Episode 1 (2022) Maja-Lee Voigt - CTRL + F_eminist futures_. Hacking algorithmic architectures of cities to come

In this episode we are joined by Maja-Lee Voigt, a Research
Associate at the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana
University of Lüneburg.

To this day it remains a question of power who is granted the
right to visibly take up and claim urban space; both physically
and virtually. A societal and literal Room of One's Own" (Woolf
1929) is still not a given for people who define as women and/or
queer. Rather, it is not only floor plans and cityscapes in which
gendered bodies hardly find unconfined spaces or representation;
discursive and online realms often turn out to be equally
restrictive, patriarchally dominated, and misogynic.
Additionally, as urban automation advances in an increasingly
'smarter' city, everyday processes are more and more controlled
by privatized algorithmic architectures of oppression.

Yet feminist hackspaces resist these heteronormatively programed
technologies. Following five months of ethnographic research on
cyberfeminist collectives and their resistive practices in
Germany and Austria in 2021, my contribution askes how digitized
cities become technologically, culturally, and spatially hacked
toward representing more diverse realities. My analysis shows how
feminist hackspaces attempt to increase accessibility to
interfaces, (digital) spaces, and decision-making processes by
sharing their tech-knowledge through open source solutions,
educative illustrations, and visions of otherwise urban futures.
Their activism demonstrates how (urban) hacking is a crucial
practice to break with non-democratically controlled
digitalization processes: playing with the uncertainty,
incalculable openness, and scope for design of possible futures
within software spaces makes hackfeminists essential actors in
imagining cities to come. Often unnoticed and underestimated,
their trial-and-error approach and understanding of hacking as a
glitching cultural technique as well as refusal of pre-programmed
patriarchal orders embodies the radical presence of potential
tomorrows: a future filled with literally uncoded uncertainties
and heterogenous hopes in favor of a hackable, thus accessible
algorithmic anarchitecture in a cyber_feminist_city for
all.

This episode is a live recording from Hacking Everything. The
Cultures and Politics of Hackers and Software Workers panel
organized at the European Association for the study of Science
and Technology (EASST) 2022 conference in Madrid on
2022-07-07. The hosts are Paula Bialski, Andreas Bischof and Mace
Ojala. Audio production by Heights Beats at Hotmilk Records, who
also produced the theme track. We are grateful for Chemnitz
University of Technology for funding.