A Field Trip to the Wandering Mines: Strange Ecologies and the Green Work of Environmental Mitigation
MATTHEW N. EISLER
In the Rhenish mining-industrial complex, the past, present, and future of geological and human time intersect. Over 30 million years, intertwined processes of evolutionary biology and geo-biochemistry produced thick seams of brown coal in the region now known as the Cologne Bay (Kölner Bucht) that began to be intensively mined from open pits from the late eighteenth century. As elsewhere, coal-based industrial enterprises enabled asymmetrical social development and came with environmental costs that human beings sought to mitigate with increasingly elaborate infrastructures of waste management. The resulting hybrid ecosystems exist in a state of fragile balance that requires constant effort to maintain, as a mid-May field trip to the Garzweiler and Hambach mines illustrated.
Matthew N. Eisler
c:o/re Fellow 01/25 – 12/25
Matthew N. Eisler is a lecturer in the Department of Humanities at the University of Strathclyde. He researches how ideology and policy inform practices of energy and materials conversion and shape social relations and environments.
I am a historian of clean and green technology and have become interested in the historical sociology of the “green work” of environmental mitigation, a project I am developing as a KHK fellow. I was curious to hear the perspectives of my companions on this question. The field trip was led by the retired hydrogeologist H. Georg Meiners, joined by Lars M. Blank, head of RWTH Aachen University’s Institute of Applied Microbiology, and Victor de Lorenzo, RWTH Kármán-Fellow and professor of research in the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), where he heads the Laboratory of Environmental Synthetic Biology at the National Center for Biotechnology. Georg spent much of his career investigating how the lignite mines affect local water quantity and quality while Lars and Victor research microorganisms capable of metabolizing industrial waste. They were eager to get out of the laboratory and lecture hall and into the field to see just what the microbial world is up against.
What we found was a vast “organic machine,” a term coined by the historian Richard White to connote large-scale industrial infrastructure in its ecological context. If the history of environmental mitigation can be characterized by a single phenomenon, it is ‘displacement:’ solve one problem and another pops up elsewhere unexpectedly. In the Rhenish mining complex (Reinisches Braunkohlerevier), we witness a cascading series of displacements. A key set of problems issue from the high sulphur content of lignite. In the 1970s and 1980s, lignite-burning German industry emitting sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides caused acid rain in faraway Sweden. Fitting power plants with scrubber technology fixed that problem but did nothing to mitigate emissions of climate-changing carbon dioxide. Moreover, sulphuric mine tailings can acidify soil and ground water. To neutralize this form of pollution, miners mix lime into the spoil.
Managing such problems is complicated by the vast scale of open cast mining. Garzweiler is an artificial canyon, and canyons can shape airflow and create their own weather systems. Georg had warned us to bundle up because it would be windy, and at Garzweiler, that wind is harvested as a resource. Energy planners have ringed the mine-canyon with dozens of giant wind turbines, exploiting an unintended ecological consequence of this industrial enterprise.
These winds cause numerous accidents on nearby motorways and also stir up particulates, a less-discussed problem of open cast mining, observes Lars. At Garzweiler’s eastern rim, where overburden is slowly processed into massive lime-laced mesas by giant earthmovers, a bouquet of hoses spray thousands of liters of water a minute in an effort to tamp down dust. But it is impossible to water all of the 40 square kilometers of the mine’s operating area. Scrubby vegetation growing atop the reclamation mesas fixes some of the particulate matter into place and I wonder aloud if this brush belt will grow into a green lung. Georg responds that this proto-forest is only an interim measure that will disappear according to the master mitigation plan of the terraformers of the Cologne Bay. From the 2030s on, the mine-canyons will be decommissioned and filled with water diverted from the Rhine, creating deep lakes in a project that could take until the end of the century and has many unknowns.
A less visible but equally problematic effect of the mine is on the realm of subterranean water. Garzweiler is surrounded by a vast network of wells, pipes, and pumps working constantly to lower the water table to enable coal excavation. This is a delicate operation. If the pumped water is not properly reinfiltrated back into the ground, says Georg, local forests, streams, lakes, and the underground springs for which the Aachen area is famous could be damaged or even destroyed.
The Cologne Bay is also a rich and important agricultural region that has become contested terrain in an unequal clash between industrialism and eco-activism. For a century, the mining enterprises followed the coal seams, and their historical progress, as depicted on topographic maps, resemble channels carved by giant coal-hungry worms munching their way through the landscape. These “wandering mines” have destroyed a number of farm communities in their path.
We visit the village of Keyenberg, a flashpoint in high-profile regional demonstrations against mine operator RWE in 2021 that became a monument to the uneven pace of environmental progress. Keyenberg is a ghost village. From the mid-2010s, it was slated to be engulfed by the Garzweiler mine and began to depopulate but when energy planners decided to phase out lignite, the abandoned village was left intact. Today, the place has the uncanny feel of a Chernobyl-like exclusion zone. A sign on one house reads “zu verschenken,” or in English, “to give away.” Such houses can be obtained for free, at the price of fixing them up and living near a windy and dusty mine-canyon. Georg says there is talk of housing war refugees here, and amidst the boarded-up buildings there are signs of life. One person, perched on a scaffold, repairs a house that boasts a well-tended hydrangea garden, activities suggestive of yet another form of green work heralding Keyenberg’s possible revival, or reincarnation.
The ongoing management of some of the wandering mine’s wastes, the conversion of its windy microclimate into clean energy, and the gradual reclamation of a portion of its disrupted hinterlands poses the conundrum of how to interpret the co-construction of such awesome desolations and their ingenious eco-infrastructures of life support. Contemporary environmental discourse imposes a dualistic moral-ethical framework of good (green) and bad (non-green) behaviors against which we are supposed to judge ourselves and others, declare a position as optimist or pessimist, and offer normative visions in a calculus that, as some argue, has centered generalized global processes over diverse local experiences of environments and environmental despoliation.
The case of the Rhenish coal belt calls attention to a particular set of conflicts, contradictions, and puzzles, and what the environmentalist Val Plumwood called “shadow spaces,” occluded from our subjective ecological visions, that invite further investigation. Human history would seem to vitiate the prospect of circumspect do-no-harm environmental activism advocated by the philosopher Arne Naess. In the imagined perspective of geological time, human beings might be perceived as acting in a near-simultaneous spasm of furious environment-altering activity.
It seems to me that the path to the kind of wise interventions Naess had in mind starts in gaining awareness of the perversities and paradoxes of myriad local projects of environmental mitigation. Understanding how human beings build organic machines like Garzweiler and its environs, learn how these strange ecologies operate as amalgams of human and natural agency, and live with the consequences might be a modest but necessary prelude to deciding the next set of mitigating moves.
I thank Georg Meiners for hosting and guiding this event and reviewing a draft of this essay, and Victor de Lorenzo and Lars Blank for enriching the experience with their insights and companionship.
Melodic Pigments – An Experiment on the Relationship between Sound and Color
Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) capable of modeling and replicating human sensory associations? This question was explored at the KHK c:o/re on April 28, 2025, as part of the science-art installation experiment “Melodic Pigments: Exploring New Synesthesia” created by the Japanese media artist Yasmin Vega (Tokyo University of the Arts) in cooperation with KHK c:o/re alumni fellow Masahiko Hara (Institute of Science Tokyo).
The goal of the installation experiment is to explore the relationship between sound and color through the phenomenon of synesthesia, in which one sensory perception involuntarily triggers another. The primary focus is on chromesthesia, a form of auditory synesthesia in which sounds evoke the perception of colors.
During the performance, Yasmin Vega played electronic music using live programming, while an AI model trained on sound-color associations predicted and visualized corresponding colors in real time. The AI model used in this project was trained on subjective data reflecting Yasmin Vega’s personal associations between sound and color. Throughout the performance, the AI processed incoming sounds every three seconds and determined the corresponding colors based on the pre-trained data, thereby creating a fluid interplay between auditory and visual elements. The colors chosen by the AI were shown on a series of hanging light tubes and as morphing pattern on a computer screen.
The installation experiment seeks to explore the AI’s ability to model and replicate human sensory associations. The focus is on exploring internal visualization processes and the sensory capabilities of machines. Yasmin Vega’s performance demonstrated that the AI was able to recognize and replicate human perceptions while generating color-sound associations that matched the artist’s expectations.
This installation experiment builds on previous works on the integration of artistic strategies into science and technology that KHK c:o/re alumni fellow Masahiko Hara has engaged in during his fellowship. In January 2024, he presented the art installation “Unfelt Threshold” developed in collaboration with the artist Aoi Suwa that explored the perceptual capabilities of machines in response to unpredictable visual stimuli. Through these experiments, Masahiko Hara aims to open up new perspectives at the intersection of materials science and nanotechnology within scientific engineering. The interplay between science and artistic practice reflects a central research interest of the KHK c:o/re, which investigates how artistic methods can contribute to epistemic questions within an expanded framework of science and technology through performances such as “Melodic Pigments”.
Interview with Yasmin Vega
How do you perceive sound and color?
When I listen to a high-pitched sound, I imagine yellow. When I listen to a dark sound, like dark bass, I also imagine a dark color, like dark green or like deep purple. The volume of the sound also changes how I perceive it. If I listen to a loud sound, I imagine red. And even if I listen to the same melody, if it’s played with different instruments, I also imagine a different color.
What surprised you most about the visualizations of the AI?
What surprised me the most was how often the AI’s visualization matched the color that I actually imagine when I’m performing. And it almost felt like the AI could understand my personal sense of color. From this whole performance, I realized that how useful it can be to work with AI when it comes to expressing something that’s really personal and hard to explain to others or share with others.
What do you think about AI and art working together? Where do you see challenges?
I wanted to use the AI just as a tool in my artworks. I felt that if I collected the training data by myself and developed the model by myself, then using AI is just like using the tool. So, the final artwork was really my work. And I didn’t feel like just writing the prompt and letting the AI to generate the image is really artwork. That’s why I originally wanted to control the AI as much as possible, but now I feel a little bit more relaxed about it. Now I’m looking for the unpredictable results that come when I can’t freely control the AI. I can say that I’m not so cautious anymore.
One challenge I see is the amount of the data. This time I only used 300 samples to train the AI model. There are so many sounds in the world, so it’s basically impossible to cover all of it. But improving the model’s accuracy doesn’t automatically mean that the artwork itself gets better. So, I think the creative value comes from something more than just how smart or how accurate the AI is.
Photos and video by Jana Hambitzer
Second Funding Phase for the Käte Hamburger Kolleg: Cultures of Research (c:o/re)
The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) has renewed funding for the KHK c:o/re at RWTH Aachen University for four more years.
The KHK c:o/re is an international Center for Advanced Studies in philosophy, sociology and history of science and technology and the first Käte Hamburger Kolleg based at a technical university. Since 2021, it has explored the transformation of research cultures in science and technology and develops a methodological approach to strengthen the integration of the various disciplines in science and technology studies. This takes place in a close exchange between the humanities and social sciences and the life, natural, technical and engineering sciences.
Beginning in May 2025, the center will start its second funding phase under the direction of Professor Gabriele Gramelsberger and Professor Stefan Böschen with continued support from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
“It’s just wonderful that the KHK gives us a platform that allows us such unusual freedom in our research,” says Gabriele Gramelsberger. “This has to do with a number of important boundary conditions. On the one hand, generous funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research allows us to invite a large number of fellows from all over the world every year to work with us on fundamental questions in science. Second, we have a great team that not only supports the work but also enables us to work together on our research goals. Finally, we receive exceptional support from the Rectorate of RWTH Aachen University, which regards the work of the Kolleg as an important asset for its strategy for excellence.”
The overall aim of the center is to investigate the impact of digitalization and globalization on contemporary research cultures, and to develop a theory of “cultures of research” from a situated, historical, and comparative perspective.
In the second funding phase, the basic research question is to what extent digitalization and globalization as universal drivers of transformation set in motion dynamics of standardization of science and “research cultures” – or whether the diversity of research cultures and the varieties of science are not increased precisely by digitalization and globalization. To address this question, the central concepts of “digitality/complexity,” “globality/varieties of science,” and “expanded science and technology studies” will be explored in three research lines in collaboration with international fellows.
“We can look forward to four more exciting years,” says Stefan Böschen. “We will certainly cultivate even more freedom for individual and joint research than we have done so far. In addition, the Kolleg allows us to further develop and strengthen our international networks related to our research topics. In this way, we hope not only to achieve insightful research results, but also to support the development of a special epistemic culture at our University.”
An interview with Gabriele Gramelsberger and Stefan Böschen looking back on the past funding phase and reflecting on the goals and expectations for the second phase can be found on our blog.
Quo vadis, Cultures of Research?
ALIN OLTEANU AND THE C:O/RE TEAM
The Käte Hamburger Kolleg: Cultures of Research (c:o/re) celebrated itself, as it completed the first 4-year cycle of funding and is now successfully entering a second funding cycle. The center is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) within its framework program for the humanities and social sciences “Shaping the Future”. On March 25-27, 2025, we were delighted to get together for a conference targeted on the specific but encompassing theme of this center, namely Cultures of Research, which, we dare say, has recently become a more prominent academic topic due to the center’s efforts.
Who are we? All of us – c:o/re team members and fellows, both current and alumni, with a scientific advisory board that has steered the center’s activities. Almost all c:o/re fellows, who have carried out research here over four years, were present. This enabled a fascinating, for us, intersectional and inter-paradigmatic academic dialogue, the kind that makes the object of Cultures of Research. Chaired by the c:o/re team, fellows and scientific advisory board members have presented their research in approximately 40 talks. It was a most enjoyable opportunity for us to discuss, in hindsight, what emerged from four years of sustained academic work, having started from scratch, and how we see the center evolving in the future.
Alin Olteanu
Alin Olteanu is an Associate Professor of Semiotics at Shanghai International Studies University. Until July 2024, he worked as a a postdoctoral researcher and publications coordinator at the KHK c:o/re.
Many of us, team members and alumni fellows, deem the conference not just useful, but necessary. c:o/re has become an important dimension in the work of several of us, intellectually and institutionally. As such, gathering altogether is as important as the regular meeting of many themed academic associations. c:o/re has opened new career opportunities and perspectives for several of us. The center was formative and instrumental in the professional development of many, not just fostering the next step on a linear trajectory, such as from postdoc to tenure, but also enabling shifts in research focus, such as from engineering to science and technology studies. A small minority of alumni fellows has even found long-term academic placement at RWTH Aachen University. Even for such colleagues, who never fully left the center, the conference was needed, to reconnect with others. Many remark that it was particularly interesting to have the chance to dialog with the scientific advisory board in a collective, transparent and friendly setting.
c:o/re directors Professors Gabriele Gramelsberger and Stefan Böschen started off the conference, welcoming what was a heterogenous but familiar gathering. They shared their views on the first four years of this center, the main research topics that channel its work and how these evolved. This ushered in the first keynote, “Historicizing Epistemology” by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, a fitting way to start off a Cultures of Research conference, setting the optics for further conversation.
The conference was structured thematically in eight panels under three main c:o/re study foci, as follows. To address the theme of Change of research practices, we organized the panels Dealing with Complexity and Digitalization of Science. The theme Organizational transformations in science was addressed through panels on Lifelikeness, “Expanded STS” & Euregio, Freedom of Research, Art and Research. The Historical and intercultural comparison of varieties of science was organized into the panels Historicizing Science and Varieties of Science. This thematic organization results from a dialectics that is both top-down and bottom-up, to follow the research center’s rationale and mission, which have been channeled, in time, through the research it produced, one step at a time.
Being part of the c:o/re team, we feel privileged to be in a position to listen to the various studies that have emerged from this research center, observing how they have shaped the center and how its entailed research topics have changed over time. To illustrate, for someone who has been a part of this four-year effort throughout, it was fascinating to listen to dialogues among the scientific advisory board with and across four generations of fellows, who seldomly knew each other. This was not just a meeting of individual scholars, but of academic groups that have crystallized during their respective fellowships, having each developed their research subculture. In this exercise, we saw first-hand the importance of institutional academic funding structured in this Käte Hamburger Kolleg format. Until now, we have worked with these scholars individually and in well-focused formats, such as thematically organized fellow cohorts.
Our festive conference opened the doors to intersectional dialogue, releasing the, however interdisciplinary, strictly focused work of individuals and clusters within c:o/re into a productive and creative chaos. As some fellows attest, while at first glimpse the range of topics brought together under the roof of the center, as seen in this conference, may seem unrelated, they epistemologically connect very well. It is such facilitating of interdisciplinary research that positioned some fellows to discover that the issues they tackle are of interest beyond the disciplinary confines within which they each operate.
We see c:o/re having enabled new and unexpected quo vadis reflections on Cultures of Research, something we can observe regarding the topic of “Expanded STS”, a c:o/re coinage that is drawing growing attention, as an anticipating consideration on scientific and technological futures. Actually, we contend that the conference panel dedicated to Expanded STS demonstrated how much STS is shaped by ‘othering’ and internal demarcation between disciplines (especially the sociology and philosophy of science). However, at the same time, our conversations reveal not only that a multitude of approaches co-exist, dealing with these boundaries differently and more productively, but also that a growing scholarly community is willing to explore new interdisciplinary avenues for cooperation.
We do not want to give the wrong impression that the research carried out at c:o/re is free of contradicting or even controversies – far from it. The conference has seen plenty of contradictory arguments and contestations among the speakers, in a way that accounts for two important matters for any research institute, namely that (1) this center is a platform for free academic debate and that (2) the approaches it hosts are epistemically compatible (that two positions on a topic are contradictory implies that they are mutually relevant). Actually, the one claim on which we found total agreement is that Freedom of Research is currently one of the most important issues for the academe, as well as society broadly. All fellows, team and scientific advisory board members see the urgent need of freely (!) discussing the freedom of scholars in the current context when sociotechnical shifts have consequences for the freedom of speech and expression.
Of course, discussion on what freedom in research is, how it is practiced and how it should be supported institutionally was fiery, encompassing a broad variety of perspectives. Overall, there is agreement that this is how an exercise in academic freedom looks like: we are free and enabled institutionally to contradict each other. We note that the Cultures of Research conference took place shortly after a new US administration started exercising pressure on scientists and universities. Political pressure on academia will undoubtedly constitute a main concern for c:o/re in its second cycle of funding, shaping its future development, as we hope and anticipate that it will shape the future development of philosophical and social inquiry on technology in general.
Unless otherwise noted, photos by Christian van’t Hoen.
The program with all speakers and titles of the conference can be found in this document.
Emotional AI in the Japanese and German Workplace: Exploring Cultural Diversity in AI Ethics as Variety of Science
STEFAN BÖSCHEN, MASAHIKO HARA, PETER MANTELLO AND ALIN OLTEANU
The Käte Hamburger Kolleg: Cultures of Research (c:o/re) is a partner on the project Emotional AI in the Japanese and German Workplace: Exploring Cultural Diversity in AI Ethics, led by Professor Peter Mantello of Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (APU) and funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. The project has been ongoing for about a year, and in January 2025, c:o/re director Stefan Böschen and Alin Olteanu visited Professor Mantello and conducted a first field study in Japan for this project.
As the title claims, this project examines the developments in Emotional AI from a comparative perspective between Japan and Germany. Such research is, of course, conducted in the context of increasingly rapid developments in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). So far, these developments have occurred in waves. Phases of great innovative momentum alternated with phases in which this topic appeared dormant. The recent technological platform of large language models such as ChatGPT suggests that this field is now entering a phase of lasting and disruptive development. The great geopolitical competition between world regions is exemplified in the sudden appearance of China’s DeepSeek. These developments raise questions about the specific technological development under the respective cultural-institutional framework conditions. With its AI Act, the European Union has issued the strictest, risk-based regulation of AI, striking a balance between protection against technology and industrial development, while the United States and Japan appear, at least at the present moment, reluctant to lay down a concrete regulatory policy, preferring instead a market state approach.
Our project offers the opportunity to reflect not only on the specific challenges for science studies, but importantly, in the context of the increasingly quantified workplace, where insights can be fed into the varieties of science discussions pioneered at c:o/re. The following itinerary documents the journey of c:o/re director Stefan Böschen and former team member Alin Olteanu through Japan, together with Principal Investigator Peter Mantello, along with Co-Investigator Hiroshi Miyashita of Chuo University, and the local assistance of Masahiko Hara, an alumni fellow of c:o/re who graciously gave us his time to accompany us from Tokyo to Beppu. The following blog post outlines some of the places and people we met along the way, as well as revealing insights we achieved on this whirlwind one week journey.
Tokyo, Monday, January 13th – AI Workshop
On the 13th of January, a workshop on the Future of AI was held at Ritsumeikan University’s Tokyo Campus at Sapia Tower. Bringing together stakeholders from the private sector, academia, and non-governmental organizations, the workshop explored various risks and opportunities of AI development in Japan. Some of the speakers included researcher Nicole Müller from the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ), who spoke about the implications of Emotional AI and Extended Reality, Imam Habib, managing director of Menlo Park, a venture capital firm, who described the regulatory challenges facing AI start-ups in the field of healthcare, Professor Hiroshi Miyashita, speaking as a data privacy expert who examined emerging legal issues surrounding the nascent but rapidly growing field of neurotechnology and Dennis Tesolat, a spokesman for General Union, Japan’s largest labor advocacy group, who spoke about the increasing employer-employee conflicts due to the adoption of AI management systems by a growing number of Japanese companies.
Tokyo, Tuesday, January 14th – German Institute for Japanese Studies and TeamLabs
In the morning of the 14th of January, we visited the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ) and held discussions with the Deputy Director of Sociology, Barbara Holhus, exploring the possibility of various short and longer-term collaboration avenues between DIJ, c:o/re and other Japanese universities. Having identified various research avenues of common interest, we agreed to meet regularly in the future. The trio of DIJ-c:o/re-APU brings a set of complementary competences to collaborate on the comparative study of research cultures and their technological evolution.
Later that day, before catching Japan’s famous Shinkansen highspeed train to our next destination, Kyoto, we took the opportunity of a mid-day hiatus to visit TeamLab Planets, an interactive museum providing customized AI-powered art experiences. Utilizing state-of-the-art technology, TeamLab Planets offers visitors seven different types of multi-sensory, fully immersive artistic environments. Not only did we all find this immersive experience very relaxing, we also noted how inspiring and motivating it can be, especially for the science and technology scholars.
Kyoto, Wednesday, January 15th – Kyoto University’s Disaster Prevention Research Institute and School of Informatics
On the 15th of January, we ventured to Kyoto University to meet researchers at the Disaster Prevention Research Institute (DPRI). Here we learned from various faculty members of the institute about the latest of current research developments in natural hazard reduction and integrated strategies utilizing the latest modeling software for disaster loss reduction. We were certainly surprised at the institute’s multidisciplinary embrace of artistic interventions in this regard, as a presentation by Naoko Tosa, a resident artist at DPRI, described her fascinating and thought-provoking designs in clothing fabric which weave digital sensors and actuators that are activated by cellular emergency warnings. Afterwards, we were invited to visit her studio, where we had a chance to get a closer look at the technical and conceptual aspects of her creative process in designing ‘disaster couture’.
The day concluded with a visit to the Department of Informatics at Kyoto University, where we met Professor Jaward Haqbeen, an Afghan AI researcher whose work focuses on the use of generative AI in language acquisition in developing countries such as Afghanistan and Nepal. We have discussed plans for future collaboration, particularly on matters of education, language learning and technological literacies.
Osaka, Thursday, January 16th – NTT’s Brain Lab Osaka University
On Thursday, we headed to Osaka to visit one of Japan’s leading research centers for brain science, NTT’s Human Information Science Laboratory (HISF) at Osaka University. Employing a multidisciplinary approach to neuroscience, HISF brings together some of the nation’s top scientists from the fields of information science, psychology, and neuroscience. Utilizing cutting-edge technologies, HISF researchers study the mechanisms underlying human perception, cognition, emotion, and movement with a current focus on understanding how environmental and social information is processed in the human body and brain. These findings are expected to serve as basis for future information technologies that are conceptually new and user-friendly. During their presentation, we learned about technology development in a surprising way, especially about the “Yuragi-Group”. This group originally develops AI according to the unique cultural principle of Yuragi, which not only enables new technical options, but also allows specific value judgments to be realized (the topic of transparency of AI). They have arrived at a unique form of AI programming that differs from deep learning programs in relevant parameters. In this way, an element of transparency has been built into the AI, as the map of affordances (this is, so to speak, the cognitive system of the AI; our formulation) can be transferred to the next system in each case. It relies on a cultural repertoire and the formation of epistemic heuristics.
Beppu, Friday, January 17th – Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University
On Friday the 17th, the team along with Professor Masahiko Hara (Institute of Science, Tokyo) gave talks at Professor Mantello’s home institution, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Beppu, located on the east coast of Kyushu Island in the south of Japan. Targeting a primarily undergraduate audience, Stefan Böschen gave an informative lecture on the importance of science and technology studies. Alin Olteanu engaged students with a talk on the semiotics of Digital Nomadism and Masahiko Hara on his experimental artistic interventions into intelligent interfaces that read human emotions.
Outlook
Like most countries, Japan and Germany share fundamental values such as freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. They also agree that accountability, transparency, human rights and privacy should be built into AI. Yet where the EU/Germany wants a top-down government-led approach to mitigate AI harms, Japan (at least at the moment) prefers an industry/sector approach to give the technology a good chance to grow. At the government level, the annual Japan/Germany ICT Policy dialog forum promotes the need for common rules on AI. Importantly, Japanese labor law is influenced by the German legal contexts. But while German law on AI in the workplace is becoming increasingly precise and restrictive, current Japanese law is vague and ambiguous. Thus, it is important to refer to the development of both EU and German law for comparisons of Emotional AI in the workplace. As Co-Investigator Hiroshi Miyashita argues, “Japan is well-known for importing foreign laws, but a patchwork of copy/paste does not work well in a Japan”.
Concomitantly, our collaborative efforts to date suggest that Japan could offer a third way by heuristically exploring the space of AI development that seeks to create harmonious human-machine relationships, with a focus on AI that preserves human dignity. Keeping this in mind, the journey goes on, and we look forward to further opportunities to collaborate with the project of Professor Mantello, as well as with the DIJ and other stakeholders from both the private and public sector. It is interesting to note that the Japanese government is fueling the evolutionary dynamic in the field by creating far-reaching exchange opportunities for incoming researchers.
Photo Credits: Peter Mantello
Lecture Series Summer 2025: Expanding Science and Technology Studies
We are happy to announce that the lecture series of the summer term 2025 will continue to explore the topic of expanding science and technology studies.
Over the decades, science and technology studies (STS) have developed many different approaches for investigating the relationship between science and society and to dig deep into the cultures of research, the ways science is conducted. For example, scholars have investigated the local cultures and politics underlying processes of knowledge production, the biases and gender divisions informing the organization of academic institutions, or the reception of future technological visions in different publics. There is a rich knowledge. However, it seems that science studies are not well prepared for the transformation challenge, a present-day topic that also affects science, knowledge societies, and the spread of knowledge. Against this background, the purpose of this lecture series is to understand first the transformation challenge and its consequences for science studies and second to explore different pathways of future science studies.
The lecture series will begin on May 7, 2025 with a talk by Nina Frahm entitled “Innovation as Res Publica: The New Governance of Technoscience and its Politics”.
For an overview of the dates and speakers, please see the program.
The lecture series will take place every second Wednesday from 5 to 6.30 pm, in the lecture hall of the center and online via zoom.
If you would like to attend the lectures, please send a short email to events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.
Program
| May 7, 2025 | Nina Frahm (Aarhus University): Innovation as Res Publica: The New Governance of Technoscience and its Politics |
| May 21, 2025 | Hannah Star Rogers (KHK c:o/re fellow): Expanding STS: Art, Science, and Technology Studies (ASTS) |
| June 18, 2025 | Bart Penders (Maastricht University): Metascience as the Social Hygiene Movement of Science Studies |
| July 2, 2025 | Daniela Wentz (KHK c:o/re fellow): Data Behaviorism: A History |
| July 16, 2025 | Carsten Reinhardt (Bielefeld University): How Uncertainty is Rendered Residual |
Call for Papers: History and Philosophy of Computing (HaPoC) Conference
Submissions are open for the 8th edition of the History and Philosophy of Computing (HaPoC) Conference that will take place on December 17-19, 2025, at RWTH Aachen University (Germany) on behalf of the DHST/DLMPST Commission for the History and Philosophy of Computing (HaPoC).
Important dates:
- Submission deadline: June 1, 2025
- Notification of acceptance/rejection: July 31, 2025
- Conference: December 17-19, 2025
About the conference:
Since 2011, the biennial History and Philosophy of Computing (HaPoC) conference series has contributed to building an interdisciplinary community and environment to address the various facets of computing and computing technology. HaPoC aims to bring together scholars from a broad range of disciplines to discuss the past and present cultures, practices and images of computing.
We welcome contributions from researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds, such as history, philosophy, sociology, computer science and software engineering, cultural and media studies, computational sciences, design and art. We invite contributors to share their expertise in respective areas and openly engage in interdisciplinary discussions. Topics include, but are not limited to:
- Historical and philosophical dimensions of computing practices
- Social and cultural aspects of computing
- Computing and the arts
- New forms of computing, such as neuromorphic computing
- Ethical and legal aspects of computing
- Reflecting and historicizing AI
We look forward to submissions by scholars from all career stages and aim at diversity of participants in terms of demographics that include gender, career stage/track, geographical location, and institutional affiliation.
Find out more on the HaPoC website (with links to past conferences).
Submission procedure:
Please submit to hapoc2025@khk.rwth-aachen.de a 2-page proposal in PDF format containing:
- an anonymized abstract (1 page, ca. 700 words) for double-blind review
- a max. 1-page statement of your name, affiliation, research focus, academic activities and optionally publications (max. 5).
Acceptance notifications will be sent by July 31, 2025.
There are no conference fees and travel grants will be offered to early career scholars, further information will follow.
We look forward to meeting you at HaPoC-8 in Aachen!
Keynote Speakers:
Robin K. Hill, University of Wyoming, US
Alexandre Hocquet, Université de Lorraine, France
Liesbeth De Mol, Université de Lille, France
Program Committee:
Arianna Borrelli, TU Berlin and RWTH Aachen, Germany
Jianqing Chen, Washington University at Saint Louis, US
Jack Copeland, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, NZ
Beatrice Fazi, University of Sussex, UK
Gabriele Gramelsberger, RWTH Aachen, Germany
Thomas Haigh, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, US
Andrei Korbut, CAIS Center for Advanced Internet Studies Bochum, Germany
Alfred Nordmann, TU Darmstadt, Germany
Mitsuhiro Okada, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan
Ben Peters, University of Tulsa, US
Mate Szabo, University of Southern California, US
Local Organising Committee at RWTH Aachen University:
Gabriele Gramelsberger (philosophy of science)
Stefan Böschen (sociology of science)
Dawid Kasprowicz (philosophy of science)
Phillip Roth (science and technology studies)
Saskia Nagel (ethics of science)
Torsten Voigt (science and technology studies)
Event Announcement: Workshop “After Networks: Reframing Scale, Reimagining Connections”
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
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.
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.
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.
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].
International Conference “Cultures of Research”
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
| Time | Tuesday, 25th | Wednesday, 26th | Thursday, 27th |
| 09:00-12:00 | Welcome and Introduction | Panel 4 “Digitalisation of Science” Lecture by Franck Varenne | Panel 7 “Expanded STS” & Euregio |
| Panel 1 “Historicizing Science” Lecture by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger | |||
| Lunch | |||
| 13:00-15:30 | Panel 2 “Dealing with Complexity” Lecture by Mary Morgan | Panel 5 “Varieties of Science” Lecture by Alfred Nordmann | Panel 8 “Art and Research” |
| Coffee break | |||
| 16:00-18:00 | Panel 3 “Lifelikeness” | Panel 6 “Freedom of Research” Lectures by Frederik Stjernfelt & Steve Fuller | Departure |
| 18:00-20:00 | Evening Keynote Lecture by Ad Aertsen | Conference Dinner | |
| Reception (finger food) |
Keynote by Hannah Star Rogers at the Materializing Methods Symposium
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.
Photo credit: Molly Renda
If you are interested in participating, please visit the event website.
