Category Archives: TITiPI

The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI) is a trans-practice gathering of activists, artists, engineers and theorists initiated by Miriyam Aouragh, Seda Gürses, Helen Pritchard and Femke Snelting. Together we convene communities to hold Computational Infrastructures to account and to create spaces for articulating what technologies in the “public interest” might be when “public interest” is always in-the-making. We develop tools from feminisms, queer theory, computation, intersectionality, anti-coloniality, disability studies, historical materialism and artistic practice to generate currently inexistant vocabularies, imaginaries and methodologies. TITiPI functions as an infrastructure to intensify these practices and to establish new ways in which policy making around technology is organized in the public interest.

http://titipi.org

Small c vs. big C: How Computational Infrastructures capture technical and social imaginary for public life

November 23, 2021 TITiPI

With The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest
NEW DATE: Friday 4 March 2022, 17:00-18:30 @ SPUI25, Amsterdam

Keywords from conversations and colored dots

In recent years, the communications, sociality and operations of public institutions have become increasingly dependent on Computational Infrastructures provided by Big Tech. From decentralized contact tracing apps for public health to free online school classrooms for education: Computational Infrastructures have rapidly expanded their remit. This conversation will center on how institutions and the lives they are tasked with supporting, are impacted by Computational Infrastructures.

https://spui25.nl/programma/small-c-vs-big-c

Image: word2complex, Varia (Manetta Berends and Cristina Cochior), 2021.

Infrastructural publishing

July 24, 2021 Constant, TITiPI, xpub

http://titipi.org/infrastructural-publishing.html

A multi-headed webpage brings together a growing list of publications on infrastructuring otherwise. The page is hosted and asynchronously maintained by a network of networks that includes Anarchaserver (Calafou), Constant (Brussels), Infrastructural Manœuvres (Amsterdam/Brussels), KASK (Ghent), The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (London/Brussels), Varia (Rotterdam) and XPUB (Rotterdam).

Hiding trees among the forest

April 4, 2021 TITiPI

Reclaiming Digital Infrastructures (RDI) is a research collaboration with KASK School of Arts in Gent taking serious the question how to understand digital networks and communication tools as an integral part of the art education.

RDI4: Hiding trees among the forest

During this session, Seda Guerses and Femke Snelting will share concrete cases, readings, art-projects and hands-on exercises to explore how obfuscation strategies might evade surveillance, protect privacy and improve security. But could it also be a way to protest, contest, resist and sabotage the increasing grasp that technology has on managing our daily lives?

The pandemic condition intensified our dependency on technologies that survey, extract and optimize data-flows. This changes social, workplace, political, health and educational spheres where technical systems have become central and inescapable. Whether you book your jury via Eventbrite, join an on-line class in Zoom, get notified by your Coronalert app, chat with your colleagues in MS-Teams or work for Deliveroo, the digital expands into the physical to govern both the human and the more-than-human.

Obfuscation methods render data more ambiguous, difficult to exploit and interpret, less useful. They rely on the addition of gibberish, meaningless data; they pollute, add noise, randomize. Obfuscation invokes an intuitive form of protection: it distorts that which is visible to render it less (or in)visible. It hides the trees among the forest.

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Infrastructure solidarity: a conversation with Miriyam Aouragh

January 6, 2021 Constant, TITiPI

A conversation about current and future technological infrastructures for solidarity. Elodie Mugrefya, Femke Snelting, Wendy Van Wynsberghe of Constant, speak with media anthropologist and activist Miriyam Aouragh about the relations between political activism and technological criticism. How to organise for social change on-line when Tech Giants profit from our interactions?

In the context of (Staying) in the Movement and following from the panel discussion Revolution and Solidarity This Time organised by De Wereld Morgen and moderated by Omar Jabary Salamenca and Joachim El Yacoub on 13 January.

The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest

April 10, 2020 TITiPI

The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest emerged on April 10, 2020 as a bugreport. With current members Myriam Aouragh, Seda Gürses, Helen Pritchard we collaborate on research, discourse and experiments that impact policy and public discourse as well as reconfigure socio-technical practice. Throughout we assume a tight coupling between what to address and how to address it. Developing methods for relating between different kinds of expertise, experimenting formats for convenings and alternative infrastructural toolsets.

More about the institute-in-the-making: titipi.org