Investigating the Kill Cloud: When Warfare Tests Tech on Civilians

This talk and panel asks what happens when military AI targets civilians and conflict zones become testing grounds for technology that touches us all. Behind it stands the Disruption Network Institute, launched in Berlin in 2023, a research hub bringing together whistleblowers, artists, activists and investigative journalists to study how global connectivity fuels warfare – what the whistleblowers Lisa Ling and Cian Westmoreland call 'The Kill Cloud'. Tatiana Bazzichelli, researcher and director of the institute, introduces its work, while scholar and artist Tiara Roxanne, one of this year's DNI Fellows, presents her artistic research on how the Kill Cloud affects 'undocumented migrants' and Indigenous communities at the Mexico-US border, along with the environmental costs of drone-based surveillance. Together they reflect on the impact of AI within and outside declared war zones and on why borders become laboratories for control technology – with free entry, held in English.