Practices of digital self-organization between surveillance and autonomy.
Digital media are ordinary tools. Emailing, tweeting, facebooking, googling, blogging, or just receiving are common everyday routines. Occasionally they help organizing activism and protest. And for some they are simply vital for survival. For refugees for example, who plan their escape routes via digital maps, arrange money transfers by crypted messages, contact their families by skype. Smartphones, within this framework, are no status symbols, but rather the technical miniaturizations of migration.
At the same time smartphones and tablets are media of communitisation, what makes securing internet access and data sovereignty mandatory. The discussion on the right to digital invisibility and integrity becomes even more importance against the background of precarious positioning. The European digital data bank Eurodac registers and administrates fingerprints of asylum seekers and „illegalized“. Brigitta Kuster will touch upon the details of smart borders and the right to (digital) freedom to mobility in her talk on June, 7th.
The more practical part of the event tries to pursue differing realities on June, 8th. While refugees are confronted with governmental persecution, queer-feminist activists deal with restrictions of their spaces to think, meet and communicate. How can we, by attempting to refuse those policies, enter into a dialogue and exchange on spaces of digital self-organization, on spaces below the radar? Which tactics do we have to un/learn and creatively test due to handling digital media policies?
An event of the Department for Media Theories (Katrin Köppert) and Time-based Media (Gitti Vasicek), University of Arts and Design Linz
In cooperation with: servus.at, FIFTITU%, Feminismus & Krawall
Within framework of the initiative DE_colonize uni_VERSITY
Within framework of the seminar: Revenge Porn, Doxing, Hate Speech. Netzpolitische ‚Ereignisse’ und feministische Interventionen, Francesca Schmidt
Registration to the workshops: katrin.koeppert@ufg.at (please indicate the workshop)