CIIP – Page 2

Rolien Hoyng: Models of the climate crisis: the quantitative and the speculative

May 7 2024 | 13:00 GMT

Online

A climate model in climate science is a proxy that does the work of standing in. It replaces the overwhelming complexity of the climate that can only be apprehended via a synoptic form, an abstraction. Yet the proxological role the model aspires to requires negotiating manifestations of agencies that for Stengers invoke the name of Gaia and to which Clark and Szerszynski respond with the idea of planetary multiplicity: a restless planet that is “self-incompatible,” “out of step” with itself, and “self-differentiating.” I am especially interested in how models of the Anthropocene that travel beyond science coalesce the quantitative and the speculative. Remarkably, while inscribed with indeterminacy, models, in their contemporary digital-algorithmic form, are the cornerstones of data-driven, quantified rationalities and numerical precision. Indeed, uncertainty and indeterminacy do not undermine the use of models but open up various possibilities and politics. Considering differential and situated experiences of these dynamics raises political and ethical questions over climate justice.

Rolien Hoyng is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, UK. Her research addresses the cultural and political implications of digital infrastructures and data-centric technologies in particular contexts of practice, including smart cities, waste, and ecology. Currently, she is working on the role of digital models as uncertain mediations of the climate crisis. Her fieldwork sites reside in Turkey, China, and Europe.

The talk is part of CIIP Speaker Series organised in collaboration with MA Fine Art and MA GMM in the Department of Art and Media Technology, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.

Ryan Bishop

Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Art and Politics in the Department of Art and Media Technology at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. He is lead editor of the journal Cultural Politics�(Duke UP) and co-edits the book series “A Cultural Politics�Book” (DUP) and “Technicities” (with Jussi Parikka, Edinburg UP). A recent book is Technocrats of the Imagination: Art, Technology and the Military-Industrial Avant-garde�(co-authored with John Beck, DUP, 2020).

Megen de Bruin-Molé

Dr Megen de Bruin-Molé (she/any) is Associate Professor of Digital Media Practice with the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, Co-Director of the Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics (CIIP) research group, and Co-Director of the London Science Fiction Research Community. She specialises in ‘monstrous’ adaptation and contemporary remix culture, in particular the digital afterlives and appropriations of historical archives, ephemera, and memory in popular culture. Her book Gothic Remixed (Bloomsbury 2020) examines popular remix culture through the lens of monster studies, and her co-edited collection Embodying Contagion (UWP/Open Access 2021) explores how fantasies of outbreak narratives have infiltrated the way people view the real world. She is also the author of numerous academic articles on remix, historical fiction, and popular culture.

Megen is also an editor with the Critical Posthumanism Network’s Genealogy�project, and co-edited the Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism.

You can find more information about Megen (and her work) on her staff profile, Instagram, or Twitter.

Stephen Cornford

Stephen Cornford is a media artist and writer whose research investigates the relationships between technologies and landscapes, between media systems and planetary systems. His work critically questions the environmental impacts of consumer electronics and scientific sensing practices, and the viability of addressing ecological collapse through extractive and economic logics. His practice conceives of a ‘spectral geotechnics’ that connects technological and geological materialities through their mutual immersion in, and production by, the electromagnetic spectrum. Much of Stephen’s recent work was made alongside scientific researchers. He has collaborated with geophysicists prospecting for lithium, and held an Earth Art Fellowship with volcanologists studying magma crystallisation with X-rays.

Stephen is currently Senior Lecturer in Fine Art and Programme Lead for MA Fine Art at Winchester School of Art. He is also a founding co-director of Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics. Stephen has had solo exhibitions in Tokyo, Berlin, Brighton, Bergen, Ljubljana & London and his work has been included in group exhibtions at the ZKM Center for Art & Media, Karlsruhe; ICC, Tokyo; Haus der Electronische Kunst, Basel; Sigma Foundation, Venice; Finnish Museum of Photography and Coventry Biennial.

stephencornford.net

Olga Goriunova: Biometrics, Data Abstractions and the Politics of Truth

April 30, 2024 | 13:30 GMT

Winchester School of Art

Guest talk by Professor Olga Goriunova, cultural theorist working with technological cultures, media philosophy and aesthetics.

Register here

Abstract

In this talk, I begin with the idea that in order to function, or be materially relevant, all abstractions need grounding. For the human subject, such grounding, I suggest, is performed via the body and the specific anchoring of the body in abstractions such as biometrics, mobile phone triangulation and a range of others. In such abstractions, the production of truth is performed in relation to the framework developed from the 18th century onwards, where the bearer of truth is nature, of which human body is part. However, with AI, “nature” as a concept loses much of its force and it is a newly constructed “matter”, which takes center stage. Therefore, using examples from ground truthing in AI to biometric technology, I ask, how are data and AI-based abstractions are grounded today and, relatedly, how is truth produced?

Olga Goriunova is Professor of Digital Culture in the department of Media Arts, Royal Holloway University of London. She was co-curator of Readme, international touring software art festivals, 2001-2005 and Runme.org software art repository (2003+), and curator of Fun and Software touring exhibition (2010-2011). This work has been conceptualized in her monograph Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet (Routledge, 2012) and in the collections she edited and co-edited, including Readme. Software Art and Cultures (Aarhus University Press, 2004) and Fun and Software: Exploring Pleasure, Pain and Paradox in Computing (Bloomsbury, 2014). She is also a co-founder and co-editor of Computational Culture, a Journal of Software Studies. She is the co-author (with Matthew Fuller) of Bleak Joys. Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) and the editor of the special issue “Digital Subjects” of the journal Subjectivity (2018). She wrote influential essays on glitch, new media idiocy, memes and lurkers before these were mobilised by alt-right, data surveillance and AI. Her new project Ideal Subjects (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming) focuses on machine learning, data and subject-construction.

The talk is part of CIIP Speaker Series organised in collaboration with MA Fine Art and MA GMM in the Department of Art and Media Technology, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.

Kristoffer Gansing

Kristoffer Gansing works across media theory, artistic research and curatorial practice. In his writing and projects, re-considerations of pasts, presents and futures of media aim to inspire transformative change. He has been professor of Artistic Research at the Danish Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen (2020-2023) where he also directed the International Center for Knowledge in the Arts. There, his recently curated symposia have accentuated perspectives beyond normative or Western centered-views on art and knowledge production, such as Not Only: A Symposium on Artistic Research (2021) and Transformative Futures –Re-imaginations of Time, Space and Materiality in Artistic Research (2022). Between 2011-2020, Gansing was artistic director of transmediale, a globally renowned art and digital culture festival in Berlin. He is the co-editor of Across & Beyond: A transmediale Reader on Post-digital Practices, Concepts, and Institutions (2016, w. Ryan Bishop, Jussi Parikka & Elvia Wilk) and The Eternal Network – The Ends and Becomings of Network Culture (2020, w. Inga Luchs). In 2023, he published the short-form book Homegrown, Outsourced, Organised – Network-based Arts and the Technoaesthetics of Infrastructure, which forms part of a larger investigation into shifting media infrastructures and non-extractive practices.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9009-1406

Tsvetelina Hristova

Tsvetelina Hristova is a teaching fellow in Global Media at the Winchester School of Art, Southampton University. She works in the fields of critical infrastructure studies, critical data studies and postsocialism, combining theoretical and methodological approaches from media studies, STS and anthropology. She earned a PhD from Western Sydney University and has been a fellow at the Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana and the Centre for Advanced Internet Studies, Bochum. Her texts have been published in the journals Big Data & Society, International Journal of Communication, Journal of Cultural Economy and the Theory on Demand book series of the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam.

Jussi Parikka

Jussi Parikka works on contemporary visual culture and operational images alongside questions of environmental media. He has authored several books on the topic including recently Operational Images (2023), Photography Off the Scale (2021, co-edited with Tomas Dvorak), and Living Surfaces (co-authored with Abelardo Gil-Fournier, 2024). Jussi works also occasionally also as a curator having participated for example in the curatorial teams of transmediale 2023 and Helsinki Biennial 2023. Recently, he co-curated with Daphne Dragona the Climate Engines exhibition (October 2023-May 2024) at Laboral, Gijon (Spain). In addition to being affiliated with CIIP, he works at Aarhus University where he leads the Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (DARC) as well as co-directs the Environmental Media and Aesthetics research program.

https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/operational-images

https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/the-lab-book

http://www.laboralcentrodearte.org/en/exposiciones/motores-del-clima

Kwame Phillips

Kwame Phillips is Senior Lecturer in Media Practices at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, specialising in sensory media production, audio culture and critical media studies. Phillips’ work uses multimodal and experimental methodologies, often grounded in remix and repurposing, to focus on resilience, race, and social justice. He is co-author (with Shana Redmond) of the chapter “‘The People Who Keep on Going’: A Radical Listening Party” in The Futures of Black Radicalism (Verso 2017). He is also co-creator (with Debra Vidali) of the multi-sensorial sound art work, “Kabusha Radio Remix: Your Questions Answered by Pioneering Zambian Talk Show Host David Yumba (1923-1990).” He is part of the Visual Scholarship Initiative.

His recent interest is in ‘mixtape scholarship’, a curation and reprocessing of sensory media to convey sonic narratives in a manner not bounded by academic tradition or traditional form. This has led to the visual mixtapes The Imagined Things: On Solange, Repetition and Mantra and Lovers Rock Dub: An Experiment in Visual Reverberation. His recent publications include “Dub, Ecstasy and Collective Memory in Lovers Rock” in ReFocus: The Films of Steve McQueen (Edinburgh University Press) and the upcoming “Creating an Ethnographic Exhibit” in The Creative Ethnographer’s Notebook (Routledge).

kwamephillips.com

Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics – Seminar

April 16, 2024 | 14:15 CET

Aarhus University

Welcome to this seminar with four guest talks on critical infrastructures and image politics by scholars and artists from the UK: Alexandra Anikina, Kwame Phillips, Stephen Cornford, and Geoff Cox. The Digital Aesthetics Research Centre and the Centre for Aesthetics of AI Images are the local hosts of this seminar and the visit.�

The seminar will explore Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics from multiple perspectives derived from a newly established research group at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton). Along with the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at LSBU and the Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (DARC) at Aarhus University, we are exploring collective and decentred forms of research.

This seminar will address the politics of images and sound as objects of research captured by various digital and scientific apparatuses and infrastructures. The presentations feature approaches grounded in artistic research, activist-focused sensory media and practices of ‘networking’ and ‘infrastructuring’ the university. The approaches are underpinned by an interest in collaborative modes of work that provide provocative approaches to audiovisual culture, as well as interrogating the very context of production of such knowledge in and beyond universities.

https://cc.au.dk/aktuelt/arrangementer/vis-arrangement/artikel/critical-infrastructures-and-image-politics-seminar-1