Short Abstract:

The Making and Doing program includes a number of films, which will be screened in four parallel theaters on Wednesday afternoon. This is the program for one of those theaters.

Long Abstract:

The films and their times are as follows:

12:00-13:00 - Picturing the invisible: legacies of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in art

13:00-14:00 - Yours in health: digital wellness cultures, essential oils, and gendered conspiracy thinking

14:00-15:00 - Worldmaking: house of Mu

The STS Making and Doing Program aims to give visibility to scholarship that relates to our fields of study and action in generative ways, without adhering to the dominant image of impact. It highlights scholarly practices for producing and expressing STS knowledge and expertise that extend beyond the academic paper or book. Projects in STS making & doing provide equal attention to practices of knowledge expression and knowledge travel as integral to experimental practices of knowledge production. By increasing the extent to which participants learn from one another about practices they have developed and enacted, the initiative seeks to foster flows of STS scholarship beyond the field and expand the modes of STS knowledge production.

Accepted contibutions:

Session 1

Picturing the invisible: legacies of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in art  

Makoto Takahashi (VU Amsterdam) Elisenda Passola i Lizandra (Technical University Munich) Karl Dagher (Technical University of Munich)

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Short abstract:

Short films about the Picturing the Invisible exhibition: a collaboration between artists, policymakers, and academics that makes visible the legacies of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. 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), where it received more than 2100 visitors. This short set of films explores the exhibition and its themes, bringing the artworks, artists, essayists, and curators to 4S / EASST through a series of tours, interviews, and performances. The student curators and co-convenors of this session are: Karl Dagher, Caitlin Kearney, Christopher Kurth, Nicholas McCay, and Elisenda Passola.

Worldmaking: house of Mu  

Andrea Kim (University of Southern California)

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Short abstract:

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.

Yours in health: digital wellness cultures, essential oils, and gendered conspiracy thinking  

Frankie Mastrangelo (Virginia Commonwealth University)

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Short abstract:

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.