Creamcake announces 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?

Creamcake is seeking academic papers, practice-based reflections; presentation, panel and workshop ideas; and art and music performance contributions related but not limited to:

•  The history of surveillance practices and technologies: how can studying the past contribute to contextualizing the present?
•  What are the social consequences of mass surveillance, classification, algorithmic takeovers and cybernetic control, and how does it affect the way we act as individuals, citizens, and populations?
•  How are categories, such as race, gender, or class, being (re)produced through systems of surveillance?
•  Who is considered a legitimate subject, who is rejected as “dirty data”, and who produces “dirty data” in turn as a way of resisting?
•  How do surveillance regimes use biometric data collection, facial-recognition technologies, full-body scanners etc. to manipulate, monitor and spy on the movements and behaviors of a population?
•  What new terrains and spaces (such as borderlands, environmental zones of toxicity or the dark net) are established, observed or visualized through surveillance technologies?
•  Changes in data visualization through processes of filtering, decryption or pattern recognition: how can data produced and transmitted by machines be perceived by human and non-human bodies, and vice versa?
•  What are possible strategies of resistance, subversion and queering in a contemporary moment obsessed with constant online-communication and self-tracking?
•  How do we facilitate our own surveillance of one another? Stalking, communication and optimization as learned social behaviors from our daily use of interactive computer-mediated technologies, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and beyond.

How to apply via form:

•  Summarize your practice (200 words max. in English or German)
•  What do you wish to explore during the 3rd “<Interrupted = “Cyfem and Queer>”? (200 words max. in English or German)
•  What tools or support do you need to present your work?
•  Provide us with a short bio (required) and supporting documentation (optional) of your work (200 words max. in English or German)
•  Tell us your contact details, location and gender pronouns

Creamcake encourages women, queer, trans and gender non-conforming people, and people of color to apply, as well as applications from emerging artists and researchers.

Accepted applicants will be invited to present their project or research on August 10 at OHM and aquarium in Berlin. Creamcake will endeavour to cover food and accommodation as much as possible and will contribute with a budget to your travel expenses. Resources for travel are limited but Creamcake is also open to connecting online.

Deadline: July 20th, 2019

For further informations and questions, please contact: interrupted@creamcake.de

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interrupted.creamcake.de