Coding Dissent: Art, Technology, and Tactical Media (39c3)

This presentation examines artistic practices that engage with sociotechnical systems through tactical interventions. The talk proposes art as a form of infrastructural critique and counter-technology. It also introduces a forthcoming HackLab designed to foster collaborative development of open-source tools addressing digital authoritarianism, surveillance capitalism, propaganda infrastructures, and ideological warfare. In this talk, media artist and curator Helena Nikonole presents her work at the intersection of art, activism, and tactical technology — including interventions into surveillance systems, wearable mesh networks for off-grid communication, and AI-generated propaganda sabotage. Featuring projects like Antiwar AI, the 868labs initiative, and the curatorial project Digital Resistance, the talk explores how art can do more than just comment on sociotechnical systems — it can interfere, infiltrate, and subvert them. This is about prototypes as politics, networked interventions as civil disobedience, and media hacks as tools of strategic refusal. The talk asks: what happens when art stops decorating crisis and starts debugging it? The talk will also introduce an upcoming HackLab initiative — a collaboration-in-progress that brings together artists, hackers, and activists to develop open-source tools for disruption, resilience, and collective agency — and invites potential collaborators to get involved. Licensed to the public under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 about this event: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/hub/event/detail/coding-dissent-art-technology-and-tactical-media