Niels ten Oever: The quantum state of topological infrastructure reconfigurations: the case of 5G
Niels is a postdoctoral researcher with the ‘Making the hidden visible: Co-designing for public values in standards-making and governance’-project at the Media Studies department at the University of Amsterdam. He is also a research fellow with the Centre for Internet and Human Rights at the European University Viadrina and an associated scholar with the Centro de Tecnologia e Sociedade at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas. His research focuses on how norms, such as human rights, get inscribed, resisted, and subverted in the Internet infrastructure through its transnational governance.
Niels tries to understand how invisible infrastructures provide a socio-technical ordering to information societies and how this influences the distribution of wealth, power, and possibilities.
Anna Engelhardt: Spectral Volumes of Russian Cyber Warfare
Anna(b. 1994, Kostroma, Russia) is a media artist, researcher, and writer based in London. Her main interests are the (de)colonial politics of algorithmic and logistical infrastructures in post-Soviet space. Anna is currently conducting her PhD on the electromagnetic infrastructure of Russian cyber warfare at Queen Mary, UoL, under the supervision of Laleh Khalili and Elke Schwarz. Anna’s recent projects include:
Machinic Infrastructures of Truth (2020), an inquiry into the production of verification systems, presented at Transmediale as a part of ‘Adversarial Hacking’ symposium;
Adversarial Infrastructure (2019), an investigation of how the Russian Crimean Bridge functions according to principles of adversarial machine learning, presented at Ars Electronica Kepler’s Gardens, 67th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, and Mute Magazine. She has recently took part at Recursive Colonialism, AI & Speculative Computation symposium with her research on racialised topologies of Russian logistics. With Sasha Shestakova, Anna is a co-founder of the Distributed Cognition Cooperative.
