re:publica 18 - Alle Sessions

• Liam Maloney
• Carolin Wiedemann
• Sophie Schulenburg

At the intersection of journalism and VR, the concepts of Image and Truth are imbued with new perceptive qualities. When Virtual meets Reality, the space is fraught with questions of representation, manipulation, complicity and consent, on both sides of the technological lens. This panel of journalists and VR experts convenes to discuss the frontlines of their work and exposes some of the cracks in our 360 degrees of enthusiasm.

VR:RV is a project by the Goethe-Institut, realized with the support of the Federal Foreign Office of Germany and in collaboration with MUTEK_IMG, re:publica, the National Film Board of Canada, the Canadian Film Centre, ARTE Germany, Eye Steel Film, Mozilla Foundation, Doc Circuit Montréal, SODEC and Retune.

• Tabea Glindemann

Jeden Tag wird auf Tinder 1,6 Milliarden (!) Mal hin- und hergewischt. 26 Millionen Matches entstehen daraus täglich. Durchschnittliche Nutzer*innen verbringen 35 Minuten mit der Plattform – und wenn man bedenkt, dass erstaunlich viele Menschen nur auf der Toilette tindern, dann müssen andere da echt krass lang drauf rumhängen.

Seit ich bei der Heart of Code (einem feministischen Hackspace in Berlin) aktiv bin, ist außerdem mein Bewusstsein dafür gestiegen, dass alle Plattformen, also auch Datingplattformen, alle Daten, die sie bekommen können, speichern. Also mache ich das auch und habe mittlerweile ein, je nach Perspektive, lustiges oder echt gruseliges Repertoire an Profiltexten oder Nachrichten (anonym) an mich gesammelt. Davon möchte ich die ein oder andere vorstellen und anhand dessen Ideen präsentieren, wie Onlinedating für mich weniger stressig und für alle anderen viel zielführender werden könnte – also quasi ein Pick-up-Artist-Talk, aber nicht von einem Pick-up-Artist sondern von einer Queerfeministin.

• Steve Lambert

The problem with reality is it’s so easy to see.

Look around. There it is. Go outside. There’s some more.

You can’t leave reality’s presence. It’s always there to remind you and it all seems so tangible and permanent. So real.

Of course, reality is not permanent at all and there’s many things we desperately need to change.

When we think about the future, this reality can get in the way. Our incomplete and incorrect ideas of reality, and reality’s persistence, end up tainting our imagination of what is probable in the world. The resulting visions of the future are tainted as well, and usually not very different than our current sense of reality.

It takes extra effort and imagination to set those tainted visions aside and dream up a reality we’d prefer, not to mention explore the innumerable futures that are possible.

But why do this?

Well, most people don’t.

Steve Lambert wants you to join him. With his Center for Artistic Activism, Lambert has worked alongside artists and activists in 15 countries on 4 continents helping them to effect power. Lambert will relay lessons learned in collaborating with larger advocacy organizations working on human rights for sex workers, drug users, and other marginalized populations to move toward better futures. And how to have fun doing it.

• Kai Krämer
• Sarah Hambridge

Blockchain technology has the potential to accelerate the transition to the clean energy future, by redesigning the rules of the game on how energy is distributed and transacted. As blockchain soars to new heights of hype there’s a critical need for the value of the technology to be established in major industries. 

The mission is clear: accelerating the arrival of blockchain technology across the energy sector, so we enable the transition to a decentralized, more democratic and carbon-free energy sector.

The EWF is a global non-profit organization focused on capturing this potential. Currently, EWF is building an open-source blockchain infrastructure to serve as the standard industry platform for blockchain applications in the energy sector to accelerate the deployment of renewables and distributed energy resources (DERs).

A platform like the one being built by EWF will be defined by the applications it supports. It will be able to host and run every energy use case, redefining the energy sector as a decentralized AppStore for energy dApps.

By developing a platform that addresses the specific needs of the energy industry, we created an ecosystem of energy players, start-ups and developers, incentivizing the exchange of knowledge between them. This was vital to eliminate repetition of efforts and to leverage scarce talent.

In this session, we'll talk about the disruptive potential of blockchain in the energy sector and why the EWF is the key to unlock it. We will provide an overview on the most promising energy use cases based on blockchain technology. Essentially, we will describe how the future we are building looks like.

supported by T-Labs

• Michael Henretty
• Ola Gasidlo
• Cathleen Berger

This talk will present ideas for how to tackle three dimensions of the future Web: voice recognition, web compatibility, and digital inclusion.

When your latest Siri, Alexa or Cortana fail to answer your questions because they seem to simply not understand your instructions, that’s probably because you’re not a (white) male with a mainstream American accent. Voice recognition tools are only as good as their training data, if the data set doesn’t include all sort of accents, dialects, and dynamic adaptation, the systems we built on top of it will never fully reap their potentials. Creating an inclusive, and freely available database to train speech algorithms comes with its challenges - but they’re not unsolvable. And once we have that? That’s when we need to translate and connect these tools to our everyday web experience, writing code that is accessible, compatible, and adaptable across whichever platform you use to access the Web. We can already see a push to create a speech driven future of the Web, but while this is still a vision for most users, the technical questions underlying this development are being addressed now - which is why we need to make sure our answers contribute to a healthy environment. And once we have the training data and the standards? That’s when our political contexts will be yet again put to a test: how can we make sure our societies continue to grow in an open and inclusive manner? What do we need to pay attention to, if we don’t want technologies to become our oppressors? It’s in our hands to use the tools we create to make sure they give power to the people - because POP culture needs a voice.

• Mushon Zer-Aviv

The Oracle of Delphi predicted that King Laius’ son would murder his father and marry his mother. In the Greek tragedy, as much as both King Laius and his son Oedipus tried to fight the prophecy, to avoid their fate, there was no escape from this tragic future.

The Oracles of London predicted that Brits will come to their senses and vote against Brexit. And the Oracles of New York and Washington predicted that Americans will vote for Hillary Clinton ("because it is her turn") rather than go for a man with no political experience, and no personal integrity. And yet, tragically maybe, the political dramas we've recently witnessed have not panned out exactly like a Greek tragedy.

But is this wide public decent against things as they are so uncalled for? Are these protest votes against the political status quo and the predictable future really a tragedy? Of course, one can rightfully claim that voting for unknown futures is irresponsible and even childish. But if the alternative is this patronizing political determinism, deprived of any real possibility for change, should we really be surprised?

Today we are surrounded by Oracles, mainly algorithmic ones, predicting and dictating our every move, crippling our political imagination. In that framework, what are the prospects for autonomy, creativity and leadership? Can we maintain this political freedom and still addressing the prophecies we cannot run away from? Most prominently climate change. How can we learn from art, poetry, science fiction? What is our role in this play? And does it really have to be so tragic?

• Michael Peters
• Damian Paderta
• Anke Knopp

Seit Dezember 2016 nimmt die deutsche Bundesregierung an der Open Government Partnership (OGP) teil. Sie hat sich zu den Prinzipien eines offenen und transparenten Regierungshandelns bekannt: Transparenz, Partizipation, Koproduktion. Die OGP ist ein internationales Kompetenz- und Evaluationsnetzwerk zu offenem Regierungs- und Verwaltungshandeln, welches 2011 von der US-amerikanischen Regierung ins Leben gerufen wurde und im Rahmen dessen sich bislang die Regierungen von 75 Nationen durch ihre Teilnahme zur Umsetzung von Open Government selbst verpflichten.

Open Government ist ein Querschnittsthema: Ein angestrebter Kulturwandel in Politik- und Verwaltungsverständnis hin zu einer partizipativen Demokratie, der sich in mehr oder weniger ausgeprägter Form in unterschiedlichen Prozessen in Deutschland schon findet, aber ausgeweitet werden muss. In vielen Fällen ist man sich vermutlich des Gebrauchs oder des Potenzials von Open-Government-Prinzipien noch nicht bewusst. Viele machen es, nennen es aber schlicht anders.

Wir möchten als Netzwerk in einem Workshop gemeinsam “unentdecktes” Open Government identifizieren und Schnittmengen mit anderen Akteuren herausarbeiten. Adressiert sind somit Akteure in der Zusammenarbeit mit Regierungen und Verwaltungen und klassischen Open Government Themen. Wir blicken dabei sowohl auf nationale als auch auf Landes- und Kommunale Ebene.

In unserem Workshop geben wir als Netzwerk eine kurze Einführung zum Thema Open Government und zur OGP. Danach gibt es eine offene Diskussionsrunde mit dem Publikum zum Thema: Was passiert bereits in Deutschland? Hier möchten wir best-practice Ergebnisse zu Open Government sammeln.

Im zweiten Teil unseres Workshops gehen wir genauer auf die nationalen Aktionspläne ein. Anschließend fragen wir, welchen Input die Community für den zweiten Nationalen Aktionsplan hat. Welche Open Government Reformen müssen unbedingt in Deutschland umgesetzt werden?

• Susan Long
• Bahar Kumar
• Sebastian Jünemann
• Ruben Neugebauer

Crisis situations quickly put conventional supply chains out of order and medical supplies become a scarce commodity. How can digital systems of micro- and distributed manufacturing help strengthen local innovation and production capacity in crisis areas? What tools can be developed so that those affected can help themselves? Questions and answers that benefit humanitarian aid and are essential in the context of a global transition to more sustainable economic models. The speakers will discuss their experiences:

CADUS has founded the world's first Crisis Response Makerspace in Berlin, which deals solely with problems of humanitarian aid and refugees. The speakers are Sebastian Jünemann, who has developed a concept for a cheap mobile hospital based on his experience in Syria and Northern Iraq with his organization, and Lissette Feliciano, a filmmaker from Puerto Rico. She experienced the political blockade of humanitarian aid after the devastating Typhoon Maria in the fall of 2017 first-hand. Together they explain why such a concept is necessary to disrupt the otherwise non-innovation friendly humanitarian relief organizations.

Bahar Kumar will talk about her experiences running a community innovation hub in Kathmandu and taking part in the latest MakerNet experiment on contract distribution, 3D printing models of earthquake-proof houses for use teaching safer building techniques to those rebuilding after the earthquake.

Susanne Long from Fieldready will report from the teams in Nepal and Syria, and the global outreach of Humanitarian Makers. Nepalese and Syrian makers visit medical practitioners in places where supplies don’t get through, they find out what is needed, and make it with support from a global network of engineers. She will look at the path to massively transforming medical supply chains to use local production capacity in post-disaster or conflict situations.

Susanne is also demonstrating her work in a workshop at the Makerspace.

supported by BMZ

• Chris Köver
• Nyla Innuksuk
• Etienne Turpin

This panel examines perspective in VR and which codes are embedded in the way these stories are told. A constellation of all star artists and VR creators from diverse backgrounds address the question of who creates content and who and how we intake content in the era of empathy VR. Together, they argue that, by breaking open the codes of how we understand story, we can expand the potential of VR to bear witness, to establish a common language, and to reinterpret our present-day operating systems.

VR:RV is a project by the Goethe-Institut, realized with the support of the Federal Foreign Office of Germany and in collaboration with MUTEK_IMG, re:publica, the National Film Board of Canada, the Canadian Film Centre, ARTE Germany, Eye Steel Film, Mozilla Foundation, Doc Circuit Montréal, SODEC and Retune.

• Joerg Heidrich

Am 1. Januar 2018 ist mit dem Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz eine der umstrittensten Regelungen der Online-Welt final in Kraft getreten. Seither sehen sich viele der Kritiker darin bestätigt, dass es sich dabei um einen Frontalangriff auf die Meinungsfreiheit handelt. Auf der anderen Seite werden seither auch viele eindeutig rechtswidrige Inhalte gelöscht. In jedem Fall ist Zeit für eine Bestandsaufnahme und einen genauen Blick auf die Inhalte des Gesetzes ebenso wie dessen Auswirkungen. Was ist hilfreich? Was muss dringend geändert werden?