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March 26, 2015 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Unmasking the Author: Art and Activism in the Internet Age
Margarita Padilla. What Do Network Machines Want and Not Want?
A change of paradigm is no small thing, and this change is going hand in hand with networks of computers, storming into a model that invites the social sphere to imitate it. Networks of people, machines, and, chiefly, changes in the distribution of power. What are the founding and genetic characteristics of this transformation? In emulating the net, social, creative, productive and critical processes search for better conditions for their proliferation; new tools, innovative methods and elements of original organisation. How do we distinguish what is new, radically new, from mere market trends? How do we distinguish what we have to nurture (what makes the network inside the network) and what we have to discard (what’s inside the network that destroys the network)?
Geert Lovink. The Politics of Designing Masks: Internet Culture after Snowden
What options do we have now that doubts hang over the radical transparency of the protection against surveillance? This lecture offers a general panoramic view of the activist and artistic strategies over the last two years, developed in response to the Edward Snowden revelations. Against the widespread depression of hackers, artists have become involved in a broad array of experiments to speak out against surveillance and Internet control. What can we learn from the tragic story of Anonymous? Why are so many people suspicious of the anonymous browser Tor? Julian Assange could, with difficulty, be a model: what went wrong? Could art represent some way out of all this?
Round table: Geert Lovink, Margarita Padilla and Alberto López Cuenca
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March 27, 2015 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Digital Commons: Towards other Ecologies of Art
Felix Stalder. The Artist at the End of the Gutenberg Galaxy: Challenges for Art in Digital Culture
The modern artist figure is a product of the 18th and 19th centuries, the heyday of literary culture. Although the majority of twentieth-century avant-garde movements rebelled against this idea, it became a model that endured and still serves as a regulatory foundation of copyright, as a powerful commercial attraction in the art market and as a structural principle for the majority of art institutions. Nevertheless, the experience of the network society for artists and audiences not only calls this model into question, it also offers a new one focused on notions such as information, shared resources and commons, through which both artists and non-artists interact and redefine their roles and functions.
Marcell Mars. A Public Library
In the catalogue of History, the public library institution appears listed in the category of the phenomena human beings feel most proud of, along with education and public health care, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and free software… A public library is one of those practically invincible infrastructures we only start to notice when it disappears. Due to the Internet, today it is easy to imagine a public library as part of a global infrastructure of universal access to knowledge for every member of society. Yet the appearance and development of the Internet is occurring at a time when institutional crisis, with traumatic and unpredictable consequences, has started to happen.
The digital project Public Library is an example of the defence of the public library and its principle of universal access to knowledge, as well as being an exploration of the infrastructure distributed for use by amateur librarians. In truth, it is a crossover between both.
Round table: Marcell Mars, Daniel García Andújar, Felix Stalder and Alberto López Cuenca
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March 26 - 27, 2015 Medialab Prado
Workshop
Geert Lovink and Alberto López Cuenca. March 26
Marcell Mars, Felix Stalder and Daniel García Andújar. March 27
This workshop is set up as an open encounter, whereby different participants from Open Source introduce their work and debate common notions with a community of artists, activists, theorists and Medialab users. The workshop aims to horizontally complement this seminar with a back-and-forth exchange of information and with work prior to the lectures enabling subsequent debate to be articulated. Furthermore, it looks to recover working environments far-removed from academic production and linked to other forms of knowledge emerging out of hacklabs and medialabs.
Open Source. The Art System after the Net
Held on 26 mar 2015
The Internet has produced new behaviours, subjectivities and institutions linked to another way of being and doing. This seminar debates how these changes throw established categories of art, the author and the circulation of unique work off balance, whilst also forming profound contradictions – from creativity as an economic value to indistinct work time. Is considering another artistic ecosystem possible from these ambiguities?
The assumption was that a transition from the author's text to hypertext would make the funeral of these modern notions possible, replacing them with a new contemporary language. With the arrival and expansion of the net, these predictions, which decades earlier were nothing more than academic speculations, could be found in the right condition to overcome the logic of individual authorship and originality, in practice. However, these desires, which had to be validated by technological displacement in the modes of producing knowledge and generating subjectivity, are today being answered in the survival and statism of a model that ignores the challenges and powers of the net. With the aim of defending the author and their originality, in some cases in a space of resistance, access, production and the circulation of knowledge in digital media, including those the museum participates in, are restricted.
There do not seem to be any doubts about the place taken up by intellectual property in the new productive environment. It also seems to be increasingly more difficult to revert the fact that symbolic production, and with it artistic production, is today part of the so-called creative industries, and which must, therefore, work under strict market logic. Nevertheless, culture and knowledge in the digital environment continue to manifest qualities that had not been characteristic of consumer goods: they are not scarce, do not run out with use and cannot be possessed exclusively. At this point a whole series of fractions arise between legal regulations, financial capitalization and the practices of access and free circulation this seminar looks to unravel. In this complex framework, there is a need to track how the work of the artist is inscribed in the environment of new digital production, to see what the regulations of authorship are after the net, how to defend the singularity of art in the face of the expansion of the creative economy and how to bring about the so-called digital commons in a new form of shared learning.
In collaboration with
Medialab Prado
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Workshop
At Medialab Prado. March 26 - 27, 2015. 11:00 p.m.
Participants
Daniel G. Andújar. Visual artist, long-time member of irational.org and a reference point in net.art. In 1996 he founded the platform Technologies To The People. He has exhibited internationally and set up other public sphere projects on the Internet, such as e-barcelona.org o e-valencia.org. Furthermore, he has run workshops with artists and social collectives and actively participated in the debate on the artist’s status in the immaterial economy. The Museo Reina Sofía recently presented his work in the solo exhibition Daniel G. Andújar. Operating System (21 January - 4 May, 2015).
Alberto López Cuenca. Professor at the Universidad de las Américas Puebla. He has co-edited the books Propiedad intelectual, nuevas tecnologías y libre acceso a la cultura (Intellectual Property, New technologies and Free Access to Cultures) (Universidad de las Américas Puebla and Centro Cultural de España in Mexico, 2008) and ¿Desea guardar los cambios? Propiedad intelectual y tecnologías digitales: hacia un nuevo pacto social (Do you Want to Save the Changes? Intellectual Property and Digital Technologies: Towards a New Social Pact (Centro Cultural España-Córdoba, 2009). His articles have featured in international publications such as ARTnews, Lápiz, Curare, Afterall and Revista de Occidente.
Geert Lovink. Professor at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland and the University of Amsterdam, where he founded the Institute of Network Cultures. He was also a founding member of ADILKNO (Foundation for the Advancement of Illegal Knowledge). He is the author of Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture (MIT Press, 2002), My First Recession: Critical Internet Culture in Transition (NAi Publishers, 2003) and Tactical Media, the Second Decade (Brazilian Submidialogia, 2005), as well as numerous other essays.
Marcell Mars (Nenad Romić). A cultural researcher, artist and hacker, he is one of the founders of the open repository on shared knowledge Public Library and co-creator of Multimedia Institut [mi2] in Zagreb.
Margarita Padilla. Computer engineer and activist. Co-founder of the space Sindominio.net and the free radio Radiopwd from her operations in hacklabs. She has published several articles such as Agujeros negros en la red (2002) in the magazine Archipiélago and Penélope, tejiendo y destejiendo la red en el libro Ciberguerrilla de la comunicación (Virus, 2000). She is also the author of El kit de la lucha en Internet (Traficantes de Sueños, 2013).
Felix Stalder. Professor at the University of the Arts, in Zurich, where he co-directs the Media Arts programme, and researcher at the Institute for New Culture Technologies, Vienna. Since 1995 he has participated as a moderator of the encounters of Nettime, a space for debate and critique. He is the author of the books Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks (New Media Center_ kuda.org , Deep Search: The Politics of Search Beyond Google (Transaction Publishers, 2009) and Digital Solidarity (PML Mute, 2014).
![Miguel Brieva, ilustración de la novela infantil Manuela y los Cakirukos (Reservoir Books, 2022) [izquierda] y Cibeles no conduzcas, 2023 [derecha]. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ecologias_del_deseo_utopico.jpg.webp)
![Ángel Alonso, Charbon [Carbón], 1964. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/perspectivas_ecoambientales.jpg.webp)
Más actividades
Oliver Laxe. HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you
Tuesday, 16 December 2025 – 7pm
As a preamble to the opening of the exhibition HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, film-maker Oliver Laxe (Paris, 1982) engages in conversation with the show’s curators, Julia Morandeira and Chema González, touching on the working processes and visual references that articulate this site-specific project for the Museo Reina Sofía. The installation unveils a new programme in Space 1, devoted from this point on to projects by artists and film-makers who conduct investigations into the moving image, sound and other mediums in their exhibition forms.
Oliver Laxe’s film-making is situated in a resilient, cross-border territory, where the material and the political live side by side. In HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, this drift is sculpted into a search for the transcendency that arises between dancing bodies, sacred architectures and landscapes subjected to elemental and cosmological forces. As a result, this conversation seeks to explore the relationship the piece bears to the imagery of ancient monotheisms, the resonance of Persian Sufi literature and the role of abstraction as a resistance to literal meaning, as well as looking to analyse the possibilities of the image and the role of music — made here in collaboration with musician David Letellier, who also works under the pseudonym Kangding Ray — in this project.
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.
Francisco López and Barbara Ellison
Thursday, 11 December - 8pm
The third session in the series brings together two international reference points in sound art in one evening — two independent performances which converse through their proximity here. Barbara Ellison opens proceedings with a piece centred on the perceptively ambiguous and the ghostly, where voices, sounds and materials become spectral manifestations.
This is followed by Francisco López, an internationally renowned Spanish sound artist, who presents one of his radical immersions in deep listening, with his work an invitation to submerge oneself in sound matter as a transformative experience.
This double session sets forth an encounter between two artists who, from different perspectives, share the same search: to open ears to territories where sound becomes a poetic force and space of resistance.
Long Live L’Abo! Celluloid and Activism
4, 5, 6 DIC 2025
L’Abominable is a collective film laboratory founded in La Courneuve (Paris, France) in 1996. It came into being in response to the disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and to provide artists and film-makers with a self-managed space from which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super 8, 16mm and 35mm. Anchored in this premise, the community promotes aesthetic and political experimentation in analogue film opposite digital hegemony. Over the years, L’Abominable, better known as L’Abo, has accompanied different generations of film-makers, upholding an international movement of independent film practices.
This third segment is structured in three sessions: a lecture on L’Abo given by Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abo; and the feature-length film Une isle, une nuit, made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.
Estrella de Diego Lecture. Holding Your Brain While You Sleep
Wednesday, 3 December 2025 – 7pm
Framed inside the Museo Reina Sofía’s retrospective exhibition devoted to Maruja Mallo, this lecture delivered by Estrella de Diego draws attention to the impact of the artist’s return to Spain after her three-decade exile in Latin America.
Committed to values of progress and renewal in the Second Republic, Mallo was forced into exile to Argentina with the outbreak of the Civil War and would not go back to Spain to settle definitively until 1965 — a return that was, ultimately, a second exile.
Mallo saw out her prolific artistic trajectory with two impactful series: Moradores del vacío (Dwellers of the Void, 1968–1980) and Viajeros del éter (Ether Travelers, 1982), entering her most esoteric period in which she drew inspiration from her “levitational experiences” of crossing the Andes and sailing the Pacific. Her travels, both real and imaginary, became encounters with superhuman dimensions.
In parallel, her public persona gained traction as she became a popular figure and a key representative of the Generation of ‘27 — the other members of which also started returning to Spain.
This lecture is part of the Art and Exile series, which seeks to explore in greater depth one of the defining aspects of Maruja Mallo’s life and work: her experience of exile. An experience which for Mallo was twofold: the time she spent in the Americas and her complex return to Spain.
Juan Uslé. That Ship on the Mountain
Tuesday, 25 November 2025 – 7pm
Ángel Calvo Ulloa, curator of the exhibition Juan Uslé. That Ship on the Mountain, engages in conversation with artist Juan Uslé (Santander, 1954) in the Museo’s Auditorium 400 to explore in greater depth the exhibition discourse of this anthological show spanning four decades of Uslé’s artistic career.
The show casts light on the close relationship Uslé’s work bears to his life experiences, establishing connections between different stages and series which could ostensibly seem distant. Framed in this context, the conversation looks to explore the artist’s personal and professional journey: his memories, experiences of New York, his creative process, conception of painting, and ties with photography and film, and the cohesiveness and versatility that characterise his art. Key aspects for a more in-depth understanding of his artistic sphere.
The conversation, moreover, spotlights the preparatory research process that has given rise to this exhibition to grant a better understanding of the curatorial criteria and decisions that have guided its development.
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.