Creamcake is pleased to announce the 3rd “<Interrupted = “Cyfem and Queer>” symposium, taking place at Berlin’s OHM and aquarium on August 10.
The Berlin-based experimental music and art platform’s day and night-long program of conversations, panels, lectures and performances this time explores the contemporary reality of data control, surveillance and automation. Earlier events moved from discussing the status quo of past and present cyberfeminist thought, practices and politics to focussing on the biotechnological and political management of bodies, sex and gender through a cyber/technofeminist lens. The 3rd “<Interrupted = “Cyfem and Queer>” symposium takes a deep dive into the way technologies and software applications operate, process, establish, cross or contest boundaries.
By monitoring our movements via smartphones and social media, a historically unprecedented and ever-growing archive of public information exists, profiling people in an attempt to predict future choices and behaviors. These developments threaten free speech, political freedom and the right to privacy. In contemplating new and utopian ways of what pioneer cyberfeminist Donna Haraway calls, “living and dying well together on terra”, we are facing the difficult task of protecting ourselves from being subsumed by data and surveillance. By looking to defend freedom of expression, while at the same time protecting the rights of marginalized groups within heteronormative, white supremacist societies, the 3rd “<Interrupted = “Cyfem and Queer>” asks, among other things:
- How are categories, such as race, gender, or class, being (re)produced through systems of surveillance?
- What are possible strategies of resistance, subversion and queering in a contemporary moment obsessed with constant online-communication and self-tracking?
- How can tracking and monitoring of bodies be deployed for our own purposes? What does it mean to be in constant intra-action with technologies above, below and within us, and how can these entanglements employ utopian political thinking and practice?
- What does a queer, cyberfeminist and digital community look like in the 21st century, and how can we reclaim the knowledge produced by surveillance technologies in order to form new collectivities and response-abilities?
The “<Interrupted = “Cyfem and Queer>” series is dedicated to broadening the discourse around (embodied) technologies, digital space, and cyborgian experience. A place for reflection and action at the intersection of technology, the internet, gender and sexuality, the event aims to formulate strategies for queering the blurred line between science, music and art. Discussion focusses on trans- and interdisciplinary approaches to feminist ideas and concepts, and developing reading, writing, thinking, performing and sounding practices, as well as other political work, in order to analyze contemporary thought on nature/culture and technology.
