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The Influencers

The Influencers 2018

Unconventional Art, Guerrilla Communication, Radical Entertainment

Festivals

The CCCB presents year 14 of The Influencers, a festival that ventures into the lesser known territories of contemporary art, guerrilla communication and the new digital cultures. Talks, screenings, workshops.

Popular anti-censorship creativity in China, 3D objects and monuments destroyed by ISIS, mysteries of the invisible infrastructure of the network and other cultural earthquakes of the post-Internet era.

The 2018 edition of The Influencers is framed within the European project The New Networked Normal (NNN), co-funded by the European Union’s Creative Europe and made up of the CCCB, the festival Abandon Normal Devices (Manchester), the festival Transmediale (Berlin) and art centre and electronic cultures festival STRP (Eindhoven). The project, which will last until July 2019, has the aim of exploring and debating about art, technology and citizenship in the Internet era.

Thursday 25 October

19.00 – 21.00. Opening Session

Geocinema. Geocinema considers planetary-scale sensory networks -cell phones, surveillance cameras, satellites, geosensors- as a vastly distributed cinematic apparatus. Their "stitching" processes are used for imperial observation, surveillance, verification and tracking.

An Xiao Mina. An Xiao Mina writes about the global internet and decentralized creativity (a.k.a. memes!). Within these broad interests, she looks especially closely at language barriers, social movements, image culture and futures of hardware with a special focus on Chinese cultural, political and technological specificity.


Friday 26 October

18.30

Screening: Contra-Internet: Jubilee 2033 by Zach Blas (2018, UK, 29 min, OV). Inspired by Derek Jarman’s 1978 queer punk film Jubilee, Jubilee 2033 follows author Ayn Rand and members of her Collective, including economist Alan Greenspan, on an acid trip in 1955. Guided by an artificial intelligence named Azuma, they are transported to a dystopian future Silicon Valley.

19.00 – 21.00. Conferences

Omsk Social Club. Omsk Social Club uses Live Action Role Play (LARP) and Real Game Play (RGP) to induce states that could potentially be fiction or a yet unlived reality for the players. Omsk’s RGPs examine virtual egos and popular experiences creating hybrids of modern day culture alongside unique personal experiences, within landscapes such as rave culture, survivalism, positive trolling, algorithmic strategies and decentralized cryptocurrency.

Femke Herregraven. She explores the new material bases, geographies and value systems carved out by contemporary financial technologies and infrastructures. Based on personal research and field trips, her investigations materialize in the shape of drawings, prints, sculptures, games, video and installations which zoom in on the relationship between financial value, geological instability, biological and technological self-organising systems.

Katja Novitskova. In the last few years Katja Novitskova emerged as one of the most innovative visual artists in the so-called "post-internet" scene. After the release of the famous Post Internet Survival Guide Novitskova started to investigate the production of imagery by other agents. The images captured by scanners, cameras and satellites -from laboratory organisms to the flows generated by the image processing algorithms- make into eerily beautiful sculptures entangled in a weed of wires.

Saturday 27 October

11.00 – 14.00

Barcelona Internet Tour. A journey through anodyne geographies which are nonetheless transcendental to the contemporary subject. Attendees will board a bus and - converted into body packets - will visit specific locations where our messages, photos and other deeply subjective materials make into zeros and ones. A project by Mario Santamaría co-produced by The Influencers. With registration.

15.00 – 18.00

Self-Contained. Swarm, Beaker, Chain. Workshop with PWR Studio. Self-Contained is a workshop about decentralised online publishing for artists, future designers, visionary publishers, grassroots activists, and advocates of a truly social network. It is led by PWR, a Berlin-based art and design studio whose works are practical investigations into systems for communication and information storage, from Cloud to Dirt. With registration. Venue: CCCB’s Aula 2.

16.00 - 19.00

Cryptorave Workshop. Have you already mined your Cryptorave ticket? Then join the workshop with your unique identity and unlock further immersive tactics for Real Game Play. Omsk Social Club will lead you through identity building strategies, Crypto-world building and an open discourse on Lucidity as Direct Action. This workshop will aid your experience during Cryptorave #7.

16.30 - 18.00

Automated Control Wars. Game/workshop. A project by CCCB Educació in collaboration with the Biennial of Though Ciutat Oberta.

17.00

Screening: National Bird by Sonia Kennebeck (2016, USA, 92 min, OV).

18.30 – 19.00

Oversharers Anonymous. Collective game.

19.00 – 21.30. Conferences

Cathy O'Neil. What can a non-academic mathematician and former hedge fund quantitative expert do that makes the world a better place? Cathy O’Neil is a writer, blogger, and consultant that decided to expose that, increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models. And not only the models being used today are opaque, unregulated, and incontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination.

Ingrid Burrington. Ingrid Burrington writes, makes maps, and tells jokes about places, politics, and the weird feelings people have about both. Which is to say that she thinks a lot about power, given that maps and jokes are tremendous instruments for exercising, explaining, and challenging power. She pays a great deal of attention to things that don’t really seem that interesting at first glance, such as satellite imagery, undersea cables, non-descript data storage facilities, Internet domain names auctions, or even prison inmates email system.

Morehshin Allahyari. Born and raised in Iran and currently based in New York, Morehshin Allahyari thinks about technology as a philosophical toolset to reflect on forms of Digital Colonialism and as poetic means to document our personal and collective lives struggles in the 21st century. She is the co-author of The 3D Additivist Cookbook and her modelled, 3D-printed sculptural reconstructions of ancient artefacts destroyed by ISIS (“Material Speculation: ISIS”) have received widespread curatorial and press attention worldwide.

 

From 23.23 on

Cryptorave. Real play game. Over the last few years we have seen an increased drive within the autonomous dance scene, collectively organising parties via the blockchain – Cryptoraves. These communities use mining as a ticket entry point via friend2friend networks. Over the years this has produced a tight knit community and spawned various other cells and node projects. To be part of it, enter the specific website and start mining! Venue: undisclosed location.

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