Digital Discomfort: Read-Write-Chaos

 Date: Friday, 19 January 2024 [NEW DATE]

Time: 13:00 - 18:00 (free dinner for participants)

Location: Varia, (Gouwstraat 3, Rotterdam)

Note: this session will be held in English

Participation: is limited, to join please send an email to info@varia.zone with [ Digital Discomfort ] in the subject.

 

The Digital Discomfort Working Group proposes a one-day gathering to collectivelly engage with the questions and praxis of discomfort aesthetics as a potential form of contemporary (techno)political resistance.

As a tentative situation, we propose read-write-chaos as a method, in order to provide ourselves and others with a spacetime for attending to the emisions, erasures, receptions and recursions of a multiplicity of computationally mundane inscriptions, semiotics and poethics. Digital Discomfort can be understood in many ways (geopolitically, somatically, informatically), but on this occasion we propose to stay close to the aesthetic component of it. Or in other words: to explore discomfort as a queer aesthetics with potential of performing resistance, underwhelmedness and resilience. It is perhaps capable of adding up to what circulates as sensible matter as well as what gets to be experienced by means of friction, slowness, fun difficulty and/or surprising obliqueness in a too linear, too seamless, tending-to-flattenness digital everyday. Read-write chaotic struggle for awlessness might emerge in the midst of spreadsheets, in the making of complex diagrams, in the mess of collective text annotation or in the middle of mumbling discussions.

Cared for by Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak and Jara Rocha, the open-ended research on Digital Discomfort learns, dialogues, and experiments with ways to refuse compliance with what science and technology scholar and ecofeminist Donna Haraway calls the “informatics of domination,” and what could be referred to as “totalitarian innovation.” From within and beyond specific (infra)structures, CfDD’s drive is to operate as an agitator of disobedient, practice-based, para-academic research on, across, and despite the techno-colonial establishment of BigTech. CfDD undertakes mundane but attentive experiments to collectively study non-Eurocentric/white origins of computational paradigms and to propose instead trans*feminist infrastructural entanglements, anti-extractivist connecting cultures, and intersectional notions of hosting and hostility in the online structures we inhabit. With “Digital Discomfort, CfDD continue their collective study of cultures and practices of computation and invites other reflections, grammars, and actions that contribute to a plurality of inter-dependent, anti-colonial, trans*feminist, anti-ableist, and environmentally just worldmaking practices of computation.

This event will take place on location at Varia and English will be the main language of operation. To sign up, please send an email to info[at]varia.zone with [ Digital Discomfort ] in the subject header and please indicate if you have any needs to access the events that are not addressed on this page: https://varia.zone/en/pages/accessibility.html or any dietary restrictions.

the Cell for Digital Discomfort @ The Hauntologists | BAK (Utrecht)

 

10 September–13 November 2022
BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht

18–20 November 2022
İKSV, Istanbul

2–4 December 2022
GUDSKUL, Jakarta

Participants include: Özge Açıkkol, Merve Bedir, Kerem Ozan Bayraktar, Cell for Digital Discomfort (Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak, and Jara Rocha), Dika+Lija, Philippa Driest, freethought collective, Ilgın Hancıoğlu, Alexandra Karyn, Gayatri Kodikal, Gatari Kusuma, Yen Noh, Rifandi Nugroho, İlyas Odman, Marina Papazyan, Anitha Silvia, and Zone Collective (Megan Hoetger and Kirila Cvetkovska), among others. 

The Hauntologists is a project emerging through experimentation and collective research within the 2021/2022 BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice. Engaging spectrality as a tactic to investigate and redress the conditions of brokenness of the world, it takes place in Istanbul, Jakarta, and Utrecht from 10 September until 10 December 2022 as a continuously evolving and geographically distributed discursive, performative, publishing, and exhibitionary composition.   

At present, many find themselves haunted by the persisting brokenness of the world—inequality, war, racial and gendered violence, precarity, techno-colonialism, and other perpetual crises. Can one haunt back to intervene and redress this ongoing sense of dread? Could spectrality be embraced as an embodied cultural and political sensibility to experiment with? Can research be practiced as a haunting to overcome the limits of traditional categories of knowledge, knowledge production, and so-called artistic research? 

+info: https://www.bakonline.org/program-item/the-hauntologists/

[workshop] Installing Ourselves into Libreplanet

RESCHEDULED: May 23

A workshop session to map out each of our current conditions of connecting and being together, the physical-political, and technological conditions using a diagrammatic methodology.

The workshop is geared towards installing ourselves into the conference's infrastructural spectralities by sharing, learning from and attuning to each others' conditions for connectivity, online participation and basic computer-mediated mundane day-to-day life. We want to pose this affirmation as an initial trigger: installing is about situating — attuning to our network of (inter)dependencies and attuning to the dependencies with our local and vernacular but also standardized and planetary networks.

This workshop was created in the context of the Fellowship for Situated Practice organized by BAK.

  + info: https://www.fsf.org/events/libreplanet-workshop-april-25-installing-ourselves-into-libreplanet