Seminar Blogs

Can Hacker Culture Be Separated from the Necropolitical Digital Culture? – Jingzhe Zhang
In her performance lecture, Evelyn Wan foregrounded three aspects of AI: 1) it is a medium with an imaginative nature because humans constitute in their imagination an intelligent presence based on informational patterns; 2) AI is part of digital culture that has always been necropolitical since the time of the telegraph as it has…
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Recover, Reinvigorate, and Re-Occupy the Political Imaginary of the University in the Netherlands – Jingzhe Zhang
In his lecture Ohad emphasized the dual nature of the political imaginary – It is both an analytical tool and a proposition. If we turn our attention from international politics to where we are – the campus, we will see that in the Netherlands, exactly by losing the political imaginary of the university, we…
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A Networked Truth: Re-imagining technology through human values – Pauline Munnich
During the last seminar of TiM “Imagining Feminist Cryptoeconomics” Inte Gloerich and Ania Molenda gave a workshop on blockchains and how we could potentially reimagine them as something beyond capitalism. Currently, block-chaining affordances are used to create economic systems. The workshop session asked us to rethink what would happen if we changed the…
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My Brother’s Mobile Phone Keeper: The Mysterious Relations of Unmysterious Things – Olga Efremov
In spring 2019 my brother lost his cancer battle. Without going deep into the emotions and consequences of the event that had become a life-altering landmark for me, I can certainly say that it put in a very skeptical light the speculations of even a remote possibility for the technology, present, past or…
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In Defence of Ephemerality – Chris van der Vegt
Laura Karreman concluded her lecture in the Transmission in Motion series with a couple of elements of the imaginary surrounding motion capture in performance that she had identified. One of these items was that motion capture can enable a kind of “saviour’s complex” toward dance and performance, trying to protect the art from…
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I Don’t Want to Know: On Hauntologial Resistance and Black Posthumanist Utopias – Olga Efremov
My writing of this blog post is overshadowed by a tragic anniversary: one year from the start of Russian invasion in Ukraine. The past twelve months have been a trying emotional journey through the mediated theatre of the largest European military conflict of the 21st century that had inadvertently became a prism for…
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Life, Universe, and Karen Barad: The Stage of Death by A Thousand Agential Cuts – Olga Efremov
When it comes to thinking about the future, I am a self-confessed techno-optimist, or to be more academically precise, a strong believer in what Jennifer Gildley (2017) called “integral futures” the incorporate “mixed methods, transcisciplinarity, complex bricolage” (95). As the seminar presenters Sonja Rebecca Rattay and Irina Shklovski noted when speaking about the…
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Afrofuturism and Imaginative Technological Design – Pauline Munnich
As Dan Hassler-Forest exposed in the seminar “Janelle Monáe’s Black Utopias and the Afrofuturist Imagination”, science fiction and thinking about the human future has predominantly been a Eurocentric practice. In the seminar, through specifically focusing on Jane Monáe, Hassler-Forest illustrates how Afrofuturism focusses not just on the future but also the past and…
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Afrofuturism, Racial Capitalism and Asian Americans – Jingzhe Zhang
The most interesting part for me in Dr. Dan Hassler-Forest’s lecture is the concept of Afrofuturism and racial capitalism. The term Afrofuturism is often used to talk about speculative fictions that express the experience and concern of African diaspora. But Afrofuturism, according to Dan, also exists as an important conceptual framework that challenges…
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Ethics of AI-art: A Case Study of Lensa – Rupsa Nag
The seminar on ‘Social Imaginaries of Ethics and AI’ made us think through how Artificial Intelligence is imagined by its makers, its social implications and ethics. Through discussions on various aspects of AI, one that came up was the use of AI in art. This was a very interesting discussion considering the recent…
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