Talk: Data brokerage through visualization (Kim Albrecht) + Cryptocompetence (Ilan Manouach)
| Dates: | Wednesday, June 3, 2026 - Wednesday, June 3, 2026 |
| Hours: | 4:30 pm - 6:30 pm |
| Ages: | Adults |
| In/Outdoor: | Indoor |
| Cost: | Free |
| Category: | Learn Something |
Please join us next Wednesday, June 3 (4:30-6:30 pm) for a special work-share & mingle with metaLAB Principal Kim Albrecht and metaLAB visiting fellow Ilan Manouach.Cryptocompetence (Ilan Manouach)
We have been taught to fear the black box, to demand that every system open itself to inspection, as though understanding were the price of legitimacy and transparency the cure for everything we cannot see.
But the most consequential systems of our age, from protein folding to the markets to the cells that keep us alive, already produce results no one fully comprehends, and they have done so all along.
This talk is an invitation to stay inside that condition rather than escape it: to treat the black box not as a fault to be fixed but as a space to think from, and to ask what accountability, traceability, and contestability might look like once we stop waiting for an explanation that may never come.
Ilan Manouach is an artist, a book publisher and a postdoctoral researcher working on conceptual comics, literary arts and AI.
He has a PhD from Aalto University in Helsinki, and he is mostly known for Shapereader, a system for tactile storytelling specifically designed for blind and partially sighted readers/makers of comics.
He is the founder of Echo Chamber, a non-profit organization exploring radical and speculative artistic practices in contemporary comics.
On the side, Ilan is responsible for the Conceptual Comics Collections at Ubuweb, is an appointed expert in experimental comics for Belgium’s public endowment of the arts, and works as a strategy consultant for the Onassis Foundation in Greece.
His latest books include Chimeras: Inventory of Synthetic Cognition (ed.), a collective interdisciplinary glossary on AI, the Neural Yorker and Fastwalkers, a 512-page synthetic comic book co-created emergent tools from the ML space.
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Segments (Kim Albrecht)
One way to understand reality is to divide it, slicing broad categories into ever finer pieces.
Science has pursued this method for centuries, and so has commerce, where humans are turned into market segments.
The shadowy industry of data brokers has refined this technique for decades, largely out of public view.
This exploratory talk investigates the hidden structures of data brokerage through visualization, observing the observers and making the obscurity visible.
Kim Albrecht conducts research at the intersection of data visualization, technology, and culture.
He is a professor of information design at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany, a principal at metaLAB at Harvard and Berlin and a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society Havard Law School.
Albrecht is known for his exploration of the aesthetic properties of data, and his work spans teaching, research, and application.
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4:30-5:30 pm - Work-share discussion, 1st floor
5:30-6:30 pm - Reception & mingle, 4th floor
42 Kirkland Street, Cambridge
all are welcome
RSVP here!
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