Tactics&Practice [podcast]

Tactics&Practice [podcast]

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Tactics&Practice [podcast] episodes

  • S4 [The Future Behind Us] E1: PsyOps and Other Secret Military Programmes [w/Trevor Paglen]

    Over the years, Trevor Paglen has documented operations, locations and activities that were meant to remain hidden from the public. He has tracked and photographed the world of secret satellites, flew in a helicopter over the NSA headquarters with the express purpose of taking aerial photographs of it and, in the early 2000s, investigated the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” programme which consisted of kidnapping, disappearing and torturing people that the agency accused of terrorism.

    The artist, author and geographer discusses suspicious activities in the night sky, classified programmes and the weaponisation of human perception in the context of military and civilian influence operations.

    RELATED LINKS

    Trevor Paglen
    https://paglen.studio

    Doty
    https://paglen.studio/2023/05/10/doty

    Trevor Paglen, I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed By Me: Emblems from the Pentagon’s Black World, 2008 (Melville House)
    https://paglen.studio/2020/04/22/symbology-patches

    COLOPHON

    Host: Régine Debatty
    Guest: Trevor Paglen 

    Recording: Régine Debatty
    Music, editing and audio mix: Gašper Torkar

    The Future Behind Us podcast series

    Curated by: Régine Debatty
    Coordinated by: Janez Fakin Janša

    Produced by: Marcela Okretič

    Production:
    Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana, 2024

    Part of:
    PXXP•XXV: Speculation and Decay

    Conceived and co-organised by:
    Aksioma

    For:
    Pixxelpoint – 25th International Festival of Contemporary Art Practices

    Produced and co-organised by:
    Nova Gorica Arts Centre

    In the framework of:
    GO! 2025 – European Capital of Culture, Nova Gorica 2025

    Supported by:
    the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Nova Gorica

    The post S4 [The Future Behind Us] E1: PsyOps and Other Secret Military Programmes [w/Trevor Paglen] appeared first on Aksioma.

    37 min
  • S3 [(un)real data] E5: The Liminal Vibes Beyond Digital Conformity [w/ Valentina Tanni]
    Internet aesthetics like vaporwave, the Backrooms and weirdcore seem to offer glimpses of alternate realities beyond the threshold of the real. From Freud’s “uncanny” to hauntology’s spectral futures, these are aesthetics that revel in the strange, the eerie and the infinitely ambiguous – a messy, chaotic antidote to the ruthlessly curated digital landscapes we’re fed today. Art historian and curator Valentina Tanni draws from her latest book Exit Reality and helps us unpack how these liminal aesthetics tap into feelings of ambiguity, the unsettling familiar and nostalgia for futures that never were – a reaction, perhaps, to the relentless corporate co-option and algorithmic control that has degraded so much of online culture into a bland, high-affect “midness”.
    48 min
  • S3 [(un)real data] E4: How Mind-Flattening Algorithmic Tweaks Ruined Posting [w/ Günseli Yalcinkaya]
    If we paraphrase McLuhan, today’s medium is the algorithm: how is this universal mediator shaping us as content creators and consumers? How does it feel to be online amid different polarising forces, when consensus reality has completely broken down? Günseli Yalcinkaya, writer and researcher specialising in youth and internet culture, has been immersing herself in the insane hidden pits of the internet to shed light on central tendencies and viral phenomena – from homogenised beauty standards imposed by filters to psyops, military e-girl influencers and heads of nation states who post memes on X – through which our online world is becoming increasingly both mid and weird.
    39 min
  • S3 [(un)real data] E3: Unmasking AI’s Pixel Puppetry [w/ Eryk Salvaggio]

    What exactly is in the images generated by AI? Is it possible to decode training datasets and detect biases that fusion models, such as Dall-E or Midjourney, reproduce? Eryk Salvaggio, researcher and new media artist interested in the social and cultural impacts of artificial intelligence, suggests a method that enables anyone to peel off the layers behind the datasets. Exploiting the ghost human labour needed to create images and label them, the full automation of AI dehumanises the representation of the real, reducing it to clusters of pixels rearranged by statistical mathematical models. However, human agency and creativity are nested between the dots of the pixels, and they still give us the power to scratch at the surfaces that algorithms are constantly trying to reproduce.

    Support us on Patreon
    or otherwise!
    RELATED LINKS

    [Website] Eryk Salvaggio

    COLOPHON

    Host: Neja Berger
    Guest: Eryk Salvaggio

    Recording and editing: Neja Berger
    Music and Audio Mix: Gašper Torkar

    Production:
    Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art
    Ljubljana, 2024

    Producer: Marcela Okretič

    Part of
    Tactics&Practice#15: (un)real data – real effects
    Curated by !Mediengruppe Bitnik (Carmen Weisskopf in Domagoj Smoljo)
    In collaboration with Janez Fakin Janša

    Supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana.

    The post S3 [(un)real data] E3: Unmasking AI’s Pixel Puppetry [w/ Eryk Salvaggio] appeared first on Aksioma.

    47 min
  • S3 [(un)real data] E2: Could We Stop Reproducing a Deepfake Past? [w/ Wendy Chun]
    Predictive models based on big data are founded on the idea that knowing the past enables us to predict the future, but what kind of future are we constructing when the models are based on a deepfake version of the past? Correlation has overtaken causation, while homophily shadows differences across these models that are not only applied in social media platforms’ algorithms, but also in policing predictives or risk assessment systems. We discuss how these practices reproduce bias and generate self-fulfilling prophecies with Wendy Chun, professor of New Media, Director of the Digital Democracies Institute and author of numerous books. Is it possible to exit the default world of endless reproducibility and conceive of a different future from what has been left out in the past?
    41 min
  • S3 [(un)real data] E1: (In)dividuality and the Quantified Self [w/ Felix Stalder]
    The rise of computation in the 1950s shifted society to one constructed purely in commercial terms, where selling and buying have become the main social relation and every possible human form of contact is reimagined as a service or a product. What does this imply for the self? When individuals are broken up into parts that are measurable as data streams, the self is quantified and life is understood through numbers, where the ultimate number is profit. Professor of Digital Culture and Network Theory Felix Stalder discusses the ambiguity of data, the limits of computation and what interpretations might exist beyond the world as a set of measurements.
    54 min
  • Exit Reality: Vaporwave, Backrooms, Weirdcore, and Other Landscapes Beyond the Threshold
    PREVIEW

    Printed: 22€
    ePUB: 10€

    “The Internet is an alien life form,” declared David Bowie in 1999: today, the prophecy has come true, and our digital tools have become magical portals with mysterious properties, windows that overlook a dimension bordering between dream and reality.

    Beyond the screen mirrors we comfortably carry in our pockets, we have discovered a region haunted by strange presences—sometimes threatening, sometimes surreal, occasionally fascinating, and other times nonsensical. These are the same presences that, over the past fifteen years, have shaped what we now recognize as “internet aesthetics,” that ensemble of subcultures, popular narratives, and visual and auditory languages through which the alien entity has finally revealed itself to humanity. The net then reveals itself for what it truly is: a threshold as physical as it is mental, where bizarre things happen, time is warped, and we find ourselves inhabiting an intermediate dimension, a territory that is “neither here nor there.”

    Exit Reality marks the first attempt to map a world imbued with disorienting hallucinatory qualities, a realm that appears to us as a parallel planet that has emerged from the depths of code-space. Starting from the advent of vaporwave, which infused the network’s native imagery with spectral qualities in the early 2010s, Valentina Tanni takes us on a descent through the levels that traverse the silent horror of the backrooms, brushes against the obsession with sensory stimulation of ASMR, delves into the algorithmic surrealism of weirdcore, and lands in the exploration of pseudomagical practices such as reality shifting and memetic rituals. All the while, we remain comfortably seated before our screen, inside a battlestation ready to take off for a one-way astral journey, eternally trapped in the liminal space born from the now inseparable bond between human visions and Machine dreams.

    Valentina Tanni is an art historian and curator. She is interested in the relationship between art and technology, with a special focus on internet cultures.

    EN | 10.5 x 16.7 cm | 264 pp | B/W and 1/32 colour | soft cover | 2024
    ISBN 978-961-7173-46-8 (Aksioma)
    ISBN 978-88-8056-254-2 (NERO)

    ALSO AVAILABLE ON METALABEL
    Colophon

    Valentina Tanni
    Exit Reality: Vaporwave, Backrooms, Weirdcore, and Other Landscapes Beyond the Threshold

    Translated by: Anna Carruthers
    Copyediting: Miha Šuštar
    Editorial coordinators: Janez Fakin Janša, Lorenzo Micheli Gigotti
    Design and layout: Lola Giffard-Bouvier

    Promotion: Sonja Grdina
    Press relations: Katee Woods

    Print: Collegium Graphicum
    No. of copies: 2400

    Published by:
    NERO Editions

    and 

    Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
    Represented by: Marcela Okretič

    This book is published in the frame of the project .expub.

    Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.

    Additionally supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana.

    Rome, May 2024 | © Valentina Tanni, NERO, Aksioma

    Related events:
    Internet Aesthetics: A Journey Beyond the Threshold
    Let’s Play: Brexit Reality

    The post Exit Reality: Vaporwave, Backrooms, Weirdcore, and Other Landscapes Beyond the Threshold appeared first on Aksioma.

    1 min
  • S2 [(re)programming] E8: Accountability [w/ Eyal Weizman]
    How to Tell
    Eyal Weizman is a Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures. He founded Forensic Architecture, where he helped develop a methodology – counter forensics – for analysing cases of human rights violations around the world to provide new evidence against official narratives in international human rights courts. Counter forensics is a response to structural limitations – such as not having access to the crime scene – and makes openly available what is concealed from the public eye. Counter forensics takes all the time needed to scan and interpret enormous amounts of data and images, trying to find clues that are already in the public domain, but which we don’t know how to look at and interconnect. Secrets can be deconstructed by following the traces they leave in the visible world,harvesting what is out there, but nobody is looking at.
    Guests: Urška Henigman, radio journalist at RTV Slovenia; Matevž Čelik, architect, critic, editor, researcher; Marko Peljhan, conceptual artist and researcher.
    COLOPHON
    Host: Marta Peirano
    Guest: Eyal Weizman
    Editing, Audio Mix and Music: Gašper Torkar
    (re)programming podcast series
    Produced by Janez Fakin Janša and Marcela Okretič
    for Tactics&Practice #10: (re)programming
    Project coordinator: Sonja Grdina
    Production:
    Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art
    Ljubljana, 2023
    Part of
    Tactics&Practice
    konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art
    1 hr 42 min
  • S2 [(re)programming] E7: Community [w/ Astra Taylor]
    Talk to Your Neighbour
    Astra Taylor is an international filmmaker, writer and political organiser. She was part of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, and has been one of its best narrators and critics. Since then, in a series of legendary attempts to improve protest movements, she has become one of the essential chroniclers of contemporary acts of collective resistance. She is the co-founder of the Debt Collective, a debtors’ union organising to renegotiate and resist debts, that succeeded in changing first the narrative around student debt loans and then eventually the politics. In a media landscape dominated by social media, we want everything to go viral, but small groups of well-organised people can have a larger impact than millions protesting in the streets or online. Mass is not engaging, and the individual is not the scale for politics and change: the level for democracy is the collective. Talking to neighbours and breaking conversational taboos are the first steps for real change.
    Guests: Tjaša Pureber, activist and social movement researcher; ​​Barbara Rajgelj, human rights activist; Asja Hrvatin, social worker and activist for the rights of refugees.
    COLOPHON
    Host: Marta Peirano
    Guest: Astra Taylor
    Editing, Audio Mix and Music: Gašper Torkar
    (re)programming podcast series
    Produced by Janez Fakin Janša and Marcela Okretič
    for Tactics&Practice #10: (re)programming
    Project coordinator: Sonja Grdina
    Production:
    Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art
    Ljubljana, 2023
    Part of
    Tactics&Practice
    konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art
    1 hr 42 min
  • S2 [(re)programming] E6: The Cloud [w/ Joana Moll]
    Everything is Not Connected
    Joana Moll is a Barcelona/Berlin-based artist and researcher. Her work moves towards a crossover between art and investigative journalism with the aim to make public the hidden costs of techno-capitalism. Back in 2013, her research began with an epiphany: services like Google do not come for free, without environmental costs. As her research has proven since then, not only does the internet have a huge impact on ecosystems, but e-commerce services, browsers, dating apps and surveillance systems extract data and energy from unwitting users. What happens when we purchase an item on Amazon? Who owns the profile images posted on dating apps? How many trees are needed to absorb the amount of CO2 generated by the global visits to google.com every second? Through the artistic outputs of her findings, Joana Moll transforms these revelations into tangible concepts fostering awareness in the collective consciousness of the footprint caused by our use of the Cloud.
    Guests: Dušan Caf, director of the Digitas Institute for better digital accessibility; Luka Frelih, artist, programmer and hacker; Filip Muki Dobranić, hacker, philosopher, sociologist.
    COLOPHON
    Host: Marta Peirano
    Guest: Joana Moll
    Editing, Audio Mix and Music: Gašper Torkar
    (re)programming podcast series
    Produced by Janez Fakin Janša and Marcela Okretič
    for Tactics&Practice #10: (re)programming
    Project coordinator: Sonja Grdina
    Production:
    Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art
    Ljubljana, 2023
    Part of
    Tactics&Practice
    konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art
    1 hr 13 min

About Tactics&Practice [podcast]

From the publisher's feed

Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana