2025
September 3, 2025
Lecture at DIAS, 11:00–12:00 in DIAS auditorium
“Philosophizing,” argued the existential philosopher Karl Jaspers (1932), “starts with our situation”. This lecture introduces key concepts, frameworks and figurations in existential media studies by setting out from a moment of interrelated crises in which advanced technologies such as “AI” (artificial intelligence) are hailed as the inevitable solution to all of humanity’s problems. In the digital limit situation (Lagerkvist 2020, 2022)—as the technology is entrusted to be salvaging us or feared to outperform and render us extinct—“the self” is simultaneously encroached from all sides. In a curious way, new “subjects” are meanwhile envisioned to be born inside the models. This raises a series of pressing questions: What conceptions of the self are actually being forged within this powerful socio‑technical imaginary? What norms for being human in the world do advanced technologies bring about, challenge or reactivate? And how can we envision selves and technologies relationally as well as within limits, for promoting an existentially sustainable future with machines?
Amanda Lagerkvist is Professor of media and communication studies, PI of the and guest researcher at the at Uppsala University. She has been appointed Core Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Study, University of Helsinki, for the academic year 2025‑2026. As Wallenberg Academy Fellow (2014‑2018) she founded the young field of existential media studies. Her work has spanned the existential dimensions of digital memories, death online and lifeworlds of biometrics. She currently explores intersections of datafication, disability and self‑hood; and the ambivalent AI imaginary and its relationship to both futures and endings (with funding from the Bank of Sweden and WASP‑HS). In her monograph Existential Media: A Media Theory of the Limit Situation (OUP, 2022) she introduces Karl Jaspers’ existential philosophy of limit situations for media theory. She is the co‑editor of Relational Technologies: In Search of the Self Across Datafied Lifeworlds with Dr. Jacek Smolicki (Bloomsbury, Thinking/Media Series) and she is currently under contract for her new monograph Dismedia: Technologies of the Extraordinary Self with The University of Michigan Press.
May 12, 2025
Talk: Feminisms from the Mexico City periphery: influencing politics from the margins?
Daniela Villegas
When: May 12, 2025, 11:00–13:00
Where: SDU, OD HUM IKV‑Locke Meetingroom (Ø10‑212a‑2)
In 2016 the Primavera Violeta (Purple Spring) covered the streets of downtown Mexico City with hundreds of women denouncing gendered violence and feminicide. Historically, such demonstrations had middle‑class and/or centralised origins; with participants residing in the central boroughs of the city. However, a particular characteristic of the 2016 marches was that the participants actively highlighted their arrival from, and residence in the peripheral working‑class neighbourhoods of Mexico City and the wider metropolitan zone. A question that is immediately raised is how do feminisms and their agents from the periphery articulate proposals and activisms for social transformation? Furthermore, is this in any way distinct from the methods and discourses deployed historically? And how do the categories of race, class, gender and public space converge in these feminists’ activisms? In this presentation I will discuss these questions in light of the newly elected mayor of Mexico City, Clara Brugada who has called to vindicate the periphery in the construction of a caring and feminist city.
Bio: Daniela Villegas is a journalist, feminist and social researcher with a PhD in Gender and Cultural Studies from the University of Sydney. Daniela investigates the intersection of cultural history, feminist activisms, pop culture representations in the media, and gender and politics. Her latest research has focused on the construction of feminist identities from young urban working‑class female activists in the periphery of Mexico City. Specifically, how identities and through them, visual activism, emerges to denounce feminicide (the murder of women because of their gender), and the fight to access abortion. Latin America, its women, and feminist movements are one of her regional areas of expertise.
Organiser: Kathrin Maurer (kamau@sdu.dk)
Event is supported by the Culture, Gender, and Technology Research Group Â鶹ÉçÇø.
May 7, 2025
Critical Techtopia Workshop: Aesthetic and Technological Imagings of the Future
Time & Place: May 7, 2025, 10:00‑14:00
SDU, Ellehammer Seminar Room (Ø28‑600‑3)
The reading group Critical Techtopia invites all interested in the future to join us for a day of speculations. The workshop will consist of shorter presentations on the crossing paths of literary fiction, social concerns, and tech‑innovative gusto: Norbert Krüger: “Utopia and Dystopia in Technologized Elderly Care”; Johan Lau Munkholm: “Technological Imaginaries in Kim Stanley Robinson”; Bryan Yazell: “More or Better Climate Stories? On the (Necessary) Limits of GenAI in the Environmental Humanities”; Gregers Andersen: “Pessimism and Optimisme about future AI”; Leonardo Nolée: “Technological and energy imaginaries in high school students' speculative fiction.” Apart from that, Dylan Cawthorne will generously showcase his sci‑fi artwork related to the topic.
February 27, 2025
Seminar on Representation in/of AI with Fabian Offert
Thursday, February 27, 2025, 19:00‑20:30 on Zoom
Zoom:
Registration is not necessary.
Please contact: Naja Grundtmann for additional info.
The Center for Culture and Technology, University of Southern Denmark and the research cluster “The Aesthetics of Biomachines and the Question of Life” (The Velux Foundations) invite you to join this exciting seminar.
"This Is Your Brain on ImageNet": Embedding and Visual Epistemology – Fabian Offert (UCSB)
"Embedding" is one of the most important techniques in the machine learning toolbox. Polemically, in natural language processing and computer vision, any useful knowledge is embedded knowledge. While the technique itself is hardly more than an advanced form of compression, it is the universality of embeddings that renders them interesting from an epistemological perspective: universal faculties – such as "seeing" in the case of computer vision, which I will focus on in this talk – are extrapolated from particular datasets and represented in an exclusively relational manner. Exactly because of their universality, embeddings live on, sometimes way beyond the lifespan of the datasets that they represent. "Historical" deep convolutional neural network features, for instance, still inform the training of newer generative models by ways of perceptual distance metrics that determine the realism of generated images. By becoming just another part of the training pipeline, however, they cease to appear as distinctive epistemic structures. More importantly, this "historical opacity" of embeddings obfuscates what I propose to understand as a major epistemic shift: scientific knowledge, at least if it relates to the visual, is often generated with the help of cultural data. Embeddings, then, can be seen as a cultural technique, and as a trading zone that spans, surprisingly, not only branches of the natural sciences, but the sciences and the humanities.
March 5, 2025
Guest lecture: Unworlding: Trans* Architectures
Jack Halberstam, Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University, will visit SDU to give a guest lecture on transness, aesthetics, and the dismantling of worlds. The event is sponsored by Center for Køn, Teknologi og Kultur and Center for Amerikanske Studier and will take place on March 5 in Room U46, SDU Campus Odense. The event is free, but please register by March 1.
Registration and further information can be found on the following link:
2024
November 15, 2024
Science Facts/Fictions (SFF): Science Fiction, Robotics Engineering and Policy
DIAS Seminar Room – SDU. November 15, 2024
SFF invites discussion on the interchange between AI, robot science, and science fiction.
SFF will investigate the practicality of speculative science fiction as thought experiments of potential futures and future technologies, but also of the way in which engineering is influenced by science fiction, consciously or unconsciously. In this, SFF also asks: to what extent is there a need to proactively influence legislation based on imagined technology instead of reactively addressing legal problems connected to new technology that has already been introduced?
Deadline for registration: November 8. Please register here:
Event is sponsored by Odense Robotics, DIAS and the Center for Culture and Technology Â鶹ÉçÇø.
2024
November 15, 2024
Science Facts/Fictions (SFF): Science Fiction, Robotics Engineering and Policy
DIAS Seminar Room – SDU. November 15, 2024
SFF invites discussion on the interchange between AI, robot science, and science fiction.
SFF will investigate the practicality of speculative science fiction as thought experiments of potential futures and future technologies, but also of the way in which engineering is influenced by science fiction, consciously or unconsciously. In this, SFF also asks: to what extent is there a need to proactively influence legislation based on imagined technology instead of reactively addressing legal problems connected to new technology that has already been introduced?
Deadline for registration: November 8. Please register here:
Event is sponsored by Odense Robotics, DIAS and the Center for Culture and Technology Â鶹ÉçÇø.
Program – November 15, 2024
9.15 – 9.20: Welcome – Simon Møberg Torp, Dean of Humanities and Sten Rynning, Director of the Danish Institute of Advanced Study
9.20 – 9.30: Introduction – Rune Graulund and Erik Granly (Department of Culture and Language), Norbert Krüger (SDU Robotics)
9.30 – 10.30: Keynote 1 – Professor Adam Roberts, Royal Holloway, University of London: "Robots, Slaves and Orphans"
10.30 – 11.00: Coffee Break
11.00 – 12.00: Science Fiction Inspiring Technical Development
- Anna Nadibaidze (SDU): “Visual portrayals of weaponised AI: How popular is Western pop culture?”
- Kasper Opstrup (KU): “Inner Paths to Outer Space”
- Erik Granly Jensen (SDU): “In the Zone. H.G. Wells on Time and Technology”
12.00 – 12.45: Lunch
12.45 – 13.45: Science and Technology Inspiring Science Fiction
- Jonas Jørgensen (SDU): “Soft Robot Aesthetics – Sensuous Speculations on Future Human-Robot Engagements”
- Robert Ladig (SDU): “From Alternative Post-Apocalypse to Dystopian Cyberpunk Fantasy: Aerial Manipulation in Games Media”
- Christian Schlette (SDU): “Large Structure Production: Its current status and future”
13.45 – 14.45: Keynote 2 – Niels Jul Jacobsen, CEO Capra Robotics: “How a space opera spawned a generation of roboticists”
14.45 – 15.45: Panel – Industry Visions for the Near and Far Future
- Thor Ellegaard Hansen (Odense Kommune): "Odense: The City of the Future, The City of Robots"
- Ole Georg Andersen (Odense Robotics): Emerging robot technologies
- Representative from Universal Robots (to be confirmed)
Background
The first employee of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin was the science fiction writer Neal Stephenson, just as the musician and artist Laurie Anderson was invited to be the first artist in residence at NASA. Similarly, Elon Musk has confirmed that the direct inspiration for SpaceX and the ultimate goal of colonizing Mars has been directly inspired by science fiction, and Tesla’s Cybertruck has been marketed as a car “that looks like the future”. In this, science fiction becomes fact – if not yet in human colonization of Mars, then at least in Space 2.0, as the manner in which the tech industry envisions and designs the way we communicate, interact, shop and drive.
Keynotes
Professor Adam Roberts is an Arthur C. Clarke Award nominee, the author of a range of science fiction novels and academic monographs, including Science Fiction (2005) and The History of Science Fiction (2016).
Niels Jul Jacobsen is the CEO of Capra Robotics. He has worked in industrial robotics and automation for more than 30 years. He is the founding father of Mobile Industrial Robots (MIR) and was on the board of Universal Robots from 2008–2015.
September 13, 2024 13:00‑16:00
Workshop: Submarine Cables: Technology and Geopolitics
When: September 13, 2024 13:00‑16:00
Where: SDU Odense (Room: Comenius)
No registration necessary. Just bring yourself and your students!
Please contact: Erik Granly Jensen erikgranly@sdu.dk or Kathrin Maurer kamau@sdu.dk for info.
Description:
Even though the accelerated development in digital communication technologies in recent decades has been accompanied by abstract images about data in the cloud, the global communication infrastructure is primarily material and consists of huge cable networks laid out on the seabed of the world's oceans (Peters, 2015). 99% of all Internet communications run through fiber-optic submarine cables. These networks have a decisive geopolitical, economic and cultural-industrial significance in the development of contemporary societies, just as they draw decisive technological-historical and geopolitical traces back to the first telegraphic submarine cables from the 1860s (Bridle, 2018). It is the analysis of the contemporary cable networks, its materiality and contexts (geopolitical, economic and cultural-industrial) and its various historical implications that will be addressed in this workshop.
Program:
13:15‑13:30: Introduction: Kathrin Maurer & Erik Granly Jensen
13:30‑14:00: Mette Simonsen Abildgaard (AAU), “Rethinking the breakdown – Greenland, Denmark and their shared digital infrastructure”
14:00‑14:30: Johan Lau Munksholm: “Geopolitics and the Unfurling Politics of Digital Infrastructures”
14:30‑15:00: Coffee Break
15:00‑15:30: Ane Grum‑Schwensen (SDU), “The Great Sea Serpent (1871). H.C. Andersen on telegraphy, oceanography, and the ambivalence of information technology”
15:30‑16:00: Erik Granly Jensen (SDU), “Materialities. Submarine cables, Gutta‑percha rubber and Geopolitics around 1870”
CANCELLED: September 3, 2024
Research seminar with Amanda Lagerkvist
Existential Media: Probing Relational Technologies of Life, Death, Extinction and Everything In‑between
CANCELLED: WHEN: September 3, 2024, 14:00‑16:00, followed by a reception event
WHERE: University of Southern Denmark, Odense campus (DIAS seminar room, V24‑411‑0)
In this seminar, Amanda Lagerkvist will introduce her empirical and conceptual work on the existentiality of (media) technology within the young field of ‘existential media studies.’ The presentation will span examples from death online research to biometric AI, from the AI apocalypse to the relations between selfhood, technology and disability. The talk will ponder these as existential media; that is media that speak to and about our human vulnerability and deep relationality. Hence, as ‘relational technologies’ they not only bring a sense of ‘life’ to the fore, but also invoke horizons of death and extinction. But even when reconceived as media of limits, within (digital) limit situations, the presentation will stress that existential media can in truth be generative and open out to the unforeseen (Jaspers 1932/1970; Lagerkvist 2022).
Amanda’s talk was to be followed by responses from:
• Bjarki Valtýsson, Associate Professor, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen
• Susana Tosca, Professor, Department of Design, Media and Educational Science, University of Southern Denmark
• Johan Lau Munkholm, Postdoc, Department of Culture and Languages, University of Southern Denmark
All attendees are then invited to participate with questions and discussion. Afterwards there would have been a reception event.
Amanda Lagerkvist
Amanda Lagerkvist is Professor of Media and Communication Studies in the Department of Informatics and Media at Uppsala University. She is the principal investigator of the Uppsala Informatics and Media Hub for Digital Existence. As Wallenberg Academy Fellow (2014‑2018) she founded the field of existential media studies. Her work has explored digital memories, death online, and lived experiences of automation.
2023
November 29, 2023
Lecture by Dominique Routhier, postdoc in the Department of Language and Culture and DIAS affiliate
When: Wednesday 29 November 2023, 11:15‑12:15
Where: The DIAS seminar room, Fioniavej 34, Odense campus
All are welcome, no registration is needed.
Art and Automation: Cybernetics, Modernism and the Avantgarde
Abstract: In a 2022 New York Times article, an artist who won a local art competition with an AI‑generated artwork dramatically declared: ‘Art is dead, dude. It’s over. AI won. Humans lost.’ This statement exemplifies a broader sense of anxiety about AI and automation, extending beyond concerns about jobs and livelihoods to encompass fundamental aspects of the human condition: our ability to think, reason, communicate, and express ourselves artistically. In a DIAS lecture presenting his new book, *With and Against: the Situationist International in the Age of Automation*, Dominique Routhier historicizes the automation‑debate by returning to its ‘cybernetic’ origins in the 1950s. The lecture thus focuses on the centrality of cybernetics — a largely forgotten interdisciplinary ‘science of communication and control’ — to the postwar moment in art, and, by way of examples from mid‑century modernism and the avantgarde, argues that the history of automation and the history of art are deeply intertwined.
November 16, 2023
Invitation to Book Launch: The Sensorium of the Drone and Communities (MIT Press)
This event delivers a discussion of how civilian drones sense the world and how they build the aesthetic imaginaries of our communities. For more info, see info on MIT Press website .
October 26, 2023
Workshop: Robots in Science and Fiction
When: October 26, 2023, 14:00‑16:00 (Denmark Time, CEST)
Where: HYBRID EVENT – Physical at University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense; DIAS Seminar Room; Zoom available:
No need to register. Just come by or join the zoom link on day of event.
October 2, 2023
Book Launch: The Ethics of Drone Design
Dylan Cawthorne from SDU TEK invites you to a book launch for The Ethics of Drone Design: How value sensitive Design can create better Technologies.
Hosted by SDU Drone Center at TEK SDU and the Center for Culture and Technology at HUM SDU.
When: October 2, 2023, 13:00‑15:00
Where: Physical event Â鶹ÉçÇø TEK, Ellehammer seminar room (TEK‑28‑600‑3)
August 23, 2023
Antimonument Expanded
3pm ‑ 5 pm (CEST)
The Center for Culture and Technology invites to this hybrid event about monuments and virtual reality:
During recent years, we are confronted with more and more images of protestors undoing monuments that express a colonial or imperialist worldview. These acts of deconstructing monuments became a universally understood symbol of uprising and discontent against publicly inscribed history. The idea for “Antimonument Expanded” ‑ Virtual Reality program aims to create a discussion about the status of such monuments in German speaking societies without physically destroying them. By means of VR technology users can intervene directly on scanned versions of the controversial monuments.
The project is focused on three public monuments in Düsseldorf made by artists formerly on the list of “Gottbegnadeten” by the National Socialist regime. These artists, even after the war, continued to receive large public monument commissions, and they are still in public spaces. Pop‑up workshops will take place in front of these sculptures where visitors can try out the Virtual Reality program. In parallel, artists living in Germany and Austria with immigration background are invited to intervene on these monuments with 3D projection mapping and performance. The concluding exhibition will take place in a gallery where the documentation of these pop‑up workshops can be seen, while giving a platform to further discuss the meaning of the project in current context.
May 24, 2023
Introduction to the Center for Culture and Technology
The Center for Culture and Technology would like to introduce itself to the new merged departments in the humanities at the University of Southern Denmark. As we encourage interdisciplinary research across the humanities, social sciences, and engineering, we are curious to explore new collaborations and find new associates.
If you are interested, join us for a brown bag lunch in O 96 Â鶹ÉçÇø (Campusvej 55) on May 24, 2023 from 12‑13, right after the department meeting. Brown bag means you bring your own lunch. There will be a few short presentations by the leader group of the center and plenty of networking.
No need to register. Just stop by!
See our website /en/cult-tech and follow us on Facebook or LinkedIn!
If you have any questions, please contact Kathrin Maurer (Professor ms of Humanities and Technology and Leader of the Center for Culture and Technology). Email: kamau@sdu.dk
April 28, 2023
Transformers are Large Literary Machines – Leif Weatherby (NYU)
This talk will examine the language production of large language models like GPT systems, emphasizing their ability to create semantically rich strings of unpredictable yet robust meaning. Although language models are not "perceptually grounded," they are actual language users that demonstrate the centrality of what Roman Jakobson called the "literary function" to language in general, and information in particular.
When: Friday, April 28, 2023, 14:00‑15:00 on Zoom
Lecture is on Zoom. Please register with Kathrin Maurer (kamau@sdu.dk), and she will send the zoom link to you!
Leif Weatherby is associate professor of German, Director of Digital Humanities, and founding director of the Digital Theory Lab at NYU. He writes about digital technologies, political economy, and German Romanticism and Idealism. He is the author of the book *Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx*, and is working on a book about cybernetics and German Idealism. His writings have appeared in Critical Inquiry, New German Critique, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other venues, and been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Film Screening and Discussion with Film Director Hans Christian Post (on Zoom)
Documentary Best in the World (2022) by Hans Christian Post hosted by the Center for Culture and Technology Â鶹ÉçÇø
What? Introduction to film, screening *Best in the World*, and live discussion with director Hans Christian Post. Event is on Zoom but you will receive a link in the chat to watch the film in HD quality. The whole event is online.
When? April 12, 2023 at 12:00‑14:00 Danish Time (Film is in English)
Where? It is an ONLINE EVENT. Click on this zoom link on the day and time of the event (12:00 Danish Time) and then you will receive further instructions. No registration necessary.
The documentary Best in the World takes stock of Copenhagen’s evolution through the eyes of architects, activists and writers to assess what is at stake. A cautionary tale for cities across the world. City leaders and urban planners have in recent years come up with ever more concepts as to how our cities can become better, smarter and more attractive to live in and launched large‑scale redevelopment programs in order to achieve this.
The city that maybe best exemplifies this trend is Copenhagen, a city often seen as the best and most livable city in the world. But this was not always the case. Thirty years ago, Copenhagen was an industrial city on the brink of bankruptcy. Through political and architectural engineering the city has experienced a complete transformation, but at what cost? Today, the city is an engine of inequality both within its own borders and in the surrounding countryside. Who ultimately gets to benefit from this desirable new city?
See flyer here.
For more info on film director: Hans Christian Post
For further questions contact: Kathrin Maurer, Professor for Humanities and Technology, SDU, email: kamau@sdu.dk
Seminar: Remote Control
Where: Danmarks Tekniske Museum, Fabriksvej 25, Helsingør
When: 2. marts 2023 kl. 13‑16
Mange hjem er i dag fyldt med digitale teknologier, som er forbundet til internettet. Det drejer sig ikke bare om vores computer eller fjernsyn, men også termostaten, robotstøvsugeren, elkedlen eller ovnen, som vi kan styre fra vores mobiltelefon, også når vi er uden for hjemmets fire vægge. Det rejser helt nye spørgsmål om, hvad et hjem er og hvor kontrollen over det ligger?
Denne eftermiddag vil forskere og kunstnere i samtale med hinanden sætte fokus på, hvordan vi integrerer disse eksternt forbundne teknologier i vores hjem. Hvordan bruger vi teknologierne i dagligdagen? Hvordan ser teknologierne hjemmet og os? Hvilke muligheder og risici følger med, når hjemmet på den måde åbnes op? Hvilke metoder og vokabularer griber forskellige forskningsdiscipliner og kunstneriske praksisser til, når de skal prøve at forstå og artikulere disse lækkende rum?
Hvem
- Søsser Brodersen, Institut for Planlægning, forskningsgruppen Design for Sustainability, Aalborg Universitet
- Sarah Frances Homewood, Human‑centred Computing, Københavns Universitet
- Karen Louise Grova Søilen, Institut for Kunst og Kulturvidenskab, Københavns Universitet
- Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard, Institutt for design, Arkitektur‑ og designhøgskolen i Oslo
- Kristin Veel, Institut for Kunst og Kulturvidenskab, Københavns Universitet
- Kassandra Wellendorf, Institut for Kunst og Kulturvidenskab, Københavns Universitet
- Robert Willim, Institutionen för Kulturvetenskaper, Lunds Universitet
Symposiet er arrangeret af forskningsprojekterne Drone Imaginaries and Communities (finansieret af Danmarks Frie Forskningsfond, SDU) og Uncertain Archives (finansieret af Carlsbergfondet, KU) i samarbejde med Center for Culture and Technology (SDU) og Danmarks Tekniske Museum v. Jacob Thorek Jensen.
2022
Lecture: The Emerging Horizontality of Desakota Urbanity in Hilly Regions in Southwest China: A Utopia Strategy of The Urban‑Rural Sustainable Development in Chongqing
Hongxia Pu
Date and time: Friday, December 2, 2022 at 15:00‑16:00
Location: U92, University of Southern Denmark, Odense
Hongxia Pu is a PhD student in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Planning at Copenhagen University.
Lecture: Terraforming Planets, Geoengineering Earth
Jim Fleming
Date and time: Tuesday, November 29, 2022, 15:00 (CET)
Location: Zoom
See flyer here
The deepening climate crisis is accompanied by proposals to manipulate the Earth’s climate. How are we to assess the merits and risks of such schemes? In this talk, Professor Jim Fleming (Colby College), a historian of the geophysical sciences, discusses the links between the history of planetary manipulation fantasies and attempts to geoengineer Earth and asks what role interdisciplinary and humanities scholarship can play in shaping climate change policy.
Jim Fleming is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Science, Technology, and Society, Emeritus, at Colby College. He has earned degrees in astronomy (B.S. Penn State University), atmospheric science (M.S. Colorado State University) and history (Ph.D. Princeton University). His research interests involve the history of the geophysical sciences, especially meteorology and climate change. He has written extensively on the history of weather, climate, technology, and the environment including social, cultural, and intellectual aspects.
The seminar is organized by the Center for Culture and Technology in collaboration with SDU Climate Cluster and the Environmental Humanities Network.
For inquiries, please contact the main organizer Casper Sylvest: csy@sdu.dk
Lecture: Das Unheimliche in Natur und Technik, untersucht anhand von dänischer und deutscher Gegenwartsliteratur
Sophie Wennerscheid
Date and time: Wednesday, November 23, 14:00‑16:00
Location: DIAS Seminar Room Left: University of Southern Denmark, Odense.
Lecture Dr. Sophie Wennerscheid on the notion of the technological uncanny in Danish and German contemporary literature. Dr. Wennerscheid is Associate Professor in the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics at Copenhagen University.
Lecture is in GERMAN and is organized together with the German Department at the University of Southern Denmark in the context of the “Werkstattgespräche.”
Aesthetics of Machine Vision: Conference
September 15‑16, 2022
Dias Auditorium (V24‑501a‑0), SDU Odense
The conference is physical and free of charge
See the flyer for the conference here
Read the program here
This conference aims to bring together a wide range of scholars, researchers and artists who explore the phenomenon of machine vision and the aesthetics of its modes of perception. Machine vision refers to advanced technologies which have been developed to carry out operations of visual automation in areas of inspection and observation in wider society. In referring to “machine” we include not only the software which underlies contemporary algorithmic systems but also reference the hardware and wider concurrent material relations, which constitute its operations. An increasing reliance on these technologies and its modes of seeing have far reaching cultural and socio‑political repercussions. In investigating the aesthetics of this phenomenon, we aim to engage with these repercussions critically, analytically as well as speculatively. Within this context a recurrent question within the sciences and in visual culture theory thus appears again: Can we see, seeing? In examining the aesthetics of machine vision, we aim to reveal a machinic seeing, thus allowing us to scrutinize the ways in which it intervenes in the world through “more‑than‑human” perspectives.
We are interested in the “aisthesis” of machine vision, in the broadest possible sense of its aesthetic-experiential aspects, its affectivities, bodily entanglements, materiality, and the speculative reflections of such sensoria. We invite scholars, artists, and practitioners to engage with how aesthetics/artworks/sensoria as imaginaries can reflect on the power of machinic sensing within the wider contemporary arenas of cultural, ethical, environmental, and socio-political realms.
Keynotes are Jussi Parikka (Aarhus University) and Luciana Parisi (Duke University), and there will be a special guest artist screening and conversation with experimental filmmaker Johann Lurf (Vienna, Austria).
Venue: The conference will be held physically at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense.
This conference is organized by Lila Lee-Morrison and Dominique Routhier (lile@sdu.dk and dominique@sdu.dk), who are postdocs in the DFF sponsored research cluster “Drone Imaginaries and Communities” () which is led by Prof. Kathrin Maurer, leader of Center for Culture and Technology (). Additional members and organizers are Rikke Munck Petersen, Associate Professor at the Section for Landscape Architecture and Planning, Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management at University of Copenhagen and Kassandra Wellendorf, Teaching Associate Professor at the Institute for Culture and Communication at Copenhagen University.
Book launch of David Nye’s new book Seven Sublimes
May 20, 2022, 13:30
SDU in Odense, Room O100 (only physical)
See here for more info
The event is organized by the Center for Culture and Technology, the Center for American Studies, SDU political history group, and the Environmental Humanities Network. For questions, please contact Casper Sylvest csy@sdu.dk.
About Seven Sublimes
A reconception of the sublime to include experiences of disaster, war, outer space, virtual reality, and the Anthropocene.
We experience the sublime—overwhelming amazement and exhilaration—in at least seven different forms. Gazing from the top of a mountain at a majestic vista is not the same thing as looking at a city from the observation deck of a skyscraper; looking at images constructed from Hubble Space Telescope data is not the same as living through a powerful earthquake. The varieties of sublime experience have increased during the last two centuries, and we need an expanded terminology to distinguish between them. In this book, David Nye delineates seven forms of the sublime: natural, technological, disastrous, martial, intangible, digital, and environmental, which express seven different relationships to space, time, and identity.
These forms of the sublime can be experienced at historic sites, ruins, cities, and national parks, or on the computer screen. We find them in beautiful landscapes and gigantic dams, in battle and on battlefields, in images of black holes and microscopic particles. The older forms are tangible, when we are physically present and our senses are fully engaged; increasingly, others are intangible, mediated through technology. Nye examines each of the seven sublimes, framed by philosophy but focused on historical examples.
Professor Helen Hester: At Home in the Future: Domestic Labour and Speculative Architecture
May 18, 2022, 14:00-15:00
SDU in Odense, DIAS Seminar Room (only physical)
See event poster here
This talk considers mid-century efforts to challenge the organisation of domestic labour through spatial design, concentrating on two case studies – the bachelor pad and the fully automated future home. How are care and housework managed within these speculative visions? Who does it, under what conditions, and using which technologies? And what potential lessons do such spaces have to offer contemporary feminism? Whilst these historical examples may indeed offer us resources for thinking about how best to mitigate the challenges of reproductive labour via living arrangements, this talk will point also to their failures, and suggest that contesting these imaginaries (as much as learning from them) is likely to prove necessary in building a meaningfully feminist conception of anti-work architecture.
Biography: Helen Hester is Professor of Gender, Technology and Cultural Politics at the University of West London. Her research interests include technofeminism, social reproduction, and theories of work, and she’s a member of the international working group Laboria Cuboniks. Her books include Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex (SUNY Press, 2014), Xenofeminism (Polity, 2018), and After Work: The Fight for Free Time (Verso, 2023, with Nick Srnicek).
For questions, please contact Dominique Routhier (dominique@sdu.dk) or Ella Fegitz (ella@sdu.dk)
Seminar: AI til læring
22. april 2022, kl. 12:00–15:00
Gæstecafeen (61.01), SDU Kolding
Seminaret er gratis og åbent for alle.
Se invitationen til seminaret her
Center for Culture and Technology og Center for Learning Computational Thinking inviterer til seminar om AI til læring (AI for learning) – med afsæt i Sidney Presseys citat fra 1933:
“There must be an ‘industrial revolution’ in education in which educational science and the ingenuity of educational technology combine to modernize the grossly inefficient and clumsy procedures of conventional education.”
Sidney Pressey, 1933
I mere end 100 år er maskiner blevet udviklet og anvendt i forbindelse med uddannelse. De senere år har man i højere grad vendt sig mod kunstig intelligens (KI) med det formål at effektivisere og ofte individualisere læring. Dette seminar sætter fokus på fænomenet. Snarere end at gribe til de meget udbredte kritikker af KI som det første, er målet med seminaret at kombinere teknologiske og læringsmæssige overvejelser. Dette muliggør en opdatering af Sidney Presseys grundtanke (ovenfor), som han udtrykte i 1930’erne, mens han udviklede en teaching machine.
Vi undersøger, hvordan varianter af Presseys vision udmøntes i dag, og hvordan og hvorvidt det er en realisérbar vision. Forskere fra tre institutter ved SDU, samt en privat aktør, kommer og holder oplæg, og diskuterer kunstig intelligens, teknologi og læring.
Oplæg ved:
Andrea Valente, lektor på Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Instituttet, er interesseret i læring og computervidenskab – med særligt fokus på simplificering af programmering og Computational Thinking. Andrea har en baggrund inden for computer grafik og formelle metoder.
Emanuela Marchetti, lektor på Institut for Kulturvidenskaber, har en baggrund inden for Interaktionsdesign. Emanuelas forskningsfokus er på e-læring i et pædagogisk perspektiv, og interaktivt mediadesign.
Bo Kampmann Walther, lektor på Institut for Kulturvidenskaber, arbejder med computerspil, nye transmedier og generelt i medieområdet mellem æstetik, kultur og teknologi.
Peter Schneider-Kamp, professor på Institut for Matematik og Datalogi (Datalogi og Datavidenskab og Statistik). Underviser ud fra en multimetodisk tilgang med fokus på kollaborativ læring.
Dion Rüsselbæk Hansen, lektor på Institut for Kulturvidenskaber og leder af forskningsprogrammet ”Pædagogik, kultur og ledelse”. Dion interesserer sig for dannelse, demokrati, magt, styring, etik, æstetik og digitalisering i pædagogik og uddannelse. Henter inspiration i politisk teori, pædagogisk filosofi og sociologi samt i psykoanalysen.
Tashia Dam, pædagogisk direktør i virksomheden Area9 Lyceum og tidligere medlem af Undervisningsministeriets rådgivningsgruppe for teknologi i undervisningen. Area9 Lyceum udvikler uddannelses- og læringsteknologier med fokus på adaptiv læring.
Kontakt:
Kathrin Maurer, Center for Culture and Technology, kamau@sdu.dk
Nina Bonderup Dohn, Center for Learning Computational Thinking, nina@sdu.dk
Seminar: Technology and Critique
March 28, 2022, 14:00-16:00
SDU in Odense, DIAS Seminar Room (only physical)
This seminar aims to engage in an interdisciplinary discussion about the relationship between technology and critique. Critique is certainly one of the humanities’ distinctive skills and we would like to investigate this qualification in light of technology. How can technological developments impact our understandings and practices of critique? How does technology shape epistemological assumptions about the world? In discussing these questions, this seminar aims to explore a notion of technology that could be vital for the understanding of the humanities. Thereby we aim to examine the relationship between humans and technology, the notion of techné and poesis, the historical dimension of technology, as well as the feasibility of technological criticism in light of application.
Bo Kampmann Walther: “Critiquing Critical Technology”
This presentation explores the field of ‘critical technology’. What does ‘critical’ mean, and what exactly is implied when technology takes a critical stance?
Kathrin Maurer: “Techné, Technology, and the Humanities”
This presentation discusses the relationship between technology and humans by analyzing the notion of techné. By emphasizing the worldmaking powers of techné, this presentation attempts to explore a notion of technology that could be seen as an epistemological and poetic practice relevant for the discipline of humanities and beyond.
For questions, please contact: Kathrin Maurer (kamau@sdu.dk)
2021
WORKSHOP on Artificial Intelligence
December 9, 2021
14:00-17:00 (UTC+1)
Location: on Zoom and physical in the DIAS Auditorium Â鶹ÉçÇø-Odense campus
Programme: See event poster here
The thematic focus of the AI workshop is the political dimension of AI and its impact on society, our interactions with AI in our everyday lives, and the question on how AI defines knowledge and intelligence from a philosophical perspective.
Location: Keynote will be on Zoom and screened for physical audience in the DIAS Auditorium Â鶹ÉçÇø-Odense campus. The round table will be physical only in the DIAS seminar room (O-DIAS Seminar room Right V24-411-0) Â鶹ÉçÇø-Odense campus.
Keynote Meredith Broussard will give the lecture “Public Interest Technology, Artificial Intelligence, and Social Justice” (on Zoom) from New York University. For more info about Meredith Broussard’s talk click here and read this here for her bio. Please register for keynote via this Zoom link.
The roundtable will be held physically on site Â鶹ÉçÇø. Please register for the roundtable in advance. The roundtable will feature four outstanding scholars and artists working on different aspects of AI:
Roundtable will be moderated by Lila Lee-Morrison:
Matilda Arvidsson, Associate Professor in International Law, University of Gothenburg
Andreas Refsgaard, Creative Coder and Digital Artist
Bojana Romic, Artist and Media Theorist and Senior Lecturer, Malmö University
Elizabeth Jochum, Head of the Research Laboratory for Art and Technology, Aalborg University
For more info about speakers and topics press here!
Timeline (Zoom/physical)
14:00 Opening – Kathrin Maurer
14:05 Introduction – Brit Ross Winthereik
14:10-14:50 Lecture by Meredith Broussard
14:50-15:15 Q and A – Bo Kampmann Walther
(physical only)
15:15-15:30 Pause
15:30-17:00 Roundtable Discussion – Lila Lee-Morrison
All are welcome!
For information, please contact Kathrin Maurer (Professor mso of Humanities and Technology, Leader of Center for Culture and Technology Â鶹ÉçÇø): kamau@sdu.dk
Event is organized by the Center for Culture and Technology Â鶹ÉçÇø, the Center for Digital Welfare at IT University Copenhagen, and the Danish Institute for Advanced Studies Â鶹ÉçÇø. The event is co-funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark.
LECTURE: Artist Samuel Swope speaks about “Flight and Air as Medium”
October 29, 2021
14:00–16:00 (UTC+1)
Location: Zoom
This HUM-TECH artist talk from Samuel Swope explores how art and engineering can inform one another, and how he has engaged this intersection in his own research and studio practice. Swope is an artist, technologist, and academic most recognized for his research and development of what he describes as aerial art. Merging multiple media and engineering practices, Swope constructs and controls aesthetic systems that work with air and are often themselves airborne. Throughout his research and studio practice he concerns the behavioral dimensions of control processes, and he often engages with issues on hybridity, atmosphere, autonomy, and the non-human. Sculptural drones, flying hybrids, artificial winds, and micro-atmospheres name a few examples. For Swope, aerial art frames air; giving it a perceptible and systematic volume. The convergence of flight and air as mediums for art affects their context as both subject matters and objects of science while also rendering and foregrounding the states and dynamics of air and the airborne in all sensory qualities.
Samuel Swope samueladamswope.com
(b. 1984 in Missouri, USA and based in Hong Kong) Samuel Swope’s recent solo exhibitions include Ready\Set\Fulfill, in collaboration with Andrew Luk, de Sarthe Gallery, Hong Kong (2021); Ecotone, Design Society, Shenzhen, China (2018); Currents, Lotsremark, Basel, Switzerland (2017); Dead Air, 100ft Park, Hong Kong (2017); and Hyperobject: rendering the non-human, duo-solo exhibition with Fito Segrera, Chronus Art Center, Shanghai, China (2016). From 2018–2019 Swope was a Visiting Artist faculty member for the Art and Technology Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Starting Fall 2021 he will join Hite Art Institute at the University of Louisville as a tenure-track Assistant Professor.
See lecture poster here.
For information contact main organizer Dylan Cawthorne dyca@mmmi.sdu.dk
Drone Imaginaries research partners working on experimental filmic research methodologies with the drone
Rikke Munck Petersen, Kristin Veel and Kassandra Wellendorf have from August to October 2021 worked on a series of workshops aimed at exploring filmic research methodologies with the drone and on-ground filming. This has resulted in five cinematic chapters with five different voices that together makes up a short film on the landscape around Gl. Holtegård, on transitions, on cyborgs, on drone filming, on on-ground filming, on caretaking and about experimental research methodologies. It culminates at the screening and panel event:
TOUCH: Film Screenings and Debate on Artistic Research Practices for a Sustainable Future
October 12, 2021
16:00–18:00 (UTC+1)
Location: SPACE10, Copenhagen
October 12th at the CAFx festival
The film and workshop experiments are done by Rikke Munck Petersen, Hongxia Pu, Kent Pørksen, Henriette Steiner, Sofie Stilling, Kristin Veel, and Kassandra Wellendorf, all researchers, landscape architects, media and cultural theorists, filmmakers, photographers at University of Copenhagen, in collaboration with the IGN International Academy 2021 Professors Anne Whiston Spirn, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA and Hugh Campbell, University College Dublin, Ireland.
This event is for free but sign-up is required. The session will be held in English: https://www.facebook.com/events/569701887582170/
The event combines an introduction to artist Jakob Kirkegaard’s work, screenings of recent co-creative film work and a conversation about the film medium – including drone footage – as a means for exploration, collaboration and reflection. Film and sound creates awareness through tangible or imaginary visions and can thereby suggest alternative forms of knowledge and action in architecture.
Panel participants include artists and researchers from Denmark and abroad: Jacob Kirkegaard, Rikke Munck Petersen, Hugh Campbell (IR), Anne Whiston Spirn (USA) and Igea Troiani (UK). The session is a collaboration between CAFx, https://www.surroundingslab.org/explore/touch and the University of Copenhagen.
TECHFORUM: Automation Futures
September 30, 2021
13:00–16:00 (UTC+1)
Location: DIAS Aud. Â鶹ÉçÇø-Odense campus (physical). See poster here.
Automation is changing the way we work, think, and collaborate. For better or worse, robots are widely expected to take our jobs, disrupt industries, and transform society. The possibilities of automation drive economic and technological visions of the future, informing ideas about education, work, manufacturing, growth, and leisure. The fully automated future will be one of self-driving cars, hamburger-flipping robots, and delivery drones. But what is real, and what is science fiction? And what is automation, after all, historically and presently?
See the program here.
For information contact Stig Børsen Hansen stbh@sdu.dk
Lecture by Rosi Braidotti: The Critical Posthumanities
Lecture on April 29, 2021 (on Zoom)
12:00–14:00 (UTC+1)
See PowerPoints from the presentation here.
Read more about the lecture here.
Book Symposium: Philosophers of Technology
Friday, March 19, 2021 (the symposium was held in English)
12:30–15:00 (on Zoom)
The Center for Culture and Technology hosted a book symposium on the newly published Philosophers of Technology (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2020).
Read more about the book symposium here.
Technological Visions of Earth: Remote Visions and Disembodied Landscapes
Friday, March 12, 2021 (on Zoom)
11:00–13:00
See programme and watch the three presentations here.
Read the review here.
Tech Forum #1: Drones, Cities and Futuring
Friday, February 26, 2021
14:00–16:00
Due to Covid-19, the lectures/workshop will be on Zoom.
Read the recap from the workshop and watch the two presentations here.
Infrastructural Sensibilities: Straight lines and the question of following
Wednesday, February 24, 2021
09:00–11:00
Due to Covid-19, the lecture will be on Zoom.
See the poster here.
2020
Opening of the Center for Technology and Culture & Lecture
Friday, Nov 6, 2020
15:00–17:00
Virtual Event
See programme and watch keynote presentation with Mercedes Bunz here.
2019
Workshop – Center for Technology and Culture (HUM-TEK)
January 24, 2019
10:00–14:00
SDU-Odense campus – Vidensbyen
Lecture: “What is the History of Technology as a Field”, Professor David Nye
See the program of the workshop here.