Category: News

Event Announcement: Workshop “After Networks: Reframing Scale, Reimagining Connections”

Hand-drawn sketch showing two nearly identical setups mirrored and connected through cable.

We cordially invite you to the interdisciplinary workshop “After Networks: Reframing Scale, Reimagining Connections”, which will take place on April 16 and 17, 2025 at the SuperC of RWTH Aachen University. The event is organized in collaboration with Nathalia Lavigne, who is currently a fellow at the KHK c:o/re.

Abstract

In the last few years, we have witnessed an unprecedented crisis in the way social interactions have merged with the informational space. The current “space of the world”, as the artificial space of social media platforms has been called (Couldry, 2025), is designed and controlled by corporations with strictly business purposes, putting at risk a sense of community in a devastating way. How can the future of the internet be imagined beyond social media platforms? What can we learn from other networks or other notions of space devised by artists? In which ways can digital communication be grounded on equity, common ownership and sustainability? These are some of the questions that will be addressed during the workshop.

The interdisciplinary program, combining art and internet studies, puts together different approaches on how science and technology are configured in other spheres beyond academia. Gathering scholars, artists and activists who have been working on disruptive understanding of digital systems, this two-day event will discuss alternative ways to reimagine connections in contrast to increasingly monopolistic and financially motivated social media platforms.

The workshop includes an opening artist talk with Eduardo Kac, a keynote speech with the media scholar Lori Emerson, who is launching her new book “Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook” (Anthology Editions, 2025) and a round table focused on a community-centered perspective of networks.

The full program can be found in this document.

If you would like to attend, please register with: events@khk.rwth-aachen.de

Speakers

Photo credits: Maria Silvano

Tatiana Bazzichelli is the founder and director of the Disruption Network Lab, a non-profit organisation in Berlin that explores the intersection of politics, technology and society (www.disruptionlab.org). Her work focuses on whistleblowing, network culture, art and activism. Since September 2023 she is the director of the Disruption Network Institute: Investigating the Kill Cloud, a new centre for investigation and empirical research into the impact of artificial intelligence on new technologies of war, automated weapons and networked warfare (https://disruption.institute). She is the author of Whistleblowing for Change (2021), Networked Disruption (2013), Disrupting Business (2013) and Networking (2006). She was a member of the Transparency International Anti-Corruption Award Committee 2020. In 2019-2021, she was appointed by the Federal Government and the City of Berlin as a jury member for the Hauptstadtkulturfonds (Capital Cultural Fund), and in 2020-2023 she was a jury member for the Kulturlichter Prize, a new award for digital cultural education in Germany. For three years until 2014, she was a curator at the transmediale art & digital culture festival in Berlin, where she developed the year-round programme reSource transmedial culture Berlin and curated several conferences, workshops and art projects.

Photo credits: Doro Zinn

Lisa Deml [she/her] is an independent curator and writer based in Berlin. Initially trained as a journalist, she subsequently worked for public institutions and non-profit organisations, including Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin; Haus der Kunst, Munich; and Ashkal Alwan, Beirut. Most recently, she curated the exhibition ‘Like Snow in the Middle of Summer’ with works by the Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué as part of Manifesta 15 (Granollers, 2024) and the international symposium ‘After Memory’ in collaboration with Víctor Fancelli Capdevila and Nathalia Lavigne and in partnership with ZKM | Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe, 2024). As of March 2025, Marie-Sophie Dorsch and her are joint artistic directors of Halle für Kunst Lüneburg e.V.

Photo credits: Jenna Maurice

Lori Emerson is an Associate Professor of Media Studies and Associate Chair of Graduate Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is also the Founding Director of the Media Archaeology Lab. Her most recent book is Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook (Anthology Editions, 2025), now available for pre-order. She is also co-author of The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies (with Darren Wershler and Jussi Parikka), author of Reading Writing Interfaces, and co-editor of three collections. Her research focuses on uncovering crisis points in past media, or, points at which there was the possibility, never fully realized, for technologies to become “other” than what they are now. Lori Emerson also tries to undo established narratives of how contemporary technologies came to be by looking at artists and writers’ experiments with, for example, network technologies.

Eduardo Kac is internationally recognized for his groundbreaking work in contemporary art and poetry. In the early 1980s, Kac created digital, holographic and online works that anticipated the global culture we live in today, composed of ever-changing information in constant flux. In 1997 the artist coined the term “Bio Art,” igniting the development of this new art form with works such as his transgenic rabbit GFP Bunny (2000) and Natural History of the Enigma (2009), which earned him the Golden Nica, the most prestigious award in the field of media art. GFP Bunny has become a global phenomenon, having been appropriated by major popular culture franchises such as Sherlock, Big Bang Theory and Simpsons, and by writers such as Margaret Atwood and Michael Crichton. In 2017, Kac created Inner Telescope, a work conceived for and realized in outer space with the cooperation of French astronaut Thomas Pesquet. In 2024, Kac’s Ágora flew to deep space aboard the Centaur rocket and is now in a perpetual heliocentric orbit. Kac’s Adsum landed on the Moon in 2025. Kac’s singular and highly influential career spans poetry, performance, drawing, printmaking, photography, artist’s books, early digital and online works, holography, telepresence, bio art, and space art. Read more.

Photo credits: Jana Hambitzer

Nathalia Lavigne [she/her] works as an art researcher, writer and curator. Post-doctoral fellow at MAC USP, she has a PhD from FAUUSP (University of São Paulo), with a dissertation entitled “(De) musealizations and practices of countercollecting in instantaneous archives.” During her PhD, she was a visiting researcher at The New School (NYC) and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. She also has a master’s degree in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies from Birkbeck, University of London. Her research interests involve topics such as social documentation and circulation of images on social networks, cultural criticism, museum and media studies and art and technology. She writes for several art magazines, including Artforum, Contemporary &, ZUM (Instituto Moreira Salles) and Humboldt (Goethe). As a curator, she has held exhibitions such as “Against, Again: Art Under Attack in Brazil” (2020), at Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery (John Jay College, CUNY, NYC) and “Tactics of Disappearance” (2021), at Paço das Artes (São Paulo). Since July 2024, she is a fellow at the KHK c:o/re.

Geert Lovink is a Dutch media theorist, internet critic and author of Uncanny Networks (2002), Dark Fiber (2002), My First Recession (2003), Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012), Social Media Abyss (2016), Organization after Social Media (with Ned Rossiter, 2018), Sad by Design (2019) and Stuck on the Platform (2022). He studied political science at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and received his PhD from the University of Melbourne. In 2004 he founded the Institute of Network Cultures (www.networkcultures.org) at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA). His centre organizes conferences, publications and research networks such as Video Vortex (online video), The Future of Art Criticism and MoneyLab (internet-based revenue models in the arts). Recent projects deal with digital publishing experiments, critical meme research, participatory hybrid events and precarity in the arts. From 2007-2018 he was media theory professor at the European Graduate School. In December 2021 he was appointed Professor of Art and Network Cultures at the UvA Art History Department. The Chair (one day a week) is supported by the HvA. Since early 2022 he is involved in support campaigns for Ukrainian artists, in particular UKRAiNATV, a streaming art studio network, operating out of Krakow.

João C. Magalhães is an Assistant Professor in Media, Politics, and Democracy at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, and an incoming Senior Lecturer in AI and Trust at the University of Manchester, UK. His work concerns the multiple intersections of platforms and politics. In 2024, he started a 4-year project on the (re)making of content moderation, funded by a Veni grant from the Dutch Research Council.

Alex Wermer-Colan is a co-founder, long-time volunteer, and Executive Director of Philly Community Wireless. A resident of North Philadelphia, Alex has contributed to all facets of Philly Community Wireless’ growth and operations, including conducting installs throughout the coverage area, engaging in community outreach with residents and organizations, training and teaching volunteers and staff, overseeing software and networking infrastructure, and developing policies and fundraising strategies to sustain the organization. In addition to his work with Philly Community Wireless, Alex works as the Academic and Research Director at Temple University Libraries’ Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio, where he supports research and teaching with emerging technologies across the disciplines. Alex holds a PhD in English literature with a focus on critical theory from the City University of University of New York’s Graduate Center. Alex serves as the Managing Editor for the Programming Historian in English, and his writing, translations, and dramaturgical work have in such publications as The Los Angeles Review of Books, New Directions, Harpers, New Criterion, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Twentieth Century Literature, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, dh+lib, Debates in the Digital Humanities, The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, Indiana University Press, and Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative.

Bruna Zanolli is a specialist in community-centered connectivity and digital care, grounded in intersectional feminism, social and climate justice, and popular education. With 15+ years of experience and research in community radio, autonomous networks, and local technologies, she works to advance public-interest technologies. Bruna supports community networks in the Global South through the Local Networks project (in collaboration with Rhizomatica and APC) and contributes to Brazil’s telecom regulator Anatel on the Community Networks Committee, advocating for inclusive policies and sustainable funding. A Mozilla Open Web Fellow (2018/19) alumni, Bruna is part of the Transfeminist Digital Care Network and APC’s Feminist Internet Research Network (FIRN). She holds a master’s in Communication and Culture from MediaLab UFRJ and is a dedicated FLOSS enthusiast.


Header Image:
© Illustration of SSTV event “Still Life Alive” (by Carlos Fadon Vicente) which also included “Intercities São Paulo / Pittsburgh” from 1988, organized by the Digital Art Exchange (headed by artist Bruce Breland) [from DAX archives, Carnegie Mellon University, “Intercities Sao Paul-Pittsburgh” Jan. 25, 1988 Letter of May 31 to Breland/Kocher from Matuck FF44].

Special issue of Cybernetics & Human Knowing out now!

Cover picture of a journal.

We are happy to share that the special issue of Cybernetics & Human Knowing entitled “(Dis)entangling Cognition, Meaning, Modeling, and Environments” has been published.

The issue is guest edited by Alin Olteanu, Phillip H. Roth, and Gabriele Gramelsberger and includes many contributions from KHK c:o/re staff and fellows.

The foreword, written by Phillip H. Roth and Alin Olteanu, is available on the journal’s website.

International Conference “Cultures of Research”

Wall of computer monitors displaying colorful data visualizations and workload schedules from a high-performance computing system.

March 25 to 27, 2025, Forum M, Buchkremerstraße 1-7, 52062 Aachen

The international conference “Cultures of Research” takes stock of the first four years of the fellow program at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg: Cultures of Rearch (c:o/re).

During these years, more than fifty international fellows came to the KHK c:o/re to explore the transformation of research in its many facets. Topics such as the digitalization of science, the growing influence of AI on research practices, the organizational transformations in science, the “engineering of science”, and the historical as well as intercultural comparison of “varieties of science” have been widely discussed.

The conference will focus the discussions on these topics in various panels with current and alumni fellows as well as members of the scientific advisory board of the KHK c:o/re.

A detailed program with all speakers and titles can be found in this document.

Program

TimeTuesday, 25thWednesday, 26thThursday, 27th
09:00-12:00Welcome and IntroductionPanel 4 “Digitalisation of Science”
Lecture by Franck Varenne
Panel 7 “Expanded STS” & Euregio
Panel 1 “Historicizing Science”
Lecture by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger
Lunch
13:00-15:30Panel 2 “Dealing with Complexity”
Lecture by Mary Morgan
Panel 5 “Varieties of Science”
Lecture by Alfred Nordmann
Panel 8 “Art and Research” 
Coffee break
16:00-18:00Panel 3 “Lifelikeness”Panel 6 “Freedom of Research”
Lectures by Frederik Stjernfelt &
Steve Fuller
Departure
18:00-20:00Evening Keynote Lecture by Ad AertsenConference Dinner
Reception (finger food)

Get to know our Fellows: Carsten Reinhardt

Man in black shirt sitting in front of a bookshelf.

Get to know our current fellows and gain an impression of their research. In a new season of short videos, we asked them to introduce themselves, talk about their work at the KHK c:o/re and the research questions that fascinate them.

How do chemical residues shape our understanding of uncertainty in modern society? In this video, Carsten Reinhardt, professor for historical studies of science at the University of Bielefeld, explores the concept of residual uncertainty and how unknown long-term effects of chemicals influence scientific debates and regulatory policies.

Check out our media section or our YouTube channel to have a look at the other videos.

Get to know our Fellows: Elisabeth Röhrlich

Woman in blue blouse sitting in front of a bookshelf.

Get to know our current fellows and gain an impression of their research. In a new season of short videos, we asked them to introduce themselves, talk about their work at the KHK c:o/re and the research questions that fascinate them.

What lessons can the nuclear age teach us about regulating artificial intelligence? In this video, Elisabeth Röhrlich, associate professor in history at the University of Vienna, introduces her research on critical parallels between the early nuclear age and contemporary debates on AI governance.

Check out our media section or our YouTube channel to have a look at the other videos.

Fellow Publication: International Organizations and the Cold War

We are pleased to announce that the book “International Organizations and the Cold War. Competition, Cooperation, and Convergence” by Sandrine Kott, Eva-Maria Muschik and KHK c:o/re Fellow Elisabeth Röhrlich is now published and available as Open Access.

The post-WWII era was a time of superpower confrontation and antagonistic bloc politics, but it was also a period in which organized internationalism reached its peak as both an ideological value and a political practice. This open access volume explores how international organizations affected the evolution and nature of Cold War rivalries, and how they in turn were shaped by them.

In seeking to understand the role that international organizations have played as sites of confrontation, this volume also highlights their role as spaces for mediation and negotiation, particularly for middle-size powers and colonized or newly decolonized countries. Through multiple perspectives, based on a diverse array of historical sources, the authors collectively explore how international organizations were able to bridge and move beyond the Cold War divide by promoting common causes and shaping common scientific knowledge, communities and practices.

Rather than focusing exclusively on western-dominated institutions within the UN system which have received the most scholarly attention to date, “International Organizations and the Cold War” highlights the role of lesser-known groups such as the Paris-based International Child Center, the Prague-based International Union of Students and historical actors such as Soviet public health experts and Chinese development specialists. In doing so, it asks new questions about the role of international organizations in securing peace and security across the modern world, and their role as negotiator in times of tension and crisis.

Keynote by Hannah Star Rogers at the Materializing Methods Symposium

Exhibition gallery featuring technological installations in a museum.

On February 20, 2025, KHK c:o/re Fellow Hannah Star Rogers will deliver the keynote at the Materializing Methods symposium at Durham University.

Materializing Methods is a one-day symposium hosted by the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities at Durham University, in collaboration with The Cultural Negotiation of Science research group (Northumbria University) and Hannah Star Rogers (Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen).

What can practice-based research tell us about working with disciplinary cultures that are not our own? With a focus on how contemporary art practices engage with expert cultures in health and biomedicine, this symposium foregrounds questions of method, practice and process in relation to interdisciplinary inquiry. Critical art practices are knowledge-producing practices that shape interdisciplinary research agendas.

“Art’s Work in the Age of Biotechnology” main exhibition gallery, Gregg Museum of Art and Design, NCSU.
Photo credit: Molly Renda

If you are interested in participating, please visit the event website.

Get to know our Fellows: Sam Selma Ducourant

A female person in black smiling and sitting in front of a bookshelf.

Get to know our current fellows and gain an impression of their research. In a new season of short videos, we asked them to introduce themselves, talk about their work at the KHK c:o/re and the research questions that fascinate them.

How does lifelikeness function as a mechanism of control? In this video, Sam Selma Ducourant, who works on the history and philosophy of sciences involved in animal production, discusses her research on the history of battery cages for chicken.

Check out our media section or our YouTube channel to have a look at the other videos.

Freedom of Research Summit: Call for Contributions

On November 5 and 6, 2025, the second edition of the Freedom of Research Summit will take place in Aachen, jointly organized by the Charlemagne Prize Foundation, RWTH Aachen University’s Knowledge Hub, and the Käte Hamburger Kolleg: Cultures of Research (c:o/re).

Panel Discussion “Conflict in Europe’s Academic Landscape and Their Impact on Freedom of Research: What’s New About It?” durng the Symposium 2024, f.l.t.r. Prof Dr Carsten Reinhardt, Miranda Loli, Frank Albrecht and Prof. Dr Stefan Böschen

With the topic “Europe in Times of Division”, the Summit aims to address the complex challenges facing our continent today – ranging from political polarization and geopolitical tensions to economic disparities and environmental divides. How can we navigate these challenges and create a resilient framework for future developments?

This year, we invite you to take an active role in shaping the Symposium. We encourage you to participate in our Call for Contributions to explore the role of science as a bridge-builder in Europe within your specific research field or area of work and to reflect on the importance of academic freedom in this context. The Summit’s Symposium will take place on November 6, 2025 at the SuperC of RWTH Aachen University.

Please have a look at the Call for further information.

The application deadline is March 31, 2025.

If you are interested in a recap of last year’s symposium, here is a blog post.

Lab-Talk: KHK c:o/re meets E.ON Energy Research Center

Group photo of nine people in winter clothes outdoors.

On January 29, 2025, a group of fellows and staff members visited the Institute for Automation of Complex Power Systems at the E.ON Energy Research Center at RWTH Aachen University.

Professor Ferdinanda Ponci and her team gave us insights into their research topics and we learned about exciting EU projects such as EnerTEF. We also enjoyed a tour of the ACS lab and discovered many common interests ranging from AI and AI bias to hardware-in-the-loop topics.

As part of the Lab-Talks, KHK c:o/re fellows and staff visit various institutes at RWTH Aachen University to promote networking and interdisciplinary collaboration between STEM projects and the social sciences and humanities.

photo credits: Jana Hambitzer