Dual (ab)use technologies. School of Elephants in the Room III
Since 2022, the School of Elephants in the Room has been dedicated to providing a platform to collectively question the extensive network of infrastructural dependencies within which contemporary cultural practices occur on an extremely mundane, day-to-day level. The school takes its name from a 2019 letter by the Constant Association for Arts and Media that asked cultural and educational institutions to consider the influence of tech giants on their practices and processes. Considering how imaginaries for tech-based relationalities have become increasingly flattened and constrained by the limits and logics of Big Tech, the school approaches computationally mediated practices as cultural practices in their own right.
This third edition is largely shaped by the ongoing, digitally-infused rotation of the liberal world order and motivated by the need for institutions, collectives and practitioners to find collective responses to its rampant violence and weaponised complexity. In response, the school has changed its usual format to become an intensive, trans-local gathering around and for internationalist infrastructural resistance against deadly regimes and extractive assumptions.
Spread over three half-day sessions, the 2025 edition invites a number of practitioners to critically engage with the concept of ‘dual-use’ – a term referring to technologies and materials that can be used for both military and civilian applications. The event provides an opportunity to explore the concept and its underlying assumptions, as well as to politicise the issues of technology and dual-use categorisations as a step towards more robust, meaningful public discourse. In other words, this iteration of the school aims to collectively identify what it means to accept binary legal, transactional or ontological categories as structuring elements of our realities and everyday lives.
The school is committed to a persistent mood of building possibilities together for another technological practice.
Language/access note: Most contributions will be made in English (by non-native speakers). Scripts and access copies will also be available in Spanish and Catalan. The space is wheelchair accessible and has elevators and adapted toilets.
This event has been co-organised with the TITiPI (Institute for Technology in the Public Interest)
Free access
Programme:
Thursday 3 July [La Capella, Espai Finestres]
17.30h – 18.15h Hans Lammerant. Dual use: A genealogy of the management of technologies and their military uses
18.15h – 18.30h Conversation with Anti Devillet
18.30h – 19.00h Break
19.00h – 19.45h Higo Mental (Marta Sesé & Ricardo Pérez-Hita). Higo Mental #34
19.45h – 20.00h Conversation with Jara Rocha
Friday 4 July [La Capella, Espai Finestres]
17.30h – 18.15h Monica Basbous. Suspicious sincerities
18.15h – 18.30h Conversation with Miriyam Aouragh
18.30h – 19.00h Break
19.00h – 19.45h Miriyam Aouragh. Israeli propaganda and imperial infrastructures in times of genocide: Old wine in broken bottles
19.45h – 20.00h Conversation with Monica Basbous
Saturday 5 July [La Capella, Espai Finestres]
13.30 – 15.00 h Marina Monsonís. Almuerzo portuario y memorias de resistencia infraestructural (Port lunch and memories of infrastructural resistance)
