This conversation with two members of a relatively new whistleblowing platform—we called them Sarah and Cleo to preserve their anonymity—intends to present the latter. It allows people working on development projects in London to leak information that can be used by local inhabitant associations to organize in time their defense against their planned eviction. We discuss the platform both theoretically—the conceptual approach to disobedience will be presented in the next conversation with Elena Loizidou—and practically, through the perspective of (often young) architects working in development projects, and the ones of local associations through the workshops organized by Concrete Action. Information ...

As an institutional practice, archival practices often tend to serve to colonization, surveillance and discipline society of the Modern world. In the last ten years, with the digital technology and social movement detecting, recording and accumulating images become a civil activity. Thus, archiving videos and other types of visual images brought also non-institutional practices and as well contemporary discussions related to image, open source, collectivity and forensics. Beside interviews with video activists; this book compiles several writers’ articles on their practices and discussions of archives from several angles: forensics, decolonization and commons.

Within mediated conditions, at some level everything becomes reduced to data. How do art practices collect data, circulate it, and themselves become data? How do artists and organizations reckon with the production and circulation of knowledge in increasingly online media environments? Running with Concepts: The Mediatic Edition examined how forms of digital storytelling, ethics, access, governance, and data sovereignty are being practiced in other disciplines. By looking at how media-makers across diverse fields are engaging with new technological tools and practices, The Mediatic Edition considered how these paradigms map onto artistic practice. In Back Up Your Data!, respondents to Running with Concepts: The Mediatic Edition reflect on new ...

How did the internet go from the utopian free-for-all, open source heaven, libertarian last frontier to the current state of permanent surveillance, exhibitionism and paranoia? This duplicity is the underlying thread that links the artists, activists, and researchers in The Black Chamber, an exhibition, a symposium, an urban intervention and a publication. The Black Chamber aims at discussing the delicate and often awkward role of art and imagination in the age of mass surveillance, stressing the multiple connections between post-studio art and independent research, grassroots reverse engineering, and new forms of political activism in the age of networks. Not just an exhibition ...

This publication marks the first results of the Tactical Media Room Ukraine project, launched in February 2022 in Amsterdam after the shocking Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Tactical Media Room is a network of activists, journalists, scholars, and artists linked by the exchange of ideas and practices—all aimed at supporting Ukrainian media and confronting Russian state propaganda. Together, the network of experts initiated a screening and a series of meetings that took place mainly in Amsterdam. Based on these meetings, Dispatches from Ukraine: Tactical Media Reflections and Responses showcases initiatives, critique, and essays that provide insights into the ways information circulates ...

Surprisingly few people have flinched at the way Osama bin Laden was disposed of. Even for the most wanted man in the world, one imagines that it would have been both ethically and politically more expedient to stage a trial before his execution, similar to the way it was done in the case of Saddam Hussein. But such an expectation would risk overlooking the degree to which, for states and individuals alike, much political activity now takes place outside of official channels and beyond the jurisdiction of formal legal bodies… Editorial Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle Radicalism as Ego Ideal: Oedipus ...

In the February 2009 issue of e-flux journal, Luis Camnitzer suggested in his essay “Art and Literacy” that a core problem in education (particularly for artists) can be traced back to an early stage when one is taught to read and write, in that order. On one level, it is simple common sense to suppose that one can only begin to write after learning how to read. But, at the same time, this ordering also takes for granted that consumption must necessarily come before production—only after you consume knowledge will you then be capable of producing it. It is a fundamental ...

AI ethics has never been far from the industries it sought to critique. While originally designed to bring values such as fairness, accountability and transparency to Big Tech and its products, the lines between Big Tech’s PR initiatives and AI ethics funding has never been clear. In practice, AI ethics now operates as a means for the co-option of critics and to enable regulatory capture. It is used by corporations to create legitimacy and to further accumulate value. The result is that ‘ethics’ has now become a high-valued industrial commodity, and AI ethics its foundry. This anthology is a collective response ...

Every Artist, a Journalist is the second Blowup Reader. It collects texts on the subject of art as a form of journalism. In this, the second edition of the Blowup Reader series, each of our participating speakers is represented along with two additional texts. The Reader begins with an excerpt from Alfredo Cramerotti’s book, Aesthetic Journalism, followed by an essay by Ken Hollings delving into the history of the Dounreay Fast Reactor, which is the subject matter in Gair Dunlop’s latest work. A text I have written, written deliberately in newspaper journalism style, gives context about the beginnings of Lino Hellings’ ...

The pyramids of Gaza, so a Forensic Architect once told me, proliferate throughout the Strip, but are most commonly seen in the camps and neighborhoods that ring Gaza City and along the short border to Egypt. They are the result, he said, of an encounter between two familiar elements in the area—a three-story residential building, of the kind that provides a home for refugees, and an armored Caterpillar D9 bull – dozer. While the bulldozer circles the building, its short shovel can reach and topple only the peripheral columns. The internal columns are left intact, forming the peak of the ...

This conversation with Eyal Weizman was recorded in February 2017 in order to be featured as a main component of the 12th issue of The Funambulist Magazine, entitled “Designed Destructions.” In it we address both descriptively and analytically the work of Forensic Architecture, a research agency at Goldsmiths, University of London, that he founded and directs, gathering architects, artists, filmmakers, and authors to investigate geopolitical crimes in which architecture or territorial components can be approached as witnesses and evidences. Although the agency’s investigations involves a variety of geographies (Guatemala, Syria, Serbia, Pakistan, etc.), this conversation mostly focuses on Palestine in general, and ...

A micro-publication about the artwork Profiling The Profilers by DISNOVATION.ORG. Based on state of the art big data analytics techniques, Profiling The Profilers is an artwork that generates a series of highly detailed digital profiles of Big Tech companies—i.e. psychological, cultural and political profiles—similar to the ones constantly generated for each user by these very same companies. In other words, this algorithm performs a sousveillance of Big Tech companies using their own tools.