School of Art & Design Visitor's Series: Joana Moll
“The User and The Beast”
Contemporary discourse often assumes that “everything is connected.” Yet, as Graham Harman argues, we must remember that, in fact, “everything is not connected.” Indeed, the actual configuration of networked technologies creates and reinforces cultural dynamics that encourage disconnectedness. Although most of our daily transactions depend on connected devices, users remain largely oblivious to the complex web that constitutes the Internet: a gigantic, yet incredibly obfuscated maze of tangled contingencies and materialities—including algorithms, tracking technologies, devices, data centers, energy, marketers, designers, engineers, CEOs, business models, labour, money, emotions, ideologies, and foremost, user data—operating through millions of human and non-human bodies on a planetary scale. However, regardless of the compelling role of this diverse assemblage in organizing and activating our so-called networked society, its historical, political, material, and affective dimensions are dramatically overlooked. This neglect has exposed the diversity of living bodies that compose the Internet to increasingly exploitative practices, primarily orchestrated by corporate-controlled algorithms and their intermediaries. Such unseen exploitation, in turn, precludes the possibility of resisting, repairing, and reshaping these systems to make them truly sustainable. Therefore, in order to start imagining and inhabiting them in a sustainable way, it is urgent to create new paradigms that propose a renewed way to imagine the diverse sets of relationships that give the Internet its shape.
Bio:
Joana Moll is a Barcelona/Berlin based artist and researcher whose work critically explores how techno-capitalist narratives affect the alphabetization of machines, humans, and ecosystems. Her research focuses on data materiality, surveillance, interfaces, and the militarization of civil society through digital media. Her exhibitions include venues such as Venice Biennale, ZKM, Ars Electronica, HeK Basel, and Transmediale, as well as universities like Harvard, Goldsmiths London, and ETH Zürich. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Financial Times, Wired, Der Spiegel, and La Reppublica. She co-founded the Critical Interface Politics Research Group at HANGAR Barcelona, has collaborated with the Mozilla Foundation, and was a fellow at BBVA Foundation, The Weizenbaum Institute, and the Disruption Network Institute in Berlin. Moll currently teaches Networks at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. https://janavirgin.com