Timeline

Call for Registration: Challenge Artificial Intelligence!

Join the workshops at the AMBIENT REVOLTS conference! Register by October 20!

Till 20 Oct 2018

Challenge Artificial Intelligence!
Join the workshops at the AMBIENT REVOLTS conference! Register by October 20!

Recoding Populism?
Challenging the Capitalocene
Involuntary Community
Unlearning Learning
Hacking the Urban Backend

The growing interconnectedness of everyone and everything is transforming our world into an unprecedented techno-social environment. The boundaries between atmosphere and politics are being suspended; already, tiny ruptures can cause cascade-like repercussions – think of cyber-attacks or stock market crashes, right-wing resentment or hashtag-based protest. Such ambient revolts are increasingly driven by artificial intelligence (AI) – involving human interaction but seemingly beyond human oversight. Set against this backdrop, the conference poses the questions: What are the techno-social logics of both regressive and repressive tendencies? What are emancipatory movements up against? What potential do micro-political acts have in day-to-day life? What regulations of automated systems at the macro level will enable democracy to emerge in the age of AI? The Berliner Gazette conference will explore these questions in the context of performances, lectures and workshops. The 18th edition of this annual Berliner Gazette event will be held for the second time in collaboration with the ZK/U – Center for Art and Urbanistics and will take place on November 7-10, 2018.

Register + join workshops! 
The conference workshops will bring together more than 100 activists from all over the world. The BG will invite key actors from the international scene to form the core of the five workshop tracks, and will issue an open call for the general public to register. 

This open call for registration targets (up-and-coming) hackers, journalists, activists and researchers. A limited number of participants is able to register by contacting the following email: [email protected] Deadline: October 20. Registration fee: 50 Euro, incl. catering. Please note: As the five workshops will be running in parallel,  everyone is invited to commit to a single track. On November 8-10, the workshops will take place from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The conference hosts will provide catering throughout the entire conference, including a warm lunch. A series of guided city walks is planned for lunch breaks!

To tackle the key issues of the conference, five parallel workshop tracks will offer five different approaches for a pragmatic critique of citizenship as a framework for political participation, addressing the following issues: “Recoding Populism?”, “Challenging the Capitalocene”, “Involuntary Community”, “Unlearning Learning”, “Hacking the Urban Backend”.

The workshop groups will communicate before the conference in order to flesh out the workshop design collaboratively. Led by experienced group leaders, participants will be invited to come up with possible answers to the questions outlined in this project paper. The results will be made available as online resources by Berliner Gazette: they may include position papers, multimedia storytelling projects and collections of ideas.

Workshop Tracks
“Recoding Populism?”
Right-wing populism (and populism in general) thrives on social media, which amplifies the voices of the extremist few rather than the voices of the many. Can the top-down logics of demagogy be reversed or even transgressed for democratic ends? This workshop tackles the rise of right-wing populism in the context of social media and explores the potential of proto-populist bottom-up approaches such as liquid democracy.

“Challenging the Capitalocene”
Capitalism has turned most of its operations into a quasi-automated matter. If algorithms operate according to discriminatory categories (race, ethnicity, gender, etc.), then how does discrimination play out in capitalism's automated processes? What are strategies against dehumanization? This workshop tackles the connex of automation, dehumanization and discrimination in AI-driven capitalism.

“Involuntary Community”
Under the conditions of all-encompassing interconnectedness, right-wing populist moods can spread in a quasi-contagious fashion. What role do system errors, glitches and other (planned or unplanned) disruptions play in this context? Can the surprise element of unforeseen (dis-)connectedness gain a political valence? This workshop explores new potentials for emerging solidarity and community.

“Unlearning Learning”
Self-learning systems define our age, thereby changing also the domain of learning. AI-driven social media are coming to provide pseudo-classrooms. Meanwhile traditional media are losing their authority as ‘educational institutions’. What is the present and future of pedagogy? What kind of unlearning needs to be done vis-à-vis self-learning systems? This workshops explores the politics of (un-)learning in the context of AI and self-learning systems. 

“Hacking the Urban Backend”
In today’s smart city the urbanite is challenged to negotiate her/his entanglement with the programmed environment. What does this mean for political action? Is public space still available or is the arena of political intervention being relocated to the invisibilized backend of the city? This workshop politicizes the rise of the smart city and searches for means of appropriation.

AMBIENT REVOLTS is the 18th annual conference of the Berliner Gazette. This project is a cooperation cooperation with ZK/U – Center for Art and Urbanistics, funded by the German Federal Agency for Civic Education/ bpb, Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

Contact us: [email protected]