Author name: admin

Vincent de Boer​​​​ at Stroom den Haag

The first time I visited Prague was 36 years ago. I was still a student at the Rietveld Academy and used the city as a great source of inspiration. I photographed towers and ornaments there and was attracted to the romance of decay. The wooden structures built to protect people from falling rubble were like the fixtures for the sculptures in my head.

My memories of Prague were so precious that after the fall of the wall, I avoided the city. I had no desire to see how it had been refurbished and repainted. The opportunity to re-explore Prague through Space-X at length was an invitation I couldn’t resist.

My focus was on the diverse number of monuments in the city. What was left of artworks from the Soviet era and what had replaced them? I wanted to explore the city as much as possible on foot, taking in all my senses.

To my delight, I recognized almost all the ornaments I had photographed in ‘88. Many of them I could still find the exact spot where I had been standing at the time. It made me even more aware of the surface I was standing on. Many of the streets are now paved with small cobblestones. It looks neat but is less telling than the asphalt, in which every repair remains like a scar. 

Another big change is the smell of the city. Back then, the city smelt of coal and sauerkraut; now it smells of sweet waffles and perfume. Also gone are the whispers and gossip. I got to know dozens of Czech colleagues and artists and went exploring in studios, mines and railway yards.

My research into monuments and public artworks were a perfect alibi to stroll unabashedly through the city and photograph everything high and low. I feel more and more at home there, understanding the connections better and hearing what is missing. 

Last November, I was a keynote speaker at the Velvet Debate and got to talk about my experience in Prague and about Stroom Den Haag. 

I wish my Space-X walk would continue indefinitely.

Vincent de Boer​​​​ at Stroom den Haag Read More »

Alex Parry at Home for Cooperation

Home for Cooperation gig, on my first night, January 2022

My SPACE X secondment was at Home for Cooperation, a community centre in the buffer zone in Nicosia, Cyprus. I made several trips here during two secondments between 2023 and 2024.  

My first trip was in January 2023. One of the questions I asked myself during this first week was what I, as someone from the UK, could do or bring in a social and politically complex context in which the UK is historically responsible for harm. 

I asked an artist from Cyprus what value I, as a visitor, could bring. She replied that as a first-time visitor, my newness and my first impressions might reveal something that someone who is embedded in living there cannot see.  

I tried to cultivate a practice of listening during this first week by noticing the strong feelings and observations that happen with initial impressions. I tried to stay alive to my instincts. I attended events, walked the streets, visited museums, drank pomegranate juice, read books in the ADHR library, and tried to slow down. I stopped to listen to sounds and tried to meet as many people as possible. Saying yes to things, meeting people, and walking down paths where I don’t know where they go. 

This first week was generously supported by Home for Cooperation. They introduced me to artists and NGO workers in Nicosia who are leading workshops in an intercommunal context.  I heard about different projects, such as Peace Players, a basketball-playing project with Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot young people, and the UN Youth Champions. This connected to my existing practice-based PhD research about the role of art workshops in the UK during a time that is described as a polycrisis; the interconnection of different global crises that are greater than the sum of their parts. My practice looks at the role of togetherness, imagination and dialogue in the art workshop during this time.   

I was particularly moved by the time I spent at the Home for Cooperation Cafe. The Cafe was opened in the buffer zone in 2011. I noticed the incredible mix of people using the space. Children crossing the buffer zone for school play in and outside the building. People holding language classes. People crossing from south to north and from north to south. Friends meeting for a beer. Groups of people sitting on the long benches outside. I noticed the visibility of institutions —NGOs at work – people in meetings with laptops and notebooks. UN peacekeeping force drinking iced coffee. Italian, Irish, British patches of flags on arms.   

My next visit in October aligned with the Home for Cooperation festival Buffer Fringe. This extraordinary performance festival takes place over several days in venues in the north and south. The opening night was in the buffer zone. The festival brings conversation, conviviality, and artistic performances from international contexts to this highly political space. It is both surreal, incredible, and moving. The wild graphics of the Buffer Fringe give the event a science fiction-like atmosphere. 

Opening night of Buffer Fringe in the buffer zone, October 2023

During this visit, I propose to interview artists who have experience facilitating intercommunal workshops. I am thinking about how to hold space in the art workshop for people who have different experiences, and opinions. I am reflecting on this in relation to heightened divisions in the UK, and I am thinking about the research questions of the Space X project. I am thinking about the role of the art workshop as a space for difference and empathy.  I go to workshops and write about them. I go to Taking the Floor- Body and Voice in the Space by Paula Carrara, which takes place as part of the Buffer Fringe programme, and A Space of Our Own, organised by the Association for Historical Dialogue and Research exploring gendered experiences of public spaces and the role of public monuments with educators from the north and south of Cyprus. 

A Space of Our Own, walk and workshop with the Association for Historical Dialogue and Research
Buffer Fringe info about the workshop – Taking the Floor- Body and Voice in the Space by Paula Carrara

During this trip I talk with artists and NGO workers about their practices in cafes, in their homes, on the streets. Some conversations are recorded, and others are not. One evening in a bar I meet community facilitator and cultural producer Argyro Toumazou. I am moved by a map she shows me of Nicosia, as though the city is not separated by a buffer zone. 

I stay with Barçın Gökbörü who runs MultiKulti parties near the buffer zone. I meet many people who pass by through the accommodation. I talk with him about the partie he hosts. I think about what a party can do that a workshop can’t. I think about feeling, and empathy when dancing. I meet dancer Arianna Economou over a shared love of the word rehearsal and a chance meeting at a presentation of work. We meet at a cafe near her studio to talk about a history of incredible intercommunal projects she has led.  

My time is latticed by meetings, and chance encounters. I see a poster about a contemporary art festival called Xarkis in a village called Kornos. I take the bus there. I find myself in a workshop around experience of pain. As a village famous for ceramics the artists have built a clay pit in the centre of the village, outside a ceramics workshop. After the workshop we all go in there. My face is covered in clay. I join a walking performance around the village, culminating in a gig played in an empty shop. One artist gives away ice cream from an ice cream van, telling stories, memories. Is this post-capitalist ice cream based on new forms of relational exchange? 

In October, during this time, the war starts in Palestine. Geographically we are close, and share the same climate, the same skies. I think a lot about the UK’s colonial history in Cyprus, and in the Middle East. I start to imagine workshops that haven’t happened. 

I stay in an accommodation with a host from Cyprus, and guests from Syria, from Germany, and from the UK. We share dinners together. We eat walnuts in syrup, made by the hosts aunt. All of us have a story about walnuts in syrup.

Eating together. Nicosia. October 2023

I visit Cyprus twice more. I see Cyprus at all points of the year. In the sunny and cold days of winter and the extreme summer heat. During these later trips I transcribe interviews, write about the workshops I attend.  

In winter I run a workshop at Home for Cooperation about care and rehearsing future worlds. How can I talk about a workshop without running one? In the workshop we reflect on care practices in our own lives, and how they might use as principles for society more broadly. We create posters based on these small acts of care in our own lives, imagining them as principles for society. 

I create a small intervention in the Home for Cooperation cafe based on reflection about workshop practices and the cafe itself. I sublimate the text ‘We are all rehearsing futures’ on mugs that Home for Cooperation uses for plants. I want to think about how actions in the present are forming futures. The text acts as a mirror and a prompt. 

Intervention in Home for Cooperation cafe ‘We are all rehearsing futures’ Alex Parry, February 2024

On my final trip in the heat of summer where mostly I am out at night due to the heat of the day. I reflect on running workshops and what this means. I think critically about how I run workshops. I reflect on planning workshops. I try to imagine another way to plan, which is less about time and more about care. I spend time Cyens maker space and learn printing techniques.  

I plan to print a small run of the publication, and a copy will go in the library at the Home for Cooperation cafe . 

Reconfiguring the workshop plan. Reflections on the workshop. Alex Parry, October 2024

Thanks to Home for Cooperation, Buffer Fringe, Andri Christofides, Barçın Gökbörü, Maro and her family, Christina Skarpari and Xarkis Festival, Nihal Soğancı, Paula Carrara, Arianna Economou, Natali Touloupou, The Association for Historical Dialogue and Research, Cyens Thinker Maker Space, Fiona Whelen, Hoi Polloi, Rüstem Kitabevi, all attendees of the workshop at Home for Cooperation, and all the other people and places I had encounters with during my time in Cyprus. Thank you for your generosity. 

Alex Parry at Home for Cooperation Read More »

On Counter-Resistant Practices: Transcending Agreed-Upon Territorial Identities, Pegy Zali, Panayiotis Lianos

On Counter-Resistant Practices: Transcending Agreed-Upon Territorial Identities

On 8 April 2017, a container was placed in Exarchia Square as part of the actions of the Exarchia Square Re-appropriation Committee, with the aim of functioning as a political kiosque. A few months after the succession of the SYRIZA government by the New Democracy, on 20 September 2019, the removal operation took place, as the first intervention of the new government in Exarchia Square. The mainstream media make sure to offer live coverage of the removal of the container, or the “Anarchist Service Center”, as journalists call it. According to the latter, it is the first time in years that these media have such access to the square, as until then, Exarchia have been considered “off-limits” for agents of institutional power. 

The sealing of the container momentarily turns it into a kind of cenotaph, a mnemonic device for all the efforts made towards a collective appropriation of the symbolic center of Exarchia. Its subsequent removal is considered to mark the beginning of a site-specific memory format, reaching our days in the form of the symbolic exhumation of all the elements that have defined the decades-long conceptual stratification in this “urban void”. What could be recognized as desecration is presented as an exorcism, aiming to satisfy the carriers of a social superstition. 

Drawing on their personal involvement in the original project of repurposing and installing the container, the creators attempt a peculiar dialogue between their personal archive and the archives of news reports where journalists describe, comment on and provide representations of the process of its removal. By presenting footage of the reconstruction and installation of the container, along with archival footage of the overall design of this spatial intervention, juxtaposed with the posterior selective representations of a schematized redundancy, the creators highlight the dipoles of purity and dirt, institutional and arbitrary processes, nature and society, and high and low art and theory, among others. The dialogue creates a critical and political condition with reference to the eccentric “queer art of failure”, highlighting the multiple qualities of the implicitly placed “matter out of place”.

The work is a study on “counter-aesthetics” forms of resistance, reaching for the possibility of the Other that lies beyond any agreed upon or conformist narrative. Using low/high theory and practices that are situated within the “slash punctuation mark”, it emphasizes the importance of recognizing the sub-cultural and the marginal as alternative sources of knowledge. It promotes the recognition of the wildly poetic in the frustratingly real cultural stock.

On Counter-Resistant Practices: Transcending Agreed-Upon Territorial Identities, Pegy Zali, Panayiotis Lianos Read More »

Creative Borderscapes and in/visibility in Kilburn, Nihal Soganci

Whispers of the Royal Stream

On a mild midday, we gathered outside Queen’s Park Station, where Kilburn’s hidden stream would have begun. Standing on the threshold between the boroughs of Westminster and Brent, we set out to walk pondering how in/visibility shapes socio-cultural identities and urban stories be it in Nicosia or Kilburn.

We moved to William Dunbar House, its brutalist façade rising stark against the sky, and reflected on how regeneration policies have transformed social housing into sleek marketing suites. Around the corner, the stories shared at the UK Albanian Muslim Community & Cultural Centre echoed these shifts, weaving together threads of unhomeliness and politics of identity.

At Shanzelize Restaurant, the conversation turned to the fantasies born of in/visibility. Shop names whispered promises of “the good life,” both alluring and unattainable, mirroring the dreams of countless migrants. Along these spectral borders, we traced how communities reclaim space, reshaping the unseen into something tangible.

Outside the former Biddy Mulligan’s Pub, now Ladbrokes, we talked about the 1975 bombing—a deep wound that scarred the Irish community, many of whom had come to Kilburn to build roads and carve out new lives. Yet, from that fracture, their resilience emerged, weaving off-modern tales into Kilburn’s ever-shifting fabric.

We ended at Kiln Theatre and Camden Art Centre, where creativity dances on the edges of the buried river, its presence lingering as a faint dampness in the air. Here, at the threshold of seen and unseen, we glimpsed the quiet power of these liminal spaces, where urban stories drift like murmurs through the folds of time and place.

Creative Borderscapes and in/visibility in Kilburn, Nihal Soganci Read More »

SpaceX-Rise Training Event 3, Dublin, Dr Marcus Maloney

March 2-3, 2023

Graduality and (Mis)Interpretation

On March 2-3, 2023, I attended SpaceX-Rise’s ‘Training Event 3’ in Dublin. As with all events I attended in this series, the encounter proved far more conceptually interesting and useful to me than the term ‘training’ would normally suggest – associated as it is (in my mind, at least) with the kinds of institutional compliance type activities that, as academics with our minds elsewhere, we are all compelled to participate in.

Across two days, the event brought together scholars, practitioners, and activists across various fields in seminar discussions, art exhibits and performances, as well as a wonderful visit to a local community group trying to envisage new and anti-capitalist ways of being.

As a sociologist very much out of my comfort zone, and for reasons that go to the heart of why this project is important, one experience in particular stayed with me. A theme that had been emerging over the course of the event – unintentionally, I think – was that perennial debate over revolution vs. reform, with apparently little appetite for the latter among this staunchly left-wing group of thinkers. The recurrence of this theme seemed to me to be an interesting product of the tension between the revolutionary spirit widely and openly shared among participants, and the actual work being undertaken which, in order to achieve anything, is always forced to compromise with the world ‘as it is’.

In the middle of all this was one art exhibit – or performance, or both/neither; I’m a sociologist, so I’m not sure what the correct terminology is – that effortlessly captured, perhaps even sought to resolve, this tension.

We found ourselves, probably thirty attendees all up, scattered at the edges of a large exhibition space, sharing it with various moveable rectangular blocks that easily dwarfed the space’s human inhabitants. It felt like it was meant to communicate, in minimalist form, the experience of inhabiting any (post)modern urban space – though again, as a neophyte, I’m not sure I interpreted any aspect of this work as intended. To be honest, I’m not even sure I’m providing a fully accurate account of what took place.

The artist then proceeded to walk slowly across the space for around twenty minutes, shifting blocks here and there, while telling us some sort of story – the details of which I didn’t fully understand and can’t remember – about time, space and graduality. It was an utterly captivating, meditative, and for me, also puzzling experience. And by the end of it, the space had been completely transformed by the artist’s gradual re-ordering of the large blocks.

I’m quite certain that the artist didn’t intend this to be the meaning, but they nonetheless made a very convincing case for that much-maligned (on the left) concept of reform – the ways in which we can and do remake the world gradually, often imperceptibly, and with the little more than a narrative and the materials we inherit from the existing structures and cultures we seek to depose.

SpaceX-Rise Training Event 3, Dublin, Dr Marcus Maloney Read More »

Andri Christofides at University of Coventry, UK

02/02/2023 – 16/02/2023 and 11/01/2024 – 26/01/2024

My secondment to Coventry University took place in two two-week visits, one year apart. Although this planning occurred to accommodate work obligations, it worked quite well in allowing for enough space in between the visits for initial relationships within the network to develop, and the focus of the secondment to be finetuned by the second visit. 

One of the main objectives I had going in this secondment was to connect with members of the network and explore the different ways in which spatial practices are incorporated into the work of colleagues across disciplines. Coming from a non-profit cultural organization like the Home for Cooperation which operates from the buffer zone of Nicosia Cyprus, the transformative potentiality of spatial practices in cross-sectoral practices and methods, was of great interest. 

A key element of my time in Coventry included walking and exploring the vastly contrasting landscapes of the city, visiting museums and galleries, while connecting with people who call Coventry home or workplace. The first visit was more about tracing my steps, finding my bearings and deciding what the secondment would focus on. Coventry offered a multitude of stimuli not only regarding its beautiful landscape contradictions but in the reflexivity I witnessed among the SpaceX network in the discussions around the aftermath of Coventry being UK’s City of Culture. 

During my first visit I had the chance to meet with Sevven Kucuk and Ryan Hughes from Coventry Biennale, discussing methodologies and approaches in organizing an arts festival where locality and creative exploration are at the forefront, exchanging experiences and practices regarding the organization of the Buffer Fringe Performing Arts Festival in Nicosia by the Home for Cooperation. I also had very fruitful discussions with Dr Ahmadreza Hakiminejad, Dr Mahsa Alami Fariman, Prof. Gary Hall, as well as PhD researchers of the Postdigital Cultures Centre at Coventry and fellow Space-X researchers.

I also gave a presentation about my organization and own PhD research at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures with fellow SpaceX researcher Georgia Perkins from Sirius in Ireland. Additionally, along with Mel Jordan and Andy Hewitt, I attended a talk in neighbouring Northampton visiting NN Contemporary and Vulcan Works, finding out more about their efforts in creating inclusive spaces for local artists. 

My second visit to Coventry, a year later, focused on reflecting on the connections built within the network and how they could potentially inform our work at the Home for Cooperation, and my own research. Having already hosted researchers at the Home under SpaceX, prior or during my second secondment visit I connected with Dr. Fiona Whelan from NCAD, Alex Parry and Marley Treloar from the University of Coventry, exchanging and reflecting on our experiences within the network and project. During this time, I also did some more hands-on fieldwork, focusing on Fargo Village at Coventry, speaking to the management team and finding out more about their approach and efforts in supporting local creatives balancing openness and inclusivity with viable business models.

Since the completion of my secondment, I had the chance to participate at an Online Conversation at Coventry University by Art, Space and the City research group, with fellow SpaceX researcher Ryan Hughes from Coventry Biennale, coordinated by Marley Treloar. The focus of the talk was on the importance of organizations being reflective towards their approach and operational structures and how this practice can inform the organization’s vision and commitment to its values and mission.

Lastly, in celebrating the possibilities of the smaller networks created within the wider SpaceX network, an informal online discussion was organized with Georgia Perkins, Marley Treloar, Alex Parry and Fiona Whelan and myself. In this meeting we discussed and exchanged experiences of our secondments, research interests and explored potential outputs and collaborations.

Andri Christofides at University of Coventry, UK Read More »

Vittorio Iervese at Verein zur Förderung von Kunst und Kultur am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz e.V.

27 Jan 2023 – 28 Feb 2023

SCREAM – STREET CORNER REALITY: Ethnography As Mockery is a spatial practices observation game inspired by the pioneers of Sociology and Urban Ethnography on the one hand, and the artistic avant-gardes of the 1970s on the other.

The main idea of SCREAM is to realise a video shot by choosing a perspective and a single sequence to which a ‘script’ is subsequently added. The aim of SCREAM is to challenge the tradition of ethnographic observation by reversing it without invalidating it. Ethnography is in fact a method based on the organisation of field notes or detailed descriptive accounts of any observation of reality made during a given period. In contrast, SCREAM creates a fictional text from the indications provided by reality that manifests itself without mediation by revealing inspirations, expectations, curiosities and patterns of everyday spatial practices.

Below are the ‘instructions’ for making a SCREAM video.

  • Observe the space near your location and choose a perspective from which to shoot. It is important that it is a public or mixed space where different daily activities take place. Choose a shooting point that is reliable and does not disturb the activities of the space to be filmed.
  • Equip yourself with a video camera or smartphone, a tripod and possibly a directional microphone (not necessary but can be useful).
  • Record a single sequence. You can also move the camera or zoom the shot.
  • Watch the recording. If you are not satisfied, try again, but try to find even in the most seemingly insignificant gestures and practices something to “play with” and meaning to bring out.
  • Add your own audio commentary in the form of a choreography or script of what really happened.

I realised until now 3 SCREAM videos in Berlin, Florence and Dublin. 

Vittorio Iervese at Verein zur Förderung von Kunst und Kultur am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz e.V. Read More »

Vittorio Iervese at Verein zur Förderung von Kunst und Kultur am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz e.V.

27 Jan 2023 – 28 Feb 2023

LOCABULARY – A KIND OF DUBITATIVE AND PROVOCATIVE MULTIMEDIA GLOSSARY  TO BE WALKED THROUGH AND LIVED IN. 

LOCABULARY stems from the need to give a name to the urban experiences and spatial practices stimulated by the SPACEX project.

LOCABULARY is a way of noting and describing the spatial practices that each of the subjects within the SPACEX project experiences and could imagine.

LOCABULARY is a glossary on “loci” with or without “genius”. 

LOCABULARY aims at provoking practices and observing their effects rather than cataloguing and prescribing them. 

LOCABULARY is conceived as a space to be inhabited: there are streets to walk along, places to stop, squares to discuss, gardens to contemplate, etc. 

ROADS are conceptual paths indicated by opposing terms, guiding concepts. 

Each POINT on a street can be considered a lemma, i.e. a word or locution. 

The PIAZZA is the place to bring one’s own experiences and to propose new ones. A place for discussion and confrontation, in the PIAZZA practices are gathered and proposed to be replicated.

Each LEMMA may include: 

• One or more descriptions of a word or expression; Definitions may in fact be multiple and disagree, so it is not certain that a certain term corresponds to a single description.  

• Images, videos, audio, links, etc. to provide examples of the concept described.

These may be in-depth studies and examples that already exist or have been collected and produced specifically in the SPACEX network cities. 

• Questions and issues that may arise from a given headword.

• The reference to other lemmas linked by opposition or affinity.

The connections are partly determined by the ‘roads’ but the LOCABULARY can function like a rhizome, that is, following a principle of connection and ethereogeneity in which ‘any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other and must be’ (Deleuze-Guattari).

Vittorio Iervese at Verein zur Förderung von Kunst und Kultur am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz e.V. Read More »

Vittorio Iervese at Association for Historical Dialogue and Research. Home for Cooperation

23 May – 4 June 2024 (1st part)

DOORS is an augmented reality software for mobile devices. It was conceived during my secondment in Nicosia at AHDR (May 2024) and after a series of urban explorations aimed at exploring conflicting narratives of public space. 1) The first step was to identify sites that are significant for the memory of the city of Nicosia, and in particular those sites that are the subject of conflicting memories and practices. 2) The second step was to collect photos and videos of the sites, as well as accounts from direct or indirect witnesses (e.g. from literature). 3) Then I designed a city trail based on some of the most significant narratives collected. 4) Finally I created an AR interface for mobile devices with the content collected during the urban explorations.

DOORS was implemented using technology that allows content to be uploaded and enjoyed on a smartphone without the need to download apps or other softwares. Just frame an image or an object to unlock audio, video, textual, etc. associated. DOORS makes it possible to create urban itineraries with stops that function as “milestones” to be reached in order to discover traces of contested and conflicting memories. Finally, DOORS allows each user to insert their own augmented content linked to specific milestones. In this way, it is possible to create participatory and interactive urban itineraries in dialogue with the oral and multimedia archives of a city.

The first prototype focused on Nicosia and Modena and can be refined and adapted to the future needs of each partner. For example, one of the possible future experiments could be to work with children in a playful-creative form of urban exploration and collection of information and narratives about the city’s spaces to be included in a mobile AR system.

Vittorio Iervese at Association for Historical Dialogue and Research. Home for Cooperation Read More »

Marcus Maloney at Stroom, The Netherlands

Me with Professor Geert Lovink, Institute of Network Cultures, Rotterdam

17/8/24 – 31/8/24

In the second half of August this year, I undertook part of my SpaceX-Rise secondment in The Netherlands, hosted by Stroom Art Centre in The Hague. The secondment was coordinated by Stroom’s wonderful and brilliant Lua Vollard, a fellow SpaceX-Rise member who couldn’t have been more welcoming and supportive. I was fully immersed at the time in two ongoing research projects: a study of race and racism in sports video games, with Associate Professor Paul Campbell, University of Leicester, and Dr Anika Leslie-Walker, Nottingham Trent University; and a number of inquiries into the male-centred and reactionary/antifeminist online ‘Manosphere’, most notably a study of its Indian incarnation with Dr Saba Hussain, University of Birmingham. In this brief context, it’s difficult to encapsulate the full usefulness of this experience to these projects, and my broader agenda, but I will try.

My secondment took me first to Stroom itself (obviously) and exposure to some of the great work Lua continues to undertake there (including a really interesting project around women and gaming). I then visited New Institute, Rotterdam, where I was privileged to meet its senior researcher, Dr Ramon Amaro. This was followed by a meeting with Professor Geert Lovink at The Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam. Finally, I met with Dr Daniël de Zeeuw, University of Amsterdam, to discuss our overlapping work with a view to future collaborations.

I had been grappling with two key challenges at the time – one practical, the other more conceptual. First, Paul had asked me to lead on a second article relating to our work on racism in video games, based on the same dataset as the first but geared more towards my digital-theoretical interests. Fully ‘unlocking’ this had proven frustrating – that is, until my encounter with Ramon whose groundbreaking work on technology and Black identities provided the ‘circuit breaker’ that enabled me to envision a second article genuinely differentiated from the first. Just yesterday (at the time of writing), this was accepted for publication in Oxford University Press’ exciting new Oxford Intersections: Racism by Context series. 

The second, in some ways pretentious, ‘challenge’ related to my theoretical wavering over the respective utility of social vs. technological determinisms in understanding digital cultures – i.e. do we shape technologies, or do they shape us? My (now ongoing) discussions with Geert, a scholar with an extensive background in both digital research and (pre- and post-digital) social activism helped me realise how unhelpfully arbitrary the binary itself is. Complimenting this was both my subsequent meeting with Daniël, but also my wider exposure over the period (especially the work being undertaken at New institute) to art-practice engagements with the ‘digital’. These engagements seem to almost inevitably dissolve boundaries between human and technology, and in ways that continue to inform my more ‘theory’-based work as digital sociologist and writer.

Marcus Maloney at Stroom, The Netherlands Read More »

Scroll to Top