The Sessions

Vladan Joler: Dissecting Technocolonialism

At this moment in the 21st century, we are witnessing a new form of extractivism that reaches into the furthest corners of the biosphere and the deepest layers of human cognitive and affective being. The stack behind contemporary technological systems extends well beyond the multi-layered 'technical stack' of data modeling, hardware, servers, and networks. Through the lenses of his two latest large-scale maps—Calculating Empires (2023) and New Extractivism(2020)—artist and researcher Vladan Joler will explore how technical and social structures have co-evolved over five centuries and how we can understand new forms of extractivism within a longer trajectory of ideas, devices, infrastructures, and systems of power.

Vladan Joler is an academic, researcher and artist whose work blends data investigations, counter-cartography, investigative journalism, writing, data visualisation, critical design and numerous other disciplines. His work explores and visualises different technical and social aspects of algorithmic transparency, digital labour exploitation, invisible infrastructures and many other contemporary phenomena in the intersection between technology and society. In his own projects as well as collaborations such as Anatomy of an AI with Kate Crawford or Nooscope with Matteo Pasquinelli, mapping is used as a means of understanding complex assemblages.

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Marija Grech: Reflections on the Un/Fathomable: Re-thinking Earth and Sea

In Western thought, the relationship between earth and sea is intimately bound up with questions of knowledge. This impacts the way that terrestrial and marine environments are understood, as well as the way that knowledge is perceived. This paper explores these intersections through an analysis of the terrestrial logic of the Anthropocene and recent work in the Blue Humanities. It argues for a ‘liquid’ engagement with the Anthropocene that would disrupt our understanding of the relationship between earth and sea, while also pushing us to rethink what knowledge is and how it might be conceptualised.

Marija Grech is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Malta. She is the author of Spectrality and Survivance: Living the Anthropocene (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) and co-editor of the Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Her work has appeared in the Oxford Literary Review, the Journal of Modern Literature and New Formations. She has been a Visiting Research Fellow in Environmental Humanities at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, and is one of the editors of the online Genealogy of the Posthuman at criticalposthumanism.net.

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Daniele Brombal: 

1. Defining the Environmental Humanities: Goals, Values, and Practices [Co-creative session]

Practicing the Environmental Humanities (henceforth EH) can be a challenging journey. There is a number of reasons for this. One lies in that the EH seek to redefine relationships across different forms of knowledge, while operating in a context that is still anchored to obsolete disciplinary boundaries. Another reason is that the current planetary crisis radically challenges the humanities to produce transformative knowledge, thus placing a significant responsibility on the shoulders of those who embark on this journey. This session aims at sharing values, strategies, and goals to navigate with complexity, co-creating  possible pathways for a conscious practice of the EH.

2. Environmental Humanities as a form of Engaged Scholarship. Sharing Novel Practices from Ca' Foscari University of Venice

Environmental Humanities have a fundamental responsibility in shaping novel visions of coexistence between humans and the rest of nature. Narratives and discourses place a fundamental role in this respect, since they constitute a powerful leverage of change across the individual, social, and political dimensions. By blending eco-linguistics and political ecology, researchers at LAST Lab (Venice Ca’ Foscari University) have designed tools to assist civil society, practitioners, and researchers in reshaping the discourse and practice of environmental decision-making. In this presentation, prof. Brombal will introduce the core conceptual and methodological coordinates of this work, sharing findings from preliminary testing conducted between 2022 and 2024 in Italy and China. 

Daniele Brombal is the Head of Studies of the MA Programme in Environmental Humanities at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, where he also coordinates the trans-disciplinary Lab on Area Studies for Sustainability Transformations (LAST Lab). His research blends environmental politics, ecolinguistics, and co-creative processes. His works are published among others on Language Sciences, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, Environmental Science and Policy, and Environmental Impact Assessment Review. 

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Claudio Celis Bueno: Artificial Intelligence and the Question of Labour: Towards a Machinic Theory of Surplus Value

This talk will examine the issue of labour in recent developments of machine learning technologies, in particular in the field of so-called Generative AI. Several strands of Marxist critique disagree on the question of whose “work” is involved in the training, maintenance, and deployment of this technology. This conceptual debate is relevant because it determines how value is understood and whose activity becomes exploited by AI firms. The first part of the presentation will examine the different positions within this debate and explain the conceptual and political implications behind them. The second part of the talk will suggest that Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of machinic surplus value can offer a novel framework from where to analyse this phenomenon and map the multiple relations between human labour, capital, and technology. As such, we will argue that the concept of machinic surplus value allows advancing an ecological (posthuman) critique of artificial intelligence.

Claudio Celis Bueno is an assistant professor in New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of The Attention Economy: Labour, Time and Power in Cognitive Capitalism (2016), and numerous academic articles and book chapters. His current research focuses on the relationship between technology, capitalism, and labour.

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Jakko Kemper: Generative AI, Everyday Aesthetic Production and the Imperial Mode of Living

This talk connects the meteoric rise of generative AI services to a question that aesthetic theory has progressively been forced to grapple with: what does it mean that aesthetic experience today by default emerges on fragile foundations, insofar as there is no longer any vantage point that is not ecologically entangled with planetary conditions of ecocide and environmental degradation? Concretely, I ask: if the conditions of the Anthropocene seem to demand moderation and deceleration, what are we to make of claims that generative AI will usher in an era of limitless aesthetic production? Generative AI services like Sora, Suno and Midjourney promise to facilitate a form of everyday life in which individual users can produce aesthetic content without bounds, but at the same time straddle planetary limits through immense expenditures of resources (including energy, water and rare earth minerals). In this talk, I will first explore the cultural logic that these generative AI services promise to usher in, arguing that they intensify an aesthetic logic that binds a frictionlessness of technological functionality to an immediacy of aesthetic production. I will then consider the ecological implications of this cultural logic by exploring how the dominant (envisioned) mode of engaging generative AI connects to and expands the material foundations of AI. I conclude that generative AI intensifies what Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen (2021) have called the imperial mode of living, advancing a colonial model of everyday aesthetic production that is directly supported by exploitation, extraction and environmental destruction.

Jakko Kemper is an assistant professor in Digital Aesthetics and Platform Vernaculars at the University of Amsterdam whose research focuses on digital culture, aesthetics and ecology. He has recently published his book Frictionlessness (Bloomsbury, 2024), is coeditor of the volume Imperfections (Bloomsbury, 2021), and has published articles in, among other journals, Information, Communication & Society, Theory, Culture & Society and European Journal of Cultural Studies.

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Ksenija Vidmar Horvat: Humanities and The New Social Contract

This presentation will address the role of the university in times of social upheaval, disorder and uncertainty. These are our times and the social challenges which we face at various locations of our public, intellectual and planetary life call for a proactive role of our academic communities. In a recent report, UNESCO therefore speaks of the »new contract« and the need to “re-imagine” universities. In modern philosophical tradition, social contract refers to the civic, legal and political arrangement between citizens and the state. Encountered with several crises of governance and democratic development, there have been numerous calls to renew the contract. This presents us with a challenge of how and where to place universities in this project. The focus of the talk will be on the humanities and how they can contribute to the process of re-imagining.  

Ksenija Vidmar Horvat (PhD University of California, Davis) is sociology of culture professor at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, currently serving as vice rector for education, and coordinating the curriculum reform towards green/digital/life-long learning. She is the principial investigator and leader of the research program group The social contract in the 21st century. 

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Jernej Kaluža: Latour's Landing on Earth: Nomadic Localism as an Ethical Imperative

This contribution could be understood as a complement to the late Latour's conceptual reflections on »landing on earth« or returning »down to earth«. In general, these terms indicate »a course of treatment« or »the imperative confronting us« in the Anthropocene Epoch. This theoretical gesture, which implies rejection of the modernist and anthropocentric ontologies, could be understood as a part of a broader conceptual turn, which includes the increasing popularity of the concepts of care and responsibility in posthumanist philosophy (Haraway 2016, Puig de la Bellacasa 2017 and others). It is also related to the increasing social polarisation that pervades broader social, cultural and political contexts and could be explained by two exclusive tendencies: one which is too attached to the earth and promotes a return to the original 'home' and the other which runs away from home and the earth, thus reproducing unreflectively modernist and individualistic tendencies. The problem of political orientation therefore arises in a unique way: How can a progressive politics, which is usually oriented towards the global, urban and individualised, maintain a sense of belonging and commitment to the community? On the other hand, can a collectivist and networked political thought even be called progressive anymore? In the lecture, we suggest that the mysterious Latourian “third way” that could untie this knot might be a non-sedentary localism which implies no necessary connection to a privileged “land” " and according to which we should be “down to earth” in all the concrete local environments we pass through.

Jernej Kaluža holds a PhD in philosophy. He is employed as a researcher at the Social Communication Research Centre and as an assistant professor at the Department of Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His professional research interests are focused on the fields of media-, journalism- and pop-culture studies, critical theory and (post)structuralism. He published his writings for different Slovenian and some international journals (Javnost – The Public, Deleuze and Guattari Studies, IAFOR Journal of Media, Communication & Film, AI & Society, etc.). 

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Jernej Markelj: Towards a posthumanist critique of Large Language Models

In my talk I will develop a critique of large language models (LLMs) from a posthumanist prespective. The first part will focus on Emily Bender’s critique of LLMs in order to highlight how its conceptual and political axioms reinforce an anthropocentric understanding of ChatGPT. Drawing on my work with Celis Bueno (forthcoming), I make a case that this anthropocentric perspective remains insufficient for adequately grasping its conceptual and political consequences. In the second part of the talk, I address these shortcomings by proposing a posthumanist critique of ChatGPT. To formulate this critique, I begin by drawing on Eric Hörl’s contention that the age of digitalization demands a radical redefinition of the concept of “critique” (Hörl et al., 2021, 7). Relying on Hörl’s intervention, I then gradually develop a posthumanist framework by grounding it in four interlinked concepts: general ecology, machinic agency, machinic surplus value, and cosmotechnics.

Jernej Markelj is a lecturer in New Media and Digital Cultures at the University of Amsterdam and a researcher at the University of Ljubljana. His work analyses the conceptual terrain of digital media cultures in relation to the agential forces that organise it. He investigates how the emergence of networked technologies, which increasingly enable or augment our daily activities, simultaneously challenges the ideas of human autonomy and agency. His research has been published with various academic publishers, including Bloomsbury and Manchester University Press, and journals such as Convergence, NECSUS, and Journal of Posthumanism.

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Lara Bazon: Cannibalizing Italian-ness: Salvo Lombardo’ Choreography of Resistance

This presentation explores the cannibal metaphysics of the Amerindian Tupi people as an anticolonial politics of relationship that defines the Self through the transformative incorporation of otherness. Arguing for the political agency of the body as a site of reconfiguration and resistance, I analyze the contemporary dance trilogy Excelsior, AMOЯ, and Sport by Salvo Lombardo as a performative cannibalization of a ballet trilogy choreographed in late 19th century by Luigi Manzotti as an embodied manifesto of the newborn Italian nation. This presentation moves beyond the framework of re-enactment to theorize an analytical tool that fosters the subversion of the binary thinking underpinning nationalistic and colonial discourses. By engaging with "cannibal thinking" as a relational politics of devouring, incorporating, and transforming dominant narratives, the presentation illuminates how Lombardo's choreography disrupts the imperial and colonial imagery woven into the fabric of Italian national identity. Through a close reading of the trilogy's subversive aesthetics, it demonstrates how embracing "otherness" through a cannibalistic lens offers a way to dismantle binary thinking, subvert nationalist rhetoric, and generate anticolonial artistic subjectivities.

Lara Barzon is a PhD researcher in Performance Studies and Cultural Studies, a performer, and a cultural curator. Awarded with the EUTOPIA PhD co-tutelle programme she is pursuing joint research between the University of Warwick and the University of Ljubljana focusing on aesthetics and politics of decolonial practices in contemporary dance. She holds a MA in Theater Studies (University of Turin), a Diploma in Physical Theater (Philip Radice Atelier) and she is certificated in contemporary dance (DEOS company) and in curatorship for contemporary arts (Opera Estate Festival). She is co-founder of the transnational performance collective Istmo Nomade with which she developed her artistic practice and has collaborated with research projects such as Precarious Movements: Choreography & the Museum (UNSW) and CARTEMAD (Universidad Complutense de Madrid). Lara has also collaborated with different roles with Institutions such as Biennale di Venezia and Montevideo Italian Institute of Culture.

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Giustina Selvelli: Environmental Degradation and Endangered Heritage: A Minority Perspective

This presentation will address the role of the university in times of social upheaval, disorder and uncertainty. These are our times and the social challenges which we face at various locations of our public, intellectual and planetary life call for a proactive role of our academic communities. In a recent report, UNESCO therefore speaks of the »new contract« and the need to “re-imagine” universities. In modern philosophical tradition, social contract refers to the civic, legal and political arrangement between citizens and the state. Encountered with several crises of governance and democratic development, there have been numerous calls to renew the contract. This presents us with a challenge of how and where to place universities in this project. The focus of the talk will be on the humanities and how they can contribute to the process of re-imagining.   

Giustina Selvelli is a postdoctoral researcher with a EUTOPIA-SIF Marie Sklodowska-Curie COFUND grant at the Department of Sociology of the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. She has obtained an MA in Anthropology and Ethnolinguistics (2012) and a PhD in Slavic Studies (2017), both from Ca’ Foscari University in Venice. She has held research and teaching positions at the Universities of Klagenfurt, Nova Gorica, Novi Sad, Ca’ Foscari of Venice and has been a guest lecturer at the Universities of Konstanz, Montréal, Mytilene, and the Balkar Institute for Balkan and Black Sea Studies in Istanbul among others. Her publications include the monograph ‘The Alphabet of Discord’ (Ibidem, 2021), a book on the Armenians in Bulgaria (Peter Lang, 2024) and an autoethnography on the Italian/Slovenian borderland (in Italian, Bottega Errante, 2024).