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The piece is a video performance, a kind of dance video

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Microbimpro is a speculative dance video with microbes. The video performance considers the body’s microbial, not-so-human agency as the basis of improvisation. It speculates with the question “What happens when we improvise” and plays with the idea that improvising is listening to one’s gut feelings. Therefore improvising would mean knowing with microbes, giving space to the microbial agency in the body.The piece outlines obscurity, uncertainty, and yet action: what kind of knowledge can we produce by improvisation? It ties into ongoing discussions about ways of knowing, microbial turn, multispecies knowledge, and the holobiontic body. It asks how could gut feelings and improvisation be more notable as producing knowledge and what the role of corporeal knowledge in society could be.Artistic methods allow not only asking questions without answering but also imagination. In the project, I used a scientific tool, a microscope, the “wrong” way. I wasn’t trying to identify the microbes but to get inspired by them choreographically. Being scientifically amateur means not knowing what you see and opens the possibility of knowing in some other manner.

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Sound installation

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In-visible Moth Spells is an installation which explores the mutual interests, shared concerns and interconnectedness of moths, humans and other species. The installation examines how light pollution, the changing urban space and dwindling natural resources affect a range species including our own. Invisible Moth Spells creates a space for moths and people to meet through spoken enchanting moth spells.This project has been developed as a response to the alarming declining numbers of ecosystems and insect populations as a result of urbanization, habitat loss, pesticide use, light pollution and climate crisis. This project aims to bring attention to and question existing social stigmas while encouraging care and sharing information about moths. The project's main objective is to make the invisible visible.

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Workshop, maximum number of participants is 8-10 at a time.

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The Garden of Senses workshop explores the mutual experiences, shared concerns and interconnectedness of moths, humans and other species. The workshop offers participants a fresh perspective on the world we inhabit and encourages us to embrace new ways of understanding, to challenge our preconceived notions, and to celebrate the incredible diversity and complexity of our natural environment. It does this through collective storytelling and guided experiential exercises such as guessing a wildflower or telling a story of a shared experience with a more-than-human being. As a result of the workshop, the participants have been part of a new experience and carry with them the sense of care for more-than-human beings.

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Workshop / Installation

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Food is material, yet it has the power to invoke feelings of both desire and disgust. In this workshop I invite participants to write a memory of: a fond memory of consuming food, a memory of disgust and repugnance in relation to food, and a formative sensory memory of preparing food. I provide craft materials to write and display participant's memories alongside my own curation of poems, photographs, objects, and technologies of food. Throughout the workshop I use highlighters to collate commonalities between participant's written excerpts and invite everyone to reflect on our ways of knowing food, its sensory material aspects and how we consume it. Certain types of food are endangered already with a movement to protect heirloom and indigenous varieties from being bred-out by industrial agriculture. In the anthropocene not only animals but specific foods that rely on industrial food production will also not be available for consumption for example bananas, coffee, avocado and chocolate. Activism and art based practice oriented to food may enact both awareness and open up a space for dialog about the kind of food futures we all want to create by reflecting on our own memories.

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Participatory art installation

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The Frictions of Futurity and Cure in Transplant Medicine project is a sensory ethnography and multimodal research creation study that follows the affective, temporal, and psychosocial challenges of solid organ transplantation in Canada. Experimenting with different methods that destabilize assumptions about il/legitimate forms of knowing, we invited people interacting across our field sites (clinicians, allied health workers, families, patients, visitors) to contribute their own doodles, sketches, and annotations to our project’s more traditional ethnographic field notes. Questions of how to understand and make meaning of these collective notes remain active for our project team. In this exhibition, we will stage an installation of collective field notes gifted to our project by individuals taking part in our sites of ethnographic research and public arts engagement including at art exhibitions, multidisciplinary salons, film screenings, and conference discussion lounges hosted by our team. A series of the collective notes will be threaded and hung in the form of a stabile—a stationary abstract mobile that plays with motion and stasis. We will engage 4S participants to take part in an emergent making practice, inviting viewers to use visual and haptic means of re-ordering and rearranging the notes (making iterations of the stabiles), inviting them to think aloud with us as we consider and reconsider together the meaning and role collective drawings and notations can play in ethnographic and arts-based research. In this way, viewers of the booth will contribute to our own attempts to play with collective practices for knowledge-making.

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Workshop with video and participants' interaction

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The Castelo Branco´s Living Lab cultivates a culture of food innovation and strengthens the city's connection with its food ecosystem.Here, we showcase how food innovation can serve to promote local and seasonal products. The local agrofood technology center (CATAA), one of the local partners of FUSILLI, leverages its food technology units to create and characterize new food products and innovative recipes. These products are then introduced to the citizens through monthly exhibitions at the municipal market and participation in food sector fairs and other events. Such initiatives not only highlight the potential of local and seasonal ingredients but also foster connections between producers and consumers. This approach was made to empower the consumers with knowledge to make informed choices for their health. Other initiatives of the Living Lab also highlighted the implementation of new school gardens and the improvement of already existing ones. Through educational activities and hands-on activities evidenced by the duplication of the number of school gardens and high adhesion on food producing workshops.Involving younger generations not only to influence the behaviour of these future consumers but also to act as a catalyst for shaping the attitudes of their families. Children can serve as effective messengers of new learnings, spreading awareness about sustainable practices and healthy eating habits. Overall, Castelo Branco stands as a pilot city, showcasing the importance of leveraging innovation in food and food production practices to tackle challenges and drive the change for a better and more resilient city´s food system.

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Interactive social game and discussion.

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In the era of surveillance capitalism, few locations are as thoroughly surveilled as the university campus. While they explore their personal, political, and intellectual identities, undergraduate students’ behaviors are documented and monitored at an increasingly intensive scale. What is the effect of surveillance systems on the American undergraduate student? Informed by an ongoing qualitative study researching the manifold effects of data surveillance on college campuses, this workshop aims to replicate hierarchies of need and visibility through an interactive game. Players designated “students” will move between stations to collect tokens representing the daily requirements of student life, while other players regulate how many tokens are distributed, or confiscate them if students are caught breaking the rules. Players will find that students’ needs are not uniform, and students will need to collaborate in order to achieve a collective win. Trading tokens and convincing station managers to dispense limited extra resources are the only ways to ensure each student receives all the tokens they need to win the game, but the agents of the university will be watching to prevent those very things… This workshop will include games that last for about thirty minutes, with a fifteen minute discussion afterward based on the observations of the players. Curious and creative minds wishing to learn through experience are welcome, and dropping in/out will be facilitated by the organizers. “Discipline makes individuals,” wrote Foucault (1979: 185). What individual does a college make of you?

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This is a video game demonstration followed by a discussion with the creator, so the form is flexible. It can be included in an exhibition or be an artist talk.

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Female pleasure is a subject that’s often overlooked: the gap between male and female sexual satisfaction remains significant in heterosexual relationships, partly due to a lack of knowledge about the clitoris (Andrejek, Fetner, and Heath 2022). We thought it would be an intriguing subject for an “expressive video game” (Genvo, 2012, p. 128). Expressive games usually highlight problematic life experiences without necessarily aiming to provide a concrete solution (Genvo 2012). More broadly, expressive games are inspired by the personal experiences of their designers. Furthermore, expressive games align with feminist epistemologies, emphasizing the importance of situated knowledge. This encourages the expression of diverse viewpoints to construct new understandings of the world (Anderson 2014), crossing traditional knowledge barriers. The goal of our game is to emphasize the significance of the clitoris, demystify it, and firmly link it with pleasure (no pornography).It’s crucial to stress that the process of creating the work itself serves to break down barriers. The game is a research-creation, meaning that both the process and the product are documented and analyzed, similarly to Latour’s endeavour in his book Aramis or the Love of Technology (1996). As a researcher and creator, I (the game director) chose to realize the game with students, both in their coursework and through research internships, and with the assistance of industry professionals. This creates a network of various actors with very different interests. The showcase of the game prototype is a great way to spark numerous intriguing discussions regarding women's experiences and tacit knowledge.

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This will be a station with several chairs at which people may write letters or notes. Supplies will be provided.

Abstract:

Earlier this year, the eminent STS scholar, sociologist, and methodologist Adele E. Clarke passed away. In addition to authoring or co-authoring several books and scores of articles, she trained several generations of STS scholars. Her writing and editing frequently involved the use of fountain pen, usually in purple ink. Using this tool, she maintained, helped slow down the process of writing and deepen one’s thinking about what goes on the page. In this Making and Doing session, we will offer people an opportunity to use her preferred writing tool to write a letter, a note, memorial, or tribute to Adele E Clarke. We will supply stationery and pens. Participants may choose to keep their notes or include then in what will become a material compilation of letters commemorating Adele E. Clarke’s legacy and effect on the field. Please join us in this session to write slowly and think deeply with and about Adele E. Clarke.

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Short documentary film to be played at VU Rialto

Abstract:

Organized in memory of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster, Picturing the Invisible provides a striking photographic portrait of life in the wake of the triple disaster. Co-curated with students at TU Munich, this traveling exhibition brings together eight talented photographers, working in the affected territories, and pairs their works with essays commissioned from policymakers, academics, authors, activists, and citizen scientists. Together these works make visible the intangible legacies of the crisis that Japan remembers as “3.11”: the ghostly touch of radiation, lingering trauma, and the resilience of those communities who are rebuilding their lives in the wake. This exhibition was previously shown at the: Royal Geographical Society, London (2021); TUM, Munich (2022); and Heong Gallery, Downing College, Cambridge (2023). This short documentary film explores the exhibition and its themes, bringing the artworks, artists, essayists, and curators to 4S / EASST through a series of tours, interviews, and performances.

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Installation: a drop-in exhibit, with interactive exercises

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I invite participants to engage “accessibility” as a making-practice. As Price argues in "Crip Spacetime" (2024), accessibility falls within neoliberal metrics if approached apart from the situatedness of classrooms. As I explore through portraiture, each teacher brings their own affective, conceptual repertoire to access-practices. (These portraits looks to a surrealist motif of tomatoes, offered by a Zadie Smith novel: each teacher stages their own “tomato,” made recognizable through stylistically simple portraits). At stake is the query: how can I come to know my own pedagogy, given that so much passes as naturalized or unrecognized? I offer prompts, based on my portraiture-practice, to invite self-reflexive encounters with design choices and access-practices. Participants can create a self-portrait based on these prompts. An additional stake emerges here: which concrete access-practices are at play, and which might be foreclosed? These exercises are existential, as well as playful and arts-based, since they hold conditions of possibility for reckoning with one’s own attachments to teaching-practices. A third stake emerges here: what teachers helped to shape my own attachments as a teacher? I offer additional prompts, inviting a portraiture-practice of past teachers, likely from graduate school. These prompts are STS-informed, centering around the metaphorical question: how pluripotent is my "tomato"? To what extent is my own "making"-practice as a teacher open to renewed or transformed affects, sensibilities, and design-choices?

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Interactive table installation with print materials, medium-size posters, and projected web exhibition.

Abstract:

Access in the Making (AIM) Lab is an anti-ableist, anti-colonialist, and feminist research lab based in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). Making and doing remains central to AIM’s ethos and activities that engage questions of disability, access, environment, and world-making through ongoing creative experimentation that refuses technosolutionism. We invite participants to engage with AIM Lab's members and diverse projects including: 1) Designing with access – from its physical lab space construction to its logo and website design, AIM is radically rethinking design by positioning access as methodology and core element of the creative progress, rather than a retrofit. 2) Protocols, values, and manifesto – a co-authored series of guiding documents for working together including: our horizontal governance, how to make our events, websites, and communication accessible, etc. 3) Air, River, Sea, Soil: A History of an Exploited Land – an online exhibition produced by AIM where six artists from the SWANA region were paired with AIM members to develop a new mode of audio-description that we call “paired description”. 4) Mobilizing Disability Survival Skills for the Urgencies of the Anthropocene - a series of research-creation projects exploring how disability knowledges can inform the rebuilding of societies amidst rapid environmental decline and the shrinking of habitable worlds. 5) Citational politics - From our “#CiteYourGrannies” stickers to “AIM reads” sessions, we challenge extractivist academic citational trends with a curated citational politic that values multiple knowledges (including those that have historically been undervalued in academia, and those produced outside of it) and modes of knowledge-making that subvert academic ableism.

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An interactive installation involving a virtual interface (an interactive website displayed on two screens and two tablets) and a physical interface for a multisensory experiment.

Abstract:

This Making & Doing session guides participants through the “Rootling” website, a creative resource on pigs. The display includes a virtual environment created in collaboration with designers and a sensory exercise for anyone interested in multispecies research. The website is part of a larger inquiry into what a porcine research method might embody, and how it might challenge epistemological practices under neoliberalism. The website interface is designed with specific attention to the process and aesthetics of searching, navigating, and knowing as inspired by pigs. Wild and domestic pigs rootle to learn about their environment, using their snouts to socialize and dig, feed and play, find comfort and explore. Using the website, “rootlers” are encouraged to learn about pigs through an omnivorous movement of discovery via text, images, memes, and scientific data. Content is neither ordered nor linear but interconnected in a messy and heterogeneous manner to facilitate unexpected lines of inquiry and unearth contradictory ideas. Participants are also invited to engage with the research method through sensual, tactile DIY interfaces which will stimulate ideas by foregrounding nonvisual cues. To help navigate the virtual and physical environments, guides will prompt “rootlers” to attune to their trajectories, intentions, and feelings while exploring. The session is intended to generate reflections on how ideas can emerge from seemingly simple origins and disparate content; how everyday rootling practices- sometimes protracted, intuitive, and playful- are devalued within academic research cultures; and the ways in which symbiotic thinking opens avenues for experimental approaches to social research.

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This is an interactive workshop hosted by the CREATE/STS Editorial Collective: Emily York, Marisa Brandt, Shannon N. Conley, Megan Halpern, Nicole Mogul, Elizabeth Reddy, Marie Stettler Kleine, David Tomblin

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In this Making and Doing session, members of the CREATE/STS Editorial Collective (associated with the NSF-funded project “Collaborative Research and Education Architecture for Transformative Engagement With STS”) invite STSers to craft learning activity and assessment “recipes.” We want visitors to our session to share and connect with the diversity of approaches to critical, feminist, and/or alternative experiential teaching & learning practices that STSers have tried and loved. We see ourselves as part of a growing field that values approaching STS undergraduate education through multiple modalities beyond the standard lecture and discussion method that dominates undergraduate education. With template starters, recipe cards, and posting boards to help us collectively make visible the kinds of learning objectives, activities, and joys and sorrows that we experience and encounter, we imagine a making and doing session that revels in the challenges and occasional successes of STS education that invites learners to do STS. While participants are not required to submit these for possible inclusion in an edited collection, the CREATE/STS Editorial Collective will share its call for an edited collection, An STS Teachbook: Recipes from our Science and Technology Studies Communities for Critical Pedagogies in Undergraduate Education. This Making and Doing session will also be complemented by a workshop. Participants of this session will have an opportunity to work intimately with members of the Editorial Collective on crafting recipes for the book and/or their personal course revisions and development.

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Based on a conversation piece, 6-10 workshop participants will beta-test the exhibit prototype and will be asked for feedback on how it could be implemented in their fields of research.

Abstract:

Embark on a creative journey as we explore a conceptual prototype for a museum exhibit, harvesting narratives as data to tackle the complexities of ‘soy sustainability’ amidst the Nitrogen Crisis.This proposal concerns a workshop to test an exhibit prototype in which participant groups will be presented with a conversation piece developed for the research project ‘Soy Stories’: an NWO-funded project, which uses transdisciplinary narrative research approaches to engage with sustainability challenges in Brazil and the Netherlands that are geographically dispersed yet intertwined through soy (van der Vleuten & de Hoop, 2022).This prototype aims to engage audiences in conversation on the Dutch nitrogen crisis, allowing for both public deliberation and data collection thereon at the same time (drawing on the notion of situated intervention cf. Zuiderent-Jerak, 2015). As such, it seeks to explore possibilities for museums to relate to current societal concerns by acting as creative and participatory platforms fostering collaboration, deliberation and research (Gorman, 2020). The exhibit prototype will not be designed for one specific museum or place but will include possibilities that allow for embedding it in different museological and socio-cultural contexts. By building on that, the exhibit seeks to stretch and break paradigms and become a novel approach to bridging science, technology and society (Steward, 2006; Raelin, 2012). The goal of this collective effort - both the prototype and the workshop - is to stimulate continuous change based on how visitors in diverse museums engage with it.

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Workshop

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In the field of cybersecurity, it is a common frustration for authorities and cybersecurity experts that people in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) do not follow official advice. At times, the ‘incompliant behaviour’ of SMEs is even depicted as a severe risk for digitized societies such Denmark. A hole in the national defense so to speak. Stepping into this rather tense situation of shaming and blaming narratives, we have conducted a large ethnographic study of 30 Danish SMEs. Through more than 50 interviews we examined the intricacies of local practice, and we uncovered what we described as “’good’ organizational reasons for ‘bad’ cybersecurity practices” (Kocksch & Elgaard Jensen 2023). We found that many cybersecurity problems in SME do not come in the shape of a clearly defined problems which can be solved by a technical solution. Instead, SMEs often encounter cybersecurity problems as dilemmas they must endure or manage in ad hoc and sometimes clumsy ways. To bring these practical realities to the attention of authorities and cybersecurity experts we have developed a dilemma board game. Each game starts with the dramatized depiction of a dilemma we have encountered in our field work. The 3-4 players are then asked to develop ideas for handling these dilemmas. The game includes a series of cards that suggest various resources and strategies that are often available to SMEs. The Making & Doing presentation invites participants to play a 20-minute version of the dilemma game.

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This is a participatory troubleshooting session that invites people to bring stories, artifacts (within reason), or documentation about ferments that have gone awry. What happens when undesirable growth or unintended circumstances get the best of us and our ferments? What constitutes failure in these settings?

Abstract:

This is a participatory troubleshooting session that invites people to bring stories, artifacts (within reason), or documentation about ferments that have gone awry. What happens when undesirable growth or unintended circumstances get the best of us and our ferments? What constitutes failure in these settings? Failure, in this context, becomes fruitful for rupturing ideas of human dominion and offers inroads for better understanding the vitality and agency of nonhuman forces (e.g., microbes, environmental preconditions). By interrogating these ‘failures,’ the session will invite participants to reframe/rethink how biology cannot be predicted or contained. This making/doing session invites participants to reflexively analyze their ferments, while also crowdsourcing ways to recuperate, restart, or repurpose a ferment. Depending on the participants’ interests, potential topics for discussion would build on existing research in multispecies STS, citizen science, and feminist technoscience. The session is intended for people who self-identify as beginners as well as experts in fermentation. It also welcomes those engaged in other lines of microbial inquiry (e.g., composting, marine microbes) or the generally curious. The goal will be to create an environment for sharing by putting into practice academic discussions about knowledge hierarchies, ways of knowing, and situated/embodied knowledges. Participants will be encouraged to bring their experiments, or pictures/stories of them, along with all matters pertaining to “I don't know who to ask this.” This will become a chance to bare all and (in some instances, literally) air out our darkest hindrances.

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Workshop featuring a series of interactive ‘Experiencing Soil’ activities interspaced with personal stories from the organizers and with room for collaborative reflection on the impact of such events.

Abstract:

Humans have diverse relationships with soils that can be shaped by personal, cultural and sensorial experiences. Soils matter at many levels since people can feel a deep connection with soil as a source of identity, sustenance and belonging. The academic perspective on soil commonly provides soil scientists with a very particular experience of soils, and they communicate their soil knowledge through publications, graphs and tables. During the Wageningen Soil Conference 2023 we organized an event that invited soil scientists to discover ways of experiencing soil with all their senses, with the goal of increasing their capacity to connect with society and inspiring them to make connections and share their work in ways that resonate with society. We have also shared this Experiencing Soils event with the Wageningen municipal community. During this Making and Doing contribution, we will bring our event to the conference. Participants will explore multiple ‘stations’ dedicated to experiencing soils in unexpected and creative ways (such as via touch, taste, smell, poetry, theater, sounds and painting). In organizing this event, we have brought together a diverse group of early-career scientists and started an ongoing collaboration to broaden the experiences of and perspectives on soil that are accepted in the soil scientific community. Therefore, we will share our motivations, experiences and personal reflections on this process and interact with the audience to collectively increase the impact of such events. Our approach can be of interest to many transdisciplinary scientists exploring innovative connections from the ground up.

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Interactive workshop followed by discussion and the creation of a microbial sound repository.

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Our imaginaries of the microbial world have tended towards the visual since Leeuwenhoek used glass lenses to see ‘animalcules’. The metaphors we use to talk about microbes have become increasingly adversarial since the advent of the germ theory of disease. Recent computational methods associated with laboratory environments have allowed us new ways to imagine microbes as bioinformatic data. However, our awareness of and relationship to the microbial world predates these innovations, and has historically been understood as relational, spiritual and sensory. In this workshop, we want to create the time and space for exploring human-microbial relations through sound. Sensory methods are an emerging area of study in STS: hygiene and social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic, the observation of fermentation practices, or the management of resistant infections in low-resource settings are some examples. The session invites participants to a process that shifts away from the cultural and pedagogical dominance of the visual, giving primacy to sound as a way into a state of being attentive-otherwise. Microbes, like sounds, require particular effort and tools to be isolated from their environments. Through this exercise, we embrace the messiness of sound as a method for a different kind of exploring the microbial and our entanglements with it.Workshop participants will engage in an exercise of attentive listening and recording, followed by a reflective discussion on the potential of sensory methods to research microbes. Recordings from this session will be uploaded to a newly created sound repository– an open archive of everyday microbial encounters.

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Abstract:

Ground Up is the name of a situated approach to researching used by the Contemporary Indigenous Knowledge and Governance (CIKG) team in CDU’s Northern Institute. Always pursued in partnerships with Indigenous researchers working under the authority of Elders in their home places, Ground Up Inquiry is committed to rendering multiple traditions of knowledge making and doing mutually visible. Here forms of life expressing disparate cosmologies are being connected and kept separate in research, where we recognise such working together as a practice, where protocols and ethos need to be explicitly nurtured and maintained with care. Concepts are taken as happening in the world as enacted sets of practices; concepts can be met with—literally; experienced in the form of participating in doing practices in making inquiries, alongside others enacting their practices. In this presentation we continue to invite and provoke such meetings in enfolding 40 years of Ground Up into making and doing 4S/EASST Amsterdam.

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"The Weight of Air" is an audiovisual documentary featuring intimate film portraits and video performances. The video’s will be projected and after there is time for a post-show discussion.

Abstract:

Hello, I am Tabor Idema and I am from IJmuiden, the Netherlands. As a child, I looked across my street and saw the steel industry, Tata Steel, and thought that they made the clouds. Later, I discovered that it is the top CO2 emitter of the Netherlands. Residents living near the industry face a 51% higher chance of lung cancer and other diseases. Tata Steel has the monopoly on the air that IJmuiden citizens breathe daily, yet local voices remain unheard amidst media focus on climate justice and Tata's PR narrative."The Weight of Air" is a documentary film giving these voices a stage. It focuses on my street in IJmuiden that faces Tata Steel. I visit my neighbors, share a cup of coffee, and discuss their homes, health, and true feelings about Tata Steel. I question my parents' decision to move here, considering our health. And across the street, a Tata worker, proud of his work, shares his views and what he really thinks about the climate protests at the fences of Tata. These personal narratives blend with black-and-white video performances exploring the theme of air.It is still a work in progress and will be premiering on the 11th of July at the Over het IJ festival ‘24, the project, supported by Collective Walden, aims to shed light on our ecological crisis. By amplifying these local voices, we hope to inspire change and foster dialogue towards a healthier, more sustainable future for all.

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An interactive workshop co-created and organised by Marieke Meesters, Maya Lane, Clemens Driessen, Sandra Calkins, Jae Fisher and Rebeca Ibáñez Martín.

Abstract:

Multispecies gezelligheid’ is an interactive workshop that encourages participants to speculate on diverse ways to do multispecies (ethnographic) research, as ethical STS scholars thematizing the mundane, but also as environmentally engaged scholars interested in fostering more expansive forms of conviviality.‘Gezellig’ (adjective) or ‘gezelligheid’ (noun) in Dutch refer to a cozy, homely and convivial atmosphere- imagine a comfy sociable situation, sharing conversations over snacks with loved ones under soft lighting. In the Netherlands, people care a great deal about their relationships, lives and everyday situations being gezellig. However, ‘gezelligheid’ can also have a dark side – an expectation of conformity and the imperative of blending into Dutch society that can marginalize and exclude forms of otherness. This workshop unpacks what it means to orient sociality towards multispecies gezelligheid, questioning how we can create a ‘gezellig’ space for a range of critters, whilst interrogating the normative horizons of gezellig. What does it imply to extrapolate a normative category derived from human sociality into multispecies ethnographies? Can this specifically Dutch notion be generative for STS research? How may this form of sociomaterial atmospheric relationality resonate with prominent cultural notions that gained theoretical impetus, such as buen vivir? Thinking regeneratively, the workshop focuses on creating gezelligheid for critters crucial for decomposing plant and animal materials, like earthworms and springtails. In creating multispecies gezelligheid, we intend to spark conversation on our positionality as scholars in relation to critters, share spaces of gezelligheid, and explore how various forms of multispecies gezelligheid are perhaps not always compatible.

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Short abstract:

A workshop with an indoor and outdoor component.

Abstract:

Water sustains life. As an 'elemental infrastructure', access to water is integral for both human and non-human activities. Despite being considered a basic human right, limited access to water persists as a pressing issue for groups around the world; this scarcity of water access has been defined as Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WaSH) insecurity. An important factor in determining is water access to communities are city data infrastructures. As collections of data about the water access points in a city, these data infrastructures play a crucial in structuring communities relations around their daily activities. However, these data infrastructures are limited to technical measurements, failing to account for the lived experiences of individuals whose water access is limited. This workshop aims to make visible the relationship between water access and data as lived experience. Building on a model co-designed with the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LACAN), a non-profit organization dedicated to serving and empowering the unhoused community in the Skid Row neighborhood, this workshop will invite 10-12 participants to engage in a brief 25-minute 'data walk' around the city of Amsterdam. During this 'data walk', participants will map out source and access points of water. The 'data walk' will be followed by a critical discussion on the uses of water, the conditions under which water is made available, and whose power dictates the flow of water. Participants will be provided toolkits to record their lived experiences as 'data'.

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This project will be presented as a 15 minute video work followed by a 15 min. presentation about the research methods used to develop the artistic work.

Abstract:

House of Mu is a project that both imagines and constructs an alternative media infrastructure and digital economy for creative-critical work. Presented as a video essay and animated prototypes, House of Mu blends popular entertainment, STS, and media theory to the contemporary technoscientific moment. House of Mu draws from “third space” worldmaking as a framework for practitioners of art and research to create and sustain virtual worlds (narratives, networks, spaces, beliefs) and transcultural maker communities using XR/ML tools. Inspired by Third Cinema, spacemaking involves a practice of symbolic dramaturgy in which shared community artifacts (language, gestures, figures) are in exchange toward new forms of virtuality, political formations, and social transformation. House of Mu is told through the story of Somu Hwa, an avatar based on a traditional mask dance play, and extends its diegetic space with Kenya-based art collectives, Ghanaian hackers, and Senegalese science fiction writers exploring narratives of electronic waste, arts activism, and indigenous mysticism. The foundational lore of House of Mu explores the Faustian negotiations at play in acquiring virtual personhood through the metaphor of “the white mask,” as Somu Hwa dances into the metaverse and its logic of perpetual speculation, in the midst of the very real possibilities of adopting multiple personas and heightened forms of social presence in the collective global village-theater that is digital life. Drawing from avant-garde performance artists as much as scholars of global media infrastructures, House of Mu is a creative work making serious provocations about where to take research next.

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Installation on a table . A set of small portable electronic devices that can be set up anywhere. A laptop will show the server back-end.

Abstract:

The MindReader ESP32® by NeuralChain AI™ is a speculative fictional parody of an AI-enabled device that claims to have extra-sensory perception (ESP) capabilities. It purports to read minds based on inferring patterns in electromagnetic radiation emitted from the brain during specific cognitive acts. This physical prototype is built on an ESP32 microcontroller, a widely-used low-cost wireless microcontroller. It is equipped with a small screen that scrolls randomly generated descriptions of fictional 4S attendees' presumed thoughts and emotions. The device queries Mistral's Mixtral, an open-source large language model (LLM) hosted on a private server, to generate humorous and insightful parody descriptions of people's mindsets. The MindReader ESP32 serves as a commentary on the increasing use of surveillance systems that are based on capturing background radiation emitted from devices, such as Bluetooth beacon space occupancy systems, which can surveil without notice or consent. The MindReader ESP32 displays scrolling ‘live’ fictional data based on attendees' emotions, interests, and thoughts, such as: {Excitement: high; Curiosity: moderate; Nostalgia: low; Thoughtfulness: high; Contemplation on the blend of technology and society; Awareness of diverse perspectives in the room; Anxiety about interactive poster session; Anticipation for engaging conversations; Hunger: medium;"} While the data is entirely fictional, it invites participants to consider the implications of real-world systems that collect and analyze personal information. This hands-on demonstration aims to spark discussions on the implications of such ways of knowing on privacy, consent, transparency, regulation, and design principles. This references earlier similar work such as the CHI 2014 Quantified Toilets performance art.

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Short abstract:

Installation with film component and interactive component.

Abstract:

Aligning with calls from scholars in STS and Cognitive Science to both resist and revise the terms central to mainstream Open Science ((Penders et al 2019, Leonelli 2023, Whitaker & Guest 2020, Devezer et al 2019, Szollosi et al 2020 ), I have argued for what I call “Situated Openness” as an alternative to information-centric Open Science (Klein 2022). ‘Situated Openness’ orients to the richness of scientific settings, interactions, embodiments and materiality as resources for scientific intersubjectivity, instead of configuring them as either irrelevant, or as sinister threats to scientific integrity. Kitchen Cognition prototypes one configuration for Situated Openness.Kitchen Cognition is an experimental, ethnographic project which playfully intervenes in the material-semiotic craft of experimental design. Situated against the backdrop of ‘reproducibility crises’ in (but not restricted to) the psychological and cognitive sciences, and accelerating methods reforms since ~2015, KitchenCognition was centered around a simple score: it asked cognition researchers, at home in their kitchens, to design an experiment using what materials they had available. This was followed up by a collaborative, analytic feedback process where ethnographer and participants screened and discussed their responses. One result of this creative-reflexive-analytic process is a short film, which will be screened as part of this interactive session. This session will also invite attendees to participate in a ‘touring’ version of the task, mediating attendees’ improvised performances of routine laboratory practices through the mundane materials and routines of the kitchen, envisioning and revisioning the overlapping contexts and contours of experiment.

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Discussion booth with props.

Abstract:

In my recreation of a 1960s gestalt psychology program, which I’ve titled "8-Fold BEFLIX Circle Dot Cyclops" (https://taper.badquar.to/8/cyclops.html), I use a random-number generator and radial symmetry to create a field of circle dot ⨀ symbols that form patchy blobs. I have repurposed this dot grid as perceptual scaffolding for a practice of weaving wander-lines through the dot garden. Within this grid, I then become a puddle, or a cell membrane, and glide my way through the grid to form shapes in vector graphics. Vector files are valid input to 3D modeling and digital fabrication technologies. The wander-blobs became 3D-printed doll-house furniture. These furnishings will become a setting for socially-situated semiosis sculptures. I have recently used these structures, in a gallery setting, to guide conversations of multi-faceted topics. I would prefer that the doll house chairs be made of hempcrete. Thought collectives should be compostable. I will present a peg-board version of the mandala system and invite people to create blobby string-figure shapes by weaving yarn around pegs. I will invite them to sit at the doll house ideation tables and set the agenda for a discussion we define together. Or, we could play with the geometry toy and think about A.I. These toys re-link perception and gesture to digital tools by setting ideas in motion through intuition, materialization, repurposing, and structured thinking.

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Short abstract:

A film

Abstract:

Women stenographers gaze out of black-and-white photographs of offices in the 1920’s and 30s, as they transform the speech of men into text that circulated as power. The stenotype machine—like the typewriter, the sewing machine, and the comptometer—allowed for speed and standardization, and a successful stenographer was one who perfectly vanished, as neutral as the machine itself. As early as 1945, scientists like Vannevar Bush fantasized about removing the “disquieting” presence of women stenographers, leaving only the machine to "type when talked to." Today, 80 years later, human captioners still use stenotype machines--now coupled with real-time translation software and digital storage--to transcribe speech to text. From court reporters, who keep the record in courtrooms, to broadcast captioners and CART providers, who caption in real time primarily for deaf and hard-of-hearing people, stenography persists in the face of the continued and escalating threat of automation. This project considers stenographers who caption for deaf students in real time. Through an experimental approach to ethnographic video, I explore how the historic invisibility of women’s work figures the desire for technological neutrality, the dream of a perfect transcription that is always just out of reach. This drive toward the neutral, machinic, and transparent is challenged by scenes of contemporary CART captioners at work in university classrooms. Through an experimental use of sound, silence, lip-synching and voice-over, this ethnographic film also foregrounds itself as a transcription machine, making palpable the complex process of interpretive and sensory mediation that pervades captioners' work.

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Installation consisting of Moving Image, Sound, Computer code.

Abstract:

The Minor Ai series consists of experiments in producing small-scale machine learning practices that explore possibilities for alternative frameworks of artificial intelligence. Emerging from the idea of small and slow Ai, these intelligent assemblages refuse the narratives and structures of Big Tech and instead foreground alternatives proposed by data humanism, ancestral knowledges, mystical encounters and feminist practices. Consisting of a series of different experiments, the works propose an exploration of the ways in which feminist diy methods can reveal new ways of doing and thinking with Ai that are esoteric, sensuous, communal and even subversive. The series aims to question the cultural logic of techno-capitalism as it is currently embedded within large-scale Ai systems and to reflect on the ways in which small Ai can become crystallized as a practice through the refiguration of existing ML structures into a “minor language” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983) for intelligent assemblages. The artifacts consist of experimental software (custom code and small-scale datasets) that takes input in the form of an interactive object and outputs moving image sequences and text.There are currently two nearly-completed experiments (esoteric Ai, which produces algorithmic images through an intelligent software based on numerology and Subversive Ai, which works against its own software structure, seeking to produce glitches in its existing order). Two more experiments are planned to be developed between Feb 2024 - June 2024 (ancestral and feminine) and can feature in the exhibition. The attached file presents the outcomes of the Esoteric project.

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Installation with audience participation

Abstract:

Multiple panels at 4S/EASST 2024 address boundaries, inheritance, and identity of STS as a field. I propose to install a “Note STS” wall in a communal space of the conference. It is a wall (or a whiteboard) where passersby’s are invited to express their opinions and needs for our field in the form of short remarks on sticky notes. The board is divided into three sections, “reject,” “continue,” and “transform.” Community members can anonymously write something about the current state of STS and place it in one of the categories. Notes can range from research orientations or critical topics (“sociotechnical imaginaries”) to modes of work and institutional frameworks (“the tenure system”). Crucially, participants are encouraged to engage with the notes left by others by moving them into different categories (e.g. from “reject” to “transform”). While they can be moved, existing notes cannot be removed from the board. This exercise is an essentially casual and passive one, without a moderator, an end discussion, or strict rules. Done with minimal “technology,” the installation removes the barriers of participation as anyone walking by need only take a moment to leave a note. It is also meant to make the deliberation an embodied, collective, and participatory practice. As participants become both performers and audiences, this installation asks what it means to “perform” our collective future as an interdisciplinary community and how we might find participatory democratic ways of shaping our future as a discipline as much as a collective of human beings.

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Abstract:

Similar to many technical universities around the world, the TU Delft possesses an extensive but significantly underutilized visual art collection. Despite internal recognition of its potential to enrich critical thinking, inspire curiosity, and spark dialogue, the collection remains largely disconnected from research and education. This observation ties in with the broader trend among technical universities to view the campus as a neutral site for cognitive work rather than for embodied experiences or for moral deliberation.Recognizing that climate change requires future engineers to engage with and care for (often distant) environments, we seek to cultivate environmental awareness among TU students, starting with their immediate campus surroundings. To this end, we are developing an interactive tour of artworks about climate change on campus for our climate ethics courses. The tour prompts reflection on the embedded norms and values within the artworks and their acquisition process. Our aim with this initiative is to encourage participants to actively perceive the university campus and its normative commitments, as a first step towards promoting environmental care.Rather than presenting the preliminary results of this tour at EASST, we propose to produce a localized version of the tour at the VU, which has a rich history of art curation. Through collaboration with Wende Wallert of the VU Art Science Gallery, we aim to develop a climate art tour for EASST that allows participants to experience the art tour method at the VU, and further explore its potential for enhancing environmental care at university campuses with us.

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Workshop (group listening experiential session)

Abstract:

Paul Merchant (1), Eleanor Hadley Kershaw (2), Angela Cassidy (2), Mary Stewart (1), Rebecca Edgerley (2), Susan Molyneux-Hodgson (2). (1) National Life Stories (British Library). (2) University of Exeter. As part of RENEWing Biodiversity - a large scale, multi-sited, post pandemic-crisis project investigating people’s involvement in biodiversity renewal, our embedded team of STS scholars, social scientists and oral historians has been capturing stories of biodiversity collaboration. This is through ethnographic research documenting interdisciplinarity in real time as the project unfolds; as well as through oral history interviews about the life experiences of academics, naturalists, policy makers, administrators, volunteers, campaigners and others. In this session, we will explore the potential of deep listening – to participants’ stories in their own voices, alongside creative responses to ethnographic fieldwork in RENEW. These stories will juxtapose the experiences of people across ordinarily siloed spaces and domains: academia and professional practice; natural and human sciences; conservation and agriculture, to invite reflections on division, common ground and working together. In turn we will use play, talk and creative tinkering to invite you to reflect, share and create your own - personal and shared - stories of collaboration. Images: - Pinecone at RENEW Collaborations Workshop. Credit: Angela Cassidy. - Man and two children. Credit: John Marshall. Courtesy of John M Marshall. - Men in field. Courtesy of John M Marshall.

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Short abstract:

We offer an interactive installation in stages for participants to “move through”, consisting of stations for self-reflection and expression, interaction with audiovisuals, and synthesis through multiple media.

Abstract:

How can we seriously contend with the futures that will result from the polycrises we forecast, from climate change, biodiversity loss, global pandemic, and economic collapse? What challenges do we experience as we begin to think through deep adaptation to climate change? How does the task of reimagining a socio-ecological context feel for us as researchers? Despite studying these phenomena in depth, academic disciplines fail to encourage researchers to "deeply adapt" beyond surface-level mitigation efforts (Bendell, 2018; Selwyn, 2021). We aim to disrupt the vision of future-as-continuation-of-present and push researchers to contemplate how they could adapt their work in the context of alternative futures (Dator, 2019) through an interactive installation. Participants will first document a project they are working on, what motivates their research and their desired outcomes. Next, we will introduce an audio-visual experience that prompts participants to think through alternative visions of the future if current socio-ecological threats are realized, inviting participants to contribute to our perspectives of what changes the future may bring. Finally, we hope to delve into what emotions reimagining the future evokes in participants and encourage them to contribute to a collaborative collage (see image for submission). In particular, we aim to hold space for participants' feelings of ecological and anticipatory grief (Cunsolo, 2017; Barnett, 2022). We choose to focus on an emotional outcome to problematize dominant research evaluations which elevate productivity. We also aim to create a collaborative experience through asynchronous collaging to acknowledge the centrality of relationships to imagining change (Finn & Wylie, 2021).

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An installation and a projected slideshow

Abstract:

In environmental governance, digital tools like computer models and sensors are employed in consensus-based, deliberative democratic processes to ensure just outcomes. These tools coordinate the values of the state, social movements, and the market and help anticipate and implement programs and policies. In situ, the utilization of these tools can both facilitate and curtail solidarities. The methods and effectiveness of how social movement actors might maintain these differences to ensure just outcomes when participating in state-led practices remain to be studied. Through the case of a critical design intervention based on STS theories of technoscience, power, and politics in governance, and the theory of agonism, this piece amplifies the role of difference and dissensus in participatory processes. It draws on three years of fieldwork with environmental justice activists participating in California's decarbonization program. I propose a conceptual and methodological framework called Agonistic Arrangements to maintain dissensus amongst various social groups. I present one such agonistic arrangement, in the form of interactive, printed materials that I designed and used in my field site. Such interventions can bridge the gap between deliberative democracy and agonism. These findings have implications for those involved in participatory governance across domains.

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Interactive exhibit, featuring poster pin-up space and flexible table-space, and seating arrangements for participants to add their own contributions to the display

Abstract:

Extant paradigms for platform governance, particularly those advanced by platform companies, configure the front-end user interface as the sphere for governance, while simultaneously occluding the back-end operations central to the economic value of the platform. Building on STS research on how this stage management of data relations configures platform governance (Huang & Krafft, in press), as well as research on hacking metaphors for the regulation of emerging technologies (Jones & Millar, 2017), this interactive exhibit animates, through experimental modalities of boundary-drawing, how what is made visible goes hand-in-hand with what is actionable for governance. As designers and STS scholars, we propose an interactive exhibit of critical and speculative drawing, inviting participants to destabilize the boundaries drawn by platform companies, and to reclaim collective power in determining what is actionable for governance. Rooted in architectural approaches to drawing and diagramming, which map spatial relationships in the built environment, this exhibit provides material and discursive tools for interrogating and re-imagining platforms. In the first act, we will utilize the metaphor of stage management to reformulate transparency as a regulatory ideal. Through a series of critical drawing exercises, participants will experiment with visualizing the back-stage operations (e.g., sketching optimization metrics central to a platform’s business model), and with re-drawing the lines of visibility demarcating front- vs. back-stage operations. In the second act, participants will shift from critique to speculation. Discarding “platform” as the metaphorical grounds for sense-making, participants will collectively re-imagine alternative metaphors by which to understand, visualize, design, and govern these sociotechnical systems.

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Performance lecture, interactive workshop

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My project aims to bring together a body of work that aims to answer the question: how do we counter the embodied ethos of extraction? How can we gather existing techniques – and develop new ways of engaging with our bodies to combat extraction’s effects? These contradictions are embodied in the commodities that shape our world (and enable economic and social mobility), in the unwaged work required to sustain volunteer communities, and in the natural resources required for computational work (mirrored in our current hunger for data for AI-driven systems). These cognitive dissonances shape our world and ourselves, and while they are often mapped intellectually by scholars and journalists, we are rarely equipped to understand that these broader contradictions can also express themselves as embodied and emotional experiences. Drawing from Ursula Le Guin and Mindy Seu’s notion of gathering, I am currently gathering, connecting, and co-creating a collection of ‘poetic tactics’ that aim to combat the embodied nature of extraction at multiple scales as a School of Commons fellow. This workshop will pilot a few different sensory practices as a part of this ‘poetic tactics’ series: drawing from creative computation, artist and mindfulness practices, and various written and visual mediums.

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Installation / exhibit and workshop

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In different corners of our planet, we are seeing vibrant networks and coalitions organizing against surveillant, carceral, and colonial technologies and the institutions that support them. In this Making & Doing contribution, we will exhibit a selection of the different sense-making tools and methods used as part of organizing efforts against technologies of control. We will show a selection of community methods of investigation, exposure and sense-making that have been used in circumvention, resistance and contestation. Examples in which the workings of technologies are dissected or dismantled, analytical frameworks used to engage or explain. This on-the-ground knowledge production and sense-making by those who are confronted by the consequences and harms of tech will be presented in different forms, such as short videos, community zines, maps, and other visualizations. Using these examples of on-the-ground forms of knowledge production, we will invite the public to experiment with applying these methods or tools as analytical tools themselves, flipping the script, using the abolutionist algorithmic ecology tool, or using diy tools to outsmart high-tech. With this installation and workshop, we invite all to apply the sense-making frames of organizers, artists, agitators, and more, by sharing and experimenting with their tools, creative practices, strategies, and visions.Examples will be selected from past two years of our work with the Justice, Equity and Technology Table, as well as local histories in collaboration with the Bijlmer Museum and IISG.

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installation/ workshop

Abstract:

The deliberation about recycling water for direct human consumption activates a range of intimate expert engagements with their object(s) of knowledge, as well as different types of expertise, sometimes in the same body. On the one hand sit technocratic experts; On the other hand, sit a different kind of expert/expertise, that of a culturally-informed, perhaps biologically innate disgust at the diverse contaminants present in wastewater. Research demonstrates that as people begin to understand the technological processes behind water recycling, their acceptance of, and trust in, the process increases. That trust, however, is uneven—while people may decide the technology itself is efficacious, they may remain suspicious of other infrastructural aspects (trust in policy makers) or environmental impacts the technology interacts with. How might researchers and stakeholders move the conversation beyond yuck to explore other issues? This making and doing project explores how using community-designed flavor profiles to tell stories engaged stakeholders across the decision-making spectrum in conversations about what futures advanced water treatment technologies might bring about. By “making taste public” (Voss & Guggenheim 2019) through a family friendly product, a gourmet popsicle, this making and doing project highlights new possibilities in expanding public deliberation around sustainability transitions while also revealing new challenges in the process of moving conversations beyond the subjective stage of the “yuck” factor into the realm of concerns about systems.

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Paper-based and online version of the game. Visitors are invited to play and/or see evaluation of test-run with actual CDR-stakeholders. Presented by Nils Matzner, Danny Otto, Linda Heenemann.

Abstract:

In addition to massive reduction of CO2 emissions, it will be necessary to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Numerous studies have explored the governance of carbon dioxide removal (CDR), modeled pathways, outlined scenarios, or analyzed demonstration projects. A critical gap in the literature are regional CDR case studies investigating dynamics that affect adoption in specific locations. In this making and doing session, we present a playful approach to jointly envision possible CDR landscapes.We developed a serious game called “Carbon Cascadia” that enables stakeholders to express their regional carbon landscape imaginations. Players have the possibility to arrange different biomass production processes and biomass-based CDR methods in cascades. These cascades picture flows of biomass and allow for individual and group reflections on resource usage. The in-game setting brings farmers, foresters, biochar start-ups, CO2 storage operators and other stakeholders together to develop and discuss the most (cost-)effective, long-term and sustainable processes to remove CO2 from the atmosphere using plants and store it long-term. Only with a joint effort and reflections on synergies and trade-offs can such biomass-based CDR measures also function as cascades, i.e. a series of removal and utilization processes. The game is design for online and offline usage. It consists of CDR gaming cards that can be arranged on digital or paper playing boards. The cards provide information on CO2 removal potentials and biomass usage or supply. It enables a novel way to materialize and accessibly discuss about pathways of CDR governance, organization and deployment.

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InstallationIt will be an interactive installation by the physical engagements as well as conceptually, using chlorophyll as a colour, drink, making photographic prints etc.

Abstract:

My practice explores the nuanced relationship between nature and humans, embracing an interdisciplinary approach. I work with different aspects of botany, farming, foraging, and gardening. Growing fruits, vegetables and medicinal herbs, making plant-based pigments and surfaces are part of my everyday practice. My project “Dissolved in pigment”, examines the exotic and native plants, mostly defined as weed in nature and the uses of it. There are two ways I want to contribute to Making and Doing at 4S.Working at botanical gardens, the domains of physics, chemistry, and botanical labs, and plant evolutionary history museums, I situate the significance of weeds within ecosystems. I want to make a space with the collection of herbarium, plants and chlorophyll as research. I will facilitate an interactive session with pigment and chlorophyll, which can be consumed, played with as colour and as a photographic printing method. This will lead to discussions on the contemporary environment of food, relationship with the wilderness, and the relationship with chlorophyll.Using vegetable pigments, a 19th century printing technique to create photograms that develop slowly, and then fade away, I will share an archive of plant species in the form of Anthotypes that will be part of an experiential installation and a series of artist collections. The installation would consist of large-scale Photograms on multiple glass screens, evoking the environment of an herbarium. An artistic inquiry as well as botanical research, this process-led work will produce an ephemeral archive of plants in a transforming environment.

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Video art installation

Abstract:

This project interrogates how digital wellness cultures, such as essential oils companies and their peer-to-peer distributors, engage gendered marketing, labor, and trauma to obscure systemic oppression. The emotional and relational labor of essential oils distributors compels women to look toward essential oils as a viable medical intervention by leveraging women’s distrust with medical establishments and hardship produced by intersecting structural inequalities. Women are hooked in by promises of essential oils offering silver-bullet solutions to complex problems stemming from inequitable social systems. These promises range from arguing that essential oils release embodied trauma stemming from spousal abuse, to claiming that essential oils are a pathway to fulfilling “divine feminine” energy manifested as subservience and submission to patriarchal domination. My design intervention features digital video content collaging together captioned TikTok and YouTube videos of essential oil distributors making these promises, accompanied by discordant, glitchy audio to capture digital wellness cultures’ distorted truths.

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Presentation with projected images and printed art objects; activity with prepared cyanotype materials for participants. Attached image is from Moon Trees; images in the workshop will be much smaller.

Abstract:

Space Shadows is an practice of capturing extraterran travelers in cyanotype prints, solidifying their shadows in chemically hardened sunlight. It began with the series Untitled (Moon Trees #1-7) in 2022, and continues now with Untitled (Rocket Parts) in 2024. For each iteration of Space Shadows, I make a series of cyanotype prints by using objects that have traveled through the atmosphere as the image matrix, and then exposing the image using sunlight. In this way, I am able to capture the “shadow” of extraterran travelers. Such a collaboration between earthling, solar energy, and space-artifact materializes a relationship of wonderment, finitude, and release that opposes the extractive national and corporate imaginations that dominate the current space age. It also enacts an immediate relationship of earthlings as creatures already engaged in cosmic encounters, without the mediation of industry. Moon Trees used leaves, twigs, and other detritus collected from the Moon Tree in Sewanee, TN, USA. This is one of several Moon Trees scattered across the USA, all of whom are grown from seeds sent into orbit around the moon on Apollo 14 in 1971 and planted on their return.Rocket Parts will be created by capturing impressions of a small rocket built and launched by Space Society Twente, a student organization at the University of Twente, NL, that seeks to find ways to make space a space for all. In this workshop, I will first present my work and then offer precoated papers for the participants to make their own prints.

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This video can either be installed as a looping installation or as video/film in a classroom or theatre.

Abstract:

'Rehearsing the Examination' is an artistic research film from a multimedia project entitled On Intelligence Tests: Psychological Objects and Their Subjects which employs novel creative approaches to study the material and performative facets of a charismatic and influential scientific object, the 20th century intelligence test kit. In 'Rehearsing the Examination' (2021), eight actors rehearse and perform a selection of intelligence test kits. By re-contextualising the testing procedure in a theatrical space, the video recasts the test examiner (usually a licensed psychologist) as an actor, the test as a prop, and the testing room as a black box theatre, and therefore re-frames intelligence testing as a theatrical performance. In the film, the actors determine what tone, affect and costuming they find appropriate for playing the examiner, and their performances of this role evidence the decision-making process that goes into the professional performance of the examiner. The test manuals themselves have complex understanding of the role of the examiner, who is figured as a hybrid educator-clinician-scientist. By staging the tests as if they are performances, this artistic research enquires into how a professional test examiner is asked to perform the tests and, at the same time, how the subject of the test is at once a participant and observer of the performance. Therein, it also queries the possibility standardising interpersonal encounters and wonders about the limits of what a good, or even good enough, performance of a test is such that the results are fair and valid.

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Multimedia installation

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In the Shadow of Ashes is an immersive, multi-media installation that sheds light on a dark chapter of British colonial rule. Engaging experimental modes of knowledge production, this counter-narrative aims to generate new reflections of the Batang Kali massacre, its subsequent concealment by successive British governments, and the amnesiac consequences of these injustices. The project presents newly found archival materials and weaves them alongside first-hand testimony by a victim of the massacre. Automated lights and projectors are activated as the narrative unfolds.The installation is set into motion by an audio composition introducing a dialogue with Lim Kok, whose father was massacred by British colonial officers in Malaya, 1948. This conversation makes reference to the arrangement of materials presented on three overhead projectors that activate in succession during the exchange, highlighting various elements. Once the medium of choice for disseminating colonial propaganda, projection is employed subversively in the installation as an ‘anti-redaction’.The exchange proceeds to reveal a shocking discovery: a cover-up by the British Colonial Office known as Operation Legacy. Abruptly, all lights go dark, replaced by the soft glow of an old monitor screen in the corner of the room. Discovered in the private collection of a diplomat stationed in British-colonised Aden, the video depicts people throwing classified documents on the ground, before setting them alight. “I never heard about this,” responds Lim in the audio piece, seeing the footage, “with that extra evidence… we may have won the [court] case.”

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Workshop. Performative Material Science. Get together with a stack of printed photographs. Related to the method of photo elicitation, associative and wild speculating on dark matter knowledge generation through photographs.

Abstract:

It is not surprising that current physics struggles with arguments regarding the (non-)detection of dark matter. On the one hand, physicists have been theoretically puzzling for nearly 100 years over the composition of said matter, which is supposed to constitute 85% of the total mass of the universe. On the other hand, it remains to be seen which experimental strategies will lead to possible detections in the foreseeable future. However, so far the own observation, current efforts to detect dark matter rely significantly on procedures that are situated far from elaborate wave- or particle-like models and well-established experimental practices. The session, under the scrutiny of STS-informed perspectives, invites following the hypothesis that dark matter exhibits more complex material characteristics than is generally recognized by physics; therefore the question is asked where and how knowledge generation in the field takes on a barely controllable momentum of its own and risks escaping future reproducibility. The workshop negotiates dark matter in the tension between formal physical constitution and collective imagination. After a brief introduction, a common dive into the topic is made by negotiating with/through photographs to re-configures the body of knowledge predominantly governed and disciplined by physics.

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Interactive demo of a card deck alongside templates for activities/formats participants can easily follow.

Abstract:

This making and doing session presents a brainstorming card deck co-created in dialogue with environmental educators, community organizers, digital democracy advocates, and other community experts. Designed to collectively generate ideas for resilience-forward curriculum activities and environmentally responsive media and infrastructure, the deck offers a dynamic opportunity for collaborative design and transformative learning experiences. In this era of deep uncertainty, the card deck provides a structured yet flexible framework for navigating uncertain terrain. Through collaborative brainstorming and ideation, participants can explore a range of potential futures and strategies for addressing environmental challenges with creativity and resilience. The card deck fosters active participation and engagement from community members, emphasizing the importance of community-driven approaches to environmental education and media infrastructure development. At its core, the card deck is about envisioning and co-creating sustainable futures. By sparking conversations and generating ideas for resilient curriculum design and environmentally responsive media infrastructure, it encourages participants to think critically about the intersections between science, technology, and society in shaping a more sustainable world. Through its dynamic and interactive nature, the card deck offers conference attendees the opportunity to engage in collaborative curriculum design and infrastructure futuring, while exploring new perspectives, and co-creating innovative approaches to planetary limits. Overall, the card deck hopes to serve as a practical and symbolic tool for advancing the goals of 4S & EASST communities, embodying the spirit of collaboration, innovation, and public engagement in addressing the complex issues facing our world today.

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The workshop will start with an introduction an example story. Then participants will be allocated to groups to develop their stories. It will close with a plenary and a reflection.

Abstract:

The workshop aims to contribute to the transformation of the technology industry by harnessing collaborative and individual scenario planning and feminist imaginaries to empower women and marginalised groups. As part of a bigger project which seeks to challenge existing biases and amplify diverse voices through innovative methodologies, we invite participants to storyboard alternative worlds, envisioning futures that promote diversity and inclusivity in the technology sector. It is by creating parallel worlds in which marginalised groups are not marginalised that will enable the participants to uncover how our world could be changed.The project, and this workshop embrace techno-feminist perspectives, which view technology as a socially constructed entity intertwined with gender relations. It acknowledges the mutual shaping of technology and gender and advocates for a flexible and anti-essentialist approach. Additionally, it aligns with feminist methodologies, emphasising the importance of inclusivity, representation, and critical reflection. It recognises the need for intersectional perspectives that account for multiple dimensions of identity.The workshop draws inspiration from the Fashion Futures project , which uses scenario planning to navigate the complexity of the future in the context of fashion and nature. Scenario planning encourages creative and abstract thinking, fostering inclusivity and diverse decision-making processes. Those wanting to take part in the workshop will come with a point of history to be transformed in mind, to transform the narrative of the current day, and it will be these that are built upon in groups through storyboarding exercises.

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The presentation will require visitors to interact with ChatGPT 4.0 one by one to generate a picture of AI collectively.

Abstract:

In this project, participants would engage in one-on-one interactions with ChatGPT 4.0, contributing to the collaborative creation of a portrait of AI. The goal is to investigate how AI is shaped by the collective intelligence of various users, the users' perceptions of AI and AI's perception of itself. When creating this portrait, users would be free to create as they want. We would also be able to discover how previous interactions between users and AI influence the interaction between the following users and AI. This project invites individuals to partake in an interactive exploration of AI, highlighting the power of collective intelligence in shaping the narrative around this transformative technology. The resulting composite portrait reflects not only the capabilities of ChatGPT but also the diverse perspectives of the human participants, offering a glimpse into the symbiotic relationship between humans and AI.

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Interactive Workshop

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Transformations toward a more sustainable and just world are urgently needed. Yet, they have proved difficult to imagine and mobilize, despite countless frameworks, recommendations and targets. Cognitive and rationally driven approaches have increasingly been critiqued for hindering deeper forms of connection and emotional resonance essential for acknowledging injustices and compelling radical visions and actions for change (Bentz et al. 2022). Artistic forms of expression can be a powerful means to navigate tensions among diverse perspectives and facilitate collective sensemaking and action (Vervoort et al. 2023). In this session, we experiment with the power of collective music making to transform our imagination. We focus on how people in the session imagine how and why sustainability transformations occur in very different ways. Together, we use musical expression to make these assumptions visible to each other, and collectively explore the tensions we experience and the political implications of transformations. Workshop participants are invited to express their approach to sustainability transformations in musical form using their breath, voice, movement, heartbeats, and touch to make sound and also co-produce sound with living beings like plants. Together, we explore the implications of the final group compositions, collectively challenging and expanding our imagination of how and why we pursue sustainability transformations.ReferencesBentz, J., O’Brien, K. & Scoville-Simonds, M. (2022). Beyond “blah blah blah”: exploring the “how” of transformation. Sustain. Sci., 17, 497–506.Vervoort, J., et al. (2023). Nine dimensions for evaluating creative practices: what they’re for and how to use them. URL https://creaturesframework.org/funding/creatures-dimensions.html

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This will be a participatory workshop/collaboration with groups of up to 10 participants. Observers can also attend to be involved in the discussion. Afterwards it will become a poster installation.

Abstract:

The need for transformation in response to grand societal challenges is a crucial but challenging task and motivates the need for new methods to explore how we can collectively vision change.This session seeks to explore new approaches to making and doing alternative futures in STS by engaging participants to create visions of alternative futures through their contribution to evolving storylines. Drawing upon a tool developed for organisational learning, this workshop will explore how the ParEvo (Davies, 2007) process can be used as a reflexive tool to investigate collective narratives held about science and technology and how it can be adapted into a new method in STS to explore participatory co-creation of transformative visions of science and technology.Participants will be directed to respond initially to a seed-story prompt, and then to build on each others' visions over a series of evolutions within the session. N participants will generate n storylines, branching off the seed story, and together generate n unique visions of STS futures. The resulting stories and their potential insights will be discussed with participants and observers, along with a discussion of the method itself to contribute to improvements of the application of the approach for this transformative visioning. The produced storylines will be turned into a display to remain up for the remainder of the conference, and in the weeks following the session they will be turned into a digital 'choose your own adventure' interactive piece of media to explore and communicate STS visions of alternative futures.

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This activity is modelled on the Vossenjacht, a Dutch-style treasure hunt which one of us has recently conducted with primary school children at the Regenboogschool, the Dutch school in London.

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STS has various origin stories. These include the challenge to the traditional philosophy of science and engagements with urgent matters of concern such as nuclear weapons. In the Netherlands, keeping one's feet dry is another major issue. Dutch STS has a long and rich history and can boast possibly the highest density of STS scholars per capita. During the conference dinner in the Amsterdam Forest, we invite participants to expand their knowledge of Dutch STS by engaging in a treasure hunt featuring pairs of later and earlier career STS researchers. These can be found in different forest locations (under trees or toadstools) together with objects and stories to share. Participants in the treasure hunt will receive a score card to be completed by visiting all Dutch STS stations in the forest. We have invited the following contributors: 1) feminist STS: Nelly Oudshoorn 2) SCOT: Wiebe Bijker. In addition, we have the following ideas: 3) citizen science: Rob Hagendijk + 4) empirical philosophy: Annemarie Mol + 5) anthropocene: Thomas Fransen & Esther Turnhout 6) publics: Huub Dijstelbloem + 7) scientometris: Paul Wouters + 8) human-tech relations: Peter-Paul Verbeek + 9) postcolonial STS: Chunglin Kwa & Amade M'charek 10) STS meets art: Esther Polak & Ties vd Werff 11) STS meets digital: Caroline Nevejan & Niels ten Oever 12) STS meets phil of sci: Hans Radder & David Ludwig 13) making and doing in NL: Teun Zuiderent-Jerak. We still need to figure out the route and registration format.

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Posters

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Through different techniques of sociotechnical analysis, the artifact of cable cars is explored as a new modality of metropolitan public transportation, highlighting sociotechnical alliances, dynamics, and relevant social groups, in the case of Mexico.

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Interactive sculpture installation with supplementary slides documenting the artistic intent and technical implementation

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Novel HCI devices are prone to planned obsolescence, which sometimes causes clever ideas and great sensor packages to be trashed before being thoroughly explored. This is a particular problem in closed-source hardware designed with strongly opinionated interfaces. The Myo armband by Thalmic Labs packed high-grade EMG sensors into a successful, compact wearable, before being discontinued in 2018. This talk covers how we repurposed a Myo armband to take advantage of its subtle muscle tracking to activate a pneumatic sculpture made from materials that are similarly regarded as junk in the making. This creative hacking approach is a promising way to thwart planned obsolescence, which is especially important when it comes to HCI and accessibility devices.By interfacing a Myo to a Raspberry Pi 3B+, we enabled forearm muscles to trigger air valves and animate assemblies of latex, bamboo, and PLA. These forms were then programmed to maintain peristalsis, only to dramatically deflate and flop about in response to custom gesture control. Though the interactions aim more for surprise and delight than technical polish, this comedy of errors examines the latent expressiveness of both the obsolete Myo hardware and everyday trash. It also allowed us to explore which software systems, exactly, would be required to take further advantage of the Myo system in an open-hardware environment. By finding fresh ways to work with what’s on our shelves, we hope to squeeze more value from devices otherwise destined for landfills.

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A guided interactive platform navigation, including film screening. There will also be a physical exhibit of the curated archive that visitors will be invited to handle.

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This contribution translates an epistemic concern: how to use film and archive-making as a research methodology for science and technology studies with a historical perspective. The initiative comes from a collective desire to act creatively in response to the patterns of authority embedded in contemporary academic forms of communication. During the pandemic, a group of historians with Global South perspectives in the US, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Italy, reoriented its research on the aesthetic, political and epistemic meaning of astronomical images in Latin America. Via zoom collaborations with filmmakers, they began to make video essays addressing issues such as center-periphery networks, authority, genre and cannon, hybridization, commensurability of modes of knowledge, and translation. The process of gathering, creating, confronting, juxtaposing, and re-organizing personal journals, collections of archives, and home-made footage in the planning, production, editing, and post-production film phases triggered new and unexpected research questions implicating and revealing affective and bodily aspects of knowledge making frequently silenced in scholarly productions. The results of this three-year process are eight video essays, a growing archive, and an interactive platform. Through guided screenings and interactive navigations, we will encourage audiences to immerse themselves in the project’s virtual space. We will also invite guests to play with a curated physical archive and to recreate their own stories and questions.

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workshop/game

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"My documents, check them out" is a collaborative, role-playing game simulating the bureaucratic mechanisms shaping migration control. Its main goal is to interest players in the problematization and re-design of the semantic categories and values used in databases for migration management. During the game, players impersonate a fictional character, and they are told that a “document” is needed to legally remain in Italy. To obtain the document, players must fill in and submit an application form containing information about their characters and their migration journey. At the beginning of their turn, players pick up a card from the deck. “Wait” and “Accelerated procedure” cards mimic the temporal dynamics shaping migration management. “Design cards” allow players to choose and introduce a new category, to capture what they consider salient elements of their characters’ migration trajectory. Players are also invited to share stories in order to receive comments and suggestions. Lastly, “Agency cards” provide the possibility to add new elements to the characters’ stories and identities. Applications are then uploaded into a software which takes a decision by producing a negative, long-term positive or short-term positive outcome. The game constitutes a tool for reflection which, according to the differently situated gazes of the players, discloses their competences, assumptions and biases about the dynamics of migration management. My documents, check them out was developed in the context of the Processing Citizenship ERC project (#714463) and was co-designed with asylum seekers, lawyers, students, civil servants.

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ethnographic film screening and discussion

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Pathology plays an important role in the process of diagnosing disease. Yet for most patients, the labor of pathologists is largely invisible. Even professionals working in the healthcare domain know relatively little about how pathologists conduct their daily work. For example, how are tissue samples processed into images by lab assistants ? How does a pathologist arrive at a diagnosis? And what are the possible roles of new technologies like AI in these diagnostic processes? Our ethnographic film Samples to Slides attempts to make the field of pathology more visible. We explore the intricate habitual actions and behaviors in a Dutch pathology lab, as well as the complex integrations of skill, knowledge, and craftsmanship in practice. Samples to Slides is also intended to serve as a tool to stimulate meaningful debates and reflection about the possible uses of AI in healthcare. This Making & Doing contribution will start with a screening the film Samples to Slides (20 minutes), followed bya dialogue about current and potential future practices in pathology. We will also reflect together on the uses of film methodology in scientific research.

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Interactive, participatory presentation using silkscreen practice as a way of thinking-with materials

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Who, or what, mediates pollution? In Bitterfeld-Wolfen, industrial heritage is a fundamental part of the cultural fabric of the city. However, processes of bioremediation have masked ongoing environmental violence through the lush spectacle of reconstructed (urban-industrial) nature, so as to erase the former fly ash and putrid odor from collective consciousness. “Sky inside the Soil” is a multi-phase, co-authored research-creation project that explores the roles of plants and trees as mediators between soil and sky in more-than-human communities of extreme toxicity. Following the seasonal cycle of ruderal plants growing around the notoriously polluted Silbersee (Silver Lake), we imagine through them the historical trajectories of labor, leakage, and repair on a former mining pit once used for wastewater from the Agfa film factory and chemical textiles plant in Bitterfeld-Wolfen. We use archival photographs and pigments derived from plant biomass to reflect on the social, economic, and aesthetic dimensions of pollution through the medium of silkscreen – a tightly woven nylon mesh, not unlike the synthetic nylon products once manufactured in Wolfen. We consider changes in viscosity over time and invite an embodied understanding of such changes though the repetitive process of silkscreen printing: prepare, place, pour, pull, lift, sweep, repeat. Using these motions to structure our reflections, we work-with and think-with vegetal mediators to re(con)textualize ideas about the long-term, more-than-human labor of remediation and regeneration.

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participatory performance

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My proposal is a demo of my ASTS project that hovers across the spaces of biomedicine through biosensors that capture intricate neurophysiological imprints, computation for data and signal processing, and artistic practice through sound design and performance making. My project allows for participatory sound sculpting, reciprocity, and affective communication by sonifying biosignals—indicative of affective and by extension emotional changes—as a way to listen to the language of the body and not the mind. In the initial phase participants are introduced to the workflow by listening to my sonified data to understand how pulse rate and gestural movements reflect in the sound. The second phase, however, engages them in a feedback loop with me by inviting them to try on the wearable that couches the sensors to leverage the same mechanism as a response to mine. I, thus, leverage sound’s capacity to induce neurophysiological and by extension emotional state changes in the body leading to its experience building and event making potential that fundamentally operates on embodied and pre-cognitive level. In this sense, while residual affect from biosignals become the departure point for the sound, I then rely on sound’s affective quality to generate further emotional states as a feedback loop between biosensors and sound. By positing sound as a relatable mess by tying in bio and acoustic signals, the project aims to create a sociality that relies on the feedback loop between bodies, operationalized by the feedback loop between bio and acoustic signals.

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This experimental bricolage includes: a poster; an opinion piece; a scrapbook (chronicling growing up as an Indigenous girl); and collages (the “Childhood Series” and the “Twitter” series).

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I was one of the three women who resigned from Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council in December 2022, speaking out against the meteoric rise in hate speech since Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform. In response, Musk dissolved the Council entirely four days later. In the wake of recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI), I write to underline the danger of AI being a vector of neocolonial harm in its deployment, diffusion, and adoption, as technology companies prioritize profits over safety. I propose building on social critic bell hooks’ work with the concept of “coding back”. In “Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black”, hooks described “talking back” as an act of resistance that challenges the politics of domination that “would render us nameless and voiceless”. Coding back challenges the asymmetrical power dynamics that are embedded within the technology companies and institutions that develop artificial intelligence. As I will show, it is a decolonial epistemic approach in that coding back centers Indigenous mental models and ways of being that break away from narrow neocolonial knowledge production. In short, it offers a set of tools to fight back against the colonial erasure of the formerly colonized.

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Storytelling with code

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The project explores the logics of GeoAI – the integration of geography and artificial intelligence – to unravel the web of dependencies between data and code in the making of AI models. Because of the instability of GeoAI, I follow a dual track development strategy that allows me to reflect on a territory as a humanist, while at the same time engaging with the territory through the very technical methods defining the territory under observation. The result is a cook-book, a companion book for code centric exploration that accompanies a traditional printed book. Topically, my inquiry is centered on the confluence of multi-spectral, high-resolution satellite sensor data, Geographic Information Systems and classification processes enabled by GeoAI at various levels of computational intensity. The project describes how daily updates from remote sensing assets in the sky create a novel paradigm of planetary assessment, and how this condition alters industries from desktop computing to agriculture, insurance, and compliance. Specifically, I describe field studies in Indonesia that demonstrate how the nexus of artificial intelligence and geospatial practices applied to mapping sustainable land use practices impact post-growth strategies and land use conflicts in the Alas Mertajati of Central Bali, Indonesia. I will show and tell the story of how GeoAI in the tropics came to be, and include with the cook-book a demonstration of the technical infrastructure that enables the first machine learning enabled local knowledge inclusive representation of agroforestry on the island of Bali. Code: https://github.com/realtechsupport/cocktail Cook: http://35.226.46.43:8501/

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This workshop is an express-version of a one-week teaching format for interdisciplinary groups of students, offered at the Technical University Munich (TUM). At the Making & Doing edition, the STS-participants will learn about the creative potential of video games for reflection, e.g. through world-building, storytelling and decision-making.They develop their video game idea thematizing a STS topic by enabling the creative potential of games to integrate societal and ethical aspects. The game ideas can go into the direction of serious games or speculative fiction. During this process, the participants explore how STS lenses can be transformed into the mechanics and storytelling techniques of (video) games, creating STS-infused game ideas for a broader public.Structure of the workshop:First, the participants will receive an introduction to storytelling through games, then some STS themes to choose from. They then start brainstorming and visualizing (through moodboards, sketches and AI generated images) their game idea in smaller groups. During this process the participants will be consulted by the workshop instructors. At the end, the groups will present each other their game idea to see how it is received by potential players and get feedback on their initial ideas.

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Our contribution consists of an exhibition with three artworks, 1 short film, 1 VR game, 1 raspberry pi installation

Abstract:

Technology hype has been the object of STS critique at a time of grossly inflated expectations and promises about artificial intelligence, the metaverse and other technological ‘frontiers.’ Such critical work has been vital to begin to challenge the soft power hype has in materially shaping the future and creating a downstream sense of inevitability, fatalism, or false hope. In resisting hype, STS scholars are now faced with the world-building imperatives implied in the field’s current turn to making and doing: What kind of practices and narratives could meaningfully supplant hype? How do we transition from just calling out snake oil and bull*hit, to creating more grounded, just and hopeful visions of the future? How can STS work empower diverse audiences to engage in critical thinking about the social, political and ethical aspects of emerging technologies? In our project ‘Against Digital Fatalism,’ we engage with these questions through an experimental and collaborative exchange with artists and creative practitioners. The project materialised in three artworks which touch on specific social and ethical issues linked to extended reality and the metaverse, namely digital escapism and injustice, power and financial speculation in virtual worlds, and hopeful and inclusive engagements with the digital. In this contribution we invite the audience to interact with each of these artworks and join us in a playful and collective exchange about hopeful futures.

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Film and discussion with Professor Sarah Hartley (University of Exeter), Filmmaker Tom Law (TomLawSays), Dr Chris Opesen (Makerere University ), and Dr Rob Smith (University of Edinburgh)

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In this session, we screen our second (low-budget) documentary that draws on and informs our qualitative research, and then facilitate discussion on doing STS through film.In 2023, we shot a short documentary film on the governance of gene drive mosquitos in Uganda. We found very few people talking about this genetic technology with most conversations occurring in elite circles, little publicly available information, and a focus on educating communities around the insectary for consent. This situation starkly juxtaposes elite statements inferring that ‘Africans will decide’. Chanan (2007) argues “documentary addresses the viewer primarily as a citizen, a member of civil society and participant in the public sphere”. As such, it is well-aligned with STS ways of making and doing. Our goal was to stimulate debate about technological futures to empower people to develop opinions and debate these futures. We contextualised gene drive mosquitoes by shooting in Uganda, interviewing only Ugandans, and getting their input into the film’s design. We drew on people from our focus group and interview research to hear their voices, aspirations, hopes, and fears, and show how they make sense of the technology and wrestle with it. But documentaries also make claims of truthfulness and are expected to be fair and honest. As critical STS scholars, we are aware of how challenging these claims and expectations are to create. We faced difficult decisions about how to convey knowledge, manage tensions between exposing power imbalances and providing neutrality, and navigate the complexities related to our own positionality.

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A carpet (2x3m)

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We designed a carpet to facilitate discussions on the complex problem of digital inequality. The carpet design is a result of our participatory action research on digital inequalities in Amsterdam (2017-2023). During this research policymakers, ICT designers, and other professionals often asked the question: Who are those citizens with a distance to the online world? Digital inequality was often oversimplified, primarily portraying older individuals lacking ICT skills. This stereotype neglects demographic diversity and fails to recognize that digital inequality affects various age groups, including children. Additionally, the emphasis on skills overlooks that ICT use is influenced by the social (technical) space that people live in, for example, the dominant societal norms and values, and the way in which society is organized. A myopic focus on elderly and individual skills risks ignoring that the structural consequences of digitalization for citizens across different backgrounds remain invisible (intersectional invisibility) and delays measures being taken to remedy the negative effects. The carpet challenge participants (policymakers, researcher, ICT designers and others) to reflect critically on their own assumptions and blind spots trough reflective questions, fostering a deeper situated understanding of the complex problem. Moreover, it helps to identify opportunities for systemic actions, recognizing that digital inequality is not solely an individual responsibility but rather a complex interplay involving macro-societal, meso-organizational, and micro-individual factors.Authors: Nicole Goedhart and Christine Dedding

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Two 90-minute sessions: 1) Introduction and Amsterdam City walking decolonial workshop 2) Development of artistic methodologies, site specific gestures and final walking performance.

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We have been developing walking interventions in multiple historical spaces that interrogate historical trauma. Prompted by the notion of Danse Macabre - an acknowledgment of mortality and the cadenced transience of nature - we are developing interrogative practices that address sites of colonial oppression and occupation via walking performances. Our decolonial methodologies are enhanced by site-specific gestures that hope to pose micro-challenges to paradigms of oppression by seeking human and human-more-than-human solidarities. Performances have taken place walking towards the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, away from the Citadel in Barcelona and were presented at the 4S Conference 2023 in Honolulu, as part of the “Performances and Practices” panel. At EASST 4S 2024, we would like to hold two 90minute sessions. In the first session, we will introduce our artistic methods and introduce our notion of serendipity as a methodology that acknowledges the limitations of our positionalities. In order to inhabit the tension between historical specificities (time-event-place), we will walk around the city, observing transnational and atemporal traces in the hopes of developing an embodied point of view deriving from participatory interactions with local audiences, communities, environments, and his/herstories. Together, and in small groups we will search for performative micro gestures and interventions, exploring potentials for decolonial paths through Amsterdam. In the second session, (which we would prefer to hold after a rest day for reflection) we will co-create a performative walk integrating participants' experiences and gestures and perform this walk with interested participants as a part of the conference.

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A physical installation with some technical setup.

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Artificial Intelligence is being used more and more in the human resource management for selecting, training or evaluating workers. In this making and doing session we will explore questions on fairness of the recruitment process and how AI can mitigate the human bias or exacerbate discrimination. With this installation, we invite participants to experience an initial screening process in hiring activities from the side of artificial intelligence, and their own human side. Participants will firstly read a job description and indicate the ranking criteria that they deem important for the job, for example previous experience, education, language, or other. Secondly, the recruiter AI will make an assessment based on the human input, while the humans go into the black box to make their own selection and ranking of the given job candidates. Thirdly, as they exit the black box, participants compare their human choices with the AI’s choices to see if and how it differed. We finally invite participants to provide feedback on the activity to map how the STS community can help our project, BIAS, to rethink AI-enhanced hiring processes.

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We propose an installation of around a dozen poster size (A0) cityscape photographs that together form an photo exhibition.

Abstract:

What if AI technologies were build by the people, for the people - serving everybody equally well, safe and fair. In short, what if they were tools for conviviality (Illich 1973)? This foto installation explores what a utopian AI technology landscape looks like, inspired by transformations of public space and technologies here in the Netherlands. Through a series of poster-size (A0) contrastive cityscape photographs, we show how Dutch cityscapes transformed over the past decades, from the car-infested molochs of the 70s, into spaces for bicycles, trees and pedestrians of today. Retracing how Dutch landscapes evolved into more convivial spaces: what would a more convivial AI technoscape look like?

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It is a short activity that's a cross between an interactive presentation and an installation.

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As regulation to hold AI accountable picks up steam with the advent of the EU AI Act, we reimagine policy construction as a community learning process rather than a top-down prescription from authorities. This activity invites conference attendees to assemble their idealAI accountability policy by combining snippets from a pool of potential printed options. Participants will select a regulatory scenario among domains of finance, medicine, or recommender-systems and put together text that aligns with the values they want to prioritize for policy. They will physically organize their policy by rearranging fabric pieces with individual requirements onto a corkboard. The policy text samples are drawn from a collaborative research exercise in which a sociology and computer science undergraduates simultaneously designed AI systems and policies governing explanations for inscrutable AI systems. This exercise invites conference attendees to confront some of the same tradeoffs that we found in our research on explainability for AI systems, like the balance between comprehensiveness and user understandability, and extend our research into further possibilities. We will pin together each attendee-generated policy on a corkboard and take a photograph. These policies will subsequently be uploaded to a website that will feature a digital version of the activity to gather input from the general public. Additionally, users will be able to view and comment on the configurations of other AI policies.

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Experimental short film (run time 19 minutes; viewable at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eALcW68eQ9w)

Abstract:

How have Western non-governmental experts used remote sensing to make public knowledge about the Iran and North Korea nuclear programs? From 2018-2019, I conducted ethnographic research to examine how nonproliferation experts gather around satellite images to uncover hidden nuclear objects on distant landscapes. I encountered expert practices that wove optical sensor datasets together with popular orientalist themes to inform public debates about nuclear dangers. But in the winter of 2020 – the pandemic winter – I was unable to continue in-person participant observation. So instead, I turned the lens inward. Holing up in a remote woodshed in rural Northern Michigan, I surrounded myself with all the cameras I could find – the webcams, GoPros, and old iPhones of everyday life – to create my own miniature constellation of optics. With cameras rolling, I then built a physical map of the epistemic community I had studied and tried to locate my own positionality in relation to the subject of my research. What unfolded was a form of auto-ontological surgery that left the deepest fibers of my civic-epistemic identity splayed out on the dissection table. I then edited the resulting footage to produce video notes for the following articles:C.C. Lawrence (2020), “Heralds of Global Transparency: Remote Sensing, Nuclear Fuel-cycle Facilities, and the Modularity of Imagination,” SSS 50(4):508-541.C.C. Lawrence (2024), “Gathering Around the Image: A New Kind of Media Cycle in Nuclear Arms Control,” SSS (accepted).C.C. Lawrence (2024), “Muscle Memories of Revelation: Extending the Imaginative Exercise,” submitted to 4S, Amsterdam.

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We'll quickly explain the rules of the game and then invite a maximum of 15 people to play in 20 minutes.

Abstract:

Corporate influence over the production and the application of science has been well established, especially when it comes to the pharmaceutical sector. In particular, Gagnon and Sismondo's ghost management framework explains how pharmaceutical companies strategically employ eight categories of capture (scientific, professional, regulatory, media, market, legal, civil society, technological) to shape scientific knowledge, mitigate risks, and sway public opinion and policy discussions in alignment with corporate interests.To make this conceptual framework more accessible to the general public, we've adapted the ghost-management framework into a board. Our endeavor involves the participation of civil society groups, government regulators, investigative journalists, and scholars in uncovering instances of corporate influence through real-life case studies presented in an engaging and gamified format. Unlike the conventional monopoly game, participants step into the shoes of different predesigned stakeholders and navigate through encounters with eight corporate ghost management captures. These encounters feature tailored real life case narratives aimed at deterring players from reaching a societal goal centered on public interests, democracy, and fairness.As players advance through the game and encounter ghost management captures in defensive sectors, they can strategically deploy energy boost cards, each serving a unique purpose. For example, "contextual integrity" cards enable players to hold stakeholders responsible (Nissenbaum, 2004), transparency cards contest confidential business information, and social value cards activate "double movements" (Polanyi, 1944). These cards aid players in comprehending corporate sway, revealing conflicts of interest, challenging legitimization strategies, scrutinizing knowledge production mechanisms, and devising theoretical frameworks to foster trust and public values.

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documentary film/ visual ethnography with a short introduction to the film and a Q&A session afterward

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What does research feel like? How does the place where knowledge is created shape the knowledge itself? And what knowledges remain neglected because we cannot transform them into written words? Academia has become a precarious work environment in which it is difficult to gain foothold and pursue a consistent career: fixed-term contracts, competitive pressures, financial constraints, mobility demands. Yet researchers manage to create spaces within this system where research becomes possible. In this ethnography from the field of Science and Technology Studies it gets clear: Research is first and foremost a sensual affair – a practice, a feeling, a place.BUILDING SPACES is a documentary film that follows four international social scientists in different positions through their lives in academia. It explores their already ‘post-digital’ workspaces, where every process is shaped by the digital – how we research, read, and write today is inextricably linked to the digital technologies we use to do so. Cinematically, it is about the mediation of a sensory experience: research, whether artistic or academic, is always a search, an emotional balancing act, a manual labour, a material work. The film puts into practice what it shows. Not all knowledges can be found in books, some must be learned through experience and discovered through filming.

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Workshop

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The sense of urgency surrounding climate change is increasing in research and policy domains, yet many citizens feel distanced from science and politics. Traditional science communication methods do not seem to reduce the distance between citizens and (knowledge) institutes. In our project “Climate Research in Dialogue”, we experiment with citizens’ assemblies as a new form of science communication to bridge this gap between society and science and to better align scientific knowledge with citizens’ lived experiences. In this workshop, attendees will experience how citizens' assemblies can be used as a new form of research and science communication. We will guide attendees through a practice citizens’ assembly regarding the roles climate scientists (can) take in mitigating the climate crisis and on preferred methods to engage with citizens and other societal actors. The aim of this session is to help attendees to reflect on their roles as researchers in society, how their roles can help address the climate crisis, and to provide an example of how they themselves can engage with societal actors. After this practice session we will hold a brief presentation on our own citizens’ assembly experiences and findings. We will discuss: 1. Theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the climate citizen assemblies;   2. Activities used during the assemblies and how the assemblies may help build relations between scientists and citizens; 3. Preliminary findings and themes from the climate citizen assemblies (e.g. proposed climate science research-questions; roles and collaborations between citizens, scientists); 4. Efforts to ensure social impact, e.g. through cross-sector collaboration.  

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The presentation will take the form of a discursive/performative presentation, where visual elements (images and films) will go together with a discursive spoken text.

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My contribution to Making & Doing involves a discursive/performative presentation of my ongoing artistic research project, 'People will miss the Earth.' Combining discursive and visual elements, the presentation will explore how creative practices can offer a critical approach to the contemporary colonial rhetoric of the New Space Age. Simultaneously, the presentation will delve into alternative approaches to Deep Space.Advocates of this multi-planetary ideology believe that humans can replicate life conditions in extreme environments through bio-regenerative technologies, fostering synergy between scientific research and space colonial settlements. However, my work seeks to highlight the limitations of this approach, with a particular focus on scientific and anthropological experiments related to extreme habitats. This includes observing the psychological effects of isolation in 'The Antarctic Gardener' (a short film based in Antarctica, focusing on a BLSS facility) and studying the impact of zero gravity on plant organisms in 'Beyond Gravity,' an installation in progress. In my new project, 'The Sea Which is Our Universe,' I am examining space analog facilities in the desert instead, juxtaposing the idea of colonial terraforming with feminist theories of worlding and sympoiesis.Deep space becomes a place of speculation about the essence of life and what makes it thrive. Rather than a territory to conquer, it becomes a place to increase awareness of our rootedness on Earth. By comparing ourselves with the alterity of an extra-terrestrial environment, we can observe life as a result of a situated, unique relational system rather than artificially reproducible mechanical relations.

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Collaborative workshops will involve four groups, each comprising a maximum of seven persons, making a total of 28 participants.

Abstract:

Post-Growth Control Wars (PGCW) is an ethnographic futures living lab and a collaborative action-research method that integrates strategic, systems, and transition design, play, generative conflict, and performance. It conceptualizes individuals and groups as key holders and catalysts of socio-technical imaginaries. Consequently, it aims to achieve several objectives.The primary goal is to create conditions conducive to observing how contested visions of the future and controversies surrounding degrowth and sustainability converge, colliding and co-evolving together in the realms of industry, governance, technology, and the economy.Additionally, PGCW aims to stimulate social (and scholarly) imagination by simulating sociotechnical scenarios framed by planetary boundaries. It seeks to challenge modern optimism rooted in the myth that techno-scientific progress can solve all challenges, including the futures it produces. PGCW also strives to decolonize imaginaries captured by technocapitalist logics and to rehearse socio-technical transition strategies towards a post-growth society.PGCW represents the latest iteration of "Control Wars," a method previously focused on automated technologies, technological sovereignty, data commons (including an adaptation for primary schools), climate change, and the potential consequences of Covid-19. Since 2018, it has been implemented in academic, activist, artistic, and design contexts in various cities, including Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, New York, Eindhoven, Porto, Mexico City, Amsterdam, and Bilbao.Specifically, PGCW has been conducted on three occasions, serving to build an archive of the post-growth imagination, create stories about post-growth transitions, identify commonplaces within the post-growth imagination, develop a catalog of possible transitional tactics, and re-enchant the discourse and potential practices around degrowth.

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Short abstract:

interactive exhibition and workshop

Abstract:

This contribution introduces a sub-type of Serious Games, namely templatic games. As the name suggests, Serious Games are played not for entertainment but for other purposes, e.g. awareness raising, education, or collaboration. They offer alternative ways of engaging with audiences in an interactive manner. Usually, developing a Serious Game is complex and time-intensive, and without relevant experience in game design a playable outcome is not guaranteed. However, in a templatic game the materials, rules and choreography have already been tested, and new games can easily be created by swapping the content that underpins the game. Two examples of templatic games will be on display: Transition Games are board games where players take on the roles of stakeholders and walk their tokens through transition phases while uncovering scenarios that either help or hinder the transition. Regen-D Games use wooden disks with QR-codes linked to multimedia materials that describe different aspects of a sustainability/regeneration initiative. They are particularly useful for dissemination and for onboarding new project members. In a one-hour workshop (with choice of two time slots), I take participants through a process of test-playing a selection of published games, followed by planning the publication of their own research in game form using the templates. We also discuss contexts of use for these games, e.g. developing games with students or playing through research findings with non-academic audiences. Outside the workshop timings, the game materials remain on display as an interactive exhibition for people to explore them on their own.

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Short abstract:

Participatory workshop. Participants will be divided into small groups to work on the tasks collaboratively.

Abstract:

From tracking apps and wearables, to ‘smart’ condoms, hormonal profiling and implantable microchips, digital contraceptive technologies offer a potential ‘solution’ to unintended pregnancy, limited pharmaceutical innovation, and enduring user dissatisfaction of modern pharmaceutical contraceptives. Femtech companies leading this development appear to be user-led and pride their technologies for meeting various user-defined contraceptive priorities, such as non-hormonal, non-invasive, and user-controlled. While a promising glimpse of hope for a landscape long overdue for change, the transformation of pregnancy prevention from a pharmaceutical drug to a direct-to-consumer digital technology brings about novel risks regarding efficacy, safety, security, and accountability. Indeed, the very ‘novelty’ of these technologies and their ‘transformative’ potential is debatable given the homogeneity of Femtech companies, the similarity of tracking apps to fertility-awareness methods, and their position within a broader landscape of retrogressing reproductive rights.This workshop invites participants to collaboratively explore contraceptive development trajectories. Adapted from a creative qualitative workshop, it is structured around three tasks: (1) prompts participants to think about the past and present by mapping contraceptive methods along a self-defined timeline; (2) introduces various ‘novel’ digital contraceptives for discussion and mapping; and (3) invites participants to speculatively imagine ‘what’s otherwise’ for contraception. While framed around transformation, innovation, and timelines, this workshop ‘troubles time’ by engaging with non-linear trajectories of change that draw attention to the continual co-production of past, present, and future timescapes. Inviting diverse perspectives to reconfigure the future of contraception aims to challenge a solutionist agenda and the normative values ascribed to ‘old’ and ‘new’.

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Short abstract:

workshop and demo

Abstract:

We will explore the use AI agents based on GPT4 in Theatrical Technology Assessment (TTA) methodology, focusing on co-designing the agents with participants to simulate stakeholder interactions. On the technology side, the format leverages on the LangChain framework and draws inspiration from models like AutoGPT to create a sandbox for stakeholders-to-AI agents interactions. The co-design process allows for the exploration of stakeholder negotiations on STS issues, such as AI regulations, through simulations that capture diverse perspectives and outcomes. TTA, embedded within the Constructive Technology Assessment framework, facilitates proactive learning among stakeholders at the nascent stages of technology development, highlighting the importance of stakeholder engagement in steering technology. The workshop will employ an iterative design process for AI agents, balancing the views of technology promoters and critics, and experimenting with how simulated outcomes are presented to the public. This approach is informed by new materialist philosophies (and discussion of post-qualitative research), particularly Karen Barad's agential realism, emphasizing the entangled nature of material and discursive elements in societal outcomes. By simulating technoscientific negotiations, such as those around AI governance, we aim to produce insights into the ethical, social, and political dimensions of technology, fostering a participatory public discourse reminiscent of the 18th century's public demonstrations of science and technology. This workshop sets the stage for a rethinking of public engagement in science and technology, proposing AI-simulated negotiations as a method for integrating societal considerations into science and technology debates and regulation.

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Interactive workshop

Abstract:

Speculative design provides us with new visions for doing old things, yet, despite admiration for innovative and imaginative ideas, it can be difficult to imagine technology outside of the political systems, economic structures, and social, racial, and gendered inequalities that shape our realities. These realities are part of a world that was designed without the needs of marginalized and vulnerable communities in mind. Unfortunately, dominant technologies reflect this erasure. Borrowing from Black Studies, speculative fiction, and tools for creating social and racial justice, this workshop explores the role Black speculative worldmaking can play in speculative design. Our workshop is a creative experiment that seeks to leverage the varied skill sets of members of the 4S community to build new methods for new technologies. Anthony Dunne's Conceptual Design technique uses textual analysis to discover essential concepts, characterize design features, investigate processes, interpret intentions, and compare design discourse. This method analyzes conceptual design works' symbolic and metaphorical meanings and contextualizes them in cultural and theoretical contexts. In contrast, the Utopia Deck approach uses card decks to imagine radical possibilities. Its step-by-step process encourages creative thinking and adaptation to unique needs, making it ideal for community development and education. For customization and inspiration, the Utopia Deck has Topic, Forecasting, Liberation, Methods, and Tools cards. Through Black speculative fiction, conceptual design, the Utopia Deck, and collective visioning, this two-part workshop will design frameworks that reimagine new systems of data, surveillance, AI, and institutions more broadly.

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Short abstract:

Interactive installation incorporating audio-visual storytelling devices, field equipment, background videos playing on loop, posters, booklets, food tasting. 4 media players will be used for 4 different containers with 4 earphones attached.

Abstract:

How can we understand concerns for sustainable development, food security and sovereignty beyond longstanding mainstream agricultural production schemes? When we focus too much on yield and feasibility, we ignore the mutual meanings of landscapes that were (or are becoming) plantations and the species that live (or used to live) within them. To foreground these relations, our interactive installation complicates olives by revealing more-than-human, infrastructural, and sociopolitical relations through the method of interactive storytelling. Employing a plethora of sounds, images and materials, we invite the participants to lose their sure footing in an oily world, where olives stop becoming just food and are called to appear and become significant in their other forms; as seed, fruit, tree, wood, symbol, landscape, companion and tool. We invite you to taste, touch, smell, listen and walk through the olive stories of our representation (do not mistake it for a concrete reality!). We complicate the matter of knowing and producing olive oil, as well as of knowing sustainability and development through comparing, contrasting and reflecting on stories of olive entangled lives and landscapes in Turkey, Palestine, Italy and Spain. As we invite olives to become agents in their own stories, we also make noticeable the agency of other non-humans. Instead of mastery over them, or a letting be that falls within the old dreams of a pristine nature, we propose an uneasy companionship and mutual affection within the smelly, messy and oily relations of future olive landscapes.

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Short abstract:

Photography exhibition

Abstract:

There is a lot of evidence that the dialogue between academic and local stakeholders can significantly enhance the conservation of biodiversity. However, local knowledge continues to be marginalised even though local communities are the ones most directly affected by the implementation of environmental policies. Mutual engagement and dialogue between different types of knowledge are crucial for robust and just policies. Ethnoornithological studies are being carried out around the world in recognition of contributions of local knowledge as tools for conservation. Thus, the aim of this project is to investigate the local knowledge of the community of Conde (Bahia, Brazil) about Pyrrhura griseipectus (endemic endangered parakeet) as part of a process of management and conservation of the species, with a view to engaging the community in decision-making processes for environmental and community identity conservation. To achieve the main objective of this project, activities are being carried out with the local communities: participant observation; interviews to inquire into the local knowledge about the biology and ecology of the the parakeet population; workshops and artistic methodologies to increase community engagement; experiments with nest boxes with the aim of recovering the species with the participation of members from the local community. Community participation is crucial not only to build relations based on trust, as provided by long-term conviviality and direct engagement, which may ultimately have consequences to the success of conservation efforts, but above all to provide a space for the voice, perspectives, and decision making of communities often silenced in conservation governance.