The Hmm @ Grey Space in the Middle

Can we build a more just world where we can love more? And can we do it through YouTube? Riyaz, a queer emancipation worker, is trying to do just that. On his YouTube channel “Riyaz Luvz” and the podcast “SPECTRUM“, he is making queer centered and social justice content. He’ll be joining us to talk about how he uses his platforms for the translation, interpretations, and representation of intersectional ideas. Link

Previously based in an international augmented reality laboratory in the middle of a mountain in Japan, Inari now finds himself in Rotterdam because of his increasing interest in container shipping and global trade. Collaborating with researchers from TU Delft, he primarily works on the concept of a “one-container container ship”. But he’ll be joining us for The Hmm to talk about another kind of infrastructure, the former net.art collective IRATIONAL.ORG, which was founded in 1995 and has gone through many transitions over the past 25 years.
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Many of the red light districts around the Netherlands, particularly in Amsterdam, have become tourist attractions and spectacles. Despite this visibility, there is still a lot of stigma around sex work and being a sex worker. Viki, a social service provider at Spot46, a center for information and advice for sex workers in The Hague, uses Instagram as a medium to fight back against the stigma. Loosely based on Humans of New York, Viki started ‘Humans in the Red Light_The Hague’ together with her colleagues as a way to show the human side of the red light district.
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How does the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the national library of the Netherlands, archive the internet? Kees, a historian and curator of the digital archive at the library, will be joining us to talk about web archaeology, his research on the earliest traces of the Dutch web, and how he digs up rare internet pearls like the first homepages, early memes, and GIFs. Link

Masks used to help people transcend their own identity and take on other roles. Now face filters make us all actors, but how does creating and becoming characters change us? Carmen is an artist who creates characters and moving images to translate her research. She’ll be joining us for The Hmm to talk about her research and graduation project, exploring face filters, masks, characters, and plastic surgery. Link

Our lives are constantly being mediated by digital technologies. Yun is a composer, performer, and curator who is concerned with how our filtered ways of sensing both limit and extend the ways we understand, categorize, and compose the world. Yun’s work investigates links between recording technologies and human senses to unearth histories of erasure, power relations, and shifting definitions of what being human is. They will be joining us for The Hmm to talk about cultural and digital erasure, taking examples from their self-deleting digital essay “Poetics and Politics of Erasure”.
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Feminist hack networks have been around since the early days of the internet. They create a space to act within technological environments that are often western male-dominated. Angeliki, an artist and media researcher, and Artemis, who tinkers with texts, drawings, and codes, will be joining us for The Hmm to talk about their Feminist Hack Meetings at Varia and the feminist server projects that they have encountered. With these projects they collectively address social and political aspects around technology. Link

With so many streaming platforms out there, what does an alternative movie-watching experience look like? WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) has been organizing film screenings and events since 2016—attempting to reconsider the way, and through which devices, we look at film today. They’ll be joining us to talk about All In This Together, a cinema-on-demand (COD) platform that offers an alternative online movie-going experience than the usual ‘browse and press-play’ format that is common in video-on-demand (VOD) services. Link