Thursday, 10th March 2022 4pm 
Computation Otherwise: Carbon Endings and Regenerative Practice
Dr. Helen V. Pritchard i-DAT, University of Plymouth/The Institute of Technology in the Public Interest

Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh.

As a response to the endings of carbon-based energy there have been many techno-utopian solutions for communities––grounded within imaginaries of survival, repair and resilience. Such emerging imaginations and politics remain powerfully attached to the image of the individual and their “smooth life” maintained by computational infrastructure and continuous energy. Instead, in this talk we will discuss working towards modes of regenerative practice, informatics for carbon endings, indeterminacy and the de-presencing of technosolutionism. In particular engaging with collaborative projects that attempt to practice a “computation otherwise” through sensing, hotspotting, and queering damage. I will discuss our work on pollution sensing with Citizen Sense; the Underground Division a collective research project on techniques, technologies and infrastructures of subsurface rendering and their promises; the project “Regenerative Energy Communties” in which artists, designers and farmers work together on regenerative imaginaries for energy; and the work of “The Institute of Technology in the Public Interest”.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/design-informatics-webinar-helen-pritchard-plymouth-tickets-293045425757

Toby Chanter’s Installation Practice Research

Encounters through the physics of blood, water, and light.

M a r c h  10^th   1100 – 2000     /     M a r c h  11^th   1000 – 1400

KARST  /  22 George Place  /  Plymouth  /  PL1 3NY

Blood is a vital organic material that has drawn both scientific interest and symbolic meaning for millennia.

Used in the classification, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, understanding blood and the pulse has been fundamental to the development of medical systems across the globe. From bloodletting to pulse diagnosis, from humorism to haematology, blood remains central to contemporary clinical practice. Expressive of both life and death and a point of physical touch in medical encounters, the blood and pulse share a complex social history.

Symbolising both honour and shame, blood is ritualised in rites of passage and marks the crossing of thresholds. Blood summons fear of infection and is used to articulate diverse cultural ideas of contamination and taboo. Blood points to contested discourses of power and resistance. Ideas of nationalism and boarder, kinship, gender, and race are bound up in cultural understandings of blood and the manifold cultivations of otherness.

This immersive and interactive installation mobilises blood and the pulse to explore the relational politics of encounter. Using wireless and wearable technology, participants real-time heart rate data excites the physics of light across a large body water. The visual effects of reflection and diffraction create a dynamic canvas while pointing to the wider philosophical influence of lens and light metaphors on knowledge and meaning.

www.sharethefall.com/info

Hedy Hurban has received a project grant for $60,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts in their Explore and Create: Concept to Realization program.

The award is for a project that explores augmenting the traditional practice of the Whirling Dervishes of Turkey with a bespoke wearable device that emits sounds, vibrations and digital images.

This project will be presented in Canada in the fall of 2022 as an installation and live performance.

Helen Pritchard & Femke Snelting November 2021, with the publication of audit late 2021.

Helen Pritchard and Femke Snelting from The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI), will help NEoN to 'audit' its digital practices. Through queer and feminist practices, Helen and Femke will interrogate NEoNs digital operations with a view to enabling the organisation to imagine other environmental and “just” practices.

(TITiPI) is a trans-practice gathering of activists, artists, engineers and theorists initiated by Miriyam Aouragh, Seda Gürses, Helen Pritchard and Femke Snelting. Together they convene communities to hold computational infrastructures to account and to create spaces for articulating what technologies in the “public interest” might be when “public interest” is always in the making. They develop tools from feminisms, queer theory, computation, intersectionality, anti-coloniality, disability studies, historical materialism and artistic practice to generate currently inexistent vocabularies, imaginaries and methodologies.


About the Artists

Helen Pritchard & Femke Snelting from The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest. (TITiPI) is a trans-practice gathering of activists, artists, engineers and theorists initiated by Miriyam Aouragh, Seda Gürses, Helen Pritchard and Femke Snelting. 

Dr Helen V. Pritchard’s research work “Queering Damage” by The Underground Division will feature as a large scale installation for the transmediale exhibition 2022 “abandon all hope ye who enter here”.

Conjuring artifice and dark humor in the face of extraction, financial fantasies, and the illusions of techno-solutionism, the works of nine artists and collectives explores the limits of refusal in a computationally ordered and altered world. Featuring Alaa Mansour, Annex, Cihad Caner, Constant Dullaart, Ibiye Camp, Lo-Def Film Factory, Stine Deja, The Underground Division and Tianzhuo Chen.

“Queering Damage” was originally commissioned by the Biennale of Thought for the Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona (MACBA) and the most recent iteration is funded by the Horizon2020 as part of the Artsformation Project  a research project exploring the intersection between arts, society and technology, and aims to explore how the arts can help lead society towards more sustainable digital futures in Europe.

The exhibition opens on 26^th January 2022 and it is also possible to visit online (also with a student group) via a proxy visit.  

Read more information about the exhibition | Book a Proxy Visit |

Edited By Craig Vear

“The Routledge International Handbook of Practice-Based Research presents a cohesive framework with which to conduct practice-based research or to support, manage and supervise practice-based researchers. It has been written with an inclusive approach, with the intention of presenting deep and meaningful knowledge for the benefit of all readers.

This handbook has been designed to present specific detail of practice-based research by outlining its shared traits with all forms of research and to highlight its core distinguishing features into a cohesive, principled and methodical approach. To this end, the handbook is presented in five sections: 1. Practice-Based Research, 2. Knowledge, 3. Method, 4. The Practice-Based PhD and 5. Practitioner Voices. Each section begins with a leading chapter that outlines each of the distinct areas as they relate to practice-based research. This is followed by a series of contributing chapters that discuss pertinent themes in more detail.“

(Routledge website)

Phillips, M. 2022. The Academisation of Creativity and the Morphogenesis of the Practice-Based Researcher. In: Vear, C. ed. The Routledge International Handbook of Practice-Based Research. London: Routledge, pp. 60-74. ISBN 9780367341435.
https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-International-Handbook-of-Practice-Based-Research/Vear/p/book/9780367341435#

Section 1 – Practice-based Research

1.3: The Academisation of Creativity and the Morphogenesis of the Practice-Based Researcher. Mike Phillips.

Summary:

This chapter explores the origins of creative practice-based research, its roots in the Art College system and its struggle to emerge imago like in the University system. It reflects on the academicisation of art and design and the slow and relentless metricization of culture and creativity, both within the context of research and the broader cultural landscape. As such, some of these characteristics have a strong UK focus, but the reader may recognise similar tropes in their recent cultural history. There is hope in the emergence of a new creature born in vitro to embrace the challenges of this new context, as an interdisciplinary practitioner with a transdisciplinary agenda. Much of this refers to the kinds of interdisciplinary work that emerged through a history of C20th artists engaging with digital technologies and subsequent entanglement with the broader science communities. As such, there is a focus on examples drawn from the work of Roy Ascott and the Planetary Collegium, a nomadic practice-based PhD programme with its origins in the 1960’s networked enlightenment. There is consideration of the ingredients necessary to support interdisciplinary practice-based research for the creative practitioner, in terms of the necessary international networks, the kinds of event/space that provides a provocative environment to nurture such work and a couple of examples of the instruments and artefacts that open up new creative relationships.

Dr Helen Pritchard is a speaker at the Digital Materialities / Digital Imaginaries symposium – 3 Nov 2021, 16:00 – 17:30.

From high-profile controversies, such as the creation of e-wastes or the carbon footprint of Bitcoin, to subtler and even invisible influences, digital technologies can have profound ecological impacts. In this roundtable discussion our four speakers will explore the materiality of the digital, and ask what can be done at all levels to make our digital world more sustainable. What emerging digital technologies may also play a role in mitigating and adapting to climate change, and where do the perils and pitfalls lie? How might digital technologies even change the way we think about ‘the human’ and our place within the planetary ecology? And what are the biggest questions we should be asking ourselves about digital technologies today? This is the first of two events on Climate Crisis and the Digital Humanities, jointly hosted by CDCS, the Turing Humanities and Data Science Interest Group, the Sussex Humanities Lab and University of Southampton DH.

Speakers

Artist Heba Y. Amin engages with political themes and archival history, using mediums including film, photography, archival material, lecture performance and installation. Her artistic research takes a speculative, often satirical, approach to challenging narratives of conquest and control. Amin is a Professor of Digital and Time-Based art at ABK-Stuttgart, the co-founder of the Black Athena Collective, curator of visual art for the MIZNA journal, and currently sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Digital War. She was awarded the 2020 Sussmann Artist Award for artists committed to the ideals of democracy and antifascism, and was selected as a Field of Vision Fellow, NYC (2019). Amin’s work has been shown in numerous exhibitions including The Mosaic Rooms, London (2021), the Böttcherstrasse Prize Exhibition, Bremen (2018), Eye Film Museum, Amsterdam (2020), Quai Branly Museum, Paris (2020), MAXXI Museum, Rome (2018), Liverpool Biennial (2021), 10th Berlin Biennale (2018), 15th Istanbul Biennale (2017), and 12th Dak’Art Biennale (2016), to name a few. Her latest publication, Heba Y. Amin: The General’s Stork (ed. Anthony Downey) was recently published by Sternberg Press (2020) and her works and interventions have been covered by The New York Times, The Guardian, the Intercept, and BBC among others. Furthermore, Amin is also one of the artists behind the subversive graffiti action on the set of the television series “Homeland” which received worldwide media attention.

Dr. Helen V. Pritchard is an artist-designer and geographer whose work considers the impacts of computation and digital media on social and environmental justice. Their research addresses how practices configure the possibilities for life—or who gets to have a life—in intimate and significant ways. As a practitioner they work together with companions to make propositions and designs for environmental media and computing otherwise, developing methods to uphold a politics of queer survival and practice. They are currently working on the book project “Animal Hackers and Critter Compilers”; together with Eric Snodgrass researching “Regenerative Energy Communities” and working with “The Institute of Technology in the Public Interest”. Helen is an Associate Professor of Queer Feminist Technoscience & Digital Design at i-DAT, University of Plymouth, a visiting research with Citizen Sense and a research fellow at Goldsmiths University of London. They are the co-editor of “Data Browser 06: Executing Practices”, published by Open Humanities Press (2018) and Science, Technology and Human Values: Sensors and Sensing Practices (2019). www.helenpritchard.info/  http://titipi.org/

Nathan Ensmenger is an associate professor of Informatics in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. His research focuses on social and organizational issues related to software work and workers.  His 2010 book, The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise, traced the emergence of the “computer expert” as a major force in American corporate and government organizations.  His research on the gendered nature of computer labor has helped frame contemporary discussions about women and work in Silicon Valley.  He is one of the co-authors of the most recent edition of the popular Computer: A History of the Information Machine.  He is currently working on a book exploring the global environmental history of the electronic digital computer.  His work on AI ethics focuses on algorithmic bias, risk, and the future of work.

Wilko Graf von Hardenberg is a Senior Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. His research focuses on how nature has been historically perceived, appraised, and managed and how each of these aspects has affected the other two. Consequently he has worked on different facets of modern European environmental history, including the politics of fascist regimes, the history of access rights, and the preservation of iconic animal species in the Alps. Moreover, he has a thriving interest in the use of digital tools and methods in historical research. His current research focuses on the intellectual history of the Anthropocene and, in general, of theories of anthropogenic environmental change. In the specific the research project looks at the development of the concept of mean sea-level and at the history of the different ways in which the level of the sea has been understood and interpreted in the modern age. Wilko holds an Italian Laurea in history (Università di Torino) and a PhD in geography (University of Cambridge). He has previously been DAAD Visiting Professor of Environmental History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a  Carson Fellow and then the Digital Humanities Research Specialist at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich.

This panel will be chaired by Dr James Baker, Director of University of Southampton DH.