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Visibility and knowledge are based on access to information. We usually consider this as either a question of collecting new or examining existing data. However, the term ‘black box society’ (Frank Pasquale) points to a situation in which data are deliberately concealed: manufacturing information asymmetry – imbalances of power due to misinformation, leverage, concealment or fraud – has become an effective tool for gaining competitive advantage across all levels of life.

The logics of technocapitalism signify a crisis of the body politic – they not only restrain agency but carve out new forms of exploitation and segregation. As power increasingly shifts from representative to performative speech, it reorganizes the strata of society by creating class divisions that affect bodies, minds and affiliations along quite different lines as how class and consent have been contextualized historically.

Making the Black Box Speak addresses these issues by focusing on the term resolution. Its semiotic wealth – ranging from perception and cognition to knowledge production and joint decision-making – evokes an ecology in which all bodies communicate, but also reveals how automated control predicts, curtails and exploits common potentials.

Producing resolution against the black box is barely accessible to direct action or critique. Rather, we aim at forming alliances with those that make the black box speak from inside. Hence, episode 3 revolves around what we call the expert figure of the renegade – a traitor to her system (such as a whistleblower or dissident) but an educator for the public at large.

Making the Black Box Speak probes forms of resistance (epistemic, social and affective) and solidarity (how to share which risks) that cut through the black box. What is at stake here is deeply performative, material and bodied. Episode 3 therefore endeavors how we can apply the rich body of “resolution” to a plasticity that can resolve what has been disrupted and marginalized.

Making the Black Box Speak calls for exceeding the established critical frameworks of art and academic discourse towards the postdisciplinary insurrection of renegade activism.