The Art of Digital Resistance | CIFRA Meetup

Technology often expects our compliance. We adapt to its speed, its logic, and its demands. But what happens when artists start interfering with the machine? In this conversation, three practitioners across media art join CIFRA to explore artistic disobedience, reverse engineering, and how to reclaim agency from within the systems that track and quantify us. Tega Brain (AU / US) — artist, environmental engineer, and researcher — on the hidden logic of slowness, why inefficiency can be a powerful design choice, and how moments of technical failure or breakage reveal the systems we’ve learned to take for granted. Sam Lavigne (US) — media artist and software developer — on the art of reverse engineering, taking systems apart to see how they truly work, and why absurdity is often the only honest way to critique algorithmic labor and digital power. Martin Honzik (AT) — Chief Curatorial Officer at Ars Electronica — on the evolution of media art as a site of protest, why technology is never neutral, and how institutions can support artists who choose to interfere rather than adapt. Together they move through questions of humor, surveillance, and the productive friction that occurs when we stop being users and start being "bugs" in the system.