Inside The Black Box. CIFRA Meetup

In this CIFRA meetup Inside the Black Box, part of our Restart Reality season, OONA and !Mediengruppe Bitnik join curator Anika Meier to reveal decades of hacking surveillance systems through art, turning cameras into collaborators and control into play. 

!Mediengruppe Bitnik's bot went shopping on the dark web and accidentally bought drugs, sparking global debates about algorithmic responsibility. They hid Nokia phones in the Zurich Opera House to give away free access to performances through random phone calls, until the opera threatened military intervention.

OONA crashed Art Basel Miami to auction breast milk to 700 people — someone in the crowd shouted "$200K!" — proving that art doesn't need a real price tag to make headlines. She shares her 6-year correspondence with David from Transport for London, turning bureaucratic surveillance requests into an unlikely love story. 

The artists hijacked CCTV signals to ask security guards to play chess, transforming spaces of control into playgrounds. They discovered 69-second blind spots on the London tube where cameras can't see, proving that "to escape surveillance, you have to evade time." 

Throughout the conversation, both artists explore creating friction in systems designed for total control. OONA's observation that "if you cannot say no, you cannot give consent" cuts through everything we accept about digital surveillance. The meetup reveals how even the most totalizing systems have cracks where play and resistance can flourish.