The Saboteurs Convention

This year GOGBOT looks into Propaganda and the role of technologies in its proliferation under the theme “Manufactured Minds”.

Together with Planetart and Patyt Reyes, we have prepared a program of interactive sessions, where we explore how to spot and resist forms of propaganda and the political agendas of techno-fascist regimes. During these sessions, spread over the day, different artist-researchers will share how they have learned to recognize, dodge, or disrupt technological processes that can lead to the ‘manufacturing’ of our minds or shape our opinions.

> See schedule under for the times and locations

At the end of the day we host “The Saboteurs’ Convention” where our session hosts will come together in a playful panel. The audience is also invited to participate and brainstorm on different ways of reacting to manipulating technologies. Our session hosts will be there to contribute as experts and add nuance and clarity to the discussion.

> The panel takes place at Concordia Theater at 19:30

Program :
With Martyna Marciniak, jiawen uffline, Ahnjili Zhuparris, !Mediengruppe bitnik, Pablo F. Quarta and Jonas Staal

Anatomy of non fact

too dirty to be trained

So-called AI models are largely fed with content scraped from your, my and whatever available websites. These models cannot self-clean like cats, so how come they are not immediately poisoned by intentionally placed prompt injections? During the workshop, we will first examine how web-scraped data is cleaned with software engineers’ imagination and estimates of “good enough” rules, a.k.a heuristics, before being used for training. Then we will follow these rigid estimates, teaming up with the overwhelming scale of “dirty data”, together develop a set of anti-heuristic heuristics that make our data too dirty to be trained on.

Close enough

Close Enough is an installation about the eerie intimacy of drone surveillance: the pilot comes to know their target through sight alone, while the target comes to know the drone mostly by its sound. Drawing on her research into drone warfare, Ahnjili ZhuParris traces how this one-sided closeness has become ordinary as more and more of life moves onto screens. The talk addresses her drone research, the making of the installation itself from hobby drones and open-source computer vision, and the way these same off-the-shelf technologies are redrawing the landscape of war, where the gap between a consumer drone and a weapon has never been narrower. The talk includes a small live demo of the work.

Declassified CIA Guide to Sabotaging Fascism

This interactive study group revisits the Simple Sabotage Field Manual to ask what its strategies of everyday resistance might mean in the age of platform technologies. Originally circulated among antifascist resistance movements during the Second World War, the manual instructs ordinary citizens on how to disrupt and undermine enemy operations in fascist-occupied Europe without getting caught. Using the manual as a historical blueprint, we will read, discuss, and translate its strategies of everyday sabotage into the context of today’s platform technologies.

Together, we will ask: What could simple sabotage look like in the digital everyday? How might we interrupt, confuse, slow down, refuse, or otherwise interfere with the oppressive technologies and platforms that structure our daily lives?

Starting from selected passages from the manual and examples from Qwen Stefani Against Techfascism (the work !Mediengruppe Bitnik presents at the GOGBOT festival), participants will collectively develop ideas for small acts of digital refusal and disobedience. The session is about thinking together and exploring the possibilities, limits, humour, and contradictions of everyday resistance within technological systems that are increasingly difficult to opt out of.

Why did Peter Thiel, Chairman of the macrodata panoptic surveillance giant, Palantir Technologies, buy a 12-million-dollar mansion in Buenos Aires?

Why are activists protesting outside of his door while dressed up as Gandalf, the wise wizard from The Lord of the Rings?

Join game designer, Pablo Quarta, in a playful rumination about the state of technofascism in Argentinian society today. Together, we will try to figure out why so many right-wing politicians and tech mogul billionaires from all around the world have their eyes on this South American country, what their ambitions are, and what every day Argentinians can do to get them to fuck right off.

propaganda theater

It is often thought that propaganda is a concept that applies only to ‘totalitarian’ regimes of the past, or to regimes that seem to be stuck in a time capsule – from Putin to Kim Jong-un. Authoritarian politics within democracies even has its own lexicon – the so-called ‘post-truth’ era, characterised by ‘alternative facts’ and fake news. Yet the word ‘propaganda’ is shunned. Is not precisely this notion – that democracy is free from propaganda – itself the product of propaganda?

Jonas Staal, artist, propaganda researcher and author of *Propaganda Art in the 21st Century* (2019) and *Climate Propagandas* (2024), takes you on a journey through this lecture on propaganda, exploring how contemporary propaganda works – including within Western democracies. From the science fiction writers advising French President Macron, to the Pentagon’s game developers, the filmmaker who conceived ‘Trumpism’ and the dramaturg who scripted Putin’s performance.

Propaganda literacy, Staal argues, is an essential weapon not only for resisting dominant powers, but also for promoting a better world.

This lecture is organized in collaboration with the Rijksmuseum Twenthe and Concordia. To enter this session, please grab a free ticket at Concordia's ticket booth.