Hello everybody. A warm welcome to our friend Nicolas Magret from this innovation.org.

They are making contemporary art with research and hacking to question the positive ideology for technology to stimulate a post-growth technology narrative.

So I'm quite interested and give him a warm welcome. Hello everyone. How does it work? Can you hear me?

Hello. So I'm Nicolas Magret and together with Maria Wyskowska we initiated this innovation.org collective. And our collective intend to reveal and challenge the dominant ideology of technological innovation and to circulate alternative narratives. So I will show you a selection of projects and mainly it's a few projects selected to resonate with the CCC and the topics here.

So we do basically curation. So we organize a festival and we curate art spaces and different series of projects around basically the rhetoric of technological innovation and the effect of this dominant ideology on society.

We also work on publication and books. I will get back to that in a minute. And we do artworks and site-specific projects that I will present in the second half of this talk.

So the first part will be focusing on our curatorial practices around this idea of counter-narratives on technological innovation. So I will introduce three works. The first one is the pirate book. It's a book we started to compile in 2014.

It's a combination of stories about sharing and distributing curatorial content outside the boundaries of local economies, politics, laws, religions and so on. So with this work we try to explore the notions such as the piracy of necessity, the idea of new originals.

And I think it's interesting to go back to this project, to come back to this project in the context of the Anthropocene and the potential imminent collapse. Because I think there is a need for non-techno solutionist and non-techno positivist stories at the moment.

And somehow a need to develop post-growth narratives. So we will see what we can learn from the following examples taken from the book. Around concerns like repair, care, maintenance and creative appropriation.

So the first excerpt from the book I would like to focus on is an example from Mexico given by our contributor, Yotay Schiardo. And basically it focuses on the stories of craftsmen that works for improving the practices of street city vendors in Mexico.

So I will play a quick excerpt of it. Yes, as one of the most fantastic examples here in the city of Garros, I would like to give you an example of how I grew up in the city of Garros.

This inspiration comes from people who are working in the city of Garros, people who travel in the metro, who I've been looking for. So here you can see the movement of the buildings here in Mexico,

what is in the system, the transport, what is in the metro. So it is our duty today to work in a way that is more practical, more passive. I feel very good to be here in all of the cities, to see the streets, and to hear the music.

Yes, we are going to play a little bit of volume, we are going to sing a little bit. I feel very good to be here in all of the cities,

in this location, through the city, to hear the music in normal form, to hear the music that contains so many instruments. So in the book we cover multiple stories in this sort, we just focus on a couple of those.

The second one is based in Seil, it's a contribution by Christopher Kirkley, and he is presenting basically how a big part of music distribution in Seil is done through copies between dumb phones using Bluetooth.

So it's a way somehow to create a circulation of contents by nearest neighbor dynamics, basically. And the third example I would like just to introduce is El Paquete Seminal, basically it's in the context of Cuban lack of fast internet,

or internet at all. Basically, El Paquete Seminal is a sort of substitute to the internet in the form of a package. It's an hard drive, as you can see here, and this hard drive also circulates one copy at a time.

And it's basically a compilation of all the contents that is considered to be missing for people. So you can see on this hard drive TV shows, books, movies, music, and all the sorts of content you could expect

from an internet browsing experience. So you can find this book online for free, and we cover many other stories, but tonight I will just present those and connect with this last contribution by Clément Renaud.

He did long-term, six years of research in China, and he shared with us this story about Shanghai technology production. It's basically something between piracy and hybridization in Chinese manufacturing,

and I will focus on this one a little bit more. So in his article, Clément Renaud described a specific local tech innovation named Shanghai. The Shanghai culture is a mix of piracy, DIY, and anti-establishment. It literally means a mountain fortress,

and it comes from a novel from the 13th century that tells the story of a group of outlaws that hides in the mountain to be outside the system and outside the regulation of the state, basically.

So in a more recent context, Shanghai refers basically to manufacturing. It emerged in the 50s, for instance in Hong Kong, to describe small-scale factories that were producing cheap, low-quality items.

And mainly counterfeit products of famous brands like Gucci or Nike, and they sold those products on markets that would not buy the fancy, expensive originals. And as electronic manufacturing migrated to Shenzhen in the early 2000s,

this informal network of Shanghai production found the perfect product in the mobile phone. So our first acquisition in this collection was basically the Ghana phone, and we've been very intrigued by this device.

So basically this device has not been conceived for its superficial design, but it's been conceived to fill a gap, a need, or a niche market. So this phone is a power bank,

basically to fill the gap of the frequent power cuts in Ghana. So it has a battery that can last for a week. You can also charge other devices with it, recharge a computer, another phone. You can also use it as a light. So that's why you have a hook to connect it on the ceiling.

And basically it's a whole package of functions and properties that were designed specifically for a local market that no any brands were paying attention at.

So we were very interested by this track of research, and we wanted to dig some more. So we started with a simple protocol. We started to collect hybrid phones that were combining multiple functions and designed for those niche markets all over the place,

mainly in the global south, but not only, you will see. So you can find a lot of fancy and weird devices that I will show. And those devices, we've been collecting them in markets in Shenzhen, like Huaqiangbei, and also online, like on Taobao or AliExpress, and so on.

So one of the reasons that we wanted to focus our research on mobile phones, because Shenzhen production is not only about mobile. It's about every kind of technology, I would say. But we kind of wanted to stick to one sort of device to have this continuity over 20 years,

and also because somehow a huge contrast could be seen through the mobile phone between sort of a north hemisphere culture, or somehow this standardized culture of the black rectangle we all have in our pockets here,

and this kind of non-normalized technological imaginaries that were emerging there. And somehow it reminds us, I think, that other technological possibilities always exist beyond the ultra-normalized industry.

So I will dig into a few of those. So each of those examples, I think, tell a specific story and reveal specific uses and cultures. So here you can see a lighter phone. So it's basically a phone that does cigarette lighter.

This one is, I would say, a walking cigarette pack that also includes a mobile phone, or perhaps the other way around.

And this one is a razor phone. So it's a phone that includes a walking shaver.

So since 2015, we've been collecting about hundreds of those hybrid phones, and I will zoom into a few of very interesting specimens and stories.

So here you can see the card phone. It's the size of a credit card. It used to be the cheapest on the market. It cost about $12, and it's made of a single board. So basically it can be very easily replicated and optimized, modified, and so on.

So that's why it's been called the Gongai phone, which means open source. And you can find this board in multiple versions in the later generation of phones. I will present in a minute.

So this one is called the Buddha phone. It's been designed as a digital alternative for Buddhist prayers and related religious activities.

So basically it replicates, for instance, the ritual components like the burning of incense, purification rites, meditative music, and more. So all of those features are included in basically the UX of the phone.

So this is the sound system phone. It's been designed for mainly the elderly people.

So one of the favorite activities of the elderly in China is group dancing on Public Square in the evenings. And this specific phone has been designed for this purpose. So it comes with several gigabytes of old-fashioned communist songs

that Chinese pensioners are particularly keen on. It has huge buttons. I mean, it's really designed for elderly. So the device is like that size. And there is also a support to stand in front of the dancers and a powerful light torch to ensure a smooth return home after the dance.

You can't take something that might not be there because if you do, they're going to notice it different. I'd say that there's probably 75% of prisoners have phones in jail.

I'd take that in on my person and places where it wouldn't get searched. The front of your trousers, in your bra. So this one is the prisoner phone, or it's also called Beat the Boss.

The Boss is a device for scanning prisoners. So actually it started on the market as the smallest phone on the market. But for some reason it became popular among prisoners, mainly in the UK, because of its small size, it's the size of a finger. And because of the fact also it's composed of 99% of plastic.

So it's barely detectable during the checks in prisons. And you can easily smuggle it inside food, inside body, obviously, but also in weird ways like inside using drones, carrier, pigeons, rats, and so on.

So we tried to exhibit all these collections of weird devices in their natural habitat, in a way. So we built a reproduction of a street market kiosk, where we basically showcased this collection of hybrid phones. And together with that we have a couple of video documentaries, like this one,

that kind of tell the larger Shanghai culture, and focus on Chinese ecosystem of technological device, production and distribution. So that's how it looks when it's shown.

Yeah, that's it for this one. And the last collateral project I'd like to introduce is a work in progress. It's called the Museum of Failures. And I will start with a quote by Paul Virilio. This acknowledgement of powerlessness before the upsurge of unexpected catastrophic events

forces us to reverse the usual trend which exposes us to accidents and inaugurate a new kind of museology and museography, one which consists in exposing or exhibiting the accident, all accidents, from the most common place to the most tragic,

from natural catastrophes to industrial and scientific disasters, including also the kind that is too often neglected, the happy accident, the stroke of luck, the coup de foudre or even the coup de grace. So as you could guess with this quote,

this project is about uncovering and compiling counter narratives about the history of technological innovation. And our project is basically to compile those underrepresented stories that can help us to disrupt the dominant positivist discourse on innovation

and help us maybe to think about technology in a post-growth era. The project takes the shape of workshops, conferences, events, and we share it as a database and exhibitions. So this symbolic museum is structured into floors.

They go in negative numbers. They are somehow the underground counterparts of usual technological museum. So each floor is a potential sort of entry or perspective on the museum, sorted by topics.

So you have like intentional failures, fiction and dystopias, risk and disasters, unexpected outcomes, and so on. So the first part of this future book is a collection of aborted projects, flops, errors,

malfunctions, business failures, ethical rejections, disasters, and that somehow reflect the outlines of our society from a historical, symbolic, poetic, and cultural point of view. The second part of this book, though, will be based on interviews and contributions, and we are open to proposals.

So if you have stories or research on post-growth technological innovation and counter narratives on technological innovation, you're welcome to submit. Okay, so the second part of this talk will be about our artworks, a specific selection to resonate with the CCC as well,

and we grouped it into this idea of psychoanalysis of the hyper-connected era. So the first artwork I will introduce is the pirate cinema. Basically, the copy culture got mainstream with BitTorrent and the Pirate Bay in the early 2000s,

and it became an essential part of culture for the world generation. At the same time as this process, since the early days of peer-to-peer, it coexisted with an intense level of surveillance. So this surveillance was conducted by universities, corporations, states,

sometimes for a statistical purpose, just to know how much is consumed from different types of contents and so on, and most of the time for copyright infringement. And we got really interested in how we could disrupt those systems

of network surveillance, basically, and use it to reveal the dynamics and the materiality of peer-to-peer file sharing, so basically to expose the materiality of this process and the geographical dynamics of the content that were consumed and shared.

So I will show a few excerpts of this project.

So we programmed the server to use BitTorrent and to synchronize every morning with the top 100 videos of the Pirate Bay. So it's sort of a man-in-the-middle attack where we see what people are sharing through our server. So it's a way to view the global dynamics through one node of the BitTorrent network.

As you can see in the video, it also reveals the user IP address and the countries, and somehow it's a way to depict the geographical dynamics of media sharing and consumptions.

The next project I'd like to introduce, following this idea of containerities, it's a series about illicit content. It's called Blacklist. So we got interested in basically who controls and decides what should be visible

or not online, or what should be blocked or not. And all those lists are built and used. And somehow, how maybe it can be something that reveals the value system we live in. So there are numerous blacklists you can subscribe to,

more or less efficient and up-to-date. Squid Blacklist, Shallalist, Cisco, and so on. And somehow that reminds us literally of the index of forbidden books that used to exist in libraries around the globe. It was a list basically of publications considered heretical, immoral, or anti-clerical.

And in an internal blacklist nowadays, you have pretty much the same. So addresses that can be blocked. They are organized into categories, as you can see here. And as a sysadmin, you can decide what type of content you want to block.

So such lists are used by universities, towns, airports, companies, individuals, and so on. And it helps you basically to restrict the access to specific content on your network. So you have categories like copyright, porn, pharmacy, and so on.

And you can see weird stuff, like feminist, for instance. And I guess it reveals the for-profit nature of this list and the fact that anything can be requested if enough clients are asking for it. So this work took the shape of a sort of an encyclopedia in 13 volumes of 666 pages.

It's basically an encyclopedia of illicit and filtered sites. And it is structured like an old phone book. It's a sort of ready-made that reveals the moral sort of portraits or framework of the web.

Blacklists is a directory of the prohibitions of the Internet deployed in the form of an encyclopedia in 13 volumes of 666 pages each. It is an extensive collection of restricted websites used for the automatic filtering of traffic considered illicit or licentious.

Just like the intent of forbidden libraries, the blacklists project points out the sidelining of online content that could be dangerous for the very survival of the system. With around 2 million websites extracted from commercial content control softwares,

this collection reveals a cultural, social, and ideological model of our society through what has been deemed unfit for consultation by specific groups and institutions around the globe.

So I guess you get the idea. All right, so this next work is a predictive adbot, and I will need to contextualize a bit. So basically, we live in the era of hyperconnectivity, and the time we spend on the phone and social media has radically increased over the last 10 years.

This has a strong effect on us. Online news and communication tends to monopolize a lot of our attention, and it does have a growing influence on our types of concerns and priorities. So we know about effects like filter bubbles, media echo chambers,

and to some extent, the influence of social media and hyperconnection tends towards a sort of uniformization, not only of our concerns, but also somehow of our innovation and creativity. And it tends towards a higher chance of predictability of our behaviors.

So basically standing from the art field, we started to notice somehow similar patterns amongst the artists around us. So we spotted numerous similar imaginaries, similar trends in interest groups, and we started to observe similar topics, similar ideas,

and even similar ways of realizing artworks and answering to ideas and concerns. So at some point, we were like, do we really need artists to simply follow the trends, and do we need artists to just illustrate the latest technological buzz? Maybe no.

So that's where the project started with this simple question, and we decided to automatize the process of mainstream creativity, we could say, and to push it toward sort of the absurd. So to do that, we created a bot, and this bot basically is subscribed to hundreds of RSS feeds.

That's the sort of feeds we will get ourselves on our Twitter feed, you know? So we basically subscribed the bot to the same. Then the bot is using some Python library to try to identify the most significant keyword in the headlines,

and those keywords are stored, and then we organized using tracery in a sort of generative poetry to create potential concepts for artworks. And those concepts are reposted on Twitter and different places to basically create a new, weird inspiration machine.

That's what you will see now.

These behaviors are being partitioned in filter bubbles, while the few massively reposted topics tend to monopolize most of the available attention. Such insular echo chambers strongly affect ways of thinking,

resulting in increasingly homogeneous imaginaries within groups of like-minded people. Predictive art bot caricatures the predictability of media-influenced artistic concepts by automating and skirting the human creative process. But beyond mere automation, it aims to stimulate unbridled, counterintuitive and even disconcerting associations of ideas.

To do so, it continually monitors emerging trends among the most influential news sources in fields as heterogeneous as politics, environment, innovation, culture, activism, or health.

On this basis, it identifies and combines keywords to generate concepts of artworks in a fully automated way, ranging from unreasonable to prophetic through absurd. Each prediction becomes a thought experiment waiting to be incubated, misused or appropriated by a human host.

OK, and we also commissioned a few artists to interpret and realize those projects a few times. OK, the last project for tonight, I see that it's almost time for me. So the last project is a map, and it's a work in progress for a future long-term project.

And basically it focuses on the fact that the web has become one of the most impactful vehicles for the propagation of ideas and culture. Hyperconnectivity did intensify the rise of online politics and made it way easier to manipulate public opinions.

I mean, this happened at a sort of unprecedented scale. So, you know, we've seen the emergence of political bots, fake accounts, troll farms, and so on. But today I will focus on the cultural aspect of this battleground.

So one of the important aspects of online culture wars that we were trying to map is perhaps this notion of transgression. So as one of the Trump supporters, Milo Yiannopoulos, used to say, conservatism is the new punk.

And think about how the culture wars have changed and changed very rapidly and in a very short space of time, the dissident element in culture, punk, mischief, irreverence, is now better represented in politics by a Make America Great Again hack than by anything on the left.

If you want to annoy somebody, if you want to piss your parents off, if you want to be ejected from polite society, as this poor angel has been, there is no better way to do it than to cast a vote for Donald Trump. This is the new punk, Republican is the new cool. Thank you for coming.

So in the context of the political correctness and self-censorship, public shaming that were occurring a lot in the left,

this obscure style of sort of iconic cynical mockery emerged as a sort of counterforce. And transgression made the alt-right attractive in a way. And this transgressive online culture is well presented in the book of Angela Nagel called Kill All Nummies.

What seemed to hold them all together in their obscurity was a love of mocking the earnestness and moral self-flattery of what felt like a tired liberal intellectual conformity running right through from establishment liberal politics to the more militant enforcers of new sensitivities

and from the wackiest corners of Tumblr to campus politics. So basically this culture of transgression aligns pretty well with what is called a weaponized meme. So a weaponized meme is when internet memes become part of political and ideological propaganda.

It can be done by the right but as well by all the political spectrum like here to fight homophobia in Russia. And as a starting point for this new series of projects, we wanted to create a kind of mind map of the emerging online culture wars.

So we used this classical political compass as a framework I mean it's a framework that has been criticized a lot but nonetheless it became popular as a format to exchange content on online forums and on the memeosphere. And it often integrates non-political characters and pop references and so on.

So after studying numerous critical researches on the topic like the computational propaganda project, Angela Nagel, Florian Kramer and so on and also on investigations, we started to assemble a sort of cartography of weaponized meme elements

with the help of Baruch Gottlieb. The online culture wars project offers a provisional cartography of weaponized meme elements using a speculative political distribution. Taking the political compass as a framework, this cartography offers a symbolic representation

of online ideological and political debates in the context of a growing polarization and radicalization. This ever evolving chart is the result of a superposition of hundreds of politicized memes found online in addition to influential political symbols, actors and influencers.

It is designed as a discussion starter intended to expose and contextualize the present battlefield of online culture wars. So we are currently continuing this map as an interactive, contributive webpage.

Well, this was a quick selection of all the new works that somehow resonate with the CCC. And thank you for your attention. A big thank you, Nicolas. Are there any questions to Nicolas? There is a microphone one.

Hi, congrats, beautiful presentation. I'm curious, what have you never dared doing? What's your next step?

I think it's correlated somehow. Yeah, so as I said, this last project is sort of a starting point for a new series of investigation and research. And at the moment we are accumulating a lot of documents on online propaganda and online influence.

And we are starting a new series of online performance using and basically challenging those strategies for the manipulation of opinions. So we are trying to develop our own propaganda strategies, basically.

Are there any questions from the internet? No? Yeah, then a big warm applause and thanks for Nicolas.