Symposihmm 📡 Capture & Control

Noura is a visual artist, onomaturge, and independent researcher whose practice moves across archival methods, laboratory-based processes, video, installation, neologisms and drawing. Her research explores visual culture and its techno-political entanglements, with particular attention to digital militarism, online aesthetics, internet hyper-niches, and non-Anglophone meme cultures. Noura will be facilitating her workshop, The Internet is a Horrible Place and I’m Here to Make it Worse, which aims to provide a strategic toolbox to investigate and analyse fringe internet communities that are involved, in different ways and to different extents, in the production and reproduction of online violence. The workshop exposes participants to a wide array of investigative methods including digital geography and participant observation of such online communities, and qualitative interviews to their members. Link

Sophie Publig is an internet archaeologist and Senior Scientist at the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures, University of Applied Arts Vienna, researching aesthetics, digital cultures, and critical posthumanism, analyzing phenomena from meme ecologies to networked subjectivities to internet folklore. Mikkel Rørbo is an interdisciplinary researcher and producer of cultural detritus. He is currently undertaking a PhD at the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures focusing on questions of reality-production, desire and abstraction. They’ll give a talk on their book Digital Occultism. Link

Marina is an architect and researcher whose work sits at the intersection of critical spatial practices, ecology, technology, and activism. In 2022, she received the Harvard GSD’s Wheelwright Prize for a project on the future of data storage. She leads the ‘Data Mourning’ clinic at Columbia University GSAPP, an educational initiative focused on the intersection between digital infrastructures and climate catastrophe. She collaborated with the Supercomputing Center of the DIPC to develop alternative models for storing data, such as the project Computational Compost. Otero was also invited by the Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge, and Innovation to participate as an expert in the development of Chile’s first National Data Centers Plan, together with local communities on the front lines of extractivism. She will be joining us, in conversation with Margarita Osipian, to discuss her research on, and in, the country of Tuvalu, which is set to become the world’s first digital nation. 

Emilia is a Finnish-French filmmaker and design researcher based in Amsterdam. Her work approaches digital infrastructures as an “atmospheric” condition; ambient, porous, and co-extensive with sensing. Many of her projects take the form of diegetic systems in which emerging technologies are embedded, politically shaped, and sometimes misused. She often works with scientific institutions, including EPFL, IAS (Uva), and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. She is a tutor at the Geo-Design MA at Design Academy Eindhoven. Emilia will be giving a new lecture-performance, with Sören Siebel, that extends from their collaborative project Earth Embeddings. Link

Søren is an interdisciplinary artist, working with space, sound, movements, bodies, video, and text.  Interested in collective and individual identities, queer-gender-non-confirmative realities, and speculative futures, he creates almost utopian spatial and performative immersive situations. Sören will be giving a lecture-performance, with Emilia Tapprest, that extends from their collaborative project Earth Embeddings. Søren will also be leading the Ambitopian Sonic Un-Realism workshop. Link

Daniël de Zeeuw is Assistant Professor in digital media culture at the University of Amsterdam. He has published in leading media and cultural studies journals on the interfaces between chronically online subcultures, platform logics, conspiracy theories, and political radicalisation. He is also a member of the Open Intelligence Lab and Digital Methods Initiative, as well as co-editor of Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy. At the Symposihmm, he’ll give a talk about his research on psyop realism. Link

Francis Tseng is a software developer specializing in simulation and modeling and occasionally video games. He is currently lead developer at the Applied Resource Policy Lab, working on planning tools. He also worked on Half-Earth Socialism, the global planning game accompanying the 2022 book of the same name. Link

Nick Vyssotsky is an artist based in upstate New York whose work explores media consumption, conspiracy theory, isolation, and waste. His practice spans video, sculpture, digital fabrication, and programming. His work La La La La La (Inside An Empty Room My Inspiration Flows) will be featured in the exhibition. Link

Tewa is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural worker based between Tripoli and Amsterdam. Her practice spans installation, painting, and time-based media, including film essays, sound works, and performance. Her work carries an inquiry and speculation around spatial and infrastructural violence, extractive technology, inherited memories and transmissions from lands, communities and species that outlasts the aftermath of genocidal and ecological continuum. We will be showing Tewa’s film ‘Written to not remain’ (2024), a video essay that investigates the acts of writing on the walls across post-revolution Libya. Individual and collective vandalism appears as ephemeral evidence of contemporary and historical entanglements, socio-political commentary, war testimonies and silent protests. Barnosa’s work questions the notion of world building in these urban gestures, to understand them as rehearsals of refusal against technologically militarised European and regional interventions in Libya. Link

Constant is an artist, director of Distant.Gallery, and professor of Networked Materialities at ADBK-Nürnberg. Exploring how social and cultural values reverberate in tools and technology, he creates works to emphasise an enjoyable friction between old and new, manual and automated, online and offline, real or not. He deconstructs and analyses the specific human circumstances under which technological instruments are created, and how this influences the way the instruments are consequently used. His work Target Audience will be on display in the exhibition at the Symposihmm. Link