In response to transmediale's 2025 theme, this year’s research workshop, organised by the Digital Aesthetics Research Center (Aarhus University) in collaboration with transmediale, reflects on how current networked, technological environments are designing, capturing, and capitalising on ways of being social. The workshop’s title references a quote from Uruguayan poet Cristina Peri Rossi stating painfully that, “in love as in boxing, everything is a matter of distance”. Throughout two days, the workshop led by part of the DARC team Pablo Velasco, Magdalena Tyzlik-Carver, Søren Pold, Christian Ulrik Andersen, Nicolas Maleve, and Jussi Parikka – will relate 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. Participants will share their work in progress during the festival weekend in a collective presentation at HKW . Participants were selected via an open call leading up to the festival.
Workshop participants 2025 are Minke Nouwens, Ruben van de Ven, Megan Phipps Christoffer, Koch Andersen, Tommy Shaffer Shane, Sami Itavuori, Matīss Groskaufmanis, Maja Funke, Katya Sivers, Daria Iuriichuk, Kola Heyward-Rotimi, Nico Daleman, Paul V. Schmidt, and Maya Erin Masuda.
Proximity is managed through techniques of approximation, of statistical modes of patterning identities, collectivities, and affective modes of attachment to corporate infrastructure. Distance is the usual preferred term for critical vocabularies, but we are always already immersed in such approximations as we are involved, addressed, captured in platforms and other interfaces of affective persuasion. What then are the best ways critical digital culture research can do in manoeuvring this situation from platforms to infrastructures, from interface to aesthetics, from love to boxing?
The workshop will engage with historical and contemporary tropes of distance as they pertain to digital culture, while collectively developing a sense of what methods, which critical tools, and what kind of conceptual traditions help to reframe the nuances in proximity and distance. It will turn to writers such as Johanna Drucker (2018), who argues for a designed dynamics of cognitive resonance that produces a feeling of "within-ness and "among-ness" and Olga Goriunova (2019) to help in this task while aiming to discover our own route through data and software culture. Like Goriunova, the workshop will explore the interest in how distance can be mobilised as a resource as well, including how “digital subjects also offer sites of reinvention, liberation, and play.”
The workshop is organised by the Digital Aesthetics Research Center (Aarhus University) in collaboration with transmediale. The workshop is also supported by SHAPE Digital Citizenship project at Aarhus University and the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (London South Bank University).