Peer2Peer: A Critical Internet Studies Gathering in LA
presented by UCLA C2i2 & FCCW
Saturday, August 8, 10AM–7PM & Sunday, August 9, 10AM–8PM
FCCW: 3053 Rosslyn St. LA, CA 90065
Info on our space here
Free
ABOUT OUR CO-PRESENTER
UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry is a community of scholars whose work engages the past, present and future of the Internet.
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
DAY 1: SATURDAY, AUGUST 8
RSVP for the whole day here
10:00 AM — Welcome to P2P!
Complimentary coffee + donuts provided.
Presenter: Stacy Wood is a writer, researcher and instructor living in Los Angeles. She is the curator and producer of Peer2Peer and the Director of Research and Programs for the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry.
10:15 AM – 10:50 AM — The Computer was a Place: Exploring early internet cultures and software in contemporary artistic practice
Presenters:
Darcy McSwain is a designer and animator, who creates critically considered and carefully designed digital experiences, often using technology to critique technology.
Airis Encarnacion is a designer, photographer, and organizer currently working in Los Angeles. Her work explores tangible/intangible manifestations of memory and shared experience, and where the two might intertwine.
11:00 AM – 11:50 AM — Dark Sousveillance & Community Resistance: Lessons from Skid Row
Presenters:
Victoria Copeland is a Research Fellow at the UCLA Center on Resilience and Digital Justice and former Senior Policy Analyst in technology at Upturn. Her research focuses on how data and technology are used to both perpetuate and “resolve” issues around interpersonal violence such as child abuse and sexual violence. She received her Ph.D and MSW from UCLA.
The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition is a community organization working to build community power toward abolishing police surveillance. They are rooted in the Skid Row neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles, based out of the Los Angeles Community Action Network.
Downtown Women’s Action Coalition empowers women who live and work in Downtown LA to influence public policy change that promotes health, safety, and economic and social justice for women through collective action, public education, community building, advocacy and leadership opportunities.
12:00 PM – 12:50 PM — IRLNET: Building community infrastructure in-person + online
A talk + discussion with Alice Yuan Zhang on Community Tools using the Plot web app.
Presenter: Alice Yuan Zhang engages with technology as a medium for social practice. She is the founder of Plot 田, a recreation room in Los Angeles which hosts public programs and experimental gatherings as well as a custom-built digital platform for creative practitioners. Previously, she co-developed the course Solidarity Infrastructures at the School for Poetic Computation.
1:00 PM — LUNCH
2:00 PM — “Mirror”
A presentation of a work-in-progress expanding on the first viral time-lapse self-portrait video, “Me.” This two-channel video installation with data-visualization textiles foregrounds timely questions about algorithmic bias, social algorithms, racial and gendered invisibility, and who gets to occupy space online.
Presenter: Ahree Lee is a multi-disciplinary artist working in video, new media, and textiles.
3:00 PM – 4:50 PM — Multiple Talks
Mashinka Firunts Hakopian on Ancestral Intelligences
Harris Kornstein on Drag and/as Technology
Jamilet Ochoa on Technologies of Restraint: Immigrant Bodies and Spectacles of Violence
Presenters:
Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is a writer, artist and researcher born in Yerevan and residing in Glendale, CA. Her current book project, Ancestral Intelligences attends to the algorithmic erasure of non-Western knowledge systems, languages, and visual cultures, arguing for ancestrality as a method for rerouting sociotechnical systems toward pluriversal outcomes.
Harris Kornstein is a scholar and an artist of queer play. By day, they are an Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona working on contemporary technologies and digital cultures and by night, they are a drag queen who among other things, helped found the #MyNameIs campaign that fought Facebook’s so-called “real-names” policy.
Jamilet Ochoa is doctoral student in Gender Studies at UCLA. Her research interests include Women of Color feminisms, surveillance technology, and the examination of power structures in carceral and detention systems.
5:00 PM – 5:50 PM — Sam Cole @ 404 Media, We’re All Still Fucked: The State of Deepfakes and AI Abuse Imagery
Presenter: Sam Cole is writing from the far reaches of the internet, about sexuality, the adult industry, online culture, and AI. She’s the author of How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex.
6:00 PM – 6:50 PM — The Internet We Could Have Had
Presenter: Christopher Kelty is professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. His ethnographic and historical work explores the intersection of science, technology and social/political theory. His current work is The Labyrinth Project, a multi-disciplinary collaborative research inquiry into conflict and controversy in urban ecologies in Los Angeles, California based in fieldwork with pest-control professionals, wildlife managers, biologists, and veterinarians. Also, Satan. He is the author of Two Bits and The Participant, and his new book, The Internet We Could Have Had forthcoming from Polity in October 2026!
DAY 2: SUNDAY, AUGUST 9
RSVP to all Sunday events here
10:00 AM — Welcome to P2P!
Complimentary coffee + donuts provided.
Presenter: Stacy Wood is a writer, researcher and instructor living in Los Angeles. She is the curator and producer of Peer2Peer and the Director of Research and Programs for the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry.
10:15 AM – 11:50 — Peer2Peer Open Studio
This is an informal space for artists, researchers, developers, designers, writers, anyone working across critical internet studies, creative coding, games, autonomous infrastructures, experimental software, digital art etc.
Bring a half-formed concept, a draft paper, a game mechanic, a technical challenge, a speculative project or just something you’re interested in or thinking through.
This session is designed to help folks find collaborators, get thoughtful feedback and share ideas. Rather than polished presentations, the emphasis is on unfinished and unformed work, experimentation and collective inquiry. Come share what you’re building, reading, stuck on etc.
12:00 PM – 12:50 — Legal “Artist” Talk
This talk is inspired by the legal events occurring in the process of national transition (from Bosnian to Dutch) and between two continents (Europe and North America). By reviewing the internet/web aesthetics that enforce national performance, the artist was able to pull off her “greatest bureaucratic hack.”
Presenter: Maisa Imamović (BiH/NL, 1994) is a researcher, web designer/developer, and experimental educator. She critically studies the role of the single user and user behaviors generated by code. She codes to challenge the ideology of user-friendliness, support cultural platforms, respond to political gems, and socialize. Text + Code are her main mediums.
1:00 PM — LUNCH
2:00 PM – 3:30 PM — Community Resilience: Resisting Data Centers and Surveillance Locally + Brooklyne Gipson on Reimagining (Online/Offline) Connection Through Community Care Work
Presenter: Brooklyne Gipson is an internet studies scholar whose research examines digital and social media environments through the lenses of Black feminist technology studies and the intersection of race, gender, and power.
3:45 PM – 5:00 PM — Multiple Talks
Danny Snelson – Probability Storms: Learning from Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint
Celeste Oon – GO CRAZY, GO STUPID: Absurd(ist) Internet Humor at the End of the World
Stacy E. Wood – Networked Cosmologies: Evangelical Visions of the Technological Antichrist
Presenters:
Celeste Oon is a PhD student at the University of Southern California. A self-proclaimed internet connoisseur, she specializes in technocultures and platform communities, with particular interest in harm, humor, and sociality. Her current project examines the diffusion of covert violence through popular digital youth cultures.
Stacy E. Wood is a writer and researcher based in Los Angeles. She is the Director of Research and Programs of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry
5:15 PM – 6:15 PM — Thirty-Five Years of the World Wide Web
On the protocols, governance, communities, and standards that keep the web noncommercial and decentralized.
Presenter: Joanne McNeill is the author of the novel Wrong Way (2023) and Lurking: How a Person Became a User (2020). She was the inaugural winner of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation’s Arts Writing Award for an emerging writer. She has been a resident at Eyebeam and a recipient of the Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.
6:30 PM – 8:00 — Dopamine Does The Internet
Authors from Dopamine Books tell stories about the Internet.
Presenters: Dopamine Books and Printed Matter are queer literary organizations that aim to elevate LGBTQI+ writing and writers through publishing, reading series, literary tours, and workshops.