with Farzin Lotfi-Jam, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Simone C Niquille
Moderated by Silvio Lorusso
Capturing everything from gestures, voice, and walking gaits to text-driven prompts, digital middlemen act as ‘innovative’ intermediaries between seller and customer, platform and user, real life and virtual life. A broker, a go-between, a disruptor in creative processes, these digital middlemen maintain unnecessary supply chains over large-scale global platforms and micro-scale economic exchanges. Decentralised data surveillance and user inputs have allowed platforms such as Amazon, Spotify, Meta, Open AI, and others to build uncanny representations of ourselves and our environments. Questioning what is at stake in the capture-all logics of these unnecessary supply chains, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Farzin Lotfi-Jam, and Simone C Niquille ask what happens when we buy into their newness but sell ourselves.