Date: Friday 16 February 2024
Time: 18:30 - 20:00 CET
Location: Varia, Rotterdam (NL)
Registration: Not needed, and there is no entrance fee!

Cloud infrastructures are deeply involved in military and oppressive operations that perpetuate racist structures. New forms of colonisation are emerging through digitised oppression, with tech companies entering into lucrative collaborations with oppressive nation-states while benefiting from the circulation of online activism and transnational solidarity. This conversation brings together a network of networks that have been collectively organising for technopolitical change for many years. Through artistic research, techno-disobedience and other means, the constellation resists the financial, extractive mode of Big Tech. During this conversation, participants will share each other's modest proposals with the audience, from Counter Cloud Actions to Digital Discomfort to trans*feminist servers. Their proposals radically emphasise vernacular, situated, specific technodiversity and work simultaneously at different scales against infrastructural violence. The conversation will be about how we can together break the dependence on the toxic Cloud regime, the anti-colonial potential of these projects but also about uncomfortable and contradictory techno-practices.

Participants

Constant is a non-profit organization based in Brussels since 1997 and active in the fields of art, media, and technology. https://constantvzw.org/

Digital Discomfort Working Group learns, dialogues, and experiments with ways to refuse compliance with that which could be referred to as “totalitarian innovation.” From within and beyond specific (infra)structures, Digital Discomfort Working Group's drive is to operate as an agitator of disobedient, practice-based, para-academic research on, across, and despite the techno-colonial establishment of Big Tech. Digital Discomfort Working Group undertakes mundane but attentive experiments to collectively study computational paradigms and to propose instead trans*feminist infrastructural entanglements, anti-extractivist connecting cultures, and intersectional notions of hosting and hostility in the online structures we inhabit. https://digitaldiscomfort.run/

TITiPI is a trans-practice gathering of activists, artists, engineers and theorists initiated by Miriyam Aouragh, Seda Gürses, Helen Pritchard and Femke Snelting. TITiPI convene communities to articulate, activate and re-imagine together what computational technologies in the “public interest” might be when “public interest” is always in-the-making. https://titipi.org/

Varia is a space for developing collective approaches to everyday technology. varia members maintain and facilitate a collective infrastructure from which they generate questions, opinions, modifications, help and action. varia works with free software, organises events and collaborates in different constellations. https://varia.zone

Illustration by Susanna Ingignoli