(un)real data ☁️ – (🧊)real effects
Book presentation with !Mediengruppe Bitnik and Felix Stalder
(un)real data ☁️ – (🧊)real effects explores the inherent ambiguity of data as an opportunity to not only describe the world but strategically intervene in it. Is it possible to create specific real-world outcomes by modifying our data streams? Can we intentionally produce data to interact with an algorithmic environment that is opaque, elusive and at the same time all-encompassing?
In this book, the authors and artists explore the production of unreal data as acts of resistance and opposition, and as attempts to carve out small and often temporary spaces of agency and autonomy when faced with systems that seem to leave little room for imagination and choice.
The book, published by Aksioma in late 2024, includes texts by Régine Debatty, Xiaowei R. Wang, Günseli Yalçınkaya, Milia Xin Bi and Thomas Spies, artworks by Simon Weckert and Total Refusal, and a collaborative project by Selena Savić, Gordan Savičić and !Mediengruppe Bitnik.
Event organised in collaboration with Aksioma - Institute of Contemporary Art, Ljubljana.
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!Mediengruppe Bitnik (read: the not Mediengruppe Bitnik) are contemporary artists working on, and with, the internet. Their practice expands from the digital to affect physical spaces, often intentionally applying loss of control to challenge established structures and mechanisms. In the past, they have been known to subvert surveillance cameras, bug an opera house to broadcast its performances to people at home, send a parcel containing a camera to Julian Assange and physically glitch a building. In 2014, they sent a bot called Random Darknet Shopper on a three-month shopping spree in the darknets where it randomly bought items like keys, cigarettes, trainers and Ecstasy, and had them sent directly to the gallery space. !Mediengruppe Bitnik’s works are shown internationally, and the group has received various awards including the Swiss Art Award, the PAX Art Award and the Golden Cube from Dokfest Kassel. https://bitnik.org
Felix Stalder is a professor teaching Digital Culture at the Zürich University of the Arts. His work focuses on the intersection of cultural, political, technological and ecological dynamics, especially new modes of commons-based production, copyright, datafication, surveillance, and transformation of subjectivity and nature. He also works as a cultural producer: he’s a moderator of the mailing list <nettime>, a crucial nexus of critical net culture, and a member of the World Information Institute and the Technopolitics Working Group, both based in Vienna. He is the author/editor of numerous books, including Kultur der Digitalität/Digital Condition (Suhrkamp, 2016/Polity Press, 2018), Aesthetics of the Commons (Diaphanes, 2021) and Digital Unconscious (Autonomedia, 2021). http://felix.openflows.com
