Opening Keynote
Negative Space: Erasure and Resistance on the Social Canvas
Historically the domain of the state, the regulation of online speech has in large part been ceded
to corporations, driven by profit and accountable only to shareholders. Their revenue model—what
scholar Shoshona Zuboff calls "surveillance capitalism"—is reliant on closely tracking our behaviors
and desires while simultaneously restricting our expression to ensure desirability to advertisers.
What impact does this have on artists and culture? What are some of the ways that artists and others
are pushing back?
Plenary Talks & Panel Discussion
The question ‘can you hear me?’ was the title of an installation on the Swiss embassy in Berlin. The
situation of surveillance through US- and British secret services have been inverted in this
intervention. An open mesh network allowed users to send their messages anonymously - on the
frequencies
that are intercepted - to the secret services.
The objections and debates of the one’s with a voice, mark the political field. Of
course
there are reasons to exclude troublemakers, to withdraw attention from trolls or to filter viruses.
What
is
the protection of the regular operation mode and where does censorship start?
With installations such as ‘Can you hear me?’ this situation was brought into the world
wide
spot light. Further there are marginalized voices that are overheard and excluded. Canalizations and
categorizations of users and their options of expression have a profound impact. We will go on a
search
for traces, an
archeology to sound the forms of exclusion. We can follow the cultural, economic and political
turns.
They coin the sociopolitical discourse and write themselves into our infrastructure, almost
unnoticed.
They can be traced back into our own hard- and software tools, as deep as into the kernels of our
mobile
phones.
Cobwebs that connect us: What is a social network?
Sarah
Friend
How do we model social networks, and how do the ways we model social networks shape our
interactions within them? A web of trust is a cryptographic construct that attempts to capture
'trust' and use it as a form of identity - and we see it widely referenced, peer to peer
applications like CirclesUBI and Secure Scuttlebutt use a social graph inspired by a web of trust to
secure their network and shape interactions. In this talk, we'll discuss the web of trust as a
primitive and look at examples, from both the peer to peer and traditional web, to think through how
subtle differences in these network topologies effect the content and norms on the platform. We'll
also touch on the surveillance potential of social networks, and how even on an encrypted or
pseudonomous network, leaked metadata can often be used to identify users.
Understanding the Impact of Surveillance
Jonathan Penney
With Internet censorship and new forms of technological tracking and surveillance on the rise globally, understanding the impact of digital surveillance—and its chilling effects— has taken on greater urgency and public importance. In this talk, Jon will draw on his own recent research and other new studies in the field to help fill in some of the gaps in our understanding of chilling effects online. Among questions he will tackle: What is the nature and scale of surveillance chilling effects online? Does the impact of surveillance persist or is it merely temporary? Are certain people or groups more impacted than others? And what are the implications for creativity, art, and expression today and tomorrow?
Participatory Workshop
Bursting the Cloud: Alternative Architectures
“The cloud” painted an alluring, appealing picture for a data hungry populace. The old days of
external hard drives and annoying backups were being whisked away. Your data would always be at your
fingertips, and you should, in fact, just forget about it. We fell in love with the cloud. Did we
know what we were falling for?
This workshop explores alternative architectures of data besides the predominant “cloud” model. We
will explore how the ground broken by the early peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing technology paved the
way for a next generation of p2p architectures and protocols that are only now maturing enough to
start paying close attention to. Without relying on Big Tech, we can still have a high quality
digital experience and connection, by retrieving values of sovereignty, community solidarity and
resilience and applying them to our digital lives.
It will be a combination of quick and simple demos, with interactive modeling of some common
patterns in p2p architectures such as “gossip”, and “distributed hash tables”.
Participatory Workshop
It Works On Paper: The Networks We Need
Get ready to doodle! We will outline some of the problems the web faces today before we break into
groups to sketch the networks we want to see tomorrow. Drawings in hand, we will discuss what we
think of when we say "ideal network", and what resources we can leverage to bring our ideas closer to
reality.
Participatory Workshop
Tools for the Next Revolution
The workshop is a journey into possibilities of expression in the communication society and uncovers
the narratives and power structures behind it. Participants will experience their own Internet
independent Wifi communication network, learn how to use it and how to extend the range of Wifi-Networks with
self built Antennas.
Closing Keynote
Towards Thrivance: Changing Narratives Through Digital Media and Science Fiction
Skawennati will present some of her own work in the digital realm, focusing on why she has chosen
the stories she has told. She will also talk about AbTeC/IIF's Skins workshops, in which they teach
Indigenous youth how to make video games and machinima based on stories from their communities. She
will tell you how their productions have changed in response to the stories they have presented to
them.
Participatory Workshop
Speculative Design: Protocol, Platform, and Peers
Thinking about the contents of the symposium, how can we create interesting ways of distributing the
knowledge, experiences, and aspirations of our peers?
Through a series of activities and methods, we will prototype and construct a (de)centralized
network
from the ways we communicate to the platforms that will layered over them.
Protocol: Could we speculate, and prototype, a new way of communicating with our peers?
What are the boundaries for protocols like dat:// and ipfs?
What are their strengths? Weaknesses?
What values do they instantiate through their nodes and edges?
Platform: Could we speculate on a frame/mirror/window for us to interact with the network?
If the browser is an interface for TCP/IP, what is an interface for our new protocols?
What are the possible affordances we give to the user?
Turing Complete User
Peers: Over time, what accumulates on the network? Speculate on how we will reflect on this
protocol in
the near-future
In a time frame ~10 years into the future
Reflect on the projects like Geocities and the vernacular web
What will the network archivists of the future find through our collective protocols?
Durational Activity - May 25
Socialgram
Socialgram is a durational activity where we attempt to visualize the social behaviour of symposium
attendees - if the symposium were a social network how would it look? We'll use a pen and paper game
as well as web interface to explore this question over the course of the day, visualizing every
conference attendee as a node in a social graph. Part self-surveillance, part social-cartograpy -
who will be the most social node of them all?
jilliancyork.com
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Durational Activity - May 25
Socialgram
Sarah Friend
Socialgram is a durational activity where we attempt to visualize the social behaviour of symposium attendees - if the symposium were a social network how would it look? We'll use a pen and paper game as well as web interface to explore this question over the course of the day, visualizing every conference attendee as a node in a social graph. Part self-surveillance, part social-cartograpy - who will be the most social node of them all?