Infrastructural Rehearsals Collective @ 2.Dh5: Weaving resistance in times of distress

March 1-2, 2025

Ru Paré, Chris Lebeaustraat 4 Amsterdam

Red Room

Have you been wondering about the relationship between the global military-industrial complex and genocidal Big Tech? Why should we disinvest from these technologies, and how can we do it? Infrastructural Rehearsals Collective would like to host a discussion on resisting Big Tech infrastructure and the violences of the green economy. Participants are invited to bring questions and propositions through projects they are dreaming of or already involved in. Propositions might include everything from community organising against corporate tech takeovers and land defence, to zine making, de-install parties, or anti-colonial tech.

Participants will share questions, concerns, and practices across our different contexts and struggles. By doing so we establish a mutual commitment to recognizing how these violences, such as massive increases in computational demands, (via AI, chip factories, data centers, autonomous weapons systems) led by a green capitalist agenda are destroying the planet, and that another world without them is both necessary and possible.

Come ready to contribute, as the session will be shaped by those who are in attendance in order to have a conversation across practices, communities, and how these inform the modes of intervention needed.

+ info: https://www.2dh5.nl/en/event/how-can-we-organise-against-the-greenwashing-extractivism-of-big-tech/

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The Infrastructural Rehearsals Collective investigates and collaborates on imaginative community-led responses to the climate crisis under fossil-fuel driven racial capitalism today. We make proposals and interventions that challenge top-down hegemonic approaches from green-washing tech capitalists to state-sponsored initiatives. As academics, artists, designers, researchers, activists, organizers and cultural workers we bring our experiences from different fields of knowledge, practices and terrains of struggle (Barcelona, Basel, Brussels, Glasgow, London, and Rotterdam). Together we figure out tools, methods, creative strategies and technologies to build capacity for international solidarity and resistance. While being embedded in a wider network of associated groups and collaborators, the Infrastructural Rehearsals Collective came together through an initiative by the Critical Media Lab (https://criticalmedialab.ch/) and TITiPI (https://titipi.org/). Through this, we look for ways to: share knowledge for climate action storytelling, do bug-reporting on big tech, make toolkits, provide vocabularies or build community infrastructures. Drawing upon Ruth Wilson Gilmore's idea of abolition as life in rehearsal, we look to model “the future from the present” by using our institutional resources towards actively making platforms, generatively problematizing deadly technosocial paradigms, or facilitating knowledge and skills that can be openly shared and redistributed. As Big Tech Cloud abolitionists, we're rehearsing in its ruins, organizing towards a world in which many words fit.

Falling and Floating. A guided tour into Volumetric Regimes feat. GOB GOB

29/03

17:30-20:30 

@Theory Stairs, FedLev Building (Sandberg Instituut)

 

Six years of trans*feminist disobedient action research on 3D technologies, paradigms and procedures are about to be published as “Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence” (Open Humanities Press, DATA-browser series). The book foregrounds technological practices that provide with a widening of the possible and brings together diverse materials on the political, aesthetic and relational regimes in which volumes are calculated. The ongoing multi-local launch of Volumetric Regimes is made up of playful contributions, informal responses and interactive formats proposed by known and unknown comrades in the making of technosciences otherwise. 

The guided tour into Volumetric Regimes: material cultures of quantified presence (Open Humanities Press, 2022) at Sandberg Institute will touch upon 3D image production tools and the possible practice of dissident worlding by axes, planes, dimensions and coordinates. It will be matched with play session and screening feat. works by Ráchel Plutón and Elio J Carranza. 

Optional Reading: 

https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=Dis-orientation_and_its_Aftermath

https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=Clumsy_Volumetrics

https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=Endured_Instances_of_Relation

GOB GOB is an initiative for critical engagement with image production software and game development by Elio J Carranza, Lauren Fong, and Aidan Wall.

+ info: https://sandberg.nl/femke-snelting-jara-rocha-falling-and-floating

 

Rock Damages

An Underground Division's performative lecture by Helen Pritchard + Jara Rocha at Sonic Acts, Amsterdam 2020.

Software as a Critique

What: Software as a Critique (Discussion)
Where: LAG
1e, Schinkelstraat 14-16, 1075 TX Amsterdam
When: Sunday 14 February 14:00-18:00

A discussion introduced by software cases like Pattern for Python, Faircoin Wallet, MakeHuman, The Unicode Standards.

With: Kym Ward, Aymeric Mansoux, Jara Rocha, Roel Roscam Abbing, Femke Snelting, Dick Reckard.


Due to the importance and ubiquity of software in our lives, it is urgent to recognise and deal with the political and social elements that are translated into the technical domain and vice versa. Looking from the technical side, code often replicates existing
social constructions, reinforcing existing hegemonies or mirroring cultural patterns of inclusion and exclusion. Conversely, technological elements have their own political agency, beyond conventional parliamentary politics, aiming for example towards efficiency, quantification, transparency.

In this afternoon meeting, we will start by looking at the interactions between technical and non-technical aspects of specific pieces of software that raise political or ethical issues. We’ll be looking at questions like: What happens when you translate a body into a 3D mesh? What variety of people are involved in crypto-currencies, and how do their different political views transfer into decentralised banking systems? Who decides how we get to choose our gender from drop-down menus, and who benefits from a multiplicity of options? What is at stake in the challenge of a machine that writes poetry?

After considering how such questions translate in potential and existing software practices, we’d like to discuss whether they could inform a kind of critique that is not confined to the spaces of artistic or academic discourse. Can these approaches and methodologies create a space of critique inside software-centered communities that is not segregated from its productive practices?

Please find more information following the link below:


http://www.constantvzw.org/site/Software-as-a-Critique.html