Category: Researchers

Dr Alexandra (Sasha) Anikina is a researcher and media artist. She is a Senior Lecturer in Media Practices at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton), Programme Co-Lead for MA Global Media Management and Co-Director of Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics research group. Her work focuses on digital and algorithmic visual culture, imaginaries of technology and AI, feminist studies of science and technology, affective infrastructures and technological conditions of knowledge production, governance, labour and affect. She writes on a variety of audiovisual media and digital artefacts, including experimental film, algorithmic recommendation systems, games, screensavers and contemporary art. She is part of the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image.

As an artist, she works with experimental film, game engines and lecture-performances. Her work has been shown internationally, including VI Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Gaîté Lyrique, Paris; Anthology Film Archives, New York; NCCA Moscow; Korean Film Archive and Art Sonje Museum, Seoul; Sanatorium gallery, Istanbul; Krasnoyarsk Museum Biennale; Schusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow; ar/ge kunst, Bolzano, Eye FilmMuseum, and others. Her artist portfolio can be found here.

Before joining Winchester School of Art, she taught at Goldsmiths, London South Bank University and King’s College London, and was Balzan Post-Doctoral Fellow at New Sorbonne University Paris 3 in 2021-2022. She was co-editor of Cosmic Shift: Russian Contemporary Art Writing (London: ZED Books, 2017, TLS Book of the Year 2017). She co-curated media art festival IMPAKT 2018 ‘Algorithmic Superstructures’ and was a Digital Earth Fellow in 2020-2021. Currently she is working on a monograph on procedural images, as well as on the themes of techno-animism and post-socialist necropolitics.

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).

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

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 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 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 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

Louise Siddons (PhD Stanford University, 2005) is Professor of Visual Politics, Head of the Department of Art & Media Technology, and Director of The Winchester Gallery at the University of Southampton. Her research focuses on intersectional visual resistance to structures of marginalisation in modernity and covers topics from the eighteenth century to the present. Immediately prior to joining the University of Southampton in 2022 she was a Visiting Researcher at the University of Sussex Humanities Lab (UK) and Professor of Art History at Oklahoma State University (USA), as well as founding co-director and curator of the Oklahoma State University Museum of Art, for which she wrote the first collection catalogue, Sharing a Journey (Oklahoma State University, 2014). Her first monograph, Centering Modernism (2018, University of Oklahoma Press), addressed the coastalisation of the postwar American art world. Her forthcoming monograph, Good Pictures Are a Strong Weapon (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) examines the intersection of lesbian and Navajo sovereignty politics at mid-century in the photographs of Laura Gilpin. Her research has been supported by grants from the British Library, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, the US-UK Fulbright Commission, and others.

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9720-8112