Workshop “After Networks: Reframing Scale, Reimagining Connections”

If “Expanded STS” can also be understood as a platform – in a sense that it gathers different disciplines that eventually go back to their original research field – the workshop “After Networks: reframing scale, reimagining connections” proposes a direct connection with the KHK c:o/re’s 2024 research theme. The interdisciplinary program, combining art and internet studies, also 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.

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 program 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.

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

You can find an overview of the speakers here.

Program:

April 16:

16:30 – 18:30: Artist talk
Eduardo Kac: Dialogical Art on Earth and in Space
Moderated by Nathalia Lavigne

Recognized for his pioneering work in the fields of telepresence, bioart, holographic poetry and space art, Eduardo Kac has been developing artworks since the early 1980s that explore the idea of what he calls “dialogical art”. His work articulates processes of communication between different spheres and agents, and between both humans and non-humans, such as animals, plants and robots. In this talk, Kac will focus on his recent works developed in outer space, showing their connection with earlier works from the 1980s and 1990s in which he expanded communication in art to include the non-human. The lecture is followed by a screening of the documentary Inner Telescope, a Space Artwork by Eduardo Kac (2017, 35 min), directed by Virgile Novarina.

April 17:

9:30: Introduction of the project “After Memory” (more info here)
Nathalia Lavigne and Lisa Deml

10:00 – 12:00: Keynote
Lori Emerson: The Future of the Internet is a Future of Networks
Moderated by Ana María Guzmán

In the occasion of the launch of “Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook” (Anthology Editions, 2025), Lori Emerson will present some case studies gathered in the book: networks that existed before or outside of the internet, digital as well as analog, IRL as well as imagined, state-sponsored systems of control as well as homebrew communities in the footnotes of hacker culture. She is the Associate Professor of Media Studies and Director of the Intermedia Arts, Writing, and Performance Program at the University of Colorado Boulder and Director of the Media Archaeology Lab. She is also co-author of THE LAB BOOK: Situated Practices in Media Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), author of Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (University of Minnesota Press June, 2014), and editor of numerous collections.

12:00 – 14:00: Lunch and coffee

14:30 – 16:30: Roundtable
Tatiana Bazzichelli, Geert Lovink, João C. Magalhães, Alex Wermer-Colan, and Bruna Zanolli: Local networks: reframing scale
Moderated by Nathalia Lavigne

In times when the ‘extinction internet’ notion has been claimed from a “platform-in-the-age-climate-collapse perspective” (Lovink, 2024), which other telecommunication infrastructures could be developed in this current configuration? How can a more nourishing sense of community be recreated beyond the social disintegration naturalized on social media? Gathering five researchers who have been working on disruptive understanding of digital systems, this roundtable will focus on a community-centered perspective of networks and their importance in the current context. Geert Lovink and Tatiana Bazzichelli will talk about the organization format of the Institute of Network Cultures and the Disruption Network Lab – founded by each of them in 2004 and 2014, respectively. Focusing on the challenges around inequalities affecting particularly the Global South, Bruna Zanolli will present recent projects developed by indigenous communities in Brazil, while João C. Magalhães will discuss the potential use of deliberative democracy, and in particular of online citizens’s councils, to address platform speech governance issue. Lastly, Alex Wermer-Colan will talk about the coalition Philly Community Wireless, co-created by him in the outskirts of Philadelphia in 2020.

Have a look at the event poster here.

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]