(re)programming: The Cloud
Everything Is Not Connected

STREAM 6/8

With Joana Moll
Conducted and curated by Marta Peirano

https://aksioma.org/reprogramming/

Digital platforms have made a business out of removing us from our real communities and replacing them with a controlled simulation of connection that only exists as a directory in a massive server commonly regarded as The Cloud. Algorithmically created out of similar tastes, pet hates and grievances, it is designed as a data extraction machine and a container for targeted advertising, gamified to maximize the anticipated user’s compulsion and company’s profit. Its phenomenal effectiveness has not only detached us from our natural habitats, it is also actively destroying them. Joana Moll studies the real environmental and social impact of The Cloud and the data extraction industry, calculating the amount of CO2 the Cloud burps into the atmosphere every time we lazy-Google the name of an actor or the amount of freedom we give away everytime we swipe left on a Tinder offer.

Joana Moll is a Barcelona/Berlin based artist and researcher. Her work critically explores the way techno-capitalist narratives affect the alphabetization of machines, humans and ecosystems. Her main research topics include Internet materiality, surveillance, social profiling and interfaces. She has presented her work in renowned institutions, museums, universities and festivals around the world, such as the Venice Biennale, MAXXI, MMOMA, Laboral, CCCB, ZKM, Bozar, The Natural History Museum in Berlin, Austrian Museum of Applied Arts (MAK), Ars Electronica, HEK, Photographer’s Gallery, Korean Cultural Foundation Center, Chronus Art Center, New York University, Georgetown University, Rutgers University, University of Cambridge, Goldsmiths University of London, University of Illinois, Concordia University, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, ETH Zürich, École d’Art d’Aix en Provence, British Computer Society, The New School, CPDP 2019, Transmediale, FILE and ISEA among many others. She is the co-founder of the Critical Interface Politics Research Group at HANGAR [Barcelona] and co-founder of The Institute for the Advancement of Popular Automatisms. She is currently a visiting lecturer at Universität Potsdam and Escola Elisava.

In the framework of Tactics & Practice #10: (re)programming.