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Webinar: “dialogues – probing the future of creative technology,” March 28

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On March 22, 2023

In Webinars

The Creative-Ai (AI and the Artistic Imaginary – WASP-HS, https://www.kth.se/hct/mid/research/cmt/projects/ai-and-the-artistic-imaginary-1.1100143) and MUSAiC (https://musaiclab.wordpress.com) project teams at KTH kindly welcome you to the next seminar in our series “dialogues: probing the future of creative technology” on Friday 28 March, 17-18h (CEST).

This seminar (held on zoom, https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/63477441422) features two artists exploring technology in the context of their work. We start with presentations by both guests followed by a discussion between each other and then the audience.

IMPORTANT: If you wish to join, please send your name (zoom handle) to associate professor Bobby Lee Townsend Sturm JR (KTH) so that you will be admitted.

Guests: Paola Torres Núñez del Prado (PE/SE) and Laura Devendorf (USA)

Paola will talk us through some of her works and performances, focusing on the presence of code, textile, multisensorial experiences, and how her interest in patterns led her to experiment with Artificial Intelligence, all framed within a critical approach to these same technologies and their social impact. She will go through some of the ideas proposed in the Neokhipukamayoq Manifesto regarding the possible development of technologies that are not created in opposition to nature: how would these be if parting from Andean/Indigenous philosophies, and placed within a syncretic, hybrid framework?

Paola Torres Núñez del Prado (PE/SE) is an artist and researcher of transdisciplinarity, working with textile assemblages and embroideries, painting, sound, text, digital media, interactive art, A.I. and video.
She explores the boundaries and connections in between tactility, the visual and audio, related to the human voice, to nature, and to synthetic ones whose listening is often considered less harmonious, such as machine or digital noises. Her work is complex: she explores the limits of the senses, examining the concepts of interpretation, translation, and misrepresentation, to reflect on mediated sensorial experiences while questioning the cultural hegemony within the history of Technology and the Arts.

She is the recipient of the Stockholms stads kulturstipendium 2022 and of the Honorary Mention in the Prix Ars Electronica 2021. She has also has been awarded the Artists + Machine Intelligence Grant from Google Arts and Culture and Google AI in 2020 and was the winner of the “Local Media: Amazon Ecoregion: contest of Vivo Arte.mov in Brazil, 2013. Her works are in collections of the Swedish Public Art Agency and Malmo City Museum.

Laura Devendorf will present a speculation rooted in her experience weaving electronics and developing software for weaving electronics. Laura will introduce the basics of woven structure in terms of its mechanical properties as well as methods by which it is designed and manipulated. Laura will also present some of the exciting opportunities for design and interaction when we consider weaving as a method of electronics production: such as the ability for textile structures to unravel, mended, and to be continually modified. Each of these underlying discussions will frame a provocation about alternative ways we might build, use, and unbuild our electronic products.

Laura Devendorf, assistant professor of information science with the ATLAS Institute, is an artist and technologist working predominantly in human-computer interaction and design research. She designs and develops systems that embody alternative visions for human-machine relations within creative practice. Her recent work focuses on smart textiles—a project that interweaves the production of computational design tools with cultural reflections on gendered forms of labor and visions for how wearable technology could shape how we perceive lived environments. Laura directs the Unstable Design Lab. She earned bachelors’ degrees in studio art and computer science from the University of California Santa Barbara before earning her PhD at UC Berkeley School of Information. She has worked in the fields of sustainable fashion, design and engineering. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, has been featured on National Public Radio, and has received multiple best paper awards at top conferences in the field of human-computer interaction.

Apply NOW for the PhD course Gender and Sustainability: Introducing Feminist Environmental Humanities, deadline 2nd November 2020.

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On October 20, 2020

In Call for applications, News

Please circulate in your networks!
How to apply? Please scroll down.

About the course Gender and Sustainability: Introducing Feminist Environmental Humanities

This online PhD course combines critical and creative perspectives on gender and sustainability from the emerging field of environmental humanities as it overlaps with science, technology, humanities, art and feminist theory-practices. It explores postdisciplinary directions in sustainability from a set of positions in environmental humanities and feminist posthumanities.

The course provides an introduction into the conceptual landscape of feminist environmental humanities, and an orientation into its methodological trajectories across the fields of science, technology, art and design. Notions of different scientific traditions in the past and present, and of inter- and transdisciplinary research are presented and framed in ways that are particularly useful for PhD researchers pursuing environmental humanities/postdisciplinary studies and practice-oriented research in art, technology and design. PhD researchers are provided with an understanding of key concepts – and the relationship between research questions, methods, objectives and outcomes – through lectures, literature seminars, workshops and collaborative project work. The course introduces participants to thinking on situated knowledge practices and ethics amidst a plethora of critical methodologies, qualitative and innovative methods, and performative research practices. On completion of the course, PhD researchers will be provided with tools to critically reflect over the epistemological and ethical challenges inherent to their own research practices and doctoral work, but also in relationship to other actors involved in the very social business of scholarship.

This new electable course (FAD3115) at KTH Royal Institute of Tecnology, in the doctoral program, Art, Technology and Design (7,5 credits), is an educational effort, supported by the KTH Equality Office for the integration of knowledge on gender equity in sustainable development research, provided by the KTH School of Architecture and the Built Environment.

Participants

To be eligible for the course, PhD researchers must have completed a masters’ degree or have an equivalent level of education in STS, history of science, technology and environment studies, gender studies, technology, art or design (such as architecture, planning, civil engineering, arts, crafts, and design) or affiliated subjects within the humanities and social sciences.

Preliminary dates (online)

Module 1 – Re-inventing nature, re-inventing methodology, November 30 + December 1
Module 2 – Doing gender and sustainability: Practice-oriented research, December 14-15
Module 3 – Speculative ethics, 4-5 February
Module 4 – Gender and sustainability in new registers: Knowledge communication, Suggested for March 2021

Coordinators

The course will be coordinated and taught by prof. Cecilia Åsberg, dr Janna Holmstedt, Dept. of History of Science, Technology and Environment, associate prof. Meike Schalk, School of Architecture, at KTH, and dr Marietta Radomska, Gender Studies, Linköping University.

Guest teachers are associate prof. Charlotte Holgersson, Organisation and Management at the Department of Industrial Economics and Management, associate prof. Jennifer Mack and dr Tijana Stevanovic, School of Architecture, at KTH, associate prof. Christina Fredengren, Stockholm University, prof. Isabelle Doucet, Chalmers Technical University, Dr Heidi Kajita Svenningsen, Copenhagen University and prof. Elke Krasny, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

The course is an open collaboration with the InterGender University Consortium and Research School in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies www.intergender.net and The Posthumanities Hub, a nonconventional research group and platform for feminist posthumanities www.posthumanities.net

Application for this Doctoral Course

Deadline for application is 2nd November 2020.

We are grateful to have received a lot of interest for this course, so we ask PhD students to formally register for this course to be accepted in the following manner:

Please apply FORMALLY to the PhD course Gender & Sustainability by submitting an APPLICATION to dr Janna Holmstedt, jannaho[at]kth.se.

Include this application in your email:

  • CV (short bio), one page
  • Letter of motivation, half a page (why you would benefit from this course in your PhD-work)
  • Description of PhD project, one page, with aim and research question, material and practice-oriented/methodological approaches and challenges


We look forward to your application!

Course info as PDFDownload

The 2020 Archipelago Lecture: Reflections on Planetary Habitability with Prof. Achille Mbembe

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On October 15, 2020

In Events

Welcome to The 2020 Archipelago Lecture: Reflections on Planetary Habitability with Prof. Achille Mbembe, hosted by KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory.

The event takes place on 25th November 2020 at 15:00 – 17:00 online.

You can join the event on Facebook: here.

via KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory:

“We are so proud to present Prof. Achille Mbembe for this years Archipelago Lecture. He is one of the most influential African philosophers, a political scientist, and a global public intellectual. His books have been translated into 13 languages.

This year the Archipelago Lecture will happen on ZOOM. More information will come, but until then: please mark your calendars and help us to spread the word.

November 25th, at 15:00 CET
Reflections on Planetary Habitability
Achille Mbembe
Research Professor of History and Politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg, South Africa
Visiting Professor at Duke University”

“A Sea Change in the Humanities”: joint KTH and The Posthumanities Hub Seminar with Prof. Cecilia Åsberg

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On September 24, 2020

In Events, KTH, News, Webinars

Welcome to the joint event hosted by KTH Higher Seminars and The Posthumanities Hub Seminar series:

the seminar with Prof. Cecilia Åsberg (KTH/Linköping University) on:

A Sea Change in the Humanities

The seminar takes place on 28th September 2020 at 13:15 – 15:00.

For more how to access the online event, see: https://www.kth.se/en/abe/inst/philhist/historia/2.78498/hogreseminarium

Photo: Marietta Radomska

Abstract:

All through the extended history of Earth, the coast line has been a zone of unrest where waves and tides have forged life and land on this planet. Despite sudden changes to our oceanic environments, the wrack zone by the edge of the sea with its kelp forests, mussel beds, flotsam and jetsam, remains a strange and beautiful place (as noted by Rachel Carson). This is one of the starting points for the research in the oceanic (environmental) humanities project, Sea Change. Another starting point is the possibilities for cooking, curing and curating with kelp explored at Lofoten International Arts Festival in 2019, the artistic duo Cooking Sections (and their exhibition 2021 at Bonniers Kunsthall), and that we are now entering the declared UN Decade of the Oceans (2021-2030). Sea Change  is a knowledge- and capacity-building project for feminist posthumanities, aiming to connect science with art, humanities and local people so to catalyze societal transformation on low trophic ways of eating, socializing and thinking, together. 

Bio:

Cecilia Åsberg, PhD, Guest Professor of STS, Gender and Environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm; Professor of Gender, Nature, Culture at Linköping University, and since 2008 founding director of the Posthumanities Hub. In 2005 she was the first to defend a PhD in Gender Studies in Sweden (a feminist science study on the popular imaginary of the new genetics), and in 2013 she inaugurated environmental humanities in The Seed Box (Mistra-Formas) research programme as Founding Director. Åsberg has attracted over €6 million in grants for her team; supervised 14 PhD students; published extensively (in Swedish, Dutch, English); given talks and taught gender studies, EH, STS, and posthumanities to BA-MA and PhD students in various positions at a range of international universities, incl Lancaster U, Utrecht Utrecht, NL, and as Fellow of Rachel Carson Centre, LMU, Germany. 

Recent publications (in 2020) include: 

The Posthumanities Hub Seminar “Toxic/Trans/Bodies” – new date TBA (Feb 2021)

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On February 27, 2020

In News

Welcome to The Posthumanities Hub Seminar “Toxic/Trans/Bodies” with speakers Andria Nyberg Forshage (writer, poet and theorist based in Stockholm, SE) and dr Wibke Straube (Karlstad University, SE)!

When: Feb 2021

Where: online

 

More info:

t4t4t4t4t: Fourfold Sex and Trans-Individuation at the End of the World

by Andria Nyberg Forshage

Abstract

At present, 20th-century notions of bodily immune systems modelled as repressive-productive sovereign border controls — and vice versa — are at once being superseded, obsolesced, reinforced and reinvigorated as perhaps never before. At the same time, 21st-century notions of desiring-productive, flexible, molecular immuno-security, already dated as hyper-modern, are being folded into and onto any imaginable kind of body, society, or network. In terms of data, flesh, sex, nation, sense-making, resource extraction, ecological disaster, and ongoing resistance, it is at once a situation of planetary global or civil war, armed peace, state of emergency, and stasis.  

Departing from a scenario of societal collapse following transgender bioterrorism on a hormonal and molecular scale as imagined in Torrey Peters’ sci-fi novella Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones (2016), this talk explores the drift of t4t desiring-machines in and through the bodies, farms, fields and factories of contemporary and imagined pharmacopornographic capitalism. Where t4t designates trans for trans desire, in the trans woman commune the logograph becomes self-replicating as desire and senseless noise, burnt and embedded through fleshy, tranimal metabolism. 

Connecting the fourfold of subjectivation as theorised by Gilles Deleuze in Foucault (1988) with the t4t fourfold complexes of infectious human-animal-societal undoings, as developed through a reading of Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, how might t4t4t4t4t be understood as an operation-operator of what Gilbert Simondon has termed the transindividual?

Bio

Andria Nyberg Forshage is a writer, theorist and poet, part of the editorial team for the Paletten Art Journal and currently working with the Knowledge Hub at Public Art Agency Sweden. She has previously presented research at conferences including the First International Trans*Studies Conference at the University of Arizona and The First International Queer Death Studies Conference at Karlstad University. They have a room of their own in Stockholm and a Scorpio rising.

 

Chemicals, endocrine disruptors and unruly bodies in trans and queer art

by Wibke Straube

Abstract:

In 2018, the post of a vegan group on facebook went viral which argued, that trans and queer bodies are the “damaged” outcome of environmental pollution and endocrine disruption by POP. The post argued further that to lobby for trans and gay rights would mean to support a capitalist, exploitative system of ecological destruction. In response other vegans and this group in particular, dismissed this (cishetero)econormative position and argued this is merely one individual’s opinion. In my talk, I would like to firstly address this “singular” opinion and unpack the idea of the trans and intersex bodies as a result of endocrine disrupting chemical. I will to do this by considering the trans and intersex body as bodily entangled with environmental pollution and toxic contamination (Ah-King/Hayward 2014; DiChiro 2010; Pollock 2016). Secondly, and most centrally, I explore how endocrine disrupting toxins emerge in trans and queer art, intoxicate art practices and artistic bodies, and foster creative pollution that subverts the gender binary norms of EDC discourses and reclaims the toxic body as a monstrous, alien becoming through and within Otherness.

Bio:

Wibke Straube, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Gender Studies, Karlstad University, SE. Their work focuses on intersectional analysis of trans, non-binary and queer embodiment, affective methodologies and the affinities of different socially marginalised bodies, their forms of survival and possibilities to create zones of liveability. They have published in Environmental Humanities and NORMA International Journal for Masculinity Studies, among others. E-mail: wibke.straube[at]kau.se

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