Vladan Joler - Signal Space
Sensing Urban Matter: Fantasies of Seamless Interoperability
Image: ELISAVA
Signal Space is the 1st event in the series of four weekly online talks Fantasies of Seamless Interoperability.
The talks are organized by the Future Architecture fellows – Hanna Husberg and Agata Marzecova (the art-science collaborative Towards Atmospheric Care), and explore how collective environmental and social imaginaries, hopes, and fantasies are shaped through invisible, yet material and very influential, infrastructure and novel ecosystems emerging at the nexus of political economy, communication technologies and the atmospheric medium in its role as a carrier of the electromagnetic spectrum.
At this moment in the 21st century, we see a new form of extractivism that is well underway: one that reaches into the furthest corners of the biosphere and the deepest layers of human cognitive and affective being. The stack behind contemporary technological systems goes well beyond the multi-layered ‘technical stack’ of data modeling, hardware, servers, and networks. The full stack reaches much further into capital, labor, and nature, and demands an enormous amount of each. The true costs of these systems – social, environmental, economic, and political – remain hidden and may stay that way for some time.
The talk will take place online on September 15, 2021, at 19:00 EET (GMT +3).
Event link
Registration is not compulsory, but if you like to hear from us regarding this talks series, please register here: REGISTRATION
The series Fantasies of Seamless Interoperability is part of Architektūros fondas' programme Sensing Urban Matter, which takes place within the Future Architecture platform and European Architecture programme 2021, is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and a strategic partner Lithuanian Council for Culture. Media partner – Lithuanian national television and radio.
Vladan Joler is an academic, researcher and artist whose work blends data investigations, counter-cartography, investigative journalism, writing, data visualisation, critical design and numerous other disciplines. He explores and visualises different technical and social aspects of algorithmic transparency, digital labour exploitation, invisible infrastructures and many other contemporary phenomena in the intersection between technology and society. In 2018, in cooperation with Kate Crawford, he published Anatomy of an AI System, a large-scale map and long-form essay investigating the human labour, data and planetary resources required to build and operate an Amazon Echo device. A previous study of his, entitled Facebook Algorithmic Factory, included deep forensic investigations and visual mapping of the algorithmic processes and forms of exploitation behind the largest social network. Other studies that he authored, published in recent years by the independent research collective SHARE Lab, included research on information warfare, metadata analysis, browsing history exploitation, surveillance, and Internet architecture.