Keynote – Whistleblowing as Artistic Practice

Tatiana Bazzichelli, Founding Director, Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE

The act of whistleblowing is a concrete process able to reveal hidden facts, misconducts and wrongdoings of institutions and corporations, producing awareness about social, political and technological matters, informing about the reality we live in. Presenting the Disruption Network Lab programme in Berlin (www.disruptionlab.org), Tatiana Bazzichelli will connect the debate on surveillance and whistleblowing to a cultural and artistic framework, analysing the influence of whistleblowing in empowering both experts and non-experts. Adopting a comparative approach, the talk will present the mutual interferences between whistleblowing, art, hacking, and network development, as well as shed light on the project-oriented influence of whistleblowing in the art field. Examining the intersection of politics, technology, and society, Disruption Network Lab exposes the misconduct and wrongdoing of the powerful, by organising inter-disciplinary conferences at the interface of scholarship and politics and local meetups throughout the year. Following a practice-based research approach, this presentation aims to further question what we can offer as researchers and cultural producers to encourage a critical debate on social, political and technological matters, as well as to generate experimental ways of thinking within the post-digital scenario.