Discussion Day 1 of the Symposium TIMES OF HANDS – GAMIFICATION VS PLAY with Cynthia Chepkemoi, Nestor Siré, Steffen Köhn, Sam Hopkins and Hans Bernhard.

A talk with Nestor Siré, Steffen Köhn and Sam Hopkins, followed by a video essay by Nestor Siré and Steffen Köhn about the (lack of) internet in Cuba and the offline sharing alternative to it: El Paquete Semanal, a country-wide offline data sharing network. With online access heavily restricted, Cuba has one of the lowest inter#net penetration rates in the world. Yet, Cuban citizens have found a way to distribute all kinds of media content in the form of El Paquete Semanal, a one terabyte collection of data that is compiled by a network of people with various forms of privileged internet access and then circulated nationwide on USB sticks and external hard drives via an elaborate network of deliverymen. In this presentation we want to describe how El Paquete has come to constitute a nested media ecosystem that facili#tates the publication of independent local media content such as video games or pdf magazines, hosts several digital marketplaces, and offers an otherwise non-existing space for advertisement. NESTOR SIRÉ (b. 1988) lives and works between Havana and Camagüey, Cuba. Siré’s artistic practice intervenes directly in specific contexts in order to analyze social and cultural phenomena. His artistic methodology consists in expanding social structures so as to find more effective ways through which art can intervene in the complex relationships between official and informal networks. His works have been shown in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Havana), Queens Museum (New York), Rhizome (New York), New Museum (New York), Hong-Gah Museum (Taipei), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico City), and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santa Fe (Argentina), among other places. STEFFEN KÖHN (b. 1980) lives and works in Berlin. He is a filmmaker, anthropologist and video artist who uses ethnography to understand contemporary sociotechnical landscapes. For his video and installation works he engages in local collaborations with artists, software developers and science fiction writers to explore viable alternatives to current distributions of technological access and arrangements of power. His works have been shown at the Academy of the Arts Berlin, Kunsthaus Graz, Vienna Art Week, Hong Gah Museum Taipei, Lulea Biennial and the ethnographic museums of Copenhagen and Dresden. His films have been screened at the Berlinale, Rotterdam International Film Festival and the Word Film Festival Montreal, among others.

Sam Hopkins summarizing the last presentations followed by a presentation with Cynthia Chepkemoi about infrastructural problems in slums in Nairobi and what kinds of alternative models emerge of this, like sharing content offline via bluetooth and other methods, and for what purposes the people use the internet. With the progress and application of Information Technology (IT), Networking and Internet access has been gaining world’s attention. It is relatively a growing phenomenon whose value has proven beyond doubts, though its’ application is majorly in developed countries and cities. Slums and Rural areas have been neglected and less has been done on its applications and they lack these services so they seek alternatives means. This paper attempts to analyse how people in slums and rural areas network,use mobile phones, share content offline and their identity. The research seek to identify which alternative devices they use to network and share content offline. CYNTHIA CHEPKEMOI regards herself as an archivist interested in the particular complexities of personal experience. She works in qualitative and quantitative research for both academic projects and market research companies. Her works employ research and surveys to understand Kenya at the margins, beyond the staple subjects. She has been involved with reports on various topics, including by ipsos on teenage pregnancies, medical insurance accessibility to Kenyans, the views of shareholders in KCB Bank research, the plight of sex workers in Salgaa in Nakuru County and agribusiness in Kericho County. She has a background in logistics and supply chain management and six year’s experience working in procurement in Nairobi.

Discussion Day 1 of the Symposium TIMES OF HANDS – GAMIFICATION VS PLAY with Bethuel Muthee, Oscar Peña, Sam Hopkins and Hans Bernhard

Oscar Peña and Hand Bernhard talking about gig economy and how to do it in a good way, protecting workers rights and about ethical issues in terms of gamification in the gig economy, for example customers reviewing workers. OSCAR PEÑA creates technology that enhances businesses and solves social challenges. Peña is currently leading the technology of HOGARU.com, a tech-enabled cleaning company with 600+ employees. He is happy to connect with anyone who is tackling social challenges and thinks that technology could give them an edge. Oscar will share his experience building Hogaru.com, an on-demand cleaning service in Colombia. From the perspective of the customer Hogaru is very convenient; you book a service when you need it, pay it through the internet and when the date comes you receive a professional cleaning service. In this way it is very similar to other gig economy companies. However from the perspective of the cleaner Hogaru took a very different approach; their cleaners are full time employees with all their benefits. Oscar believes that it is the job of the technology to provide convenience to customers while at the same time ensure stability to the cleaners. Hogaru thinks it is important that companies make sure all their stakeholders are doing well, and think technology and innovation can help to achieve this.

A presentation by Bethuel Muthee about debt, loans, sports betting apps, financial speculation and gambling and how it messes up our perception of time, using the trick game pata potea as a metaphor. Kenyan social media has been in uproar over the country’s burgeoning debt and its concomitant strain on citizens through taxation. This comes against a backdrop of a decade of massive government borrowing and the exponential growth of fintech services that have increased personal debt of numerous households. Credit is ubiquitous and has been theorised by scholars such as Arjun Appadurai and Maurizio Lazzarato, to be a fundamental social relation of Western societies. Happening contiguously has been the rise of sports betting, either online via betting apps, or through USSD codes for those without smartphones. Nairobi has a number of betting shops set up by betting companies where one can watch and keep up with a variety of games. Both credit and gambling are happening on digital platforms that exemplify what Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik refer to as the “speculative time-complex” in which the future determines the present. This presentation seeks to think through how notions of the future shape sociality that is increasingly virtual and what, if any, solutions there might be to reclaim the present BETHUEL MUTHEE is a poet living and working in Nairobi. He is a member of Maasai Mbili artists’ collective. He was series editor for Down River Road’s inaugural issue Place. As a member of Naijographia he has co-curated three exhibitions Naijographia (2017, Goethe-Institut Nairobi), Wanakuboeka Feelharmonic (2018, British Institute in Eastern Africa) and From Here to When (2019, Goethe-Institut Nairobi).

A presentation by Kagonya Awori about her PHD research about Educational Games, the use of 360 video and AI in learning and more, followed by a talk with Sam Hopkins. Kagonya Awori proposes a lens for game design that is based on indigenous African ways of knowing. Based on a study with elders in Kenya and diaspora youth in Australia, this talk proposes a lens that can motivate the design of games that can better mediate learning for African communities. The People-Place-Praxis lens is based on the view that knowledge is developed, shared and stored over time through situated face-to-face interactions with people and indigenous epicentres. The P-P-P lens views People as knowledge, Place as knowledge and Praxis as knowledge. This triad view of knowledge asserts that immersive learning involves supporting social, situated and physical interactions among members, and in close association with indigenous epicentres. DR. KAGONYA AWORI is a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researcher. She has over 10 years experience in User Experience Research and Design having worked across the globe in countries including Kenya, United Kingdom, and Australia, with companies such as iHub Kenya, Microsoft Research, National Australia Bank and Safaricom PLC. She holds a dual Masters in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University (USA), a Bachelors in Business Information Technology from Strathmore University (Kenya), and a PhD in Computer Engineering from the University of Melbourne, (Australia)

TIMES OF HANDS – GAMIFICATION VS PLAY - Symposium Introduction into the Gamification v Play Symposium and into Gamification in general by Sam Hopkins and Hans Bernhard. One of the many effects of digitalization is the growing presence and significance of games. On the one hand we see them on mobile phones and laptops, as recreational activities and as a career, as a global practice. On the other hand gamification is used as a means of increasing productivity and efficiency and as a tool for learning. Considering how ubiquitous it is as a practice, it raises the question of whether games and gaming are not less a consequence of digitalization as they are much more a precondition for its success: is it possible to imagine contemporary digital fields – whether economic, social, cultural, or political – without playful, game-like features? Defining the framework of the symposium are a broadened concept of digital work – i.e. every work that is produced through digitalization is digital work – and a new perspective on games. Nairobi is both a source of inspiration and the focus of these investigations. As an African tech hub, embedded in global finance and knowledge networks and rich in idiosyncratic digital practices, Nairobi is a space with complexity and contradictions in abundance. The symposium examines themes like the global influence and local practices of Silicon Valley rhetoric, the presence of Chinese tech ideologies in the South and the North, the practice of offline file sharing in Nairobi, the emergence of the transcontinental professional gaming industry and the explosion of the ride-hailing industry in East Africa.

In the sixth episode of the second season of the Octopus, Leo Impett and Hans Bernhard are talking about the possibilities of AIs dealing with art history, the advantages and disadvantages of AIs dealing with art and everything else and an upcoming project by them about an AI as a curator. https://biennial.ai/

In the fifth episode of the second season of the Octopus, Tina Sauerländer and Liz Haas are talking about AI art, the consequences of AI in real life and if AIs are actually t h a t smart. (sorry for the sound issues, the recording got a bit messed up and I did my best to fix it - the editor)

In the fourth episode of the second season of the Octopus, Lars Wehringer from Capulcu Collective and Sam Hopkins talking about platform capitalism, how we are surveilled and consequences of that, thinking about digital resistance and giving advice how to protect your privacy (if this is even possible).

In the third episode of the second season of the Octopus, Diana McCarty and Hans Bernhard dive into collective work, the struggle of artists, techno/cyberfeminism, net culture and much more!

Fatima Kastner: Haben Roboter Rechte? Hans Bernhard im Gespräch mit Fatima Kastner über Ethik der Roboter, Verantwortung und Handlungsträgerschaft Künstlicher Intelligenz, der Frage nach dem Verhältnis von Globalisierung und Digitalisierung und Menschenrechten in der Weltgesellschaft.

Battling the barbarism of our time Jean Peters from the Peng! Collective We kick off Season 2 of the Octopus with a bang - an interview with Jean Peters from the Peng! Collective. Jean takes us inside some of the projects of the collective, from Zero Trollerance (2015), the development of an army of anti-misogny bots to Mask. ID (2015) a tool for morphing different passport photos together to googlenest (2014) a prescient spoof google product based on data extraction. In this wide-roaming discussion we explore big questions about what it means to be politically active, where the border between art and activism lies and how we can "battle the barbarism of our time". https://pen.gg

We discuss The Alt Right with Ivan Knapp from the University College London and Zenker, an artist and game designer from Leipzig. This verbal exchange includes metaphorical and practical analysis of games and game-ecologies such as Warhammer and World of Warcraft, and stretches over phenomenons such as the Alt Right, New Fascism, the Manosphere, Incels, White Supremacists and libertarian Silicon Valley Transhumanism, but also Gamergate, Cuck Memes and Elliot Rodgers. One focus is the nostalgia of 1980s aesthetics in Alt Right music and graphics (Vaporwave becomes Fashwave), both an unimaginative vision of the future based on the past, and the effective adaptation strategies of leftist protest techniques by this new right movement. Ivan Knapp looks at all these developments from the angle of the social dynamics of adolescent male groups, talks about Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land and the dangers of Marvel comics, Zenker talks about current experiences of New Right movements in Eastern Germany, the reconstruction of fantasy worlds and his 4 years of research in the global Alt Right. Links: https://incels.net https://www.reddit.com/r/Vaporwave https://worldofwarcraft.com https://www.warhammer-community.com https://spectator.us/mencius-moldbug-moment https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/11/accelerationism-how-a-fringe-philosophy-predicted-the-future-we-live-in https://vimeo.com/137939689

This double-bill episode compares two image recognition projects. German artist and academic Christian Sievers talks about his art project ‘World Instance’, based on ImageNet resources and Kenyan coder and neural network expert Brian Muhia discusses his application ‘Shambabot’ which identifies plant illnesses. These two image-based projects are contrasted with the work of Stefanie Glauber, an artist who employs neural networks to experiment with the world of odors and scents. Our discussion floats along and peacefully orbits the different layers of recognizing, understanding and interpreting of sources and data through machines and different senses. The podcast covers, in quite detailed technical discussions, how image interpretation and neuronal networks work. Links: https://worldinstance.net https://twitter.com/negamuhia?lang=en http://www.stefaniglauber.com/odormirror.html

Today's podcast delves into the mind-bending world of Deep Fakes. Deep Fakes are AI-based machine learning technologies which can seamlessly map 'source' moving-image onto 'target' moving-image, typically used to map one persons face onto another persons body, often used in news, politics, pornography and art. Artist Max Mauro Schmid, discusses how this is done technically, and debates some of the epistemological ramifications of this with Professor Hans Bernhard. What happens when we experience these generated clips? Are we able to perceive their uncanny nature? Are notions of fake and real really useful in trying to parse these moving-images? Are the critical faculties required to live in a world in which binary constructions have broken down a cognitive burden? Links: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/23/to-fix-the-problem-of-deepfakes-we-must-treat-the-cause-not-the-symptoms https://www.creativebloq.com/features/deepfake-examples

Our guest on today’s podcast is the researcher and curator Mi You (Doc. Diss) who expands and extends our understanding of the Silk Road. Drawing on personal travels in Central Asia, and affiliated research by historians, Mi You speculates that the networks of the Silk Road were far more distributed and decentralised than traditional historiography accounts for. She examines paintings which evidence the smuggling of silkworms, deconstructs the contemporary Chinese state hagiography of Admiral Zheng He, and reframes the infamous tributary system of the Chinese Empire as exchange rather than donation. We end by hearing a bit about fermentation as a metaphor for cultural practices in Eurasia. Links: https://www.academia.edu/37890380/Silk_Roads_Tributary_Networks_and_Old_and_New_Imperialism_in_Extra_States_Nations_in_Liquidation_Cahier_4 https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/the-silk-road-9780190208929? https://casco.art/en/studylines/unmapping-eurasia

Today's guest is Julia Scher, Professor of Surveillance Architecture at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne (KHM). We approach the tech landscape from an embodied perspective. What happens to the body when the self is digitised? How are we reckoning with the infiltrative Internet of today? How do we continue to empathise and connect with one another? Professor Scher revels in these questions, opting for tech seduction in lieu of tech pessimism. She draws a genealogy of tech from the endlessness of Californian life; the infinite highway and endless hamburger. And she relishes to the soft rounded corners of our safe contemporary devices. Links: http://www.juliascher.com http://cyborganthropology.com/Steve_Mann https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520280069/the-gentrification-of-the-mind

In this podcast we talk to the artist Sophia Bauer about her research into the soundscapes of Kenyan Forests. Sophia uses sound to inquire into the presence of the past in today’s world. Inspired by the research of forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, who reframes Forests as social networks in which trees help one another to survive, Sophia frames sound as a relational medium. Sounding entity produces pressure waves which move through space, penetrating everything in their way and affecting all of us, human and non-human. We talk about the fungal networks which distribute nutrients from mother trees to weaker specimens, and how sound can be a forensic tool to deconstruct notions of landscape and the hierarchies embedded in them. Links: https://www.ted.com/speakers/suzanne_simard http://www.soundofnairobi.net

Our third podcast engages with some of the ideas, and fears, regarding computer-led cognition, as proposed by James Bridle in his book New Dark Age. Our discussion flows, and meanders over a contemporary landscape populated with notions of code/spaces, hyperobjects and computational thinking. We discuss the enmeshing of the digital and the physical environments that we live in, the limitations of computer science and modelling, and the shadow of the male ego in the tech landscape of today. We mull over the significance of Deep Blue and AlphaGo, and the singular obsession with speed in the financial sector. Finally, we end up by opening our imaginations to the explosive contemporary folk culture of conspiracy theories. Links: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3002-new-dark-age https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/codespace https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/hyperobjects https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/this-is-water-by-david-foster-wallace

In the second episode of ‘Octopus’, lizvlx aka Liz Haas, Sam Hopkins and Hans Bernhard talk broadly and widely about the art market. With a focus on new technologies and potential new distribution strategies they discuss how the murky and opaque world of art dealing negotiates visions and techniques of transparency such as Blockchain? On a further level, they reflect and report on how artists like UBERMORGEN experiment with the surveillance capitalist tools of the Internet and how do they explore new models of producing and thinking about art. Links: https://cutt.ly/ge5UcO5

For the inaugural podcast session of ‘Octopus’, Sam Hopkins and Hans Bernhard discuss the often invisible infrastructural networks of our contemporary world. The cables, the railways, the roads, the freeports, the free-trade zones and the export-processing zones (EPZ) that trace an often indiscernible architecture of power. Using Extrastatecraft, the illuminating text by Keller Easterling, as a launchpad, our discussion roams from the idiosyncratic marketplaces being exploited in the slums of Nairobi to the mesmerising physicality of the cable networks that snake around the globe. We tentatively conclude that the only thing that knows the system is the system itself. Links: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2163-extrastatecraft https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass https://redlines.network

Introduction of the Octopus Podcast