This year’s edition of Mine, Yours, Ours festival deals with surveillance as one of the most important issues of contemporary era. With its main function to eliminate deviation and steer the population in the direction of functional behavior – whatever functional behavior might mean – certain type of surveillance is present in every civilization. The one who surveils always takes the position of power, not just in a way of defining the boundaries of acceptable behavior, but also in a sense of concealing its own deviations. This is the reason why we don’t trust those who surveil, even if we accept their definition of what is acceptable…

⇒ FRIDAY, 08 April, 2016 ⇐

11:00 h, OKC Palach (Kružna 8)

Amy Suo Wu: TACTICS AND POETICS OF INVISIBILITY
– invisible ink workshop

Photo: Tanja Kanazir / Drugo more (Flickr galerija)

Tactics and Poetics of Invisibility is a workshop on how to make, apply and activate various kinds of invisible inks such as milk, lemon juice, starch, baking soda and saliva. Invisible inks are one of the oldest forms of steganography, the art and science of hiding in plain sight. In the workshop, you will also learn of its history and basic theories of invisible ink and steganography.

The workshop is a part of a research into steganography and how analogue forms of steganography could make up for deficiencies of digital communication and provide a possible solution to more secure communication in the age of pervasive online surveillance. Historically speaking, compared to cryptography which was considered more scientifically sophisticated as it was primarily a mathematical endeavor, steganography was its dark cousin, elusively steeped in alchemy, magic and mystery. Through analogue forms of steganography it aims to explore the practical act of evading the digital gaze on one hand and on the other hand explore the poetic and creative potential in forming alternative modes of communication to strengthen community bonds. This project is made possible by the O&O subsidy of the CBK Rotterdam.
https://amysuowu.hotglue.me/tpi

Amy Suo Wu is an artist, designer and educator researching how technology, language and media shape people and vice versa. Her research based hybrid practice is an exploration into how to activate and intervene in critical and playful ways. Since 2013 she has been working at the Willem de Kooning Academy (Dutch Academy of art and design based in Rotterdam) teaching Design Research, Concept and Image in the Graphic Design department and the Hacking minor to students across all disciplines. In the same year, she co-founded Eyesberg, a (graphic) design studio motivated by conceptual and experimental approaches. She has also facilitated and organized zine making workshops and festivals in the Netherlands.
http://amysuowu.net/

17:00 h, Filodrammatica (Korzo 28/1)

Evan Roth: INTERNET LANDSCAPES
– lecture presentation & discussion

Video of the presentation
Camera & editing: Filmaktiv

In Internet Landscapes, Evan Roth will discuss his work as it relates to visualizing and understanding the Internet’s physical, digital, and cultural landscapes. He will introduce his latest networked video, Internet Landscapes: Sweden, commissioned by Masters & Servers in 2015, and recount his personal quest to reconnect with an Internet that has changed significantly since he first went online in the 1990s.

Evan Roth (b. 1978) is an American artist based in Paris whose practice visualizes and archives culture through unintended uses of technologies. Creating prints, sculptures, videos and websites, his work explores the relationship between misuse and empowerment and the effect that philosophies from hacker communities can have when applied to digital and non-digital systems.

His work is in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Israel Museum. Recent exhibitions include the 2016 Biennale of Sydney; Electronic Superhighway (2016-1966) at Whitechapel Gallery, London; and This Is for Everyone at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Roth co-founded the arts organizations Graffiti Research Lab and the Free Art and Technology Lab and in 2016 was a recipient of Creative Capital funding.
http://www.evan-roth.com/

19:00 h, Filodrammatica (Korzo 28/1)

Tomislav Medak: BEYOND THE PARADIGM OF TECHNOLOGIES OF CONTROL
– lecture presentation & discussion

Video of the presentation
Camera & editing: Filmaktiv

Over the last decade the tenor of debates over digital networks has radically shifted. The technological systems that once seemed as inherently emancipatory, allowing everyone to speak to and mobilize the broadest of publics, creating a foundation for a global public sphere, with the growing consequences of centralization of communication services, commodification of content and dataveillance has retained a very different cast. We’re all caught in the dragnet of algorithmic governance controlled by commercial operators and surveillance state. Our existence as data points limits our agency as liberal subjects in a democratic context. Predictive analytics based on electronic tracking and breadcrumbs have found their application beyond commerce, and together with the deployment of UAVs, have transformed the foundations of warfare. In short, capitalism has caught up with the internet. The military-industrial complex was never far. Accordingly, our political heroes today are those who blew the lid on this world of surveillance: Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. Critical media culture is obsessed with the fantasy of control, where only the tech-savvy escape its spell. The spooks, the hackers and the anons. And yet this fantasy of technological world is deeply dis-empowering and elitist. After discussing these developments, in my talk I’ll focus on a completely different project altogether — Public Library — trying to analyse what resources and strategies do we have available to continue to draw on emancipatory fantasy of technologies.

Tomislav Medak is a philosopher with interests in contemporary political philosophy, media theory and aesthetics. Together with his colleagues, he’s running the theory program and publishing activities of the Multimedia Institute/MAMA (Zagreb). He’s a free software and free culture advocate, and one of the people working on various facets of Memory of the World/Public Library project. He is author and performer with the Zagreb based theatre collective BADco.
  

James Bridle: BLACK BOX, BLACK CHAMBER
– lecture presentation & discussion

Video of the presentation
Camera & editing: Filmaktiv

Surveillance today is pervasive but invisible, inspiring generalized anxiety in those who think about it, and dissociative resignation in those who don’t. In this it feels much like the Cold War used to do, and Climate Change increasingly does. What can we learn from the associations between these global afflictions? What forms of agency and knowing are possible within their complex networks, and what role does art have to play in approaching them?

James Bridle is a British artist and writer based in Athens, Greece. His artworks have been commissioned by galleries and institutions and exhibited worldwide and on the internet. His writing on literature, culture, and networks has appeared in magazines and newspapers including Wired, Domus, Cabinet, The Atlantic, The New Statesman, The Guardian, The Observer, and many others, in print and online. He lectures regularly at conferences, universities, and other events. His formulation of the New Aesthetic research project has spurred debate and creative work across multiple disciplines.
http://shorttermmemoryloss.com/
http://booktwo.org

Nina Boelsums: UNVEIL
– performance
  

Photo: Tanja Kanazir / Drugo more

As a physical metaphor for the invasion of privacy online, “Unveil” is a dress that opens up with each new cookie stored on a computer. While the wearer browses the internet, she accumulates more trackers and her body gets more exposed.

In the virtual world, losing privacy can seem like an abstract and trivial concept. “Unveil” makes the issue physical and exposes the historically most private parts of ourselves: the naked body. It visualizes the reality of privacy violation. It makes no distinction between the online and the ‘real’ world.

While the wearer of the dress goes online, a script counts the number of cookies that get stored on the computer, and when this number increases, it is communicated to an Arduino on the back of the dress. With each new cookie, two servo motors spin. They wind up threads that are connected to the slits in the dress, opening them up and exposing the wearer’s skin.

Nina Boelsums (20) is an Industrial Design student and privacy activist. She explores the possibilities of programming in art, and the interaction between technology and society. Her designs are combinations of these subjects.

She lives in Amsterdam and studies at the University of Technology Eindhoven.

20:00h, Filodrammatica (Korzo 28/1)

Annie Machon: THE PANOPTICON: RESISTANCE IS NOT FUTILE
– lecture presentaion & discussion

Video of the presentation
Camera & editing: Filmaktiv

Privacy was enshrined as a fundamental human right in the Universal Declaration in 1948. But since the evolution of the world wide web it has never been under greater threat, with panoptic spy surveillance and corporate vigilantes stalking the internet.

As a former MI5 intelligence officer-turned-whistleblower, Annie Machon has experienced every side of this issue. Today she emphasizes the value of privacy and puts out a call to the tech industry, declaring that “the tech community is our last line of defense” against global security surveillance. During her talk, she will explore the problems, effects and possible solutions to today’s Panopticon.

Annie Machon was an intelligence officer for the UK’s Security Service, MI5, in the 1990s, before resigning to help blow the whistle on the crimes and incompetence of the British spy agencies. She is now a writer, media commentator, political campaigner, and international public speaker on a variety of related issues: the war on terrorism, the war on whistleblowers, the war on drugs, and the war on the internet. She is currently the European director of LEAP (www.leap.cc) and Co-Director of Code Red (www.codered.is), as well as a member of the Sam Adams Associates (http://samadamsaward.ch/).

Annie has an MA (Hons) Classics from Cambridge University. She is the author of Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers: MI5 and the David Shayler Affair.
http://anniemachon.ch/
https://twitter.com/anniemachon
https://about.me/anniemachon