Cyan Bae participates in the 4th Weizenbaum Conference on the subject of Practicing Sovereignty: Interventions for Open Digital Futures. Her film installation Dear Chaemin is exhibited with eight other international artists that address the plurality of forms and approaches of practicing digital sovereignty.

Dear Chaemin

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a series of video letters are sent to the director’s sister in Seoul. Should we want to return to the ‘old normal’? 

This pandemic has been disproportionately affecting communities already marginalised in pre-Coronavirus societies, aggravated by socio-political technologies of racialisation, sexism, homo- and transphobia. Dear Chaemin juxtaposes the Korean and Dutch contexts of biopolitics in contact tracing and crowd control practices, entangled with the b/ordering technologies against queer communities in Seoul and people of Asian descent in Europe.

Dear Chaemin (Trailer)

Weizenbaum Conference

The Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society is organizing its 2022 annual conference on the subject of “Practicing Sovereignty. Interventions for open digital futures”. The conference will take place at the venue „Alte Münze“ in Berlin on Thursday, 9 June and Friday, 10 June 2022.

The international conference and exhibition will investigate new opportunities for digital participation and policymaking and discuss alternative technological and social practices from various fields and disciplines. We frame digital sovereignty as a right to be claimed and a process constantly in the making, as a condition of the ability to critically partake in the digital transformation.

The conference will provide a transdisciplinary platform for scholars, artists, activists, and human rights advocates who develop transformative practices spaces to foster digital involvement. Grassroots initiatives, community projects, and participatory practices in design, art, and activism appear as collective counter strategies and bottom-up interventions that challenge the normalization of inequalities and insecurities and push back against threats to an open society. They lay the groundwork for new forms of agency, paving novel ways of practicing sovereignty – both in the sense of collective activities as well as in terms of public education and experimentation.