Transverse & Timetravel
Writing Practices in Design and Artistic Research
Our current research attends to infrastructures for digital publishing, energy, AI, XR, NetZero, future work, green transitions, critical computation, biodiversity, video archiving, toxic materials, institutional operations, urban resilience, urban commons, decolonial listening, social transformation, life affirmation and critical access.
Schedule
CRITICAL SOUP:
Shared Lunch
Please join us for lunch at the Critical Media Lab to share soup and exchange with research groups.
Welcome from IXDM Research
TRANSVERSE:
Nishat Awan
Nishat is Professor of Architecture & Visual Culture at UCL Urban Laboratory. Her research focuses on the intersection of geopolitics and space, including questions related to diasporas, migration and border regimes. She is interested in modes of spatial representation, particularly in relation to the digital and the limits of witnessing as a form ethical engagement with distant places. Nishat will discuss the transversal writing practices of the ERC Starting Grant, Topological Atlas. The project combines ethnographic research with digital mapping, working across Pakistan and Turkey in challenging geographies. https://nishatawan.me
Writing workshops focusing on practices and exchanging research experiences:
TRANSPOSE:
FieldNotes
Solveig Qu Suess, Johannes Bruder
The workshop will be organized through a series of writing prompts, where we will explore the vignette as a form. Drawing on feminist ethnography in its affective turn — to show and not tell, a moment in time rather than a full plot — the vignette is a microcosm which lays out stakes for one’s writing or film to come.
TIMETRAVEL:
Writing with and against the archive
Lucie Kolb, Lara Kothe, Stefanie Bräuer
Drawing on critical fabulation methods, this workshop discusses and explores writing strategies for intentionally failing to reconstruct histories of oppression and for narrating them otherwise.
TRANSCODE:
Labelling For the Food Commons
The workshop engages participants in an experimental machine-teaching activity to address food commoning, predictive algorithms and sensing kitchens and bodies.
Artistic Research in Design Networking Event
Chaired by Linda Ludwig.
Three artistic research networks share details of their support and vision for research.
Double Book Launch:
— Plants by Numbers
— Technologies of Care in a More-than-Human World
with Helen V. Pritchard, Jane Prophet, Taey Iohe, Youngsook Choi, Yvonne Volkart and Seasonal Fermentation Group.
We celebrate through conversation, presentations and a closing performance the launch of two open access books. Plants by Numbers: Art, Computation and Queer Feminist Technoscience, edited by Jane Prophet and Helen V. Pritchard (Bloomsbury 2023) and Technologies of Care. From Sensing Technologies to an Aesthetics of Attention in a More-than-Human World by Yvonne Volkart (diaphanes 2023).
Jane Prophet is an interdisciplinary visual artist and critical theorist of art, science and new media. Her practice-based research and writing emerge through collaborations with experts from neuroscience, stem cell research, mathematics and cardiothoracic surgery. She works across media and disciplines to produce objects and installations, frequently combining traditional and computational media. One stream of her work explores the socio-cultural and ecological influences that form landscapes and plant species, resulting in site-specific artworks that examine history, economy, and community. Other works respond to contemporary challenges in health and well-being, made with community partners and experts from public health and pain research. Prophet’s artwork is widely exhibited internationally and held in national, corporate and private collections, including the Arts Council of England’s National Collection. She is the co-editor of Plants By Numbers, an anthology that brings together artists and curators to discuss plant ecologies, art and design practices, and computation (Bloomsbury Academic 2023). Her chapter explores writing, drawing, and making beside trees, “phytographia”, focusing on her artworks made with plants.
Breakwater is a London-based Korean diaspora artists duo of Youngsook Choi and Taey Iohe. With a mutual interest in counter-narratives of ancestral/indigenous knowledge and queer methodologies, Breakwater’s practice centres around the socio-politics of neo/colonialism, climate justice, and migrants’ lived experiences. Breakwater is the recipient of ACE project grant (2020-2022) for the diaspora healing project Becoming Forest which proposes mental health as a collective responsibility and adopts a folk healing approach of engaging seasons and nature as critical healers. Currently, Breakwater is developing a new work around Canvey Island towards the Estuary Festival 2025.
Youngsook Choi is an artist/researcher with a PhD in human geography. Grief has been the focus of Youngsook’s recent practice, posing collective grief as the process of socio-political autopsy upon neo/colonial patterns in loss and environmental destruction. To challenge the extractive process of knowledge production enhanced by colonial operations, Youngsook co-founded the research-practice working group Decolonising Botany as a half of the collective Breakwater. Youngsook is also in the journey of organising the transnational grief council for ecological loss – Foreshadowing.
Taey Iohe is an artist whose work spans across diverse media, including moving images, sound, social practice and assemblage through an Asian crip/queer lens. Their approach fuses research-based work with personal narratives that challenge socio-botanical entanglements within environmental hormones, medical humanities and ultimately advocate for climate justice. Taey holds a PhD in the programme of Gender, Identity and Culture, funded by Writing on Borders, at University College Dublin. A member of the Decolonising Botany Working Group, Feminist Duration Reading Group and a Somerset House resident, they teach Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art.
This Botanical Kombucha Vinegar (2023) was co-produced by Gabriela Aquije Zegarra, Nora Hass, Jana Hoffmann, Maya Ober, Laura Pregger, Nour Perel Zea Ober, and Sibylle Stoecki, as part of the summer explorations of the Seasonal Fermentation Group, guided by the share wisdoms of the aromatic and medicinal plants kin of the Landhof Gemeinschaftsgarten.
Apéro at the Research Library
(rosa book shop, CIVIC)
Open Call: Bring your zines, poetry, papers, books, materials, ephemera, publishing infrastructure, impromptu readings to share in the rosa book shop during the Apéro.
Isadora Neves Marques
Isadora Neves Marques is an award winning film director, visual artist, and writer working across poetry and theory. Her essays and critical writings focus primarily on the intersections of art and cinema with ecology, gender, technology, and science fiction. She is a regular contributor to e-flux journal and Art Criticism, and has published in books by MIT Press, Verso, Sternberg Press, Archive Books, and museums such as Haus der Kulturen der Welt, among others. She is a co-founder of the film production company Foi Bonita a Festa, her films and artworks have been show in major art institutions globally. She is also co-founder of the poetry press Pântano Books, through which she published her poetry collection Sex as Care and Other Viral Poems (2020) and poetry collections by CAConrad, Serubiri Moses, and Odete.