Oil, the 20th century’s most important non-renewable resource, lies at the centre of discourses on ecological peril and financial oppression, though its colonialist history has faded from view. In a lecture performance enacting a liquidation of recent Mideast history, speculative exploration, and extractive economics, the artist—acting on behalf of Oil Research Group (ORG), a one-woman collective—is propelled by the concept that ‘data is the new oil’, coined in 2006 by British mathematician (and customer loyalty card inventor) Clive Humby. Oil is a finite source at the very core of both global financial markets and #nofuture petroleum wars; information, seemingly infinite, also ‘leaks’ into the collapsing tripartite structures of governance, markets, and society. The digital self is sticky, like a bird after an oil spill. Moving along the axis of four Ds: dirt, debt, death, and data, ORG traces the finitude and preciousness of dominant technologies, along the way testing assumptions about the material and immaterial ways in which we are connected, addicted, fossilised, and, one hopes, liberated in their wake.

What does “home” mean? What does this notion contain, physically, somatically, and emotionally? And how is it contained within our bodies, moving across geographies and generations? What does it mean “to home”? And who are we homing and being homed by? In this workshop, we will consider “home” as both a noun and a verb. Along a sensorial journey guided by Federico Protto, we will retrace the lingering resonances of home/s and how they are inscribed in our bodily memory. Together with Lisa Deml, we will engage in a collective reading and writing practice to address home, to invite it into the space and time of the workshop, and to share it with other participants. The workshop leans on Federico Protto’s long-term artistic research project MAPA which explores migration experiences and transgenerational trajectories to discover new ways for cross-continental connections and to activate empathy in a constant state of being “the Other”. Originally, the word “mapa” referred to the textile surfaces on which maps were painted in military contexts. In the context of MAPA, cartography becomes a transformative medium, challenging colonial narratives and hegemonic geographies and embracing an open and dynamic approach to mapping.

Since its inception in 2007, ECCHR has generated a tremendous amount of knowledge in the field of strategic human rights litigation. Whether stemming from legal casework or from critical reflections upon it, the material that ECCHR has amassed spans a wide array of geographical regions and topics and includes a variety of actors and networks from transnational human rights work. While ECCHR´s legal casework addresses specific human rights violations in various contexts, it often also reveals connections between different forms of injustice. With the project Living Open Archive, ECCHR aims to identify such connections and make them visible using a variety of media formats and narrative techniques. By illuminating the broader political and historical context of ECCHR’s work, it provides a resource for developing new legal approaches and informed strategic interventions in the changing social and political landscape of human rights work.

Moderated by Lisa Deml

The first roundtable explores how memories are inscribed in datafied landscapes and across networked cartographies. Contesting the notion of the digital as a “terra nullius,” artists and researchers Giselle Beiguelman, Ofri Cnaani, Thiago Costa-Leiros, and Pedro Oliveira retrace the ways in which colonial systems, national identities, and extractivist economies are carved into virtual topographies. Through their respective practices, ranging from media archaeology, ethnomusicology, transmedial performances, and anticolonial studies of listening, they investigate the correlations between geographical and computational territories and the different agencies and ideologies that seek to claim them. Considering the mnemonic nature of platformed landscapes, this roundtable seeks to uncover buried histories, to gather scattered testimonies, and to activate ruins as repositories for multiple histories, both real and imagined ones.

Domingo no Golpe (Sunday at the Coup d’État)

Giselle Beiguelman and Lucas Bambozzi. Brazil, 2024, 22’43”

Domingo no Golpe (Sunday at the Coup d’État) [Brasil, 2024] is a “ready media” documentary about the attempted coup d’état that took place on 8 January, 2023, in Brazil. The term “ready media” refers to works in which the producers focus on existing materials rather than creating new material. This is the case with this documentary, which was produced entirely using footage from the security cameras of the Palácio do Planalto (the official workplace of the President of Brazil in Brasília). These surveillance images were made available to the press by the GSI (Institutional Security Office) by order of the Federal Supreme Court (STF) in April 2023. The narration is based on excerpts from the final report of the Parliamentary Investigation into the Acts of 8 January, released on 17 October, 2023, and read by Senator Eliziane Gama (the rapporteur). Domingo no Golpe (Sunday at the Coup d’État) addresses an 8 January that did not begin just a year ago and, as the rapporteur’s statement suggests, has yet to end - a statement that serves as a guiding thread throughout the narrative. An initial cut of the documentary was made publicly available online on 8 January, 2024.

Acapulco

Bruno Moreschi Directed by Bruno Moreschi and Pedro Gallego, Switzerland, 2023-2024, 114’

Employing methodologies rooted in critical pedagogy, Bruno Moreschi crafted an immersive experience for the “seers” who participate in this film. Leading experts from around the world received printed postcards by mail featuring some images used to train IA / Computer Vision, while crowd workers who tag these images participated in several experimental reading and conversation sessions. The culmination is a visual odyssey that invites speculation on novel approaches to image comprehension, advocating for a paradigm shift in computer training methods towards more nuanced, human-centric perspectives.

The widely perceived feeling of overload that comes with the digital attention economy has led not only to feelings of anxiety, exhaustion and lethargy caused by excessive screen time, but also to a diminished collective and intimate capacity to perceive, process, or simply select relevant instances from the past. As the fantasy of infinite storage space has led to 90% of the information ecocidally held in remote data centres being unused, a shift towards a more sustainable digital memory model is urgently needed. Nevertheless, digital trends have delegated the task of (promoting) the memorable to big tech platforms, which algorithmically dispossess and commodify the once humble techniques of memory. Looking at the pervasive presentism through a historical lens, this workshop invites participants to become ex-users, interrogating and breaking with a memory model that has forgotten that remembrance requires a patient and performative participation of the collective body. At the intersection of artistic knowledge and archival expertise, it seeks to alter the extractivist nature of digital data in favour of their transformation into cultural heritage.

The talk and live music-led meditation session draws on sound design, psychology, neuroscience, folklore and diasporic spirituality. Studies of Air and Smoke is both an art performance and a meta-educational intervention; it is neither a concert nor a lecture. Thiago Leiros-Costa explores the dualism between being an artist and a scientist, performing both roles in the same evening and exploring their connections. The first part of the session assesses the nature of attention and awareness, and how the brain and our expectations are vital in constructing our experience of the world around us. Participants are invited to approach the second part, a musical performance, as a meditation session. Prompts and triggers given during the talk will be explored in the course of the performance. The music will range from folk to free improvisation and sound design.

Moderated by Inge Hinterwaldner and Víctor Fancelli Capdevila

Digital technologies promised to connect us seamlessly with every moment across different temporalities. Thus, pasts, presents, and futures seem to have collapsed into a perpetual now and drowned in flows of information, data, and news. However, these virtual infrastructures are owned by private corporations. Internet users are tranquilised with loading bars and circular buffers as they wait and queue to access the memories they have entrusted to platforms. Increasingly, the digital past is becoming delicate, ephemeral, obsolete, and inaccessible. How can we remember or forget, when we are no longer the keepers of our own data - and, thus, of our digital and digitised memories?

In this lecture performance, artist Ofri Cnaani will present two segments from her ongoing Digital Afterness research project. The performance serves as a method to develop a lexicon that activates the space between theory, visual representation, and speculative writing. Leaking Lands (Part One) examines the catastrophic fire that destroyed two centuries of treasures at Brazil’s National Museum. The work investigates the residues of body, data, and matter left behind, forming an ecology of ‘leftovers’ that exists between eras and orders. Motivated by the notion of non-human testimonies, this piece aims to splice scientific and poetic knowledge to capture the post-fire transition from physical or biological form to the digital realm, through the perspective of six entities. Device Amnesia (Part Two) explores the island nation of Tuvalu’s journey toward becoming the “First Digital Nation” amidst the looming threat of climate change, using digital twin technology. The work explores the nation’s digital transition, through the lens of four technological devices, each representing a different techno-political affair, to ask how accumulated local knowledge could become intelligible and reproducible across contexts.

The workshop begins with a seemingly simple yet thought-provoking invitation: to interact with a printed postcard of an image used to train computer vision systems. However, this image is incomplete. A programming code called Decanonization has removed the part that microworkers—who routinely tag and organise datasets on platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk—have identified as significant. By interacting with this altered image and through a joint discussion moderated by Nathalia Lavigne, this workshop will contribute to a broader project that Bruno Moreschi is currently developing in collaboration with programmers. Its focus is on how to train AI in ways that make its categories more flexible, ensuring that the concept of possibility is not constrained by the limitations of probability.

From 1956 to 2006, over a period of 50 years, about 210,000 negatives were produced by the image department of the Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Center. After the merger of the Research Centre and the University of Karlsruhe to form the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, these negatives were taken over by the KIT archive and, as part of a project supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG), 10 percent of the material was selected, digitised, and made accessible between 2017 and 2022. Based on this example, a possible future practice of dealing with visual material in the KIT media database, which has grown to hold more than 300,000 assets today, will be considered in relation to today’s practice.

Moderated by Nathalia Lavigne

The last roundtable, moderated by Nathalia Lavigne, brings together artistic and activist projects that imagine and put into practice other forms of connection. If there is no alternative to the current state of the internet controlled by private corporations and platforms, it is essential to devise a different understanding about networks and to apply the distributed intelligence developed for online environments in offline contexts, too. The four participants - Lori Emerson, Özge Çelikaslan, Kat Mustatea and Maryam Monalisa Gharavi - will talk about imaginary networks proposed since the late 19th century through the present moment, a collaborative archive sustained by a community of activists and researchers, and digital performances that discuss the idea of language as a network and how to deal with its disappearance.

Transients is a series of performances that simultaneously work with and against the possibility of a form of media-archaeological listening. They activate a historical object, the Subharchord II synthesiser built by the GDR in East Berlin in 1964. The piece listens to the ways in which its material-technical composition resonates in the present and, more specifically, how its filter design reappears as a constitutive component for the algorithm of the so-called “dialect recognition software,” a proprietary machine learning solution used in Germany since 2017 for cases of undocumented asylum seekers since 2017. Because we cannot listen to how this software listens, engaging with the filter in the Subharchord II allows for sonic and historical juxtapositions at the limits of history, offering a “para-genealogy” of machine listening and its connections with the building of a nation, its people, and, more importantly, its others.