The Hmm @ IMPAKT

What does the desktop of a digital security and privacy advocate look like? For our very first Desktop Cribs, Deborah will be giving us a sneak peek into how she keeps her computer extra secure. With a background working in the arts, digital human rights, and the (open-source) technology sphere, she currently works at the Foundation for Public Code and spends her free time practicing her OSINT investigation techniques and making ceramics. Link

Are neural networks edging closer and closer to generating unique artworks? Luba is a curator, producer and researcher specialising in artificial intelligence in the creative industries. She is currently working to educate and engage the broader public about the latest developments in creative AI. Luba will be joining us to talk about the artistic possibilities and implications of DALL-E, the new technology released by OpenAI that can generate realistic images from text descriptions. Link

Weaned on television, video games, and the birth of the Internet, Anne is marked with the seal of channel-surfing culture, symptomatic of the generation that came of age in the apocalyptic wake of the Y2K bug scare. Her AR filters have amassed over 300k impressions on Instagram and her GIFs have over 500 million views. Anne works across the digital galaxy as a social media artist, digital shaman, polymorphic collage, video and GIF maker, contemporary mythology observer, tarot reader, and much more. She’ll be joining us tonight to talk about divination and social media. Link

Do games have the power to tell queer stories and help people rethink their own view of the world? According to Bee, a queer artist currently pursuing a game design degree, they definitely do. In their free time they can be found either illustrating or lurking on Discord, engaging with and moderating several creative communities, but tonight they’ll be joining us to talk about ‘​generic nonbinary game’, ​a short visual novel they made for the Rainbow Game Jam, and which became an outlet for their fears about studying games as a queer person. Link

Making its way across social media feeds around the world, the Bernie Sanders meme just wouldn’t quit. But why did this image resonate, and bring joy and laughter, to so many people? Chen is a Ph.D. student at Boston University, who is studying memes, online communities, and how pop culture shapes them. She’ll be joining us to dissect the Bernie Sanders meme and answer the question of what makes a meme go viral.
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Nadine is an independent research designer preoccupied with how unseen social, political, legal, economic and cultural systems design our objects, bodies, homes, cities, technologies, experiences and knowledges. She’ll be joining us tonight to talk about Orders of the Undead, a project in collaboration with skin infections specialist Henry de Vries, which uses Instagram filters and a deep analysis of zombie pop culture media, to highlight how ideas and behaviour that originate in colonialism continue to be propagated in our entertainment media and replicated in everyday prejudices. Link

Deemed by The Atlantic to be “one of the biggest online phenomena of an extremely online year”, cottagecore has filled our TikTok feeds with fresh baked bread and idyllic rural life. Agnieszka is a writer and cultural researcher whose recent work has focused on the socio-political implications of visual languages used by online subcultures and movements. She’ll be joining us for The Hmm to talk about cottagecore as a site of socio-political change—investigating its ability to reframe domestic labour and productivity in late-stage capitalism. Link