Date: Friday 12 September
Time: 15:00 - 18:00
Location: Varia, Gouwstraat 3
Participation: is made via registration, see below for how to sign up \

Today, while all the talk is ‘AI’, databases actually run the data world. Companies like Oracle and SAP provide Customer Relationship Management, Enterprise Resource Planning and similar process-oriented software for businesses and administrations. In his historical research on Cold War computing Francis Hunger compared the Western product SAP against the East-German Robotron SOPS, both developed in the 1970’s and onwards. Surprisingly, these independent developments shared a lot of similar features and cultural techniques, although one of them was considered capitalist and the other socialist. After a 45 min introduction to the historical background, this worksession takes political commentator Aaron Bastani’s naïve call for a “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” serious and conceptually investigates how today’s capitalist production databases could be converted to socialist databases. \

Are you curious to join? No programming knowledge, but conceptual stengths, are required. ‘AI’-talk and tech-bro-culture not welcome. Nerds, feminists, artists and non-stalinist socialists are encouraged.
To participate please send an email to info@varia.zone with [socialist database] in the subject line. \

To prepare, listen to three episodes of the Future Histories podcast \

Following the worksession we’ll have an hour to eat and drink together, before Francis shares more of his practice in an artist talk; ‘Futile Data’. Our food will be a low-energy-consuming means to power non-artificial brains, while drinks address the sociality of humanoid actors. \

This worksession falls within Varia’s Counter Coloniality Seed research thread, and is supported by the Creative Industries Fund NL. \