What possibilities can refusal open up? What limitations does it impose? As crises across economic and environmental spheres produce contradictions and gaps, what role might refusal play in negotiating and opening up new values of calculation and computation? Reflecting on the frictions that emerge between practices of refusal, This is Not Anarchy, This is Chaos is a two-day binge-watch of talks, lectures, and films featuring artists, theorists, and activists whose works refuse the seduction and desire of technological promises and logic.

The symposium will be live-streamed only on our website. No registration necessary.

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Fantasy and Damage
Panel Participants: Zach Blas, Antonia Hernández, Donal Lally, Tatjana Söding
Moderator: Adam Bobbette

A tapestry of algorithms wraps and governs all bodies, spaces, and institutions in a web of machinic perception so tightly that forms of computational intelligence have become quotidian to the point of invisibility. Through an almost imperceptible matrix of sensors, trackers and cameras, capital gains access to new materialities of code and cognition. From entertainment to biometrics, the microscopic to the cosmic, increasingly life falls under the effortless monitoring and regulation of algorithms. Data centres configure and automate social relations, economic value guides decision making and prediction, and artificial intelligence executes tasks with efficiency. Yet, this automated dreamworld is more fantasy than reality, and the results are often mired in damage across human, more-than-human and environmental domains.

Fantasy and Damage examines the multiple forms of injury that have been computationally constructed by the extractivist logic of tech. Questioning how hype and desire for participation have been leveraged to create speculation and scarcity around new technologies, this panel examines the implications of desire, fantasy, and deception, their relations to extractive technological infrastructures, and the role refusal plays in contesting them.