ARTEFACTS OF RESISTANCE

Artefacts of Resistance: Creating Archives of Transnational Protest Movements

How can protestors balance their need for visibility and anonymity? This was one of the central questions of Artefacts of Resistance, an interdisciplinary project that brought together urban geographers and artists around some significant recent protests in India.
The concept costume by Manu Luksch addresses the protestors’ dilemma by transforming through movement [more info…]

Another response is the open-access media archive designed by Mukul Patel, which gathers audio interviews and other materials obtained through fieldwork at protest sites across India; data are translated, transcribed and tagged before being uploaded. It is intended be a secure database for resistance movements, a research tool to articulate new relationships within the data (by accommodating rich, searchable metadata), and serve as a repository of narratives. Through its use of open protocols, the archive offers protestors a secure alternative to proprietary social media platforms. [see video documentation below]

Presentation schedule: check What’s On listings

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Artefacts of Resistance: Creating Archives of Transnational Protest Movements is a collaboration between Srilata Sircar of King’s College London’s King’s India Institute and Manu Luksch as part of the King’s College London x Somerset House Studios Programme
in collaboration with Ufaque Paiker, Ashoka University; Mukul Patel, emergence.is; Raktim Ray, UCL.

Archival materials are drawn from the project Transnational Infrastructures of Resistance: From Empire to Occupation funded by the Antipode Right to the Discipline grant.
The team has secured support from the AHRC Imagining Futures fund 2023 to further develop the project.

ARTEFACTS OF RESISTANCE

Balancing visibility and anonymity is a central concern of Artefacts of Resistance, an interdisciplinary research and design project that brings together urban geographers and intermedia artists to document and elaborate the solidarity networks and infrastructure that grow at sites of mass protest. A concept costume that transforms through movement is one public-facing aspect of the project, which at its foundations is an open-access media archive documenting contemporary that builds on transnational solidarity networks [read more…]

cloudBloomer

cloudBloomer is a short piece of C++ code that uses openFrameworks to manipulate pointcloud data. It is the result of Jack Wolf and Manu Luksch’s collaborative search for visual metaphors to express the notions of the quantified self and algorithmically-managed space.
Coded by Federico Foderaro and Mukul Patel.

Free download: [cloudBloomer userManual] [installer]

cloudBloomer is responsible for the ‘visual data dust’ FX of the installation artworks Third Quarterly Report and The Empty Quarter, award-winning short film Algo-Rhythm, and the music promos The Devil Has a Hold on the Land (Band of Holy Joy) and Our Light (Traumpatrouille).

cloudBloomer

C++ script using openFrameworks, no coding skills required) to render video output of pointcloud manipulations [code & manual]

HEAR/HERE TO SEE

A free (and ad-free) iPhone app that guides participants on a 30-minute walk around Westminster, London, revealing the ubiquitous use of algorithmic decision making in public space and by government and the private sector. [read more]

JARGON ANALYTICS

JARGON ANALYTICS is a tool to highlight and question keywords associated with predictive infrastructures. By installing the JARGON ANALYTICS Chrome PlugIn, webpages are analyzed for jargon, which is consequently tagged. When scrolled over, tagged content is expanded and users are presented with provocative questions and hyperlinks to the PREDICTIVE CITY glossary. [read more]

LIBERTIES REWIRED

A tech-info-bazaar at Volksbühne Berlin exploring responses to the challenges faced in our increasingly algorithmically-managed society

RECLAIMING THE ‘SMART’ STREET

How do you imagine the street of the future? Where does AI feature – and where shouldn’t it feature – in this future? The ‘smart’ street and its users harbour massive amounts of data and computation (‘AI’) that is deployed by public and private entities for multiple purposes in often opaque ways. We invite you to this workshop at Science Gallery London, Tue 21 May 2024 to reclaim the street as a site that is citizen-centred – and to rethink the concepts of ‘smart’ and ‘intelligent’. [further reading]

THE ART OF VOTING

Harvie Branscomb is an independent monitor, activist and expert of voting procedures in the USA, and has analysed and developed recommendations and campaigned for fair and secure voting for more than two decades. In this video interview, Harvie discusses manual, mechanical, electronic and hybrid voting systems, and his ideas for reform. [read more]

A WORD A WEEK