Relational Technologies, Technological Relations – An interdisciplinary assembly on existential challenges of AI and biometrics
Project Rooms
Curator: Jacek Smolicki and the Uppsala Hub for Digital Existence, in collaboration with Färgfabriken
Participants in the exhibition: Joanna Zylinska, Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter, Maria Hellström Reimer, Tania Ruiz, Mahmoud Keshavarz, Pedro Oliveira, Max Björverud, and Jacek Smolicki.
February 7 17.00–21.00: Exhibition opening and public program.
Technology has always been with us and within us. It has shaped our relationships with each other and with the world around us since humanity’s beginning. However, the recent acceleration in the development of computing technologies, increasingly driven by automated algorithms and artificial intelligence, has reconfigured many of these relationships in unprecedented ways. Machine-based, AI-driven quantification and biometric measurement of human and non-human lives, behaviors, and practices are just some examples that prompt us to ask: In today’s techno-cultures, how do we relate to each other and our shared environments on personal, social, political, and even ontological and existential levels? How do technologies—and those who shape them from front to back—negotiate, mediate, and manipulate these relationships?
Relational Technologies, Technological Relations emerged from discussions held as part of a research project titled BioMe: Existential Challenges and Ethical Imperatives of Biometric AI in Everyday Lifeworlds, funded by WASP-HS led by Professor Amanda Lagerkvist at IM/Uppsala University. The project’s central aim has been to investigate the experiential range of encounters with these technologies, focusing on both their possibilities and their challenges and vulnerabilities, in order to examine the urgent ethical imperatives they pose for a networked humanity.
This event marks the conclusion of the BioMe project by focusing on how artists, critical media practitioners, and other creative individuals and collectives engage both practically and conceptually with automation, surveillance, life-measuring technologies, and the biometrically orchestrated realities of everyday life. Through diverse perspectives on relationality, these works will interrogate the current hype around DNA analysis services, shed light on the opaque logic of Netflix content categorization algorithms, explore links between modern and historical anthropometric systems, question border-control technologies, critically engage with artificial voices, and reconnect with the biodiverse forms of intelligence.
Program and publications
February 7, opening event
5 pm: Vernissage. Opening of the exhibition and a short introduction to the event and weekend program.
6 pm: Keynote. Joanna Zylinska: Bio-AI: Hybrid Ecologies, Buggy Ontologies
7 pm: paus
7:30-9pm: Panel discussion: Relating to and through technologies in artistic research.
With: Joanna Zylinska, Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter, Kristoffer Gansing, Maria Hellström Reimer, Tania Ruiz, Mary Maggic, Mahmoud Keshavarz, Pedro Oliveira, Max Björverud, moderated by Jacek Smolicki.
Drop in, no admission fee, no pre-registration.
Additional program
February 8
11:30am-3pm: Workshop with Mary Maggic
Workshopology: The Land Is in our Bodies
Due to limited number of spots (max 12), please, register for this workshop by February 7, 5 pm by sending an email to jacek.smolicki@im.uu.se.
11:30am -1pm: Talk with Maria Hellström Reimer and Tania Ruiz
DNA at Play. Flows of facts and fictions in the field of recreational genetics
Drop in.
2pm-3pm: Talk: Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter and Kristoffer Gansing:
The Great Netfix by A Video Store After the End of the World
Drop in.
3pm-4pm: Discussion: Mary Maggic and Marie Rogg
Drop in.
February 9, Discussion
11:30am-1pm: Matilda Tudor, Pedro Oliveira, and Mahmoud Keshavarz
In conversation on bordering technologies and relations they forge
2:3pm: Closing notes and relations to come: Amanda Lagerkvist
Drop in.
February 14
12am-12.55pm, 13.20pm-14.15pm
and
February 15
11:30am-12:25pm and 1:30pm-2:25pm
Workshop: Brett Ascarelli: Curriculum Vitae duet: playing with a ”bio-metric” form to find feeling, relations and stories.
A limited number of people can attend, secure your spot with: jacek.smolicki@im.uu.se.
February 22
13.30pm-4pm: Book presentation and launch: Olle Essvik, Lars Kristensen, and Robert Willim: Dead, Alive, Mundane, Obsolete
March 1
13.30pm-4pm: Workshop, lecture, listening session: Jacek Smolicki:
Voices as relations: On past, present and future modes of communing with artificial voices
More information about the program can be found here.
Publication
The event Relational Technologies, Technological Relations is also a prelude to a book with a similar title to be published and launched later in 2025.
Participants
Amanda Lagerkvist
Contributes to the program
Amanda Lagerkvist is primary investigator at the Hub for Digital Existence, Professor of Media and Communication Studies in the Department of Informatics and Media at Uppsala University and PI of the Hub. As Wallenberg Academy Fellow (2014-2018) she founded the field of existential media studies. Her current work explores the existential dimensions of media technologies through lived experiences of biometrics; intersections of datafication, disability and selfhood; and the ambivalent AI imaginary and its relationship to both futures and endings. 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. Read more about Amanda here.
Jacek Smolicki
Participates in the exhibition
Jacek Smolicki, PhD, is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher at the BioMe Project at the Department of Informatics and Media, Uppsala University. Committed to practice-oriented, artistic and design research methodologies, Smolicki explores temporal, existential and technological dimensions of listening, recording and archiving practices in human and more-than-human realms. His work is manifested through soundwalks, soundscape compositions, diverse forms of writing, and a/v installations. His research within the BioMe project concerns human and other-than-human voices in the context of obsolete and emerging technologies of capture. In 2020, as a Swedish Research Council postdoc grantee, he was affiliated with Simon Fraser University and in 2022/2023, he was a Fulbright visiting scholar at Harvard. He is a co-founder of the Walking Festival of Sound. His edited book Soundwalking. Through Time, Space and Technologies was published by Routledge in 2023. Read more about Jack here.
Jenny Eriksson Lundström
Contributes to the program
Jenny Eriksson Lundström, is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Informatics and Media at Uppsala University, AI4Research Fellow (2024) and co-PI in the BioMe Project. She researches digitalization, innovation, and lived experiences of AI and digitalization, in particular for the individual decision maker. Eriksson Lundström is most recently published in Communications of the Association for Information Systems, European Journal of Information Systems and AI& Society. Read more about Jenny here.
Joanna Zylinska
Participates in the exhibition
Joanna Zylinska is an artist, writer, curator and Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice at King’s College London. She is also a member of Creative AI Lab, a collaboration between King’s and Serpentine Galleries. Zylinska is an author of a number of books, including AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams (Open Humanities Press, 2020,open access) and Nonhuman Photography (MIT Press, 2017). An advocate of ‘radical open-access’, she is an editor of the MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW book series for Open Humanities Press. Her art practice involves experimenting with different kinds of image-based media. In 2013 she was Artistic Director of Transitio_MX05 ‘Biomediations’, the biggest Latin American new media festival, which took place in Mexico City. She is currently researching perception and cognition as boundary zones between human and machine intelligence, while trying to figure out what art ‘after AI’ will look like. Her latest book, The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future Between the Eye and AI, came out from the MIT Press in November 2023 (open access). Read more about Joanna here.
Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter & Kristoffer Gansing
Participates in the exhibition
A Video Store After the End of the World is a project by Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter and Kristoffer Gansing, inaugurated as part of the first Trans★Feminist Digital Depletion Strike on the 8th of March 2023. This event brought together a transnational network of organisations, collectives and individuals in protest against cloud-based computing and its extractive logic. Hosted in a public park in Copenhagen, the initial video store collected more than 2000 home-recorded video tapes as a setting for a conversation on counter-cloud media infrastructures. By referring to the end of the world, the project does not suggest a coming apocalypse, but a hopeful living in or in spite of what Anna Tsing has called “capitalist ruins” that are already very much here. Read more about Linda here. Find more information on the previous activities here.
Maria Hellström Reimer
Participates in the exhibition
Maria Hellström Reimer, professor in Design Theory and Practice at Malmö University, School of Arts and Communication. Trained as an artist Hellström Reimer holds a PhD in theoretical and applied aesthetics in landscape architecture. Her research is interdisciplinary, concerning questions of knowledge, value, and change. Since 2014 she is associated researcher with TEAMeD (Théorie, Éxperimentation, Arts, Media et Design) research group at Université de Paris 8. Read more about Maria here.
Maria Rogg
Contributes to the program
Maria Rogg, PhD candidate at the BioMe Project at the Department of Informatics and Media has a background in participatory design invested to widen public access to design methodology and spur social change. In her academic work, Maria continues to explore design as a critical and existential inquiry to question and speculate upon social imaginaries, knowledge politics and norms at the intersection of (art) activism and media technology. Within BioMe and her doctoral dissertation project “Twists of the Smart Body. Biohacking as Existential Practice” she traces how the ethical limits and potentials of biometric AI are fleshed out through biohacking as an existential media practice. In the vein of collaborative research, Maria investigates how biohackers twist biometrics to intervene alternative and more response-able AI futures. Read more about Maria here.
Mahmoud Keshavarz
Participates in the exhibition
Mahmoud Keshavarz is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden. His work addresses the role of materiality, technology, and designing in mobility, migration, and bordering with a particular focus on the question of race, colonialism, and coloniality. He is author of The Design Politics of Passport: Materiality, Immobility, and Dissent (Bloomsbury 2019) and co-author of Seeing Like a Smuggler: Borders from Below (Pluto Press 2021). Read more about Mahmoud here.
Matilda Tudor
Contributes to the program
Matilda Tudor, PhD and researcher in the Department of Informatics and Media, is a media phenomenologist and feminist media researcher. Her work largely focuses on critical and minority perspectives on what it means to live with and through digital media and communication technologies in relation to the micro politics of everyday existence. It includes a particular interest in theories of embodiment and time-space relationships within the post-digital age. She currently explores experiences of medical age assessments in Swedish migration processes, and everyday automation within intimate human lifeworlds and perceptions of the future. She is the coordinator of the Uppsala Informatics and Media Hub for Digital Existence and the main coordinator of the DIGMEX network and its associated activities. Read more about Matilda here.
Max Björverud
Participates in the exhibition
Max Björverud is a maker, creator, coder, inventor, technologist, lecturer and arranger of sounds. Individually and in collaboration with others, he has developed a number of interactive design services, playful and educational experiences for national and international institutions. Read more about Max here.
Pedro Oliveira
Participates in the exhibition
Pedro Oliveira is a researcher and sound artist whose work is committed to an anticolonial study of listening and its material intersections with the violences of the European border. His work was exhibited and performed at the Akademie der Künste Berlin, Send/Receive Festival Winnipeg, CTM Festival, Festival Novas Frequências, Akademie Schloss Solitude, among others. He held fellowships at the Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, and taught at the Humboldt University Berlin and Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf. Currently he is a guest faculty in Sound Studies and Sonic Arts at the Universität der Künste Berlin.
Tania Ruiz
Participates in the exhibition
Tania Ruiz, born in Chile and raised in Colombia, Ruiz is a French visual artist, lecturer and researcher in visual arts, and member of the TEAMeD (Théorie, Éxperimentation, Arts, Media et Design) research group at Université de Paris 8. Ruiz holds a PhD in Fine Arts and her primary focus is on issues related to art in the public realm. Her works include, among others, three major public art commissions, including a large permanent video-based artwork for Malmö Central Station. Read more about Tania here.
Mary Maggic
Contributes to the program
Mary Maggic is an artist and researcher whose practice revolves around workshopology and biohacking as critical sites of care and knowledge production that can move us beyond toxicity narratives and ecological ruins. Before cross-contaminating with the global community of biohackers and bioartists, Maggic spent their summers in the tropical jungles of Costa Rica and Honduras for biodiversity and conservation research.
After completing their Masters at MIT Media Lab (Design Fiction research group), their project “Open Source Estrogen” was awarded Honorary Mention at the Prix Ars Electronica ’17 in Hybrid Arts. In 2019, they completed a 10-month Fulbright residency in Yogyakarta, Indonesia investigating the relationship between Javanese mysticism and the plastic pollution crisis. Later, Maggic received the 2022 Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship for their continued dedication to public workshopology and site-specific world-making practices. Based in Vienna since 2017, they are a current member of the global network Hackteria: Open Source Biological Art and the Asian feminist collective Mai Ling. Read more about Mary here.
Image: Maria Hellström Reimer and Tania Ruiz, DNA at play: the Transparency and Opacity of Recreational Genealogy
Contact
Funding
The BioMe project and this concluding event are funded by WASP-HS, the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation, and the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation.