Tuning Earths

11.30 Introduction: Jennifer Gabrys
Sensing Environments, Experimenting with Citizenship

11.45 Panel 1: Conjuring Cosmopolitics
Chaired by Helen Pritchard
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Re-animating Soils. Transforming Human-Soil Affections through Science, Culture and Community
Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova, Plant Sensing and Aesthetics
Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas, Zooetics

13.30 Lunch Break

14.30 Panel 2: Punking Participation
Chaired by Lara Houston
Doina Petrescu, Co-Resilience
Beth Coleman Repair and Refusal: Data Publics and Points of Precarity
Alex Murray-Leslie, Deinscribing High-Heeled Shoes to Inform Unusually Wild Sensing and Theatrical Audio Visual Expression of the Feet in Musical Performance [Please note: Prerecorded contribution]

16.00 Panel 3: Tuning Earths
Chaired by Jennifer Gabrys
Susan Schuppli, Playing Back the Histories of Climate Change
Didier Debaise, Speculative Narrations: How Stories Produce Worlds

17.15 Concluding Address: Sarah Whatmore
Chaired by Jennifer Gabrys

Beth Coleman is Associate Professor of Experimental Digital Media and the director of the City as Platform Lab at the University of Waterloo, Canada. She is the author of Hello Avatar (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2011) and a specialist in digital media, race theory, game culture, and literary studies.

Didier Debaise is a permanent researcher at the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) and the director of the Center of Philosophy at Free University of Brussels (ULB) where he teaches contemporary philosophy. His main areas of research are contemporary forms of speculative philosophy, theories of events, and links between American pragmatism and the French contemporary philosophy.

Matthew Fuller is the author of How to be a Geek: Essays on the Culture of Software (Polity). Other titles include Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (MIT), Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software and Elephant & Castle (both Autonomedia). His latest book, How to Sleep: The Art, Biology and Culture of Unconsciousness (Bloomsbury), will be published in 2018.

Jennifer Gabrys is Professor in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Principal Investigator on the European Research Council funded project, Citizen Sense. She is the author of Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (University of Michigan Press, 2011), and Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

Olga Goriunova is Reader and Director of Postgraduate Research at the Department of Media Arts, Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet (Routledge, 2012), editor of Fun and Software: Exploring Pleasure, Pain and Paradox in Computing (Bloomsbury, 2014) and co-editor of Readme. Software Art and Cultures (University of Aarhus Press, 2004).

Lara Houston is a Postdoctoral Researcher on the Citizen Sense project. Lara is a sociologist and ethnographer interested in the politics and poetics of information technology infrastructures. One strand of her work explores practices of maintenance and repair. Beginning at the point where artefacts or systems are unravelling invites different insights about the work of living with and sustaining technologies (or choosing not to).

Alex Murray-Leslie is an academic artist working on wearable musical instruments for the feet and is co-founder of Chicks on Speed, an internationally renowned art band. She has exhibited and performed in key cultural festivals and Art Institutes including: 57th Venice Biennale, MoMA New York, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Centre Pompidiou, TBA 21, Science Gallery Dublin, Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and ZKM, Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe.

Doina Petrescu is Professor of Architecture and Design Activism at The University of Sheffield School of Architecture. Her cross-disciplinary research addresses outstanding questions in architecture and urban planning, focusing on issues of civic participation and gender and the relations between co-production and resilience. She is co-founder with Constantin Petcou of atelier d’architecture autogérée (aaa), a Paris-based interdisciplinary platform conducting practice-based research in participative architecture.

Helen Pritchard is the head of Digital Arts Computing and Lecturer in Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London. Since 2013 Helen has been a member of the European Research Council funded project Citizen Sense. As an artist and geographer Helen’s interdisciplinary work brings together the fields of Computational Aesthetics, Geography, and Feminist TechnoScience.

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa teaches at the University of Leicester. Her most recent book, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) initiates a conversation between feminist critical thinking on practices of care and debates on more than human ontologies and ecological futures. Her current research concentrates on ongoing formations of ecological cultures, looking in particular at how connections between scientific knowing, social and community movements and artistic interventions can contribute to transformative more than human ethics and politics.

Susan Schuppli is an artist and researcher based in the UK, whose work examines material evidence from war and conflict to environmental disasters. Current work explores the ways in which toxic ecologies from nuclear accidents and oil spills to the dark snow of the arctic are producing an “extreme image” archive of material wrongs. Creative projects have been exhibited throughout Europe, Asia, Canada, and the US.

Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas are artists, educators, and co-founders of Urbonas Studio, an interdisciplinary research practice that facilitates exchange amongst diverse nodes of knowledge production and artistic practice in pursuit of projects that transform civic spaces and collective imaginaries. Urbonas’s work has been exhibited at the São Paulo, Berlin, Moscow, Lyon, and Gwangju Biennales; at the Manifesta and Documenta exhibitions; and in solo shows at the Venice Biennale and the MACBA in Barcelona.

Sarah Whatmore is Professor of Environment and Public Policy and Pro-Vice Chancellor for Education at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on cultures of nature and interrogates the ways in which human relations with the natural world are imagined and practiced in the conduct of science, governance and everyday life. She has published widely on the theoretical and political implications of these questions and is an acknowledged pioneer in what have become known as ‘more-than-human’ modes of enquiry.

Citizen Sense is a project led by Jennifer Gabrys that investigates the relationship between technologies and practices of environmental sensing and citizen engagement. Working through participatory and practice-based community research, the Citizen Sense project has monitored air pollution from the gas fields of northeastern Pennsylvania to the congested streets of South East London.

For more information, see citizensense.net and @citizen_sense.