Since 2011, I have (with Geoff Cox) organized a series of workshops with transmediale festival in Berlin, and shifting partners from cultural as well as academic research institutions.
At the workshops, participants interrogate the transmediale festival theme, but also reflect on possible relations to existing research practices, including peer-review, austerity measures, infrastructures of research, the scalability of research, and more. The participants (some inside/some outside academia) are selected on the basis of an open call. Independently, they are asked to write and share a paper as well as respond to each others. At a physical workshop this mode of peer-review is continued. Based on this they are then asked to shorten their research into the length of a newspaper article for presentations and distribution at the transmediale festival. The print newspaper is edited and produced collaboratively, through speedy hands-on making.
Following the event, they are invited to submit a scaled up full version to a special issue of A Peer-reviewed Journal About[the selected research theme] (APRJA).
… all publications/newspapers can be downloaded here.
2022: RENDERING RESEARCH
Digital Aesthetics Research Centre, Aarhus University
Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, London South Bank University
École de recherche graphique, Brussels
A collective exploration of how we make our research public, and the forms it can take through speedy hands-on making. In this sense, the workshop explores ways of collapsing the traditional workflows of academic publishing (typically taking many months to reach its public by which time its currency is questionable), drawing more closely together work in progress and feedback, writing and print production (using e.g., free and open source software and risograph print). It is part of an iterative process that began online late 2021. Early ideas were presented at transmediale festival for art and digital culture in January 2022, and in March 2022 as part of a 3 day workshop at École de recherche graphique in Brussels, where this publication was produced.
2021: RESEARCH REFUSAL
Digital Aesthetics Research Centre, Aarhus University
Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, London South Bank University.
Writing in 1965, Mario Tronti’s claim was that the greatest power of the working class is refusal: the refusal of work, the refusal of capitalist development, and the refusal to bargain within a capitalist framework. One can see how this “strategy of refusal” has been utilised in all sorts of instances by social movements, but how does this play out now in the context of wider struggles over autonomy today – not just in terms of labour power and class struggles; but also intersectional feminism and queer politics; race and decolonialism, geopolitics, populism, environmental concerns; and the current pandemic? In what ways does a refusal of production manifest itself in contemporary artistic, political, social, cultural, or other movements? And, how might a refusal of certain forms of production come together with a politics of care and “social closeness” – also when thinking of how research itself might be refused?
2020: RESEARCH NETWORKS
Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (Aarhus University),
Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (London South Bank University)
Global Emergent Media (GEM)
The workshop was part of the Marshall McLuhan Salon at the Canadian Embassy in Berlin.
Transmediale 2020 (End to End) aimed to deal with the pervasiveness of networks and their limits. By drawing on the legacies of critical and autonomous network cultures, workshop participants discuss whether there is a conceivable counter-power to networks? Which alternative technological models and cultural narratives are needed to construct the principles of end-to-end communication anew? How might the critique of networks extend to non-western contexts and reflect the limits in a global canonical perspective?
2019: MACHINE FEELING
Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (Aarhus University)
Cambridge Digital Humanities Learning Programme (University of Cambridge).
The workshop presents a critical inquiry into new technologies of feeling, recognizing that digital culture has become instrumental for capturing and managing what Raymond Williams’ would once have called “structures of feeling”—referring to lived experiences and cultural expressions, distinct from supposedly fixed social products and institutions. It focuses specifically on the domain of machine learning and on the ability of technologies to capture and structure feelings and experiences that are active, in flux, and in the present.
2018: RESEARCH VALUES
Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (Aarhus University)
The Brandenburg Centre for Media Studies (ZeM).
There is value and there are values. There is the measure of wealth, metrified and calculated in numerous ways, and there are ideas, ethics, preferences of taste, and customs of ideology. But what really happens when the two are conflated? How do we understand how the values associated with something give it value; or, how giving something a value affords certain values? And, in what ways are the conflations of value and values tied to the circulation of value and values in contemporary technical infrastructures? This workshop interrogates value and values in ways that respond to techno-cultural shifts and embrace the range of economies that pervade digital culture.
2017: MACHINE RESEARCH
Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (Aarhus University)
Constant (a non-profit, artist-run association for art and media based in Brussels)
Research on machines, research with machines, and research as a machine. This workshop explores machinic perspectives to suggest a situation where the humanities are put into a critical perspective by machine driven ecologies, ontologies and epistemologies of thinking and acting. It aims to engage research and artistic practice that takes into account the new materialist conditions implied by nonhuman techno-ecologies. These include new ontologies and intelligence such as machine learning, machine reading and listening, systems-oriented perspectives to broadcast communication and conflict, the ethics and aesthetics of autonomous systems, and other post-anthropocentric reconsiderations of materiality and infrastructure.
2016: EXCESSIVE RESEARCH
Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (Aarhus University)
Liverpool John Moores University
The Liverpool Biennial.
What happens when research is less about exchange and more about excess? This workshop relates to the announcement of transmediale 2016, Conversation Piece which highlights the compulsive actions of digital culture, and how we are constantly encouraged to stay active, to make, to share and to secure. Following a research workshop in Liverpool, organised in partnership with Liverpool John Moores University and the Liverpool Biennial, this issue of APRJA delves into the nature of these actions and their limits.
2015: DATAFIED RESEARCH
Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (Aarhus University)
School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong.
We produce, share, collect, archive, use and misuse, knowingly or not, massive amounts of data, but what does its “capture” do to us? What are the inter-subjective relations between data-commodity and human subjects? In asking these questions, the workshop seeks insights into the logics of data flows between materials, things, data, code, software, interfaces and other stuff that permeates the cultures of datafication. Rather than merely mimicking the sciences’ use of (big) data, the arts and humanities must explore what kind of sensorium datafication generates for things and humans. What are the implications of being data? What are the darker forces involved in capturing and using data?
2014: POST DIGITAL RESEARCH
Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (Aarhus University)
The physical workshop took place at Kunsthal Aarhus
Post-digital Research addresses the messy and paradoxical condition of art and media after digital technology revolutions. It critically reflects on the term “post-digital”. The workshop not only presents a uniform interpretation of the notion, but includes a variety of positions related to the use of the term, its application within various fields, and how it is reflected in artistic research.
2013: RESEARCHING BWPWAP
Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (Aarhus University)
Leuphana University of Lüneburg.
Researching BWPWAP asks what kinds of technological and artistic practices might produce radical effects for an institutionalized research culture? How can we save research from itself? In referring to the cancellation of Pluto’s planetary status in 2006, BWPWAP (Back When Pluto Was a Planet), the 2013 edition of the transmediale festival interrogates techno-cultural processes of displacement and invention, and asks for artistic and speculative responses to new cultural imaginaries. This can also be interpreted in the context of a research culture that has been significantly destabilized by network culture and digital media. Certainly, much research culture has shared Pluto’s fate: conferences reduced to networking events to foster cultural capital, and scholarly communications reduced to impact factors measured by grant givers. In other words, research is not just about measuring the performativity of a single researcher (the peer-reviewed journal system), but also the processes of questioning, investigating, speculating, and sharing between peers in a broader sense.
2012: IN/COMPATIBLE RESEARCH
Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (Aarhus University)
The Vilém Flusser Archive (University of the Arts, Berlin)
World of the News – The world’s greatest peer-reviewed newspaper of in/compatible research presents cutting edge in/compatible research in an accessible free tabloid format.
The workshop addresses academia’s increasing demand for publication of academic peer-reviewed journal articles. Perhaps researchers need new visions of how to produce and consume research?
2011: PUBLIC INTERFACES
Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (Aarhus University)
Emerging from ongoing research around interface criticism, the aim of this workshop is to broaden the topic to encompass the changing concept of the ’public’. The workshop brings together researchers within diverse fields – across aesthetics, cultural theory, architecture and urban studies – united by the need to understand public interfaces and the possible paradigmatic changes they pose to these fields.
Christian Ulrik Andersen 