Category: Projects

Universities have become increasingly dependent on a proliferation of outsourced services, database providers and information management systems, with spiraling costs across the sector as a whole. 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.

This project aims to take stock of 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 need to look outside the formal educational setting for examples of practices that are more open and collective, adaptive to conditions and allow for the development of infrastructures based on principles of commoning and care. What forms of infrastructure can be imagined in keeping with the free/open exchange of knowledge, sensitive to difference and the operations of power, infrastructures that support collective practices, social, environmental and epistemic justice?

The project has evolved through collaborations with the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (London South Bank University) and the Critical Media Lab (Basel Academy of Art and Design). A special issue of the journal Culture Machine is currently in preparation, which aims to take stock of the challenges and possibilities for University as Infrastructure. It draws from the conversations we had in two workshops, in the Critical Media Lab and online, including a flurry of participants.

Culture Machine 25 Open Call [now closed]

Co-Investigator: Alexandra Anikina
Artist-in-Residence: Angela YT Chan

SOUNDSCALE is a UKRI-funded project investigating the intersection of emerging technology of DAS, dark fibre networks and urban environment. It involves a collaboration between multiple schools at the University of Southampton. Dr Alexandra Anikina and Angela YT Chan are leading the artistic research strand of the project which is hosted by CIIP and the Departrment of Art & Media Technology, Winchester School of Art.

“SOUNDSCALE aims to approach the responsible research and development of the emerging technology of Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) in smart cities through an interdisciplinary, citizen-centric, and bottom-up approach. We integrate a spectrum of research methodologies, ensuring each discipline informs the others at every stage. This includes unlocking the physical sensing capabilities of legacy optical fibre cables in a UKRI facility; measuring social, spatial, and health inequalities in cities through extensive data linkage; conducting arts-based research to explore citizen’s lived experiences; and studying AI ethics, policy, and environmental implications.

Simultaneously, we will incorporate citizen participation, deliberation, and narratives throughout, fostering a co-creation process, underpinned by a humanistic perspective on the complex intersection of culture, media, society, technology, and critical infrastructures. Our project not only offers a new paradigm for regulating emergent technologies with citizens at the forefront but also commits to mitigating risks, addressing ethical concerns, and ensuring ground-breaking technologies are sustainable, privacy-compliant, and inclusive. In our project, multiple disciplines, from physical, social and environmental sciences to humanities, interlace in a cohesive project, informing each other at every stage and providing reciprocal benefits.”

SOUNDSCALE project website