Big Tech and Counter-Technologies is an artistic-research structure and grant commencing in June 2024. The initative seeks to support thinking on the impact of Big Tech on the production of culture, space, and methodologies for alternative political imaginings. The project will support artistic research concerning the impact of technology on shaping material, political and affective cultures in the form of public exhibitions, a residency, and publication. Big Tech and Counter-Technologies has been developed wihtin the within the context of the EU Horizon project INCA (https://inca-project.eu/).
Selected projects will be provided with financial support, as well as multiple contexts to exhibit their research and findings in Bologna, Italy and Madrid, Spain. Projects will be selected and curated by Into the Black Box and Carmen Lael Hines, who will work in close intellectual collaboration with selected practioners in developing their projects.
Into the Black Box is a transdisciplinary and collective research project: http://www.intotheblackbox.com/. Some members of the collective are engaged in INCA project and will continuosly support "Big Tech and Counter-Technologies". Especially, Niccolò Cuppini, lecturer at the UNiversity of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland, whose research initially stemmed from a history of political thought of urbanization, gradually expanding to encompass themes of logistics and digital platforms over time. He engages in numerous international projects that have taken him to various European, African, American, and Asian cities in recent years. His last book is "Planetary Metropolis 4.0.Beta Testing".
Carmen Lael Hines is a writer, researcher, and curator interested in technology, bodies, and the implications of their entanglements. Working at the intersection of arts, architecture, critical theory and design, she currently lectures in the Department of Visual Cultures at the Vienna University of Technology, where she teaches critical theory to students of architecture. She is pursuing a PhD in philosophy at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna and is currently editing two books, Dissident Practices: Posthumanist Approaches to a Critique of Political Economy, to be published by Bloomsbury, and Bordering Plants, to be published by Sternberg Press. As an FWF funded researcher, she supported the curation and research behind Austria’s contribution to the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021, which explored the topic of platform urbanism. In her capacity as curator, she develops exhibitions with interdisciplinary and research-oriented focuses, the most recent being: Bordering Plants, Exhibit (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna), Access if the new Capital(e-flux screening room NY), Planetary Drift(The Austrian Cultural Forum NY), Whose History? ArchitekturzentrumWien (as part of the Claiming*Space Collective) and Materia(Galerie Kandlhofer), amongst others. She gives at institutions across Austria, Italy, Germany, Spain, Sweden and the UK based on her research, the most recent being AI Pornbots and Chimeric Flesh at INDEX Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm. She hosts a podcast with Morgane Billuart called Girl Employee, which explores femtech, digital feminism(s), platform capitalism, and visual culture.