 Hello everybody. A warm welcome to our friend Nikolas Magret from disnovation.org. They are making contemporary art with research and hacking to question the positive ideology for technology to stimulate a post-growth technology narrative. So I'm quite interested and give them a warm welcome. Hello everyone. How does it work? Can you hear me? Hello. So I'm Nikolas Magret and together with Maria Roskovska we initiated the disnovation.org collective. And our collective intend to reveal and challenge the dominant ideology of technological innovation and circulate alternative narratives. So I will show you a selection of projects and mainly it's a few projects selected to resonate with the CCC and the topics here. So we do basically curation. So we organize a festival and we curate art spaces in different series of projects around basically the rhetoric of technological innovation and the effect of this dominant ideology on society. We also work on the publication and books. I will get back to that in a minute. And we do artworks and site specific projects that I will present in the second half of this talk. So the first part we'll be focusing on our curatorial practices around this idea of counter narratives on technological innovation. So I will introduce three works. The first one is the pirate book. So it's a book we started to compile in 2014 and in 2014. It's a compilation of stories about sharing and distributing cultural content outside the boundaries of local economies, politics, laws, religions and so on. So with this work we try to explore the notions such as the piracy of necessity, the idea of new originals. And I think it's interesting to go back to this project, to come back to this project in the context of the Anthropocene and the potential eminent collapse. Because I think there is a need for non-techno-solutionist and non-techno-positivist stories at the moment and somehow a need to develop post-growth narratives. So we will see what we can learn from the following examples taken from the book around concerns like repair, care, maintenance and creative appropriation. So the first excerpt from the book I would like to focus on is an example from Mexico given by our contributor, Yotay Skierdo. And basically it focuses on the stories of craftsmen that works for improving the practices of street city vendors in Mexico. So I will play a quick excerpt of it. I am known as one of the fantastic craftsmen here in El Barrio de la Mercé. So today I would like to introduce you to the cows, how they have evolved through time. This inspiration comes from the people who bring their cows, blinds who work in the subway, who take care of singing. So there begins the wave of the movement of the cows here in Mexico, which is in the system of collective subway transport. So today it is easy for us to work in a way that is the most practical, the most simple. I present to you, very good afternoon, all of you, the users, and I put the music on them. We turn down the volume a little bit and start shouting. We shout, all of you, good afternoon, all of you, on this occasion I bring the sale, a compact disc in a normal format, a compact disc that contains 20 great themes, the cumbia music. So in the book we cover multiple stories in this sort. We just focus on a couple of those. The second one is based in a sale. It's a contribution by Christopher Quickley. He is presenting basically a big part of music distribution in sale. It's done through copies between dumb phones using Bluetooth. So it's a way somehow to create a circulation of contents by nearest neighbor dynamics, basically. And the third example I would like just to introduce is El Paquete Seminal. Basically it's in the context of Cuban lack of fast internet or internet at all. Basically El Paquete Seminal is a sort of substitute to the internet in the form of a package. It's an hard drive, as you can see here. And this hard drive also circulates one copy at a time. And it's basically a compilation of all the content that is considered to be missing for people. So you can see on this hard drive TV shows, books, movies, music, and all the sorts of content you could expect from an internet browsing experience. So you can find this book online for free. And we cover many of the stories, but tonight I will just present those and connect with this last contribution by Clément Renault. He did a long-term six-year research in China, and he shared with us this story about Shanghai technology production. It's basically something between piracy and hybridation in Chinese manufacturing, and I will focus on this one a little bit more. So in his article, Clément Renault described a specific local tech innovation named Shanghai. The Shanghai culture is a mix of piracy, DIY, and anti-establishment. It literally means a mountain fortress, and it comes from a novel from the 13th century that tells a story of a group of outlaws that hides in the mountain to be outside the system and outside the regulation of the state, basically. So in a more recent context, Shanghai refers basically to manufacturing. It emerged in the 50s, for instance in Hong Kong, to describe small-scale factories that were producing cheap, low-quality items, and mainly counterfeit products of famous brands like Gucci or Nike, and they sold those products on markets that would not buy the fancy, expensive originals. And as electronic manufacturing migrated to Shenzhen in the early 2000s, this informal network of Shanghai production found the perfect product in the mobile phone. So our first acquisition in this collection was basically the Ghana phone, and we've been very intrigued by this device. So basically this device has not been conceived for its superficial design, but it's been conceived to fill a gap, a need or a niche market. So this phone is a power bank, basically to fill the gap of the frequent power cuts in Ghana, but it has a battery that can last for a week. You can also charge other devices with it, recharge a computer, another phone. You can also use it as a light, so that's why you have a hook to connect it on the ceiling. And basically it's a whole package of functions and properties that were designed specifically for a local market that no any brands were paying attention at. So we were very interested by this track of research, and we wanted to dig some more. So we started with a simple protocol. We started to collect hybrid phones that were combining multiple functions and designed for those niche markets all over the place, mainly in the global south, but not only you will see. So you can find a lot of fancy and weird devices that I will show, and those devices we've been collecting them in markets in Shenzhen like Wachan Bay and also online like on Taobao Aliexpress and so on. So one of the reasons that we wanted to focus our research on mobile phones, because Shanghai production is not only about mobile, it's about every kind of technology, I would say, but we kind of wanted to stick to one sort of device to have this continuity over 20 years and also because somehow a huge contrast could be seen through the mobile phone between sort of a north hemisphere culture or somehow this standardized culture of the black rectangle we all have in our pockets here. And this kind of non-normalized technological imaginaries that were emerging there. And somehow it reminds us, I think, that other technological possibilities always exist beyond the ultra-normalized industry. So I will dig into a few of those. So each of those examples I think tell a specific story and reveal specific uses and cultures. So here you can see a lighter phone, so it's basically a phone that does cigarette lighter. This one is, I would say, a working cigarette pack that also includes a mobile phone or perhaps the other way around. In this one is a razor phone, so it's a phone that includes a working shaver. So since 2015 we've been collecting about hundreds of those hybrid phones and I will zoom into a few of very interesting specimens and stories. So here you can see the card phone is the size of a credit card. It used to be the cheapest on the market. It cost about $12 and it's made of a single board. So basically it can be very easily replicated and optimized, modified and so on. So that's why it's been called the Gong iPhone, which means open source. And you can find this board in multiple versions in the later generation of phones. I will present in a minute. So this one is called the Buddha phone. It's been designed as a digital alternative for Buddhist prayers and related religious activities. So basically it replicates, for instance, the ritual components like the burning of incense, purification rites, meditative music and more. So all of those features are included in basically the UX of the phone. So this is the sound system phone. It's been designed for mainly the elderly people. So one of the favorite activities of the elderly in China is group dancing on public square in evenings. And this specific phone has been designed for this purpose. So it comes with several gigabytes of old fashioned communist songs that Chinese pensioners are particularly keen on. It has huge buttons. I mean it's really designed for elderly people. So the device is like that size. And there is also support to stand in front of the dancers and a powerful light torch to ensure a smooth return home after the dance. They're small, nice and neat to put away, up in the bums. I'm a pro of them, they've got 20 and 10 minutes. Why Mars balls? Because they're available in most of the visit halls. You can't take something that might not be there because if you do, they're going to notice it different. I'd say that there's probably 75% of prisoners have phones in jail. I'll take that in, I'm a person, in places where you wouldn't get searched. The front of your trousers, in your bra. So this one is the prisoner phone. Or it's also called Bit the Boss. The Boss is a device for scanning prisoners. So actually it started on the market as the smallest phone on the market. But for some reason it became popular among prisoners, mainly in the UK, because of its small size, it's the size of a finger. And because of the fact also it's composed of 99% of plastic. So it's barely detectable during the checks in prisons. And you can easily smuggle it. Inside food, inside body, obviously. But also in weird ways, like inside using drones, carrier pigeons, rats and so on. So we try to exhibit all this collection of weird devices in their natural habitat in a way. So we built a reproduction of a street market kiosk where we basically showcase this collection of hybrid phones. And together with that we have a couple of video documentaries, like this one, that kind of tell the larger Shanghai culture and focus on the Chinese ecosystem of technological device, production and distribution. So that's how it looks when it's shown. Yeah, that's it for this one. And the last curatorial project I'd like to introduce is a work in progress. It's called the Museum of Failures. And I will start with a quote by Paul Virelio. This acknowledgement of powerlessness before the upsurge of unexpected, catastrophic events forces us to reverse the usual trend which exposes us to accidents and inaugurate a new kind of museology and museography. One which consists in exposing or exhibiting the accident, all accidents. From the most common place to the most tragic, from natural catastrophes, to industrial and scientific disasters, including also the kind that is too often neglected, the happy accident, the stroke of luck, the coup de foudre or even the coup de grace. So as you could guess with this quote, this project is about uncovering and compiling counter narratives about the history of technological innovation. And our project is basically to compile those underrepresented stories that can help us to disrupt the dominant positivist discourse on innovation and help us maybe to think about technology in a post-growth era. The project takes the shape of workshops, conferences, events, and we share it as a database and exhibitions. So this symbolic museum is structured into floors. They go in negative numbers. They are somehow the underground counterparts of usual technological museum. So each floor is a potential sort of entry or perspective on the museum sorted by topics. So you have intentional failures, fiction and dystopias, risk and disasters, unexpected outcomes and so on. So the first part of this future book is a collection of aborted projects, flops, errors, malfunctions, business failures, ethical rejections, disasters, and they somehow reflect the outlines of our society from a historical, symbolic, poetic and cultural point of view. The second part of this book, though, will be based on interviews and contributions and we are open to proposals. So if you have stories or research on post-growth technological imaginaries and content narratives on technological innovation, you're welcome to submit. Okay, so the second part of this talk will be about our artworks, a specific selection to resonate with the CCC as well. And we grouped it into this idea of psychoanalysis of the hyper-connected era. So the first artwork I will introduce is the pirate cinema. Basically the copyculture got mainstream with BitTorrent and the Pirate Bay in the early 2000 and it became an essential part of culture for a world generation. And at the same time as this process, since the early days of peer-to-peer, it coexisted with an intense level of surveillance. So this surveillance was conducted by universities, corporations, states, sometimes for a statistical purpose just to know how much it's consumed from different types of contents and so on, and most of the time for copyright infringement. And we got really interested in how we could disrupt those systems of network surveillance, basically, and use it to reveal the dynamics and the materiality of peer-to-peer fissuring. So basically to expose the materiality of this process and the geographical dynamics of the content that were consumed and shared. So I will show a few excerpts of this project. So we programmed the server to use BitTorrent and to synchronize every morning with the top 100 videos of the Pirate Bay. So it's a sort of a man-in-the-middle attack where we see what people are sharing through our server. So it's a way to view the global dynamics through one node of the BitTorrent network. As you can see on the video, it also reveals the user IP address and the countries, and somehow it's a way to depict the geographical dynamics of media sharing and consumptions. The next project I'd like to introduce, following this idea of content narratives, it's a series about illicit content. It's called Blacklist. So we got interested in basically who controls and decides what should be visible or not online or what should be blocked or not. And all those lists are built and used. And somehow, maybe it can be something that reveals the value system we live in. So there are numerous Blacklist you can subscribe to, more or less efficient and up-to-date, SquidBlacklist, Shallalist, Cisco and so on. And somehow it reminds us, literally, of the index of forbidden books used to exist in libraries around the globe. It was a list, basically, of publications considered heretical, immoral, or anticlerical. And in an Internet Blacklist nowadays, you have pretty much the same. So addresses that can be blocked, they are organized into categories, as you can see here. And as a citizen, you can decide what type of content you want to block. So such lists are used by universities, towns, airports, companies, individuals, and so on. And it helps you basically to restrict the access to specific content on your network. So you have categories like copyright, porn, pharmacy, and so on. And you can see weird stuff, like feminist, for instance. And I guess it reveals the for-profit nature of this list and the fact that anything can be requested if enough clients are asking for it. So this work took the shape of a sort of an encyclopedia in 13 volumes of 666 pages. It's basically an encyclopedia of illicit and filtered sites. And it is structured like an old phone book. And it's a sort of ready-made that reveals the moral sort of portraits or framework of the web. Blacklist is a directory of the prohibitions of the Internet, deployed in the form of an encyclopedia in 13 volumes of 666 pages each. It is an extensive collection of restricted websites used for the automatic filtering of traffic considered illicit or licentious. Just like the intent of forbidden libraries, the Blacklist's project points out the sidelining of online content that could be dangerous for the very survival of the system. With around two million websites extracted from commercial content control softwares, this collection reveals a cultural, social, and ideological model of our society through what has been deemed unfit for consultation. By specific groups and institutions around the globe. So I guess you get the idea. All right, so this next work is a predictive output and I will need to contextualize a bit. So basically we live in the era of hyperconnectivity and the time we spend on phone and social media has radically increased over the last 10 years. And this has a strong effect on us. Online news and communication tends to monopolize a lot of our attention and it does as a growing influence on our types of concerns and priorities. So we know about effects like filterable, media echo chambers, and to some extent the influence of social media and hyperconnection tend towards a sort of uniformization, not only of our concerns but also somehow of our innovation and creativity and it tends towards a higher chance of predictability of our behaviors. So standing, basically standing from the art field, we started to notice somehow similar patterns amongst the artists around us. So we spotted numerous similar imaginaries, similar trends in each interest groups and we started to observe similar topics, similar ideas and even similar ways of realizing artworks and answering to ideas and concerns. So at some point we were like do we really need artists to simply follow the trends and do we need artists to just illustrate the latest technological base? Maybe no. So that's where the project started with this simple question and we decided to automatize the process of mainstream creativity we could say and to push it towards a sort of the absurd. So to do that we created a bot and this bot basically is subscribed to hundreds of RSS feeds. That's the sort of feeds we will get ourselves on our Twitter feed, you know. So we basically subscribed the bot to the same and then the bot is using some Python library to try to identify the most significant keyword in the headlines and those keywords are stored and then we organized using treasury in a sort of generative poetry to create a potential concept for artworks. And those concepts are reposted on Twitter and different places to basically create a new weird inspiration machine. That's what you will see now. Predictive art bodies and algorithm that turns the latest media headlines into artistic concepts. In the age of hyperconnectivity the perverse implications of media echo chambers are becoming more and more obvious. Groups of similar behaviors are being partitioned in filter bubbles while the few massively reposted topics tend to monopolize most of the available attention. Such insular echo chambers strongly affect ways of thinking resulting in increasingly homogeneous imaginaries within groups of like-minded people. Predictive art by caricatures the predictability of media-influenced artistic concepts by automating and skirting the human creative process. But beyond mere automation, it aims to stimulate unbridled, counter-intuitive and even disconcerting associations of ideas. To do so, it continually monitors emerging trends among the most influential new sources in fields as heterogeneous as politics, environment, innovation, culture, activism, or health. On this basis, it identifies and combines keywords to generate concepts of artworks in a fully automated way, ranging from unreasonable to prophetic through absurd. Each prediction becomes a thought experiment waiting to be incubated, misused, or appropriated by a human host. Okay, and we also commissioned a few artists to interpret and realize those projects a few times. Okay, the last project for tonight, I see that it's almost time for me. So the last project is a map, and it's a work in progress for a future long-term project. And basically, it focuses on the fact that the web has become one of the most impactful vehicles for the propagation of ideas and culture. And hyper-connectivity did intensify the rise of online politics and made it way easier to manipulate public opinions. And I mean, this happened as a sort of unprecedented scale. So, you know, we've seen the emergence of political bots, fake accounts, troll farm, and so on. But today, I will focus on the cultural aspect of this battleground. So one of the important aspects of online culture wars that we are trying to map is perhaps this notion of transgression. So as one of the Trump supporters, Milo Yiannopoulos used to say, conservatism is the new punk. And think about how the culture wars have changed, and changed very rapidly in a very short space of time. The dissident element in culture, punk, mischief, irreverence, is now better represented in politics by a make America great again hack than by anything on the left. If you want to annoy somebody, if you want to piss your parents off, if you want to be ejected from polite society as this poor angel has been, there is no better way to do it than to cast a vote for Donald Trump. This is the new punk, Republican is the new cool. Thank you for coming. So in the context of the political correctness and self-censorship, public shaming, that were occurring a lot in the left, this obscure style of sort of iconic, cynical mockery emerged as a sort of counter-force. And transgression made the alt-right attractive in a way. And this transgressive online culture is well-presented in the book of Angela Nagel called The Kill Ornormies. What seemed to hold them all together in their obscurity was a love of mocking the earnestness and moral self-flattery of what felt like a tired liberal intellectual conformity running right through from establishment liberal politics to the more militant enforcers of new sensitivities and from the wackiest corners of Tumblr to campus politics. So basically this culture of transgression aligns pretty well with what is called a weaponized meme. So a weaponized meme is when internet memes become part of a political and ideological propaganda. It can be done by the right, but as well by all the political spectrum like here to fight homophobia in Russia. And as a starting point for this new series of projects we wanted to create a kind of mind map of the emerging online culture wars. So we use this classical political compass as a framework. I mean it's a framework that has been criticized a lot but nonetheless it became popular as a format to exchange content on online forums and on the memeosphere. And it often integrates non-political characters and pop preferences and so on. So after studying numerous critical researches on the topic like the computational propaganda project, Angela Nagle, Florian Kramer and so on and also our own investigations we started to assemble a sort of cartography of weaponized meme elements with the help of Baruch Gottlieb. The online culture wars project offers a provisional cartography of weaponized meme elements using a speculative political distribution. Taking the political compasses of framework, this cartography offers a symbolic representation of online ideological and political debates in the context of a growing polarization and radicalization. This ever-evolving chart is the result of a superposition of hundreds of politicized memes found online in addition to influential political symbols, actors and influencers. It is designed as a discussion starter intended to expose and contextualize the present battlefield of online culture wars. So we are currently continuing this map as an interactive, contributive webpage. Well, this was a quick selection of all the new works that somehow resonate with the CCC and thank you for your attention. A big thank, Nicolas. Are there any questions to Nicolas? There is a microphone one. Hi, congrats, beautiful presentation. I'm curious, what have you never dared doing? What's your next step? I think it's correlated somehow. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so as I said, this last project is sort of a starting point for a new series of investigations and research. And at the moment, we are accumulating a lot of documents on online propaganda and online influence. And we're starting a new series of online performance using and basically challenging those strategies for the manipulation of opinions. So we are trying to develop our own propaganda strategies, basically. Are there any questions from the Internet? No? Yeah, then a big warm applause, thanks for Nicolas. Thanks.