January 2019
2019: Decelerate
Happy New Year from the Heads of Lab!
2018 was a really big year for the ETHOS Lab. There were so many highlights of our Speculative Instruments theme it’s hard to pick a few. We spent the two semesters discussing and working through how methods can help us be speculative, or might be speculative in themselves, learning a lot about speculation in science fiction, STS, anthropology, and the kinds of instruments that open up futures.
Our Spring series of speakers - Sarah Pink, Stuart Geiger and Orit Halpern - all shared recent research or work in progress that illustrated different sites of speculation and future-making. During Richard Tutton’s visit to the Technologies in Practice research group as an ERASMUS exchange scholar, he spent some time in the Lab introducing us to Silicon Valley’s Multiplanetary Imaginaries. Participating in some speculative futures ourselves saw us (Alexa and Google Home included) host the 2018 IoT Day in collaboration with the VIRT-EU project, hang out with the Copenhagen Open Data crowd, and when GDPR came around, we hosted a “deletion poetry” party, getting hands on with the legal text. In the Autumn of 2018, we took on our first international exchange students, Michela Seresini from The Nuiversity of Milan, Italy and Sophia Knopf from TU Munich, Germany, who lent their energies and enthusiasm to our many events. We participated in another successful Culture Night, with more GDPR deletion poetry and sound visualisations. In October, we hosted the first of two Visual Vignettes workshops with Mascha Guggannig of TU Munich, the second will take place this Spring in Germany. Ada Lovelace Day at ITU was a great success (check out Sophia’s blogpost!) which overflowed the lab and started conversations about women in STEM that we will continue in 2019. Towards the end of the year we hosted two Data as Relation datasprints on #techplomacy, ahead of a field trip members of the project took to Silicon Valley and the Tech Ambassador.
Our thematic emphasis for 2019 will be on Decelerate. We want to create spaces for pausing with technologies. In a tempo focused development environment, we want to know what methods insert hesitation and allow for unknowing, whether in the field, in para-site style events, and in the doing of research through digital methods. What kinds of events structure the open exchange of thought and discussion? Where do we find spaces to discuss the implications of technological change, and think about how things could be otherwise. Acceleration is given such inherent goodness (speed!) we want to pause at its opposite. Building on the success of the Compliance installation at DASTS last year, we are busy designing Decelerator installations for the Lab to participate at various events throughout the year. As researchers interested in the temporalities of knowledge, academic life and data itself, we look forward to using Decelerate to come together, continuing to ask critical questions of technological changes.
We’re looking forward you at the events of the year to come. A couple of dates for your diary are in this first newsletter of the year, so please mark the calendar now! To stay up to date on ETHOS Lab activities, sign up to our mailing list here, and follow us on twitter, facebook or instagram.
With all best for a fabulous 2019,
Rachel, Marisa and Simy
ETHOS Lab
www.ethos.itu.dk
