critical infrastructure lab

August 31, 2025 at Noorderlicht Biennale, Akerkhof 12, 9711 JB Groningen

Organisers

• Christy Westhovens
• Noorderlicht photography biennale
• critical infrastructure lab
• Kunstpunt Groningen

We constantly move through a sea of radio signals. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cell towers and satellites form an invisible landscape that permeates our everyday lives. These electromagnetic waves shape how we communicate, move and live together — and yet, we never see them.

With Signals of you, her installation at the Tschumipavilion, Christy Westhovens makes this hidden network tangible. The red panels respond to Bluetooth signals emitted by our devices, revealing how we continuously broadcast digital traces. The pavilion becomes an archive of daily presence, showing how infrastructure and behaviour together shape urban space.

The Radioscape Symposium offers a deeper exploration of this work. Bringing together artists, scholars and critical voices, we will reflect on how radio signals construct public space. What role do we play in these digital environments? Who has access to these invisible layers, and who is excluded? And what does it mean to render such ubiquitous but hidden signals visible?

Programme

• 12:00—13:00 Visit: Noorderlicht Biënnale, Niemeyerfabriek, Paterswoldeweg 43, Groningen
• 13:30—14:30 Data walk and visit Signals of you, Het Tschumipaviljoen van Kunstpunt, Hereplein, Groningen
• 16:00—18:00 Symposium, Noorderlicht, Akerkhof 12, Groningen
  • Introduction by Christy Westhovens
  • Roundtable with artists, researchers and guests
  • Discussion with Q&A

A manifesto has been released in conjunction with the event.

Photos by Sebastiaan Rodenhuis.

This program is made possible through funding of Mondrian Foundation, Fonds 21, Stimuleringsfonds voor Creative Industrie.

Lineup

• Arthur Elsenaar >> Artist and teacher at ArtScience Interfaculty,
  Hogeschool der Kunsten Den Haag (KABK/KonCon)

• Christy Westhovens >> Artist and researcher, Technology, Performance and
  Society research unit, University of Music and Theatre Munich (HMTM)

• David Gauthier — moderator >> Artist and Assistant Professor of
  Computational Media and Arts, Utrecht University (UU)

• Gabriel Pereira >> Assistant Professor in AI & Digital Culture, University
  of Amsterdam (UvA)

• Juli Laczkó >> Artist and teacher at HKU Media, Image and Media
  Technology, Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht (HKU)

• Maxigas >> Co-principal investigator, critical infrastructure lab;
  Assistant Professor of Computational Methods, Utrecht University (UU)

• Niels ten Oever >> Co-principal investigator, critical infrastructure lab;
  Assistant Professor, European Studies, University of Amsterdam (UvA)

• Pawan Seshadri Venkatesh >> CTO, UrbanVind

Photos by Sebastiaan Rodenhuis.

We are pleased to invite you to the launch event of the report Standardisation with Chinese Characteristics? The Missing Pillar in Rebooting Europe’s Industrial Policy, commissioned by the China Knowledge Network (CKN), with the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy as lead ministry.

The report explores the crucial yet often overlooked role of technical standardisation in European industrial policy. It argues for a more strategic orchestration of standard-setting by governments in cooperation with industry, offering a Blueprint for Action across five domains: (1) Programming; (2) Promoting; (3) Protecting; (4) Partnering; and (5) Process.

We are honoured to welcome lead author Alexandre Gomes to present the key findings. The presentation will be followed by a panel discussion with key stakeholders from government and industry. The event will conclude with a Q&A session with all participants, moderated by co-author Maaike Okano-Heijmans.The panelists will be announced soon.

Please note that a camera crew will record the presentation and the panel discussion. This video will be published online later on the CKN website. The Q&A will not be recorded, and only the authors and panellists will appear on video.

The report will be shared under embargo with the people that have registered, a day before the presentation.

We look forward to your participation in what promises to be a timely and forward-looking discussion on aligning European standardisation efforts with strategic industrial goals.

About the authors:

Alexandre Gomes is a Research Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for International Relations ‘Clingendael’ in The Hague, where he is part of the EU and Global Affairs Unit and of the ‘Geopolitics of Technology and Digitalisation’ programme. His research focuses on the role of technology in geopolitics.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans is a Senior Research Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for International Relations ‘Clingendael’ in The Hague, where she leads the ‘Geopolitics of Technology and Digitalisation’ programme. She is also a Visiting Lecturer in the Master of Science in International Relations and Diplomacy (MIRD) programme of the University of Leiden.

Miriam Sainato is a former Research Assistant at Clingendael’s EU and Global Affairs Unit, where she contributed to the Geopolitics of Tech and Digitalisation programme.

Niels ten Oever is an assistant professor in the European Studies department and co-principal investigator of the critical infrastructure lab at the University of Amsterdam. Additionally, he is a coordinator of the Tech, Power, and Policy theme group at the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies and a visiting professor at the Centro de Tecnologia e Sociedade at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro. His research focuses on how norms, values, and ideologies get inscribed, resisted, and subverted in communication infrastructures through their transnational governance.

Susann Lüdtke has an educationalbackground in China Business and Economics. She achieved her doctoral degree ineconomics and worked as a research fellow for Prof. Dr. Sebastian Heilmann atthe University of Trier and Prof. Dr. Doris Fischer at the University of Würzburg.Dr. Lüdtke was invited to Zhejiang University in Hangzhou (China) as a visitingscholar. After working as a consultant for the automotive industry, Lüdtke hasworked as a consultant for patent analytics and patent management since 2018. Dr.Lüdtke is frequently working as an external expert for projects on technicalstandards and quality infrastructure.

We are at a critical threshold in our computational futures. Investment in artificial intelligence (AI) is booming, and its application across society is accelerating at an unprecedented scale. Meanwhile, we are crossing the boundaries of several life-supporting planetary systems. Devastating heat waves, storms, fires and floods remind us of how human activity impacts all life on this planet.

In this reality, a blossoming community is challenging the tech solutionist approaches from our political and industry leaders and advocates for actual change to ensure that our technologies stay within planetary boundaries. The Green Screen coalition is announcing a series of brown bag sessions to spotlight this work. We hope these sessions provide opportunities to discuss key topics on the nexus of environment and tech with experts, draw inspiration from their work, learn in the open and build pathways to sustainable futures.

Keep an eye on this page for new brown bag session

Upcoming brown bag sessions:

Extraction in the majority world: AI infrastructure and the raw materials that power it

July 7, 4 – 5 PM CET

On Zoom – Register now

In this session, Paz Peña will present on the work done together with the Decolonial Feminist Coalition of Latin American activists on Digital and Environmental Justice, with a particular focus on the environmental impact of data centers in the Latin American context, and Ahmed Isamaldin will discuss the organizing work he does with the Center for Environmental and Social Studies (CESS) on mining in Sudan.

About the speakers

Paz Peña is an independent senior consultant specializing in technology, gender, and social justice. She is a 2025 Mozilla Senior Fellow, currently researching the environmental impacts of artificial intelligence data centers in Latin America. In 2021, she founded the Latin American Institute of Terraforming to explore the connection between technology and the ecological crisis from a feminist perspective. Paz is the author of “Tecnologías para un planeta en llamas” (Paidós, 2023), an introductory book that examines the role of techno-capitalism in the climate and ecological crisis. She is also a journalist and holds degrees in social communication and gender studies. Paz is based in Santiago, Chile.

Ahmed Isamaldin is a multi-disciplinary artist and researcher from Khartoum, Sudan. He holds a degree in physics from the University of Khartoum and has studied graphic design, photography in Cairo, and visual communication at Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin. His work centers on themes of immigration, psychology, revolutionary processes, decolonial design, and technology. He is currently leading the communication team at the Center for Environmental and Social Studies (CESS) in Sudan.

June 13 16:15 – 17:10

Western Europe is slowly coming to grips with the fact that all the digital infrastructures we depend on, may not be as dependable as we all thought. Network architectures come with their own infrastructural ideologies embedded in them. They are not just a medium for the circulation of digital messages, but also distribute power in particular ways. With the wars in Ukraine and Gaza intensifying, and the U.S. taking a more antagonistic approach than Europe had been used to, Europe is increasingly re-evaluating its choices with regards to our communications infrastructures. 

Some community-led initiatives are gaining prominence that focus on implementing pilots or prototypes of mesh networks: communication infrastructures that are by design much more decentralised or federated than the centralised communications infrastructures we have become used to. Thereby pinpointing and highlighting key weaknesses in how we have come to depend on central providers that are not infallible. Perhaps it’s these mesh-type networks that are essential to becoming a more resilient society?

In this session, we hear from Radical Data and their mesh networks initiative, which participants of the conference can join themselves and experiment with. Next to that, Maxigas will describe the Reticulum protocol for building local and wide-area networks with readily available hardware, which comes with an anti-military licence and a bottom up user community also active in Amsterdam. It is an interesting example because of the attempt of its designers and users to embed social values into the technical choices of protocol design, implementation and deployment. Lastly, we learn about the Black-out Box, an initiative by Waag Futurelab which is part of the Meshtastic network, a network of hackers and organisations experimenting with a LoRa mesh-network that functions fully independent of the internet. And may be part of an emergency network in case all else fails.  

Speakers

Rayén Jara Mitrovich, Performance Artist | Co-founder of Radical Data

Jo Jara Kroese, Co-founder of Radical Data

Marleen Stikker, Founding Director Waag Futurelab

Maxigas, Co-Principal Investigator at critical infrastructure lab | Assistant Professor of Computational Methods at Utrecht University

https://conference.publicspaces.net/en/session/mesh-networks-1

Much attention has been given to the ways that AI threatens to supersede human intellectual processes and functions. AI, however, is driven by large language models and very real material resources. Almost every resource on the planet is fueling the AI juggernaut, with consequences for the power grid, nuclear energy, political structures, the production, trade, and trash of physical devices, human labor, and financial systems. The fast pace of AI’s technological advancement appears not so much to be leaving the materially tied world behind but feasting upon it. Panelists in this session will discuss such questions as: What is the reality behind the rhetoric of AI? What are the current and potential political and economic solutions to ameliorating AI’s role in the global system? What is the role of the media, diplomats, corporations, and activists in these decisions?

• Fieke Jansen, Head of the Critical Infrastructures Lab, University of Amsterdam
• Sandra Makumbirofa, Senior Researcher, Research ICT Africa
• Viola Schiaffonati, Professor, Politecnico di Milano
• Thomas Schneider, Director of International Affairs, Swiss Federal Office of Communications

Moderator: Kevin Blasiak, Postdoctoral Researcher, Vienna University of Technology

More here.