Location: Middelheim Museum

The talk will trace the rise of "data extractivism" - a new model of accumulation embraced by big technology platforms - and the way it which it, while promising universal emancipation and empowerment, ends up subjugating citizens and institutions to the profit-maximizing logic of Silicon Valley firms. The talk will argue that digitization, pursued on terms set up by the "Big Tech," is likely to complete the otherwise stalled project of global neoliberalism, with data platforms continuing the privatizing mission that began with the liberalizing legal and economic reforms of the 1980s. This doesn't bode well for society at large -- and even less so for its artistic and cultural constellations. The Big Tech's desire to commodify social life doesn't just stop at knowledge but also includes cities, public spaces, and the built environment at large. One way to stop these trends is by problematizing and politicizing the resource at the heart of the new extractivism - i.e. data - and to reembed struggles around technology into broader efforts to oppose the increasingly violent and heavily financialized global capitalism of today.

Evgeny Morozov is the author of The Net Delusion and To Save Everything, Click Here. Morozov’s monthly column on technology and politics appears in The Observer (UK), Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), El Pais (Spain), Le monde diplomatique (France), Internazionale (Italy) and several other newspapers. His writings have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and other publications. Previously a senior editor at The New Republic, he has been a fellow at Georgetown University, Stanford University, Open Society Foundations, New America Foundation, and the American Academy in Berlin.

___________________________________________________

Summer School #2 will be examining how public space can be made and what role art can play in this. The starting point is that public space does not actually exist, but must constantly be created and activated. On the basis of several real cases, the symposium will look at which artistic strategies are able to generate public space.

www.makingpublicdomain.be

Language English