We Make Stuff: Digital Ecologies

Joana Bárbara Fonseca will present research from her PhD project - Digital Eyes - Towards an Aesthetics of Surveillance in Digital Technodystopia, where she considers how new approaches to dystopian fiction, ‘artveillance’ and digital aesthetics can be used to critique digital surveillance technologies and act as new forms of counter surveillance. 

About the speaker

Joana Bárbara Fonseca is currently an FCT fellow in the PhD Program in Materialities of Literature at the University of Coimbra. Her main research focuses on digital technodystopia and surveillance, as concepts, practice and aesthetics – from Orwell to contemporary speculative fiction.

She holds a BA in Portuguese and Lusophone Studies, from the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Coimbra, and an MA degree in Classical Studies on the Ancient World branch, by the same institution, with a thesis about the representation of the feminine on the first latin novels, titled 'Sexo Fraco e Leveza de nimo'.

Coral Manton will present work from her ‘Women Reclaiming AI’ project, an expanding activist art-work that rewrites and reimagines the cultural myths of AI and robotics by developing a feminist AI voice assistant. The work aims to critique the commercial pursuit of humanising AI technologies and challenges the bias, stereotyping and pervasive influence embedded within. She will also discuss her recent work ‘The Infinite Guide’ (2018), a speculative art work and research project, powered by a conversational AI system.

This will be followed by an AI workshop, which will ask participants to explore our present and future relationships with AI, giving you the opportunity to learn about the art of designing a new form of AI agent, along with a discussion about the practice of humanising AI technologies and ethics.

About the speaker

Coral Manton is a Lecturer in Creative Computing at Bath Spa. Her PhD research brings together her background in museums and immersive digital art practice. Her current research, funded by the South West Creative Technology Network, investigates whether an immersive museum collection database can be an effective way for visitors and curators to explore collection objects and historical data.

Her research also explores new ways in which visitors can interact with the collection database and whether visualising the collection in an immersive way can be useful for curators' understanding of the collection and extracting multi-layered narratives for exhibition. She is developing prototypes with Birmingham Museums as part of the master planning process for a proposed redevelopment of the museum.

Beny Wagner will present his film Outside (2017) and discuss how the themes of metabolism, waste, language and media materiality that arose through the making of the film have informed his AHRC-funded PhD research, which investigates the historical emergence of the concept ‘metabolism’ as a prism through which to study the reciprocity between moving image and the life sciences.

About the speaker

Beny Wagner is an artist, filmmaker and writer. Working in moving image, text, installation and lectures, he constructs non-linear narratives which investigate the ever shifting boundaries of the human body. His research themes have included: language, ecology, histories of science, media archaeology, agricultural production, the politics of waste. He is currently working on a long-term collaborative project together with Sasha Litvintseva.

Wagner is currently a PhD candidate at the Archaeologies of Media and Technology Research Group at Winchester School of Art, Southampton University in association with Centre for Media Research, Bath Spa University. He is also a senior lecturer at Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam and has been a guest lecturer at several other academies around the world. Wagner graduated from Bard College in 2008 and was a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academy in 2015-16