Berlin, AUG 8-9:
A GAME OF YOU: Into the Social Media Vortex
The third event of the Disruption Network Lab, in cooperation with Kunstraum Kreuzberg /Bethanien and in collaboration with SPEKTRUM.
Kunstquartier Bethanien, Studio 1, Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin-Kreuzberg
Performance & Screening: Spektrum, Bürknerstraße 12, Berlin-Kreuzberg
Tickets: Saturday 8 Aug: 5€. Partner events at Spektrum: Donation based
#GamerGate, Technovikings & Smart Media as a Psychedelic
Webcomic - survival in the wild torrents of our digital lives
With: Gabriel S Moses (sequential artist and graphic novelist, IL/DE), Chris Köver (co-founder of Missy Magazine, journalist and feminist activist, DE), Matthias Fritsch (artist, author of videomeme Kneecam No.1 aka
Technoviking, DE), Pedro Lopes (computer scientist, artist & hardware thinker, PT/DE). Oliver Lerone Schultz (researcher, DE).
Event inspired by the work of sequential artist and graphic novelist Gabriel S Moses.
Event funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds Berlin. In cooperation with Kunstraum Kreuzberg /Bethanien and in collaboration with SPEKTRUM. Curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli.
With a conceptual site-specific Cube intervention by Topics Books - Weserstr. 166, Berlin Neukölln.
Saturday Aug 8, 2015
17:00-18:00 - SOCIAL MEDIA AS A PSYCHEDELIC WEBCOMIC
Presentation by Gabriel S Moses (sequential artist and graphic novelist, IL/DE)
18:30-20:30 - Panel: GAMERGATES, HAPTICS & TECHNOVIKINGS
Chris Köver (co-founder of Missy Magazine, journalist and feminist activist, DE), Matthias Fritsch (artist, author of videomeme Kneecam No.1 aka Technoviking, DE), Pedro Lopes (computer scientist, artist & hardware thinker, PT/DE). Moderated by Oliver Lerone Schultz (researcher, DE). Respondent: Gabriel S Moses.
21.30 - Partner event at SPEKTRUM - Donation welcome
21.30 - CONDUCTIVE ENSEMBLE PERFORMS: A ROUGH GUIDE ON HOW TO PLAY MUSICIANS by Pedro Lopes + Open end bar
SPEKTRUM, Bürknerstraße 12, 12047 Berlin-Kreuzberg
Sunday Aug 9, 2015 - Partner event @ SPEKTRUM
20:30 - SCREENING: The Story of Technoviking + Open end bar
Monumentary by Matthias Fritsch (Germany, 2015, 1:30h, in English). Donation welcome.
SPEKTRUM, Bürknerstraße 12, 12047 Berlin-Kreuzberg
A GAME OF YOU: Into the Social Media Vortex
Social media and technology are reshaping our understanding of the distinctions between story, game, discourse, and life. This two-day event, brings a multi-angled perspective in which from one side, artists, graphic novelists, game developers, and researchers question and play the narrative embedded into games, social media platforms, and their usage; from the other side, they reflect on the consequences of spreading our identity into the vortex of social media imaginary, to the point that social media starts hunting us back, as we become the game.
With the emergence of social media platforms we are gaining new abilities to play with the narrative, to affect both our imagined recollections and our tangible physical environments. But is this a means for better individual control or a plunge into an overwhelming spin-out?
The cases of #gamergate and Technoviking demonstrate that borders between games, smart media and our private life are often very questionable. #gamergate has shown to an extreme degree that sexisms, and online hate can become really tangible and advocacy against online-harassment is deeply needed. The story of Technoviking has instead shown how Internet phenomena and memes can become a crucial question of intellectual property and personal rights.
So is online life now all a game or just a story?
Some would say language is now fully collapsing into the real. Everything is at hand, everything is virtual; there’s an app for that; all our most fundamental daily actions are quantified and compartmentalised into generic automation series, told apart by upgrades and business schemes.
We go out on the streets but we protest through our smartphones; we practically play with politics using like, share and post keys instead of jump, right and left; we convey emotion and proliferate content instantaneously to all the world's corners but we don't know how big our world really is, how much of it we are affecting, and when it comes down to what we feel about it, well, liking has very little to do with actually liking things anyways.
Herein lies an invitation to ponder on and evaluate the current cognitive, social and even political significance of these overarching online multisensory 'game-stories' and to reconsider – what's their moral and what's at stake? Or is this the kind of psychedelic trip Super Mario has when he eats the wrong mushroom?
Saturday Aug 8, 2015 • 17:00-18:00
The Great Superpower Shroom Binge: Social Media As A Psychedelic Webcomic
Presentation by Gabriel S Moses (sequential artist and graphic novelist, IL/DE)
Should smart media be considered a form of storytelling? In his presentation, Gabriel S Moses offers a reflection on social media in conjunction with digital nativity and emerging online trends. Moses connects the discourse of comics’ storytelling to our Facebook timelines, where all the cyber- dramas of our lives are rendered as info-graphic actions; chronicled and edited sets of two-dimensional pictures and words in a constant stream. The presentation revisits the old debate over ludic vs. narrative functions and projects it onto this new setting: Should our online timelines be considered a new kind of interactive comic, since they break down into flowing clusters of edited images, narrated by bits of chat bubbles and twittery one-liners? And how does time work in an environment where, on one hand, we are all encoded, recorded, and then played back to ourselves in highlights, but at the very same time we experience and alter it all in real time?
Saturday Aug 8, 2015 • 18:30-20:30
Panel: Gamergates, Haptics & Technovikings
Chris Köver (co-founder of Missy Magazine, journalist and feminist activist, DE), Matthias Fritsch (artist, author of videomeme Kneecam No.1 aka Technoviking, DE), Pedro Lopes (computer scientist, artist & hardware thinker, PT/DE). Moderated by Oliver Lerone Schultz (researcher, DE). Respondent: Gabriel S Moses.
This panel analyses the subject A Game of You, with a multi-angled perspective. On the one hand, we experience the fascination of losing our identity in the labyrinths of social media, actively playing with the concept of virality, producing memes, tactics of disruptions and creative trends. On the other hand, we know that once our identity is gone into the vortex of social media, it starts belonging to a complex network of subjects, bodies, and languages hat can interact with it, can somehow play with it, and even control it. How does the concept of identity ownership change in social media, and what if our identities lost in the networks come back to hunt us, becoming the game of somebody else that we cannot control anymore? This panel brings together three different perspectives; Matthias Fritsch describes the creation of one of the first Internet viral memes, the Kneecam No.1 aka Technoviking which brought him into the highest Court in Germany; Chris Köver talks about online misogyny as exemplified by #gamergate but also other debates on sexism - as for example the #aufschrei hashtag on Twitter - pointing out that online and social media culture isn't really any kind of "special" violent or sexist zone, but very much reflective of the misogynist (racist, transphobic, etc.) structures that we can see in the rest of our society; Pedro Lopes reflects on the relationships among human computer integration and form of digital play, seeing that if we primarily get by with pressing generic buttons, what happens next in our physical bodies?
Saturday Aug 8, 2015 • 21.30 - Partner event at SPEKTRUM – open donation
Conductive Ensemble Performs: A Rough Guide On How To Play Musicians By Pedro Lopes
+ Open End Bar
SPEKTRUM, Bürknerstraße 12, 12047 Berlin-Kreuzberg
Pedro Lopes <http://plopes.org/> has been working with electrical muscle stimulation technologies to create human-computer interfaces that read and write directly to the body, which rather than being external (out-of-the body interfaces like our smartphones) become truly integrated. The conductive ensemble is a performance created for the Disruption Network Lab's "A GAME OF YOU" which features musicians [de]controlled by electrical muscle stimulation. The influx of technology into the musical performance emerges as an experimentation in music and in social networks, by simultaneously interfacing human-human and also machine-human.
The ensemble will play "32 milliamps", a piece in which the audience disrupts the musical narrative by triggering involuntary muscle contractions on the musicians. In this piece, the idiosyncrasies of digital social-networks become physical: real-time control [stop/start the musician] & customization [make the musician change the instrument]. This happens via computer controlled electrical muscle stimulation.
Sunday Aug 9, 2015 • 20:30 - Partner event @ SPEKTRUM – 2€
Screening: The Story of Technoviking
+ Open end bar
Monumentary by Matthias Fritsch (Germany, 2015, 90min, in English). Donation welcome.
SPEKTRUM, Bürknerstraße 12, 12047 Berlin-Kreuzberg
What would you do, when you danced half naked in the middle of the street in front of a camera & years later the world starts worshiping your image but you don't want all of this?
"The Story of Technoviking" follows an early successful Internet meme over 15 years from an experimental art video to a viral phenomenon that ends up in court. Originally filmed in public space at a political demonstration, labelled by a community, remixed and shared by tens of millions, the clip's images can't be removed anymore from the collective memory nor be deleted from the servers that are located all around the world. Opinions of artist, lawyers, academics and fans are mashed up with a big variety of online reactions and show the dilemma that is created when our fundamental right of the protection of our personality is in conflict with our fundamental right of free speech, when user behaviour gets in conflict with 100 years old laws that our legal system is based on. To what direction should our culture and society develop in the future? And how can one make a film about it when officially its not allowed to show the protagonist?
Participants
Gabriel S Moses (sequential artist and graphic novelist, IL/DE)
Gabriel S Moses, 1982, Jerusalem, is a Berlin based sequential artist, a published graphic novelist and a commentator on visual literacy in media. In other words, he’s into very serious comics for very serious people. He also speaks and showcases in various venues for media-culture and art, including Lenbachhaus (Munich), FILE Festival (Sao Paulo) and transmediale (Berlin). In 2014, his most recent project ENHANC[=MENT won 1st prize at ‘e Anthropocene Project. A Report’onference at HKW, Berlin.
Chris Köver (co-founder of Missy Magazine, journalist and feminist activist, DE)
Chris Köver is a journalist and feminist activist who likes the Internet a lot (at least some parts of it). She is co-founder and publisher of feminist Missy Magazine and currently works as a editor at Wired Germany. Her writing covers politics, culture, tech, gender and food. Mostly in German, sometimes in English. She has contributed columns, reporting and criticism to Spiegel Online, Die Zeit, Neon, Vice, taz and other media – and has just finished working on a DIY-Tech-Book for girls scheduled for publication this August.
Matthias Fritsch (artist, author of videomeme Kneecam No.1 aka Technoviking, DE)
Matthias Fritsch lives and works in Berlin. He studied Media Art at the University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe (HfG) in Germany and Film, Fine Art and Curating at Bard College, Centre for Curatorial Studies (CCS), New York State, USA. He has made several short and long movies, and media-based installations. He focuses on the digital communities formed within Internet video platforms and examines their importance in the formation of the contemporary cultural production. Fritsch's filmic works focus on issues of authorship and property. He traces the potential and boundaries of related cultural practices by way of participation. Since 2010 Fritsch is the artistic director of the annual Moving Silence events in Athens and organizes other international events within this platform for contemporary silent film.
Pedro Lopes (computer scientist, artist & hardware thinker, PT/DE).
Pedro creates muscle interfaces that read and write to the human body. Pedro’s work is a philosophical investigation of HCI as in Human-Computer Integration, rather than merely “Interaction”. Pedro's work has captured the interest of media, such as NBC, Discovery Channel, NewScientist or Wired. As a musician, he plays percussion with turntables. Pedro has performed in venues such as transmediale, Serralves Foundation, and in ensembles conducted by William Winnant & Reinhold Friedl.
Oliver Lerone Schultz (researcher, DE)
Oliver Lerone Schultz is doing transversal and post-media research in multiple contexts. Initially Oliver studied philosophy, history of science and ethnography in Berlin, extended by studies in Cognitive Science and Political Economy of Industrial Societies in Berkeley. Oliver was active in several media-activist projects and extended curatorial work, like laborB* and globale-Filmfestival. Currently at the Centre for Digital Cultures (Leuphana University of Lüneburg), where among other things he co-initiated the Post-Media Lab, Oliver is preparing research and publication projects on 'modes of projection'. http://lerone.info
