‘The Invisible Interface and the Future of Politics and Power’

Switching on a light, cooking a meal, placing a phone call, watching TV or driving a car - almost all human activities in our modern civilization are controlled by computer programs.

The fabric of everyday life is woven out of disappearing digital codes. There is no escape anymore: We are wrapped in an invisible Interface. Even standing on the street makes us use computers. Cameras may observe our face, our emotions and behaviours. Smartphones track our motions and actions. Autonomous cars will sense our motions and use them to calculate their paths.

Drones may bring roasted pigeons or Amazon deliveries in the future, but already today bring death and terror to humans having the wrong bits in their digital records.

A global butterfly effect connects any potential action of any human being to an arbitrary reaction of anything else in the future. We are wrapped in code. And any computer can be reprogrammed as any other computer, so the code may change. It starts blowing our mind.

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Kyle McDonald

Kyle McDonald (US) is an artist who works in the open with code. He is a contributor to arts-engineering toolkits like openFrameworks, and builds tools that allow artists to use new algorithms in creative ways.

Anna Biselli

As a political activist and a trained computer scientist Anna Biselli found that the many of the most interesting technical problems lead to vast political challenges in a future society.

Matthieu Cherubini

Matthieu Cherubini is currently a PhD candidate in the Design Interactions department in Royal College of Art. His research by project examines the implications of artificial moral agents on our domestic and everyday lives, both today and in the near future.