How do different flows and different forms of power intersect on the Muntplein/Place de la Monnaie in Brussels? For five days, Alex Zakkas and Kurt Tichy joined the ranks of various human and machinic agents already watching over the square. Starting from their observations, Constant hosts an evening discussing surveillance methodologies and the ways in which they change as a result of technological developments. What is the relationship between preemption, prehension, and prediction? In what way are public data streams manipulated in order to prevent/stimulate/anticipate certain courses of events?

With guests Dennis Pohl and Inigo Wilkins we reflect on the problems of the neoliberal politics of surveillance and, more generally, on the notions of control, randomness, and unpredictability and how they differ across physical, biological, cognitive, and social systems. Moderation: Femke Snelting.

An evening in the context of The new local and part of Precarious Pavilions, curated by Michiel Vandevelde and produced in collaboration with the Kaaitheater and its program CITY:LAND.

Alex Zakkas and Kurt Tichy take a situated perspective within the practices of mapping, modelling, tracking, and monitoring that striate urban spaces such as the Muntplein. The aim of their intervention is to investigate the relationship between observation, prediction, and control and to draft possible detours from the routes of customer tracking and generalized surveillance.
Dennis Pohl investigates how infrastructural conditions and architectural designs have influenced the development of the European institutions in Brussels, Luxembourg, and Strasbourg. As a contribution to Rhythmic Contingencies, he brings in the perspective of (digital) infrastructure as a technology of power and the material and semiotic conditions of network narratives.
Inigo Wilkins’s research focuses on (in)determinacy in noise music and the way in which this relates to information theory and cybernetics, arguing that constrained randomness is intrinsic to the functional organization of complex, hierarchically nested systems, and that the navigation of noise is a necessary condition of reason and consequently of freedom.

Artists Hana MileticÌ , Beny Wagner, Sasha Litvintseva, and Ola Hassanain join the discussion, taking their own practices as points of departure for a reflection on the disruption of (temporal) patterns and experiences.