Self as Actor: Colonising identity

The role that digitality, especially the web, plays in our lives, has become a symbiotic feature of our social reality, reflecting an incessant shifting network of interactions. In addition, Benjamin H. Bratton’s The Stack was a valuable pivot as we examine how global megastructure computation has influenced our geopolitical realities and how our understanding of these and in turn, ourselves, is/are shaped by global multi-layered and interconnected digital systems.

Stateless

During the recent past, citizenship used to essentially encompass our local community: the neighbourhood, city and country in which we lived. But the digital world has no such physical borders, and its citizens now need to ‘live’ with everyone everywhere. Confronted with enormous social and political unrest our understanding of democracy is seriously challenged. At a time when both the meaning and the role of citizens is changing under the demand for global integration and homogenisation, an estimate of 21 million people around the world remain stateless. Refugees are currently increasing in numbers due to the exodus from the war torn countries.

(DIWO) from the web to the blockchain

28th April 2018, Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett, Co-founders and directors of Furtherfield gave a lecture and workshop as part of the State Machines programme.

New Imaginaries for Crypto Design

The Deep Web evokes images of an underworld, the locus of shadow economies where illicit trade takes place that cannot bear the light of day. This image is understandable if you consider the bad press encrypted channels have received over the years. News reporting mostly publishes sensational stories on cyber-criminals operating in a virtual legal vacuum on the Darknet, arms and human trafficking, murder-for-hire and extreme gore on contraband websites such as Silk Road. Data leaks, such as the Panama Papers, further politicised this so-called “invisible” web. Furthermore, the popular Deep Web documentary (2015) helped shape a dramatic image of these impenetrable parts of the Internet as a lawless cove, mainly populated by bandits, predators, and pirates.

Monitorial Citizen: the ordinary witness

The importance of social media activism was already well established by bloggers in Tunisia and Algeria then spreading to other countries in the MENA region with the case of several bloggers in Egypt receiving substantial international exposure due to their effective use of media activism. This outreach via the so called egalitarianism of cyberspace is not without problems.

Unbuilding Citizenship

James Bridle’s work explores the implications of technological acceleration and opacity for everyday life and the implications of algorithmic citizenship, deterritorialised nations and digital governments.

Improper Names

A name. Everybody has one. In the documentary, individuals, artists and academics from all over the world share their thoughts about the meaning and purpose of one’s name from both private and public perspectives. The problem of homonymy and other reasons for changing one’s name are explored as the film draws references from history, popular culture and individual experiences, leading us to the case of a name change that caused a stir in the small country of Slovenia and beyond.