TALK: Cables, Data and Labour. How to Visualize Digital Capitalism.

On 17 October, there will be a talk entitled ‘Cables, Data and Labour. How to Visualize Digital Capitalism’. Organised by several partners of the INCA project (UNIBO, SUPSI, and Fondazione IU Rusconi Ghigi), the coordinator Edoardo Mollona will be in charge of introducing the talk in which the speakers will be the 5 artists selected for the INCA exhibition to be produced during the 2025.

Digital technologies are increasingly shaping the spaces, temporalities and configurations in which we live together. Their use is pervasive and simultaneously invisible. Behind each touch on our smartphones, there is an articulated and stratified overlapping of devices and services, hardware and software like the cloud, the AI, data centres and fibre cables. They all contribute to shape a global dimension of connectivity which is not free from conflicts and tensions.

Art and architecture have also been affected by this set of innovations we label as digital innovation. On the occasion of Big Tech and Counter-Technologies residency in Bologna, 5 practitioners will meet the public to illustrate their perspective on how digital tech today can be approached through their artistic practice. With a critical focus on tech giants such as Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft, selected projects engage the materiality of techno-capitalism on micro, meso to macro scales. Questions of labour, logistics, infrastructure and space thread each project together to pose the following: what is the spatiality of the digital? And how can we propose and visualise alternative imaginings?

Participants:

• Intro: Edoardo Mollona (University of Bologna)
• Speakers: Michel Kessler, Morgane Billuart, Raúl Silva, Cyrus Peñarroyo, McClain Clutter