Speakers

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. He 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 2018, in cooperation with Kate Crawford, he published Anatomy of an AI System, a large-scale map and long-form essay investigating the human labour, data and planetary resources required to build and operate an Amazon Echo device. A previous study of his, entitled Facebook Algorithmic Factory, included deep forensic investigations and visual mapping of the algorithmic processes and forms of exploitation behind the largest social network. Other studies that he authored, published in recent years by the independent research collective SHARE Lab, included research on information warfare, metadata analysis, browsing history exploitation, surveillance, and Internet architecture.

Miglė Bareikytė is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Siegen, interdisciplinary research project “Organizing Human-Nonhuman Cooperation”. She is interested in situated research of the development and usage of digital technologies as well as their anticipatory claims. Her current research focuses on the topics of algorithmic accountability, geopolitics of AI, and (digital) media ethnography. Her broader research interests comprise infrastructural politics, representation, and distribution of power in Europe. In October 2020, she defended her PhD thesis at the Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Research Training Group “Cultures of Critique” on the topic of situated Internet infrastructure research in post-socialist Lithuania that will be published in January 2022 at Transcript Verlag in English language. Miglė Bareikytė holds degrees in Media studies, Communication Studies, and Political Science from Free University of Berlin, Vilnius University and Vytautas Magnus University.

Rahul Mukherjee is Dick Wolf Associate Professor of Television and New Media and Director of the Cinema and Media Studies program at University of Pennsylvania. His research on environmental media and mobile phone cultures has been published in his recent monograph Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty (Duke University Press, 2020) and in journals such as Media, Culture & Society and Asiascape: Digital Asia. Rahul is part of the advisory board of the journal Media + Environment and the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication.

Adriana Knouf, PhD (US) works as an artist, writer, and xenologist. She engages with topics such as wet media, space art, satellites, radio transmission, non-human encounters, drone flight, queer and trans futurities, machine learning, the voice, and papermaking. She is the Founding Facilitator of the tranxxenolab, a nomadic artistic research laboratory that promotes entanglements among entities trans and xeno. Adriana regularly presents her artistic research around the world and beyond, including a work that has flown aboard the International Space Station. Her work has been recognized by a number of awards, including an Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica (2021), an Honorary Mention from the Science Fiction Research Association’s Innovative Research Award, and as a prize winner in The Lake’s Works for Radio #4 (2020).