In-Between Media

Recording:
[Part 1]   [Part 2]   [Part 3]

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During this conference, the Institute of Network Cultures presents panels, talks, and round table conversations about precisely these questions. Starting off with TikTok as a research subject, we dive into its nature and qualities which lends itself to a specific user attitude: both engaged and not, both within each other’s space, and not. Furthermore, we’ll hear some hands-on testimonies about streaming resistance and look at practices that both critique and use (mainstream) platforms as a method, or even a weapon. Ending the day, we strive to find strategies for dealing with the locative media that is tracking us everywhere, as well as the techno-capitalist narratives underlining our technologies. How can anarchists—or simply users—tactically misuse online platforms?

In-between Media is organized within the framework of the two-year research project Going Hybrid, which investigates several aspects of the ‘evolution’ happening in hybridity, both in hybrid publishing, participatory live casting, and living archives. Partners of Going Hybrid are MU (Eindhoven), The Hmm (Amsterdam), Hackers & Designers (Amsterdam), Willem de Kooning Academy (Rotterdam), Framer Framed (Amsterdam), Varia (Rotterdam) and IMPAKT (Utrecht). You can find more info on the project here.

This program is part of a two-day conference. On the 10^th of March we invite you to join several workshops, expert sessions, and plenary talks at FramerFramed Amsterdam. We’ll discuss the possibilities of event reporting through a whole new workflow, how online visitors can impact a physical space, whether or not living archives are even truly ‘alive’, how to squat the cloud, setting up quick and dirty live streams, and what to think of when looking at the (hybrid) future. There is also a closing party at 0T301 on the 10^th.

Program

• 10:00 – Introduction by Geert Lovink
• 10:15  – Data Extraction, Materiality, and Agency, Joana Moll

Scrolling Intimacy: The TikTok Limbo 

• 11:00  – Bored in the (Hybrid) House: TikTok as Ludotopia in a Time of Crisis, Tina Kendall
• 11:10  –  Dead and Kicking: TikTok and Subculture, Agnieszka Wodzińska
• 11:20  –  Infinite Scroll as a Symbolic Form, Jordi Viader Guerrero
• 11:30  –  Round table talk with Tina Kendall, Agnieszka Wodzińska, Jordi Viader Guerrero, moderated by Dunja Nešović.

Lunch 12:30 – 13:30

Practices of Streaming Resistance 

• 13:30 –  Thresholds of Access, a conversation between Margarita Osipian and Karl Moubarak (The Hmm and Hackers & Designers)
• 13:50 –   Digital Infrastructure Resilience and Weaponized Design, Cade Diehm
• 14:00  –  UKRAiNATV, or: Introduction to Stream Art, Hybrid Togetherness and Virtual Politics, Roman Dziadkiewicz
• 14:10  –  Round table talk with Cade Diehm, Roman Dziadkiewicz, and Karl Moubarak, moderated by Margarita Osipian.

Break 15:00 – 15:30

From Tactics to Strategies 

• 15:30 – LURK: Jenga Computing and Precipice Workflow, Aymeric Mansoux
• 16:00 –  How-to.computer: A Self-Hosting Guide, Lukas Engelhardt
• 16:30 –  The Tactical Misuse of Online Platforms, Nick Briz
• 17:00 –  On Tactical Video Archives, Donatella Della Ratta

Drinks 17:30 – 18:15

About the speakers

Chloë Arkenbout works as a researcher at the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam. She has a background in both media studies and philosophy and is interested in the tactics marginalized people use to challenge oppressive discourses in the digital public sphere – from social media comment wars to memes. They also co-edited the Critical Meme Readers INC published in 2021 and 2022. In addition, she works at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences where she teaches speculative design and is a member of the university’s Research Ethics Committee. She is co-moderating this conference with Tommaso Campagna. 

Nick Briz is an internationally recognized new-media artist, educator and organizer. His work investigates the promises and perils of living in an increasingly digital and networked world. He is an active participant in various online communities and conversations including glitch art, net art, remix culture, digital literacy, hacktivism and digital rights. He’s co-founder of netizen.org a nonprofit focused on digital literacy and digital culture, he’s Associate Professor Adjunct at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Lecturer at the University of Chicago, and a freelance Creative Technologist.

Tommaso Campagna is a researcher and videographer at the Institute of Network Cultures. His interest is in both theoretical and applied research of new media art and activist practices. Currently, he is curating THE VOID, a platform for experimental publishing in artistic research. He also collaborates with different global and local activist projects such as tracking.exposed, SPORE, Exploit Pisa and Amsterdam Alternative. He is co-moderating this conference with Chloë Arkenbout. 

Donatella Della Ratta a is an Italian researcher, she studies the Arab media. She wrote Shooting a Revolution. Visual Media and Warfare in Syria. Della Ratta has authored three monographs on Arab media, and curated chapters on Syrian media and politics in several collective books. She is a contributor to Italian and international media outlets such as Al Jazeera English, Hyperallergic, Internazionale, and Il Manifesto. She has professional experience as a journalist, TV author and producer. She has curated several art exhibitions and film programs on Syria, and she is a co-founder and board member of the web aggregator on creative resistance SyriaUntold.

Roman Dziadkiewicz is born in Opole studied and PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. Lives and works in Kraków. A multisensual artist, researcher, activist, songwriter, and occasional artist-curator. Engaged in long-term studies, interdisciplinary, intersensual projects, projects, actions, workshop strategies, graphic design and text-based projects and also collective activities on the border of art, social and educational spheres. His interests are particularly oriented around the question of challenging and disintegrating the artwork, correlations between daily life, cultural/ritual contexts, texts (narrations, history, stories) and politics/publicness. 

Cade Diehm is the founder of The New Design Congress, an international research organisation forging a nuanced understanding of technology’s role as a social, political and environmental accelerant. He studies, writes, consults and speaks regularly on topics such as digital power structures, privacy, information warfare, resilience, internet economies and the digitisation of cities.

Lukas Engelhardt is a graphic designer and artist in Amsterdam. He creates and explores (supposedly) autonomous spaces, both online and offline, and tries to understand the tactics, terms and conditions necessary to negotiate and maintain them. He builds, breaks and fixes servers for himself and for others and is active in the housing struggle. Together with Justus Gelberg he founded the graphic design studio Correspondence. In 2022 he graduated from the Design Department at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. 

Geert Lovink is a Dutch media theorist, internet critic and author of Uncanny Networks (2002), Dark Fiber (2002), My First Recession (2003), Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012), Social Media Abyss (2016), Organization after Social Media (with Ned Rossiter, 2018), Sad by Design (2019) and Stuck on the Platform (2022). He studied political science at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and received his PhD from the University of Melbourne in 2003. In 2004 he founded the Institute of Network Cultures (www.networkcultures.org) at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA). He was a media theory professor at the European Graduate School between 2007-2018, and was appointed Professor of Art and Network Cultures at the UvA Art History Department in December 2021. The Chair (one day a week) is supported by the HvA.

Tina Kendall is Associate Professor of Film & Media at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, United Kingdom. She has published widely on extreme cinema and negative affect, and her work on boredom and digital media has appeared in a range of publications, including New Formations, NECSUS, and Film Quarterly. She is currently completing a book project, Entertained-or-Else: Boredom and Networked Media (Bloomsbury Academic 2024). 

Joana Moll is a Barcelona / Berlin based artist and researcher. Her work critically explores the way techno-capitalist narratives affect the alphabetization of machines, humans and ecosystems. Her main research topics include Internet materiality, surveillance, online tracking, social profiling, and interfaces. She has presented her work in renowned institutions,museums, universities and festivals around the world. Furthermore She is the co-founder of the Critical Interface Politics Research Group at HANGAR [Barcelona]. She is currently a visiting lecturer at Escola Elisava in Barcelona; an artistic researcher in residence at the Critical Media Lab at HGK in Basel, and a former research fellow at BBVA Foundation and The Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin.

Karl Moubarak is a designer, researcher, and web developer whose practice is rooted in the digital sphere and focuses on the development of on- and offline sites for connectivity and exchange. He is a member of Amsterdam-based workshop cooperative Hackers & Designers (2019–ongoing), Eindhoven-based interstitial collective body Office of Queer Affairs (2017–ongoing), and Beirut-based historical oral archiving initiative OH4L (2020–ongoing). Karl works on projects that aim to make visible the processes, tools, and mechanisms that co-constitute them, and generates experimental methods of liveness and dissemination, as facilitated by the sensitivities of free, libre, and open-source software.

Dunja Nešović is a new media researcher based in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Margarita Osipian is an independent curator, researcher, and cultural organiser based in Amsterdam. Engaging with the intersections and socio-political frictions within art, design, and technology, she organises workshops, exhibitions, and collaborative projects both in formal institutions and in more precarious and ephemeral spaces. Holding an MA in Media Studies from the University of Amsterdam and an MA in English Literature from the University of Toronto, her research has focused on visual culture, technology, and the carceral state. Margarita is part of The Hmm, a platform for internet cultures, on the curatorial team of Sonic Acts, and part of the artistic core of the W139.

Agnieszka Wodzińska is an art historian, writer, tutor, interested in exploring counter-hegemonic cultural practice and issues of embodiment and collectivity in the post-digital age.

Aymeric Mansoux has been messing around with computers and networks for far too long. He was a founding member of server based collective GOTO10 (a.o. FLOSS+Art anthology, Puredyne GNU/Linux distro, make art festival). Some works and collaborations include: Naked on Pluto, a Facebook critique in the form of a Facebook game; The SKOR Codex, an archive about the impossibility of archiving; What Remains, an 8-bit Nintendo game about whistleblowing and the manipulation of public opinion in relation to the climate crisis; and LURK, a server infrastructure to host discussions around net/computational art, culture, and politics. Aymeric received his PhD from the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths University of London for his investigation of the techno-legal forms of social organisation within free and open source based cultural practices. He works at the Willem de Kooning Academy, Hogeschool Rotterdam, where he founded and ran until 2021 the Experimental Publishing master programme (XPUB), and now holds the position of lector in Commercial Practices (reader/professor of practice-oriented research), investigating alternative and sustainable modes of organisation and production in the cultural sector and art/design education.