30 Oct 2018

Open Call for Artists including one 10 day Residency in Limassol, Cyprus

Digitality has become an integrated experience, a depiction of our complex and hierarchical social reality. Although, by now, many users have become aware of the large degree Big Data involves the vigorous use of algorithms for analytics as well as software for surveillance, it has not curbed the mass use of social media. In fact, mass networking on social media has become the cultural tool for establishing a sense of intimacy despite the unease of personal disclosure. Real issues such as human rights abuses, homelessness or climate change cannot contest viral videos, fake news, cute pets and more recently, the controversial obsession with 'dark tourism' selfies. We are informed by algorithms on who we are, selective advertisements help us to become skilled actors in our own self shaping. Users' social activities are mined as data, making possible real-time tracking and monitoring. This colonisation of personal data is already manipulating social media content. Targeted personalisation on the Internet today purges reality with users becoming dehumanised commodities existing in a fabricated unreality. The control of the coloniser is now defined by the monopoly of the data colonised.

Areas of interest

Social Media Self shaping, Online personal and group identity, Corporate data mining, Biological labour versus human generated data labour, Artificial Intelligence, Colonisation of humans by non-human actors, Human obsolescence, Unpaid data workers, Dark tourism, Smart cities and tools of surveillance, Social and political implications on data mining human behaviours.

Self as Actor: Colonising Identity is part of State Machines: Art, Work and Identity in an Age of Planetary-Scale Computation

Focusing on how such technologies impact identity and citizenship, digital labour and finance, the project joins five experienced partners Aksioma (SI), Drugo More (HR), Furtherfield (UK), Institute of Network Cultures (NL), and NeMe (CY) together with a range of artists, curators, theorists and audiences. State Machines insists on the need for new forms of expression and new artistic practices to address the most urgent questions of our time, and seeks to educate and empower the digital subjects of today to become active, engaged, and effective digital citizens of tomorrow.

This project has been co-funded with the support from the Creative Europe programme of the European Union and the Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture.