Tuesday 25 November 2025, 5pm GMT Lecture Theatre B. Winchester School of Art
The Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics (CIIP) research group warmly invites you to a conversation between Audrey Samson (of the artist duo FRAUD), Stephen Cornford, and Yaiza Hernandez Velazquez. The event marks the launch of EURO—VISION: Undergrounding the Critical Mineral, published in October 2025 by K. Verlag.
Lithium, copper, uranium, child labor, and the bed of the deep sea—the mining sector is one of the most contested and problematic arenas of consumer complicity today. EURO—VISION: Undergrounding the Critical Mineral begins not with a location or a specific resource, but with a fundamental question: what counts as extraction today? While we might picture drills and quarries, the deeper story unfolds across financial markets, trade policies, legal frameworks, and the metrics used to define what is “critical” in the first place. Taking the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act as a point of departure, this richly layered volume traces the hidden infrastructures and governing logics that shape how the mining industry moves substances from and across the Earth—and what these minerals, in turn, move with them.
Developed by the artist duo FRAUD (Francisco Gallardo & Audrey Samson) in close collaboration with environmental humanities scholar Michaela Büsse, the book gathers a wide range of voices—artists, scholars, economists, activists, lawyers, and journalists—to reflect on the long genealogies of resource extraction, the valuation paradigms that uphold them, and the terminologies that give them legitimacy. But the story doesn’t stop there. In the context of EURO–VISION, “undergrounding” becomes a tactic: a means of unsettling the structural violence concealed behind seemingly neutral data, and of turning toward the mineral itself—its material presence, its histories, its speculative potential.
Published in K. Verlag’s Processing Process series, EURO—VISION draws on FRAUD’s ongoing, research-led inquiry into critical mineral governance. Combining interviews, visual essays, and commissioned texts, it opens new pathways for thinking about the entanglements between geology, economy, and power. At once analytical and imaginative, the book invites us to see the subterranean anew—not simply as a resource, but as a site of resistance, relation, and possible futures.
October 1 2025 | 11:30 GMT | Online via MS Teams REGISTER HERE
Material Interests Talk: “Critiquing a ‘sustainable military’: an artistic investigation into militarism and the colonial legacies of the climate crisis”
This presentation introduces Angela’s work as an independent research-artist specialising in climate change through one of her longer-term projects.
Critiquing a ‘sustainable military’ (2022-) is an artistic investigation into militarism and the colonial legacies of the climate crisis.
By studying the UK military’s net-zero goals for 2050 against the timeline of climate history, Angela’s work engages with collaborators in activism, science and technology studies, and journalism.
Online or in-person, Advanced Research Centre, Room 224, University of Glasgow
Event description
The Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics (CIIP) research group warmly invites you to a talk by two of CIIP’s co-directors Sasha Anikina and Kwame Phillips. They will share thoughts some of CIIP’s recent work on haunted/haunting, and the recently announced Culture Machine open call on the University as Infrastructure.
The talk is hosted by the Infrastructure Humanities Group at the University of Glasgow.
bio
Critical Infrastructure and Image Politics (CIIP) is a research group dedicated to investigating the politics of contemporary digital and visual cultures at the intersection of media art and critical theory. They 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 Infrastructure Humanities Group is a research group dedicated to elaborating the methodologies and theoretical insights of the infrastructural humanities to address the material needs of diverse partners – from community to policy to industry – and make legible otherwise unavailable forms of collective agency and ways of knowing.
Universities have become increasingly dependent on a proliferation of outsourced services, database providers and information management systems. From virtual learning environments, digital attendance systems, human resources software, booking platforms, data repositories, and online teaching platforms to the basic provision of email and server space, much of the infrastructure of the contemporary marketised university is outsourced to big tech. The time of both students and staff is increasingly called upon to input, update, confirm, action, and feedback on information stored in outsourced databases, producing surplus value for external software providers, many of which are ultimately owned by private equity firms. The student and staff experience and ‘well-being’ – both vaunted as key priorities by all universities – have become determined by the functionality of these online systems and their ‘affective’ operations.
Vol 25 of Culture Machine aims to take stock of these infrastructural challenges to the collective creation of critical culture and theory. We argue that an understanding of the University from an infrastructural perspective helps to stress that the technologies it chooses to adopt follow a colonial and extractivist model with damaging effects on the wider environment and the well-being of people. What is required are viable alternatives — consisting of technologies but also knowledge practices and organisational cultures, with a commitment to care and justice in development and maintenance processes.
We are recruiting an Artist in Residence to undertake artistic research with a focus on Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) technology, in the context of the recently awarded UKRI grant ‘SOUNDSCALE: Sensing On Urban Noise: Distributed Sensing for Collaborative and Sustainable Cityscapes and Living Environments’, http://soundscale.ac.uk.
The role
The postholder will be based in the Department of Art & Media Technology in Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton and within the Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics research group, https://criticalinfrastructures.net/.
The postholder is expected to conduct independent artistic research and to collaborate with members of the research team by participating in team meetings and contributing to methodology, research process and outcomes. The SOUNDSCALE project aims to study the emergence of DAS technology from an interdisciplinary perspective, including contributions from the arts, humanities, social and physical sciences.
We invite applications from a wide variety of practices and want particularly to welcome applicants with experience of community work and community engagement, interdisciplinary research and critical approaches to technology and infrastructure. This role is especially relevant to applicants working with technology from a variety of standpoints, including civic and community-oriented technology, feminist and decolonial approaches, sound art, algorithmic governance, media and cultural studies, digital media, environmental approaches, and others. The communities and physical research sites of the project are located in Southampton and London.
You will be an artist with a portfolio of research projects. A PhD is not required for this role. Apply by uploading your portfolio and CV outlining your professional experience.
The postholder will actively participate in the research process according to their expertise and will offer a distinct contribution to the project, with the potential to integrate their existing methodologies into the methodology of the project. The postholder will closely work with Project Co-I Dr Alexandra Anikina, and with other members of the research team, including PI Dr Rafael Mestre, Co-I Prof Matt Ryan, Co-I Prof Dianna Smith, Co-I Prof Mohammad Belal and others, as well as our community partners.
The postholder will contribute to outcomes and impacts, including engagement activities and knowledge exchange resources, potentially including policy guidelines, toolkits, co-authoring papers, etc. The project comes with funding for production of artworks, as well as travel budget for conference attendance and mentoring support.
We encourage interested candidates to contact CIIP co-director and Co-I Dr Alexandra Anikina (a.anikina@soton.ac.uk) and PI Dr Rafael Mestre (r.mestre@soton.ac.uk) with informal enquiries.
*The title of Research Fellow in Artistic Research or Senior Research Assistant in Artistic Research will be applied upon appointment depending on the successful candidate’s qualification level.
The environment
You will join a supportive, highly interdisciplinary environment in a working group of colleagues from different disciplines. You will have research freedom to design your own path to achieve the project’s goals.
The Department of Art & Media Technology works across art, game design, cultural leadership, digital media, creative technologies, and curating. The department supports a politically alert and contextually astute, interdisciplinary research environment, in which practice-based, scholarly, and editorial processes are at play.
Thinking of applying but concerned you might not meet all the requirements? Studies show that certain groups are less likely to apply to a role if they don’t meet 100% of the requirements. If you feel this is the right project for you, we encourage you to apply, and particularly welcome women, Black, Asian and minority ethnic, LGBTQI+ and disabled applicants.
This year marked the Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics research group’s first collaboration with the transmediale festival in Berlin, part of an extended collaboration between transmediale and Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton), which is planned to continue with future iterations of the festival.
transmediale is an annual festival that brings together international artists, researchers, activists, and thinkers with the goal of developing new outlooks on our technological era through the entanglement of different genres and curatorial approaches. In the course of its history, transmediale has grown from its beginnings as VideoFilmFest to one of the most important events for art and digital culture worldwide.
CIIP co-directors Alexandra (Sasha) Anikina, Kwame Phillips, and Megen de Bruin-Molé coordinated a series of three events at the festival, which ran from 29 January through 2 February 2025. These events corresponded to the festival theme of ‘(near) near but – far’, expanding on this theme through the lens of ‘haunting/haunted’. How do we develop a necropolitics of resistance in this political climate, saturated by crisis real and fabricated, persevering in conditions that are unthinkable, being sucked / plunged into something we might conceptualise as ‘cybergothic’ (Van Elferen 2009, Konior 2020, Anikina 2024)? How do we live in proximity to this horror that is both palpable and incorporeal, the toll that it takes, still persisting and working despite the increasing weight?
Haunting, writes Avery F. Gordon, ‘is distinctive for producing a something-to-be-done […] precisely the domain of turmoil and trouble, that moment (of however long duration) when things are not in their assigned places, when the cracks and rigging are exposed, when the people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings cannot be put away, when something else, something different from before, seems like it must be done’ (2008, p. xvi). It also implies the kind of haunted, occult space described by Franz Fanon, Sonjah Stanley Niaah, or Katherine McKittrick; potential places of redemptive, transformative simultaneity, where the haunting presence and the haunted present are both proximate and synergistic.
In the half-day ‘Structures of Haunting’ workshop, a group of 25 participants reflected on ways in which the present is haunted by past(s) and futures. What are the structures and infrastructures that scaffold this haunting, and bring it close both temporally and spatially? To explore this question, a group of seven artists and researchers hosted by Winchester School of Art engaged in a series of divination and séance attempts, seeing these as practices of enactment in the present, rather than of predicting ‘the future’ or uncovering ’the past’. Participants joined the workshop both online, and in the basement of a former crematorium in silent green.
Combining sound (a performative sound piece by Liz Gre), voice (a performative eulogy by Kwame Phillips), movement (a dance performance by Rebecca Pokua Korang), and intervention (a sonic and gestural call and response by SA Smythe), ‘Echoes of Care’ was a collaborative multidisciplinary performance exploring the theme of haunting and Black ways of care, and exploring the body as a vehicle for epiginetic memory of carelessness and carefulness. Playing physically with the concept of closeness (of those performing) and proximity (to the audience who remain peripheral), the performance considered the sound of careFULness and careLESSness and how that sound might echo through our bones, memories, and beyond.
On the last day of the festival the CIIP team gathered for Sasha Anikina’s lecture-performance ‘On the Cybergothic’, a short audiovisual interrogation of the politics of substitution. While substitution of politics is a general condition (“Having looked for politics in order to avoid it, we move next to each other, so we can be beside ourselves”, say Moten and Harney in the Undercommons), the politics of substitution is one of its digital-born symptoms. As we are offered neoliberal “politics” as a substitute, our digital shadows grow into doppelgängers, substitutes of ourselves in the eyes of larger infrastructures. From digital twins and grief bots to smart home as dual-use tech, the worlds of the cybergothic violence are never too far. How far does the substitution stretch? What haunts our online spaces? What ways of being, mourning and existing online can we embody?
This lecture-performance was followed by a discussion and meditation on the theme of haunting/haunted between Sasha, Kwame, and Megen, in which they looked back over the events of the festival. They also acknowledged the present absence of their fellow co-director Stephen Cornford, who was not able to attend the festival, but who will be on a residency at ZK/U | Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik in March/April 2025 to work on a film about carbon accounting and its visualisations in forestry.
Other CIIP members and colleagues from WSA were also featured at the festival, including a screening and conversation with artists Bhenji Ra and Tati au Miel chaired by Liz Gre, and several events and screenings related to Ryan Bishop and Jussi Parikka’s WIND project.
“Ours is a time with a dark heart, ripe for noir, the gothic and the baroque” (Zafón 2020).
Watch out for CIIP’s presence exploring haunting/haunted at the 38th transmediale festival for digital art and culture taking place in Berlin from January 29th to February 2nd, featuring directors Megen de Bruin-Molé, Kwame Phillips and Sasha Anikina and with collaborations with Liz Gre, SA Smythe, Rebecca Pokua Korang, Chera Kee, Francis Gene-Rowe, Yaqian Lai, Yadira Sánchez Benitez, Georgia Perkins and Alejandro Limpo Gonzalez.
WED 29.01 14:00 Silent Green/Betonhalle Workshop: “Structures of Haunting” led by Megen de Bruin-Molé (also live-streamed).
SAT 01.02 11:00 HKW/Angie Stardust Foyer Performance: “Echoes of Care” with Liz Gre, Kwame Phillips, SA Smythe and Rebecca Pokua Korang.
SUN 02.02 11:30 HKW/Angie Stardust Foyer Lecture Performance + Conversation: “On the Cybergothic” + “Haunting/Haunted” with Sasha Anikina + Megen de Bruin-Molé and Kwame Phillips.
Tuesday 18th March | 11:00 GMT | Lecture Theatre B, Winchester School of Art [in-person]
The Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics (CIIP) research group is pleased to invite you to an artist talk by Harun Morrison
Harun Morrison is an artist and writer based in London and an associate artist with Greenpeace UK on the project Bad Taste. His work is currently on show with Devonshire Collective in the solo exhibition Conjunctionin Eastbourne. In 2024, he was in a two person show, DONO, at Somerset House Studios project space G31 alongside Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom. His forthcoming novel, The Escape Artistwill be published by Book Works. Recent group exhibitions include Sonic Acts 2024: The Spell of The Sensuous, Amsterdam, Chronic Hunger / Chronic Desire in Timișoara, Romania and BALATORIUM Disturbed Waters, in Veszprém, Hungary as part of the European Capital of Culture 2023 programme, Bamako Biennial, 2020 in Mali, and Storm Warning: What does climate change mean for coastal communities? at Focal Point / Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange, UK Recent solo exhibitions include, Dolphin Head Mountainat the Horniman Museum, London (2022 -23), Mark The Spark at Nieuwe Vide in Haarlem, Netherlands (2022) and Experiments with Everyday Objects, Eastside Projects, Birmingham, (2021). Harun is currently co-developing community gardens in Merseyside for Bootle Library and Mind Sheffield, a mental health support service, as part of the Arts Catalyst research project, Emergent Ecologies. @harunishere
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.
Tuesday 11th March | 10:00 GMT | Lecture Theatre B, Winchester School of Art and online
The Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics (CIIP) research group is pleased to invite you to an artist talk by Lucy Helton
Visual artist LUCY HELTONborn in London and returning after 18 years in New York, received her master’s degree in fine art photography from HarFord Art School, CT, in 2014. She’s currently a funded PhD practice-led researcher at the Slade School of Fine Art focusing on human environmental impact in outer space. Rising from a necessity to express her personal anxieties and concerns about the environment, her first photo book Actions of Consequencewas nominated for the MACK First Book Award 2014, shortlisted for the Kassel Dummy Award 2015, and The Anamorphosis Prize 2015. Her book Transmission(Silas Finch, 2015) –a message from our future to our recent past – printed on antiquated fax machines, was shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture First Book Award 2015. Seeing visual arts as a means of engagement, Helton uses concept- specific technologies to image the relationship between human beings and the landscapes we inhabit. Gaining a HAM (amateur) radio license, she continues to test the boundaries of art and technology by making both long and short-range image transmissions. Helton’s books are held in the collections of the Cleveland Institute of Art Gund Library, MoMA Archives and Library, MET Watson Library, Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives, Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs of the New York Public Library, Houston Center of Photography, International Center of Photography, NY, Hirsch Library at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, David M. Rubinstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, GRASSI Museum of Applied Arts Leipzig, Germany, Alkek Library at Texas State University, Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol, UK and the Tate Library Special Collection, London.
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.
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.
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.
