Disruption Network Lab is launching a new programme stream – DISRUPTIVE FRIDAYS, live every Friday at 5pm Berlin time. The first conversation involves Marc Garrett (Furtherfield), Cassie Thornton (Feminist Economics Department), Ela Kagel (Supermarkt Berlin) and Tatiana Bazzichelli (Disruption Network Lab).

The guests share ideas for creative solutions and resistance to the isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. What are our strategies to keep working with art and culture when our contexts of sharing are so limited? What can we learn from this situation to generate new forms of collective care?

Ela Kagel (Digital Strategist and Founder of SUPERMARKT Berlin, DE).
Ela Kagel specialises in the intersection of society, technology and economy. Since the 1990s she has produced media art exhibitions, designed spaces for cultural exchange and helped establish digital platforms, networks and communities. From 2009 to 2011 she was program curator for the transmediale festival in Berlin. Central to Ela’s practice is supporting bottom-up initiatives deeply rooted in particular communities of practice. In 2010 Ela co-founded SUPERMARKT, an independent hub for digital culture and collaborative economy. Since 2018, Ela is also board member of RChain Europe, a technology cooperative based in Berlin.

Marc Garrett (Co-director & Co-founder, Furtherfield, London, UK).
Marc Garrett is codirector and cofounder, together with Ruth Catlow, of the arts online collective Furtherfield, with two physical venues, a gallery, and a commons lab, all situated in Finsbury Park, London. He curated the major exhibition “Monsters of the Machine: Frankenstein in the 21st Century”, at Laboral, Spain in 2017. In 2017 he copublished “Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain” with Ruth Catlow, Nathan Jones, and Sam Skinner. He is in the process of completing his PhD at the University of London, Birkbeck College.

Cassie Thornton (Artist, Feminist Economics Department, UK)
Cassie Thornton is an artist working under the title of the Feminist Economics Department (the FED), in collusion with Strike Debt. Her work investigates and reveals the impact of governmental and economic systems on public affect, behavior, and unconscious, with a focus on debt and security. Cassie Thornton received a MFA from California College of the Arts and a BFA from University of Wisconsin-Madison. She recently launched The Hologram, an artwork about collective health care.

Tatiana Bazzichelli (Founder and Director, Disruption Network Lab)
Tatiana Bazzichelli is founder and artistic director of the Disruption Network Lab, an organisation in Berlin working on information technology, network culture, hacktivism and whistleblowing. In 2011-2014 she was programme curator at transmediale festival, where she developed the year-round initiative reSource transmedial culture berlin and curated several conference events, workshops and installations. She has been appointed jury member for the Hauptstadtkulturfonds (Capital Cultural Fund) by the German Federal Government and Berlin for the funding years 2019-2020.

Photo Courtesy of the organisation