The annual Research Workshop was initiated in 2012 as a collaboration of Aarhus University , London South Bank University , and transmediale festival. It provides a forum for emerging researchers to enter into speculation, critique, exchange, and dialogue about their research topic. The primary focus is on the participants’ research projects, as well as fostering networks, knowledge exchange and widening dissemination.
Writing in 1965, Mario Tronti’s claim was that the greatest power of the working class is refusal: the refusal of work, the refusal of capitalist development, and the refusal to bargain within a capitalist framework. One can see how this "strategy of refusal" has been utilised in all sorts of instances by social movements, but how does this play out now in the context of wider struggles over autonomy - not just in terms of labour power and class struggles - but also within intersectional feminism and queer politics, race and decolonialism, geopolitics, populism, environmental concerns, and the current pandemic? In what ways does a refusal of production manifest itself in contemporary artistic, political, social, cultural, or other movements? And, how might a refusal of certain forms of production come together with a politics of care and "social closeness"? The transmediale festival announcement puts it this way: “From the small acts of refusal that reside in the mundane and everyday, to tender forms of resistance that allow us to repair collective infrastructure, transmediale 2021–22 will map out the political agency of refusal, examining its potential to form new socio-political realities grounded in care, hope, and desire.”
This publication presents the outcome of an online workshop (organized by Digital Aesthetics Research Centre, Aarhus University; Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, London South Bank University; and transmediale festival, Berlin) with the participation of nine different groups located at different geographical locations, some inside and some outside the academy. Each group was selected on the basis of an open call and has taken part in a shared mailing list, creating a common list of references, and discussing strategies of refusal, and how these might relate to practices of research and its infrastructures: what might be refused, and in what ways; how might academic autonomy be preserved in the context of capitalist tech development, especially perhaps in the present context of online delivery and the need for alternatives to corporate platforms (e.g. Zoom, Teams, Skype, and the like); and how to refuse research itself, in its instrumental form?
Following the workshop, each group has been asked to produce a section of this newspaper that in different ways represents the group’s abstractions on the subject. The design has been developed by Open Source Publishing, a collective renowned for a practice that questions the influence and affordance of digital tools in graphic design, and who works exclusively with free and open source software. The intention behind this publication has, in this way, been to explore the expanded possibilities of acting, sharing, and making, differently - beyond the normative production of research and its dissemination. Importantly, it has also been a means to allow emerging researchers to present their ideas to the wider community of the transmediale festival in an accessible form.
The newspaper will be distributed at the festival’s various physical events in Berlin in the coming weeks, and is available for download here and over on the Digital Aesthetics Research Center website .
You can also find extended versions of the participants research in APRJA , an open-access research journal that addresses digital culture.
Christian Ulrik Andersen & Geoff Cox
Logistical (B)orders is a multidisciplinary research network invested in examining the differential impacts and contested sites of contemporary extractive capitalism. Working from disparate sites across Asia and the Middle East, they draw upon critical logistics studies, media theory, artistic and activist tactics, Marxism, and decolonial thought to analyze the faultlines in the supply chains of logistical capital where counterpower might arise.
Özgün Eylül İşcen, ICI, Berlin Geoffrey Aung, Columbia University, New York Sudipto Basu, JNU, New Delhi
not working group aims to cultivate hanging out as a mode of research. It adapts to the needs of its members following a simple principle it learned from the gambling industry: When the fun stops, stop. Not working is always open for collaborations and was joined by @afffirmations for this year's transmediale newspaper. New members are always welcome: isolationplayground[@]gmail.com. @afffirmations is your Daily Refill of Positive Affirmations on Instagram. With Quotes for the Heart, @afffirmations inspires a growing number of followers around the globe everyday. Don't forget to check out @afffirmations Instagram for Official Merch.
Alan Diaz is an architect and theorist based in Mexico City with a research focus on critical philosophy, philosophy of technology and media theory. Lara Scherrieble, Goldsmiths College, is a researcher in the field of pop-culture and resistance and co-founder of the queerfeminist collective and dj-label FAM_. Lukas Stolz is a PhD candidate at the Sociology department of Goldsmiths College interested in post-progressive radical imaginaries in the Anthropocene.
GOVERNANCE is at once an collaborative audio-visual noise performance project, and an experimental tactical media collective. Through performative interventions, lectures, and multimedia publications, we view the works of Governance as an exaggeration of the performativity of knowledge production; an investigation of the gestures, affects and embodied dispositions that are culturally legible as ‘knowledge work’ and imbued with a veneer of ‘objectivity."
Rebecca Uliasz is a media artist and PhD Candidate in the department of Computational Media, Arts and Cultures at Duke University and holds an MFA from SUNY Stony Brook. Quran Karriem is an experimental musician, media artist and PhD Candidate in the Computational Media, Arts and Cultures program at Duke University. Brett Zehner is a Ph.D. candidate at Brown University in Performance Studies and Computational Media and he holds an MFA from UC San Diego.
MELT (Loren Britton & Isabel Paehr) are arts-design researchers who engage games, technology and critical pedagogy. Tuning to material-discursive conditions of tech infrastructures, they trouble patterns of agency in socio-technical systems through queer play, unlearning and leaking. Their work crumbles structures, unbounds materials, dissolves technology and makes collectivities. Turning up the heat they read Denise Ferreira da Silva to understand how heat links climate change to colonialism, from there they un-discipline knowledge from transfeminism, computation and chemistry. MELT is shaped by ice, freezing, software, disability justice, moving at trans- crip- kinship- time, Black feminisms, materialisms, de-colonisation, gifs, climate protests, anti-racism and dancing.
Nothing Happening Here is an art-research collective formed from the Speculative Sensation Lab (S-1) at Duke University in 2020. Currently, we are based in Berlin, Athens and Durham, NC. Our work involves nothing, bad debt, refuse, stitching, credit, experiments, machine performance, and instituting otherwise.
Kelsey Brod is a PhD student in the Computational Media, Arts and Cultures program at Duke University. Alexander Strecker is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke. Jordan Sjol is a PhD candidate in the Program in Literature at Duke. Kristen Tapson (PhD) is a Scholar in Residence in the Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. Katia Schwerzmann (PhD) is a research and teaching fellow at the Bauhaus Universität Weimar.
Bad Bitch Link Up : Our research group consists of four anti-disciplinary artists and scholars navigating refusal across mediums and fields of study both within and without the academy. Together, we aim to highlight enduring lineages of refusal while attending to contemporary moves towards redress and reparative justice. We’re inspired by the sustenance of the quotidian, the exponential facts of Blackness, and the ancient futures of non-colonialism, which all undergird our refusals and calls for UBI & reparations. All members are graduates from UCLA:
alea adigweme is a multidisciplinary Igbo-Vincentian cultural worker based in Tovaangar, the unceded Tongva land commonly called Los Angeles. Catherine Feliz is an interdisciplinary artist born & raised in Lenape territory (NYC) to parents from Kiskeya Ayiti (Dominican Republic). Kearra Amaya Gopee is a multidisciplinary visual artist from Carapichaima, Trinidad & Tobago, based in Los Angeles, CA. A.E. Stevenson is a Ph.D. candidate in Cinema & Media Studies.
Bucles is an in-process, independent and transdisciplinary research group working in the intersection of media studies, media theories, and critical theory, with an open and ongoing interest in philosophy of technology, media aesthetics, and the history of science and cybernetics. While originally formed in 2017 as an informal unit of inquiry, dialogue, and thought in Santiago, Chile, our current geographical separation has pushed our actions to resort to telematic conversations, literature discussions, and paper assessments – all of which in turn informs our own individual processes.
Diego Gómez-Venegas, PhD researcher at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Media Sciences) Joaquín Zerené, PhD researcher Universidad Austral de Chile (Human Sciences) Dusan Cotoras, Research Assistant at "Ciencia Chile Contemporaneo" group (STS)
DARC (Digital Aesthetics Research Center) is located at Aarhus University and functions as a shared intellectual resource that identifies, analyses, and mediates current topics in digital art and culture. Our aim is to provide new knowledge about the relationship between art, culture and technology. We focus on forming research projects, collaborations and international networks. We publish newspapers and a journal, arrange PhD seminars, internal research seminars, research conferences, and organize public exhibitions and events with digital media artists and researchers from around the world. Besides contributing analytically and theoretically to the field, DARC also engages in practical experiments, and often in collaboration with artists and practitioners.
Malthe Stavning Erslev, PhD Researcher, Aarhus University Gabriel Pereira, PhD Researcher, Aarhus University Emanuele Andreoli, PhD Researcher, Aarhus University Søren Pold, Associate Professor, Aarhus University Winnie Soon, Associate Professor, Aarhus University Magda Tyżlik-Carver, Associate Professor, Aarhus University Christian Ulrik Andersen, Associate Professor, Aarhus University
CSNI (Centre for the Study of the Networked Image) is a research centre based at London South Bank University. It brings together researchers from cultural studies, contemporary art and media practice, and software studies, who seek knowledge and understanding of how network culture transforms the production and circulation of images. Our aim is to broaden the discussion of the networked image to address planetary scale computation and wider ecologies including the non-human.
Marloes De Valk, PhD Researcher
Rosie Hermon, PhD Researcher