Participants include:
Nora al Badri,
Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan,
Flipping the Coin,
Lorem,
Nadim Samman,
Orit Halpern,
Andrea Khôra,
Most Dismal Swamp,
Özgün Eylül İşcen,
Trevor Paglen,
Jon Rafman,
Ala Roushan
Contemporary life plays out amid a profusion of technical systems whose inner workings are obscure—if not locked. There is no master key. And yet, this encrypted world must be borne, somehow. How does this register in culture? What moods, symbols, or narrative frames capture the aesthetics and politics of exclusion, occlusion, secrecy, and speculation concerning technology’s inside? This conference at the historic silent movie venue Theater im Delphi explores the dark side of tech, bringing together artists and eminent media theorists for two days of lectures, performances, and screenings. Covering topics ranging from algorithmic governance, to hallucination, artificial life, art, and (digital) afterlives, the presentations unfold counter-narratives to Big Tech’s claims regarding a new culture of transparency and openness—showcasing, instead, a poetics of encryption. The gathering builds upon the recent book Poetics of Encryption: Art and the Technocene (Nadim Samman, KW/Hatje Cantz, 2023), which surveys an imaginative landscape marked by Black Sites, Black Boxes, and Black Holes. These terms indicate how technical systems capture users; how they work in stealth; and how they distort cultural space-time.