[not taking place]

[the lines below were written collectively in a rush due to the speed of the events that made our panel in transmediale 24 not take place at the end, and they can be found integrally here https://pad.riseup.net/p/r.5e8fb6bd54cdce773db487845244e55d]

Introduction for the panel: Anti-Colonial Tech through Resistance and Discomforts, planned for transmediale, 2 February 2024. Prepared by Varia, Constant, TITiPI, Digital Discomfort Workgroup 

                                   

-- who are we and why are we here

Before starting this conversation, and share some of our techno-disobedient practices, we would like to give you some context about who we are and why we are here today.

As you probably know, a call for strike circulates at the moment. It asks for international cultural workers like us, to withdraw our labor from German cultural institutions as a way to resist the suppression of freedom of expression, specifically expressions of solidarity with Palestine. Some participants and members of the tm team that we deeply respect, have decided to withdraw their participation. We understand their decisions to do so. 

Also, local organisers have questioned our presence.

And yet, we are still here.

We are here because we want cultural spaces in Germany, and everywhere, to commit to liberationist struggle and internationalist solidarity. 

After many discussions, we decided that this means we need to inhabit spaces that allow for these conversations, especially the conversations that are increasingly being banned, silenced or avoided across contexts.

So here we are, in all of our doubts, discomforts and contradictions.

We are artists, theorists, designers, researchers and activists. We work from Barcelona, Rotterdam, Brussels, Amsterdam, Basel, Glasgow and elsewhere.

We form a network-of-networks which includes Varia, TITiPI, Constant, the Digital Discomfort Working group and it extends into many other related practices.

While not everyone has decided to be here on stage, the conversation has been shaped by exchanges between all of us, in preparation for our presence today, but already for many years.

Together we explore modes of resistance to the extractive, and colonial approach of technological infrastructures that are being modelled and proliferated by Big Tech companies in collaboration with nation states, Big Oil and the finance industry.

We engage with trans*feminist, anti-colonial practices, experiment with ways to infrastructure otherwise, and platform divestment. 

We practice technodisobedience and abolishing the cloud regime. For example, we have organized a trans*feminist digital depletion strikes that we first started organising a year ago, with a meeting here in Berlin.

-- to say it as clear as we can

But before continuing, to say it here as clear as we can:

    This work opposes anti-Muslim hatred, anti-Semitism, racism, apartheid and all other forms of oppression.

    Our practices have been and continue to be in solidarity with the people of Palestine and their right to self determination and freedom.

    We need to resist the technological regimes that obstruct their capacity to make a life worth living possible.

    The only path forward is to end this brutal occupation.

    We call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire.

    To release all hostages and unlawfully detained prisoners, both in Gaza and the whole of Palestine.

    For a future where everyone is equal and all Palestinians have the right to return home.

-- what is gathering us

Since the beginning of Israel's most recent deadly siege, which has turned into an explicit genocide in Gaza, we started to meet more often, with a renewed urgency.

With many others, we saw how proprietary digital platforms were once again the go-to places for informing, organising, and raising voices. 

Soon, reports about the shadow-banning of Palestine-related content on all major social-media platforms became mainstream knowledge. It lead to a more widespread awareness of the colonial figurations propelled by these platforms, because they invisibilized pro-Palestine content or outright censored them.

Journalists and activists suggested hacks to "fight the algorithm": they suggested to post selfies in your stories, comment on Palestinian content as if it was vacation or food content, in addition to all the different signs, symbols, and words to use instead of being able to state clearly what was and is still happening. But these efforts are all about continuing to exist within those platforms, instead of divesting from them.

We are in solidarity with the reasoning of many to keep using these platforms for organising resistance and for evidencing the genocide. But it is heartbreaking to realise that these same platforms are provided by the companies that make up the israeli military-technological-startup complex, and that it feels unimaginable to desert or boycott them.

We have seen before how at moments of crisis political urgencies cause a separation between the struggles for social justice from those towards just technologies, and we have tried in many ways to think with and as activists on how to develop other habits of making struggles present, other modes of archiving and organising. 

But this time it seemed different.

All our attempts at affirmative software and network practices, and ways to communicate online otherwise, do they actually make sense when urgencies such as these arise?

Opting out of commercial platforms means that it has become difficult to connect with potential allies, solidarity contexts and places for radical transformation, paradoxically at a moment that a critique of the extractive and exploitative modes of these platforms became painfully reconfirmed.

-- it is not just social media, not just Palestine 

And of course, it is not only about social media.

The many issues with what the transmediale program calls "the logics of content production" are only part of the colossal infrastructures of oppression and subjugation that are being rolled out as we speak. The scale at which they operate seems to pulverize our experimental, collective but modest attempts at thinking and doing computation otherwise. 

Amazon and Google's cloud fueled collaboration with the Israeli Defense Forces provides facial detection and sentiment analysis technologies that are deployed in Gaza. This technology allows for further surveillance of and unlawful data collection on Palestinians, and facilitates expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements on Palestinian land. The Nimbus project shows how the data produced by using Big Tech services trains AI models, which then end up being mobilised in colonially-motivated warfare.

There is a mutually reinforcing cycle in place, as the Israeli tech sector is characterized by a sort of military-apartheid-startup continuum. A prime example is Unit 8200, the military intelligence operation of the IDF. Unit 8200 is responsible for waging cyberwarfare, code-decryption and surveillance of Palestinians, and has a great deal of alumni who have founded companies both in Israel and Silicon Valley.

 As published in the Perspective Paper of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies on December 28th, 2023:

    More than 1,000 start-ups have been founded by 8200 alumni. Its graduates are involved not only in cybersecurity start-ups but in many other fields as well, ranging from Waze to Wix to SolarEdge. These examples represent only a small fraction of the broader trend. It is no exaggeration to assert that graduates of these units have significantly shaped the Israeli hi-tech sector over the past decade. These units are a true powerhouse propelling the Israeli hi-tech sector, with a significant portion of the technology they develop flowing back to defense applications.

    Bar-Ilan University's BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 2, 248, December 28, 2023

The Israeli weapons industry does not hide its market advantage of being able to field-test weapons and technology, at the expense of Palestinian people.

The Pegasus trojan suite and the Heron drones, deployed for internal surveillance and warfare, make their respective producers world leaders in their trade. Of course these weapons are for sale to nations authorized by the Israeli Ministry of Defense so that other colonial projects can make use of it. For example the Israel-Morocco normalization process has been oiled with the access to IDF's tech which Morocco quickly put to use to support their own colonial efforts in Southern Sahara. The Frontex agency that militarizes the borders of Fortress Europe is another client of the Heron drones, with which it observes and tracks the movements and the sinking of migrant vessels in the Mediterranean, and Azerbaijan has joined the list of clients of the Israeli arms industry, too, in the occasion of its ongoing war with Armenia.

What has been encouraging in all this, is that the emerging visibility of these connections has meant that many began to do critical investigations into these widely used tools and softwares. There is the project that showed steps to move away from or boycott Wix, there has been the "No Tech for Apartheid" campaign and also a collective awareness was created around the censorship that people have experienced. It has resulted in more and more people seeking alternatives, or simply logging off.

In solidarity with ongoing efforts for resistance, as well as the need for making struggle visible, we have to figure out how we can together divest from daily technological habits that continue to thicken our complicity in these violent acts. From Google Drive to Instagram, if there are no outsides to these companies then we need to find other ways to resist them.

But how to do that.

-- what we mean by anti-colonial tech and how it relates to our solidarity for Palestine

What is becoming clear is that anti-colonial technologies, if anything, need to reckon with the intrinsic connection between projects like Nimbus and the everyday business of Google and Amazon. It is no accident or miscalculation on their part to collaborate with the state of Israel and to provide the means for deploying genocide and deepening apartheid. Palestine is the testing ground for technologies that are then used and exported throughout the world. As we have seen from the battlefield to demonstrations on streets in the US and Europe, these weapons and tactics will come for all of us. In that sense, the global call that "We are all Palestinians" should gives us pause to strengthen our solidarity and our vigilance. 

Anti-colonial tech are not just about resisting Big Tech, that is only the beginning.

Of course we need to resist surveillance and data extraction, but when we say "anti-colonial tech", we mean technological practices that resist the central, major and uniforming narrative of contemporary computation. It is about resisting the depletion of creative possibilities for life while paying attention to ways that nation states, tech companies and finance collaborate to erase entire populations including their cultures.

Anti-colonial technologies radically foreground vernacular, situated, specific technodiversities that are fundamental for resistance and survival.

They refuse infrastructure-solutionism in response to all difficulties: ecological, social, economical, or epistemic.

They work against infrastructural violence at different scales at the same time. Banal and breathtakingly colonial, all routed through the smartphones in our pockets.

-- about the conversation

So where to start?

It is clear that we need to operate on multiple timelines of urgency; we need quick forms of organising, but also to lay the ground for working towards longterm divestment, towards joyful, systemic techno-political change.

We therefore decided to spend the folloẃing 45 minutes with you to share some of the things in process, some beginnings, modest proposals for moving networks and political engagement away from toxic cloud environments, activating paths towards anti-colonial tech. 

This conversation is also a call for others to join this work, and while we opted out for a Q+A on stage today, we warmly invite you to come see us afterwards and find out how we can continue doing this work together.

Most of the practices we will present do not respond to the concerns we raised directly. They are the ground, the starting point for an experimentation with technopolitical practices that can take up issues of scale, control and agency, that can deal concretely with other economies that resist extraction, with other ways of data ownership, with labour involved in maintenance of infrastructures, with ways to build solidarity, or simply with what it means to work with old devices and low energy consumption. 

We think that possibilities for anti-colonial technology might be there.

We'll try to hold on to 'fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities' that are already here, present. Thinking with Ruth Wilson Gilmore's work on abolition, we opt for building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.

https://transmediale.de/en/2024/event/anti-colonial-tech

[panel] Sublime Depths | transmediale 2023

With Femke Snelting, Georgina Voss, Irene Fubara-Manuel, Jara Rocha

Moderated by Romi Ron Morrison

 

02.02.2023 17:30  Akademie der Künste / Hanseatenweg / Club Room

Volumetric technologies are increasingly sought after commodities in a wide range of contexts from entertainment to city planning to military surveillance. Rendering a reality of their own, instead of the one's captured, volumetric technologies reflect a nested regime of representations, truths, and ideologies, producing an affective computational sublime. Hidden inside glossy renders and visual effects, these representations proliferate explicit politics, taking up space, volume and depth, minimising difference and the modes of representation.

In this conversation, Femke Snelting, Georgina Voss, Irene Fubara-Manuel, and Jara Rocha, with moderator Romi Ron Morrison, discuss the problems and promises of volumetric technologies and their seamless movement between entertainment, shopping, ikea catalogues, smart borders, and wildlife preservation. Unpacking the affects of the computational sublime, their conversation aims to bring bodies and data points and spaces back into relation with each other.

 

+ info: https://2023.transmediale.de/en/event/sublime-depths

 

Rendering Research at ERG (BXL); Book launch feat. Elodie Mugrefya

Possible Bodies (Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting) feat. Elodie Mugrefya will present their upcoming book Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence on Thursday 24th March at 17.30, at ERG (école de recherche graphique), 87 rue du Page – 1050 Bruxelles – as part of the Rendering Research workshop organized by DARC (Aarhus University), CSNI (London South Bank University) and transmediale festival for art and digital culture. All welcome.

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. For the occasion of Rendering Research we will be joined by Elodie Mugrefya, who we invited to re-interpret, critique, and/or remix materials from Volumetric Regimes through her sensibility for technocolonial knowledge production.

 

Elodie Mugrefya is a member of Constant, Brussels where she takes part in its artistic and collective researches while developing a writing practice that intersects with Constant's themes of interest; notably notions surrounding collectivity, technological infrastructures and socio-political troubles. Constant develops projects across art and technology and operates through its commitment to free/libre open source cultures and intersectional perspectives. https://constantvzw.org/

 

+ info: https://www.centreforthestudyof.net/?p=6230 

+ info on the overarching context of Rendering Research: https://transmediale.de/projects/aarhus-university-london-south-bank-university

abandon all hope ye who enter here | Queering Damage / The Underground Division at transmediale 2022 exhibition

 

Conjuring artifice and dark humour in the face of extraction, financial fantasies, and the illusions of techno-solutionism, abandon all hope ye who enter here explores the limits of refusal in a computationally ordered and altered world. Bringing together nine artists and collectives, the works in the exhibition materialise the strange realities and cruel attachments that are often obscured beneath the veneers of shiny, seductive interfaces, and inside algorithmic black boxes. 

(...)

+ about exhibition: https://transmediale.de/projects/abandon-all-hope-ye-who-enter-here

+ about Queering Damage: https://transmediale.de/artworks/queering-damage

 

Depths and Densities: a bugged report / Transmediale Journal

Possible Bodies is an ongoing collaborative research on the technical and lively tensions between so-called bodies and volumetric practices. The inquiry is ready to emerge at any possible intersection that lies between two vectors. One vector is constituted by physical bodies that might be somatic or not, human or not, isolated or not, named or not. The other vector is tensed by the calculation the volume bodies occupy with their very presence in space, being virtual—made of bits—or physical—made of atoms.

The project aims at problematizing the concrete and fictional entities that “bodies” are, in the context of 3D tracking, modelling, rendering, calibrating, and scanning operations towards them. Such operations have perhaps grown in sophistication and speed within the digital realm, but are certainly not new. The particular contemporary topology of volumetrics draws from intricate genealogies of many knowledge clusters of modernity (perspective setting procedures, occupation measuring techniques, scale calibration tools, average volume normalizing, position prediction methods). Protocols and paradigms proliferating and circulating confirm the limitations of how, when, where, and why bodies could or should be considered and measured. In other words, there is a continuum that facilitates the smooth flow of very specific volumetrics (and not others) from architecture to border surveillance—passing through the spectacularization of sports, biomedical practices—to the juridical, the military, and the pornographic. The technoscientific conditions for the smoothness of this flow constitute the rigidity of mere probable trajectories along the continuum of volumetrics and restrict the wild twists and surprising hacks needed to jump from the probable to the possible!

Of course scale affects the mathematics of presence very strongly. Take the scale leap from individual somatic corpo-realities (of, say, zoologically recognized organisms) towards the so-called body of earth. Quite a jump evidences how the infrastructural complex of geo-operations such as mining and the measuring of soil depends on software tool sibling to those used in the biomedical realm (like tomography), but adapted to a different field for geological data handling, interpretation and 3D-visualization. Such tools power both bio-medical imaging and techno-colonial subsurface exploration and keep corpuses of knowledge persistently affecting each other. In Possible Bodies there is an interest in attending to how these parallel technical developments contribute to a crystallization and standardization of such operations.

Under the guise of a one-afternoon workshop at transmediale 2019, Possible Bodies invited a group to collectively study open-source tools for geo-modelling while attending to the different regimes—of truth, of representation, of language or of political ideology—they operate within. It attempted to read those tools and a selection of texts in relation to one another, with the plan of injecting some resistant vocabularies, misuses and/or f(r)ictions that could affect the extractivist bias embedded in the computation of earth’s depths and densities. The workshop was a trans*feminist experiment and proposed to compile a “bug report” as an act of affirmative responsibility taking for this turbocapitalist momentum.

It was a hands-on situation that took the Gplates software platform as a case study. Gplates is an interactive plate-tectonics visualization program and an open-source application software that visually reconstructs very complex datasets of use for the geophysicist community.This platform was chosen as the affected, affective, and perhaps effective infrastructure to converge around—and attend to—for the workshop, while triangulating its visions of the Earth with software technology and bits of critical theory.

The Depths and Densities workshop was populated by a mix of known companions and just-met participants (in total, a convergence of circa 30 voices), each bringing her own particular intensities regarding the tools, the theories, the vocabularies, and the urgencies placed upon the table. The discussions were recorded on the spot and transcribed later. This publication cuts through a thick mass of written notes, transcriptions, and excerpted theoretical texts, sedimented along five vectorial provocations: on the standardisation of time, on software vocabularies, on the activation of geontologies, on the computation of velocities, and on the techniques of 3D visualizations. Each vectorial provocation was taken up by a sub-group of participants, who assumed the task of opening up a piece of the Gplates whole (such as a technical feature, a forum, a tutorial, an interface etc.) and tensioning it with some text matter from a reader pre-cooked by Helen Pritchard, Femke Snelting, and myself. The platform worked as a catalyst for our conversations and hence its community of developers would eventually become deferred interlocutors of a report.

The following cut was made to share a sample of that afternoon’s eclectic dialogues in what could be transferred as a polyphonic bugged report:

--> https://transmediale.de/content/depths-and-densities-a-bugged-report

Optimization and Its Miscontents: Counterpolitics of Surveillance Capitalism | + the case of Panoramic Unknowns

Workshop

Sun, 03.02.2019
10:30–18:30

K1

HKW, Berlin

Taking as its starting point a framing of optimization and its miscontents, this one day-long workshop takes a deep dive into the technologies and applications underlying optimization logic. Participants examine artworks and scholarly projects that attempt to gauge and broaden our conception and understanding of optimization systems, and offer techniques to expand our political agency under these circumstances. Through these counter-political strategies, participants situate our relationship with these systems and explore the means at our disposal—be they subversion, queering, resistance, or militancy—for engagement within and outside of the optimization regime.

With: 

Zeljko Blace

Baruch Gottlieb

Seda Gürses

Participating contributors: Ramon Amaro, Dia Kayyali, Dmytri Kleiner, Ben Miller, Phoebe V. Moore, Conrad Moriarty-Cole, Rebekah Overdorf, Martin Pasek, Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, Clemens Schöll, Femke Snelting

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Case: Panoramic Unknowns

Proposed by: Possible Bodies (Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting)

Unknown Object Tracking [1] is being applied on an industrial scale in robotics, car traffic control and 'intelligent' surveillance systems; think Amazon warehouses and Google street view. This technique employs panoramic cameras, which provide 360-degree views that are processed by specialised software in order to locate volumes in space. But when surveying areas like factories, big halls, streets or even a single room, there are always many 'blind spots' and 'unknown objects'. Machine Learning is currently being employed to optimize such known unknowns.

Possible Bodies [2] is a collaborative research on the very concrete and at the same time complex and fictional entities that "bodies" are, asking what matter-cultural conditions of possibility render them volumetrically present. For Optimization and its miscontents we invite participants to use their political/aesthetic/technical sensibilities towards the computation of volumetrics. We invite you to attend to Unknown Object Tracking [UOT] as a spacetime mattering that is not necessarily organized from the outside to the inside (as the optimised god-like sight) but from the inside-out, somehow both adjusting to and reversing a 3D paradigm of convergence into a "point of origin". 

The seamlessness that a 360 capture demands is based on the analysis of tiny 'features' that are sophisticatedly attended to by Computer Vision agencies. Features are differences, anomalies, visual anchors, identifiers that are considered to be specific for a single capture.

UOT depends on processing past data and simulations that are kept, learned and trained before being projected into the future, while real time data from the camera is used to adapt to changes. Their predictive claim is based on past measurements that make optimization systems vulnerable to unexpected change and/or wild surprises, as the unknown can only be detected if it falls within the boundaries of the probable. Where is the possible in considering panoramic unknowns? What if we consider the unknown not only as risky but fundamental to an orchestation of spacetime that is not necessarily harmonic and predictable, but also dissonant and accidented?

[1] https://vision.unipv.it/CV/materiale2016-17/4th%20Choice/0293.pdf

[2] http://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org

+ info: https://2019.transmediale.de/content/optimization-and-its-miscontents-counterpolitics-of-surveillance-capitalism

Depths and Densities: A Possible Bodies Workshop at Transmediale 2019

Workshop

Fri, 01.02.2019
15:00–18:00

K2

HKW, Berlin

The contemporary infrastructural complex of mining and measuring soil depends on software tools for geological data handling, interpretation, and 3D-vizualisation. Such tools power techno-colonial subsurface exploration with computational techniques and paradigms. Possible Bodies (Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, and featuring Helen Pritchard) invites you to collectively study open source tools for geo-modelling while attending to the different regimes they operate within. It will inject resistant vocabularies, misuses and/or f(r)ictions that could affect the extractivist bias embedded in the computation of earth’s depths and densities. The workshop is a trans*feminist experiment and an act of affirmative responsibility-taking for this turbocapitalist momentum. Possible Bodies is a collaborative research, interrogating the concrete and, at the same time, the fictional entities of “bodies” in the context of 3D-tracking, -modelling, -rendering and -scanning.

with  Femke Snelting, Helen Pritchard & Jara Rocha


https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org

Participants are encouraged to bring their laptops for the workshop.

+ info on workshop and festival: https://2019.transmediale.de/content/depths-and-densities-a-possible-bodies-workshop 

Machine Research < ever elusive > Transmediale

Infrastructures / Interfaces

Talk

Sat, 03/04.02.2017

14:00 - 15:30

Studio

(HKW, Berlin)

Machine Research presents the outcomes of a three-day research workshop held in October 2016 in Brussels, organized by Aarhus University, Constant association for Art and Media, and transmediale. During the workshop, participants explored the use of various writing machines and ways in which research has become machine-like. The workshop questioned how research is bound to the reputation economy and profiteering of publishing companies, who charge large amounts of money to release texts under restrictive conditions. Using Free, Libre, and Open Source collaboration tools, Machine Research participants experimented with collective notetaking, transforming their contributions through machine authoring scripts and a publishing tool developed by Sarah Garcin. The print publication launched at transmediale is one result of this process. During two sessions at transmediale, some original participants will further present, discuss, and experiment with their research results.

+ on the sessions: https://2017.transmediale.de/content/machine-research-interfaces 
+ on the festival: https://2017.transmediale.de/

*extra* video of the session, registered by the festival's crew and uploadedon their youtube channel:

testeo de texteo del sur: una ficción política

primera aproximación a la posibilidad de estudiar de forma más detenida y compleja el sur como ficción política. La materia base para atender a su comportamiento es la del lenguajeo, ya sea en composición textualizada, oral o en código ejecutable:

The term “South” brings a not-only geographically located nor a strictly territorial problematic: it invokes an ontological, constitutive and transversal construct, a structural management of life. Better said: South is infrastructural, if we consider any apparatus (Agamben) to be infrastructural once it affects semiotic-material flows at a certain scale and under a certain regime of standardisation. 

(...)

Politics magnetizes around the conditions of possibilities. A politics of the possible implies to understand that its very key objective is the transformation of desire by accessible means. Fictional works are powerful techniques to widen desire in the shape of “the possible”. Fictions jump over the given – “the probable” – as imaginations that are expanded, projected, constructed, diffracted and cared-about. Often they function as proposals, other times as ready-to-go scripts and usually as hands-on instructables. They offer worldviews that might operate as blueprints for the immediate. And they can be quite affordable, too. Taking and applying fiction for affecting the conditions of possibility as a plan risks to be understood as a mere “goodist” proposal, almost naïve or only tactical. Quite differently, political fictions are at the fundament of the shared world we build on a daily basis. The Modern Project is one of the most evident and sophisticated fictions: operating collectively, unfolding along all its variations of techno-scientific and socio-cultural components. Political fictions have a leading role at the composition and adaptation of the possible in terms of their all-scale, all-durabilities, all-tangibility gradients of materiality, subjectivities and collectivities.

Texto completo, elaborado en el marco del Phd Workshop "Machine Research" organizado por Aarhus University, Constant y Transmediale: https://machineresearch.wordpress.com/2016/09/26/jara-rocha/