The Digital Divide symposium

I’M NOT A FUTURIST, the artistic intervention by Biarritzzz
@biarritzzz

As screen-based, networked digital technologies are seemingly a precondition for participation in contemporary everyday life, algorithms have become highly agentic semi-presences that massage our psyches, subjectivities and social systems.

Biarritzzz is an artist and a VJ based in Recife, in Brazil. Her artistic intervention I’M NOT A FUTURIST is a live audiovisual live improvisation discussing the contradictions between the institutionalized concept of Future guided by a storytelling approach. Regarding this dreamy psychedelic anti-futurist intervention, she writes: “I believe that the correlation of scientific racism, the constructs of progress and developmental politics, and the romanticization of machines over other technologies is an important issue to investigate in order to enable us to think of a digital world that won’t reproduce the errors of modernity.”

This symposium, The Digital Divide, in three parts pushes algorithms into plain sight and considers their production and use as political acts, raising questions about claims to infrastructural neutrality, and highlighting programmed bias and resulting social injustice.

The symposium was the launching event of the series of programs of the 2-year Creative Europe project ATTENTION AFTER TECHNOLOGY, a cross-border collaboration between Kunsthall Trondheim @kunsthalltrondheim , Art Hub Copenhagen @art_hub_copenhagen, Tropical Papers @tropicalpapers_ State of Concept Athens @stateofconceptathens and Swiss Institute @swissinstitute , funded by the European Union