When Angela Merkel becomes chancellor – yet again; when they spurn your right to vote – yet again; when you work hard and can’t pay your bills – yet again; when infotainment is fed to you as knowledge – yet again; when the world spins feverishly but nothing changes – yet again! – it’s time to join The Influencers.

Since the dawn of the Digital, the festival unites activists, artists, authors and academics from abroad at the CCCB each fall. It’s a fuss-free weekender led by Bani Brusadin, an all-in-all friendly and seemingly uncomplicated affair, until, that is, the featured “guerillas” start laying out their subversive ideas and strategies. Follow them closely as they unzip their arguments and you’ll feel your brain tingle as it wraps itself around concepts that are often as simple as they are radical. Blue pill, red pill? Like, like, like? Swipe right or left? If there were a dark web for technologically-minded art guerillas, this is how their profiles would read:

Danja Vassiliev
Pronounced Da-nya Vas-ile’-ev. Russian-born Critical Engineer living between Berlin and NYC. He hearts topics of network insecurity, software/OS modification, hardware re-engineering and digital forensics. He pretty much loves all technology-related subjects, is in favor of Open Source and is a very capable manifesto writer. If you want to build your own serv –
er to host your web at home, he’s your man.

Liam Young & Kate Davies
10 rotten tomatoes for these Brits. They have the job we all dream of. When Liam and Kate aren’t futurists, curators or out exploring the rich hinterlands of art and architecture, they’re a design research studio called Nomadic Fields. They venture to the ends of the earth to bear witness to alternative worlds. They know their way around drones, have been to Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone, US military outposts and rare-earth mining territories in Inner Mongolia. They’re always looking for people to join their missions.

Nora Al Badri & Nikolai Nelles
Nikolai and Nora are German and agree that the first-to-third-world power divide, where 1 has it all and 3 has nothing, is completely still in place, totally not ok, and urgently needs challenging. So, they 3D scanned Nefertiti’s head at the Neues Museum Berlin, where the Germans keep it these days after taking it from Egypt some 100 years ago. It happened without permission – the taking and the scanning. And now they’ve got a very nice replica in Cairo and everybody is invited to download and print the bust for their very own home décor. Visit nefertitihack.alloversky.com to get the code.

James Bridle
James, another Brit, has a keen eye for the keen eye – surveillance cameras. He likes to photograph them. He also ponders our relationship with technology (a lot) and created his own smart car after some dude in the States calmly watched a movie while his Tesla drove itself into a truck. He’s dead. James, however, is alive and well and can tell you all about it over coffee.

Adrian Chen
Staff writer at The New Yorker. Also:
@irlclub. / Email: Adrian802@gmail.com. / DMs are open. Ask for my Signal #. PGP fingerprint: 0xa8c32ab6483fdff6. Has a cute smile. Likes cool people from the Internet and sometimes he can’t feel his avatar.

Vladan Joler
A very smart cookie from Belgrade, Serbia, but not smart enough to provide you with a phonetic version of his name. Vladan scores when it comes to visualizing information flows. He’s a data punk suffering from digital rights blues. Share Lab is his alter ego. His nemesis? Facebook! He mapped that fucker. /The charts are so beautiful that you forget that it’s you providing this information. Heart.

Alice Marwick
Hailing from the US, Alice has got it all, the BA, MA, PhD, press clippings and a fellowship at the Data & Society Research Institute in New York City. Ask her everythin9 you ever wanted to know about media-manipulation and how people seek social status through attention and visibility online. Not the easiest first date.

Daniel Keller
Detroit born, Keller handles Berlin’s nasty winters with ease. When the artist isn’t playing at being the director of Absolute Vitality Inc., he pokes prosumers and investigates polarized global societies and techno-utopianism. Show him your palm.

Hasan Elahi
Hasan examines issues of surveillance, citizenship, migration, transport, and the challenges of borders and frontiers. He’s an artist, by the by, who values methodology over technique. He knows where he was on September 11th. The FBI does, too.

Amy Suo Wu
A beautiful mystery that reveals herself in the in-between. She’s the reason for all these little dots and beads [you can’t see them if you’re reading this article online. Sorry. Find a paper copy and …]. String them together, and see where it leads.

Jesse Darling
This London-based Darling has a thing for shitty white vinyl emulsions and white paint in general. She sees it as a symbol of structural violence – institutionalization, gentrification, and erasure. Rem Koolhaas was her first love, Ikea her second, you might be her third (if you enjoy junkspaces, that is).

The Influencers – Festival de arte no convencional, guerrilla de la comunicación y entretenimiento radical.

26 al 28 de octubre • CCCB @ Montalegre 5 • Entrada gratis