Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper navigates how the tokenisation of images, from abstract art to AI-generated visuals, challenges norms and becomes a tool of resistance. By transcending traditional representation, token images on social media complicate meaning-making by reconfiguring values through technology.

Paper long abstract

This paper navigates the relationship between tokenisation, digital images, and activism, exploring how social causes connect to visual forms that signal moral and cultural values. These tokens require tangible forms to anchor them, even if that form is abstract—whether an image, a computer-generated interpretation, a hyperlink, or an absence that resists the web of relations its users might hold. The image form of a token allows users to represent their moral values as a material or semiotic connection to "imago." However, digital images' attachment to value shifts across symbolic systems, language, code, and its readability as visual objects through as machines and screens.

A Flusserian interpretation is employed to analyse how to "read" images, particularly through critical code studies, framing the black square as key examples of this. Abstract computational images convey violence and become tools for visual resistance. The suppressed value inscription challenges traditional semiotic structures. The paper concludes by exploring how the intersection of aesthetics, AI, and activism resonates with computational visibility through operational images and generative tokens, such as All Eyes On Rafah, contributing to new forms of visual resistance. Both works highlight the complexity of abstract activism as a visual form and virtue signalling on social media.

Keywords: tokenisation, digital resistance, black square, AI-generated images, abstraction, Flusser, Malevich, visual culture, activism.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper presents a politico-aesthetic artifact (re-search.site), a bespoke platform for exploring search infrastructures in workshop settings, which engenders participants to share diverse forms of expertise through experimentation with socio-technical systems as hybrid-knowledge practices.

Paper long abstract

The actors and dynamics of search are changing with the uptake of LLMs aka chatbots, which often provide one answer to all queries or an overview, instead of ten hyperlinks. To grasp the interplay between digital and data infrastructure and the politics embedded within these (search) artifacts (Winner 1980; Star 1999), new methods are needed to understand information/ knowledge infrastructures and to bring about technological literacies. Transient as well as opaque, what are some of the criteria determining search results, how can they be captured, compared and critiqued?

This presentation highlights results from workshops (Living Labs), where participants (re)search their interests with a bespoke platform (https://re-search.site) that enables users to visualise, compare and interpret their search results based on different browser/search engine/operating system settings and a ‘chatbot rodeo’ that facilitates a comparative interface of responses from the same prompt. Applying a ‘feminism of the broken machine’ (Sharma 2020), the data visualisations (outputs) shed light on certain power dynamics that are hidden in the backend databases when engaging with knowledge infrastructures of search. This tactical media platform can offer other patterns of technology, with the détournement of corporate technical systems through instilling ‘hacking culture norms to create these critiques,’ which in turn ‘offer new social meanings that can alter society’ (Star Rogers 2022). A politico-aesthetic artifact, the re-search.site is a media artwork and a functional web interface, which also engenders the participants to share diverse forms of expertise through experimentation with socio-technical systems as hybrid-knowledge practices that can foster change.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines artworks engaging AI biometrics as hybrid epistemic objects, turning machinic visibility into biographically authored exposure - intentional, and negotiated, not merely extractive or imposed. It reworks how biometric seeing is staged, shifting the terms of being seen and by whom.

Paper long abstract

Artistic engagements with biometric surveillance have largely been examined through the lens of resistance and evasion. This focus corresponds to a dominant artistic repertoire that seeks to disrupt or escape machinic recognition. This paper proposes a different reading. Rather than resisting machinic visibility, certain contemporary artworks reconfigure these technologies into a site of biographically authored exposure. I argue that these works function as hybrid epistemic objects that redistribute expertise and intervene in how truth claims about biometric identity are produced.

Using a non-oppositional STS lens on human–machinic vision engagements (de Vries 2017; Lee-Morrison 2019), I examine two projects — “Self Portrait from Surveillance Camera” by Irene Fenara and “Gram’s Faces” by Heather Dewey-Hagborg. Selected as critical cases, not representative samples, within a wider mapped corpus of 160 artworks, these works repurpose AI-based biometric technologies not to escape them, but to author forms of biographical presence through them. Within these human–machine–space assemblages, exposure becomes intentional, situated, and negotiated.

By analysing artworks and artists’ statements, I show how these technologies are transformed from instruments of capture into epistemic devices for producing situated truths about lived biography. In doing so, these works challenge understandings of algorithmic biometrics as purely extractive or imposed, instead demonstrating how aesthetic practices can reclaim and redistribute the authority to make claims about biometric vision and identity. By framing these artworks as hybrid epistemic interventions, the paper shows how artistic exposure reworks how biometric seeing is staged, shifting the terms of being seen and by whom.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper traces an object itinerary of Christoph Büchel’s activist artwork Barca Nostra to investigate artistic readymades as hybrid objects that overcome the separation of aesthetic and political judgements.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory and Karen Barad’s notion of agential intra-action, this paper seeks to determine how artistic readymades (objects taken directly from the world and reframed as art) function as hybrid objects that can foster the production of knowledge in interaction with other actors. For the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), Christoph Büchel presented Barca Nostra, the wreckage of a migrant boat that sank in the Sicilian Channel in 2015. Büchel’s action sparked fierce debate and a series of secondary activist actions on the exhibition site. The relational entanglements that formed around Barca Nostra can be viewed through Barad’s ethico-onto-epistem-ology, which shows that all world-making is deeply ethical. New Materialism proposes that if ‘things (and humans equally) are in a constant state of becoming, vibrating or extending out along lines and across webs of being’, then we can ‘trace those movements and resonances to understand their distributed agency’ (Bauer 2019). An object itinerary follows ‘the routes through which things circulate’ (Joyce and Gillespie 2015). Barca Nostra is a politico-aesthetic object: it functions at a remove from politics, but it is inherently political because it reflects upon and interacts with the world. Aesthetics and politics ‘overlap in their concern for the distribution and sharing out of ideas’ (Bishop 2012). By tracing an object itinerary, the different intra-actions of Barca Nostra, this paper will show that not only does art provide a different lens to epistemic objects, but how art objects themselves are knowledge producing.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper explores Latour and Weibel's “thought exhibitions,” held at the ZKM in Germany, from an ethico-onto-epistemo-logical perspective. It investigates how its hybrid exhibits, created by fusing scientific evidence and art, engaged the public in the cosmopolitics of the New Climate Regime.

Paper long abstract

In recent years, cultural institutions in many parts of the world have dedicated themselves to exploring matters of global concern like climate change through art and technoscience, including the ZKM Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. Here, between 2002 and 2020, STS scholar Bruno Latour and artist/curator Peter Weibel organised four “thought exhibitions.” Through these spatio-aesthetic experiments, they sought to challenge the foundations of European Modernity and dualisms underpinning it (e.g. nature/culture, object/subject, human/non-human, etc.). Using the museum space as a test-bed for complex ideas, these exhibitions aimed to encourage visitors to contemplate new ways of understanding, inhabiting, and acting within a planet that appeared no longer inert, stable, and a passive background to human activity, but had become an active, reactive agent in human history. How to live under what Latour (2017) called the “New Climate Regime” was explored here through hybrid objects created through artist/scientist collaborations. This paper explores Latour and Weibel’s “thought exhibitions” and some of the artworks created, fusing evidence and aesthetic materials through the lens of Barad’s (2007) ethico-onto-epistemo-logical perspective, which holds that ethics, knowing, and being are closely intertwined in world-making (p. 203). This allows us to ask: what kind of world-making did these “thought exhibitions” attempt? What kind of knowledge-claims did their hybrid artworks support? And finally, how did these thought exhibitions figure in Latour’s endeavour to create a Dingpolitik aimed at composing a better common world?

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

How can we account for aesthetic and embodied forms of knowing within research and policy frameworks? My research looks into the relational aspects of living labs by noticing aesthetic, embodied, spatial, temporal, and more-than-human ways of knowing at an ‘impulse lab’ in Vienna.

Paper long abstract

As knowledge in Living Labs often emerges through aesthetic and embodied practices, it raises key STS questions about expertise and governance of science – technology – society relations. A central concern to my research is how diverse forms of knowing can be accounted for within research and policy frameworks. From a feminist STS perspective, it thus becomes important to look for points of intervention and ways of living together well.

The discourse on Living Labs has expanded in recent years, as have the interpretations of their characteristics. While some scholars highlight persistent issues of temporality, governance, and continuity (Hossain et al., 2019), others explore how these very challenges contribute to the experimental character of Living Labs and describe them as ‘constitutive tensions’ (Schikowitz et al., 2023).

My empirical analysis focuses on aesthetic, embodied, spatial, temporal, and more-than-human knowledges (Davies et al., 2012; Mattozzi & Parolin, 2021) at an ‘impulse lab’ in Vienna. Spatially located in a warehouse scheduled for demolition, the Nordbahnhalle was a collective experimentation initiated by architects and urban planners from the Technical University of Vienna, activated and maintained by the Halle’s many residents. Researchers, students, artists and small business owners among others share their ‘impulse lab’ experiences and tell a good story about the relational arrangements that enable some social groups, embodied activities, and attachments while constraining others (Star & Ruhleder, 1996; Farías & Blok, 2017; Marres, 2007.)

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

We discuss how the taste of food as an "epistemic object" was investigated through an "artistic" research process in the context of a citizen science project with "gustographic" investigations and a participatory exhibition offering experiments for shaping one's own ways of tasting.

Paper long abstract

The paper reports on an exhibition on "Taste!" that was done in October 2020 at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin. The exhibition comprised a series of experiments allowing participants to experience how the taste of food changes when they modify elements of the situation of eating (e.g. soundscape, use of artefacts, body posture, social interaction, mental frames). As such the exhibition was an aesthetic installation, it exposed sensory experiences, and it exposed the participants' agency in creatively shaping these experiences. I discuss the exhibition as art (aesthetic practice of creating intense sensory experiences) providing a different lens to epistemic objects (what is taste? how does it happen?). The exhibition was part of the citizen science project "Schmeck!", which investigated how the aesthetic experience of food comes about, how it is influenced, and if and how it can be changed (for example, with a view to sustainability, i.e. learning to relish seasonal, regional, vegan, insects etc.). We developed an "auto-gustographic" research approach and found that it is "the situation that tastes" not certain food objects or biographically determined subjects. Tasting appeared as a complex aesthetic practice, too complex to be instrumentally controlled - but therefore open to creative experimental shaping. That is what the exhibition was to convey, not in words, but in the medium of sensory experience itself, as embodied findings made by participants themselves (published as Voß/Guggenheim 2019: Making taste public; Voß et al. 2023: Provoking Taste, in Voß et al. (eds.) Sensing Collectives).

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper presents an arts-based speculative ethnography of a Cuba governed by prediction markets. The project stages encounters between algorithmic forecasting and Afro-Cuban divination, examining how hybrid epistemic practices reshape authority and expertise in governing uncertain futures.

Paper long abstract

Oracle Index is an arts-based research project exploring how futures are produced, interpreted, and contested in a speculative near-future Cuba governed through cryptocurrency-based prediction markets. Developed in collaboration with Cuban media artist Néstor Siré as part of a research project on cryptocurrencies and informal economies, the project builds on years of ethnographic research on Cuba’s informal digital infrastructures. It proceeds through extrapolation from these realities, extending existing trajectories such as the rise of prediction platforms like Polymarket, Cubans’ use of cryptocurrencies for everyday survival, and the geopolitical pressures shaping the island’s economy.

In our scenario the Cuban state—facing a renewed total U.S. embargo—adopts futarchy, a governance model in which governments define political goals while prediction markets determine which policies are most likely to achieve them. This allows the state to attract foreign crypto investment and channel it into the national economy while maintaining political control. Because these markets are restricted to foreign investors, however, Cubans, the population most affected by the embargo, are excluded and generates parallel betting cultures, repurposing state prediction data as the numerical basis for La Bolita, the island’s historic underground lottery or engaging Santería divination practices.

Oracle Index treats speculative narrative as a method for STS inquiry. The project assembles a hybrid epistemic object, part ethnography, part speculative design, part installation, that functions as a politico-aesthetic device staging encounters between algorithmic prediction markets and vernacular divination. Through this hybrid object, it examines how expertise, evidence, and authority are redistributed when societies begin to govern through probabilities.