Boiling Head

30/11/2024

With Matt Mahmoudi (Researcher & Advisor on AI & Human Rights at Amnesty Tech/Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities at Uni. of Cambridge, DK/IR/UK), Sophia Goodfriend (Post-Doctoral Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative, Journalist, +972 Magazine, IL), Khalil Dewan (PhD Nomos Fellow in Law at SOAS University of London, UK). Moderated by Matthias Monroy (Editor of the German civil rights journal Bürgerrechte & Polizei/CILIP and nd.Der Tag, DE).

On November 17, 2023, amid Israel’s military assault on Gaza, reports began to surface of Palestinians being held en masse between two large structures on Salah al-Din Road, the main north–south thoroughfare in Gaza. Israeli authorities had announced the opening of an evacuation corridor to allow Palestinians fleeing bombardment of their homes and neighborhoods in the north to move to Israeli-designated safe zones in the south. Before the military would allow Palestinian families to pass, however, they were forced to have their faces scanned. With airstrikes and shelling ongoing – which have killed over 39,000 at the time of writing – the Israeli occupying army required Palestinians, already the world’s most heavily surveilled community, to submit to the extraction of their biometric information as a condition of their being allowed to reach safety.

In his presentation, Matt Mahmoudi describes how Gaza has gone from being the world’s largest open-air prison to an open-air exposition for technologies of violence. Since Israel imposed a near complete siege on Gaza in October 2023, it has been using artificial intelligence to further streamline its campaign of killing, destruction, and violence in Gaza. Occupied Palestine has long been home to vast architectures of surveillance and control. This talk outlines some of the key algorithmic practices undergirding Israel’s system of oppression, in particular movement restrictions, against Palestinians.

Under Israel’s deepening occupation over the Palestinian territories in more recent years, Israeli technologies developed an “international brand” (particularly resonant against the backdrop of the War on Terror), allowing Israel to become a vanguard for practices of racialised surveillance, warfare, policing, and control with impact far beyond the region. The infrastructures of violence in the occupied Palestinian territories and their logics constitute the modus operandi for the proliferation of “smart” interventions elsewhere, under a veneer of greater convenience and safety, but to profoundly devastating effect.

Sophia Goodfriend unpacks the genesis and impact of Israel’s AI powered targeting in Gaza. Drawing on first hand testimonies from Israeli intelligence veterans and statements offered by Israeli military officials, she will outline how systems like Lavender, Where’s Daddy, and the Gospel rely on a vast, unlawful, and increasingly automated surveillance infrastructure built up across Palestine over the last two decades. Originally billed as humane solutions to regional conflict, her talk reveals how these systems have abetted the imperatives of successive right-wing Israeli governments by papering over lethal operations with a veneer of algorithmic rationality. In recent years, military heads have encouraged an overreliance on automated systems in a bid to drive up death tolls while promising such systems make their operations efficient and precise. Returning to testimonies offered by Israeli whistleblowers and published in +972s investigations, her talk underscores the violence enabled by the unrestrained deployment of such systems as well as the dangerous precedent they offer for the rest of the world.

Khalil Dewan’s presentation explores Israel's targeting practices through the perspectives of those subjected to targeted killings, illuminating the often-hidden realities of state lethality. By examining the interplay of future warfare, lawfare, and emerging technologies, the discussion will reveal how advancements in AI and autonomy are redefining the kill chain and expanding the roles of private actors in lethal operations beyond traditional battlefields. Key themes will include the individualisation and privatisation of warfare, raising critical questions about accountability and the shifting parameters of who can be legitimately targeted in resistance.

30/11/2024

Shona Illingworth (Artist and Professor of Art, Film and Media, University of Kent, DK/UK), Anthony Downey (Professor of Visual Culture in the Middle East and North Africa, Birmingham City University, UK).

We increasingly live in a contemporary global (dis)order defined by aerial forms of hyper-surveillance. In the shadow of physical and psychological threats, indefinite aerial surveillance, sustained bombardment, and the routine deployment of Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAV), entire populations now live under conditions of unrelenting anxiety. Given the degree to which these systems are consistently powered and maintained by Artificial Intelligence (AI), there is a profound lack of transparency when it comes to understanding the fatal interlocking of global surveillance technologies and automated targeting networks. Throughout the following conversation, Shona Illingworth and Anthony Downey will address these concerns through a discussion of their ongoing work on the Airspace Tribunal.

Established by Illingworth and human rights lawyer Nick Grief in 2018, the Airspace Tribunal is an international people’s tribunal that was formed to consider, and continues to develop, the case for and against a proposed new human right to live without physical or psychological threat from above. Focusing on Illingworth’s related artwork, Topologies of Air, and Downey’s research into predictive AI and pre-emptive warfare, they will explore two interrelated questions: how can we more effectively deploy creative practices to critically address the weaponization of AI and, through incorporating the respective fields of global security, human rights, and trauma studies, how can post-disciplinary research in the arts, humanities, and social sciences more effectively engage with lived experience as an integral part of these debates.

30/11/2024

With Lucy Suchman (Professor Emerita, Lancaster University, UK/CA), Erik Reichborn-Kjennerud (Senior Research Fellow, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, NO), Marijn Hoijtink (Associate Professor in International Relations, Principle Investigator PLATFORM WARS, University of Antwerp, NL/BE), Elke Schwarz (Associate Professor, Queen Mary University London, UK). Moderated by Jutta Weber (Professor for Media, Culture & Society, Paderborn University , DE).

The panel examines closely the materiality, epistemological logic, and proliferation of military AI-driven human-machine assemblages and their highly problematic sociotechnical practices. In doing so, it seeks to find effective ways to destabilize the military AI hype with its rhetorics of responsibility and to disrupt the industrial-military surveillance complex. Lucy Suchman discusses 'Disarming the Kill Cloud: Investigating the limits of data', in which she considers how the naturalisation of data functions as an enabling device for the operations of targeted assassination, and how questioning the production of data might help to further delegitimise these operations. Erik Reichborn-Kjennerud will draw attention to how the past conditions our violent present. To do this, he will introduce the notion of martial epistemology to highlight the importance of understanding military knowledge production to see how we can disrupt the alarming effects of present and future trajectories of martial operations. In her presentation "Platform Wars: Data, Digital Surveillance and the Future of Warfare", Marijn Holtijnk proposes to understand 'the platform' as a paradigmatic technology and representative of how today's wars are thought, waged, and lived. Elke Schwarz's presentation "The Hacker Way: Moral Decision Logics with Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems" argues that such developments in military AI reflect a prioritization of 'know-how' over 'know-what'. In turn, this jeopardizes not only global security but also the integrity of human ethical reasoning itself.

https://www.disruptionlab.org/investigating-the-kill-cloud

29/11/2024

With Lisa Ling (Whistleblower, Technologist, former Technical Sergeant, US Air Force Drone Surveillance Programme, US), Jack Poulson (Executive Director, Tech Inquiry, US), Naomi Colvin (Whistleblower Advocate and UK/Ireland/Belgium Programme Director at Blueprint for Free Speech, UK), Joana Moll (Artist and Researcher, Professor of Networks, Academy of Media Arts Cologne, ES/DE). Moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli (Director, Disruption Network Institute, Artistic Director, Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE).

This keynote brings together the four fellows of the Disruption Network Institute to present the results of their research to an audience for the first time. The research of Lisa Ling takes a closer look at the “Kill Cloud,” a rapidly growing networked structure of global reach with the primary intent of dominating every conceivable spectrum of war. Using unclassified public information, she aks to engage a newer connect and surveil military paradigm that expands the current notion of a battlefield. The second presentation introduces the research by Jack Poulson, the Executive Director of Tech Inquiry. Tech Inquiry began with a singular focus on fusing proactively published government datasets with analysis of journalism. Naomi Colvin’s research project identifies where debates about AI safety and AI in the military intersect or fail to; firstly at the level of ideology and secondly at the level of practical policy, with a particular focus on the UK. Joana Moll’s research “The User and the Beast” analyses the role of Ad Tech in expanding the capabilities of the Kill Cloud, reinforcing a co-dependency that silently blurs the boundaries between the military and the civilian sectors, posing significant threats to democratic processes by benefiting totalitarian modes of operating at a global scale.

29/11/2024

With Jesselyn Radack (Head of the Whistleblower and Source Protection Program WHISPeR at ExposeFacts, US), Thomas Drake (Whistleblower, former Senior Executive at the National Security Agency, US).

Jesselyn Radack will introduce the conference themes by reflecting on the implications and challenges of the whistleblowing phenomenon for the analysis of wartime conflicts, based on her experience in supporting and representing many military and national security whistleblowers. Meanwhile, Thomas Drake will discuss how to engage a diversity of experts (connecting whistleblowers, data researchers, human rights advocates, and artists) in the current debate around AI and the future of war.

21/09/2024

With Moro Yapha (Migration and Human Rights Advocate, GM/DE), Stella Nyanzi (Activist, Poet and Digital Rights Defender, UG/DE), Nyima Jadama (Activist & Moderator, GM/DE). Moderated by Mo R. (Project Lead, Tactical Tech, EG/US/DE).

This panel explores the pivotal role of media and technology in raising awareness and fostering community bonds among migrants and refugees. It discusses the challenges faced by migrants in Germany, Europe and beyond, and how the process of gaining agency can shift the focus from 'being a migrant' to 'becoming a citizen'. Through their individual stories, speakers will also illustrate the power of media and self-advocacy in combating systemic alienation and oppression.

Reflecting on his personal migration journey from The Gambia to Europe, Moro Yapha recounts how the lack of communication tools initially limited connectivity. This experience inspired the creation of a Facebook group in 2014 to document the perilous journey to Europe and highlight human rights abuses faced by migrants, especially those from sub-Saharan Africa. The group aimed to share untold stories, search for missing persons, and raise awareness of the struggles and exploitation faced by migrants in Europe. Motivated by the need for self-representation, Moro Yapha became a migration and human rights advocate, leveraging online platforms to challenge prevailing narratives and promote migrant voices. In 2016, this advocacy led to the co-founding of Wearebornfree! Empowerment Radio, the first self-organised African radio station in Berlin and Potsdam, now known as Kangkiling Radio. The station serves as a platform for raising awareness, empowering black music and cultures and building community among African migrants in Europe. Additionally, Moro has worked for seven years as an intercultural mediator at Fixpunkt e.V, supporting undocumented sub-Saharan Africans with health, legal, and social services.

Stella Nyanzi is a dissident poet and activist from Uganda working at the intersection of women's and LGBTQI+ rights, labour rights, freedom of expression and research, digital democracy and civil rights. She is currently a fellow of the PEN Centre Germany's Writers in Exile Programme and the Center for Ethics and Writing. Nyanzi has been arrested and charged several times for her political poetry in Uganda. Digital platforms have always played a key role in her activism. is a nascent campaign based on her recent cases in the Bavarian criminal court and administrative court. She photographed 3 security guards uttering hate speech which comprised racist, sexist and homophobic national stereotypes against a Ugandan asylum seeker in an asylum shelter in Bavaria. When they threatened to call the police, she uploaded their photograph on her Facebook timeline. Police officers confiscated her phone, opened up a section 201 case against her, forbade her to enter the premises, and escorted her off the grounds. A few weeks later, she received a house ban from all asylum and refugee shelters in Bavaria. Based on the two criminal and administrative cases, she started organising Ugandan asylum seekers to speak out against the dehumanisation they face in asylum shelters. She will briefly discuss the challenges and strategies of organising for asylum dignity based on the responses to photographing and posting online the faces of security guards violating the human rights and dignity of asylum seekers. For whom does digital democracy work in Bavaria?

Through her work on media literacy and the empowerment of refugees, migrants and women, Nyima Jadama developed her career in Germany as a TV presenter, moderator and media trainer. She left The Gambia in 2015 and dedicated herself connecting marginalised communities worldwide. After an initially difficult journey, bureaucratic hurdles and various work experiences, she founded the 'Bantaba Academy' for migrants and refugees and hosts 'Nyima's Bantaba' and 'Unfiltered Podcast' at the media organisation ALEX Berlin, giving migrants and refugees a voice to discuss their problems and tell their stories. Initially she joined ALEX Berlin as a trainee, but since 2020, she runs her own programme. Nyima describes that the word ‘Bantaba’ comes from her home language Mandinka, which is spoken in some parts of West African countries. Bantaba is a large tree under which the community in The Gambia gathers to discuss the concerns of society. With her programme, in which culture, migration and empowerment are discussed, Nyima talks about migration with migrants – and not without them, as is often the case in the media. Topics range from the direct participation of refugees to countering hate speech against migrants. The podcast 'Unfiltered Bantaba' was added in September 2023. Guests talk about stories that matter to them. Today, she is developing a media literacy project in The Gambia with the r0g agency. Through the creation of a Media Field Guide, she is empowering young women to be active in the media sector and to move from a state of oppression caused by cultural barriers to an awareness of their role in society.

https://www.disruptionlab.org/hacking-alienation

21/09/2024

With allapopp (Digital Media and Performance Artist), Milagros Miceli (Sociologist and Computer Scientist, DAIR Institute, AR/DE), Marwa Fatafta (Researcher, Policy Analyst and Digital Rights Expert, PS/DE). Moderated by Walid El-Houri (Researcher and Editor, LBN/DE).

This panel brings together three different situated experiences of the development of AI technologies (including machine learning, digital surveillance, data generation and labelling), challenging the language used to describe them, their inner functioning and their application in both civilian and wartime contexts. Technologies are never neutral and reflect the biases, systemic structures and cultural paradigms of the geographical, social and political contexts in which they are developed. Furthermore, their usage is brining concrete consequences affecting the lives of marginalised communities and contributing in generating transational repression.

While engaging with recent developments in decolonial thought in the field of artificial intelligence, such as the Decolonial AI Manyfesto and embracing both personal hopes and discomfort caused by the expanding post-Soviet decolonial dialogue, with its new hot spot in Berlin, allapopp envisioned an ambitious experiment: to facilitate a conversation about technology in general, and the future with AI in particular, led by “us*- born on the (post)colonial margins of post-Soviet translocal experiences, cultural, geopolitical, and ethnic half-bloods.” By doing so, allapopp aims for these imaginations to enter a tangible realm of technological envisioning – envisioning futurities as a means of political participation and self-determination. And while doing so, allapopp continuously wonders: who is us*?

Through a specific investigation of data work, the often overlooked labour essential to creating datasets, Milagros Miceli discusses how it plays a critical role in shaping AI technologies. In this talk, she will present findings from the Data Workers’ Inquiry, a community-based research project conducted with 15 data workers. She will describe how issues of migration, exploration, and power shape data work, significantly impacting datasets and AI systems, and argue for the importance of addressing historical inequities, labour conditions, and epistemological standpoints when discussing AI Ethics. This talk will also highlight the need for new research questions and methodologies to better understand the complexities of AI data work.

Looking beyond the harms or 'side effects' of AI and its dangerous impact on marginalised and racialised communities, Marwa Fatafta's presentation draws on the current reality of occupied Palestine, where these technologies have been designed to automate systematic discrimination, human rights abuses, and large-scale killing. She will discuss Israel’s recent use of AI systems in warfare to surveil, target, and bomb civilians and civilian infrastructure on an industrial scale in Gaza and its implication on a global scale. Far from being an isolated issue in a faraway land, she will showcase how these battle-tested technologies and systems – and the industries behind them – are often repurposed to fuel the oppression and crackdown on migrants and minorities here in Europe. Finally, she’ll delve into the complicity of big tech in providing the technologies or services underpinning these abusive systems without transparency and how we can hold them accountable.

21/09/2024

With Anna Titovets Intektra (Artist, Researcher and Curator, RU/PT). Moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli (Artistic Director, Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE).

Floating, fighting, surviving: digital tactics, strategies, and challenges of defeating the alienation of migrants.

According to statistics, at the end of 2023, an estimated 117.3 million* people worldwide have left their home countries due to wars, conflicts, human rights violations, or because of the potential dangers connected with their ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or political opinions. When moving to a new country, migrants not only lose their roots and part of their identity but also acquire a new label from the point of view of the law. This label – be it “refugee,” “migrant,” “immigrant,” “displaced person,” or “asylum seeker” – becomes a rather crucial determinant of a person's life and rights in the new country. It's not only a matter of legal status but depending on the type of this label people become more or less unseen, oppressed, or alienated in society.

Modern immigration involves not only a physical change of geography but also relocation to a new digital environment. Despite the prevailing idea of digital globalisation, each country and even each city has its local characteristics in the digital fabric of society, digital bureaucracy, and policies towards data protection, privacy, and surveillance.

The keynote will focus on practical survivalist strategies, community-building approaches, and challenges in the process of fighting for social equality, searching for a sense of [digital] belonging, reshaping identity, and protecting social rights with digital means and technologies. Among the tactics and tools to be mentioned are not only the creation of self-organised communities, but empathetic chatbots, social media groups with crowdsourced hacks and tricks, AI bots helping to solve different migration-related issues, and guerrilla chatbots for misbehavioral activist tactics helping migrants fight existing rules in the gig economy sector. The keynote will present some examples of artistic projects addressing alienation and migrant issues. Besides, it will examine the phenomena of digital ghettoisation and the challenges of the specific pre-conditioned experience of the city and culture shaped by Google services and ranking-based apps.

The talk is partly based on Anna Titovets’ personal experience of immigration as well as research and observations gained from recent participation as a mentor/curator in the Pause / Play: Culture Under Pressure project, which deals with the artists and cultural practitioners who had to relocate due to wars and conflicts.

Artistic and tech initiatives are important for highlighting the problematic areas of digital and other forms of discrimination and, ideally, should become a foundation for change. However, these initiatives should first and foremost be seen as practices of empowerment, utilising digital tools to foster a sense of support in resisting injustice.

*According to the data published by The United Nations refugee agency.

https://www.disruptionlab.org/hacking-alienation

17/09/2024

Join us tonight Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival

A Song of Woes

Performed by: Jason Kunwar I Ranav Adhikari I Sanskriti Shrestha I Turi Leng Seong Agostino I Nischal Khadka
Tuesday, 17 September, at 21:30–23:00
Venue: Blå

A Song of Woes, We offer Steeps celebrates the fact and fantasy of Nepalese and Himalayan experience in songs, stories and melodies from all over the region.

21/04/2024

WAXING PHASES - CRESCENT
2 days of A/V live performances focused on Ambient Drone music and new media arts in on the 20th and 21st of April.
Join us for the live stream on the event day.

20/04/2024

Gaza, Ukraine & Azerbaijan: Challenging Network Authoritarianism
With Manolo Luppichini (Filmmaker and Author, IT), Arzu Geybulla (Journalist and Editor, AzNet Watch, Global Voices, AZ/TR), Tetyana Lokot (Associate Professor in Digital Media and Society, Dublin City University, UA/IE). Moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli (Artistic Director, Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE)..

This panel brings together three different stories from Gaza, Ukraine and Azerbaijan, documenting the monopoly of communication channels during wartime and how strategies of digital authoritarianism can be used to maintain power, target people and distort reality. We will also discuss how it is possible to circumvent restricted access to digital infrastructure in war, and how it is possible to empower people to use distributed tools to fight digital oppression.

Besides killing tens of thousands, the Israeli offensive has been destroying Gaza's telecommunications infrastructure. To bypass the blackouts and restore connections in hard-hit areas, NGO ACS-Italia is testing a network of Web-Trees: mobile hotspots radiating free, universally-accessible WI-FI signal. Web-Trees are grown by local Web-Gardners, committed to keep their community connected to the rest of the world and to their social ties. Manolo Luppichini will bring his recent direct experience in Rafah, when together with NGO ACS-Italia, he worked on developing the Gaza’s Web-Trees project to provide digital access within Gaza.

Journalist and editor Arzu Geybulla will speak about Azerbaijan's passionate affair with digital authoritarianism. Since 2003, the government has deployed an array of measures and tactics to spy on civil society representatives and the public at large and resort to digital censorship, persecution, and repression. As a result, Azerbaijan has ranked poorly year-on-year, on many international indexes measuring political and social freedoms including its backsliding on internet freedoms.

Tetyana Lokot presents how to resist networked authoritarianism in Ukraine’s occupied territories during Russia's full-scale invasion. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has seen the authoritarian state mixing its usual external cyber warfare tactics with internet control and information manipulation approaches inspired by its internal networked authoritarian regime. Russia’s interventions in the information spaces and telecommunications infrastructure in temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories demand greater scrutiny, yet we should also be studying Ukrainians' grassroots citizen responses to these threats.

BEYOND CONTROL
Resisting Digital Oppression & Authoritarianism

20/04/2024

Unveiling the Depths of Online Racism: Jihad Van Puymbroeck's Story to Justice

With Jihad Van Puymbroeck (Activist and Communication Strategist, BE). Moderated by Nyima Jadama (Activist & Moderator, GM/DE).

In January 2018 Jihad Van Puymbroeck started to work at VRT NWS, the Flemish Public Broadcast. It was a moment she should have celebrated, where she could be proud of herself. But it was taken away from her, and even more than that. Who is Jihad Van Puymbroeck? A woman, a Muslim woman, with Moroccan and Belgian origins, committed and ambitious. Apparently the ideal target for the Flemish far right youth movement Schild & Vrienden. The head of the organization Dries Van Langenhove orchestrated an online racist hate campaign against her. Her overall presence in influential environments was disturbing their vision of the Belgian landscape. Their strategy to clear Jihad from the way was by making her loose her job at the strategic employer, attempting to gagging and damaging her professional and mentally.

In September 2018 journalists of VRT NWS found a way to infiltrate the online Discord groups of Schild & Vrienden and their secret activities. To the outside eye, the members succeed to build a misleading image through their well-dressed looks and eloquence. Take a deeper look and you discover a closed network where racism and sexism are rife. They uncovered the racist, sexist and antisemitic face of the right-wing group. A criminal investigation was launched after the VRT documentary.

Jihad Van Puymbroeck is one of the civil parties, she discovered a file of 200 pages of ‘secret conversations’ with the aim of smearing her. After more than 6 years the judge sentenced Dries Van Langenhove with 1-year prison sentence. Jihad Van Puymbroeck won her case after a long agony. The judge specifically mentioned Jihad in his judgement: “He encourages antagonism, discord and conflict and as such fosters physical and psychological violence."

Jihad Van Puymbroeck will tell her story about the reasons which drove her becoming a civil party, what strategy she used to sustain this legal battle, how she almost gave up but eventually saw how justice prevails.

BEYOND CONTROL: Resisting Digital Oppression & Authoritarianism
https://disruptionlab.org/beyond-control