Program

This presentation will present a range of transparency critiques in order up to open a discussion about contemporary info-activism. The notion of transparency is usually mobilised as a 'good': Transparency goes against state secrecy, represents responsible policy, and stands for openness about data and research methods. As Lessig remarked in a critical piece about the transparency movement: 'How could anyone be against transparency?' (The New Republic, 9 October 2009).  This session aims to look more closely to the workings of transparency.

What political and philosophical assumptions are embedded in the use of the word 'transparency'? Does transparency also expect something from the public? And what does that say about the politics of practices of 'bringing things into view'? We will go through a list claims made by contemporary scholars (amongst others Clare Birchall, Andrew Barry, Evelyn Ruppert) who have critically examined the idea and status of transparency and look at the use of the concept in social movements. The aim of the session is a discussion about the extent to which these insights are fruitful (or too limited) to discuss contemporary forms of info-activism.


 

The evolution of our species is no longer determined by the physical prowess of dominant genes, we create new interfaces to interact with the mind and push as into new territories of thinking.

The architectural space, the environment we live in, demands the body to move in it. Maps are the physical tool we use to navigate this space, these objects are the signifier of the relationship to our surroundings. Google Maps has created a 1:1 reality, of the architectural world, that gives the impression of real time feedback. It offers up the perfect exploration that can be accessed with a scrolling finger, and yet with all the available possibilities for moving in an online space we’re still set in the bodily plane.

The imaginary spaces we create have developed into new worlds that are poured into online gaming and communities. We’ve created a new visual language influenced by the architectural space but with more possibilities. The Memory Palace, an important branch of the imaginary space, allows us to assign large amounts of information to our everyday environment and objects. In this space we transcend the body, moving from object to object recalling memories, we move freely from our constraints without the body weighing us down. How can we combine the abstracted ideas, that come from transcending the mind, with a new map of reality.

In the workshop we will explore how we understand and access the architectural and imaginary space. Combining the everyday and sublime to transcend our physicality and create interfaces to experience virtual space in a new way.

By way of a comparison between two subcultures/communities that both assert their autonomy vis-à-vis the State through a 'flight into the future', hackers and psychonauts, the former innovating around intellectual property law, the latter around controlled substance acts, a reflection is made on the limitations of instituted, sovereign power. The entire face of the earth having been mapped out and divided up between instituted powers, the last remaining no-mans-land is the ever-evasive near future. Providing a hideout for occasional "social bandits", the legal greyzone is concurrently being turned into an incubator for corporate innovation, placed right at the centre of the innovation-driven, high-tech economy, and much lauded by EU policy makers. In management discourse, a half-conscious admission is given to the intimate relation between corporate innovation and illegality by the much talk about "Shenzhen innovation". Here "Shenzen" does not designate an industrial region in China but the historical state of being outside-the-law that was constitutive of innovativeness.

As filesharing and hacking provides numerous examples of, the "open" innovation model is fine-tuned as a model for procuring innovation from users, out of which some may even be hostile to the corporations, and possibly find themselves on the "wrong" side of law. Their illegal status does not gainsay that corporations can make a profit from them, on the contrary, illegality lays down the base-line for negotiating the labour conditions of the pirates. The exchange rate of their "labour" is negative. Likewise, the pharmaceutical industry is opening up its methods for innovating drugs, where the old, in-house, and top-down model for developing a new medicine is replaced with an inductive approach to drug development.

Drugs whose effects are barely known are released on the pharmaceutical market, and a monitoring system scans for unexpected side-effects among patients that could provide the starting-point for a new cycle of drug discovery. In the light of this development, the psychonauts, making up the least risk-averse and most knowledgeable niche in the drug market, come to occupy a similar position vis-à-vis the pharmaceutical industry as do hackers vis-à-vis computer industry. Labouring in the legal greyzone, subject to the punitive side of law but not to its protective clauses, hackers and psychonauts are pioneering new forms of citizenship in the Schumpeterian-Shenzen innovation state.

Hacking is perennially the subject of much study and debate and has been examined using various disciplinary theories and perspectives. Despite being yet another proposed theory about hacking, this talk will discuss potentially useful concepts, methods and frameworks to better analyze and understand hacking in relation to law and society.

The talk will delve into such topics as the meaning and elements of hacking, the significance of values and ethics, and the relationship between hacking and law from the viewpoint of socio-legal studies.

Tails - The Amnesic Incognito Live System - is a live system based on Debian GNU/Linux and aims at providing privacy and anonymity to its' users. Users range from activists to journalists who want to protect their sources, doctors who want to protect patient data, to simple Bitcoin users, you, me, Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and others.

The core team is very small, and there are relatively few contributors for this system which has been proven to be booted around 10.000 times a month around the world lately.

During the workshop, we'd like to present the functioning of this free software project and tell you how you can effectively help Tails. There are lots of ways to contribute : helping with user support, writing documentation, translating, proof reading, web programming, testing ISOs, reporting bugs, triaging bugs, auditing code, writing code, contributing back to Debian for software used in Tails, doing system administration, advocating Tails, formulating ideas on further improvements and more.

Our idea is to help you set up a working environment for a particular task you are interested in, in order to start contributing right away. This workshop shall also be a space for mutual knowledge exchange and discussions around the usages and implementations of Tails.

Stuff you could bring:

•     Your laptop.
•     A Tails USB stick or DVD is not necessary, but welcome, especially if you want to do testing.
•     Empathy.
•     Ideas.

The workshop will be provided by Tails developers and contributors.

Bitcoin is more ambitious than merely providing a somewhat anonymous way to buy stuff on the Internet. Bitcoin is meant as a new money for the Internet age. However, this new money is supposed to be based on different principles than all modern currencies, i.e., credit money. 

Because of this ambition, Bitcoin prompts us to ask what money is. Bitcoin reflects on various qualities of money, which are usually taken for granted, by addressing them as "technical challenges". In particular, the Bitcoin design is an attempt to solve the "technical" problem of how to exclude people from the wealth of societies and how to maintain a permanent conflict of interest. Hence, we want to present what Bitcoin's inner workings imply about the social conditions known as the free market. In particular, from these "design challenges" we can learn that a market economy needs state domination. This stands in contrast to what Libertarians, who might posit Bitcoin as an anti-state intervention, like to believe. 

Furthermore, Bitcoin is an expression of scepticism against credit money. For example, the total amount of Bitcoin that can ever be created is fixed to 21 million. Hence, Libertarians argue whether Bitcoin is yet another fiat currency or an adequate emulation of gold on the Internet. In opposition to this, if there is time left, we want to discuss the question why all modern currencies are credit money. That is, why does capitalism lead to the development of a credit system and in the last instance credit money. Instead of discussing the advantages/disadvantages of a new gold standard, we want to discuss why there is no gold standard in modern capitalism or why credit money is the adequate form of money under capitalism. 

No prior knowledge of the inner workings of Bitcoin is required to take part in this workshop.

A search from cluelessness (ASFC) interferes with sensations and aesthetics of knowledge through searching With being clueless as the drive from which the activity comes from and How it is propelled.

In the streets of Amsterdam, Aharon will skateboard-surf from one person to another searching from questions both he and people encountered are clueless about.

Each encounter will be recorded and have its own audio file.

In the vicinity of interference, the recordings will be distributed among interference attending public as a part of an exchange sequence. Each file will be given in exchange for an idea about the life of that file as linked to other files. (eg what kind of a link, how it might operate, will it actually function, etc..).

The exchanged conversation will be added to the senseclueless.beep.pm wiki and linked there, in the manner/s suggested, with the appropriate recording.

ASFC will form a sequence of interferences across materials (eg, digital/physical/etc.), times (eg both short/long time based via encounters and wiki respectively) and space types. sing the interferences to question subjects as well as itself - hence Being utterly clueless.

The ASFC talk will be conversational, hence clueless about How it will actually Be...

There is a deep and dynamic relationship between the evolutionary pathways of computers and humans, each influencing and helping to configure the other. Yet while machines are getting lighter, faster, easier to use, performing ever better at ever lower costs. The same cannot be said of the human, which has not kept up with the raging pace of development of the machine. Humans have not changed in any significant way in the last 200,000 years. There is, however, an illusion of productivity, which reinforces this relationship. Parallels can be drawn between this situation and the psychology of addiction. A damaging habit persists while the illusion of a perceived benefit is fed. 

Where critical media theory focuses on the impact that different technologies have upon human culture. The concerns addressed in Computational Somatics are slightly different. The impact I am most concerned with is not cultural but somatic, it pertains to the body. 

In the same way that when a human misuses a machine the machine eventually breaks down. When a machine misuses the human, it is the human that breaks down.

UPDATE: please check https://pad.interference/p/diysynths

This talk focuses on simple diy synthesizers that can easily be made with a handful of electronic parts. While the field of electronic sound synthesis is huge and can be a big adventure to delve in, the introduction to it can be done in a simple manner for anyone interested in electronic sound generation without needing to know too much before being able to start playing with some cheap analogue components.

Highlighting some of the essential building blocks for sound made by electronic circuits, some of the possible ways of synthesis are explained.

This talk/workshop requires no former knowledge of electronics.

While wotwot has spent a big part of his professional life with digital systems, the elegance of the analogue has meanwhile caught on more of its well deserved attention.

In this performance a heart rate monitor is used to feed the entropy pool of a unix machine whose only purpose if to generate PGP keys for the participants. A visitor takes a seat, she is wired up to this machine which will analyse the idiosyncracies of the visitor's unique heartbeat signature and the signal coming from the EKG machine will feed the entropy pool that feeds the random number generator, an essential component in the generation of cryptographic keys. Biosignals are excellent sources of entropy.

Combining a naturally occurring source of entropy within the visitor's body with the generation of a digital identity, this performance links the bodily to the digital and allows the body to play an important role in a process that is typically considered strictly computational.

The moment of key generation is a very specific form of liturgy for cryptopunks, and has a belief element based on trust. Is this random number generator any good? Is this machine trusted? Is this machine bugged? Is my private key stored anywhere else I might not know? Who is this person giving me my revokation certificates? Can I trust this key?

On saturday OCCII’s stage is going to be open to the participants of interference that want to share their musical / performative projects. Expect many diverse short performances, ranging from algorithmic simphonies made with one line of code to DIY analog synths built during the workshops, but including bands and djsets as well.

Partial line up:

• Urban grey
• Wotwot
• Visy and Viznut
• Ji Youn Kang
• Einzelganger
• Silence on Pluto
• Dj Dog
• Podinski
• Franscore
• Skinnr
• Dj Smog
• moar?

Please let it be known if you want to join.

Liquid Surveillance by David Lyon and Zygmunt Bauman discusses a wide variety of relevant topics. From the ethics of algorithms, to the self-modification of consumers, from the tyranny of reason in the 20th century to transformation of Foucault panopticon to a banopticon. They all share a key-concept; the distribution of power.

In this session we’ll do a group reading of some of the key paragraphs of the book and discuss their relevance in todays society in general and the implications for the hacker community in particular.