Berlin · JUNE 17-18 · 2016:
DEEP CABLES: Uncovering the Wiring of the World
“Art & Evidence” conference series by Disruption Network Lab
The 8th event of the Disruption Network Lab at Kunstquartier Bethanien, Studio 1, Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin. Directed by Tatiana Bazzichelli.
Funded by: Der Regierende Bürgermeister von Berlin, Senatskanzlei, Kulturelle Angelegenheiten / City Tax.
In partnership with: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung.
In cooperation with Kunstraum Kreuzberg /Bethanien.
Pre-Lab 1.6 at SPEKTRUM, Bürknerstraße 12, Berlin-Kreuzberg.
In collaboration with: NOME, Wau Holland Stiftung, Copenhagen Center for Disaster Research (COPE), Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG). With the support of the Free Chelsea Manning Initiative Berlin.
Entrance 5€ / day. In English language.
Hackers, engineers, investigative journalists, writers, researchers, artists and activists unveil how the Internet really works, how it is secretly structured, and in which way interlinked land and undersea network cables influence our political, cultural and everyday life.
Pre-events
May 28 · Linz, Austria · Panel at Art Meets Radical Openness · 16.00-17.30
CAPTURING NETWORK TRAFFIC: Direct Access and the Politics of Network Cable Infrastructure
Panel with Matthew Rice (Advocacy Officer at Privacy International, UK); Anne Roth (net activist, senior advisor for the German Parliamentary Inquiry on Mass Surveillance for the group Die Linke, DE); Fieke Jansen (Project Lead, Politics of Data, Tactical Tech, NL/DE); Evan Light (FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Mobile Media Lab, Concordia University, Montreal, CA). Moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli (Director of the Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE). Read more.
June 1 · Berlin · Pre-Lab & Film screening at Spektrum · Screening starts at 20.00
Community get-together + film screening: 20,000 Cables under the Sea: The Internet and the Physics of Fiber Optics (Coproduction: NDR, fact+film, nordmedia, Radio Bremen, arte 2009, 46 minutes). Read more - english / german.
Friday June 17 · 2016
17:00-18:30 · KEYNOTE
NETWORK EXPOSED: CHARTING THE INVISIBLE
Henrik Moltke (investigative journalist, DK/USA), Trevor Paglen (artist and geographer, USA). Moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli (artistic director, Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE).
19:00-21:00 · PANEL
DIRTY CABLES: THE TECHNOLOGY & POLITICS OF NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURES
Moritz Metz (radio journalist, DE), Marc Helmus (network operator and engineer, DE), Anne Roth (net activist, senior advisor for the German Parliamentary Inquiry on Mass Surveillance for the group Die Linke, DE). Moderated by Anna Biselli (journalist, Netzpolitik.org, DE).
Saturday June 18 · 2016
16:30-18:00 · KEYNOTE
THE INTERNET, REALLY: BEHIND THE SCENES OF OUR EVERYDAY LIVES
Andrew Blum (writer & journalist, USA). Respondent: Bernd Fix (computer security expert, Wau Holland Stiftung, DE).
18:30-20:30 · PANEL
CABLE BREAKS: THE POWERS BELOW THE SURFACE
Ingrid Burrington (artist and researcher, USA), Helga Tawil-Souri (associate professor, Middle East and Islamic Studies NYU, Palestine/USA), Gabriele “Asbesto” Zaverio (sysadmin, co-founder, MusIF, FreakNet MediaLab, IT). Moderated by Jacob Lillemose (postdoctoral researcher and curator, Copenhagen Center for Disaster Research, DK).
DEEP CABLES: Uncovering the Wiring of the World
“Art & Evidence” Series by Disruption Network Lab
Hackers, engineers, investigative journalists, writers, researchers, artists and activists unveil how the Internet works, how it is secretly structured, and in which way interlinked land and undersea network cables influence our political, cultural and everyday life.
The first event of the “Art & Evidence” series by Disruption Network Lab 2016 investigates the cultural, historical, geographic and technological dimensions of the Internet, tracing land and undersea network cables. In the post-cyberpunk Sci-Fi novel “Mother Earth Mother Board“ published on Wired Magazine in 1996, writer Neal Stephenson tells about a hacker tourist that “ventures forth across the wide and wondrous space of three continents”, revealing the physical materiality of the cyberspace and how it is wired together. This novel was precursor to the development of our info-sphere and the online everyday life that we experience everyday connected through the Internet and its nodes.
At the root of the Internet infrastructure lays a very material dimension, that influences how the Internet functions, how it is organised and controlled, and its geopolitical configuration.
Recently disclosed N.S.A. (National Security Agency) documents demonstrated that telecommunication companies, such as AT&T, have been particularly important to N.S.A. allowing the access to billions of emails across domestic networks. Large amounts of the world’s Internet communications travel across American cables, and a broad range of classified activities work by installing surveillance equipment on Internet hubs. The materiality of the wired network is crucial to understand how surveillance works physically, and more in general, how the whole Internet infrastructure is conceived.
In the 2015 book The Undersea Network, Nicole Starosielski argues the network of undersea cables is the mirror of historical and political realms, and the connections it enables are not just technological, but also the consequence of deliberate negotiation of cultural and geopolitical assets. In this event, researchers, engineers, investigative journalists, hackers, writers, artists and activists, are brought together to unveil who runs the Internet and in which way its infrastructure influences our political, cultural and everyday life. Starting from this very concrete subject, the physicality of the network cables, the event culminates with the discussion about digital-divide and breaks of connectivity in strategic landing sites, where the discrepancy between poor access to bandwidth and high presence of cable infrastructure is caused by military, political, and economical reasons.
KEYNOTE · Friday June 17 · 17:00-18:30
NETWORK EXPOSED: CHARTING THE INVISIBLE
Henrik Moltke (investigative journalist, DK/USA), Trevor Paglen (artist and geographer, USA). Moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli (artistic director, Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE).
In August 2015 Henrik Moltke and a team of journalists from Pro Publica and the New York Times revealed intimate details of the National Security Agency's decades-long partnership with the telecom giant AT&T. A seemingly innocuous detail in a random document allowed the team to pin down the elusive collaboration, referred to by codename in the documents leaked by Edward Snowden. A cable severed by the 2011 earthquake in Japan caused an outage, after which NSAs ‘collection’ - or tap - on the cable resumed. The date matched the repair on the northern leg of the Japan-US Cable, one of a handful of main arteries connecting Asia and the US. At the end of the cable is an anonymous looking industrial building, far off on the Mendocino coast of Northern California. The cable station is operated by AT&T. Under the motto “Follow the cables”, Henrik Moltke recounts how he retraces the physical footprint of deep state secrets.
In this presentation, Henrik Moltke and Trevor Paglen will trace a link between the imaginary concept of “The Internet” and the present configuration of geopolitical wired structures, where big data, cloud computing, mass surveillance, and the monopolies of big corporations are intertwined. By disclosing through photography the development of transatlantic and undersea fibre-optic cables, and reconnecting the past with the present by charting the hidden infrastructure of information technology, this event will expose the inner functioning of the modern business of cable infrastructures, showing the global dimension, as well as the invisible sites of the physical Internet.
PANEL · Friday June 17 · 19:00-21:30
DIRTY CABLES: THE TECHNOLOGY & POLITICS OF NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURES
Moritz Metz (radio journalist, DE), Marc Helmus (network operator and engineer, DE), Anne Roth (net activist, senior advisor for the German Parliamentary Inquiry on Mass Surveillance for the group Die Linke, DE). Moderated by Anna Biselli (journalist, Netzpolitik.org, DE).
This panel investigates the materiality and hidden infrastructure of land and undersea network cables, tracing a path from the first submarine cables to today’s worldwide fiber-optic network, and presents the real but hidden world of the Internet, where big data is linked to geopolitical surveillance. The participants will speak about the existence of secret data warehouses where our Internet selves are stored, the geographical architecture and functioning of land and undersea cables, the secrets of the network infrastructure, showing what the Internet actually is and its consequences for our online everyday life, both in its public and private aspects. Expert of the hidden Internet world Moritz Metz, network operator and engineer within the cable industry Marc Helmus, and member of the working team of the German Parliamentary Inquiry on Mass Surveillance Anne Roth, will enter into a dialogue to reflect around the materiality of the wired network and its historical and geopolitical dimensions. Starting with an analysis on the physical network infrastructure both on land and on sea (with Moritz Metz and Marc Helmus), the panel will culminate with an analysis of the discourse of data interception and surveillance on cable infrastructure, and what we know so far (with Anne Roth).
KEYNOTE · Saturday June 18 · 16:30-18:00
THE INTERNET, REALLY: BEHIND THE SCENES OF OUR EVERYDAY LIVES
Andrew Blum (writer & journalist, USA). Respondent: Bernd Fix (computer security expert, Wau Holland Stiftung, DE).
In the book Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (German title: Kabelsalat), journalist Andrew Blum goes inside the Internet’s physical infrastructure, revealing an utterly fresh look at the online world we think we know. What is the Internet physically? And where is it really? The Internet, its material nuts and bolts, is an unexplored territory. Connecting a shockingly tactile realm of unmarked compounds, from the room in Los Angeles where the Internet first flickered to life to the caverns beneath Manhattan as new fiber-optic cable is buried; from the coast of Portugal, where a ten-thousand-mile undersea cable just two thumbs wide connects Europe and Africa, to the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, where Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have built monumental data centers, Andrew Blum chronicles the dramatic story of the Internet’s development, explains how it all works, and takes the first ever in-depth look inside its hidden monuments. Is the Internet in fact “a series of tubes” as Ted Stevens, the late senator from Alaska, once famously described it? How can we know the Internet’s possibilities if we don’t know its parts?
www.andrewblum.net
PANEL · Saturday June 18 · 18:30-20:30
CABLE BREAKS: THE POWERS BELOW THE SURFACE
Ingrid Burrington (artist and researcher, USA), Helga Tawil-Souri (associate professor Middle East and Islamic Studies NYU, Palestine/USA), Gabriele “Asbesto” Zaverio (sysadmin, co-founder, MusIF, FreakNet MediaLab, IT). Moderated by Jacob Lillemose (postdoctoral researcher and curator, Copenhagen Center for Disaster Research, DK).
If the Internet is material at its core, based on an infrastructure of physical cables, it is in principle also victim to the same laws of physics as other material entities. The Internet is not simply a diffuse cloud of information as the mythology of IT industry wants us to believe but a tangible thing in the world under the influence of its surrounding as well as of the logic of its own materiality. The emphasis on the materiality of the Internet thus also points the vulnerability of the Internet. Rather than understanding the Internet as a given thing, almost like a second air, the emphasis indirectly suggest that the Internet is a thing that like so many other things could one day break or disappear. While there is certainly reason to criticise the Internet when it works at its worst as a control mechanism there is just as much reason to be critically aware of the instances when it might not work at all, when it breaks down and our dependency on – and trust in – it is exposed, in some cases with catastrophic consequences. Seen from this perspective the materiality of the Internet becomes a question of vulnerability and resilience, of risk management, that connects with contemporary disaster research. This panel is dealing with “cable breaks” as a metaphorical concept, showing that the Internet is a result of political and power alliances – andtherefore subjected to vulnerabilities and interruptions related notonly to its physical materiality, but also to cultural and political dynamics. It wants to investigate various blackout scenarios by inviting respectively an artist focusing on submarine cables and the confluence of local and global politics and history in specific US landingsites; a media scholar and documentary filmmaker expert on Internet breakdown and vulnerabilities during conflicts, analysing the digital occupation of Palestine; and a computer programmer working with "breaks", digital-divide and off zones in Italy and Sicily.
Participants
Henrik Moltke (investigative journalist, DK/USA),
Henrik Moltke is an investigative journalist, researcher and documentary filmmaker. His most recent work, in collaboration with filmmaker Laura Poitras, has appeared in the New York Times, The Intercept and at The Whitney Museum of American Art. Moltke won the 2014 Danish Investigative Journalism Award and was nominated for the Cavling Prize, the most prestigious award in Danish journalism.
Trevor Paglen (artist and geographer, USA).
Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work spans image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines. Among his chief concerns are learning how to see the historical moment we live in and developing the means to imagine alternative futures. Paglen’s work has had one-person exhibitions at Vienna Secession, Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum, Van Abbe Museum, Frankfurter Kunstverein, and Protocinema Istanbul, and participated in group exhibitions the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and numerous other venues. He has launched an artwork into distant orbit around Earth in collaboration with Creative Time and MIT, contributed research and cinematography to the Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour, and created a radioactive public sculpture for the exclusion zone in Fukushima, Japan. He is the author of five books and numerous articles on subjects including experimental geography, state secrecy, military symbology, photography, and visuality.
paglen.com
Moritz Metz (radio journalist, DE)
Moritz Metz is a freelance radio reporter, editor, producer, programmer and podcast advisor in Berlin, mainly working for public stations like Deutschlandradio. In his documentary "Where the Internet lives" (Deutschlandradio / SWR / WDR / BR / ARTE Future) he explored the physicality of the Internet, from his home Internet connection to a secret cable landing station in California, from the worlds biggest Internet exchange point to a gambling datacentre in the rock of Gibraltar. The documentary was one of the finalists of CNN Journalist Award 2015. Moritz runs the bi-weekly DIY- and maker-show "Netzbasteln" on DRadio Wissen and co-founded the studio "Radiobüro" in Berlin-Kreuzberg.
moritzmetz.de
Marc Helmus (network operator and engineer, DE)
Marc Helmus is a network engineer for German network operator with fundamental knowledge in telco infrastructure in Germany. He has been planning and building transport networks for almost twenty years, especially in passive infrastructure and DWDMnetworks. He lives in Hamburg and Essen.
Anne Roth (net activist, senior advisor for the German Parliamentary Inquiry on Mass Surveillance for the group Die Linke, DE).
A political scientist by education, Anne Roth cofounded the first interactive media activist website, Indymedia, in Germany in 2001 and has been involved with media and digital rights activism ever since. She has worked as a journalist, web editor and translator. Anne is currently senior advisor for the Parliamentary Inquiry on Mass Surveillance of the German Bundestag, specifically for the parliamentary group Die Linke (‘The Left’). Until August 2014 she was programme editor and researcher for the Privacy and Expression programme of the Tactical Technology Collective. Here she developed trainings and educational material on digital security and tracking, primarily directed at activists and communities at risk. She writes about domestic policy and home affairs, privacy and surveillance, about media, net politics and feminist issues.
annalist.noblogs.org
Anna Biselli (journalist, Netzpolitik.org, DE).
Anna Biselli is writing for netzpolitik.org, one of the most influential political blogs in Germany. Before joining netzpolitik.org she studied computer science. During her studies she started to dig into the political issues arising with technological developments like big data and artificial intelligence. She started to get politically active in the digital rights movement and focussed on bringing the interfaces of politics and technology to a wider public. At netzpolitik.org she has the possibility to turn this personal engagement into her profession.
netzpolitik.org
Andrew Blum (writer & journalist, USA).
Andrew Blum is the author of Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, the first book-length look at the physical infrastructure of the Internet. Tubes has been translated into ten languages, including German (as Kabelsalat), Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, and Spanish. Blum’s writing about architecture, design, technology, urbanism, art, and travel have appeared in numerous publications, including Wired, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times. Blum has degrees in literature from Amherst College and in human geography from the University of Toronto, and lives in his native New York City. He is currently writing a new book about the global infrastructure of the weather.
andrewblum.net
Bernd Fix (computer security expert, Wau Holland Stiftung, DE).
Bernd Fix is a German hacker and Computer Security Expert. He joined the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) in 1986 and was later one of the spokespersons of the CCC (1987-1989) and contributor for the “Hacker Bible 2”. His work on computer security focussed on computer virus research. In 1987 he devised a method to neutralize the Vienna Virus; this event marks the first documented antivirus software ever written. One of his research viruses for IBM mainframe computers was allegedly stolen by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service in Germany) in 1988 to be used in attacks against East Block and NATO mainframe computer systems in the so-called “Project Rahab”. After the death of his friend Wau Holland (co-founder of the Chaos Computer Club) in 2001, Fix helped to establish the Wau Holland Foundation and serves as a founding member of the Board of Directors ever since.
wauland.de
Ingrid Burrington (artist and researcher, USA)
Ingrid Burrington is an artist who writes, makes maps, and tells jokes about places, politics, and the weird feelings people have about both. She is a fellow at the Data & Society Research Institute in New York, working with surveillance geography, data centers, and network infrastructure. Her first few projects were essays written for Creative Time Reports and Waging Nonviolence about an office park next to the NSA and the data center landscape of northern Virginia. While a resident at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, she created Seeing Networks in New York, a field guide to Internet infrastructure in New York City. She researches, writes about, and organizes public programming around the influence of computational systems of perception and representation. She has been writing for The Atlantic about data centers, geopolitics of the international cloud, and cable infrastructure. One of her mapping projects is Submarine Cable Taps (2014), created to better understand what the reach of GCHQ's submarine cable tapping might look like.
lifewinning.com
Helga Tawil-Souri (associate professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, Dep. of Middle East and Islamic Studies NYU, Palestine/USA)
Helga Tawil-Souri is Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, and Director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University. Helga works on issues to do with technology, media, culture, territory and politics in the Middle East, and especially Palestine-Israel. She has researched and written on Arab media; Palestinian cinema, television, video games and popular culture; on telecommunications and Internet infrastructure and development in the Palestinian Territories; as well as on cultural/territorial politics in Palestine-Israel including analysing checkpoints as cultural and economic spaces, identification cards as material artifacts and territorially-bordering mechanisms. Helga has published a wide range of peer-reviewed articles and invited chapters. She is co-editor of the 2016 book Gaza as Metaphor; her monograph titled Digital Occupation is forthcoming, as is a co-edited a volume on Arab Media and Culture. She also serves on a number of journal editorial boards and Middle Eastern non-profit foundations.
helga.com
Gabriele “Asbesto” Zaverio (sysadmin, co-founder, MusIF, FreakNet MediaLab, Radio Cybernet, IT).
“Asbesto” is the co-founder of Radio Cybernet (the first Italian streaming-only Internet radio), the FreakNet MediaLab in Catania (the first Italian organization to offer free access to email and internet, since 1994), and the free software Poetry HackLab in Palazzolo Acreide in Sicily, where he lives. He is the Director of the MusIF (Museo dell’Informatica Funzionante), a Museum of working computers based in Palazzolo Acreide, a place where people can, both physically and remotely via Internet, enjoy using historical computers, know their history, learn basics of electronic and computer science, and share a piece of our history. The Museum is supported by UNESCO and the Free Software Foundation. “Asbesto” is also the creator of the first wooden laptop in the world. He wrote a book about Haiku, Koan, Zen stories and other things, Col saldatore alle due di notte (published by Dyne.org Foundation, Amsterdam).
museo.freaknet.org/en/
Jacob Lillemose (postdoctoral researcher and curator, Copenhagen Center for Disaster Research, DK).
Jacob Lillemose is Postdoc in Arts and Cultural Studies, working with Cultural History of Disasters at the Copenhagen Center for Disaster Research, COPE. In 2012 and 2013 he was exhibition curator at the transmediale festival in Berlin. In 2011 he received his PhD from the Institute of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen with a dissertation on art and software cultures. Since the mid 1990s he has worked internationally as a freelance curator, lecturer, and writer. Working within the tradition and legacy of conceptual art he has curated a show with the films of Gordon Matta-Clark. His curatorial work in the field of media art includes exhibitions with Heath Bunting, UBERMORGEN.COM, Technologies to the People, and Cornelia Sollfrank. He has co-curated (w. Inke Arns) the travelling retrospective exhibition on the works of the web collective irational.org. He is a member of the Danish net art collective Artnode, Independent Research Center for Digital Art and Culture.
