May 7, 2021

3rd Workshop on obfuscation

TU Delft and Cornell Tech organise the online event Obfuscation strategies which represent creative ways to evade surveillance, protect privacy, improve security; as well as protest, contest, resist and sabotage technology. Obfuscation methods render data more ambiguous, difficult to exploit and interpret, less useful. They rely on the addition of gibberish, meaningless data; they pollute, add noise, randomize. Obfuscation invokes an intuitive form of protection: it distorts that which is visible to render it less (or in)visible. It hides the trees among the forest.

Online

 

Important dates:

• Registration re-opens on: February 3, 2021
• Submissions due: March 15, 2021
• Notifications: April 1, 2021
• Workshop: May 7, 2021
• A vernissage will take place on May 4, 2021
• Study group meets on: April 30, May 6 and May 19, 2021

The aim of the workshop is to convene participants around the concept and practice of obfuscation in digital societies. We welcome researchers, scientists, policy makers, public-interest developers and coders, journalists, activists, artists and other interested parties to discuss obfuscation in environments and conditions of asymmetrical power and information. The workshop will open with a vernissage on May 4, 2021, where we will welcome all participants and release artworks and media from invited speakers.

Everyone is welcome to participate in the workshop, with or without submission. You can already register for the event.
If you are interested in presenting your work, want to propose your own session or join our study group, please check out the call for participation.

The 3rd Workshop on Obfuscation was originally planned to take place in the Spring of 2020 in Delft, the Netherlands. We were in full force preparing the workshop, when COVID-19 was recognized by the World Health Organization as a pandemic. With these disconcerting developments in the back of our minds, we reconsidered whether it would remain relevant to do a Workshop on Obfuscation, and, if so, how we should go about it. We were aware that there was no such thing as “simply moving the event online“. We were especially concerned how such a seamless translation would impact the many questions at stake in organizing a workshop on forms of resistance towards ever powerful technology companies and infrastructures. Hence, we took the time and budget we had to explore ways to create an engaging and productive online gathering. Among other efforts, we aimed to organize all gatherings associated with the workshop to take place using free and open source tools provided by TU Delft and platframes developed by Hackers and Designers. You can read more about the motivation to take the 3rd Workshop on Obfuscation online and the choices and decisions involved in the process here. 

For more information, see here.