I want to introduce Xuxa. Xuxa Niederberger is an artist, educator and researcher in digital culture and the arts. She has developed and curated the education program for HEC, that's the House of Electronic Kunst in Basel, and has been researching digital artistic practices and the commons, and is currently a researcher on the Latent Spaces research project. I think you're going to be talking a little bit about that as well. So, Oti, thank you very much for being with us. Thank you. Thank you, Adnan, for that nice introduction, and also thank you for having me. I'm very happy to be here, and I'm also very happy that you are still here after these quite intensive days. And that's already my presentation, so I will be talking about the user, and I'm an artist and a researcher and an educator, so that's the crossroad that I'm talking from. And in my talk, I will focus on how technology is connected to infrastructure. How technology is connected to identity. And then we use a little bit a cultural studies framework and I say it because I need to clarify what I mean with culture. For my work, culture is the shared practice of meaning making. So it's not about high culture or low culture or specific subcultures, but it's a very broad understanding of conscious as a practice of meaning making and a shared practice of meaning making. And for me, education is, and artistic practice as well, is deliberate intervention in that meaning making. So it's a process that is part of a proto process and is intervening in that. So the background is a research project, it's called Latent Spaces, performing ambiguous data, and it is hosted at the Zurich University of the Art. And it's a bigger research project, so I'm part of a group, we are seven people, and we have a media theory position, a data science position, and then four artistic practice sub-project. And the unifying thing of this that data is a representation of reality. We maintain that data is something else, that data is data, so it's something very specific in itself, and that it can hold different meanings. And the question is, what meaning is realized through data about reality? And so the ambiguity of data is in this research project the space we explore and we try to intervene in artistic practice and through scientific inquiry. So my part is the Unreal Data sub-project. My question is, what does this data fight contemporary means for users? For users, I first had to clarify the question, what is a user today? Because the user today is very unarticulated, but still very often used term. And we have a shared understanding what a user is. It is a kind of technological practice that is never, ever specified. So it is something like a rest. So the user is not a nerd, it's not a hacker, and what is that rest? Because it is often also a very problematized position, so users are in need of education. So it is, in a way, a cultural form, shared understanding, and as that, it is also historical. So a user today is something completely different than what a user was in the 1980s. And personal computing came up and it's also different of what it was in the 90s when this networked communication with the internet became popular. So the question is what it is today. And today, I would say it is, that is about the shared imagination. So today, you to be a user is to be having a practice inside of data-driven environments. So data-driven environments and in social media, of course, and the platform, streaming platforms, but also communicative things like messengers, of course, commercial platforms, but then also things like infrastructural things, web search, and all these free services we have on the Internet. And increasingly, this is also affecting tools, so things that we were thinking of as product we use to do our stuff that are increasingly cloud-based software like Microsoft Office, but also Adobe Creative Cloud, and of course also the developments we have with artificial intelligence as part of a new articulation of data-driven environments. And that means that to be a user today is to increasingly rent access to computing power that is also not located on our devices anymore. So we have kind of a situation where digital performativity is distributed without we are able to know exactly where it is, where it is located. So we have quite a new situation. And this situation is a change on an infrastructural level. So we have a new, what is I think really significant today is that we are moving in the digital domain away from code as a space to act and this is based towards infrastructure. So when Lawrence Lessing was able to say code is law in 1999, today we need to say that infrastructure is law. And that is law means that infrastructure is a highly normative place. So we have little to say about infrastructure. It's hidden, and often it is quite normalized, and we don't have choice. And for the question, what does that mean for the user? How is infrastructure affecting users as a subject position or identity. How we become users through infrastructure. And I did a small observation on the Twitter crisis. It's already like one and a half years. It feels very old already. In October 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter. I feels very old already. In October 2022 Elon Musk bought Twitter. I'm sure you remember. And people were looking for alternatives. And one of the alternatives that was discussed was Mastodon. And Mastodon is quite similar to Twitter. It's a micro-blogging service as well. It's not corporate owned but a network of connected servers that are often run by private persons, non-profits and communities. And what happened in that discussion about whether to move and what the alternatives are is something that I found is articulating something like a subjectivity crisis for users. articulating something like a subjectivity crisis for users. So there's a tweet of a friend of mine. He said, as long as the alternatives, and he meant Mastodon, are from nerds for nerds, this discussion is of little use. And what he's saying is not only articulating his personal crisis, but it is articulating something like a boundary of that user-subject position, because he's articulating something like a boundary of that user subject position, because he's articulating that he is not a nerd. So to be a user is clearly not the same as a nerd. And it is also what he says and how he says it, it is clear that it is not something that you can change easily. So that is something really that is difficult to tackle. And it's not just like, I would have said, try it out. And it's not a practical problem, but it's an identity problem. That's something else. And why? And I call it the return of the server because if you sign up to Mastodon you have to choose a server first before you identify yourself and when you're signing up to services and platforms you are identifying yourself as an individual and that's also a subject position and maybe the most broad basic subject position we have. It's the classic liberal individual. That is a person that is self-contained. And in the classic liberal thinking, communality comes always after the individual. So you're born alone and then you grow into some society. And we know it's not true, but this is deeply, deeply, that's deep inside of how people see themselves. And it is enacted through software. So when you sign up to a platform, you identify yourself as a liberal individual. So you provide contact details and names and email addresses. And then you are on the platform and then you can shape, you can get into communities. So community comes after. And in Macedon, the first thing you have to do is to choose a community to change. And there are many servers. That's one problem, quite a problem. But then also you have to ask yourself different questions. You have to ask yourself, what is the community I want to join? What is important to me? To whom would I like to belong? Do they maybe want me or maybe not? And that's something completely different. And you do that before you even can enter a username or choose a username. And so that is something that is really clashing with a broader subject position, which is the liberal individual. So the interesting thing that it is articulated to a technological device, like the server. And the server is, we know everything, we know that everybody knows that it is a basic infrastructure of the internet still, even for Twitter, also Twitter runs on server. But for users, the server has been abstracted away from services. So we just have services, but we don't have tangible infrastructure anymore. And we also don't have access or even visibility for the labor and the maintenance of these infrastructures. And this return of the servers feels, for some, like me, that I remember the time of the servers in the 90s, for me it is a bit like time traveling, you know? It has some nostalgic flair. But for others, it is a traveling or a shift in technological domains. So they feel they need now to have technological knowledge about servers, which is not even true, but it feels like that. So if things appear, other things change as well. And so this is an example of how subjectivities are shaped by infrastructure in everyday practice. And the interesting part for me now as an educator is the everyday practice because this kind of subjectivity building and shaping of self-understanding towards a technological practice happens in the everyday. So it is already established before we even start an educational initiative or a thing. So that's something that is pre-configured and we need to deal with that. And a lot of resistance or problems in educational initiatives come from this prefiguration to everyday practice. And we can see that they're becoming habitual before any educational intervention. And so things do not only have politics. They also have pedagogies, and that is important to know. So the everyday, interestingly, I'm stopping a little. So the everyday, interestingly, I was delving a little bit in the everyday, the everyday is quite deeply disregarded in computational culture. And I found this screenshot from Urban Dictionary, and I was researching the difference between the geek and the nerd, because I'm using nerd for my self-description, and somebody told me that I'm not a nerd, that I'm a geek, and I didn't know the difference. So the difference is, you know, the relationship between technical and social skills, and it's quite funny. So, but the most interesting thing is the normie. And the normie, that's a normal person. That is the only explanation of what a normie is. A normie is a normal person block. So there is nothing to say about it. If you scroll down, you get paragraphs of explanation where the geek is and where the nerd is. But a normal person, there is nothing to say. And that's exactly that space of the political. So it's the same like with infrastructure. It's hidden. We don't talk about it. It's unaware, and that's why it has so great normative power. And that's the everyday in computational culture. And interestingly, because I was talking about the crossroad of education and art and the technological, it's the same in education, where the everyday is a place of no knowledge. In order, that needs to be overcome towards expertise. So education is always a move away from the ordinary towards expertise and skills and diplomas and institutions and so on. And it's the same in the arts, where the everyday is strictly separated from the domain of art, which is the exceptional. The artwork is an exceptional thing, and also the artist is an exceptional thing, like the genius. And I know that this is not things that probably a lot of us would not subscribe to, but it's still the dominant position in aesthetic discourse today in our theory as well. So we have a disregard of the everyday everywhere. So what can we do in critical cultural education that of the digital, if you want it to be not only about the everyday as a problem to be overcome, but inside the everyday and open it as a space to act. So you know, not move towards something else but act where you are. So I'd like to discuss the feminist servers for that as an example. So this is Sister Server. This is one of the feminist servers and part of that as well. And feminist servers are basically community infrastructure, so they provide services and things for their members. And they are born out of the realization that commercial platforms are not protecting marginalized people. So the idea of having feminist service is to have a safer place for vulnerable people. And it is not only infrastructure, so it is not only autonomous infrastructure, but it is also a critique of infrastructure and technology, because there are two documents. You probably know the one from 2014. It is the feminist server manifesto, and then there's a newer one that is a re-articulation from 2022 that is called the wish list for trans feminist servers and bot document. They use a cultural form for that. So it's not just a manifesto. So they use, again, the server as this infrastructural thing as a protagonist that talks about itself. So bot document are self-articulations of a server. A feminist server is, a trans-feminist server does, and so on. And through these, through this self-articulation, they establish a new territory to think through technology, and they focus on the ideological domain of technology by raising questions of servitude. So what does it mean to be served and what does it mean to serve? And through this, that whole relation that you have to technology becomes articulated. And in a way that makes it possible to invent or wish for or try to have other relations and these relations, the new relations on the feminist server should be or are aimed at being structured through maintenance and care and not through consumption and extraction. And that is very interesting. And so to be on a feminist server means, to be a user on a feminist server is, you still use these services, you know, and not everybody is an admin. I'm not an admin on my family's server. But you are part of a conversation. And in this conversation, you are part of an ongoing negotiation about the conditions of services and servers. And that includes technical maintenance, but it includes also all that work that goes into maintaining a community as such. And that's quite a lot of communicative work. And I'm impressed by this much work on that. And so what we can learn from trans feminist servers is that what they do is they refuse symbolization. So they are not works of art. They are, in a way, narrative devices of questioning technology, but they are also working technology. So they are both. And by refusing symbolization, they stay in the everyday. So they do what they claim in the everyday and every day. And that is only possible because they refuse the symbolization. And the feminist server, they have a background in artistic and activist institutions and people, but they stay out of the purely symbolic space of the arts. And the second thing I think is important is that they maintain that learning is a collective, so that it's not about individual expertise and it is not about solidifying roles and who is the admin and who is the super admin, but it needs to be a collective space of learning. And coming back to the user, it allows to have a notion of use that is participation. Because both documents, they maintain that feminist service do only exist because there is a community that cares enough to make them exist. And if nobody is using services, then we don't need to have a user, and then we don't need the community. So to be a user on a feminist server is not an act of consumption, but it comes also as it has been described as coming with responsibilities, like you're using the service, and that is including your monitor functionality and you're giving feedback about functionality and needs and what needs to be done. And that's a completely different understanding of use than use as a purely consumptive act. So, and I am very inspired by the feminist service and I think that it is an example and that I would like to have more of these methods and pedagogies that are capable of transforming the everyday into the meaningful as a precondition for difference. That's my end. Thank you. Thank you very much, Shusha Bail. We switch laptops. Get me back to my notes thanks so much questions we'll have then in the end hi we had a clarification question from the pad if you could explain briefly again the refused symbolization from the feminist service practices? Repeat. Okay. The feminist service, my definition. Okay, I try. Okay, I think that the radicality of feminist servers is that they do a kind of important move on an aesthetic theorem. Because they refuse to have distinction. Either you are in the everyday or you are in the aesthetical domain. So they maintain that this is an aesthetic practice and the two documents and the self-articulations are proof of that, but they are not being purely symbolic like traditional notion of art is and traditional aesthetic or modernist aesthetic understanding maintains that you need to be you know this disconnectedness and the disinterestedness of the artwork and so so they refuse that and that this way I think that I call that their refusal of symbolization so they don't transform transform their practice into a symbol for something else. It's for themselves. Thank you. Thanks.