9. – 10. May 2025
Annual Conference 2025 | Digital Interventions. Bodies, Infrastructures, Politics
May 09, 2025 – May 10, 2025
Being online or not, there is no outside of “the digital”. The digital is always already inside us and dispersed throughout our everyday environments. Our bodies, infrastructures and politics are fundamentally intertwined with digital technologies and practices. The conference Digital Interventions investigates the potential of artistic practices that aim at either creating and safeguarding emancipatory spaces of the digital or challenging and countering the many forms of digital surveillance, exploitation and repression. Looking at the interstices between art, activism and hacking, the concrete materiality and embodied nature of the digital is analyzed as both the site and the means of digital interventions.
The term “digital interventions” itself is wrapped in fundamental and irresolvable contradictions. The digital sphere is a space of refuge and resistance as anonymity and privacy of communication provide shelter from oppressive violence. And yet, at the same time, the digital sphere is subject to massive surveillance, trolling and disinformation that capture and undermine political expression. With social media participation governed by the attention economy, the internet structured by platform capitalism, and political discourse undermined by algorithms – what are the practices and where are the breaches for artists and activists to intervene and challenge these developments? How can complicity be turned into criticality?
Focusing on bodies, infrastructures and politics we follow the hypothesis that it is a core task of the arts to make visible, critique and disentangle dysfunctional processes, false categories and ideological reductions as well as the complicity of platforms and online services with state power and the military-industrial complex.
It is organized by the working group “Digital Activism” in cooperation with HAU Hebbel am Ufer.
Programm:
Freitag, 9. Mai 2025
HAU 2
18:00 – 18.30 Begrüßung/Einführung
Sarah Reimann (HAU Hebbel am Ufer)
Karin Gludovatz (Sprecherin SFB 1512)
Simon Teune und Iryna Kovalenko (Tagungsorganisation SFB 1512)
18:30 – 19:45 Keynote
Aria Dean: Labor, Art, and the Vernacular Aesthetic Online
Introduction: Brigitte WeingartWechsel ins HAU 3
21:00 – 21:45 Performance
Claudix Vanesix: Non-Fuckable Tokens (NFTs)
21:45 – 22:30 Artist Talk mit Claudix VanesixFür den Besuch der Abendveranstaltung von Claudix Vanesix: Non-Fuckable Tokens (NFTs) ist der Kauf einer Eintrittskarte erforderlich.
Samstag, 10. Mai 2025
HAU 209:30 – 10.00 Einführung
Florian Schlittgen und Naomi Boyce (Tagungsorganisation SFB 1512)10:00 – 11:00 Keynote
Brigitte Weingart: The (Micro-)Politics of Meme Culture
Introduction: Matthias Warstat
11:00 – 11:15 Pause
11:15 – 12:30 Roundtable
Aram Bartholl, Jean Peters und Şirin Fulya Erensoy: Art Challenging Digital Repression
Facilitation: Simon Teune
12:30 – 14:00 Lunch Break and Workshop
Kill Your Phone mit Aram Bartholl (Workshop 1) ODER Shrink Your Files mit Matthias Grotkopp (Workshop 2)14:00 – 15:15 Roundtable
Pekka Kallioniemi und Muriel Fischer: Desinformation (and) War
Facilitation: Florian Schlittgen und Iryna Kovalenko
15:15 – 15:45 Pause
15:45 – 16:45 Lecture Performance
Azadeh Ganjeh: Not a Body for Burial
Introduction: Matthias Grotkopp16:45 – 17:00 Pause
17:00 – 18:00 Keynote
Joana Moll: Follow the Body: Materiality and Resistance in the Age of Data Extraction
Introduction: Matthias Grotkopp18:00 – 19:00 Abschlussdiskussion
Facilitation: Margarita Tsomou19:00 – 20:30 Pause (Abendessen nicht inklusive)
