Boiling Head

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20/09/2025

TECHNOVIOLENCE: Confronting Systematic Injustice

An exploration of how evidence of systemic violence - across war, borders, extractive industries, surveillance, and urban oppression is produced, challenged, and exposed. Through art, activism, and investigation, the conference empowers communities to resist and confront invisible crimes demanding public attention.

Full infos & programme:
https://www.disruptionlab.org/technoviolence
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LIVESTREAM #1: 16:30 - 18:00

KEYNOTE: Breaking the Code of Silence: From Whistleblowing to Systemic Change in Tech

Opening:
Tatiana Bazzichelli (Artistic Director, Disruption Network Lab, Director, Disruption Network Institute, IT/DE).

Keynote:
Breaking the Code of Silence: From Whistleblowing to Systemic Change in Tech

Ifeoma Ozoma (Director of Technology Policy, Kapor Center Advocacy, US). Moderated by Tammarrian Rogers (Tech Expert, Founder, Sarell, US/UK).

Ifeoma Ozoma’s keynote will examine how nondisclosure agreements and corporate secrecy mechanisms function as instruments of technoviolence, systematically silencing workers who witness and experience discrimination, harassment, and human rights abuses within technology companies. Drawing from her whistleblowing work after Pinterest and her subsequent advocacy for legislative reform, Ozoma will explore how tech companies weaponize legal frameworks to perpetuate injustice and protect corporate interests over vulnerable communities.

The conversation will trace Ozoma’s journey from experiencing gender and race discrimination at Pinterest to breaking her nondisclosure agreement and speaking about systemic inequalities. This act of resistance led to her cosponsorship of California’s Silenced No More Act, landmark legislation that prohibits employers from using NDAs to suppress workers’ voices on discrimination, harassment, and other illegal conduct.

Ozoma will discuss her pragmatic approach to systemic change, rejecting academic theorizing in favor of tangible action that produces immediate material improvements for workers. Through Earthseed, the Tech Worker Handbook, and shareholder activism, she has created playbooks for forcing corporate accountability by leveraging financial risk rather than appealing to corporate conscience. Her strategy demonstrates how understanding power structures, from legislative processes to corporate hierarchies, enables more effective resistance.

The keynote will examine the intersection of individual courage and collective action, highlighting how marginalized individuals within tech face disproportionate retaliation while being essential to exposing systemic violence. Ozoma will address broader themes of technoviolence, including how surveillance technologies, algorithmic discrimination, and platform policies harm vulnerable communities globally. She will emphasize the urgency of current action, arguing against the American myth of individual mobility that prevents tech workers from recognizing their shared position as exploited labor regardless of salary levels.
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September 19th
LIVE STREAM #2: 18:00 - 20:45

On Platform Brutality + Dismantling the Algorithmic Gaze

BOOK PRESENTATION: Geert Lovink (Founding Director, Institute of Network Cultures, NL).

PANEL: Jennifer Kamau (Co-founder International Women* Space, Co-lead at the Migrant Justice Community of Practice, KE/DE), Heba Y. Amin (Artist and Professor of Art, ABK-Stuttgart, PS/DE), Anni Garza Lau (Artist, Technologist, Co-founder Ghost Agency, MX), Gro Sarauw (Artist, Co-founder Ghost Agency, DK). Moderated by Geert Lovink (Founding Director, Institute of Network Cultures, NL).

PRESENTATION: On Platform Brutality

Geert Lovink will present a new essay that is part of his new book, Platform Brutality, coming out late September (Valiz, 2025). It is third part of a triptych after the books Sad by Design (2019) and Stuck on the Platform (2022). After decade of docile facilitation and sneaky extractivism Silicon Valley is now showing its ugly face. This is not only initiated by Trump II but also coincides with the overall stagnation and regression in terms of social media usage. Platform Brutality is a scathing diagnosis of our digital condition in the aftermath of Covid, grappling with a world overwhelmed by platform decay, social media addiction, and a psychic toll.

PANEL: Dismantling the Algorithmic Gaze

This panel analyses how forms of algorithmic and technological control are emerging at borders, in militarised contexts and in urban environments, spanning examples from Germany to Mexico and North Africa. It also discusses how we can imagine forms of resistance and empowerment based on social justice, using opacity as a means of resistance, as well as technological tools and collective action to counter epidemic violence.

As a migrant woman and activist in Germany at International Women* Space, and the Migrant Justice Community of Practice, Jennifer Kamau examines how border technologies such as Frontex, EURODAC, and the European asylum regime, surveil and control Black and Brown people. These systems shape daily realities of exclusion and criminalisation, exemplified by tools like the Bezahlkarte and recent border standoffs with neighbouring countries. She also explores the intersection of technological and environmental violence, highlighting how climate-induced displacement exacerbates the vulnerability of marginalised communities. Furthermore, she discusses the risks posed by AI, facial recognition, and cyber-surveillance in facilitating state and corporate oppression in migration.

The talk is followed by Heba Y. Amin’s presentation “Opacity as Resistance: Reversing the Image Politics of Empire”. In an effort to maintain colonial control in North Africa, the British military founded the Middle East Command Camouflage Directorate near Cairo in 1941. British artists were recruited to engineer large-scale illusions designed to mislead enemy surveillance. Camouflage, in this case, was not merely a tactical device but part of a broader scopic regime of empire. Its operations relied on a colonial gaze that reframed the desert as an empty landscape for optical manipulation, erasing its inhabitants in a theatre of deception. Drawing from this history, this presentation asks how we can subvert and reclaim camouflage as a counter-methodology: not a technique of domination, but a practice of opacity, refusal, and disruption aimed at dismantling the militarised, algorithmic gaze and imagining resistant forms of visibility.

Anni Garza Lau and Gro Sarauw introduce the work of Ghost Agency. Ghost Agency operates at the intersection of research, artistic practice, digital technology and humanitarian inquiry. Working trans-locally between Mexico, the United States and Europe–yet rooted in Mexico’s specific context–the group investigates how gender violence and tehcno-impunity converge in systemic patterns of abuse, producing injustices in the digital age, especially for women and the environment. As a search for antidotes to epidemic violence under capitalism’s technological and institutional dismemberment of human lives, their practice is both a catalyst for novel literacies and technological designs and a response to neglected humanitarian aspects of digital technologies, which, Ghost agency claims, lead to forms of repression such as those faced by many women in Mexico.

Moderated by Geert Lovink, the following conversation explores how digital infrastructures enable systemic violence and reimagine what comes next.
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September 20st
LIVE STREAM #3: 16:00 - 18:15

PANEL: Exploited, Extracted, Erased: The Global Logic of Big Tech

Rima Sghaier (Digital Rights Advocate, Researcher, TN/IT), Sarah Ciston (Critical AI Researcher, Critical–Creative Coder, US/DE), Lya Cuéllar (Journalist and Political Scientist, SV/DE), Safa Ghnaim (Critical Tech Researcher, Educator, PS/US/DE). Moderated by Nil Uzun (Research Associate, Technology and Diversity, Institute of Sociology, RWTH Aachen, TR/DE).

This panel traces the systemic and extractive logic of Big Tech, examining how today’s digital infrastructures are weaponised against vulnerable communities. Topics include AI systems accelerating warfare, targeting campaigns on social media, erasing Palestinian voices, building techno-colonialist utopias in Central America and exploiting workers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Speakers unpack the intersections between digital repression, xenophobia, and platform complicity, while offering critical tools for understanding and resisting technoviolence in its many forms.

In the presentation “Targeted by Design: Technoviolence, Xenophobia, and Algorithmic Injustice in SWANA“ Rima Sghaier explores how Big Tech and social media advertising enable and reinforce information disorder, fuelling xenophobic campaigns targeting vulnerable communities, while erasing the narratives of others, namely Palestinian voices. By unpacking platform design choices, extractive data economies, digital militarism, and feminist critiques of power in tech, the talk traces how communities are profiled, policed, and profitably excluded. What does it mean when violence is not incidental, but systematically designed into our digital infrastructures?

When the same chatbots and automated agents many people use daily are being scaled up to wage wars, we must better understand these AI systems and hold them to account. Sarah Ciston presents her artistic project AI War Cloud Database with her talk “Mapping the Techno-Imperial Boomerang”. AI War Cloud Database catalogues the AI decision-making systems used in warfare, which have been shown to accelerate and amplify death and destruction. The project details 50+ systems based on the type of machine learning tasks they use; who develops, deploys, and funds them; and their military and commercial purposes – in order to show how global technoviolence traces directly back to our mobile phones and social platforms. With the spotlight now on systems like Palantir’s Foundry and Israel’s Lavender, the stakes for AI tools are becoming increasingly urgent and personal.

In an era of global democratic backsliding, Central America is being used as a laboratory for new autocratic strategies. Tech entrepreneurs and libertarian ideologues see our nations as testing grounds for their ideas outside of the rule of law. Shifting the focus from digital infrastructure to the real world, Lya Cuéllar will trace this scenario. From private cities in the Caribbean, through a failed experiment with crypto as legal tender, to the transnationalisation of the carceral state, these actors in the US and Europe work with local elites to turn the region into a blueprint for their plans at home. Communities are being displaced and criminalised in the name of techno-colonialist utopias while the parallel erosion of democratic institutions leaves them with few options to fight back. And yet, everyday people are showing creative possibilities for resistance in a new global dystopia.

In the talk “Digitized Divides: Revealing the trade-offs of a tech-dependent world”, Safa Ghnaim shares stories of the exploitation and extractivism of technologies: from the mining to manufacturing and applications, painting a picture of the devastation left in its tracks by the owners and operators of these tools. In particular, focusing on technoviolence in the DR Congo and in Palestine gives an insight into how business models, power structures, and systems of oppression make our global struggles interconnected. None of these stories are new, but they are lesser known, hidden on the feeds of social media and painted over by Big Tech marketing campaigns. Listen to just a few critical cases and you’ll find out what’s really beneath the shiny surface of technology.
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LIVE STREAM #4: 18:45 - 20:30
KEYNOTE: Secrecy, Surveillance & Grassroots Resistance: Terry Albury & Lynzy Billing

Terry Albury (Former FBI Agent, Whistleblower, US), Lynzy Billing (Investigative Journalist and Photographer, UK/AF/PK). Moderated by Caitlin L Chandler (Writer, Journalist, US/DE).

This keynote maps the intersection of secrecy, state violence, and grassroots work, showing how insider courage and deeply personal reporting can disrupt entrenched systems of digital and real-world oppression. It brings together in a conversation Terry Albury, a former FBI counterterrorism agent whose leaks revealed systemic profiling and surveillance tactics deployed on journalists, vulnerable and marginalised communities (e.g. LGBTQ+, racial, ethnic and religious minorities, as well as women and migrants), and Lynzy Billing, a British investigative journalist and photographer of Afghan-Pakistani origins whose reporting exposed the human toll of the anti-terrorism strategies that US has deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Exposing national security secrets requires courage and involves confronting the mainstream media's silence on the issue. This work involves truth-tellers, whistleblowers and investigative journalists, who risk a great deal to denounce misconduct and wrongdoing. However, at a time when marginalised people are being targeted, monitored, detained, incarcerated, and eventually killed, it is also important to focus on the work of local community members who are often the first to reveal abuses. Grassroots activism, providing a platform for first-hand accounts and documentation, can expose the systematic violence and oppression experienced by marginalised communities.

The keynote will discuss concrete examples of digital and real-world systems of oppression, highlighting the necessity of reporting from the ground and also providing safe systems for whistleblowers at local and national levels. Almost twenty-five years after the “war on terror”, how is “national security” being weaponised domestically and abroad? Is the media investigating the structural abuses of institutions, or failing to hold states accountable? As the world experiences a trend towards authoritarianism and re-militarisation, and as technology evolves to allow for widespread surveillance of dissidents and journalists, what possibilities remain for resistance? This discussion will provide an opportunity to share stories connecting the experiences of the speakers with those of the Disruption Network Lab's community of activists, human rights defenders, tech experts, investigative journalists, artists, dissidents, and more.

Part of Re-Imagine Europe: New Perspectives for Action. Co-funded by the European Union.

Boiling Harmonies 2025 brought sound, movement, and visuals together in a night of pure expression. Grateful to all the ...
27/02/2025

Boiling Harmonies 2025 brought sound, movement, and visuals together in a night of pure expression. Grateful to all the artists and everyone who joined the experience.

Captured by Noor Baidya Hada .

18/02/2025

Dear friends, we have a spontaneous & thrilling surprise for you! 🚀

After three incredible Boiling Harmonies sessions in Berlin, we’re beyond excited to bring the first-ever Boiling Harmonies Festival 2025 to Kathmandu, Nepal this February! 🎶🏔️

Get ready for an electrifying fusion of experimental sounds, interdisciplinary art/performance, and immersive audiovisual storytelling—all set against the vibrant cultural backdrop of Kathmandu. 🌏🎭

Expect:
🎵 Live experimental sound performances
🎨 Interactive installation
🔊 Audiovisual experiences
💫 A gathering of artists, performers
Join us in celebrating unconventional creativity and collective expression—where harmonies boil, and new artistic realms emerge! 🔥🎶

Stay tuned for more surprises! 🌟 Follow us and spread the word. See you in Kathmandu! 🇳🇵✨



Feb 21 (Friday) at Sunshine Botique hotel, Lazimpat
Feb 22 (Saturday) at Hotel Vajra, Bijeshwori

Artwork Design by 🎨✨

More info @ https://harmonies.boilinghead.com

Limited Number of Tickets, Tickets Link in Bio!!

Buy Tickets Here
Hotel Sunshine Boutique, NRS 1000/-
http://bit.ly/3X89yMV

Hotel Vajra, NRS 1000/-
https://bit.ly/4hFti2J

21/09/2024

With Moro Yapha (Migration and Human Rights Advocate, GM/DE), Stella Nyanzi (Activist, Poet and Digital Rights Defender, UG/DE), Nyima Jadama (Activist & Moderator, GM/DE). Moderated by Mo R. (Project Lead, Tactical Tech, EG/US/DE).

This panel explores the pivotal role of media and technology in raising awareness and fostering community bonds among migrants and refugees. It discusses the challenges faced by migrants in Germany, Europe and beyond, and how the process of gaining agency can shift the focus from 'being a migrant' to 'becoming a citizen'. Through their individual stories, speakers will also illustrate the power of media and self-advocacy in combating systemic alienation and oppression.

Reflecting on his personal migration journey from The Gambia to Europe, Moro Yapha recounts how the lack of communication tools initially limited connectivity. This experience inspired the creation of a Facebook group in 2014 to document the perilous journey to Europe and highlight human rights abuses faced by migrants, especially those from sub-Saharan Africa. The group aimed to share untold stories, search for missing persons, and raise awareness of the struggles and exploitation faced by migrants in Europe. Motivated by the need for self-representation, Moro Yapha became a migration and human rights advocate, leveraging online platforms to challenge prevailing narratives and promote migrant voices. In 2016, this advocacy led to the co-founding of Wearebornfree! Empowerment Radio, the first self-organised African radio station in Berlin and Potsdam, now known as Kangkiling Radio. The station serves as a platform for raising awareness, empowering black music and cultures and building community among African migrants in Europe. Additionally, Moro has worked for seven years as an intercultural mediator at Fixpunkt e.V, supporting undocumented sub-Saharan Africans with health, legal, and social services.

Stella Nyanzi is a dissident poet and activist from Uganda working at the intersection of women's and LGBTQI+ rights, labour rights, freedom of expression and research, digital democracy and civil rights. She is currently a fellow of the PEN Centre Germany's Writers in Exile Programme and the Center for Ethics and Writing. Nyanzi has been arrested and charged several times for her political poetry in Uganda. Digital platforms have always played a key role in her activism. is a nascent campaign based on her recent cases in the Bavarian criminal court and administrative court. She photographed 3 security guards uttering hate speech which comprised racist, sexist and homophobic national stereotypes against a Ugandan asylum seeker in an asylum shelter in Bavaria. When they threatened to call the police, she uploaded their photograph on her Facebook timeline. Police officers confiscated her phone, opened up a section 201 case against her, forbade her to enter the premises, and escorted her off the grounds. A few weeks later, she received a house ban from all asylum and refugee shelters in Bavaria. Based on the two criminal and administrative cases, she started organising Ugandan asylum seekers to speak out against the dehumanisation they face in asylum shelters. She will briefly discuss the challenges and strategies of organising for asylum dignity based on the responses to photographing and posting online the faces of security guards violating the human rights and dignity of asylum seekers. For whom does digital democracy work in Bavaria?

Through her work on media literacy and the empowerment of refugees, migrants and women, Nyima Jadama developed her career in Germany as a TV presenter, moderator and media trainer. She left The Gambia in 2015 and dedicated herself connecting marginalised communities worldwide. After an initially difficult journey, bureaucratic hurdles and various work experiences, she founded the 'Bantaba Academy' for migrants and refugees and hosts 'Nyima's Bantaba' and 'Unfiltered Podcast' at the media organisation ALEX Berlin, giving migrants and refugees a voice to discuss their problems and tell their stories. Initially she joined ALEX Berlin as a trainee, but since 2020, she runs her own programme. Nyima describes that the word ‘Bantaba’ comes from her home language Mandinka, which is spoken in some parts of West African countries. Bantaba is a large tree under which the community in The Gambia gathers to discuss the concerns of society. With her programme, in which culture, migration and empowerment are discussed, Nyima talks about migration with migrants – and not without them, as is often the case in the media. Topics range from the direct participation of refugees to countering hate speech against migrants. The podcast 'Unfiltered Bantaba' was added in September 2023. Guests talk about stories that matter to them. Today, she is developing a media literacy project in The Gambia with the r0g agency. Through the creation of a Media Field Guide, she is empowering young women to be active in the media sector and to move from a state of oppression caused by cultural barriers to an awareness of their role in society.

https://www.disruptionlab.org/hacking-alienation

21/09/2024

With allapopp (Digital Media and Performance Artist), Milagros Miceli (Sociologist and Computer Scientist, DAIR Institute, AR/DE), Marwa Fatafta (Researcher, Policy Analyst and Digital Rights Expert, PS/DE). Moderated by Walid El-Houri (Researcher and Editor, LBN/DE).

This panel brings together three different situated experiences of the development of AI technologies (including machine learning, digital surveillance, data generation and labelling), challenging the language used to describe them, their inner functioning and their application in both civilian and wartime contexts. Technologies are never neutral and reflect the biases, systemic structures and cultural paradigms of the geographical, social and political contexts in which they are developed. Furthermore, their usage is brining concrete consequences affecting the lives of marginalised communities and contributing in generating transational repression.

While engaging with recent developments in decolonial thought in the field of artificial intelligence, such as the Decolonial AI Manyfesto and embracing both personal hopes and discomfort caused by the expanding post-Soviet decolonial dialogue, with its new hot spot in Berlin, allapopp envisioned an ambitious experiment: to facilitate a conversation about technology in general, and the future with AI in particular, led by “us*- born on the (post)colonial margins of post-Soviet translocal experiences, cultural, geopolitical, and ethnic half-bloods.” By doing so, allapopp aims for these imaginations to enter a tangible realm of technological envisioning – envisioning futurities as a means of political participation and self-determination. And while doing so, allapopp continuously wonders: who is us*?

Through a specific investigation of data work, the often overlooked labour essential to creating datasets, Milagros Miceli discusses how it plays a critical role in shaping AI technologies. In this talk, she will present findings from the Data Workers’ Inquiry, a community-based research project conducted with 15 data workers. She will describe how issues of migration, exploration, and power shape data work, significantly impacting datasets and AI systems, and argue for the importance of addressing historical inequities, labour conditions, and epistemological standpoints when discussing AI Ethics. This talk will also highlight the need for new research questions and methodologies to better understand the complexities of AI data work.

Looking beyond the harms or 'side effects' of AI and its dangerous impact on marginalised and racialised communities, Marwa Fatafta's presentation draws on the current reality of occupied Palestine, where these technologies have been designed to automate systematic discrimination, human rights abuses, and large-scale killing. She will discuss Israel’s recent use of AI systems in warfare to surveil, target, and bomb civilians and civilian infrastructure on an industrial scale in Gaza and its implication on a global scale. Far from being an isolated issue in a faraway land, she will showcase how these battle-tested technologies and systems – and the industries behind them – are often repurposed to fuel the oppression and crackdown on migrants and minorities here in Europe. Finally, she’ll delve into the complicity of big tech in providing the technologies or services underpinning these abusive systems without transparency and how we can hold them accountable.

21/09/2024

With Anna Titovets Intektra (Artist, Researcher and Curator, RU/PT). Moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli (Artistic Director, Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE).

Floating, fighting, surviving: digital tactics, strategies, and challenges of defeating the alienation of migrants.

According to statistics, at the end of 2023, an estimated 117.3 million* people worldwide have left their home countries due to wars, conflicts, human rights violations, or because of the potential dangers connected with their ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or political opinions. When moving to a new country, migrants not only lose their roots and part of their identity but also acquire a new label from the point of view of the law. This label – be it “refugee,” “migrant,” “immigrant,” “displaced person,” or “asylum seeker” – becomes a rather crucial determinant of a person's life and rights in the new country. It's not only a matter of legal status but depending on the type of this label people become more or less unseen, oppressed, or alienated in society.

Modern immigration involves not only a physical change of geography but also relocation to a new digital environment. Despite the prevailing idea of digital globalisation, each country and even each city has its local characteristics in the digital fabric of society, digital bureaucracy, and policies towards data protection, privacy, and surveillance.

The keynote will focus on practical survivalist strategies, community-building approaches, and challenges in the process of fighting for social equality, searching for a sense of [digital] belonging, reshaping identity, and protecting social rights with digital means and technologies. Among the tactics and tools to be mentioned are not only the creation of self-organised communities, but empathetic chatbots, social media groups with crowdsourced hacks and tricks, AI bots helping to solve different migration-related issues, and guerrilla chatbots for misbehavioral activist tactics helping migrants fight existing rules in the gig economy sector. The keynote will present some examples of artistic projects addressing alienation and migrant issues. Besides, it will examine the phenomena of digital ghettoisation and the challenges of the specific pre-conditioned experience of the city and culture shaped by Google services and ranking-based apps.

The talk is partly based on Anna Titovets’ personal experience of immigration as well as research and observations gained from recent participation as a mentor/curator in the Pause / Play: Culture Under Pressure project, which deals with the artists and cultural practitioners who had to relocate due to wars and conflicts.

Artistic and tech initiatives are important for highlighting the problematic areas of digital and other forms of discrimination and, ideally, should become a foundation for change. However, these initiatives should first and foremost be seen as practices of empowerment, utilising digital tools to foster a sense of support in resisting injustice.

*According to the data published by The United Nations refugee agency.

https://www.disruptionlab.org/hacking-alienation

Join us tonight Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music FestivalA Song of WoesPerformed by: Jason Kunwar I Ranav Adhikari I Sansk...
17/09/2024

Join us tonight Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival

A Song of Woes

Performed by: Jason Kunwar I Ranav Adhikari I Sanskriti Shrestha I Turi Leng Seong Agostino I Nischal Khadka
Tuesday, 17 September, at 21:30–23:00
Venue: Blå

A Song of Woes, We offer Steeps celebrates the fact and fantasy of Nepalese and Himalayan experience in songs, stories and melodies from all over the region.

Adresse

Berlin

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