We Are Data

What: Film programme organised in collaboration with the Werkleitz Festival in Halle
When: Sunday 21 October 21:00
Where: Werkleitz Festival Zentrum, Kleine Märkerstraße 7a, Halle (Saale), Germany

With each gesture we make and every act we undertake we transfer information, information that is part of our interaction with the people that are close to us and with the institutions and concepts that define our society. In the past these processes mostly happened directly from one human to the other, without an intermediate. Only the most important communications where recorded and archived, in contracts, treaties, paintings or books. With technological developments in the 20th century, the invention of the Internet and the rise of big data, this situation has changed radically. We have created systems that record and archive almost everything we do and virtual realms to mirror the physical world we live in. We’ve filled our habitats with datafied objects and more and more we have become sets of data ourselves. What we do and how we express ourselves is tracked, quantified and coded. The datafied individual is categorised and stored in massive databases that are built and managed by companies and governments. They tell us that they want to “connect us” and provide us with better services, but they are also there to make profit and control us. We are allowing ourselves to be commodified and manipulated in systems of predictive analytics and micro-targeting and the amounts of private data we are handing over every day of our life, is unprecedented. What will happen now that the way these systems function is determined more and more by artificial intelligence and algorithms?

Films:

The Hands on Tuesday (Ruce v úterý) – Čeněk Zahradníček (Czechoslovakia 1935, 13 min)
The Expression of Hands (Der Ausdruck der Hände) – Harun Farocki (Germany 1997, 30 min)
Toute la mémoire du monde – Alain Resnais (France 1957, 21 min)
A Dialogue with Cyberspace – Brian den Hartog (BE/NL, 2018, 14 min)
Remind Me – H5 (Ludovic Houplan & Hervé de Crécy) and Röyksopp (France 2002, 5 min)
Hyper-Reality – Keiichi Matsuda (Colombia 2016, 6 min)
Wir sind Daten – Peter Weibel & Hotel Morphila Orchester (Germany 2013, 5 min)

Programme curated by Arjon Dunnewind, Impakt Festival, Utrecht