Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 1 kg of chicken breast 1 kg of chicken breast 1 kg of chicken breast 1 kg of chicken breast 1 kg of chicken breast 1 kg of chicken breast 1 kg of chicken breast 1 kg of chicken breast 1 kg of chicken breast 1 kg of chicken breast 1 kg of chicken breast 1 kg of chicken breast 1 kg of chicken breast 1 tbs of flour 1 tbs of baking powder 1 tbs of baking soda 1 tbs of baking soda 1 tbs of baking soda 1 tbs of baking soda 1 tbs of baking soda 1 tbs of baking soda 1 tbs of baking soda 1 tbs of baking soda 1 tbs of baking soda 1 tbs of baking soda 1 tbs of baking soda Thank you. Hi everybody, welcome. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending on where in the world you are today. My name is Wade Wallerstein. I'm a digital anthropologist, a curator at Gray Area in San Francisco, and a community manager for Outland Art Magazine. I'm really, really excited to be here today to welcome you to the NextCloud Atelier House Open Studio Visit. The NextCloud Atelier House is a one-month online residency program which is hosted in the service.ac cloud and is curated by Sofia Braga, Davide Bilacqua, and Matthias Fischer, in which five artists, Dene Tapia, EEEFFF, Christina Kokior, Mary Magic, and Ajao, have been invited to use the service.at infrastructure to create a project, engage, and collaborate with each other. The participants were invited to use all the tools in the cloud instance, which is a content collaboration platform built around the idea of cooperation. It allows communication channels to chat in video conference, and it has specific tools to organize group workflows. During the residency period, we had a ton of special guests that led the artists through a virtual tour of the city of Linz, where the service.at server and thus the cloud is physically based. For a little bit of background, service.at is an association working with open source internet infrastructure and producing artistic research on current topics in the field of networked media and technologies. The service organizes the AMR, which is dedicated to art, activism, and open culture and by yearly research labs with artists and developers of the scene the online studios can all be visited via the service.at cloud at cloud.service.at slash atelier house we'll post all the links down below in the chats, and you can also find it at the service.at website. So throughout 2021, the Nextcloud residency curated by Sophia Braga and Matthias Pitcher has been ongoing, and it's consisted of an online folder at service.at.cloud. And every month that cloud space was given to a different artist. They could upload new content or modify and delete what was already there, and thereby engage with each other's work in an open source and creative common spirit. Within the NextCloud Atelier house, Service.at aims to create a short-term digital institution whose role is to enrich online residencies through online means, fostering digital art and supporting its needs. As a curatorial experiment of a self-made institution, the project investigates what can be the role of the atelier house or the studio house in the online space. The Nexicloud Atelier House is funded through LINZ Import 2021, LINZ Kultur & Kunst und Kultur im digitalen Raum, Land Oberösterreich. I'm really excited because first up today is an artist that I know personally and that I admire very much. Ah Zhao is joining us. Active online as a media artist, blogger, activist, and programmer, Ah Zhao is the virtual persona of Shanghai and Berlin based artist Shu Wenkai. Born in 1984, the title also of George Orwell's classic allegorical novel, and in one of China's oldest cities, Xi'an, Ah Zhao's art and works are marked by a strong dystopian awareness, literati spirits, and sophistication. Much of Ajao's works speak to new thinkings, controversies, and phenomenon around the internet, with specific projects focusing on the processing of data, the blogosphere, and China's Great Firewall. His recent projects extend his practice to various disciplines, among them architecture, topography, and design, to capture the pulse of the young generation consuming cyber technology and living in social media. A Zhao lives and works in Shanghai and Berlian. A Zhao, take it away. Hello everyone, I think it's very happy we can join the community and share my idea with another artist for the whole month. And I think today I will talk about my research during the residency and I will give more uh the background story and talking about why i want to do this and how can i find a way based on the technology to to as an art yeah can we play the my PDF. Okay. I think the last five years I've focused on my identity from the cyberspace. I used the, I think almost the one, two, three, four, the four solo show I'm talking about my idea. The first day as the 2017, it's named the user love high frequency trading. The show, my solo show I'm talking about maybe, okay, today we are not a human. We can ask the user for our first identity because for me every day i wake up i check my my iphone i check email sometimes i call the deliver food sometimes i need to use the the the i message to contact my friend i think most of the time the iMessage to contact my friend. I think most of the time in my daily life I'm a user, I'm not just a human. So I think the whole show is a kind of announcement of okay, now if you think yourself, I think I can think myself as a user. So the whole show is talking about as a user, how do you think yourself and maybe you can find the new power and then maybe you can find you are under control by the administrator because I don't say I'm the administrator. I'm just a normal user. So after that, just a normal user so after that i have the new show it's named the the boat why i want to make sure the call as a bolt the bolt from the internet about uh what it means internet about i think internet bolt it's the the very old-fashioned technology for searching energy. If you want to search something, it means in the database they have something you want. And I think Internet Bolt is very traditional technology for searching energy. If they want to get the data, they need to send Internet bolt to get the data back to their database. So I use the same words, the bolt. Why I need to make the bolt? Because, okay, I want to, as a user, and how can I know myself? I think something has changed in my memory. And what has changed in my memory, I think the memory now is not only from my body, from my head, I think the memory also from the internet, from my social media, from my smart device. So I think I can use the Bolt way to visit the new system of my memory. So I make the show talking about that. And then I make two solo shows in one year. One is named the Kine Simulator. And another one is named the Deep Simulation. The two solo show is talking about okay i already know myself as a user and also i can use both way to visit my new memory system and maybe i can have a chance find a new way to saying the word so i think maybe i can add the player. So the true show is talking about how to recognize yourself as a player and what I mean as a player. The player is saying the words from the online game, from the game side. And also for me as a player, you can have a chance to understand the whole world. Maybe it's by the competing power. It's not separate online and offline. I think all the world, you can recognize it's the competing power, the result of the processing, and it's controlled by the algorithm. processing and it's it's controlled by the algorithm so i think maybe i can as a user to understand the the word and also the the little bit different the user and the the the player i think a player it means you're always in the different kind of world view. And also you can create your own rule. And also you can try to break the old rule. So I think the player is more powerful than the user. It's a chance. If we cannot escape internet, we cannot escape the control by the algorithm, control by the competing power, maybe we can as a player to try to do something new and create our own way. So that's the last five years I'm focused on. And before the residency, I think maybe I should do more the smaller things because the big topic I think for me is already finished. And I think I need to do something special for my daily life. So I think maybe I can back to the boat because when I make the boat, the solo show, I made a website. It's showing my memory. I collected my memory for the half year, and I used the website. You can see here the website. I uploaded a lot of material from my daily life. I used my iPhone. I used a smart glass, and also I record the screen from my social media. So that creates my memory for the half year. So I think that's my memory. And this time I want to do the same thing. Maybe I can make a boat for myself the the the now you can say the the url the the the agile is a boat it's already here i i try the before i make it based on the nlp but i think it and not working very well and this time i try, based on my old works, it's named the icon. I have a lot of icons for my daily drawing. I want to use the machine learning, the AI, the program to learn from the icons and make a boat. People send something, they can give the feedback and give the feedback depends on what they send to the boat but but when I do a research deeply a little bit change my mind because now if you want to make make the machine learning the program based on the image. I find two, the topic, one is based on the style again. I think that now I can say the very old fashion. And another one is the pumped energy, I think the little bit new. So, and also I found something very commercial, the company they do the dial tool and also it's based on the image and the test. I think I'm very lucky because the last week I found a totally new one. It's named the Codeville and it's very friendly. They are open source and I already tried something, used the Codeville to make some of the results. That I made yesterday because I'm from Shanghai and now I think everyone knows in Shanghai the zero Covid policy, it makes everyone crazy and suffering. So I write the sentence like Shanghai is dead and through the AI program and they gave me the result. I think it very works for my idea. Maybe I can add it to something like the icon from my daily life. And also I can use this, the open source, the code to create the special mode for myself, for the boat. And also, before the boat, it's based on the dialect. You can talk to the boat. So I also do a little bit of research. Maybe I can try to make a boat based on the GTP3. So I think during the one month research, I must say, I changed my mind. I think maybe I can have a chance to totally redesign my boat with the GTP3, redesigned my boat with the GTP3, the program and the new, a little bit new, the pumped energy. So I think maybe that's the boat's future, but now I don't decide. I think I already showed the whole things. I can finish the one month. I think the most things for me is research. And also I can use the one month to make me more clearly what do I want and because the one month is very short for the for me to finish the whole things but I think I don't make I don't make it finish this year and also it's a long-term project because if you want to create the boat for yourself it should be a long time and depends on the new technology depends on my new idea I think the very interesting for me and now I don't know why I should do that I just know that's the things I can do for my daily life. Every day I can do a little bit more about code, a little bit more how to fade my bot. But I don't know. Maybe one day the bot can replace me to talk to everyone. Maybe they cannot talk, but maybe they can have the interview based on the test, they can give the feedback. Maybe that's my dream and I can go the other side, I can hate myself, but the boat is me and maybe another kind of the boat. That's all. Yeah, sorry, I think I don't share the screen so maybe I can share the PDF again and show something. I think I checked the wrong place. The PDF, yeah, yeah, yes I stuck here okay that's the boat the boats I made the website and this is the this is the the the we make a website for the for the foot for the boat and I upload my daily material up to the website and it creates half a year of my memory. And this is my boat, the Tele my daily life, a hand raise. And sometimes I make it for the real big one. And that's the two parts I found, the steel gun and also the pumped energy. And I found another new one, I think it's a commercial AI for the text to the image. And also the one I used the called the cog view. And that's the result. I saw that Shanghai has died and they gave me the best rate, the result. And this is my idea. Maybe I will make a GTP3 with something. Sorry. Now it's finished. Hello. Thank you, Ayao. I jump in as there seem to be some little connectivity problems with weight. He's trying to come back to the stream. Yeah. So, thanks for sharing your project and maybe we can repeat one time more where the visitors can check your project or interact with the bot. It is on Telegram, right? I cannot hear you yeah it's based on a telegram yeah okay mm-hmm so I would try to share them the link to in the banners so at first we can show your website link so that if somebody is interested they can check out your website and yes so the next the correct link for your boat is I'm looking to retrieve it please bear with me yes thank you thank you so much I'll put it here create a new banner so that should be done right here t.me slash So that should be the right here. Yes. Yes. Yeah. This spot. Perfect. Okay, so after maybe I have a quick question. As I was in the background, I could not follow the whole presentation, because we were trying to grab wave weight in the back um maybe i will just ask you how uh what would be the next steps of the of the boat for you um now you have this time for uh developing what is coming what is coming next yes i think now now I prefer it's based on the text. So it's more like you can talk to the real human. And during the text, maybe I can work with something, the text to the image through the machine learning. I think it's more interesting. And I think I already have a lot of interviews by the text. So I think based on the GTP3, I can feed the AI my interviews. So I think it's a very interesting way to, if you can talk to the boat of the future. But I think I need two or three months to finish everything yeah but now i think i'm more clearly than the before the residency that's good i'm very happy that uh your residency was allowed you to to reach a new state of thinking in the in terms of bots um i see wendy's back that's great cool good that you're back um yeah um we hope that it stays uh like this i will go back in the back again uh and give you the stage to continue the discussion great sorry guys uh you know uh in technical difficulties over here. Thank you so much for that presentation, Ajao. That was really lovely. I just have a you know, I have a question. I think that what you're exploring in relation to memory is really fascinating because often I think about the fact that, you know, so much of my mental storage is happening in the cloud, so much of my mental storage is happening in the cloud. So much of what I know to be true and how I think about the future is based on what's stored on my phone, on my laptop, in the cloud, in Google Docs. And it's interesting that you're bringing a bot into this world because the bot's entire existence, its entire perception of itself, if it even might have one, lives inside the cloud. And so I'm wondering how you, in creating these bots, you know, developed a relationship with them, you know, with so much of your memory in the cloud, as well as its entire objecthood or personhood or something kind of in between? I must say I don't know why I'm working on my own boat because if I cannot as a boat, how can I know the bots think about themselves? So I think it's like I'm trying to teach my bots. Maybe it's like I learn from other bots. How can I create a bot? It means how can I learn how to think from the AI, how to think about the machine learning? I need to know the underground the the logic and not as a user to use that so i think it creates the boat it's the best way to learn as a boat yeah absolutely um and how do you uh i mean you talked about this a little bit, but how do you plan on, how would you foresee this project developing, you know, in the future past the residency? I try to, I think it's more easy to, after I finish that, I think it's very easy to introduce the people I have a boat and I can on my website and sometimes maybe I have the interview, I have a talk, I think maybe you can talk to my boat first and I can give you another the feedback. I think I want the boat as a part of me first. And then if I think depends on the technology part, if it's more like the human or more individual, I don't know. I have a lot of the features for that. But for me, very important part is how can I choose the right resource for the bot because now a lot of resources can be used. So I think sometimes I don't... I actually learn to choose as a bot. So I think that's maybe the best part for me. So it'll be hard to say, but I can feeling if I can create a bot like myself, I will change and not a bot like me. Maybe I'm more like a bot. Yeah, I think about that too. You know, what if I'm more like a bolt. Yeah, I think about that too. You know, what if I'm becoming, yeah exactly, what if I'm becoming like this non-human entity by putting myself and my, you know, who I am inside of these technological structures. Thank you, thank you so much Ah Chow. I'm also, I'm really excited to introduce our next artist who will be speaking, Mary Magic. Mary Magic from Los Angeles is a non-binary artist working at the intersection of hormones, body, and gender politics and ecological alienations. Magic frequently uses biohacking as a xenofeminist practice of care that holds the potential to demystify invisible systems of molecular biopower. Completing their masters in the design fiction group at MIT Media Lab, they received the Pre-Ars Electronica Honorary Mention in Hybrid Arts in 2017 for the project Open Source Estrogen, and also a 10-month Fulbright Research Award in Yogyakarta, Indonesia in 2019. Magic is a current member of the global network Haktaria, open source biological art, the tactical theater collective Aliens in Green, the Asian Feminist Association Myling Vienna, as well as a contributor to the radical syllabus project Pirate Care and to the online cyber feminism index. Mary, the floor is all yours hi can everyone hear me okay yeah okay thank you so much for the introduction wade um i'm sorry for the background noise i had to relocate to get better internet and there are a bunch of people installing a show. So I apologize for that. I'm just going to share my screen now. I hope this works. Thank you. It's not working for me. Oh, the joys of screen sharing, you know, I think this is always an issue and you think after two years of pandemic that we have figured it out, but not yet. It remains a mystery. Yeah, sometimes they just don't want to cooperate. Okay. Then... Hmm. How should we do this? Ah, okay. I got it. Okay, I need to go to System Preferences. Thank you. I actually need to restart Google Chrome. Is it all right if I hop off and hop back on again? Yeah, no problem. I think that while we're waiting for Mary, I just wanted to pose a question to the whole group, just in relation to the project that Ajao shared. I'm wondering how you all resonated with this idea of the non-human entity living in the cloud, and if there were any specific resonances that ajia's project brought up for you When can I start? I think on the fly. This is just like a quick question. I think for me your question is quite about what does it mean to have agency inside of the cloud and inside of the technology. And it could be done from different perspectives. For example, from the perspective of cyborgs or from the perspective of governability. Or in terms of extended provision or extended memory and i think this is the end of my speculation and i want to give the voice to the magic thanks so much welcome back mary hi sorry about that this is a really cool um Hi, sorry about that. This is a really cool mirror effect. I'm kind of into it. Okay. Yeah, so sorry about that. I guess I can start presenting. Can you see my screen now? Yeah, okay, cool. Okay. Hi, everyone. So my project is titled Archiving the Disobedient Body. And at first, I proposed a daily ritualized practice of scanning a different part of my body, and then stitching everything together at the end of the residency and kind of creating this Frankenstein body. And the reason why I propose this is because I've been really interested in calculations of the body and the way that bodies are measured and put into categories. I've been researching about body and gender politics for some years now. So this is related to that background of research. And I also have a background in biohacking and hacking hormones and how hormones are, how gender is codified by hormones. So this is all like kind of the background of my research for this project. And I got really interested in 3D scanning because 3D scanning is getting more and more accessible because now we have like the latest iPhone has like the LiDAR sensor and you can download all these apps that can actually make some pretty good scans. So for this residency I wanted to explore these different technologies. I wanted to not rely on the iPhone for my main technology because it's not that everyone has access to the latest iPhone. So I was exploring some other tools like using Scanect. So this is a open software that you can download and what it's using is it's actually using a Xbox connect and you can use version one or version two and I can just play this video so you can see this is me trying to scan my right arm and in this process it almost felt like I was performing with the machine because as you can see like the program is always stopping me and saying that, oh, my hand is moving too fast and I have to move my hand back to its original position to continue the scan. So this is the final result and it's really shitty. Like you can see that I'm missing so many fingers and the resolution is not great. But what's nice about the software Scanix, you can actually do a bit of editing. You can fill in holes. You can colorize your scan. So it was pretty interesting using this software. I would say this is the most accessible thing that I found besides using something like photogrammetry which I find very tedious so I didn't want to go into photogrammetry for 3D scanning. I have some other videos that I could share. So I mentioned before that I was exploring other technologies. So I also was trying out this app called Hedges. No, not this one. So Hedges is actually, they advertise this app for scanning faces. So I wanted to use this app for my face in particular. So here I am just, again, performing with the machine. It was really really annoying because every time I was moving too quickly or moving out of place, my phone would vibrate. And it was vibrating constantly telling me to slow down, slow down. And it just made me even more stressed because when you're in this 3D scanning process it's kind of like like a one shot like you only have one chance so um I ended up making like so many scans of my face and they all ended up looking so terrible um so it's definitely a lot of training like um I think I was really optimistic when I thought I could do this every day, but it took me an hour or two hours just to get a decent face scan. So you definitely have to be very patient with this technology. Of course, it would be so much easier if there's another person in the room with me performing the scan but I wanted to see what I could achieve by myself. So now I'm going into the library and I'm going to export the model to PLY with colors and then you can view the 3D model so that's how it looks so that was like the first one that I did and it's not great so I started to do more and more and more so now the video is sped up 600 so i'm moving so slowly but the the footage is sped up actually see so now there's like a tracking error and then i don't realize that there's a tracking error because i'm trying to keep my eyes looking straight ahead and I'm trying not to blink. So it's really hard to get an accurate scan. So I find this process very performative and the fact that every body part has to be performed in a different way to be captured by this technology. So in the end, none of the scans that I did were perfect. I think I probably did 10 or 11 face scans within two and a half hours and there were a bunch of glitches. I posted one glitch here on the website. So this one was really funny because for some reason it gave me two faces and then i tried to do the same face scan using scanix which i just showed you earlier and um so i got this idea from a scanix tutorial that I found on YouTube where this guy just sat in a chair with wheels and swiveled around. And this kind of helped the performance. I didn't have to turn 360 degrees by myself. I had the assistance of a chair. And this worked out pretty well. But as you can see, like the scan is not very high detail. So the top of my head is missing. So again, it's not to colorize the scan. So there I am. And you can still see the chair behind me. Yeah. yeah and here's when I try to export it I think I need to purchase some kind of pro license to get more details. But there aren't even that many details scanned to begin with. So yeah, so that's kind of my process so far in this residency. And what I can do now, how much more time do I have left we're almost just out of time okay yeah all right then I guess I'll just finish it for now and open up to questions. Yeah, thank you so much, Mary. It's quite interesting to see you present just after Ajao because I think, you know, Ajao's thinking about kind of deification of the self and of personhood through a very, in many ways an abstract metric by personality, creating a portrait through personality, whereas you're taking a more physical and literal embodied approach to that. And so I'm wondering, you know, how do you navigate kind of the, or what did you learn from navigating the incompleteness and glitchiness of this emergent technology of scanning? Well, I'm really glad you brought up the word glitch because I kind of view the human body as a constantly glitching entity. Just based on my hormone research on environmental toxicities and the fact that there really is no stable or fixed definition of the body or gender. I really like the glitches, actually. I just imagine if I manage to 3D scan my whole body, it's going to look just like a total freakish Frankenstein monster. And I like that because I think that part of this project is recognizing the failure of these machines and the failure of technology to really understand the body as an unstable medium. Because part of this project is speculating, well, how do we capture and archive something that is constantly changing? So I like that these technologies are not perfect, obviously because they're designed by humans. But yeah, I definitely want to explore this project further and to think about what it means to open source our bodies, to archive and to open source our bodies. But yeah. Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, really wonderful. And I think, you know, of course, as well, we're also dealing with algorithmic bias here and technologies that are built specifically for white bodies and particularly cisgender male white bodies. So, yeah, really, it's really important to continue questioning this. We're, you know, we're a little bit behind time, so I'm going to move on to the next artist who is presenting. We're here today joined by EIF, which is a cooperative and artistic group of two people, Nikolai Svetsev and Zina Tsuk. Active from 2013, they are based in Minsk and Moscow. EIF works with emotional effects of the new economic regimes driven by computation, materiality of sensibility, affects within creative industries, frictions between user interfaces and protocols, and test settings for collective imaginaries. The methods of EIF are making public actions and live situations, online interventions, performative seminars, software and hardware hacks, framing and framing environments and settings. Take it away, EVE. Thank you a lot. Thank you very much, thank you very much. We would like to start with a minute of silence in memory of the innocent victims in Ukraine. Bye. you you We propose now to listen to the sound, to the actually stretched sound of a passing loaded with military equipment extracted by us from a 30 seconds anonymous video. And this train is moving from a station near Gomel, Belarus, towards Chernihiv, Ukraine. And usually in peacetime this train from Goimil to Chernigiv takes around three hours and 32 minutes. And to the nearest station on the Ukrainian territory, Gornostayevka, it is one hour 37 minutes. But now passenger trains between the cities do not go, because the infrastructure is occupied by Russian troops, and so this train is loaded with military equipment of the Russian Federation. And this region in Belarus, where we're coming from, we're coming from Belarus, and this region is a deeper area of Russian aggression against Ukraine. And what we propose as a collective listening session is to listen for a while, maybe for one minute this sound yeah and please attempt the sound as a uncompressed infrastructural time of the world yeah that is transferred into the user experience Thank you. You can connected to the infrastructures of war. This is the our idea what we can propose you know, and that is the collective listening of the sound, the stretched one or uncompressed one is the part of the school of algorithmic solidarity initiative we started and developed during the residency. And yeah, it can, it aimed maybe yeah and like it focuses mainly right now on the infrastructures of coloniality but also we attempt to more as well go to the infrastructures of solidarity opposed to them. So we started to think about algorithmic solidarity quite a while ago, but due to the war we started to think how to make it anti-war and how to make it anti-imperial. So right now we are experimenting with different exercises which we actually collected at Atelier House service. Yeah, and the link to the to the page we shared in the other part for your convenience. And please go there and find your choreography through these exercises and through these blogs. And maybe now we can elaborate a bit about the background of this idea of the school and we can do it going through the exercises. And please tell us when we'll be out of the time. Yeah, so we're currently exploring two parallel approaches, strike and solidarity, and how this engaged with different infrastructure and production mechanisms. Yeah, so and our main focus here is to create different forms of coexistence and how like opportunities to practice algorithmic solidarity and to think about different structures collectively and also to think about a landscape embodied with technologies that curate affect. But here our main focus is on the bodies that- That's how cyber sized by the computations and devices that are like focusing points for these computations or input or output interfaces for it. Yeah, and let me a bit elaborate on the structure of the exercises. For example, there is the exercise of correctly perceiving the data that was shown by flight radar website or the service and for the flight this very special one which was the turning point for the whole infrastructure of the region of Belarus and countries near it. The flight was forced to took down in Minsk in 2021 in the summer and the reason of Belarusian government to take over this flight is to arrest the Belarusian activists and we found the coordinates on the map where the initial point of turning happened. Our idea is to somehow make it by human bodies and to do so I think our idea is to is what is the best to do it is the rent that your country house which is right below the actual actual turning point. And if you go through the exercises, you can find that every of it contains some section of supporting materials that can be used to zoom into the situation and to try to make it not so and we try to make it not so rich of narrative but make it more like a dry facts there. Yeah, and also right now we're trying... Actually, the residency was very productive for us because we didn't have enough structure to support ourselves. So our weekly meetings were very... like were crucial for us. And so right now, for example, we have a crazy document with a lot of ideas on how to proceed the exercises. Also, we already thought of we already thought of students that we are currently teaching subjects related to forms of coexistence and our next proposal for them will be to practice different forms of algorithmic solidarity. And maybe we can go through this document and translate on the go some questions that were appearing in certain points of our exercises, and maybe we can end with some of them. Yeah, so for example, why to compute? Can we imagine an algorithm that is working for 100 years? Where is the subject? Platforms are an alternative or survival survival radical reveries where is the promised flying machines archives who and how archives and and how we can uh pay for the website for 100 years in the future yeah maybe that would be a nice um end to the uh our residency that is thinking about infrastructures and um yeah thank you for listening thank you so much Eve you know I right what right now it's you know it's a scary time in the world and I appreciate you giving a moment of silence to the innocent Ukrainian victims you know and so but I think that what your project represents is a lot of hopefulness in terms of how people all around the world might engage in algorithmic solidarity. So I'm wondering, you know, as a result of this residency, what are you two most hopeful about? Thank you for your question. Thank you for your question. Well, I think for us right now, this solidarity actions are very crucial and important. So we're trying to establish as well as we did it during the revolution the political imagination practices which would then help to rebuild broken structures yeah and at the same time it's interesting to think about the violence of infrastructures or the violence of computations as a part of colonial regimes as well. Because the coloniality is not about ideology, it's more about colonial machines in a very functional meaning. And to think about them from our localities is interesting. It's important to work on different speeds, how to say, to see how these transmission machines can produce some frictions. And when I'm talking about the speeds, I'm talking about the speeds of the collective direct actions, like activism and some direct and very clear acts of solidarity. But at the same time, it's very important to have the resources to unroll more long distance thinking process, establishing new types of institutions, for example, if we are talking about, for example, contemporary art, because now this is the question, what does it mean to have a contemporary art institution in Belarus or even worse in Russia? Should it be like before or not? But this is the question, how it could function in a way when it's not a part of this colonial practice. I think the main field where we apply our energy now. Yeah. Thank you both so much. Yeah, really, really fascinating work. Next up, moving right along, because again, we're running out of time. I'm excited to announce Christina Kokior, who is a researcher and designer working in the Netherlands. With an interest in automation, situated software, and peer-to-peer knowledge production, her practice largely consists of investigations into the intimate bureaucracy of knowledge organization systems and, more recently, collective and non-extractive digital infrastructures. Welcome Christina. Thank you so much Veit for the introduction. And it's actually a great pleasure to follow EEF. Also because in general, I've heard to follow everyone. I've been enjoying a lot the peeking into people's practices. But also because I think the subject that I was mostly busy with during the last few weeks also stems from an interest and involvement with collective digital infrastructures. digital infrastructures. And so I've been making a few experiments around notions of asynchronicity and lack in relation to digital infrastructure, such as the NextCloud. to perform a small desktop experience. I don't know what to call it, but I will try to share my screen to see if everything works and let me know if it doesn't. We should be able to see ourself for a few seconds, I think. Takk for ating mediet! Nå er det en av de fleste som har kastet på. 1 cm. Vi klicka på konektivet. E aí Vi klicka på klippet på sida. I'm going to make a new one. I'm going to make a new one. I'm going to make a new one. I'm going to make a new one. I'm going to make a new one. I'm going to make a new one. I'm going to make a new one. I'm going to make a new one. I'm going to make a new one. I'm going to make a new one. I'm going to make a new one. I'm going to make a new one. I'm going to make a new one. I'm going to make a new one. We remove the sim card slot. We remove the sim card slot. Vi klicka på ena fjellet. Vi klicka på ena fjellet. Vi klicka på ena fjellet. Vi klicka på ena fjellet. Vi klicka på ena fjellet. Vi klicka på ena fjellet. Vi klicka på ena fjellet. Vi klicka på ena fjellet. Vi klicka på ena fjellet. Vi klicka på ena fjellet. Vi klicka på ena fjellet. Vi klicka på ena fjellet. Vi klicka på ena fjellet. Vi klicka på ena fjellet. I will install the battery. 1.5 cm Vi klicka på en av de tre fjellfjellene. We remove the battery. We remove the motherboard. Viper Pro XS Max 1.5 cm Vi klicka på klippet på sida. Vi klicka på klippet på sida. Vi klicka på klippet på sida. Vi klicka på klippet på sida. Vi klicka på klippet på sida. Vi klicka på klippet på sida. Maybe this is a good quote to end with. The construction of a past consists also of a negotiation of what remains and what gets forgotten. And it is an extract from a text written by Hans Lamarant. That's a beautiful quote to end on, Christina. Thank you so much. What an interesting project in the sense that you are taking something that's invisible and giving it physical form and giving the process that is often obscured from us some kind of visibility. And I'm wondering, you know, what was the process like of translating this kind of esoteric, you know, file transfer protocol into something that was accessible to an audience and performed poetically in this way. By the way, I think it worked a bit too well, this creating of lag, because probably you could not read half of the sentences, of a lot of sentences. I think in general I'm quite interested in finding ways to materialize abstract processes, computational processes, and the work of translation is usually something that I also like to do collaboratively or through live moments, through performances, but also through exercises to expand on together. For the last few weeks. Yeah, looking into synchronization, I think it is for me an ongoing question how to make visible these processes, especially as it is, I think, something that, at least within the collective that I'm part of, we encounter these aspects on a regular basis and they create a sense of discomfort when the material infrastructure fails, when we run out of electricity or we forgot to pay our internet connection. Actually, this hasn't happened luckily, but someone has accidentally closed, turned off our server before or we weren't aware that whilst a couple of us were hosting a workshop in the physical space where we are based, at the same time, hosting a workshop in the physical space where we are based at the same time someone else was uploading a really large file and this was clogging let's say our resource management or our resource sharing and finding ways to become synchronous and asynchronous and in the way that we organize ourselves in a, yeah, digitally sharing data and a physical in the digital space is something that is very, yeah, I find very interesting. And I think for me, it's not necessarily that this is one, it's a series of visualizations and a series of making material through these experiments. And this is also how I hope to continue beyond the four weeks. Beautiful. Thank you so much, Christina. I'm going to still keep thinking about some of the phrases that I read. There's a lot to, you know, unpack. It's all resonating. She is a writer, multimedia artist and technologist born in the Chilean working class. She is a researcher and lecturer of hacking and autonomous practices at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. She is the founder of the Digital Witchcraft Institute, which is an arts organization that was Denea's project for her fellowship with the Mozilla Foundation, which originally started as an artistic research experience dedicated to collection showcase advanced non-conforming approaches to the use of tech. To the present day, the Digital Witchcraft Institute has executed a series of projects about sacred interoperability. Oh, I love that word. In the past, Dene has been part of several organizations dedicated to digital justice, such as the Rise Up Collective in the US, Coding Rights in Brazil, and Derechos Digitales in Chile. She has a bachelor degree in social communication from Universidad de Chile, a master of science in management from the University of Bristol, and a research master in comparative literary studies from Utrecht University. Dinae, the floor is yours. Thank you, Wade. I think I have to update my bio, this makes the diplomas a bit weird. But thanks anyway. This has been a really nice experience, the Nextcloud at Lirr House. I told the people before that this has been a really nice group. I love the team in Lins and I wish we can see each other in person maybe later in the summer. I have a presentation prepared and I uploaded it and now it's there for you to also look at it. My project that I developed during this month is called The Grave and it is a Marxist oracle. And it is a Marxist oracle. As Wade said, I'm the founder of this organization called Digital Witchcraft, in which I explore this intersection between magic and technology. And bots have been, oracular bots, divinatory bots, have been one of the outputs that have been more successful because using simple coding tools, simple grammar generative code, it is very easy to create lots of products and also workshop this bots as well. And now I guess I'm a mother of many bots that now exist in the universe and the cybernetic universe and this one in deals a lot with the Marxist ideology. In using this, well, first of all, most of the bots, Oracle bots I have made exist in Twitter or in master instances. And this, and I usually use this approach in which, I don't know, people can ask my bots things and the bots reply back. There I have one of the first bots I made is dedicated to the Argentinian cumbia singer Gilda. She died tragically in an accident and she's now kind of a religious figure in Argentina. And now the boat is really popular popular and people ask her things through the bot and it became like an interesting technological device in which people basically talk with the dev. Well, this has happened in similar experiences have happened with other books I've made. One that I really like is the one that uses text from a purpose of my own dream journaling and creates like this strange divinatory phrases. But yeah, all of those usually exist in in twitter or in mass and now i wanted to test this concept in the web in order to not depend on a third uh for the social media or infrastructure and this is the case of the grave is simple ht HTML in which using this button below you can ask anything and it will and you could get an output that is a juxtaposition of my favorite quotes from the Communist Manifesto and images that I curated from chats that I have in Signal with my friends. This is for instance, one of the outputs of the vote. It says, what the boy you see therefore produces above all are its own great diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. This is a quote of the manifesto. It inspires the title of the oracle, the grave, and the title of the Oracle, the Grave, and the image in the back is a landscape, I guess. Using CSS I modified the image. And I decided to use the manifesto because it strangely has a very esoteric nature. And this is very contradictory with communist ideology, which is materialistic. And the other world shouldn't have too much important place here. However, it is very obvious that there is a sense of spirituality in this text and this is something that I wanted to explore further. Another output, for instance, is this one. It says, an appendage of the machine and behind is Orson Welles with a strange face. Yeah, this is related, I guess, to the many references in the manifesto to the... to this, like, lowlight references in the manifesto on how chain of productions in industrial societies turn the worker into an appendage of the machine rather than someone doing like dedicated and focused work. This one says, the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the netherworld whom he has called up by his spells. And behind is my boyfriend, Harry. That day he was trying to roller skate and he failed. So he is laying in the grass. he failed so he is laying in the press and yeah and that quote in the manifesto refers to the bourgeoisie on on how and again this kind of prophecy that exists in the manifesto, how capitalism is not sustainable and this class, this oppressive class, is basically destroying itself, while proletariat will come victorious. proletariat will come victorious. It is not my place here to say that this is happening or not, but it is, in my opinion, an invitation to constantly test this prophecy. It is happening like this, it is not. I enjoy it very much using this format, this like, and the oracular rationality to explore this in these times of globalization, precarization, and and inconformity. Well, here I'm adding some conclusions that I, or topics that now I want to keep exploring. Well, the first one is something that I already mentioned, like this contradiction between what is material and what is the otherworldly, how these two can coexist or not. I think they can. Silvia Federici, Italian scholar, also thinks they can. And it is basically the basis of my project digital witchcraft especially considering that in my opinion we are in a spiritual crisis that should be sold in material terms as well um also this is something I guess we talked about with Cristina, like how what I use was very much cheap tech and it's kind of in an opposition to expensive tech. I mean like this times of artificial intelligence and all this like hot topics and this idea of the artist and advanced tech that is very popular in places like Linz, for example, not service places in Linz, but it is there is also a material contradiction in terms of the entire space. Also something that happened to me using the Oracle was I struggled with overconsumption because I kept pressing the ask button all the time, one, one, one, and to get these outputs. And that prevented me to focus. And this is something that I would like to address in a future iteration of this project, maybe. I wonder if, and that's why I rather present this, this break like this, like in this specific slides and not light in the site. Like maybe it is good to, yeah, just focus on one thing and just reflect and see just like when I read the tarot, for example, how the image is connected to the question and the interpretations of that card. So maybe this Oracle in the future could have maybe some type of limitation on how many times you can update it, I don't know. And finally, it is one of the of the studio visits someone said that this was a provocative topic and I don't know maybe it is but maybe it is I still find very crucial that in many neoliberal societies I come from Chile the most neoliberal place in the world next to the US communism is still a bad about the world it's something that is actively prevented by business people and I don't know unionizing is seen as a horrible thing and I like to,, unionizing is seen as a horrible thing. And I would like to continue studying, yeah, communism and Marxist writings. I think they also exist, it is some of the ideas exist very much in opposition with what I consider sanitized activism. And because, well, as most Marxist theories said, this problem of how capital can co-opt basically everything. However, it is quite difficult. This is something that communism is something that in my opinion has not yet super-coopted, at least in some context. I don't know, I'm thinking of a union in the in the united states it's still difficult to think of how that can be co-opted but well those are my um thoughts after this experience you can check the board by yourselves in this address and try and play and have fun with it i don't want this to make it like overly serious. That's I guess the function as well of the images. I used some, I found how nice is to, I realized how nice is to check the type of image that you share with your friends in chats. It's very intimate. If you see it here in this example, it's mostly like, I don't know, nice landscapes that you visited or funny photos or, yeah, funny photos. And it's very wholesome. And I would like to present my work like that as well in a wholesome way but again but at the same time in a very straightforward way i'm actively proposing the um the reality of the class struggle so that was my that was my project. You can check some of my work by Googling Digital Witchcraft Institute. Thank you. Wonderful, thank you so much, Denae. Before I open it up for a larger group conversation for a few minutes, I just wanna say to the audience, if you have any questions or want to chime in at all, feel free to drop those in the chat i'll be going through and collecting them and relaying them to the group here um but today um i am so curious because i have my own fascinations with the relationship between technology and magic and um the paranormal and the fantastic. And, you know, in speaking with this bot or these bots, did you have any, like, extremely strange or uncanny experiences that resonated with you or kind of stuck with you afterwards? Yeah, it happens. Well, Christina actually had an experience of that type with one of the boats and it's in this in in the side of my of the grave actually on how art also operates many times in oracular ways uh a very simple example that i thought was like i don't know being super in love with someone and then you listen to a song on the radio and you say oh this is totally about me and it's very much about how you read a work of art and how it becomes kind of a prophecy and what i do it has it's not like Y lo que hago no es material de cine, pero ha pasado que después de una lectura de tarot digo cosas como Oh, sí, esto es totalmente esto y esto es totalmente esto. Y no hay muchas personas que yo conozca que han experimentado estas cosas. people I know has experienced these things. So yeah, this is why I feel like the oracular, the divination devices mostly operate as reflexes of what you already have inside you than something that externally, you know, inoculating magic in a space. Yeah, it's interesting. I've been reading a book by Alex Kittnick called Distant Early Warnings, where he talks about Marshall McLuhan's concept of the artist as a distant early warning, kind of conducting through their creative practice a kind of research that is only possible in the studio. And as a result, being able to foresee things that come in ways that science, academia, and the government just can't replicate. And I love the way that this project kind of speaks, you know, to that. And so, you know, in opening it up to the wider group, I think that, you know, this, the way that this residency functioned and the kind of critical research and experimentation that you were doing, you know, has revealed so many different things, whether it's from the oracular potential in your case, Denae, whether it's in the potential for protest and solidarity in EF's case, in EEF's case, or the quantification of the self and the body in Mary's case, all the way to the literal processing and kind of temporal qualities of this technology. So, you know, I'd love to touch in with all of you about, you know, how did this residency and your experimentation with this cloud technology, how did it make you feel about the future? And how do you want to see these kinds of technologies implemented or changed for the future? I know that was a big question, so take a second to think about it. I can answer. I don't know if 3D scanning technology needs to be redesigned or improved even more. I think it's more about what we do with this technology because what I'm interested in is how definitions of the body get constructed through these technologies. So it's not so much about the technology itself, but it's like the outcome of it. So what kinds of normative policing do we put on bodies as a result of calculating and measuring bodies so i think that's um so for the future i would like us to have a more um more of a cultural dialogue about um what these technologies how these technologies manifest in our physical reality how these technologies manifest in our physical reality. Absolutely, absolutely. But anybody else? In a recent broadcast that I actually shared with Christina, I I made this comment about about this kind of a trend of thinking about the future, this idea of speculative design and how it's kind of popular, I guess, in some artistic circuits. But of course, it's a very valid concern, especially in times of, I don't know, climate emergency and war. However, at some point, I think it distracts us from things that happen in the very present. the very present. And even though, of course, it's really fun to engage in speculation, in my opinion, it shouldn't overlook the really material problematics of the breast meat. Christina, from leading that workshop, did you kind of have similar feelings? I think, so I was thinking what to answer to your question. And for me, actually, I find it really interesting that this, the whole setup of the Atelier house is made in such a way that it takes into consideration the digital infrastructure and the infrastructure in general that makes such a residency possible. So I think even starting from looking at the conditions of yeah, collaboration and art making is really, I would be, I'm very optimistic about this approach in general. And as for things that I have been thinking about in relation to the future, yes, I do think there is, I do have some sense of, well, with a few other fellow researchers and friends, we've been using the term hope-punk a lot and I think I feel quite inclined to bring this term up now, like what is possible within the constraints that we are facing now and with building practices of solidarity and like EEF has also been talking about and collaboration. I have a lot of hope punk in that, let's say. I haven't heard that phrase before, hope punk. I love that. I'm totally going to steal that. I think that's awesome. We've got a couple, you know, questions, uh, trickling in from the audience. Um, and the first one is for Eve. Uh, do you ever feel threatened by the overly authoritarian governments, uh, in the sense that you would consider yourselves a target, especially if your work would be discovered and found threatening to the current regime? Yeah, maybe before going into that, a few thoughts on the previous question well i've been thinking that quite often we do collective situations where we act out different scenarios but imagined from our nowadays positions imagined from our nowadays positions but kind of going into some directions which right now do not exist for example when we made a situation In Kiev, one friend of us imagined that we would have a kind of, for me, it's more about, how is that? Reassembling what we have right now and how it can, you know, if play around it and find another science fiction of the present day as a quote. Yeah. I love that image of a drone or a robot taking care of animals. It sounds super cute. Yeah. cute. Yeah, at the same time it's quite weird because of the situation, the war on the Ukraine and all the drones that are providing this computer vision of the territories and dehumanizing politics of Russia, making people like animals at the same time. But the idea of escaping this military technology that was born inside of some military institutions is quite a participatory one. And answering to the question directed to us, I want to find somehow the perpendicular way to answer it because there are different levels of violence. It could be like shocked one, like you can be caught or arrested or it could be long-lasting violence of, I don't know user imagine algorithms for example that are not on a human especially bodies and you know human body tissues but more about nerves for example in neurons yeah i think it will be my answer to this question. And there are things like cyber security, you know? So we're trained in that for years. It's certainly a scary time to be an artist making political statements, I think. And I think that what we're talking about here in terms of cloud technologies and surveillance and how they interface with the work that we do is really critical. There is a question in the audience for Christina. This person says, thank you for almost breaking our cloud. How much of the process of developing and testing your project was fun and how much of it was frustration were you at times confused about the results because the nature of the action obfuscates the process of debugging in a fun way i i love that question that's really good um i yeah let me re-read it briefly. And I think it's, yeah, there is always a lot of frustration, I think, in getting closer to the machine in terms of translating it first for yourself and then for someone else, leading someone else through the encounters that you've had. But I have to, yeah, I would say it was a healthy balance. But the fun came actually more towards the end when things started falling into place. There was also a lot of experimentation of, yeah, I think, yeah, trying to understand the logics that, yeah, maybe the logics took over the poetics at that point. And it was less enjoyable. But yeah. It's always a love-hate relationship, you know. It makes our lives possible and it also makes them sometimes impossible too. The next question that we have is for Denae. And this person asks, in the radical tech scene scene black boxing is often criticized and it said that users should be made aware on the technological functioning do you think that a certain reflection on spirituality can combine with this wished demystification of tech and where do you otherwise see space for spiritual where else do you see space for spiritual reflection in the hyper rational tech industry oh denay you're muted uh very interesting questions i really mean it because this is the first time i think that of yeah maybe a different perspective on on black boxing because yes it's true we usually think that people usually promote that that black boxing is a bad thing however in some bad thing. However, in some sense, you could say that, especially in relation to magic, you could say that black boxing kind of rejects you from other things that you don't want to deal with. I always use this example and I told it to people of CER on how Silvia Federici explains how in the pre-industrial societies people lived with magic or magic existed in a very pervasive way and many things were not questioned because of magical reason and in many cases things that were beneficial to the community. I love the example of a person that I don't know for who didn't want to go to work a specific day and this person could just say that a ghost was inside their body and simply you couldn't go to work in such a situation and people in the society of pervasive magic simply accepted that because i don't know there are things that are sacred there are things that you shouldn't be you shouldn't be questioning. I know that it might sound very anti-scientific, but it is a viewpoint in which black boxing is put at the use of communities. And here maybe it's also connected to the second question second part of the question on how um how close are actually computer science and and magic this is initially many people would say that this is not true however in the research i have made these connections are are everywhere i i started this These connections are everywhere. I started this interest in magic and tech doing research on hackers and shamans. And it was very amazing to see the many connections between the two, how lots of instances of these communities are very ritualistic, and how the act of coding can be parallel to the act of casting a spell. I think that tech communities are not... There are parts of it that are not hyper rational and they're very welcoming to other worldly approaches. It's interesting, yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, I was just watching a really incredible documentary about UFOs actually last night and that finally, you know, no matter whether we can explain them or not the phenomenon of seeing unidentified flying objects is real uh we see things and we don't know what they are and there's kind of this weird in-between place of wanting to acknowledge not wanting to acknowledge and not knowing uh or being able to know what the truth might be. We have one last question from the audience, and that one is for Mary. And this person asks, what has more potential in your opinion, high-res virtualization of bodies through precise scanning, or a more mental virtualization of using your own imagination to fill the gaps of a more low virtualization of using your own imagination to fill the gaps of a more low res, poorly working tool? Sorry, I just put some chocolate in my mouth. That's a really interesting question because we're in this we're living in this age where everything is getting more and more high res and we're almost like we have this like nostalgia for when things were like lower resolution like vintage photographs and VCR tapes and things like that. And I think there is there is a psychology behind our mind being able to fill in those gaps and allowing us to use our imagination. I actually wouldn't be surprised if technology started to go back in this direction. But it's really hard to predict technological trends these days. But I might actually look more into that psychology of the way the mind wants to fill in gaps because um i think um on a mental emotional psychological level um yeah that's that's really interesting to look into but thanks for that question Beautiful. Thanks so much to everyone who asked a question. I think that that is everyone that has asked something and we're right about at the end of our session. Thank you all to all of the artists for being here and for sharing your projects with us today they were really beautiful and uh you've definitely sparked a lot of thought in me and surely our audience as well about how we can think through cloud computing um and collaborative networking tools uh for a different kind of future and all of the different you know prismatic aspects within that. Does anybody have any last words? Yeah I would also like to very much thank Sofia, Matthias and David and also all the artists for being together. It was a very wonderful experience. Thank you for your trust in us, for providing your platform to us. Yeah, I think that they did a, I mean, they did a great job in choosing all of you. These were really fascinating questions. They did an excellent, I'm really glad they put the trust in you as well, because I got to learn so much more about your practices. And, you know, how we're going to step into this brave new world together. Again, thanks. Thanks so much to everyone. And thanks so much to the service team and to the Atelier House team. This is a really incredible and awesome opportunity for all the artists involved. Bye everybody, have a great rest of your day, night, or week. Until next time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.