That’s Hot #2: GIRLMATH
Friday, July 26
5.30pm
That’s Hot is a discourse series curated by Dr. Nóra Ó Murchú, Jade Barget and Elise Misao Hunchuck. Through three discussions, with two guests each, the series will be examining collective intelligence through the archetype of GIRL. That’s Hot explores how anti-fascism, mathemathics and resistance manifest in the GIRL online.
#2: GIRLMATH
Exploring the girl logic of calculation, GIRLMATH brings together Irma Mastenbroek and Christina Lu to discuss counter statistical approaches to knowledge and ways to corrupt and sabotage the flawed technological dream of scale and ease in favour of generative friction.
The internet is easy. Take a selfie, upload a meme, gain followers, repost, own everything. But being a goddess in the rising tides of networked polarisation, data monetization, and libertarian platform CEOs can be boring. Algorithmic patterns on repeat continuously reinforce a caustic hegemonic social order. Platforms relentlessly extract emerging behaviours matching half-formed desires with new markets, extending influence through rapid expansion and dispersion. That’s all so low vibration.
But a girl can plot. With the metrics and logics of the digital long established, she must act under close watch, and her tactical subterfuge needs the many and not the few. That’s Hot celebrates the possibility of a counter-swarm of political sedition and intellectual hostility.
So, where’s the counter-swarm, and how can we join? In three discursive events over the summer months, That’s Hot, turns to the figure of the girl, mapping out her potential for simultaneous distraction and counter-operations, seeding deceit under thin, glossy layers of veiled naivety. As a symbolic, consumer, and inhuman category [1], how can the girl operate as a networked, decentralised, and oppositional swarm, manoeuvring through, rather than against, the current digital landscape?
That’s Hot is curated by Jade Barget & Nóra O' Murchú and features Alex Quicho, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Caroline Sinders, Cristina Lu with more to be announced.
[1] Everyone is a Girl Online by Alex Quicho: www.wired.com/story/girls-online-culture
About the Curators
Nóra Ó Murchú (she|her) lives and works in Ireland and Berlin (GER). As a curator and researcher, she explores online culture and the impact of technological developments. Her multidisciplinary practice encompasses narratives and fictions that result in objects, exhibitions and interventions. She is currently a lecturer in Computer Science and Information Systems at the University of Limerick in Ireland and Artistic Director of transmediale in Berlin.
Jade Barget (she|her) is a curator based in Paris (FR) and Berlin (GER). She explores atmospheres after nature, a theme at the heart of her recent multi-chapter and ongoing programme The well tempered, with performances at Espace Niemeyer in Paris and soft power in Berlin, as well as exhibitions at Frac Île-de-France and Fondation Fiminco, both in Romainville (FR). Jade was part of the curatorial team of transmediale, Berlin (GER), for the 2021-22, 2023 and 2024 editions and is currently part of the curatorial team of the 15th Gwangju Biennale (KOR).
Elise Misao Hunchuck (she|her) lives and works. BetweenBerlin (DE) and Milan (IT). She is a spatial researcher, editor, curator, writer, and educator. Her transdisciplinary practice brings together architecture, landscape architecture, ecology, and media studies to research sites in Canada, US, Japan, China, and Ukraine. Currently she is a visiting adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (New York, US) in the M.S. Advanced Architectural Design (AAD) programme. She is an editorial board member for the journal Scapegoat Journal: Architecture / Landscape / Political Economy and since 2021 has been the editor and discourse curator for transmediale in Berlin (DE).
About the guests
Christina Lu (she|her) lives and works between London (GB), Cupertino (USA) and Shanghai (CHN). She is an AI researcher and technologist. Combining rigorous technical research with speculative philosophical analysis she aims to instantiate a more viable future with synthetic intelligence. She is a doctoral student in computer science at Oxford, prototyping new architectures for models capable of continual learning and open-ended evolution. Her various proposals on speculative technologies have been supported by Antikythera, Serpentine Arts Technologies, RadicalxChange, and PACT Zollverein. Previously, she was a software engineer at DeepMind, implementing systems for ML experimentation at scale and conducting sociotechnical research.
Irma Mastenbroek (she|her) lives and works in Berlin (DE). She is a Berlin-based digital rights activist and technofeminist. Her focus is on mathematics, AI, and data feminism. She founded LODelle, for digital feminist networks and initiated a collaborative project to regulate major online pornography and rebuild the industry with consent and more cyber intimacy. Irma is involved in AI regulation and working on AI auditing and ethics, and is researching girl blogging and girl math for the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam (NL).
TROPEZ
at Sommerbad Humboldthain
Wiesenstraße 1, 13357 Berlin
Google Maps
Monday – Sunday
10.00 am – 6.00 pm
TROPEZ
at Sommerbad Humboldthain
Wiesenstraße 1, 13357 Berlin
Google Maps
Monday – Sunday
10.00 am – 6.00 pm