Research Team
Research Team

Prof. Dr. Helen V. Pritchard

Professor / Head of Research IXDM

Professor Helen V. Pritchard is an artist-designer, geographer, activist and queer love theorist. Their work considers how computational infrastructures and digital media impact social and environmental practice. Helen works with participatory and creative practice methods for co-research, drawing on trans*feminist and queer approaches. 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, regenerative energy and computing otherwise, developing methods to uphold a politics of queer survival and practice.

Since 2013, Helen has been a member of Citizen Sense, an award winning group investigating the relationship between technologies and practices of environmental sensing and citizen engagement: And, since 2020 a co-organiser of The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI), together they convene communities to hold computational infrastructures to account and to create spaces for articulating what technologies in the “public interest” might be. With TITiPI they are the principal investigator on the CHANSE funded project ‘SOLiXG’. They are also co-investigator on the Swedish Energy Agency funded project ‘Regenerative Energy Communities’, working at the intersections of energy design and agro-ecology.

They are the co-editor of ‘Data Browser 06: Executing Practices’ (2018) and ‘Sensors and Sensing Practices’ (2019), the manual Infrastructural Interactions: Survival, Resistance and Radical Care (2022) the forthcoming (2023) anthology ‘Plants By Numbers: Art, Computation and Queer Feminist Technoscience’ and the Future Media Series for Goldsmiths Press.

Helen is Professor and Head of Research IXDM, HGK Basel, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland FHNW. They also hold an associate professorship in Queer Feminist Technoscience at University of Plymouth.

Helen also teaches on the MA Experimental Design at IXDM.

Related
A short text paragraph printed on a coloured paper slip on a table that had been distributed alongside many other cases for a research presentation
Data Management Planning

4th & 5th March 2024

A two-day workshop exploring a particular document in research processes, the data management plan and discussing its implications and how it could be re-imagined.

Transverse & Timetravel

Monday, December 11th 2023

Annual Research Day, Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW

A day of provocative joyful workshops, talks, performances, book launches, tender reading and exchange. Open to all.

Plants by Numbers

Art, Computation, and Queer Feminist Technoscience

Energy Crafting: Grow you own solar cell

23 & 24 September 2023 at We Are AIA Zurich

With 施 惟 捷 Shih Wei Chieh, Maya Minder, Wiriya Rattanasuwan, TITiPI (Femke Snelting, Martino Morandi) and Regenerative Energy Communities.

Edith Clarke, 1921, patent for accounting for electrical quantities in transmission lines
Operations Room in Hangar

In July, Hangar Barcelona welcomes an Operations Room, a method for investigating how computational infrastructures affect institutional operations, proposed by The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI).

Read more at hangar.org

Uses and perceptions of spaces on Campus (2015–2020)

Monday, 12 June 2023.

Case study of the University of Buenos Aires from a gender and affective perspective.

Public talk by Griselda Flesler.

Energy Giveaway at the Humuspunk Library

Exhibition at Awareness in Art (AIA) gallery Zurich, curated by Regenerative Energy Communities.

Researching in Two Acts

Wednesday, 8 March 2023

With artist researchers Elly Clarke and Clareese Hill, hosted by Helen V. Pritchard. As part of the Trans★Feminist Digital Depletion Strike!

IXDM and transmediale partnership launch

Our institute and transmediale are launching a new partnership for the 2023 festival edition a model, a map, a fiction.

CML at transmediale festival Berlin

1–5 February 2023

Dividing

Saturday, 14 January 2023 @ CML

Collective work meeting of the Dividing project contributors. Open to interested students and researchers.

IXDM Inaugural Lectures

Wednesday, 14 December 2022

IXDM invites everyone to join us for the inaugural lectures by our new Head of Research Helen V. Pritchard, and Visting Professors Viktor Bedö and Budhaditya Chattopadhyay.

Dr. Helen V. Pritchard is the new Head of Research at IXDM