 And now a warm welcome for Vera Tholmann. She's from the Research Centre for Proxy Politics. For those ones from Berlin, as far as I know, there's still a very exciting exhibition in the Museum of Photography. And yes, a warm welcome for Vera Tholmann. Thanks. Yeah, thank you very much for inviting me. First of all, it's just me, Boas Levin, my colleague who is also the co-author of this text that I'm going to present today. Didn't make it in the end. It was also very kind of last-minute invitation that we received a week ago. So yeah, I'm going to present a text which is entitled The Body of the Web or Proud to Relay Flesh. It's a text where we want to install the proxy as a figure of thought and continue an argument that Hito Steyer, the artist, started in her text Proxy Politics, Signal and Noise, which you can find online. So in this co-author text, we are going to pick up her trope of the proxy and test it in relation to different cases of protest. So from our understanding, the notion of proxy politics can be understood as both a symptom of crisis in current representational political structures as well as a counter strategy, aiming to critically engage and challenge the existing mechanisms of security and control, which leads to a series of questions. What forms of resistance might fit this vague techno-political economic condition? Must protestors become image makers? Do resistance movements need to employ PR consultants? How does one protest in public space if there's no public space left? And in what way does this virtuality and duplicity challenge both public space and human bodies? Actually, the letter is the most important that we're trying to answer or follow through with this text. Can you hear me well? Yeah, good. Ah, this. Yes? No, OK, I just thought there's a comment. Since July 2015, protesting in public space in Spain has become an expensive affair. I don't know if you remember from media reports in July there was a huge protest where they used the hologram as a medium. So protestors are now threatened by hefty fines and authoritarian reaction to the anti-austerity protests three years earlier. The citizen safety law, otherwise known as the GAC law, criminalizes protests that interfere with public infrastructure. Under the new law, which was passed by the governing people's party in December 2014, protestors are liable to fines up to 600,000 euros for marching in front of Congress, blocking a road or occupying a square. The law criticized as a severe attack on Spaniard's right of assembly and speech is the most recent attempt by the government to curb a wave of popular protests that has swept the country since 2011. With the unemployment rate exceeding 25% and one half of Spaniards under 25 jobless, hundreds of thousands of outraged citizens took the streets, occupying squares, and universities. In response to a discredited political class tarnished by years of political scandal and corruption, the Indignados, Spanish for the outraged, sought to mobilize citizens in a series of grassroots demonstrations across the city by reclaiming their right to public space. Another flashback to 2011, where protests using similar occupation strategies were taking place across the world. In Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, Israel, and the United States, Rothschild Boulevard and Tel Aviv, home to the headquarters of Israel's largest banks, became a kilometer long encampment dubbed the 10 Republic. I have some pictures here. Lasting for almost three months, this protest called the 10 Republic. Sintagma Square in Athens, too, was filled with tents and makeshift dwelling places and became a site of lasting popular assemblies and daily clashes with the local authorities. In Zuccotti Park, New York, activists tapped into the electricity grid via lantern posts and set up semi-autonomous mesh networks for the benefit of the protesters. Though numerous commentators pointed out the role played by new technologies, such as social networks and smartphones, in facilitating the protests, it was the city square as old as political thought, which was the true common denominator. Our understanding of the rights of free speech and assembly, as well as the concept of participatory democracy, are deeply indebted to the development of the Greek city-state. The polis and later the Roman public square. In nearly every protest occurring around this time, the spatial dimension of political action was once again affirmed. Might this significance be altered by the emergence of new technologies of control and new modes of resistance? As Hannah Arendt pointed out, the idea of polis, which for her denoted the public realm of a political community, does not necessarily designate the physical location of the Greek city-state. Rather, this form of public realm is the organization of the people, quote, as it rises out of acting and speaking together, end of quote. Thus, it's all the more fitting that when the People's Party of Spain passed its draconic law, demonstrators were quick to seek an alternative to bodily presence in physical space. Their solution was a hologram protest. The first ever, as media outlets were quick to point out, skillfully choreographed and artfully projected in front of the gates of Congress in Madrid. The independent newspaper reported, Spanish activists have staged the world's first ever virtual political demonstration. The Daily Mail's headline read, the world's first hologram protest, and News India asked and answered, ghosts on Spain's street? No, it's world's first virtual protest. In an interview, Cristina Flecher Fominaya spoke person for the activist group that organized the hologram intervention. Nosomos Delito, in English, we are not a crime, explained how it all came together. A group of creative professionals who decided to remain anonymous provided the needed technical support. Prior to the outdoor projection, which lasted for the course of an hour, the campaign was developed online. A web page with a slightly lofty title, Holograms for Freedom, in which anyone can leave the hologram a written message or a shout out, was where it started. Finally, these composite images were screened across a transparent screen and looped. By representing people as holograms, which appear in a particular cool blueish tone reminiscent of surveillance camera footage, the protest organizers seem to allude to the popular depiction of a dystopian totalitarian state. Specters, for once quite literally, haunted the sterile streets, voicing the grievance of those spared from assembling there. The event had been rehearsed, performed, and recorded in a nearby city, and the equipment had been installed in Madrid by a PR company in the clandestine clandestine operation. A tech-savvy, invittingly absurd way to demonstrate without violating the new law. Instead of public space, the demonstrators inhabited a new medium. After all, bodies in public space pose a problem in contemporary politics. The natural, corporeal vulnerability of protesting was now intensified by the threat of disproportionate financial penalization. This was a proxy protest fit for the age of proxy politics. So what is a proxy, then, like the way we understand it? A proxy is a decoy or a surrogate. The word derives from the Latin procurator, procurator, meaning someone responsible for representing someone else in a court of law. These days, the word proxy is often used to designate a computer server acting as an intermediary for requests from clients. These servers afford indirect connections to a network, thus providing users with anonymity. However, proxy servers are not distinct technology to hide users, but can also be set up for the opposite task to monitor traffic. Proxy politics, as defined by Hito Steier, as the politics of the stand-in and the decoy, is characterized by fraudulent contracts, chimericals, sovereignities, and void authorities. The concept of the proxy is emblematic of our post-representational, post-democratic political age. Disembodiment and invisibility of politics and its increasing subordination to economic interests. So this political age is one increasingly populated by bot militias, puppet states, ghost writers, and communication relays. So now one paragraph on post-democracy or the post-representation and what it actually means. So there's a book by Colin Crouch. It's entitled Post-Democracy. And there he describes the current political condition as one in which power is increasingly relinquished to business lobbies and non-governmental organizations. As a result, he argues, quote, there's little hope for an agenda of strong egalitarian policies for the redistribution of power and wealth or for the restraint of powerful interests. End of quote. As a corollary to the rise of neoliberalism, the vision of an autonomous potent political subject is devastated by the growing power of privileged elites standing at the nexus of transnational corporations, extraduretical zones, infrastructural authorities, non-governmental organizations, and covered rule. Similarly, for Jacques Concierge, in his book entitled Post-Democracy, he refers to democratic action. Post-Democracy and the government practice and conceptual legitimization of a democracy after the demos, a democracy that has eliminated the appearance, miscount, and dispute of the energies and interests. At the heart of this condition lies an ontology of deception, where the public realm is conceived as a series of smoke screens, faults, flags, and simulations. The democratic appearance of the people is strictly opposed by its simulated reality, one which is set up by the conjunction of media proliferation of whatever is visible and the endless count of opinions polled and votes simulated. With this concept of double government, political scientist Michael Glennon has introduced a vision of US political power split between elected government officials and a network of institutions constituting a disguised republic. Glennon traces this phenomenon back to World War II and President Truman's signing of the National Security Act of 1947, which established, among others, the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA. Since then, he argues, the United States has moved toward a double government, wherein even the president exercises little substantive over the overall direction of US national security policy. Similarly, in Turkey, Egypt, Yemen, and Syria, political commentators have used the notion of the deep state to describe the nexus of police, intelligence, services, politicians, and organized crime. Surely secrecy or discretion to use its diplomatic euphemism is as old as politics itself, but its recent resurgence under the guise of democratic rule reveals Akhana imperie, the secrets of governance, to be all but arcane. So the age of proxy politics is thus one in which power is displaced into the hands of extra juridical unchecked authorities, whether by way of covered institutions, vetted bills and classified budgets, organized crimes and gray markets, or no less disturbingly, for gross privatization and the rise of transnational corporations. According to Sheldon Wallen, the paradox of our current regime is that the more open to the pressures of organized interests, the more opaque even mysterious politics becomes. Consequently, responsibility becomes virtually untraceable. In her lying in politics, a text published in 1972 written in response to the revelation of the Pentagon Papers, Hannah Arendt lamented the beginning of an age in which image making has become the core value of American global policy. When image makers govern, the institutions of representational democracy are destined to become a mere semblance. A recent example came as the House of Representatives voted in May 2015 to end bulk surveillance by the NSA. Rather than bringing all bulk surveillance to an end, the vote merely took the government out of the collection business. It would not deny its access to the information. It would be in the hands of the private sector, almost certainly telecommunications companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint. In other words, even after seemingly successful governmental reform, it was revealed that the corridors of power lay elsewhere between politics and the private sector. So popular protests in one country are often conduits for the expansion of power in another, in the aftermath of a successful nonviolent regime change and by a great activist behind the odd-poor movement relate their experiences into tutorials and training camps, teaching activists in numerous countries how to ignite and lead a revolution. What's more, Srejda Popović and Slobodan Dinović, both former odd-poor activists, founded Canvas, which is the center for applied nonviolent action and strategies with the aim of educating pro-democracy activists around the world in what they regard as universal principles for success in nonviolent struggle. Canvas has trained activists in more than 50 countries, including Iran, Ukraine, Palestine, and recently Tunisia and Egypt, to name but a few. By late November 2000, an article in The New York Times had revealed that prior to the revolution, odd-poor had received funds from US government-affiliated organizations, such as the National Endowment for Democracy. In addition, their ties to the private global intelligence company Stratfor, also known as the Shadow CIA, prompted questions concerning activists' involvement in global American-covered foreign policy. So how might proxy politics be more than just a condition, the name of a political regime that thrives on obscurity, opaqueness, and decoys? How might it also designate a corresponding mode of resistance? Ideally, proxy politics would encompass myriad modes of withdrawal, both technical and metaphorical. Its tools could be a VPN, a holographic surrogate, a stock image, a double or a double. Its outcome is always concealment, evasion, subterfuge, subterfuge. The hope is that strategies such as these might be effective during our current interim phase, the period in which the difference between real virtuality and virtual reality, the tangible and the digital, is increasingly difficult to discern. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly evident how severely controlled both spheres are the worldwide web by way of its architecture and protocols and public space via increasing privatizations. As Alexander Galloway has observed, instead of a politicization of time or space we are witnessing a rise in the politicization of absence and presence-oriented themes, such as invisibility, opacity, and anonymity, or the relationship between identification and legibility, or the tactics of nonexistence and disappearance, new struggles around prevention, the therapeutics of the body, piracy, and contagion, information capture, and the making present of data via data mining. According to Galloway, recent protest movements refusal to make clear demands as a form of black boxing, a conscious withdrawal from political representation and collective bargaining. The choice is for relations, relays, and links in the words of Edouard Glissant, all qualities associated with the proxy. This politicization upholds the right to opacity, also quote from Glissant, rather than reverting once again to the age-old demand for transparency. For Glissant, opacity is the force that drives every community, the thing that would bring us together forever and make us permanently distinctive. Recently in Paris, where the state of emergency declared in the wake of recent terror attacks prevented climate change activists from assembling in public spaces during the Climate Change Summit, protesters installed over 10,000 pairs of shoes at Place de la République, theatrically standing in place of the absent bodies. Images of the square circulated widely in the media, emphasizing the inherent mediatization of contemporary protest and the need for effective images, not necessarily real bodies. Holograms and shoes function as placeholders, making it all the more possible for images of absent bodies to communicate large-scale discontent. So in reference to the wave of protests in 2011, Judith Butler has suggested that protest in public space has, quote, become politically potent only when and if we have a visual and audible version of the scene. Communicate it in lifetime so that the media does not merely report the scene, but is part of the scene and the action. Indeed, the media is the scene or the space in an extended and replicable visual and audible dimension. In Madrid, the shadow-like figures in the hologram embodied a double movement, a process of de-territorialization and re-territorialization. Slogans and chouts were crowdsourced, online and synced with holographic images filmed in a nearby city. Then the resulting image was meticulously revoked and reworked to match the distances and angles of the scene in front of Congress. So in recent years, there has been a growing interest in the re-territorialization of the internet. The artist Trevor Peglin and theoreticians such as Tung Huihu and Keller Easterling have drawn attention to the materiality of the internet. Data centers under sea cables and routers would in turn rely on hydroelectric power stations and dams for electricity, as well as railway tracks and telegraph lines for communication routes. The web, until recently associated with immateriality, virtually, and spacelessness, as exemplified by the popularity of the term cyberspace, clearly has a body, a sprawling physical infrastructure and ever-growing ecological footprint. The benign-sounding cloud is nothing less than a publicity ploy for a vast campaign to centralize digital data and to turn software and hardware into a black box. As our computers have become thinner and sleeker, the weight of the cloud has only grown greater. So the body politic is now intertwined with the body of the web. And the web, the world-wide, is constrained by national policies and geographical realities. In October 2015, citizens in Thailand protested against their military government's plan to channel internet traffic to international servers through a single network gateway with the intention of perfecting state surveillance and censorship. This political move was dubbed the Great Firewall of Thailand. As in Madrid, the choice of protest space corresponded with the space the new law was tailored for. The military government's websites were targeted and downed for several hours by denial of service attacks. The online action was reported beyond activist platforms and international media. However, it lacked images that could represent the bodies of those who would literally be bared from leaving Thailand where the government was following through on its plans for greater surveillance and censorship. In the meantime, the Hacker Collective Anonymous declared cyber war on the Thai government. Operation Single Gateway targeted Thai police servers in an effort to demonstrate the actual vulnerability of virtual state institutions. So how can one possibly grasp the current relation between the digital and its outside? Back when the internet was still thought of as synonymous with cyberspace, both were clearly defined as separate. A quote from Wendy Chan, cyberspace as a virtual non-place made the internet so much more than a network of networks. It became a place in which things happened, in which users' actions separated from their bodies, and in which local standards became impossible to determine. It's thus free users from their locations." End of quote. So in the 1990s, the internet was imagined to be a perfect frontier, a science fiction dream come true, where users could navigate as powerful agents invisible and free of physical constraints. Yet, as Wendy Chan in her book, Control and Freedom, published in 2006, as she has demonstrated, the worldwide web was designed as a technology of control from the start, geographically rooted and constantly monitoring its users via protocols such as TCP-IP. So in what way does virtuality challenge our conception of public space and the mobilization of human bodies? As we've seen, the digital and the real coalesce in ever new forms and devices. And despite the gaming industry's recent success and bringing early visions of virtual reality to technical perfection, think of Oculus Rift or something like the Body Snap app, prior myths of virtual reality are slowly but certainly eroding. The old demarcations between the human body in physical space and the so-called immateriality of the digital sphere are superseded. Attempts to conceptualize the effect of the synthetic face-to-screen situation, either one that this is the downfall of the sovereign subject or extricate emancipatory potential from the entanglement of humans and technology. How, then, might a proxy give way to different bodily modes and morphologies, a body both present and absent? Whereas Donna Haraway and Rosy Bradotti have attempted to destabilize the subject as it was conceived during the 20th century exploring notions as the cyborg and conceptualizing a feminist post-humanism. Might the proxy antagonistically restabilize a very concrete subject in a synthetic situation? Is a proxy a technical body? Does it have flesh, after all? Might it serve as the abject other of the high-tech clean and efficient bodies endorsed by contemporary culture as Haraway envisions or rather as a nomadic device that enables people to become post-human subjects in Bradotti's line of thought? Bradotti warns of a fatal nostalgia for either a humanist past or the Cold War cyborg and instead proposes that we embrace vulnerability, take pride in being flesh. Her post-human theory aims at shaping and shifting new subjectivities against modern humanism. A school of thought, she criticizes for its white male supremacy, Eurocentric normativity, imperial past, and inhuman consequences. So proxies permit human bodies to step out of the line of fire to evade forensics. The lack of a human silhouette, face, or fixed physiognomy and can be associated with numerous individuals wherever they are. Rather than the avatar, a creatively designed pawn in a network gaming environment, they assume either a transformative shape and form or none at all. Last two sentences. Proxies are necessary. In contemporary political struggle, they are counter-figures to capitalist self-improvement or a glissandian opaque other. So proxies provide an escape route from a schizophrenic situation which denies or limits bodies to being mere vessels of biotechnological information. Proxies offer a path toward a new, a fleeting relation as sovereign bodies. Thank you. Thank you very much for the spontaneity in the talk, and I think there might be time for questions outside. Thank you.