Being online or not, there is no outside of "the digital". The digital is always already inside us and dispersed throughout our everyday environments. Our bodies, infrastructures and politics are fundamentally intertwined with digital technologies and practices. The conference Digital Interventions investigates the potential of artistic practices that aim at either creating and safeguarding emancipatory spaces of the digital or challenging and countering the many forms of digital surveillance, exploitation and repression. Looking at the interstices between art, activism and hacking, the concrete materiality and embodied nature of the digital is analyzed as both the site and the means of digital interventions.
The term “digital interventions” itself is wrapped in fundamental and irresolvable contradictions. The digital sphere is a space of refuge and resistance as anonymity and privacy of communication provide shelter from oppressive violence. And yet, at the same time, the digital sphere is subject to massive surveillance, trolling and disinformation that capture and undermine political expression. With social media participation governed by the attention economy, the internet structured by platform capitalism, and political discourse undermined by algorithms – what are the practices and where are the breaches for artists and activists to intervene and challenge these developments? How can complicity be turned into criticality?
Focusing on bodies, infrastructures and politics we follow the hypothesis that it is a core task of the arts to make visible, critique and disentangle dysfunctional processes, false categories and ideological reductions as well as the complicity of platforms and online services with state power and the military-industrial complex.

It is organized by the working group "Digital Activism" in cooperation with HAU Hebbel am Ufer.

To register, please send an email to: a01@sfb1512.de 

Program

07:45 – 08:15 Transition to HAU 3

To attend the evening event by Claudix Vanesix: Non-Fuckable Tokens (NFTs), the purchase of a ticket is required.

11:00 – 11:15 Break

03:15 – 03:45 Break

04:45 – 05:00 Break

07:00 – 08:30 Dinner break (dinner not included)

HAU 3

To attend the evening event by Claudix Vanesix: Non-Fuckable Tokens (NFTs), the purchase of a ticket is required.