Chaos Communication Congress
Chaos Communication Congress
Plunge into Proxy Politics (32x57)
: 28, 2015
Speakers: Vera Tollmann, Boaz Levin
During this lecture presentation, Boaz Levin and Vera Tollmann,
co-founders of the Research Center for Proxy Politics, will develop the
proxy as a figure of thought by spinning and testing it in different
contexts.
The Research Center for Proxy Politics aims to explore and reflect upon
the nature of networks and their actors, that is, machines and things as
well as humans. The proxy, a decoy or surrogate, is today often used to
designate a computer server acting as an intermediary for requests from
clients. Originating in the Latin procurator, an agent representing
others in a court of law, proxies are now emblematic of a
post-representational political age, one increasingly populated by bot
militias, puppet states, ghostwriters, and communication relays.
During the period of the project (September 2014 to August 2017) the
center hosts a series of workshops at the Universität der Künste,
Berlin, revolving around a wide range of relevant topics including the
politics of digital networks, the political economy of
crypto-currencies, the genealogy of networked thought, the mediality of
physical landscapes and strategies of opacity. The center also conducts
material, experimental, investigations into the conception and
construction of alternative networks, or alternets.