WSA PhD researchers Yaqian Lai, Alejandro Limpio Gonzalez, and Katya Sivers presented their research and practice as part of this year’s transmediale festival.
transmediale is an annual festival that brings together international artists, researchers, activists, and thinkers with the goal of developing new outlooks on our technological era through the entanglement of different genres and curatorial approaches. In the course of its history, transmediale has grown from its beginnings as VideoFilmFest to one of the most important events for art and digital culture worldwide.
At the festival Yaqian Lai and Alejandro Limpio Gonzalez contributed to the ‘Structures of Haunting’ workshop, alongside colleagues from WSA’s department of Art and Media Technology and elsewhere. Yaqian’s project explores the formation of spatial knowledge on digital maps through the lens of experimental cartographic practices in contemporary visual media, and in her presentation she played with the idea of an atlas as a visual method of divination. Alejandro approaches ocean observation from an anthropological perspective, looking at networked images, online platforms, machine vision and artificial intelligence as key elements through which the ocean becomes a visual space in contemporary science and environmental governance. Presenting as part of Ocean Matter Studio, his contribution included a video art piece called ‘Haunted Wire’, exploring the cultural imagination sustaining the deep sea as space.
Katya Sivers, whose research and practice explores the critical potential of technology and visual art, also produced and presented work at PhD workshops hosted by the Digital Aesthetics Research Center (Aarhus University). Under the title everything is a matter of distance, the DARC workshops ‘related to the temporalities of always-on and FOMO, to the aesthetics as ways of sensing distance and proximity, and to the possibilities for resistance and critique’. The participants produced a peer-reviewed newspaper of their work, as well as a series of presentations and readings at the festival.
This series of events formed part of an extended collaboration between transmediale and the Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics research group at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton), which is planned to continue with future iterations of the festival.