Убежище / Suoja / Shelter

"The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way
we express what we think."^[1]

Computation and automation are relentlessly reshaping the political world order on a planetary scale, eroding national and personal sovereignties and spawning new forms of governance. Along with the climate crisis, their exponential rise demands a fundamental shift in our understanding of the political realm. Unlike climate change, sovereignties are social constructs, whether national or personal, whether a question of geopolitics or self-determination and should be negotiated.
It is upon us, if this process will ultimately lead to societies controlled by algorithms that utterly influence our individual decisions. It is a topical question whether and how we define our personal and national sovereignties in a post-surveillance information society: how shall we delegate decision-making to partly or entirely automated, statistically-based software capable of machine learning? How shall we keep an acceptable degree of self-determination in the online realm intact? How do we deal with the affective responses from our computational devices, and how far do we let them? What is the role of art practices in this ontological shift, which doesn't emerge alone but has to be catalysed?
These questions propel the discussion of events in computation's past, such as the failed attempt to build an automated system for economic planning and management based on a nationwide computer network (OGAS), with which Soviet bureaucracy could have been completely reorganized. This ambitious plan, a product of cybernetics, faced stiff opposition from bureaucrats, who feared that sweeping reorganization might eliminate their roles. Control and surveillance were not automatized once, which doesn't mean that they are not detached from direct human agency today. Surveillance now is clearly smoother, stealthier, and more effective than before computation, data mining, and machine learning, and despite its all-encompassing presence often remains unnoticed deliberately. Online companies clearly use legislative gaps, and profit from the Internet users' data traces they leave behind, which data is often used without the consent of the users: the system of surveillance-capitalism (Zuboff; 2018) arises as a consequence.
The pandemic just accelerated the processes of digitisation, and, as Yuk Hui describes, the "subsumption by the data economy"^[2]. It might reveal itself in a certain sense as a portal, "a gateway between one world and the next"^[3], but it seems to bring various setbacks with itself when it is an excuse for arbitrary legislation, while the public attention is focused on an illness, and while other deficits and pre-lockdown matters, such as the pitfalls of surveillance-capitalism withdraw to latency.
At this point, it seems clear that the establishment of technological sovereignty is the very basis for maintaining democracy as we know or imagine it. People who use computing devices are increasingly defined as users, and ultimately, as the product itself, contributing monetizable data and even labour to the profit of tech companies. Though not a new idea, the option of making self-determined choices that impact and shape both individual technologies, and the social and economic processes in which they are embedded, is still more wish than reality.

"Really useful knowledge is knowledge calculated to make you free."^[4]

Drawing on the concept of "really useful knowledge"^[5] originating in radical educational movements of the early nineteenth-century England, when it signified a curriculum required for working class emancipation, and when education provided a model for collective "self-help" the Suoja /Shelter Festival-Laboratory will set up an online Knowledge Room to provide "really useful knowledge" and guide us, users of networked computational devices, towards to online sovereignty, before "knowledge itself disintegrates into the information generated by fully automated calculation, and into fixed capital, which, along with 'big data', forms the hyper-synchronized associated milieu – or what I call the digital Leviathan"^[6]
Parallel to construction a room of "calculated knowledge", a Situation Room is being set up, without location, dispersed in the computational network, which provides the infrastructural, historical and conceptual basis of its existence. Situation Rooms emerge in crises to provide intelligence and support decision making processes of leaders, their history and existence is dependent on computation, thus tracing their origin leads one back to the Second World War, to the roots of cybernetics. Our online iteration of a Situation Room entails various forms of exchange, entanglements and Daseins.
Moving online, we are creating a space for performative experiments, discussions, immersive interactions; welcoming the diversity of artistic practices which can re-identify themselves for a digital space; offering to make it is a tryout with a prospect to continue working with the same topic, but on a bigger scale, during the future off-line event.
We believe that every safe space, including online spaces, can be only a temporary measure to surmount crisis and to gain strength to meet reality. The space emerging from our online connectedness is clearly not a utopia, and brings along open questions we will attempt to engage with in a non-hierarchical way.
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^[1] Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, and Julie Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of
Computer Programs, MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Series (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985).
^[2] Yuk Hui, One Hundred Years of Crisis, in: e-flux Journal #108 - April 2020,
^[3] Arundhati Roy, "The pandemic is a portal", in: Financial Times, 04.03.2020, (link)
^[4] Johnson, R. (1988) 'Really useful knowledge' 1790-1850: memories for education in the 1980s. In Lovett, T. (ed.) Radical approaches to adult education: a reader. London: Croom Helm, 22.
^[5] "Really useful knowledge" is referred to in the context of contemporary art by an exhibition and a publication of the same title (curators: What, How & for Whom/WHW, 2014, Museo Reina Sofía Madrid).
^[6] Bernard Stiegler, The Neganthropocene, Ed, translated, with an introduction by Daniel Ross, London: Open Humanities Press, 2018. 210.