Symposihmm 📡 Capture & Control

With our second Symposihmm of the year, Capture & Control, we’ll be exploring the entanglements between processes of physiological and geological capture. How can we make sense of this paranoid era in online platforms? And how are our minds and our planet being captured, rendered, and manipulated? In the 2000s, Stanford University taught ‘captology’, a course on computers as persuasive technologies. It’s perhaps no surprise that Mike Krieger, who went on to create Instagram, took this class. Over the past twenty years, social media platforms have continued to perfect the tools of persuasion. They have figured out with extreme precision how to grab and hold our attention, while simultaneously becoming the main source of information for many people. Following these shifts online, artist and researcher Trevor Paglen has argued that these platforms are the perfect place for “influence operations”, referring to the psyops (psychological operations) of secret services. Whereas back in the day no one on the internet knew you were a dog, today you can’t tell who’s a bot, troll, or CIA agent.  A notion that can feed into conspiratorial thinking and schizoposting. For Paglen, we are currently moving from surveillance capitalism into an era of psyops capitalism, where our behaviour is not only being tracked for profit, but also manipulated and steered. Others are calling this era, and the online visual culture in its wake, “pysop realism”, pointing to conspiracy minded posts rooted in distrust and paranoia.

While we comment, post, and scroll our way through social media—externalising our thoughts for data capture—the rampant digitisation and replication of the earth and biological life is quietly taking place. Companies like Quixel, with over 18,000 3D assets that they’ve captured—plants, rocks, logs, coral reefs, forest floors—sell our earth back to us to be used in gaming and other industries. Google Maps has led to Google Earth has led to the end-goal of digitally capturing the entire planet in order to create digital twins, train AI world models, ‘preserve’ habitats and monuments on the brink of collapse, and build predictive systems. Palantir thrives on this data hoarding, using it to analyse and create connections within disconnected data sets for militarisation and surveillance purposes. In the US, Flock cameras scan around 20 billion license plates every month, tracking the movement of people within cities and between states. And surveillance is expanding even further, onto our own bodies, with Meta selling over 7 million pairs of their Ray-Ban smart glasses in 2025, a huge jump from previous years. The processes of capturing, connecting, and analysing every element on earth is no longer a paranoid delusion, it’s unfolding in front of our eyes.

📋 Program 11.00 – 12.30

• Welcome and introduction
• Talk by Daniël de Zeeuw
• Talk by Sophie Publig & Mikkel Rørbo

12.30 – 13.15

• Lunch break

13.15 – 15.00

• Half-Earth Socialism: A Planetary Crisis Game with Francis Tseng
• The Internet is a Horrible Place and I’m Here to Make it Worse: A workshop with Noura Tafeche

15.15 – 17.00

• Lecture-performance with Emilia Tapprest & Søren Siebel
• Conversation with Marina Otero Verzier

Throughout the day there will be an exhibition with works by Nick Vyssotsky and more artists to be announced.

Please note that the activities between 13.15 and 15.00 won’t be broadcast on our livestream. Upon arrival at A Lab you can sign up for one of the activities on a first-come-first-served basis.

📅 Date: Saturday 24 October 🕗 Time: 11.00 – 17.00 CEST 📍 Location: A Lab and livestream on The Inbetween 🎟️ Tickets: Onsite €27,50/Student €20/Livestream 7,50

♿ Accessibility notes During the event we can provide live closed captioning for those with hearing impairments and disabilities. Please reach out to us via info@thehmm.nl—at least 3 days before the event if possible—if you are joining on-site and have this access need, so that we can reserve a seat for you within view of the screen with captions. If you are joining online via our livestream, live captioning will be available as one of the streaming modes.

🩵 This programme is kindly supported by the Creative Industries Fund NL, AFK and hosted by A Lab.