Signal to noise: a live interface based on analog radio interference

“Signal to Noise” is a sound installation using radio transmissions and mobile radio receivers as an interface for audience-based performance. Carrying radio receivers, the audience moves through the space created by two overlapping radio transmissions that broadcast on the same frequency, creating a volatile acoustic space of radio interference that changes with each motion of every participant. The result is an embodied and interactive creation of a soundscape which is shaped by the unpredictability of interference and noise in analog radio. The installation deals with the battleground of ideological discourses, broadcasting archived radio programs of the Cold War era. Listeners move through the space in which transmissions from the East and West jam and disrupt each other and with every motion enact an ever-changing soundscape. The resulting choreography technologically reenacts the “fight over hearts and minds” at the border between East and West, recallingthe technological and ideological mechanisms used during the Cold War, where Western propaganda radio was jammed by Eastern authorities

Nomadic, migrating, commuting, wearable technologies and their infrastructures

One of the central issues of the present political agenda is the migration crisis. Apart from economic and environmental migration, we experienced in the latest years the exacerbation of some political conflicts and implicitly a political-based migration too. Tragic images of migrants’ attempts to cross the Mediterranean Sea or traversing other migration corridors were doubled by welcomed or hostile reactions of authorities in the countries of destination. The press did not spare us details about the migration routes, infrastructures, migrants’ pack-sacks, clothes and their smart technologies (see, for example, Meyer, 2015). But even for those who are not obliged to migrate, the present work flexibility pushes them to a rather increased commute between their homes and their working places. New economies started to take roots and support such developments as Airbnb hosting models or low-cost flights

The planning game - for an archeology of cybernetics in economy

Taking as starting point ‘The Planning Game’ developed in the frame of ‘Utopian Cities, Programmed Societies’ project, the paper reunites viewpoints related to cybernetics, socialist industry, AI & cybernetics archaeology within the ex-socialist countries, and looks to offer a platform of reflection related to games as method and tool of analysis and critical intervention. Apart from the historical and theoretical aspects of the intervention, the panel discusses game as a form of reenactment, as performative intervention, as a method to unveil the multi-scalar technological condition of socialist industries and economies. It allows the audience to learn about the organization of socialist industry (and the institutional incentives for generating “precarious data”), but also about the way of functioning and the incidence of the individuals. Our aim is to address aspects related to the symbiosis and dynamics between data and users, between a centralized economy and the citizens of a socialist state, as well as the competitions between states. By doing so, the panel aims to bring into discussion concepts such as quality of data, human-data interaction, ideological, social and data control, and economic competition and shows how some of these concepts might help us to have a better understanding of the digital present.</p