Keep Your Sensitive Files, Elsewhere with Virginia Zangs + Maisa Imamović
When pressure mounts to delete, where do your most sensitive files actually go? What infrastructure exists to hold what matters most - securely, on your own terms? Drawing on best practices from Open-source intelligence (OSINT) journalism and data decentralization strategies, this workshop is primarily grounded in an understanding of contemporary digital (in)security conditions:
What surveillance tools are currently being deployed against vulnerable communities, artists, and cultural workers
Where your files are most vulnerable – including the places you'd least expect
What you are legally entitled to protect – and how to assert it
What recourse and alternatives exist
From there, participants will prototype their own storage infrastructure capable of holding files that are sensitive precisely because publishing them carries risk: immigration records, legal documents, personal testimony, organizing materials. Participants will:
Bring sensitive documents, records, and materials and learn
Learn to host them on a Raspberry Pi – a small, affordable, self-contained device that keeps your data off proprietary servers and outside the reach of platforms that can be compelled to hand it over.
Set up the digital environment for practising digital hygiene, email + password management, alternative storage systems (NAS, IPFS), and the everyday practices that let you control your own online presence.
Tools and technology introductions, resource handout and access to a shared are.na channel.
Capacity: 20
Cost: Sliding Scale $25-40
Virginia Zangs is an architect, computational designer, and researcher investigating how socio-technical infrastructures of intelligence shape ecological, political, and cultural realities. Her practice spans cultural institutions, research labs, and design studios, combining theoretical research with computational and spatial design. She is founding partner of the design studios interMediations and ZangsMichalove. She is currently a Ph.D student in Media Arts & Practice at the School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California.Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 “ Intelligens” and "City in the Cloud - Data on the Ground" at the Architektur Museum Munich (2025-2026). She has presented at symposiums, conferences, and hackathons, including the BlockchainGov International Symposium at Université Paris Panthéon-Assas, the AI & Cities - Digital Double Symposium in Rome organized by ETH, UZH, Digital Visual Studies Max Planck Society, and FCL Future Cities Laboratory (2024), and the Open Source AI Hackathon at Brown Institute, Columbia University (2024).
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. In 2022, her first book The Psychology of the Web Developer, Reality of a Female Freelancer was published by the Institute of Network Cultures. In the academic year of 2024-2025, she taught creative coding and the history of cyberfeminism as an adjunct professor at USC Media Arts Practice, UCLA Design Media Arts, ArtCenter Interaction Design, CalArts Critical Studies and Integrated Media. She holds an MA degree in Aesthetics & Politics from the California Institute of the Arts. In 2025, her second book entitled Maisa in Webland: Detouring UX Destinies was published by Set Margins. She is ⅓ of Rip Space, where she co-curates, organizes discursive events and radical knowledge-sharing programs, and supports with design & archival maintenance. Currently, she is pursuing a Ph.D. in Media Arts + Practice at the University of Southern California.