The submarine wired network — dominated by content providers, social media, and multinational technology companies — shapes the current "Undersea Continuous Monument", one of the most influential and polluted places in the world. This is what Weber referred to as "the iron cage" of economic rationality, driven by invisible informational networks and transnational private interests. Unlike people crossing seas and lands, the flow of data and capital remains uninterrupted. This became particularly evident during the pandemic lockdown, which did not affect the data extraction or prevent private and inter-state cyber attacks.

Bulle Cybernetique is a commercial exchange object, a scent formula potentially capable of circumventing State confinement measures and media censorship, while containing encrypted information. The scent formula has been developed by analysing World Cyber Crime maps and major cyber attacks involving countries and large companies, due to web threats, sabotage, espionage… Each type of attack, as well as the States or companies involved, is associated with specific olfactory notes based on precise associative criteria, which the algorithm code is instructed with. The development of an olfactory code has been conceived in collaboration with Diletta Tonatto, fine nose, sociologist of olfaction, and founder of Tonatto Profumi. The fragrance, like an enigma code, would also be decoded through a technique called headspace analysis in combination with gas mass chromatography to determine the chemical components of the scent formula and decipher the 'encrypted message' it carries.

Bulle Cybernetique is a luxury product that embodies the perturbing aspects of technology, unveiling underground and invisible facts through a mysterious, seductive, aerial, and ephemeral essence.

Artificial Worldviews is a series of inquiries into the system underlying ChatGPT about its descriptions of the world. Utilising prompting, data gathering, and mapping, this project investigates the data frames of »artificial intelligence« systems. Artificial intelligence and machine learning methods are often referred to as black boxes, indicating that the user cannot understand their inner workings. However, this trait is shared by all living beings: we come to know a person not by examining their brain structures but by conversing with them. The so-called black box is not impenetrable since we can gain an understanding of its inner workings by interacting with it. Through individual inquiries, we can only acquire anecdotal evidence of the network. However, by systematically querying ChatGPT's underlying programming interface, we can map the structures of the system. In the talk, I will elaborate on my research on ChatGPT, in which I methodically request data about large-scale, indefinable human concepts and visualise the results. These outputs visualise expansive data structures and unusual, sometimes unsettling worldviews that would otherwise be unimaginable. The terms »power« and »knowledge« unfold vast discourses from philosophy, politics, and social sciences to natural sciences; they hold multidimensional meanings within social relations. The resulting graphics resemble narratives found in the works of Franz Kafka or Jorge Luis Borges, representing an infinite library of relational classifications, bureaucratic structures, and capricious mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion.

With the aspirational agenda to collect “the sum of all human knowledge”, the free and open encyclopaedia Wikipedia has been consistently the only non-profit website in top 20 for most of the last 20 years (often in top 10, sometimes top 5). However, as a participatory platform dominated by contributors from the USA, who are most often cis, white, straight, male, middle aged, middle class, strongly biased to anglo-saxon culture, led to huge content gaps. This is further manifested in the policies, interfaces, infrastructures, volumes of open data, free media and other parts of Wikimedia ecosystem.

Progressive Wikimedians have tried in the past decade to compensate for this, to reduce those gaps, to advance to a more diverse participation, representation and ownership, but also to innovate work and relations through feminist, queer, decolonial and other methods. Many have experienced toxic reactions, gaslighting and sometimes organised sabotage of their work to the point of burnout and leaving the platform.

Azahara Cerezo has moved her artist's website files to a small portable server that can be connected to a solar panel. Using a small mirror and a camera, the server takes selfies and displays them on the main page of the website, so that whoever enters it sees part of the elements that physically support it, that is, that support her work.

The talk takes as its starting point this Duchampian "boîte-en-valise" of cognitive labour to analyse the possibilities, but also the contradictions of the project itself. The session proposes to connect "Mobile server" to other works done and in progress around the ambivalence of autonomy, the material dependencies of the digital sphere and the tensions around the idea of decentralisation.

AUTO()construcción is a real-time audiovisual project that fuses live coding and cinema, called "live cinema coding". It incorporates AI-powered data visualization and procedural 3D animation using gaming platforms. The project examines informal housing globally, envisioning the growth of megacities through DIY design systems. Informal architecture, prevalent in North America, Latin America, Asia, India, and European peripheries, offers a pragmatic response to urban challenges. Analyzing cinematic representations of futuristic cities and the architectural provocations of the avant-garde of modernism, AUTO()construcción transcends the limits of traditional practice. It serves as a catalyst to reinvent the urban landscape, challenging conventional architectural norms and the role of non-architects, self-taught design and the emergence of housing in multiple sectors that in 2024 will be equivalent to 70% of the world, actions in the face of the impossibility of the citizen middle in the real estate market, self-construction after years of existence has grown and configured the built environment in its own language challenging traditional architectural norms. AUTO()construction transforms living spaces into continuous expressions of flexibility and informality, reflecting diverse notions of freedom. Through a non-gaming approach, the project uses video game engines for cinematic expression, exploiting real-time capabilities for immersive experiences. It employs machine learning techniques such as StyleGAN to explore global architectural styles, allowing the synthesis of diverse influences into unique architectural facades. The fusion of styles from regions such as Cuba, Bolivia, Mexico and Bombay blurs the line between human creativity and mechanical interpretation, fostering new design possibilities.

How does it feel when you are looking for another educational program and your family and friends tell you: Are you going to study all your life, you are almost forty? Haven't you studied enough and never found a well paid job or anything to do with what you have studied?

2024 is different. I rolled into 2024 mourning the creative past, jumping like a grasshopper from one project to the other and yearning for a mellow year of training, developing my skills, and staring into space and its problems. How does it feel when your projects are exhibited yet feel dead lined unfinished? How much could I possibly spend more out of my pocket to create a show for the same people plus maybe 10 more but 10 less of the before to attend? How much more space can I have at home to fill with my own artworks? What to do with my body that is exhausted and numb to be present to start thinking about finding the new subject to make another show.

'When Good Enough is Enough: the premiere' is instead a year-long slow performance-installation that delves into combining my different educational practices as mentioned in a CV, developing new skills and finding a different way to educate myself slowly and patiently by re-researching my true self - not the one created for the art system to keep thriving and placing me into a line of competition and shared posts.

I am creating another level of education for myself; one that is different from ‘Education’ as a system or a multi-disciplined performance in a disciplined worked-out world. The education system still feels like a dance that needs to be rushed and its outcome results in an ever-exhausting loop. I have educated myself to imagine where all this education can take me to, and I am still arriving and perhaps I will never arrive. I imagine a chair as a continuous prop to play with as well as clapping and booing sounds, repetition of text like when you are forcing yourself to learn by hard and blank moments immersed in burnout.

Costume design: Sarah Portelli
Ssoundscape: Tina Camilleri
Photography: Alisa Komarova  

As technology moves forward, our interpretation of it becomes increasingly complex. Data-driven platforms, generative AI, synthetic data, algorithmic agency and automated decision-making systems are only a few examples of the profound integration of AI into everyday life. The increasing interaction between human and non-human agents is shaping new types of social relationships enabling new ways of being and acting in the world. What kind of intelligence are we creating? What are the socio-political and ethical implications of computational systems? How do these technologies reinvent traditional notions of power and control? By embedding artistic practices in the broader narratives of AI, artists emerge as crucial agents in navigating and deciphering the digital transition, which is not only culturally but also socially transformative.

Together with Mara Ferreri, Davor Misković, and Marcell Mars, Valeria and Tomislav undertook a research project to complement the artistic interventions of "Figure It Out: The Art of Living Through System Failure." By hosting bonfire storytelling sessions, conducting interviews, engaging in online ethnography, and diving into bibliographic research, they have been gathering stories of popular illegalisms from a variety of contexts. Their aim is to uncover the underlying logics that connect these acts of defiance and to reflect on the nuanced strategies of refusal necessary to honour their rich complexities. This research will be published as a book and an e-zine in November 2024; during this symposium Valeria and Tomislav will discuss their research process as a preview.

Over the past year, Ilina has been documenting what she calls techlore – ‘folk knowledge’ on the complex and opaque functionalities of the modern technologies that surround us. These techlore stories touch on issues affecting our data and privacy, the shortcuts we use to fix our devices and the explanations we find for technological mysteries. For her project Advice Well Taken, Ilina collected folk tales of digital salvation: everyday stories of anthropomorphisation, hacking and corner-cutting. They show how ordinary people are doing what they can to assert control over technology. During this talk Ilina will share some of those stories with the public as well as what she has learned from hours of interviews conducted with people from all sorts of backgrounds.

The work Women’s Affairs is a result of a series of encounters and conversations with women across Serbia, within which we shared stories about survival techniques and navigating the gaps of a state benefit system which constantly fails to assist and support life. We talked about lifelong work without a single day of official employment, about the diverse grey-zones of labour, about real and fictional earnings, invisible union struggles of women, mutual solidarity, the dysfunctional administrative web of social benefits, fake and real divorces, perseverance, small life gestures of resistance and big struggles we undertake. The stories and experiences we recorded testify to the incredible imagination and heroic endeavours of women in a hostile environment and various skills we acquire through life and coping. Hospitality, honesty, wonderful homemade specialties, vital energy and strength were all major ingredients of our informal gatherings full of playfulness and joy. The created material of stories. sounds and photographs we now share both through an art installation and new live encounters.

With Ghost Work, !Mediengruppe Bitnik looks at the ingenious practices which people with little or no power devise when systems fail them. Ghost Work collects mechanisms and resources devised to build resilience in remote work systems and on freelance work platforms. The research focuses on the ingenuity of workers in the global gig factory and particularly on tactics the workers on platforms such as Upwork based in the Eastern Europe and the Global South contrive to fake their location or presence to circumvent scant pay, surveillance and control that is frequently not expected from the gig workers in the Western Europe and the Global North.

Historically, women have been neglected by traditional labs. Through this research, I challenge and criticise the definition of the laboratory based on the science model, which is not exempt from the dominant “racist, sexist, and colonial past” (Livio and Emerson, in Bogers and Chiappini, 2019, p.287). In doing so, I introduce a feminist perspective of the laboratory following authors such as Lori Emerson and practices in feminist hackerspaces. According to Emerson and Livio, there exists a marginalised underrepresentation of people “in lab leadership, membership, and communities” (Livio and Emerson, in Bogers and Chiappini, 2019, p.288). Labs must include women as well as feminists’ concerns, adding and restructuring “the way labs work" (Livio and Emerson, in Bogers and Chiappini, 2019, p. 289). One of the problems of the laboratory environment is access. Access is complex, and unbalanced practices are recognised when analysing who accesses the lab. Access depends not only on performativity but also on resources. Another detrimental aspect of labs is a “privilege, especially in higher education” (ibid.). Generally, those with access to lab environments are “employed by an institution of higher education” (ibid.), so expertise accesses the lab, and these become “gendered, colonial and racial” (ibid.) spaces. According to Emerson and Livio, it is required to “change to better welcome those potential participants” (Livio and Emerson, in Bogers and Chiappini, 2019, p.290). I understand this as a structural and societal issue founded in the origins of science in colonial thinking: “history of labs is inseparable from the history of science, [as] science is a project with colonial origins” (ibid.), and so “writing alternative histories of labs” (ibid.) is required, including those “marginalised [and] excluded in the scientific codification” (ibid.), because “‘scientific knowledge’ and historical approaches are incomplete” (Dickson, in Livio and Emerson, in Bogers and Chiappini, 2019, p.290). According to Livio and Emmerson, “inclusion of diverse persons and perspectives” (Livio and Emerson, in Bogers and Chiappini, 2019, p.290) is required to build a feminist lab, where “counter-methods” (Livio and Emerson, in Bogers and Chiappini, 2019, p.291) can be practised through community access and participation. Moreover, considering the lab as a place for knowledge production, Emerson and Livio highlight the need for “transparency about funding and research stakeholders” (ibid.). Feminist labs, according to Haraway, should practise principles of “partiality and not universality” (Haraway, in Emerson and Livio, in Bogers and Chiappini, 2019, p.291). Donna Haraway's idea of "partiality and not universality" in the context of feminist labs suggests that these laboratories should embrace a situated and specific position, acknowledging the diversity of experiences and perspectives of individuals, particularly women, rather than attempting to establish a single universal view. This approach recognizes that different women have different experiences and challenges, and it seeks to highlight and address these diverse perspectives instead of imposing a singular worldview. It emphasises the importance of difference, openness, and diversity rather than assuming a universal, hegemonic, imposing view. These feminist labs have “more-than-human concerns” (Livio and Emerson, in Bogers and Chiappini, 2019, p.295), considering non-human living beings and community members. These raise “ethical questions” (ibid.), and labs become places for “ethical material” (ibid.), where humans, animals, and marginalised groups will become Earth's living beings by occidental science.

This lecture-performance is shaped by the author's personal audio-visual aesthetics informed by a subjective view of activist directions that are DIY at their core: declaring independence, digital autonomy, and tiny #BeYourOwnPlatform movement against obvious enshittification of digital platforms for musicians. The state of "digital work & life" seems to be defined by transformation into »techno-feudalism«, increasing slavery to data-sucking algorithms, A.I. systems scraping art works, digital "property" and other »creative content«, and corporate platforms unable to moderate alt-right nazis, TERFs and transphobes while censoring reports of lived experiences of genocide. Amidst all this are tiny movements of indie smolwebs, digital gardeners and frugal computing enthusiasts. The hashtag marks a small effort to reinvent DIY ethics that is calling for cultural and political emancipation in the techno-reality: anti-consumerist, using free software, decentralised, self-hosted, federated and home-grown.

The idea of dysfunction and inefficiency in technology can be approached not as an accidental and inconsistent state of knowledge in the present, but as a prepared-for and intentional condition for future knowledge. Starting with this proposal, my paper goes on to look at digital infrastructures and their associated workflows and systems in the moments of their breakdown. Why something is out of order is a crucial question for strategic thinking, I argue, because it does not merely reveal the assumptions of what the supposed working order is, but gets to the reasons why the malfunction is required, and who the beneficiaries are. Beyond the disrepair itself, thus, the paper focuses on its key consequences that condition the digital infrastructure for the uncertain future. Engaging with DevOps as the empirical encounter of software development and IT operations, I work to reverse the meaning of the discipline to become the strategic tool that provides the computational means of dealing with uncertainty. Current DevOps sees the dysfunction reactively as the inconsistency between the constant flows of software requirements on the one hand and the organisation’s communications on the other. Here the inconsistency is only aggravated by the attempts at fixing it, which is confirmed by the unexpectedly inefficient returns in IT, known as Solow’s paradox. In terms of strategic thinking, DevOps requires a way of dealing with ignorance in the abstract form, which would be compatible with the audit protocols of the digital infrastructure and could be brought in as its scalable feature. I find that the two ways of preparing for future knowledge - abductive reasoning and the Bayesian situated approach - offer two sets of means for creating such abstractions. The former, abduction, is often used as a way of preserving ignorance for decision-making when dealing with unknown variables. The latter is a variation of the Bayesian approach that deals with the specific material entanglements, as philosopher Karen Barad puts it, and thus always leaves room for uncertain and contingent, while simultaneously offering a scale-free solution for creating strategically inefficient digital infrastructures.

In this presentation I explore my practice research with adolescent girls in London. My PhD research is interested in adolescent girls’ performances of self in digital spaces, and the potentiality of autobiographical art and performance making to disrupt algorithmically-driven decision-making about the sharing of social media content. My research asks: who/what could adolescent girls be online? And how might social media provide new worlds for them, within a material world that is often ill-equipped for their survival? With early versions of Facebook asking, “what’s on your mind?”, encouraging users to share a “status” with friends, and Instagram now encouraging users to share content to their “story”, social media presents itself, first and foremost, as a personal space to share your life with the select few that you accept into it. The reality, however, is that these capitalist and highly-marketized platforms prioritise and reinforce hegemonic performances of femininity that are used to exploit women and girls in order to sell them products. My applied theatre practice research explores how adolescent girls’ emerging autobiographical performances of digital self, might disrupt these hegemonic ideas of girlhood, resisting, or refusing, the computational limitations of the platform and focussing instead on content produced for the creator, not the consumer. I draw on cyberfeminist ideas that encourage social media users to be a ‘glitch’ in the machine, to intentionally cause system failures as an act of feminist resistance. Through an engagement with Butler’s and Goffman’s theorisations of the self as something that shifts, and can never be fully realised, I position social media as a catalogue, or portfolio of self; the ‘doing’ of self is documented in words, photos and videos that continue to exist beyond the moment of articulation. Research at the intersection of performance, and social media, predominantly explores performances made with or about social media, where social media functions as a performance making tool, or a subject to be explored through the performance. This presentation will explore how this relationship might operate in the opposite direction; How might theatre and performance making skills impact how participants engage with social media? How might we view the production of social media content as one and the same as producing any other form of art or performance? This presentation details the first phase of my practice – a series of exploratory creative workshops focussed on autobiographical art and performance making with digital and non-digital methods – and considers, in what ways are adolescent girls engaging with and narrating themselves on digital platforms, and to what extent can performance techniques alter or develop their engagement with social media?