Karl Moubarak
Karl Moubarak is a designer, researcher, and web developer whose practice is rooted in the digital sphere and focuses on the development of on- and offline sites for connectivity and exchange. He is a member of Amsterdam-based workshop cooperative Hackers & Designers (2019–ongoing), Eindhoven-based interstitial collective body Office of Queer Affairs (2017–ongoing), and Beirut-based historical oral archiving initiative OH4L (2020–ongoing). Moubarak works on projects that aim to make visible the processes, tools, and mechanisms that co-constitute them, and generates experimental methods of liveness and dissemination, as facilitated by the sensitivities of free, libre, and open-source software. The Cell for Digital Discomfort (CfDD) is interested in developing practices that foster a “solidary discomfort” by circulating questions and experiments that deal with turbo-capitalist domination, linear solutionism, and seamless operations. CfDD wants to stay with the unease despite too-comfortable modes of infrastructural becoming, in order to intersectionally imagine ways to refuse compliance with totalitarian innovation, and to do so in a more explicit conversation with crip techno-science, anti-colonialism, queer struggles, and environmental justice. Recent projects include: The Love Letters Audio Tour, Van Abbemuseum (2021–ongoing); Platframe for the 3rd Workshop on Obfuscation (2021); How to Serve Your Trash to the Public Domain (2020); and The Network Imaginaries Hyperdrive Portal (2020). Moubarak lives and works in Amsterdam and is part of the online Cell for Digital Discomfort in the Fellowship for Situated Practice.