Critical Infrastructures

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

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.

Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics – Seminar

April 16, 2024 | 14:15 CET

Aarhus University

Welcome to this seminar with four guest talks on critical infrastructures and image politics by scholars and artists from the UK: Alexandra Anikina, Kwame Phillips, Stephen Cornford, and Geoff Cox. The Digital Aesthetics Research Centre and the Centre for Aesthetics of AI Images are the local hosts of this seminar and the visit.�

The seminar will explore Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics from multiple perspectives derived from a newly established research group at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton). Along with the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at LSBU and the Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (DARC) at Aarhus University, we are exploring collective and decentred forms of research.

This seminar will address the politics of images and sound as objects of research captured by various digital and scientific apparatuses and infrastructures. The presentations feature approaches grounded in artistic research, activist-focused sensory media and practices of ‘networking’ and ‘infrastructuring’ the university. The approaches are underpinned by an interest in collaborative modes of work that provide provocative approaches to audiovisual culture, as well as interrogating the very context of production of such knowledge in and beyond universities.

https://cc.au.dk/aktuelt/arrangementer/vis-arrangement/artikel/critical-infrastructures-and-image-politics-seminar-1

University as Infrastructure: diagramming the systems reliance of higher education

April 16, 2024 | 09:30 CET

Aarhus University

In this workshop we will collaboratively diagram the data and software systems on which all Universities have become dependent. The time of both students and staff are increasingly called upon to input, update, check, and action information stored in outsourced databases, producing value for external software providers, many of which are ultimately owned by private equity firms. Taking our lead from the practices of Mark Lombardi and Vladan Joler (among others), we see this diagramming exercise as a means to visualise the University’s integration into platform logistics and economies of data profiteering.

The workshop is co-organised by the Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics research group (CIIP, Winchester School of Art), together with the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI, London South Bank University), Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (DARC) and SHAPE (Aarhus University).

https://aias.au.dk/events/show/artikel/workshop-university-as-infrastructure

Federating Research: CIIP x CSNI x DARC

December 01, 2023 | 10:00 GMT

Winchester School of Art

A panel discussion between Dr Alexandra Anikina, Dr Stephen Cornford, Professor Geoff Cox (London South Bank), and Professor Jussi Parikka (Aarhus) on the relationships between image and infrastructure.