Thursday Night Live! The Vertical Atlas: Island.eu

PLEASE NOTE: This event will be combined with the book launch of 'Steve Bannon, A Propaganda Retrospective' by Jonas Staal.

The Vertical Atlas: Island.eu explores ways of mapping new techno-political geographies, based on the tension between Europe's data protection against the borderless reality of cyberspace and the simultaneous datafication of the Mediterranean sea as an extended border of European sovereignty. With speakers Benjamin Bratton, Victoria Ivanova and Marten Kaveats.

Since the early 2000s, a new sovereign model has started to surface from the supposedly free space of the Internet: cloud platforms such as Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple (GAFA). Over the years, it has become clear that these platforms represent not only a new corporate model, but also a political one that claims sovereignty over cyber and material space through its infrastructure and algorithms. At the same time, modern states are beginning to morph into platforms themselves. In this context, the clash between the European Union and the American GAFA stack over European citizens’ data resulted in a showdown between these two logics of governance. The newly released GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is the first product of this battle.

While in Brussels EU politicians hear Mark Zuckerberg’s defence on the Cambridge Analytica scandal, at the southern border of the Union the Mediterranean sea is turned in to one of the most surveilled areas in the world by the EU itself. Projects such as Frontex and Eurosur are implemented by the European Union to map and datafy the surface of the sea, extending the EU’s sovereignty through the machinic vision of monitoring satellites and the presence of the coastguard’s fleet. Whilst flows of migrants from Africa and West Asia are claimed in the form of data, the people themselves are not welcome. Safety and efficiency are the regulatory logic behind these policies, with biometric indexing at the borders already being discussed.

Public event and research lab

Vertical Atlas:Island.eu is the first of a series of five events that attempt to develop a techno-political cartography, departing from the conceptual model laid out by Benjamin Bratton in The Stack.This series aims at investigating specific geozones where the entanglement of different sovereignties surface and different stacks clash. Each event consists of a public program in Het Nieuwe Instituut and a research lab for invited guests.

Partner

Vertical Atlas: Island.eu is developed and produced by Hivos Digital Earth and Het Nieuwe Instituut. Check also the Vertical Atlas website!

Thursday Bite

Before the Thursday Night you can grab a bite to eat with the speakers and staff of Het Nieuwe Instituut. At 18:00 Het Nieuwe Café will serve soup with bread or a quiche with salad. Dinner vouchers are available for € 7.50 up to a day before the particular Thursday Night event via the Tickets link.

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* Artwork by Kévin Bray.