ENTANGLED NETWORKS 2: Empires

Curated by Miranda Mungai

3 November 2023

Tickets

Empires, the second Screening & Discussion, reveals the repercussions of Big Tech takeovers across sectors, and their impact on every aspect of our daily lives. We will examine the commodification of our online activities, and start to assert our digital agency by imagining a future beyond Big Tech.

Participants: Lotje Beek (NL), Lukas Engelhardt (DE)
Moderated by: Miranda Mungai (UK)

The session begins with a screening of Center, Ring, Mall (Mateo Vega, 2023), a poetic short documentary exploring the progress promised by three types of urban infrastructure, and the potential to rethink these infrastructures as sites for possibility.

Join us for a discussion with Policy Officer at Bits of Freedom Lotje Beek and artist Lukas Engelhardt on the possibilities for an internet beyond Big Tech. Beeks will look at how to prioritise the interests of the people over the interests of Big Tech, while Engelhardt will explore the potential of autonomous online and offline spaces. Together they will explore the possibility of an internet that exists outside of Big Tech, and consider ways we can come together to create alternative networked infrastructures.

This series of three Screening and discussion events examines our networked society through the lens of three themes: community, categorisation and commodification. Each event explores one of these interconnected themes through the screening of a short film followed by a discussion. Together, we will examine the increasingly opaque ways in which our data is being used. In the communal, non-hierarchical discussion that follows each screening, we will try to re-imagine our world of data as a world of possibility, and begin to understand how we might reclaim our digital agency.

The short films are our tools and departure points for these discussions. We will think through each film collectively, and consider the themes and possibilities it presents.

TICKET FOR THIS PROGRAMME

What else is on Friday?

Check the timetable to visit more programmes with your Festival Pass (5-days) or Day Pass (1-day). With the passes you can also visit the festival exhibition Our Terms, Our Conditions at the IMPAKT [Centre for Media Culture] and Fotodok/Casco.

Friday day pass 5-day festival pass

For more information on the festival tickets please see here

We Are Public
This programme is free for We Are Public members. On the We Are Public website you can see how to get a ticket with your membership.

Miranda Mungai Lotje Beek Lukas Engelhardt

Miranda Mungai

― Curator

Miranda Mungai is a film curator, events producer and facilitator with an interest that lies at the intersection of sociality, new media, and short, experimental non-fiction film. She engages with the potentiality that emerges from the synergy between film, neutral exhibition spaces, and non-hierarchical, generative discussion. She has a first class degree in Film Studies from King’s College London and has worked for the London Short Film Festival, Open City Documentary Festival, Sheffield Documentary Festival and various arts institutions, community projects and activist networks in the UK.

Lotje Beek

― Speaker

Lotje Beek is a policy advisor at Bits of Freedom, an organization that fights for internet freedom. Lotje mainly focuses on the tension between dominant online platform and our freedom of communication. She lobbies at a national and European level for rules that break platform dominance and protect digital human rights.

Lukas Engelhardt

― Speaker

Lukas Engelhardt is a graphic designer and artist in Amsterdam. He creates and explores (supposedly) autonomous spaces, both online and offline, and tries to understand the tactics, terms and conditions necessary to negotiate and maintain them. He builds, breaks and fixes servers for himself and for others and is active in the housing struggle. Together with Justus Gelberg he runs the graphic design studio Correspondence. He graduated from the Design Department at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam.

Archive

Festival 2023