Events – CIIP

Aziza Kadyri: Artist Talk “Break Down and Stitch Up”

November 28 2024 | 15:00 GMT | Lecture Theatre A, Winchester School of Art and online REGISTER HERE

The Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics (CIIP) research group is pleased to invite you to an artist talk by Aziza Kadyri.

In the talk, Kadyri will discuss her transmedia practice, which integrates AI, extended reality, and traditional Central Asian crafts to explore the intersection of cultural heritage and immersive technology. Through the manipulation of archival fragments and the use of AI to adapt and respond to imagery and performance, Kadyri investigates how pre-modern techniques can inform contemporary practices of recording and remembering. Her talk will also highlight the collaborative nature of her work, challenging conventional ideas of individual authorship and embracing a collective approach rooted in artisanal traditions.

https://www.azizakadyri.com/

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

Syaura Qotrunadha: Artist Talk

November 7 2024 | 15:00 GMT | Lecture Theatre A, Winchester School of Art and online REGISTER HERE

An artist talk by Syaura Qotrunadha,�an Indonesian artist whose dynamic portfolio spans diverse mediums, including photography, textiles, woodwork, interactive installations, recycled paper, video art, historical and digital archives.

In the talk, Syaura will share insights into her interdisciplinary creative process, exploring how diverse media—from woodwork to video art—can powerfully address contemporary global issues while reflecting cultural narratives.

Since 2013, Syaura Qotrunadha has actively participated in group exhibitions, showcasing her work at notable events such as “Biennale Jogja XII” in Yogyakarta (Indonesia, 2013), “Developing World: Alt-Process” in Colorado (USA, 2014), “METAMORPHOSIS METAVERSE” in Montréal (Canada, 2022), “Ars Electronica Festival” in Linz (Austria, 2022), “Circle in the Square” in London (UK, 2023), and “Sandbox” in Glasgow (Scotland, 2023). Her recent exhibitions include “VISARALOKA” in Bali, Indonesia (2024).

Syaura’s thought-provoking works delve into themes of music, history, education, and social and technological issues, merging artistic practice with cultural engagement. With an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, and background in both Mechanical Engineering and Photography, she bridges technical skill with creative exploration.

Her work has been screened at notable venues such as the New Museum in New York (2022), ACC Media Wall in Gwangju (2021), and Black Maria Cinema in Manila (2021). Syaura is a recipient of the Julius Baer Next Generation Art Prize and The 4th VH Award by Hyundai Motor Group.

https://www.syaurasyau.com

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.

Angela YT Chan: Climate History and Technology

October 31 2024 | 15:00 GMT | Lecture Theatre A, Winchester School of Art and online REGISTER HERE

Angela YT Chan is an independent researcher, data engineer and artist specialising in climate change.In her talk she will introduce key themes across her practice that focuses on how climate change narratives in the public domain relate to colonial histories, technologies and justice. She will share creative digital methodologies in her critical research and interdisciplinary collaborations through highlighted projects. These include “forestscapes”, a collective inquiry into forest and ecological restoration with generative arts and sound materials with Public Data Lab (KCL), and her independent research-arts practice with current projects “Critiquing a ‘sustainable military’” and “The Colonial History of Climate Tech” (supported by Tactical Tech and Heritage for Global Challenges Research Centre respectively).

Bio

Angela YT Chan is an independent researcher, data engineer and artist specialising in climate change. Her work explores power, narrative framings and technology in the colonial and ongoing history of the climate crisis. Angela works with a variety of media and processes, such as video, illustration, writing, narrative games, workshops, sound, creative coding, and her projects often include extensive collaborations in arts, technology, policy and activism (recently Public Data Lab, The Policy Institute). Highlight residencies include Arts Catalyst, FACT/Jerwood, Sonic Acts, Primary, Abandon Normal Devices, and Tactical Tech.

Angela has produced curatorial projects and workshops, collaborating with artists, activists and youth groups (formerly under the name Worm: art + ecology, 2014-2020). She co-directs the London Science Fiction Research Community. As a university educator, she teaches climate colonialism, environmental and social justice in art practices, critical research, games and speculative fiction (Goldsmiths UoL, KCL, RCA, WSA), and mentors artists working on digital media technologies. Angela is also a research consultant, having worked in international climate and cultural policy at Julie’s Bicycle and independently on climate projects for major cultural institutions. She has recently joined INTERPRT, a research agency that pursues environmental justice through spatial and visual investigations.

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.

https://criticalinfrastructures.net

https://angelaytchan.net

Ami Clarke

October 15 2024 | 10:00 BST | Fishbowl, 1039 Eastside Winchester School of Art

Visual artist and founder of Banner Repeater, Ami’s practice works critically across art and technology, in film and video, sculpture and sound, often coming together in multi-media installations. Her work uses live data, game engines, Virtual Reality, CGI, and 3D model making to create environments in real life, in VR, and on-screen. Ami’s work explores ways of living with complexity and uncertainty, drawing out interdependencies across finance, the environment, and ideological apparatus such as neoliberalism, from a critical xeno-feminist post-human position. What that means is there is an emphasis on grasping something of the complexity of the multi-temporalities and scales, cross-species contaminations and alliances, necessary to confront the environmental challenges ahead – within an evolving awareness of power relations, which necessarily take into account colonial histories as well as neocolonial extractions of value.

https://www.amiclarke.com

Angels, Bots, Cute AIs and Animism: A Conversation on AI Imaginaries

July 10 2024 | 18:00 BST | Borough Road Gallery, London

The Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics group in collaboration with the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image is inviting you to a discussion of cyberfeminism and AI imaginaries, including a talk by Bogna Konior and followed by a conversation with Amy Ireland, Gabriela Méndez Cota and Alexandra (Sasha) Anikina. The event will take place on Wednesday, 10th July at the Borough Road Gallery, London South Bank University (entrance on Borough Road).

18.00 Welcome by Sasha Anikina and Geoff Cox

18.10-19.00 Angels in Latent Spaces: Notes on AI Erotics, Bogna Konior

This lecture engages with female Christian erotic mysticism, from the Middle Ages until modernity, as an early philosophy of artificial intelligence. Through a selection of original mystical writings and contemporary cyberculture theory, it explores how female stigmatics and mystics could be considered as thinkers of the internet to come, including the subjects of human-machine romance as well as artificial reproduction. Drawing on my own canon of cyberfeminist and mystical texts, as well as experiments with image and text generators, I propose a prophetic reading of these early theologies. The writings of these mystics model for us, I argue, a way of thinking about artificial intelligence and the destiny of our species, where inhuman eroticism is a gateway into a machine age, already prefigured by the popularity of AI partner apps like Replika, virtual reality sex in VrChat, the popularity of avatar erotic models, or remote sex technologies.

19.00-20.00 Angels, Bots, Cute AIs and Animism: A Conversation on Imaginaries – with Bogna Konior, Amy Ireland, Gabriela Méndez Cota and Alexandra (Sasha) Anikina. The conversation will be followed by drinks at the gallery.

Bogna Konior is an Assistant Professor of IMA (Interactive Media Arts) at NYU Shanghai. She is also a Research Fellow in the Antikythera Program on Speculative Computation at the Berggruen Institute, and a mentor in the Synthetic Intelligence program at Medialab-Matadero Madrid. Her work on digital culture, philosophy of new media, and posthumanism has been presented internationally, recently including the Cambridge Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, e-flux, and the Ljubljana Biennale. She is currently working on two projects concerned with long-term trajectories of technological development. Her current academic project is on Polish science fiction writer and philosopher, Stanislaw Lem, and his neglected contribution to the theory of biotechnological evolution of autonomous reason. She is also conducting a multimedia research project on female Catholic mysticism as an early form of cyberfeminism and a predictor of machine erotics, nonhuman personhood, and artificial reproduction. Together with Anna Greenspan and Benjamin Bratton, she is the editor of Machine Decision is not Final: China, and the History and Future of AI (Urbanomic, 2024).

Gabriela Méndez Cota is a researcher in the Department of Philosophy at Universidad Iberoamericana, Ciudad de México. Inspired by deconstruction, psychoanalysis and technoscience feminism, her work explores the subjective and ethical dimensions of technological/political controversies in specific contexts. Her books include Disrupting Maize: Food, Biotechnology and Nationalism in Contemporary Mexico (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). Among other places, her work has appeared in New Formations, Media Theory, Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and the Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identities (2020). Since 2014, she has been co-editor of the open access journal of culture and theory, Culture Machine (culturemachine.net). Between 2019 and 2021 she led a practice-based educational initiative on critical/feminist/intersectional perspectives of open access, which included a collaboration with the COPIM project at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University, and which resulted in a collective rewriting of The Chernobyl Herbarium (Open Humanities Press, 2015).

Amy Ireland is a writer and theorist best known for her work with the technomaterialist transfeminist collective, Laboria Cuboniks, whose Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation (Verso, 2018) has been translated into eighteen languages. With Maya B. Kronic she is the author of Cute Accelerationism (Urbanomic, 2024), and an anthology of her philosophical essays (Filosofía-Ficción: Inteligencia Artificial, technología oculta y el fin de la humanidad), was published by Holobionte in 2022. Amy’s work has appeared in various academic journals, poetry anthologies, art reviews, and exhibitions, including the Barbican Centre’s 2019 ‘AI: More than Human’, and the 2021 Athens Biennale. Amy currently works as an editor and translator for the UK contemporary art and philosophy publisher, Urbanomic.

Alexandra (Sasha) Anikina is a media theorist and artist whose work focuses on algorithmic and visual culture, affective infrastructures, imaginaries of technology, feminist STS and technological conditions of knowledge production, governance, labour and affect. Recently she has been focused on two bodies of work: one, feminist and decolonial imaginaries of AI and procedural animism; and the other concerned with post-socialist state necropolitics. She is Senior Lecturer in Media Practices at the department of Art and Media Technology in Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton and co-director of Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics research group and Programme Co-Lead for MA Global Media Management. https://linktr.ee/alxanikina

Geoff Cox is Professor of Art and Computational Culture, and co-director of the Center for the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI) at London South Bank University, as well as adjunct at Aarhus University. Hisesearch interests lie broadly across the fields of software studies, image politics, experimental publishing and AI literacy. https://www.centreforthestudyof.net/

The event will be hybrid and recorded. It is organised by Dr Alexandra Anikina as the first in the series of AI conversations hosted by Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics research group (University of Southampton) and the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (London South Bank University). The event is supported by Web Science Institute.

“The Chronicles of Xenosocialist AI”: Towards Feminist and Decolonial AI with Artistic Research and Creative Methods

“The Chronicles of Xenosocialist AI”: Towards Feminist and Decolonial AI with Artistic Research and Creative Methods

Thursday 23 May, Winchester School of Art, Lecture Theatre B & Online

Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics research group hosts a workshop and a half-day informal symposium dedicated to the use of artistic research, science fiction, future studies and other creative methods in researching cultural approaches to AI and decolonial and feminist AI imaginaries.

11.00-13.00 – Workshop “Other Futures: Science Fiction Methods for Technopolitical Imagination”

This workshop is aimed at employing methods from science fiction writing, future studies and speculative design to engage in experimental ‘version-making’ and imaginaries of the future. It offers a series of collective exercises (that can be also retained as thinking tools) to engage with technopolitical visions of the future that go beyond binary options of utopia or dystopia, but rather towards complex and productive versions that can be tweaked, used in storytelling and theory-fiction or applied to alternative imaginaries of AI.

13.00-14.00 – Lunch

14.00-14.50 – Session 1, “The Chronicles of Xenosocialist AI” – Laura Trilla, Gustavo Collado, Mandus Ridefelt, Sasha Anikina, Nupur Doshi

“The Chronicles of Xenosocialist AI” is a collaborative world-building project aimed at imagining micropolitical narratives, visual cultures, non-state infrastructures and new relationalities of a potential xenosocialist AI (encountering the human-inhabited Earth) could be, drawing on science fiction methods and decolonial and feminist approaches. It was developed as a fictional radio station, prompt manifesto and mixed media installation in Medialab Matadero, Madrid.

15.00-16.00 – Session 2, Decolonial and Feminist AI Imaginaries: Francis Gene-Rowe, Mandus Ridefelt, Yadira Sanchez Benitez

Francis Gene-Rowe, Against Coercive Computation: Imagining Daoist AI

Mandus Ridefelt, Mutual Hearing Aid

Yadira Sanchez Benitez, Land based algorithmic ecologies

16.15-17.15 – Keynote by Maya Indira Ganesh “On the limits of knowing in AI times”

Dr Maya Indira Ganesh is a technology researcher and writer whose work investigates the social, cultural, and political implications of the ‘becoming-human’ of machines, and vice versa. Maya spent 15 years working at the intersection of gender justice, technology, and human rights with Indian and international NGOs.

Networking and drinks

***

This event is organised by Dr Alexandra Anikina and Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics group (Department of Art and Media Technology, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton) and supported by Web Science Institute and Medialab Matadero, Madrid.

Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton combines expertise in web science, data science and artificial intelligence to study the relationship between society and the largest information system in history: the World Wide Web.

Medialab Matadero, formerly known as Medialab Prado, is a cultural space and citizen lab in Madrid (Spain). It was created by the Madrid City Council in 2000, growing since then into a leading center for citizen innovation. It follows a participatory approach, using collective intelligence methods (developed in living labs) and fast prototyping tools such as fab labs, to use and co-create digital commons.

MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2024 – Webinar registration

The Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics research group is inviting applications to the MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships. We are looking to collaborate with excellent postdoctoral researchers worldwide who wish to come to the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton in the UK to lead on their own research project while acquiring new skills through interdisciplinary research, collaborative networks and inter-sectoral mobility.

In particular, we are interested in projects on the politics of contemporary digital and visual cultures at the intersection of media art and critical theory. We foreground transdisciplinary and practice-based methodologies of artistic and activist-led research in media and technocultures with specific interests in material infrastructures, critical posthumanities, algorithmic visual cultures, feminist and decolonial technocultures, and media ecologies.

The internal University of Southampton deadline for the applications is 28 August 2024. The scheme deadline is 11 September 2024.

The University of Southampton’s Horizon Europe Team is holding an online information webinar about this scheme on Thursday 20th June 2024,15:00-16:00 UK time. Please register here.

A Video Store After the End of the World: The Great Netfix

June 05 – July 03, 2024

Borough Road Gallery, London South Bank University

Set up as a media re-distribution unit, The Great Netfix, an exhibition by A Video Store After the End of the World (Kristoffer Gansing & Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter), unfolds as a performative installation that works to reform relations between labour, automation and ownership.

The Great Netfix will consist of a low-tech media infrastructure that allows for the extraction of streaming media onto VHS. Exploiting how the contents of digital media platforms are not endless, the exhibition aims to discuss how the streaming economy is materially entangled and based on an economy of artificially created scarcity. In contrast, The Great Netfix “unclouds” online audiovisual media in a performance of the labour of automation and as a material speculation on alternatives to the algorithmic cloud. Consisting of a media front-end and a labour back-end, in The Great Netfix, VHS tapes are used to host the extracted media streams. During the course of the exhibition period, a stack of VHS data packages is built up, which can be picked up by visitors who then become the future custodians of A Video Store After the End of the World, interconnected through a VHS distribution network.

The Great Netfix is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation and The Swedish Research Council and is organised in collaboration with the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI) at LSBU, The Digital Culture Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London, and the research group Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics (CIIP) at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.

The servers are down. The Streaming has stopped. The cloud is gone.
Welcome to a Video Store After the End of the World.

A Video Store After the End of the World was first installed in Copenhagen as part of the Trans★Feminist Digital Depletion Strike on the 8^th of March 2023 which brought together a transnational network of organisations, collectives and individuals in protest against cloud-based computing and its extractive logic. The video store and its VHS medium here became a backdrop for a conversation about how we can collectively imagine new, more sustainable and local ways of sharing knowledge, art and culture than through the energy-intensive cloud-based networks we rely on today. Due to its slow biodegradation process, VHS has the potential to outlive digital servers and humanity too. By referring to the end of the world, the project does not suggest a coming apocalypse, but a hopeful living in or in spite of what Anna Tsing has called “capitalist ruins” that are already very much here.

The initial video store collected more than 2000 used video tapes for home recording, some of which have been used to create mix-tapes on counter-cloud practices. In a next phase, the collection is now being mobilised to create a distributed model of A Video Store After the End of the World.

For more information on the project and its past activities visit https://vhs.data.coop/

In Search of Places Lost: screening and talk by Krassimir Terziev and Tsvetelina Hristova

May 17 2024 | 18:30 BST | May Day Rooms, London.

Test screening of the video essay Time Sticks to the Walls by Krassimir Terziev and Tsvetelina Hristova and discussion with the authors.

Between 1945 and 1989 the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, part of the East-European Socialist Bloc, undertook the construction of public parks and amusement complexes for the working class. These structures were once built with a sweeping determination for a future that never materialised. The promise of a classless communist utopia operated with a vast horizon of a planetary communal futurity, where scale sealed the certainty in a deterministic line of progression and projected the vision of accessible and disciplined sociality. 1989 interrupted the trajectory of this imagined future and with this interruption, the temporalities of infrastructural developments and relations shifted into the unstable terms of public procurement contracts that banked the accumulations of the past into fungible futures.We reflect on how artistic exploration can provide an outlet to engaging with loss and trauma in the post-socialist urban landscape. The focus on loss opens the space for a critical interrogation of the possibilities of reclaiming an affective infrastructural commonality of joy, leisure and recreation beyond the consumerist spaces of the capitalist city.

Krassimir Terziev is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans a diversity of media, including video/film, photography, painting/drawing, and text, questioning the boundaries between reality and fiction, while exploring the manifold transitions and tensions between a globalized world, dominated by overwhelming multiplicity of symbolic imagery, and its material groundings in technological, physical and human ‘hardware’.

Tsvetelina Hristova is a Teaching Fellow in media studies at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton and part of the Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics research group. Tsvetelina works on topics that interrogate the politics of media, mediation and automation.

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.