Tag: artistic research

FRAUD – Euro-Vision Book Launch

Register and get the meeting link: https://events.humanitix.com/fraud-euro-vision

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.

We are hiring: Artist in Residence; deadline 6 June

See the full ad on jobs.soton.ac.uk.

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.

CIIP is open to collaborative work, suggestions, partners and new members. If you would like to be involved, please contact us here.