Singer. Dancer. Movie star. Activist. Queer icon. Afrofuturist. Working class heroine. Time traveler. Prophet. Feminist. Android. Dirty Computer. Janelle Monáe is all these things and more, making her one of the most fascinating artists to emerge in the twenty-first century. Dan Hassler-Forest’s new book Janelle Monáe’s Queer Afrofuturism explores how her work has connected different…

    ** This event has been swtiched online due to COVID-related issues. Please join us on Microsoft Teams! AI systems are increasingly part of everyday products, and designers take part in shaping how they are being integrated in our daily life. As a technology, AI is facing more unknowns about consequences and ethical use…

    **This session takes place at De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam In the Acting Like a Robot research project we investigate how theatre may contribute to new approaches to the design of robot behavior and the interaction between humans and robots. The big challenge for such design lies in what Lucie Suchman describes as the “deep…

  A medium never simply “is”. It carries with it not only a history but also a future. Its future is imagined as a perfection of its – sometimes imaginary – potentials, just as there are imaginations of future media, which may also be or remain imaginary media. Moreover, there is always an imaginary of…

    My natural response to the challenge set by Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink and Anne Karin ten Bosch in the final session of this year’s TiM seminar series to explore methods of drawing, the ‘soft atlas’ and performative mapping (Utrecht University 2022) was to venture outside with a drawing pad and pencil in my hand….

    I have been enjoying the privilege of writing this blog entry from a place in Utrecht Museum Speelklok after having visited their extensive exhibition of musical automations. I came to the place in search of something being “lost in translation”, to quote the title of Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film, when musical performances were…

  Thank you for your participation in 2021-2022 Transmission in Motion Seminars & Meet the Makers. Details for the sessions in the upcoming season (2022-2023) will be updated in September 2022. In the meanwhile, you can read about TiM Seminar 2021-2022, and past Meet the Makers events. Also, feel free to read student blog posts…

    The framing of music as writing, as fundamentally techical in the broadest sense, and the implicit inflation of technics and culture that seemed to underly the presentation, is perhaps a delayed response in the field of musicology to the questions about Modernism in visual art that arose in the middle of the last…

  Jonathan Jaschinski   Critical Concepts for the Creative Humanities is a dictionary that compiles 70 concepts bearing the potential to unfold critical power and open up new lines of thought in what the authors call the “creative humanities”. They use this phrase to underline that both humanities and the “field of design, art, and…

    The fifth session of the Transmission in Motion 2021-22 seminar series took place in an unusual setting: a Gather virtual town meeting set up to introduce the participants to an alternative “discursive space of connective and integrative dialogue” (Utrecht University 2022). Departing from the premise that “students with solid training in inter- and…