Lecture

In "Dissecting container ships", the historic origin of containerization is followed all the way back to the 18th century, covering the switch from sailing ships to steam vessels, towards mechanization of shipping, pushed by industrial production.

Container shipping effectively moves 90% of all the manufactured goods on the globe today, namely functioning as a backbone of modern civilization. Knowing the basic idea behind containerization allows you to find your own point of intervention on solid ground.

This presentation puts forward the concept of "bot logic" as a response to what the researcher Deb Verhoeven calls "infrapuncture". "Infrapuncture" is a portmanteau word which conflates "infrastructure" and "acupuncture", referring to small-scale interventions that have a catalytic effect on the whole. Currently there is a growing interest in activist communities in bots as a tool to amplify voices. Simultaneously, the Oxford Internet Institute has initiated a years-long research phase into the political role of bots, focusing specifically on propaganda networks.

While clouds connect us, today not every cloud is made of air and mist. Some clouds are so dense and heavy, they no longer occupy the sky and instead rise up from the underground. In this talk I will present an alternative epistemology of human-made clouds, manifesting at various altitudes on a vertical axis.

This talk will a take a recent data visualisation and mapping project, Migration Trail, as a basis for a discussion of the ethics of cartography. Maps' richness, the detail and amount of information they can bring together, is also what makes them potentially problematic, particularly when a subject such as migration forms the subject of those maps.

The United Transnational Republics is the first known “3GO”: a Global Governmental Grassroots Organisation working towards the democratisation of the globalised world we find ourselves in:

Democracy as we know it since the last two centuries only takes place within nation-states. At the same time globalisation happens globally, outside of national definitions, legislation or agreements.

This lecture traces the socio-political background of cybernetics and the development of the computer during the Cold War, illustrated with examples taken from popular cinema of the era. From Norbert Wiener's initial experiments with an anti-aircraft gun in the early 1940s to its assimilation into general systems theory, cybernetics provided the US military with an illusion of control over the fragile equilibrium of international relations.

Everyday experiences of networked society oscillate between processes of intensified control (Facebook, data retention, profiling) and new niches of autonomy (Wikileaks, Anonymous, commons-based peer production). Where does this contradictoriness of the networks come from? What can we do to expand the niches of autonomy without facilitating the processes of control?

Chair: Christoph Nebel