NZ/DE)
Natasha Falkov is an organiser, writer and filmmaker from New Zealand. Natasha is currently organising with the Berlin Collective Action initiative, a Berlin based emergency fund providing financial aid to those whose livelihoods have been severely impacted by the COVID-19 crisis. (BCA emergency fund)

Makers vs. Virus · Disruptive Fridays #2

April 10 2020: Michael Ang, Andreas Kopp, Lieke Ploeger

The second edition of Disruption Network Lab’s new programme stream - DISRUPTIVE FRIDAYS (live every Friday at 5pm Berlin time) features a conversation between Michael Ang (artist and engineer), Andreas Kopp (creative technologist, maker, post-it artist and teacher) and Lieke Ploeger (Disruption Network Lab).

We will speak about critical making in times of corona: how can we use digital fabrication techniques such as 3D printing and laser cutting in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic? Michael Ang & Andreas Kopp participated in the recent #wirvsvirus hackathon organised by the German government to find digital community actions against the corona virus and its effects. Together with Nicholas de Coster they developed a design for an open source/DIY protective face shield, which is currently being printed and distributed to help medical professionals stay safe from infection (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4239203).

Michael Ang (Artist and engineer, CA/DE).
Michael Ang is an artist and engineer who creates light objects, interactive installations, and technological tools that expand the possibilities of human expression and connection. Applying a hacker’s aesthetic, he often repurposes existing technology to create human-centered experiences in public space and the open field. Countering the trend for technology to dissociate us from ourselves and surroundings, Michael’s works connect us to each other and the experience of the present moment. He is the co-inventor of the Infl3ctor, the projection system for Digital Calligraffiti. He holds a Master’s Degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University, USA and a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Canada.

Andreas Kopp (Creative technologist, maker, post-it artist and teacher, DE)
Andreas Kopp loves to make things and learn new techniques of making, designing and coding. He is the founder of Erfindergarten, an open workshop for digital production, Fab Lab, youth club and DIY community and workshop space in Munich, where he gives kids the best start into making and inventing things by learning them 21st century skill and inspire them to start learning and inventing themselves. He is also the artist/artisan behind postitartcreators. Kopp has been commissioned to create portraits and installations for exhibitions, events, shop-windows, shopping centers and commercials all over the world. He often works with Post-it® Notes but has also done works with cups or origami paper and loves to make his works interactive.

Lieke Ploeger (Community director, Disruption Network Lab, NL/DE)
Lieke Ploeger is the community director and administration officer of the Disruption Network Lab. She is the co-founder of the independent project space SPEKTRUM art science community, where she worked as community builder from 2014 to 2018. Her core interest lies in building and developing both online and offline communities of interest, with a focus on sharing knowledge and expertise in an open way. She previously worked for the Open Knowledge Foundation and for the National Library of the Netherlands. She has a double master of arts from the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands and has been involved in various European research projects in the areas of open cultural data, open access and open science.

Disruptive Fridays #1

April 3 2020: Cassie Thornton, Marc Garrett, Ela Kagel, Tatiana Bazzichelli

Disruption Network Lab is launching a new programme stream - DISRUPTIVE FRIDAYS, live every Friday at 5pm Berlin time. The first conversation will involve Marc Garrett (Furtherfield), Cassie Thornton (Feminist Economics Department), Ela Kagel (Supermarkt Berlin) and Tatiana Bazzichelli (Disruption Network Lab).

We will share ideas for creative solutions and resistance to the isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. What are our strategies to keep working with art and culture when our contexts of sharing are so limited? What can we learn from this situation to generate new forms of collective care?

Ela Kagel (Digital Strategist and Founder of SUPERMARKT Berlin, DE).
Ela Kagel specialises in the intersection of society, technology and economy. Since the 1990s she has produced media art exhibitions, designed spaces for cultural exchange and helped establish digital platforms, networks and communities. From 2009 to 2011 she was program curator for the transmediale festival in Berlin. Central to Ela’s practice is supporting bottom-up initiatives deeply rooted in particular communities of practice. In 2010 Ela co-founded SUPERMARKT, an independent hub for digital culture and collaborative economy. Since 2018, Ela is also board member of RChain Europe, a technology cooperative based in Berlin.

Marc Garrett (Co-director & Co-founder, Furtherfield, London, UK).
Marc Garrett is codirector and cofounder, together with Ruth Catlow, of the arts online collective Furtherfield, with two physical venues, a gallery, and a commons lab, all situated in Finsbury Park, London. He curated the major exhibition "Monsters of the Machine: Frankenstein in the 21st Century", at Laboral, Spain in 2017. In 2017 he copublished "Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain" with Ruth Catlow, Nathan Jones, and Sam Skinner. He is in the process of completing his PhD at the University of London, Birkbeck College.

Cassie Thornton (Artist, Feminist Economics Department, UK)
Cassie Thornton is an artist working under the title of the Feminist Economics Department (the FED), in collusion with Strike Debt. Her work investigates and reveals the impact of governmental and economic systems on public affect, behavior, and unconscious, with a focus on debt and security. Cassie Thornton received a MFA from California College of the Arts and a BFA from University of Wisconsin-Madison. She recently launched The Hologram, an artwork about collective health care (https://www.furtherfield.org/cassie-thornton-presents-the-hologram/).

Tatiana Bazzichelli (Founder and Director, Disruption Network Lab)
Tatiana Bazzichelli is founder and artistic director of the Disruption Network Lab, an organisation in Berlin working on information technology, network culture, hacktivism and whistleblowing. In 2011-2014 she was programme curator at transmediale festival, where she developed the year-round initiative reSource transmedial culture berlin and curated several conference events, workshops and installations. She has been appointed jury member for the Hauptstadtkulturfonds (Capital Cultural Fund) by the German Federal Government and Berlin for the funding years 2019-2020.

Disruptive Fridays Archive

Watch all Disruptive Fridays episodes in our YouTube Playlist

Disruptive Fridays - Live Streaming Series

Weaponised Disinformation in Regions of Hot and Cold Conflict · Disruptive Fridays #26

November 12 2021, 5pm CET

Speakers

Investigating Illicit Money Flows · Disruptive Fridays #25

Investigating illicit money flows: From Panama Papers to Pandora Papers. How journalists uncover corruption, tax evasion and conflict of interest.

November 5 2021, 5pm CET:

Frederik Obermaier in conversation with Michael Hornsby.

The project ‘Challenging Corruption: Empowering Future Voices’ is funded by GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit) as commissioned by the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Digital Futures · Disruptive Fridays #24

May 28, 2021 · With: Imogen Malpas, Julia Kloiber, Irem Kurt & Ana Filipa Maceira · Moderated by Nada Bakr

Speakers

﻿Previous editions

Expanding the Stream · Disruptive Fridays #23

May 21, 2021 · With: Alexandra Weltz-Rombach, Oliver Baurhenn, Klara Hobza · Moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli

Speakers

Online Events: What Works? · Disruptive Fridays #22

April 30, 2021 · With: Serah Njambi Rono, Maja Durlik, Anna Kuliberda · Moderated by Lieke Ploeger

Speakers

Legacy of Resistance - Rediscovering Yugoslavia’s Partisan History · Disruptive Fridays #21

April 16, 2021 · With: Marta Popivoda and Gal Kirn · Moderated by Elena Veljanovska

Speakers

Global Fallout: Covid-19 in Africa, Latin America & Beyond · Disruptive Fridays #20

March 26, 2021 · With: Jacqueline Klopp, Madlen Davies and Ido Vock · Moderated by Alannah Travers

Speakers

THE Q IN QONSPIRACY: QAnon as a Paradigm for Future Social-media-driven Conspiracism· Disruptive Fridays #19

March 12, 2021 · With: Wu Ming 1 and Florian Cramer, moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli

The conversation is centered around Wu Ming 1’s forthcoming book La Q di Qomplotto [The Q in qonspiracy], to be published end of March by Edizioni Alegre, which describes how conspiracy fantasies help legitimise systems of control (find here the index in English).

Speakers

ReImagine Community: Collective learning and creative mentoring · Disruptive Fridays #18

February 26, 2021 · With: Erin James and Scott Elliott · Moderated by Lieke Ploeger

Speakers

Radical Health Care · Disruptive Fridays #17

February 12, 2021 · With: Feminist Health Care Research Group (Inga Zimprich & Julia Bonn) and Luiza Prado · Moderated by Elena Veljanovska

Speakers

Are Kleptocrats the big winners of Covid-19? · Disruptive Fridays #16

January 29, 2021: With Tom Burgis moderated by Alannah Travers

Speakers

Colonial Borders & Counter Archives · Disruptive Fridays #15

December 4, 2020: Lauren Alexander, Ghalia Elsrakbi, Daniela Ortiz,moderated by Nada Bakr

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Follow the Data: Corruption, Leaks & People vs. Power Disruptive Fridays #14

November 20, 2020: Natalie Sedletska, Denis “Jaromil” Roio, Friedrich Lindenberg, moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli

ReImagine CultureLearnings from Culture during COVID-19Disruptive Fridays #13

October 16, 2020: Davorka Begović, Anna Ramos, Slavo Krekovic, moderated by Lieke Ploeger

Speakers

Global Surveillance in the Data SocietyDisruptive Fridays #12

September 11 2020﻿: Sonia Kennebeck, Assia Boundaoui, Jer Thorp. Moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli, Mauro Mondello

Play or Get PlayedDisruptive Fridays #11

August 28, 2020: Marloes de Valk, Chloê Langford, Gabriel Helfenstein, moderated by Jonas Frankki

Shadows of ControlDisruptive Fridays #10

August 21, 2020: Elena B. Stavrevska, Artan Sadiku, Filip Balunovic moderated by Elena Veljanovska

Crossing Borders: Sub-Saharan Communities of Care & Resistance Disruptive Fridays #9

June 19 2020: Sharlotte Kigezo, Peter Nkanga, Jedi Ramalapa, moderated by Magnus Ag & Lieke Ploeger

Empowerment vs Power - Strategies for Justice & Equality · Disruptive Fridays #8

June 12 2020: Mutale Nkonde, Melissa Segura, Marshall Trammell, moderated by Jonas Frankki

Whistleblowing During COVID-19 · Disruptive Fridays #7

May 15 2020: Renata Avila, Joseph Farrell, Rima Sghaier, Tatiana Bazzichelli.

Harm Reduction and Queer Care · Disruptive Fridays #6

May 8 2020: Pedro Marum, Mariana Cunha, Mariana Nobre V., Rafi, Nada Bakr

Lockdown or Crackdown? · Disruptive Fridays #5

May 1 2020: Stellan Vinthagen, Mauro Mondello, Jonas Frankki

Virus Tracking & Surveillance · Disruptive Fridays #4

April 24 2020: Lauri Love, Joana Moll, Julian Finn, Tatiana Bazzichelli

Pirate Care · Disruptive Fridays #3

April 17 2020: Valeria Graziano, Natasha Falkov, Elena Veljanovska

Makers vs. Virus · Disruptive Fridays #2

April 10 2020: Michael Ang, Andreas Kopp, Lieke Ploeger

Disruptive Fridays #1

April 3 2020: Cassie Thornton, Marc Garrett, Ela Kagel, Tatiana Bazzichelli

Previous editions

ReImagine Culture
Learnings from Culture during COVID-19
Disruptive Fridays #13

Global Surveillance in the Data Society
Disruptive Fridays #12

September 11 2020: Sonia Kennebeck, Assia Boundaoui, Jer Thorp. Moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli, Mauro Mondello

Play or Get Played
Disruptive Fridays #11

Shadows of Control
Disruptive Fridays #10

Crossing Borders: Sub-Saharan Communities of Care & Resistance
Disruptive Fridays #9