Can you try disconnecting ?
What’s the average cost of a package?
How can we scale distributed intelligence without reaffirming any technocratic and elitist vision?
Does everybody need the newest, bestest appliance, or is a phone that can make a phone call what you really need?
So what does it mean to think at scale and organize with intimacy?
To what extent is optimization part of the way we have designed software and computation to work?
Is this a real geographical location?
What happens when you realize the nature of the catastrophe which you have suffered and the nature of the catastrophe which you have escaped?
Do we think of this as nature?
What does the digital feel like when we encounter the infrastructures that sustain it? What happens when the invisible systems of computation, cooling, energy, and extraction become part of our physical environment? What if we cool bodies instead of servers?
The first session of the School of Algorithmic Solidarity focuses on the materialities of digital infrastructures. Former server ventilators, once used to cool the servers of a platform-economy company, become the main material of a deprivation-room-like environment. Out-of-service cooling machines can be reprogrammed for burnt-out, exhausted bodies. Surrounded by technological leftovers, participants are invited to experience and navigate an environment shaped by the physical conditions of digital economies.
Over several months of research in the transmediale archive, eeefff traced questions that have remained unresolved, suspended, or continue to resonate today, or acquire different meanings when displaced into the present. During the session, these archival materials encounter another kind of leftover (obsolete machines and technological remains) are used as operational prompts, repurposing historical questions as tools for bodily action rather than objects of historical reflection. Through movement, sensation, and experimentation, the session asks how our bodies are already trained by digital environments and what other ways of sensing and acting might still be possible.
Please note that this session will be documented on video. By registering, participants should be aware that documentation produced during the session may be used as part of a subsequent artistic installation and/or presented in the context of the project and its future public presentations.
