#purplenoise

#purplenoise is an interdisciplinary technofeminist research group that uses real-life events to explore social media as the arena for protest and political activation. Inspired by Christina Grammatikopoulou’s concept of expanded space, #purplenoise stages online-offline campaigns, communicates through various social media channels to explore its feedback loops. The research methodology puts “noisification” at the center of its strategy. In this context, “noise” is understood as “a manipulative communication strategy which, by deliberate disturbance or confusion on communication platforms, attempts either to obscure or falsify a message or information for its recipients, or to deliberately launch false information.” (Grammatikopoulou 2019)

Strategies such as intervention, infiltration, manipulation, propaganda, fake news, manifestos and poetry are fueled by love as well as anger and are implemented with a strong visual appearance. At the heart of #purplenoise there is technofeminist propaganda: the desire to fuck over social media, to bring down platform capitalism, to reconquer public space, to escape the social control exercised by monopolies, to refine political manipulation, to use affect in order to build the common, to turn power into care, to produce more just realities, to create new narratives about the future.

For its campaigns #purplenoise uses hashtags (specific for each action, but also some general ones like #imakenoise and #purplenoise), a meme that appears in many forms (the feelers), our freely variable gender symbols, and a fixed color code (variations of purple/pink/magenta, e.g. also through colored light). The feelers meme goes back to Donna Haraway’s Camille Stories. In it, she describes a future scenario in which humans do not experience gender specification before puberty and, moreover, can supplement their human physical boundaries by freely selecting features from other creatures. #purplenoise chose the feelers as a playful symbol for the necessary expansion of the human sensorium.

The group was initiated in 2018 by Cornelia Sollfrank. Janine Sack has developed the visual appearance. For each project, different collaborators come together who are listed individually for each project.
The current group consists of: Magdalena Götz, Christina Grammatikopoulou, Marion Niewiadomski, Janine Sack, Sabine Siegfried, Cornelia Sollfrank, Johanna Thompson, Sophie Wohlgemut.
Former collaborators include: Isabel de Sena, Charlotte Bonjour, Marlene Halser, Andrea Kelemen, Andreea C.