We received over 100 applications from artists, researchers and concerned citizens. The participants were selected on the basis of their motivation. The aim of the CODE 2023 programme is to influence public policy on a national and international level, by creating awareness and by defining ways in which we can improve laws and legislation that will protect us as digital citizens and consumers.

For the next months, from March until June 2023, we will work closely together in a co-creation process consisting of a series of events: three workshops, a hackathon, various presentations at inspiring festivals, and an online exhibition. We will develop interventions and awareness campaigns to expose the power of tech companies and to activate politicians, policymakers and citizens to take action. The outcomes of the programme will be at the center of the IMPAKT Festival 2023: Reclaiming Digital Agency.

Yu Zhang (NL)
Yu Zhang has a background in fine arts and design. Her Ph.D. research investigates the theory and artistic practice of interactive technologies for public, large-scale installations. As a researcher and artist, she approaches visual art with mixed reality installations and projections, sensor-based interactives, and computational arts. Besides, Yu’s teaching experiences cover a broad space including traditional classrooms, workshops and design-led project-based learning activities. Currently, she lives and works in Eindhoven.

Jannie Busschers (NL)
Having more than 15 years of experience in working with juveniles and their families at the child protection board, Jannie is driven to make the work of social workers easier, their (ICT) tools better and doing so, more effective. This need for change inspired her to follow the master Managing Information and Sustainable Change, which led her to work at the departement of Justice, where she still works today. Here she tries to build the environment in which policy makers and social workers, police men or other justice workers, work closer together to re-enforce their social IMPAKT.

Hennie Bulstra (NL)
Hennie is a civil servant working for the Dutch Government and is (inter)nationally highly involved in emerging technologies (Blockchain, Verifiable Credentials, Self Sovereign Identity) and also an innovation lead. He holds a position as business consultant and advisor on matters of Strategy and Innovation. He has a broad experience in informatics and architecture and policy and law execution. Hennie is also an actor and played in a number of plays (among them: Festen, The Birthday Party, Who is afraid of Virginia Woolf, Carnage, Silver Linings Playbook, The Bourgeois Gentleman.)

Robert B. Lisek (DE)
Robert B. Lisek is an artist, mathematician and composer who focuses on systems, networks and processes (computational, biological, social). He is involved in a number of projects focused on media art, creative storytelling and interactive art. Drawing upon post-conceptual art, software art and meta-media, his work intentionally defies categorization. Lisek is a pioneer of art based on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Lisek is also a composer of contemporary music, author of many projects and scores on the intersection of spectral, stochastic, concret music, musica futurista and noise. He is the author of 300 exhibitions and concerts.

Alexander Walmsley (DE)
Alexander Walmsley is a media artist and programmer with a particular interest in urban landscapes, technological environments and infrastructures. His work is situated primarily between 3D and photography, and makes use of a variety of media, including photography, photogrammetry, VR/AR and video. His recent work has been shown at the 59. Venice Biennale, Daejeon Biennale of Arts and Sciences, Tirana Art Lab, Sharjah Art Foundation, The Photographers’ Gallery, and VRHam! Festival. He previously studied archaeology and anthropology at the Universities of Cambridge (UK) and Geneva (CH).

Phivos-Angelos Kollias (DE)
Dr. Phivos-Angelos Kollias explores emerging technologies’ creative potential and their impact. By combining his classical music background and knowledge of innovative techniques and concepts, he creates digital projects that explore how technology can be used for artistic expression. His projects often take the form of interactive sound installations, virtual reality, music performances, and video games. Through his work, Kollias explores themes such as Artificial Intelligence, bridging the listening with other senses and multi-disciplinary collaborations. His music encourages critical thinking about the social and cultural implications of technology while exploring how technology has the potential to enhance human creativity.

Ana Spagnolo López (BE)
Ana is an industrial/product designer but she prefers to refer to herself as a designer in general due to the diverse set of projects she has been involved in the past few years. Related to gender, education, mobility, spatial, urban, sustainable and interface design. She is also an assistant teacher in a design studio at her home school: Universidad de Buenos Aires. Currently doing her master´s degree in media and information design at LUCA school of arts.

Jasmine Erkan (DE)
Jasmine is a researcher and writer based in Berlin, interested in exploring the intersections of politics, technology and digital culture. She holds a BA in political science and an MA specialising in human rights & democratisation. Currently, she is a researcher for Data-Pop Alliance, a non-profit organisation that has initiatives in data, technology, and policymaking. Some of her most recent research and writing has centred around platform governance, disinformation, and digital tools in humanitarian response. In 2022, Jasmine contributed to the ‘Critical Meme Reader: Global Mutations of the Viral Image’, published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam.

Sixin Zeng (NL)
Sixin Zeng is an artist and graphic designer based in Den Haag, The Netherlands. Various media such as video, publication, sculpture, and other visual ephemera are in her practice functionally to share and narrate stories that are extracted from facts of real life and blended with fiction. Her often-participatory works are driven by intrinsic considerations of the fragments of life she experienced and scraps that received from other living beings, anonymous objects, and environments, primarily leading her to the themes of migration, diaspora, feminism, and topics hovering on top of the intersection, which influence her most as an individual.

Leon van Oldenborgh (NL)
Leon van Oldenborgh is an artist with a background in game and interaction design. He creates both physical and digital interactive experiences that playfully disrupt the way people routinely interact with their environments, encouraging them to reflect on how their choices on behaviour within the experience relates to their actions outside of it. Through his work, he explores the nuances and complexities of individual human behaviour. He examines how people decide to interact with one another and how those decisions are influenced by factors such as technology, culture and social expectations.

Ahnjili (NL)
Ahnjili is a data scientist, Ph.D. candidate, artist, and science communicator. Ahnjili’s academic research focuses on developing smartphones- and wearables-based biomarkers that can be used to monitor one’s mental and physical wellbeing for clinical trials. Ahnjili’s artistic research and science communication focuses on educating the public about A.I. and algorithmic violence, which refers to the violence that is justified or is created by an automated decision-making system.

Marion Lissarrague (BE)
Marion Lissarrague is a queer artist based in Brussels. His practice uses video, installation, performance, graphic design to explore techno-politics. Her current research focuses on the eugenics and essentialist evolution of a digital society deeply rooted in binaries, and investigates through installations the shaping of a networked, measurable reality reduced to a technological simulacrum. Her practice spans a repertory of investigation, documentary fictions, hijacked archives, found footages, sculptures unveiling the limits of digital patterns. Mixing research and experimentation, his works leads to apprehend technologies outside their classification, outside of static entities while using the unknown as an entry point.

Denisa Pubalova (NL)
Denisa Pubalova is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of art and science, focusing on processes beyond the human experience. Her curious practice involves many disciplines ranging from art, through posthumanities, speculative philosophy, and new media studies, to the fields of science. She works in generative art with scientific data to communicate post-anthropocentric theories. Currently, she is researching data fetishisation in the nexus of art and science.

Robin van de Griend (NL)
Robin van de Griend is an independent software developer with a background in mathematics. They are interested in the AI, cybernetics and internet culture, in particular the reciprocal relationship between human culture and AI ‘machine culture’. Cultural ‘propagation’ on the internet is principally mediated by black box AI recommender systems, creating resonances and feedback. Seeing (internet) culture as a dynamic, cybernetic system, Robin tries to make visible these moments of cultural feedback to better understand its underlying mechanics.

Aslı (DE)
Aslı Dinç is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher based in Berlin. Her works focus on the production of speculations, loops, installations and performances, with particular emphasis on dystopian narratives, tech capitalism and human-non-human-machine interactions. She is a member of the PASAJ independent art space and the international performance art platform Performistanbul. She is a co-director and co-curator of the Upper Town art and research program. Her works have been featured, among others, in UdK, Berlin (2022); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2022); VECTOR FESTIVAL: Network Dependencies, Toronto (2021).

Helena Roig (NL)
Helena is a visual artist from Barcelona with a documentary photographic background exploring the possibilities of interdisciplinary methodology across mediums, currently concentrating on digital imagery, video, online archives, and traditional lens-based practices. Her practice is informed by a response to the perverse relationship between the photographic medium, power, and the challenges of consent that comes with it. Helena’s working process is always driven by collaboration and community-building processes. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, she is exploring the political aspects of digital intimacy from a xenofeminist perspective.

Allon Bar (NL)
Allon Bar focuses on making products and services more human-centric and privacy-respecting. He has worked as a UX designer, researcher, and product manager for tech companies, and designed an identity-free file transfer tool. Allon also worked for the United Nations, civil society, and governmental organizations around the world, among other things on the intersection between technology and human rights. He obtained degrees in international affairs, language and culture studies and history from Columbia University and Utrecht University, and is a senior fellow of Humanity in Action.

Lea Luka Sikau (DE)
Artist-researcher Lea Luka Sikau conducts her PhD on rehearsal processes, technology and new opera at the University of Cambridge. She has been a Fellow at Harvard University’s Mellon School for Performance and was awarded with the Bavarian Cultural Award for her research at MIT. Lea Luka has worked together with some of the most sought-after visionaries in the arts such as Marina Abramovic, Stefan Kaegi (Rimini Protokoll), Paola Prestini (National Sawdust NYC), and Romeo Castellucci. Amongst others, Lea Luka got commissioned by Ars Electronica Festival, Climate Week NYC, Earth Institute and Reeperbahnfestival for creating performances and media art installations.

Vinciane Dahéron (BE)
Vinciane Dahéron is an artist and graphic designer currently living in Brussels. She works with libre and open sources tools, and uses hacking in collaborative and experimental projects to point out problematic uses of technology. Her research is including, writing with bots and algorithms, web to print, changing the interaction between bodies and surveillance tool. She also teaches during workshops about ways to create graphic design projects with programming.

Yedam Ann (DE)
Yedam Ann is an artist based in Berlin. Her interest in separation, convergence, and complexity from how differentness of identities is dealt with in community is visualized in the video, space installation and performance. Currently, she explores the interlocking identities of space and humans in a public area.

Lukas Völp (NL)
Lukas Völp was born and raised in Frankfurt a. M., Germany. He started his design education at the HS Mainz in the Communication Design Bachelor. After some time working as a graphic designer, he decided to do a master’s degree at the Design Academy Eindhoven. He graduated from the Social Design department in June 2022. His graduation project addressed the implications of artificially intelligent systems on the social realms of society. With a specific interest in the way algorithms are involved in the formation of the opinion and identity of their users, he continues to study the design of digital interfaces as the subject of his artistic research practice.

Antje Jacobs (Amarante Swift) (BE)
Antje Jacobs is a PhD candidate at the University of Leuven (Belgium) and the University of Melbourne (Australia). She has a background in art studies and science and technology studies. Her research focuses on bio art and its epistemic potential to de-center the human and to highlight multispecies entanglements. In the participatory and co-creative research, and within the theoretical framework of posthumanism, she engages with the existential question of how the human species will get through an escalating situation of power cuts and digital blackouts. The project aims to envision progressive futures in which multispecies relationality will become the new normal.

Deniz Kurt (NL)
Deniz Kurt is a media artist and creative technologist, who works in the fields of computational creativity, AI and Machine Learning, generative art, web design and creative coding. Kurt has academic background in Media & Cultural Studies (MSc) and Creative Industries (MA), with dissertation on “Artistic Creativity in Artificial Intelligence”, she gives talks and lectures in the field, and explores the synthesis of technology and art as a medium. Kurt’s body of artworks addresses the projections of algorithmic aesthetics, social studies, and digital media, in combination with speculative future scenarios to augment human experience in a post-digital age.

Mohsen Hazrati (DE)
Mohsen Hazrati lives and works in Berlin. He graduated with a BA in graphic design from Shiraz Art Institute of Higher Education. His works focus on Literature and digital technologies and have been presented at various conferences such as; UdK Berlin, the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, IAM weekend Barcelona, EVA, and UCL mal London, Elo University of Central Florida, TEDx Mollasadra St, and exhibitions by Grafikenshus museum, PeertoSpace, RadianceVR, Espronceda, synthesis, Triennale Kleinplastik Fellbach, Transfer gallery, etc. Since 2013, in collaboration with Milad Forouzande, he has been the co-founder and curator of “Dar-AlHokoomeh Project”; a new media art project and activity, based in Shiraz, Iran.

Felipe Schmidt Fonseca (DE)
Felipe Schmidt Fonseca is a Berlin-based Brazilian activist and free/open advocate turned researcher. Currently he is a PhD candidate at the Northumbria University, investigating waste prevention and generous cities in the OpenDoTT project. Through the last two decades Felipe was a co-founder and leader of a number of community and networking initiatives dedicated to critical thinking – and making – in the crossroads between culture, science, technology and society. Some examples are Tropixel, MetaReciclagem, CulturaDigital.BR, Bricolabs, Rede//Labs, Lixo Eletrônico, Ciência Aberta Ubatuba, UbaLab.

Oleksandr Freising (DE)
In recent years my practice has been based on working with huge amounts of data, understanding and exploring its essence and transforming it into an artistic image. I have concentrated on the themes of social systems and paradoxes and the construction of new social and linguistic constructs. The interrelation of biological and digital nature. Decentralization of physical, digital and intellectual resources. Study of chaotic structures. In these areas I have used the tools of game engines and neural networks to create simulations of advanced social constructions, simulating natural evolution. Also with the help of web tools I was exploring the possibilities of creating new ways of communication and decentralisation. But with the beginning of the full-scale invasion of my country by Russia and the first month of the war that I spent in a bomb shelter, it changed my artistic practice a lot. I have concentrated even more on themes of centralisation, monopolisation especially of intellectual resources. I have defended Ukraine’s intellectual and cultural integrity and independence from Russian imperialism. I started using the tools of new media to document and deconstruct destructive military actions into an artistic image.

Lisa Bador (DE)
Lisa Marie Bador is a French-German philosopher, writer and musician. She received a master degree in History of Philosophy from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, as well as a master degree in French Literature from the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 together with the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Resident of Backsteinboot, an artist community and event space based in Berlin-Spandau, she produces music under the name Lichtenberg Syndrom. Currently translating Shintaro Miyazaki’s book “Digitalität Tanzen” from German into French, she plans to start a thesis in Media Sciences under his direction, with the aim of highlighting the political stakes of cybernetics through modeling and game theory. Her first poetic text, “Yes future; Experimental Urban Cryptology”, will be available online in a few weeks, under the name Lisa Maria Weiland.

Rebekka Jochem (BE)
Rebekka Jochem was born in Cologne and studied Product Design at the Hochschule Wismar, in the North of Germany. This is where her interest in feminist approaches to technology started to form. After graduating she decided to follow up on these interests at the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands. In her work which often takes the form of a combination between electronics and textiles, she looks closely at body-technology interfaces and how the politics within biometric data influences digital identities. Currently based in Brussels, Rebekka is now developing her practice.

CODE 2023 is the third edition of CODE, and is organised by IMPAKT [Centre for Media Culture] together with Werktank (Leuven), Privacy Salon/Privacytopia (Brussels) and transmediale (Berlin). CODE 2023 is realised thanks to the kind support of Gemeente Utrecht Stimuleringsfonds and Fonds voor Cultuurparticipatie.

Read more about CODE 2023