Femmes Branchées #46 :: Rena Tangens / Big Brother Awards

Studio XX, Montreal’s foremost women’s digital resource centre, is proud to present Rena Tangens, German artist and activist, visiting Montreal for the Maid in Cyberspace Festival. Prolific and engaged, she exposes the stakes surrounding citizens’ rights to privacy, the use of independent networks during situations of war, and the necessity of open and alternative frameworks and structures in order to assure personal freedoms, democracy and creativity.

Rena Tangens, artist and networking pioneer, lives and works in Bielefeld, Germany. Her works bring together diverse practices such as experimental film, video and free radio. She founded the gallery and art project “Art d´Ameublement” together with colleague padeluun in 1984. She has been active online since 1987, and she brought the first modem to the international art exhibition Documenta (1987). She was instrumental in integrating women into the Chaos Computer Club (Berlin). She effected an artist residency in Canada in 1988.

Rena Tangens is co-founder of the association FoeBuD e.V., the Bionic bbs and the independent networks Z-Netz and CL (Germany) and Zamir Transnational Network (set up during the war in former Yugoslavia, 1992). She has also worked in software development for the Zerberus bbs program. Advancement of Privacy as precondition for Living Democracy and Respect of the Network as a Social Space, along with research on androcentrism in the networks is currently the focus of her works.

She is curator of the ongoing monthly culture and technology event, Public Domain, since 1987. In collaboration with FoeBuD, she published the first manual on PGP encryption in German language. Since 2000, she organises and is jury member of the Big Brother Awards in Germany.

FoeBuD e.V.: http://www.foebud.org
Pretty Good Privacy: http://www.foebud.org/texte/presse/artikel
Big Brother Awards: http://www.bigbrotherawards.de/en/
Privacy Card: http://www.foebud.org/texte/aktion/privacy-card
Article: http://www.tangens.de/presse/lemonde/

For more information, please contact Studio XX at 514.845.7934