Participants

Mari Bastashevski is an artist, writer, and a lecturer at Kunstakademie in Trondheim Norway. Occasionally she collaborates across disciplines and performs random acts of journalism. Twice she circumnavigated the world by sea. Her current research explores how emerging visual technologies like VR could become field sites for researching speculative near futures of human-animal-technology relations. Mari’s work, Pending Xenophora, is the result of this research.

Pending Xenophora is a multiverse designed with a rout of garden snails. The term comes from a category used to label unorderable and unclassifiable organisms at the Natural History Museum in London and a genus of medium-sized to large sea snails. Xenophora are quintessentially unclassifiable; the ideal speculative being to engage in this work. They are collectors that sort through and then cement other shells onto their bodies. Since no two Xenophora are the same, the Xenophora is always pending, always in the process of knowing, unknowing, learning, unlearning, collecting, and computing. They point towards parallel futures, abandoned exactly at the fork between curiosity and subjugation.

Mari will showcase her collaborative world-building methodology with snails through her exhibit and keynote. Participants will listen to a snail performance and explore their world in VR. They will then be invited to join Mari in generating speculative methodologies that allow other-than-human subjectivities to be included into the speculative practice of world-building. In thinking with snails, we will try to establish what constitutes an interesting question and a satisfying answer, what is and isn’t meaningful research, and how common household technologies can be reconfigured to this task. 

Konstantin Aal conducts research into fall prevention among seniors (iStoppFalls) and the use of social media during the Arab Spring. Go to session.

Tanja Aal’s research interests include HCI4Margins, community based research in sensitive settings, digital participation and inclusion, e(mental) health, and methodological innovation. Go to session.

Santiago Renteria is a transdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, music and biology. Go to session. 

Alizée Armet works on the visual repercussions of intelligent machines in artistic practice using a combination of technological art, computational art, and hacking art. Go to session. 

Camille Bellet studies digital sensing and cow care in farming in France and the United Kingdom, looking at how different sensing devices emerge, are shaped, and impact the way humans understand and care for cows, human-cow relations, and the ethics of cow care. Go to session. 

Liliana Bounegru’s work covers new media, digital culture, digital journalism, data journalism and digital methods, and develops digital methods to trace the circulation of political misinformation, junk news, memes and trolling practices online. Go to session. 

Through his work, John Carrillo seeks to obscure, or illuminate planes of existence. Through which, our awareness of space, and human-object relations are challenged and questioned. How our imaginations may be enhanced by adjusting our human perceptions of reality is a constant thread that runs through his projects. Go to session.

Richard A Carter is an academic and digital artist who is interested in examining the more-than-human within digital activities, objects, and environments. Go to session. 

Gabriele Colombo’s research and teaching activities focus on the design of visual tools in support of digital social research, and on the design of novel strategies for the communication, exploration, analysis and valorisation of collections of images and videos. Go to session. 

Jenny Dodsworth’s research interests are focused around digital media, political ecology, and perceptions of more-than-human rural landscapes. Her thesis focuses on digital identities in, and imaginations of, the Lake District National Park within the social media platform Instagram. She also works as an RA for the European research project contracts2.0, which aims to develop novel contract-based approaches to incentivise farmers for the increased provision of environmental public goods. Jenny is also a member of the Digital Ecologies research group. Go to session. 

Kristine Ericson researches the history of design and technology, with an interest in designed simulations of the natural world. Go to session. 

Thomas Fry conducts interdisciplinary work on novel ecological change and its social and political character, including rewilding, species introductions, and resurgent wildlife populations, in both rural and urban areas in the global North and South. Go to session. 

Maike Gebker is a design researcher who focuses on designing temporal ecologies, the materiality of the internet, and artificial nature. Go to session. 

Jonathan Gray’s current research focuses on the politics and social life of public data. Go to session. 

Margarita Grinko’s interests are in the area of ​​ICT for Development, Animal-Computer Interaction, Design Case Studies, and Grounded Design. Go to session. 

Matthew Halpenny is an interdisciplinary media artist from Montréal who works between the milieus of biology and technology. They examine the embodied material processes that form the technology we use daily while offering speculative open-source design solutions. Go to session.

Helmut Hauptmeieer is deputy Director at the Institute for Media Research at the University of Siegen. Go to session. 

Michelle Lai Jingmin is an Eindhoven-based ecological designer and artist. Since 2016, she has been working as a creative freelancer, researcher and ecological practitioner with a strong interest in the natural world and their interconnections. Go to session.

Diana Leca specialises in twentieth-century poetry and poetics, with a focus on short forms. Her broader research interests include American lyric poetry, critical theory, aesthetics, natural history, and the environmental humanities. Go to session. 

Rob Mackay is an award-winning composer, sound artist and performer. His recent projects have moved towards a cross-disciplinary approach, including geology, soundscape ecology, theatre, audiovisual installation work, and human-computer interaction. He has been working along the migration routes of monarch butterflies, collaborating with partners in Mexico, the USA and Canada. Go to session.

Adrian Mackenzie researches how contemporary cultures affect and are affected by technologies in a broad sense. His current research projects focus on platforms and platform sociology in the context of science and media, on biosensors and biosensing practices in the context of health and illness, and on data science-related transformations in knowledge in the sciences, education and government. Go to session. 

Guillaume Malaret is a French sound artist, field recordist, composer and sound designer. Grounded in recording and electroacoustic composition, his field interpretations are intimately linked to his environment. Go to session.

Felipe Mammoli is currently working on an ethnography of environmental modelling practices in Brazil, especially regarding the Amazon Forest. His interests revolve around how digital data practices intersect with environmental issues in climate change research and what kind of politics emerges from these encounters. Go to session. 

Emily Morgan is a contemporary art historian with research interests in the history of photography, the photography of industry, the distribution and circulation of photographic imagery, as well as animal studies. Go to session. 

Larissa Pschetz’s research focuses on Interaction Design and related areas of Human-Computer Interaction, Social Sciences and Humanities. She is interested in “Temporal Design”, a design approach that looks at time as emerging out of relations between cultural, social, economic and political forces. Her research is currently also focused on Inclusive IoT, and Biodesign. Go to session.

Joe Revans is a London-based designer and futures researcher recently graduated from the MA Material Futures programme at Central Saint Martins. His work explores environmental futures, socio-ecological design and the integration of more-than-human perspectives into design practices. Go to session.

Lisa Schonberg is a composer, percussionist, and environmental sound artist with a background in entomology and ecology. She documents soundscapes, insects, and habitat through music composition, spatialized sound work, and multimedia collaboration. Since 2017 Lisa has worked with ATTA (Amplifying the Tropical Ants), a project in collaboration with Brazilian entomologists investigating ant bioacoustics in the Amazon. Go to session.

Jan Christian Schulz is a social designer and researcher based in Germany and the Netherlands. He investigates environmental hyperprocesses and the constitution of ecosystemic relationships through technological media through an approach at the intersection of design and science. Go to session. 

Mayline Strouk’s PhD research investigates what leads the researchers in seabird ornithology to the field and to a specific field site in particular. She explores seabird researchers’ networks and mobilities to study and follow seabirds along their migratory journeys in the North Atlantic and Arctic region, and thus also investigates the specificities of polar environments for fieldwork. Go to session. 

Hannah Tollefson researches the mutual implications of environment and infrastructure, with a focus on how extraction, energy, and logistics shape settler colonial resource economies and ecologies, drawing on perspectives from the environmental humanities and media and technology studies. Go to session. 

Alice Vadrot researches the role of knowledge and science in international environmental politics and policies, particularly biodiversity and ocean governance. Her current project MARIPOLDATA aims to understand how we will govern oceans in the future and how inequalities related to science and data infrastructures can be addressed, studied, and reduced. Go to session. 

Krystel Wanneau’s research lies at the intersection of environmental politics, expertise and international organizations. She has conducted extensive research on the United Nations environmental programme to understand its authority from the perspective of its experts’ networks and careers. Her involvement in the MARIPOLDATA project specifically addresses the conduct of ocean science laboratory ethnography and the study of science-policy interrelations stemming from the BBNJ Treaty’s controversies. Go to session. 

Skye Wassens researches the ecology and conservation of wetland dependant amphibians. She has lead a number of research projects on the relationship between flooding and amphibian dispersal, tadpole ecology, the relationship between native and introduced freshwater fish and amphibian recruitment during wetland flooding, temporal activity patterns of wetland dependant frogs and large scale drivers of amphibian habitat occupancy in regulated rivers and floodplain wetlands. Go to session. 

Mitchell Whitelaw’s research takes up data and code to seek out moments of insight and delight that intensify our engagement with a complex world. ​​His current research investigates environmental and biodiversity visualisation, and digital design for a more-than-human world. Go to session. 

Susanne Wieland is an artist, designer, and researcher interested in ecological temporalities and innovative design recently graduated from the MA Material Futures programme at Central Saint Martins. Go to session.

Volker Wulf is a researcher in the field of Socio-informatics, taking a practice-based approach to the design of IT systems in real-world settings, including cooperation systems, knowledge management and community support. Go to session.