abstracts and bios 2

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+#Aphorisms by Citizen Troll
+
+##By Clara Balaguer
+
+(no video available for privacy reasons)
+
+What can the individual citizen—from a political left minority, with little to no programming skills—do to resist tropical authoritarianism fed by online misinformation? In response, notes (and not answers) from a three-year process of performative research on the ideological troll as archetype, profession, and socialized (gender-fluid) behavior, set to the backdrop of the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte (a.k.a The Punisher). Duterte’s allegedly “benevolent” dictatorship is characterized by policies that promote state-sponsored violence, institutionalized misogyny, and neocolonial loss of sovereignty promoted through grassroots and astroturfed online mobilization, disinformation, and, of course, trolling.
+
+Clara Balaguer (PH) is a cultural worker. From 2010 to 2018, she articulated cultural programming with rural and underserved communities in the Philippines through the Office of Culture and Design, a residency space, and social practice platform. In 2015, she co-founded Hardworking Goodlooking, a cottage industry publishing hauz interested in horror vacui, thickening research on the post-(or de-)colonial vernacular, collectivizing authorship, and the value of the error. Currently, she coordinates the Social Practices course at Willem de Kooning Academy and teaches Experimental Publishing at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. Frequently, she operates under collective or individual aliases that intimate her service in a given project, the latest of which is To Be Determined.

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+#MEMEPROPAGANDA
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+##By Silvia dal Dosso & Noel David Nicolaus (Clusterduck)
+
+https://vimeo.com/345462356
+
+While mainstream media and academia are still debating the importance of internet memes for contemporary communication, fringe groups on social platforms have been actively using them to reframe public discourse and influence elections. While most critics have been careful about overstating the importance of memes, some scholars have attempted to interpret memes as the emergence of a powerful language, capable of creating, subverting, and destroying symbols, narratives, and mythologies.
+
+In order to assess the real impact of memes, extensive quantitative investigation seems crucial. Platform capitalism thrives on the extraction of value from data – the exact same data that researchers would desperately need in order to perform the aforementioned investigations. But this data, for the most part, is not accessible to researchers. Facebook seems particularly unwilling to cooperate with independent scholars, using the post-Cambridge Analytica sensibility for privacy and data as a pretext to deny access to its API.
+
+Clusterduck is an interdisciplinary collective investigating digital subcultures and online communities. With their project #MEMEPROPAGANDA they focused on the growing political and social impact of memes. To conclude the research started with #MEMEPROPAGANDA, Clusterduck will focus on the role of social platforms for the creation, spreading and reception of memes, with an eye on the role of the most engaged online communities.
+
+**Silvia dal Dosso (IT)** is a creative in the digital field and researcher of internet trends and subcultures. She wrote and directed The 1 Up Fever (2013), a mockumentary and transmedia operation about the use of Bitcoin in a phantomatic AR smartphone-based video-game inspired by Super Mario Bros. With Clusterduck she created #MEMEPROPAGANDA, an interactive exhibition built to create active engagement and awareness about the process of memetic propaganda. Her work has been screened as part of public lectures at Cineglobe Film Festival du CERN, IFFR Rotterdam, Tentacular Festival, Currents New Media Festival, S.a.L.E Dock for Venice Biennale and featured on Canal+, Motherboard, Rhizome, and others.
+
+**Noel David Nicolaus (DE)** is an independent scholar and editor living and working in Berlin. As PhD student in Anthropology at Humboldt University Berlin, he researched trans-european mobility in the context of the Euro-crisis, with particular focus on the reshaping of citizenship. He has written for magazines and journals such as Stadtaspekte and sub\urban, and has been involved in local urban initiatives in Berlin, such as Megaspree and Stadt Neudenken. He is currently working as an editor in Berlin. He is also part of the Digital Art Collective Clusterduck, an interdisciplinary group working at the crossroads of research, design, and filmmaking, aiming to investigate processes and actors behind digital creativity.

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+#The World Wide Web of Gatekeepers
+
+##By Evelyn Austin
+
+https://vimeo.com/344050810
+
+The online environment is our main source for imparting and receiving information, making it hugely important for the functioning of our democracy. Increasingly, this environment is dominated by a few companies that act on an immense scale and with complete disregard for our privacy, freedom of expression, and safety. The regulatory response is lacking, with governments knowingly and unknowingly co-creating a world wide web of gates and gatekeepers, in which governments, corporations, and private entities have the power to exercise unparalleled control over the public debate. This talk will look into current challenges to our freedom of expression, how the open internet is under threat, and why you should care.
+
+Evelyn Austin (NL) works for Bits of Freedom, a leading European digital rights organization based in Amsterdam. She supports Bits of Freedom’s volunteer-run projects, contributes to their European network, and works on issues around freedom of communication. She is interested in the intersection between technology and society, and in topics such as our freedom of expression and assembly, the privatization of what should be our collective data, design, and human rights. She is also the co-founder of The Hmm, a network of contemporary visual culture enthusiasts.

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+#Memes as Means
+
+##By Isabel Löfgren
+
+https://vimeo.com/345459399
+
+Isabel Löfgren will focus on ‘memes as means’ for autonomous collectives and initiatives by artists, academics, and creative practitioners as political resistance to the disinformation wars caused by rising authoritarianism in Brazil during the recent presidential elections and in the post-electoral period, and offer some ideas about visual and media literacy today that demands new ways of seeing, acting, being.
+
+**Isabel Löfgren (BR)** is a Swedish-Brazilian artist, educator, and researcher based in Stockholm and Rio de Janeiro. She currently works as a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. Her artistic practice involves creating collective action and educational platforms for sustainable dialogue, and emancipatory politics.

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+#Workshop 2: All Sources Are Broken: a Post-Digital Reading Group (blog report)
+
+##By Labor Neunzehn
+
+Where does the networking purpose of hyperlinks actually start in offline texts? What happens to the text when we decide to explore the hyperlinks and the online media resources which are referenced? We all use the internet every day to retrieve tons of information, without paying too much attention to the sources. In this workshop we will try to radically connect research with reading strategies. Participants will receive a quick overview of digital archival best practices and dive into ASAB, a web-based application and an artist experiment about books, hyperlinks obsolescence, and reading strategies developed by Labor Neunzehn. The project considers how hypertext and print already coexist (as opposed to one superseding the other), through a navigable archive of collected reference material that visitors can both navigate and shape themselves. Participants will learn how to create a profile and use ASAB’s main backend features to cross-reference book citations and online media sources. We will be reading books together, just like in a reading group, but gradually shifting from the material to the digital world, in order to explore the deferred space between offline and online, its delay and decay.
+
+Materials and requirements: Participants need to bring their own laptops with Chrome or Firefox browsers installed in advance.
+
+**Labor Neunzehn (DE)** is an artist and curator duo engaged in a multidisciplinary discourse that involves expanded cinema, music composition, publishing, and critical reflection in media art, with a specific reference to the migration of these languages between the online and the offline domain. Labor Neunzehn is run by Valentina Besegher and Alessandro Massobrio, and based in the homonym project space in Berlin since 2015.