 for the next talk, exposing systems of power and injustice. Systems of power and injustice, they are everywhere, everyone hates them. These people have been handling with these systems for five years now. It's the Disruption Network Lab from Berlin, and they are an institution for arts, politics, whistle-blowing, and, what was the last one? I forgot. Here, to give the talk for you, Tatjana and Lieke. And while I'm here, I'm sorry, just to quick mention, the talk will also be available with subtitles by our great subtitle Andrews. Thank you very much. So, thank you very much. We are really happy to be here. My name is Tatjana Bazzikelli, and I'm the director of the Disruption Network Lab, and with me there is... Yeah, my name is Lieke Plucher, and I'm directing the community program of the Disruption Network Lab. Yes. We want to do, in a sense, a long presentation, but hopefully not too boring, because we really like to connect different dots in our activity. That is also why we usually try to describe what we do as an interconnection of different practices. We work on the cultural aspect within whistle-blowing and culture, and hacking and politics, and also we try to be really careful and close to the discourse of social justice and the importance of the civil society. But we are a conference program in Berlin, so we usually try to invite people that work on these subjects. But at the same time, we also do a great work of preparation before each conference, and we want to present here a bit the genesis of our program and also what we have been doing in the past five years, even before. So I'm actually starting with something that doesn't go on, of course. This is the great technology aspect that everything works until the first time. Oh, yes, here we are. You know, this is always the point when you do events, you go on stage, the technology doesn't work, but now here we are. So I go back to basically 19 years, so it's not really five years ago, and I really like to bring this image because in a sense we are real also because we believe in certain practices and we believe also in the network that creates these practices. And here I was at the hack meeting in Italy, in Rome, in 2000, that was my second hack meeting, I'm Italian, as you can imagine, and it was a really great situation in which back in the time a group of us was trying to create the connection between hacking and art. And at the same time we also ask ourselves if hacking is political. And of course there were a lot of interesting debates because not all the people in the time really believed on the connection of art and hacking because of course art was always confined in the specific systems, but what we were trying to do, and this was our effort, was trying to open up this system, especially also the cultural system and the ones of art, and also demonstrate that hacking can also be an attitude that brings you to interpret society and culture in a very different way. So this is what we were doing back in the time, at least a group of us, not all. We were at the Forte Prenestino in Rome doing this great event. And then my first international hack meeting was actually here at the CCC, the Chaos Communication Camp 2003. That is also the year in which I moved to Berlin. So we are both based in Berlin and back in the time I had another kind of interesting discussion. The camp was much smaller than today, but it was also a very interesting time because it was really at the beginning if you want. And I had really great sharing with people and instead I had the opposite problem coming to Germany because back in the time the people were not really considering hacking as political at least here at the CCC. And so my struggle was always to show actually this is also part of the root of the CCC if you think about the work of Wow Holland. So I always refer to Wow because I think he is really a great example of how it's possible to bring hacking into society. And today we see actually that we have both the art and culture track and we have also the ethnic politics and society. So I think that sounds to move on. Of course, there was also the art track at the CCC back in the time, but there was less discourse about politics and I think there should still be more because at least in my impression is that we speak a lot about that but we have always to try not to just confine ourselves into the technological field. Really try to demonstrate what happened if you open these fields. If you go into culture, into art, into society and make hacking something really concrete that is also going beyond the technology and beyond the digital itself. So then I jump in time and I go back, still I mean it's back in time but it's fast forward to the discourse of whistleblowing. And so this is also the point why I wanted to create this connection of these dots because I mean this is a really great installation that the Chelsea Manning Initiative did in Berlin and they were really working a lot to support Chelsea Manning even before when it was called Brady Manning and I still feel also that there have not been enough talks about whistleblowing here, not really many people speaking about Chelsea Manning and I also would have wished to have more debates about that still because back in the time in 2013, 2015 this was really a big topic that we were having so why there are not so many people now speaking about whistleblowing and this is a question that I want to bring to the whole community. I think we have not to forget these people because even if the discourse of Snowden was really hype back in the time, Chelsea Manning is still in prison, Ola Bini was in prison, Assange is in prison, many other whistleblowers are in prison and so is also our needs and our duty to support these people and try still to speak for an open society and also a freedom of information. So I wish that the next coming four years we will also go back to this discourse. And so I also want to bring something that for me was really important and was a panel that I was creating back at Transmediale in 2014 when I was creating this festival. And I want to bring it here because at the time this was a panel with Trevor Pagling, Jay Cappell, Baun and Laura Poitras. We were really discussing about the impact of art and evidence and also how art is informed by whistleblowing, how it's possible to use whistleblowing also as a tool to change society. And so the discourse of art as evidence was really important because also was trying to go over the real of evidence are something very technical and to bring it into culture. I mean is what Laura Poitras did with Elfim, for example, about Snowden. So I want to refer to that also because it was a really big inspiration for the work that I'm doing at the moment. And so I want to go into that now and we start speaking about the Disruption Network Club and in particular what we are trying to do is also to create a feedback loop that is bringing together the discourse of art, politics and disruption. And disruption is something that comes from business. We appropriate this concept and in business means to introduce in the market a product that the market doesn't expect. And if you think, if you want to apply disruption into culture, into politics and you think about hacking, then you imagine a situation in which you want to introduce in a closed system something that the system doesn't expect. And this is also what is happening with whistleblowing. So there are a lot of very interesting discussion that is possible to have. And in a sense, this also goes back to art history if you think about the unexpected that also was created by the avant-garde years and years ago, like to introduce the unexpected in a system that is closed, that is already very much defined. And so the Disruption Network Club started in 2014. We started to really conceptualize it. And so the idea of disruption was very important but also the idea of creating a network and creating a laboratory. And the way we define it is to examine the intersection of politics, technology and society and to expose the misconduct at the wrongdoing of the powerful. The first event that we did was in April 2015. And here I want to go back on the discourse of whistleblowing because the first keynote that we have was Brandon Bryant. So I also want to remind this person because back in 2015 it got very popular but we still have to remember the courageous act of many whistleblowers that were speaking back in the time and that are not so mentioned anymore, especially the drone whistleblowers because they are really a category that has been highly persecuted. And Brandon was a sensor operator and in the US Air Force he was working there between 2006 and 2011 and he was part of this predator program. And when I met him, in a sense, I really had the impression that I understood what does it mean to change your perspective and to meet a person that before did something that you would also not agree with but then to see this person that changed opinion and started to do something very courageous. And I think in a sense, this is also almost an artistic act to bring the unexpected into society when you are a whistleblower and in this case, this case was really to speak about drones and war and how are you able to make a change and how are you able to inspire people by creating almost data is the act of bringing something that you cannot expect and turned around the situation by revealing a misconduct. So now I jump a bit because if I'm going to tell you all the conference, perhaps we stay here until six and we did actually until now 17 conferences and no, 16 conferences and yes, we are preparing now the 17 one and I just want to mention this one because I think also gives, what is this? Okay, yeah, maybe, I mean, we enter another realm of investigation and so we are speaking about challenging supremacism and this conference was about the understanding of the right wing extremism and the idea of inviting people that are also infiltrating context of right wing extremism and at the same time also are trying to bring the unexpected inside them. So I want to mention Daryl Davis is a black American musician that since the 80s has been befriended member of the Cook Looks clan trying to make them change opinion by just having a dialogue and I found this story very inspiring because at dance just with the act of speaking he was able to make a change. Okay, I hope you are listening to me, you hear well? Yes, okay, so go back to Daryl Davis and so I think this is also a really great example of bringing into culture something that is unexpected and also bringing something that could make a change because he is also claiming that since the 80s to now almost 200 people from the Cook Looks clan basically changed their opinion and they did it by meeting a black man. Then we also had a great contribute from Patrick Emerson and Julian Ebbner that were infiltrating the alt-right and the far-right in UK. So I also suggest you to get the information from Hope Not Hate and the report that Patrick Emerson did. I believe there is also a film that came out about him and so we enter now into the discourse of the current program that also leaked a join because you came with us from January this year. So I'm just going briefly to introduce the first conference and then I leave it to you. So we are doing since January a series that is called The Art of Exposing Injustice and we are working together in partnership with the Transparency International and also many other realities. And as you can see from the title, we really want to expose the misconduct and the wrongdoing of the powerful as this is also our title and try to reflect with people how it's possible to make a social change. And there is also a community program. Yeah, so my name is Lika Pluchar and I joined the Disruption Lab at the beginning of this year. Actually, we were already collaborating also since 2015 because I used to run Art Space in Berlin called Spectrum where we also developed a community program and we found that this was a really valuable way to connect with people outside of the usual activities. So I joined Disruption Lab specifically to develop also a community program for the Disruption Network Lab which we launched this year under the title Activation. So what we do in this program, we have now already did 16 conferences like Tatjana just said. So we wanted to have a way of connecting with this large network that we build up both the speakers at events but also the people that come to our events and there's of course a lot of other initiatives and realities operating in Berlin that are working in the fields of our conference topics. So we felt it was really important to also find a way to share more with this crowd and also to connect more with our community rather than just doing bigger scale conferences a couple of times in the year. So we developed this program to interact with our community on a more regular basis. So what we're doing now is we're doing meetups each time before each conference and after each conference and there we go into the field of the conference topic before it actually happens and we give also Berlin communities and activists and other initiatives and we give them a way to present their research connected to us or give input to our program so as an ongoing sharing with our community. So yeah, going forward we will present a bit of these examples of what's already happened. Now we started six months ago so we had a couple of meetups but first Tatjana will introduce the first conference that we did this year. Yeah, so the first conference that we did this year was called Dark Heavens Confronting Hidden Money and Power and in a sense we were really going into the discourse of exposing misconduct again. The way we define it was to explore the inner mechanism of the financial system and also the corruption of offshore companies and of course also you can imagine our main topic was to speak about the Panama Papers that is another discourse that is still important to remember that happened some time ago and also thanks to a whistleblower and their consequence of these acts are still very much alive in society and we had with us many great speakers. Usually our conference format is pretty simple is two days in which we have one keynote and one panel. Sometimes we also like to break up our own system and try to split up some talks but more or less it's like that. And we really try not to make it too big even if lately we had really great participation but not too big in terms of program to have many things happening at once because we really want to focus on the few people that we invite because we think their act is really important, courageous and so we have to give them enough importance also to speak with the public. So we had for example, Frederiko Bermeier with us and Pelin Unker that not so many people knew actually was their first public talk. She told us, we didn't know this. I mean she has been very important for the discourse of the Panama Papers because she was reporting corruption in Turkey and also phasing charge for that. And so we have also to remember the important work of journalists for example, investigative journalists that are both working with whistleblowing, whistleblowers are trying to tell the truth and often they really suffer violent and strong form of persecution. And then we also show the film, the Panama Papers from Alex Winter and we did a really deep program about the discourse of anti-corruption and also protection of investigative journalists that are working on this subject. So yeah, this was the first conference of the year it took place in April and then we also started off our community program. So around this conference in April we organized two meetups. So this was the first one exposing secret connections and this was also the start of the year that we did in 2019. So this was kind of the warm up meeting to this topic of the Dark Havens conference. So what we did was we invited the local chapter of Transparency International, so Transparency Germany and also Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, so two initiatives from Berlin, both of them. And Transparency Germany shared with us the work that they're doing and the interesting thing is that they work also of course a lot on financial transparency but they organize this all in different working groups composed of volunteers. So our thinking was also it's good to hear from them what they're doing but if people are really interested in this topic and they actually want to get involved and empowered to do something they could also join one of these groups and understand more what's going on around this topic and what they can actually work on directly themselves as they want to. And the other thing was actually something really interesting which happened right around the time of our conference was the launch of the Open Company Data Registry and this was done by Open Knowledge Foundation Germany together with Open Company. So they developed this database where they shared Open Company data in a way that's easy for people to share and find information, so sharing it as open data rather than the registry that's currently used in Germany. So this is a very valuable tool for journalists to actually find information if they're researching about corruption. So it was really interesting to hear from them how they developed this and why they developed this and also how people can actually use this tool. So this was kind of the warm up we did to the conference. Then we had the actual conference and then we followed up with the meeting afterwards. So to kind of reflect on what happened at the conference continue some of the discussions. And we also invited one of the speakers at the conference which was Friedrich Lindenberg from OCCRP Data and he came to the meetup to share a bit more in depth what this tool actually is. Also how people can use it, how people could help in improving the tool because it's not completely ready and there's a lot of things they would like to add on to it. So this was a really interesting way also for people to sort of dive deeper into the topic and we had a sharing of one of the workshops we organized in connection to the conference. So this was organized by the art collective rybn.org and it's called Offshore Tour Operator. So this is a really great workshop actually if you're interested in this topic and you wanna find out more about the Panama Papers and the traces of offshore corruption in daily life it's really recommended to go to their website. They have also an app and you can see everything online they're sharing everything openly. You can basically find all the addresses that are in the database in OpenStreetMap so you can go exploring and finding traces of this offshore banking in the daily landscape. So in the workshop we did this with a special GPS device on our back and these are some of the photos that actually Tatjana and Jonas discovered in the rich west of Berlin so obviously a lot of traces of corruption down there and yeah as you can see on the map sometimes it's a lot of walking around to try to find the places. But yeah the workshop obviously was only limited to a certain amount of people that could join which we thought was a pity because there was many people interested that couldn't join so we decided to have this extra moment at the community meetup to share what had been going on so that more people could understand this and also maybe do the workshop themselves or explore Berlin which actually is a way to make you very paranoid so I don't know if it's always nice but it's important to know a bit more about that. Yeah and then we moved to the next conference this was this year in June so this was the most recent conference we did and it was called AI traps automating discrimination and in this event we were reflecting on how AI and algorithms can reinforce the prejudice and the bias that's already in the current society and how this has an impact and increases discrimination especially for groups that are minority minorities so there's discrimination based on race, gender for example and this is actually quite a big problem especially since AI is growing and growing and having a bigger impact in our society. So we hosted different panels this was the final panel of the conference and it was about the politics of AI so it was especially connecting this problem of AI to the wider political systems of our society so the speakers there were Diya Kayali, Oskis and Dan McQuillan and they were also discussing how just changing AI is not enough we need to actually go beyond and look at where this is coming from that AI is prejudiced and maybe we should even change societies because there's a lot of negative influence and we need to be more aware of the context in which these AI's operate and here we see on the slide a slide about the gender discrimination that's often reinforced by AI especially because of the increased facial recognition technologies so also we had quite a lot of transgender speakers in this conference because it's a topic affecting this community especially a lot Yeah, we also spoke about racial discrimination Yeah, also racial discrimination and all the talks are online on our website so if you want to catch up on anything you can find all the videos there and because of this transgender queer connection we also decided to warm up this topic by doing a meet-up around this so this week in May, so a month before the conference we invited a community from Berlin called the Xeno Entities Network and they're a very interesting community because they're connecting the discourse of queer, feminist and gender studies with digital technology and they often host what they call open conversations so they organize the night around AI threats on queer bodies so especially about the impact that this AI and surveillance and control mechanism have on the queer and trans community so we had a night here at the space where we're hosting our meet-ups which is called State Studio in Berlin so it's an art science gallery and yeah, we were all sitting around watching different fragments on the topic and then discussing together like what are the counter mechanisms and what can artists and activists do to counteract these forms of increased surveillance and control then we had the conference and then the second meet-up afterwards which we wanted to focus also on yeah, some positive examples of what actually people have been doing against this or some first starts of what can be done against this AI bias problem so we invited two projects again based in Berlin so there was the Open Tufa project run by Open Knowledge Germany in Algorithm Watch and the Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies which is developed by Coding Rights and yeah, it was a really nice meet-up also because at the end of it we got this great image shared through Twitter from one of the participants that felt really inspired by the whole event and just decided to sketch what has been going on so yeah, the Open Tufa project for those that don't know it I would really check it out it was very interesting it was a project that run in 2018 and for those of you who are German you probably know Tufa as a credit scoring company so if you're in Germany and you want to rent a house you usually have to provide a paper from the Tufa private company that will tell you what your score is and if you're actually allowed to rent this house like if you have enough credit rate and yeah, the strange thing is that this is calculated by an intransparent algorithm so the Tufa is a private company and people are not really sure how the score is calculated so Open Knowledge Foundation Germany and Algorithm Watch organized a campaign where people could donate their Tufa data and they were trying to reverse engineer this algorithm to find out what exactly was going on so by inviting them and sharing this more widely we wanted people to give a better understanding of what's been going on and also for them maybe to join this kind of projects in the future or donate their data or get involved with such initiatives and share the great work that has been done already then I'll hand over again so and the next conference that we are preparing and you are all invited is called Citizens of Evidence and we are reconnecting with this discussion about whistleblowing but we are also trying to reflect on how to extend the concept of whistleblowing to the civil society so how can people enable the facts to expose misconducts and how they can either do it by themselves or in collaboration with journalists or with researchers and activists and also, you know, activists themselves and Citizens of Evidence also, as you say, as I say, reconnect with this discourse of imagining how we could transfer whistleblowing into society and culture and what we are preparing at the moment is the whole program that will involve very great speaker, for example, we have Matthew Caruana Galizia that is the son of Daphne Caruana Galizia, the journalist that has been assassinated in Malta to expose misconducts and corruption, analyzing also an ingrelation to the material of the Panama paper so we create the reconnection but at the same time we have also people that are more grassroots oriented and are really analyzing other form of movements for example, the other keynotes we will have is vooming one from the vooming collective and Italian great collective writers that back in the time under the name of Luther Bliss that wrote the book Q that has been also translated into German, I really suggest you to read and he will speak about the movement of the Val di Sousa that is a really special and interesting case of people that are fighting the construction of the high speed train to connect the city of Turin and the city of Lyon in France and this is I think is a very important argument and discussion platform as well to understand also how a movement was successful because thanks to their activity that is going back to 25 years and even more the train was actually never really able to go into existence and also the corruption, speculation that was around all this plan and also the crazy and really bad impact on the climate and the territory. So I mean, now I'm not going to tell you all the details of the conference but of course you can watch, look it online and also come, that is nice and I leave then to you the description of the workshop. Yeah, so we're organizing two things like additional to the conference so a community meetup which I'll present in a second but also a workshop on the final day so on the Sunday after the conference and this is called Flying in Berlin Sky and Afternoon Investigation which is really going to be a very exciting workshop because there's an investigative journalist Emmanuel Freudenthal and a hacker called Sector035 and together they will take us to the Tempelhofer Feld which is a big airspace in Berlin to do some research of what's going on in the sky. So they're working on plane tracking. They're actually Emmanuel's behind the dictator alert project which is a great initiative trying to figure out how dictators are moving around the world through the sky. So yeah, we hope to find out some interesting things by going to Berlin, Tempelhofer Feld and putting up some antennas, catching what's going on in the air and then analyzing this later. So a good example of some open source intelligence work that we can do directly ourselves after the event. And we will go to Supermarkt as well. Yes, we will end the day at Supermarkt which is also a great art space in Berlin to finalize our analysis and investigation. So yeah, we're really looking forward to that and Emmanuel will also be a speaker at the conference but also hold this workshop. And yeah, to warm up for all of this in September, so on the 4th of September for those of you in Berlin or wanting to visit Berlin, you're really welcome to join us because we will do a preparatory meetup actually more a workshop on how to set up a secure self-hosted file distribution system. And we're organizing this together with the great conference Radical Networks which was held last year in Berlin. This year it will be in New York. And this is a conference around network technology and how to use this also as an artistic medium but also an event that celebrates the free and open internet. So something very closely related also to our work. And we felt it's very important also to organize this meetup as a real hands-on workshop for people to understand how they can set up their own self-hosted installation of NextCloud, so an open source alternative to Google Drive, and also how to set up their own Wi-Fi servers on Raspberry Pi. So yeah, we tried to do that all in three hours so that will be a challenge but you're really welcome to join us and participate. So, and also if you want to know more about the conference after this talk, we have a lot of flyers here, you can pick up the program. Stickers, everything. And yeah, the workshop will be hosted by Sarah Grant and Dania Faziliyev who are both part of the Radical Networks and also the Weissers Eben studio in Berlin. So yeah, hopefully it will look like this with a lot of people joining and then getting involved and learning. And yeah, and so I just also want to bring a little conclusion. I mean, actually I want to say two things. One is, I mean, nice to finish this talk also showing this great video, you know, installation that was done by the Chelsea Manning Initiative when we were doing our conference stands in which we also invited Mustafa Al-Bassam of Laltseq. This is also another great name that I like to mention, part of our program. And you know, keep fighting is a very important concept for us and I want to conclude again with a little reflection of, I mean, I know that for a lot of hackers to speak about culture only and related to whistleblowing, might sound very boring, like, oh no, I want to put my hands on on things. Culture sounds very theoretical and boring. But I think that, you know, because we really like to connect dots. We have not to forget that at the moment what we are witnessing in politics and society and maybe it's also going to influence the technology of the future that we will have is a sort of info war because we are really witnessing the emergency of a lot of right-wing extremist movements and so we still believe that to work on culture is very, very important, especially also for the people that work with technology and are able to shape the society that will also come in the future. So I think that we have to work together, you know, there cannot be only, you know, people coding without people working on culture. We have to stress up this aspect, probably hopefully next time we will have an audience formed by 100,000 people and they won't be scared by the world culture. And then I want to conclude also to thank our great team that we didn't mention. That's, we have a team of really great people, Jonas Francki and also Nadab Barker, Monty, Giacomo Marinsalta, and some of them are also here at the camp. So I really feel to thank all of you and I think we are done and we can open for questions. Exactly. Thanks a lot to our lovely speakers. Are there any questions from the audience about this talk? Anybody? Is there a question from the internet? No. No questions? Then I would like to finish... I'll avoid the lake, probably. Yeah, I think we also go there. Yeah, the lake is the place to be. Let's finish with the last round of applause and... Thank you. And thank you all for coming.