RESEARCH TEAM

  • Peter Mörtenböck
    Project Director

    Peter Mörtenböck is Professor of Visual Culture at the Vienna University of Technology and Senior Research Fellow at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research focuses on the development of theoretical frameworks around the emergence of networked ecologies and collaborative forms of spatial production vis-à-vis the current dynamics of geopolitical conflict and urban transformation. In recent projects such as Networked Cultures (2005–2013, www.networkedcultures.org), Other Markets (2010–2015, www.othermarkets.org) and World of Matter (2011–2017, www.worldofmatter.org) he has collaborated with a worldwide network of artists, architects, planners, curators, cultural and media scholars to investigate the interaction of architectural practices with resource ecologies, network creativity, global economies and informal urbanism. Mörtenböck previously served as Professor of Media Aesthetics at the University of Paderborn, and as an affiliated faculty member of the Royal College of Art, London. He is the founding director of the Visual Culture Unit at the Vienna University of Technology’s Faculty of Architecture and Planning.
  • Helge Mooshammer
    Research Coordinator

    Helge Mooshammer, PhD, is an urban and cultural theorist. He was director of the international research projects Relational Architecture and Other Markets (www.othermarkets.org) at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Vienna University of Technology. He is currently a Research Fellow in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research is concerned with changing forms of urban sociality arising from processes of transnationalization, capital movements, informal economies, and newly emerging regimes of governance.

    Mörtenböck and Mooshammer have published more than 100 essays on architecture, urbanism, contemporary art and visual culture in scholarly volumes und international journals such as Grey Room, Architectural Research Quarterly, Social Text, Architectural Theory Review and Third Text. Several scholarly articles and essays have been translated into other languages, including Estonian, French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish and Turkish. Their research and curatorial work has been presented, amongst others, at the Whitechapel Gallery London, the Netherlands Architecture Institute Rotterdam, Storefront for Art and Architecture New York, Proekt Fabrika Moscow, Santral Istanbul, Ellen Gallery Montreal, and the Venice Architecture Biennale.

    Their recent books include Visual Cultures as Opportunity (Sternberg 2016), Informal Market Worlds: The Architecture of Economic Pressure (ATLAS & READER co-ed. with Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, nai010 Publishers 2015), Occupy: Räume des Protests (transcript 2012), Space (Re) Solutions: Intervention and Research in Visual Culture (transcript 2011), and Networked Cultures: Parallel Architectures and the Politics of Space (nai010 Publishers 2008).
    www.thinkarchitecture.net
  • Ignacio Valero
    2017/18 Professorial Research Fellow

    Ignacio Valero has a PhD from the University of California a Berkeley and is an associate professor of humanities and sciences at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, in the Graduate Fine Arts, Design, Critical Studies, and Diversity Studies Programs. He has formerly taught at UC Berkeley, the University of Florida, the University of Madrid Carlos III, University of the Andes and Xavier University of Colombia, and other universities. He continues to present work and lecture internationally. Valero's current research interests include: affective capitalism and the shared economy, semiocapitalism and the knowledge economy, technology and the creative industries, the political economy and epistemology of the image, consumption, desire, social media, and the society of the spectacle; globalization, environmental sustainability, informal markets, social movements and the commons; and the aesthetic, philosophical, social, and cultural dimensions of "archaic modernity,” utopia and dystopia in science fiction, anime, gender, sexual difference, and pop consumer culture. Stemming from these interlocking issues, he has been researching and writing on innovation, ideology, and global neoliberalism, big data, fake news and post-truth media, populism & democracy, social ecology, biopolitical production, and aesthetics, art labor and gentrification, under his developing concepts of EcoDomics, the Aesthetic(s) of the Common(s), and the Emotariat. He is also interested in understanding practices leading to critical and creative pedagogies. Valero was formerly Dean of the School of Fine Arts at CCAC, Latin American Coordinator with the United Nations Environment Program’s International Center for Environmental Education, CIFCA at Madrid, Spain, and has also been an Environmental Policy Consultant with the United Nations Development Program, US AID, Colombia’s National Planning Department, and the Inter-American Development Bank. He was a Senior Research Associate with the Colombian Science Foundation, the first General Coordinator of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta Eco-Development Pilot Project, Director of Planning and Deputy Director General of Colombia's Environmental Protection Agency, and a member of the presidential environmental advisory council for the writing of the new Colombian constitution.
  • Christian Frieß
    Researcher

    Christian Frieß is an architect, artist and researcher trained at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the Vienna University of Technology, where he currently is Project Assistant (FWF) at the Visual Culture Unit.

    His multidisciplinary practice spans from the architectural design of the Soundstudio Lobby in the Semperdepot in Vienna, the critical design project Vierzig Morgen at the memorial site Mauthausen to the graphic poem Away from there (Luftschacht Verlag 2015). He co-founded the working group Das Kollektiv and the society Korona Mai – Verein zur Förderung einer interdisziplinären Auseinandersetzung mit der gebauten Umwelt.
  • Tom Trevatt
    Researcher

    Tom Trevatt is a lecturer, writer and curator undertaking a PhD in the Visual Cultures Department in Goldsmiths, University of London. The title of his thesis is "Axioms of Petroculture: The Political Economy of Art in The Second Age of Oil", which deals with the cultural logic of the political situation created by recylcing petrodollars into the financial economy. He is a Lecturer at Goldsmiths, Univeristy of London and University of Creative Arts, Epsom/Rochester.
  • Carmen Lael Hines
    Researcher

    Carmen Lael Hines is a writer, artist and researcher working in video, text and installation. She is currently working as the curatorial assistant for the upcoming project: “Platform Austria” at the 17th Venice Architectural Biennale. Carmen completed her BA in English Literature and Language at the University of Oxford and her MA in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths College, The University of London. She is interested in issues of scale, communication and re-production. She has exhibited her work UNA festival(The University of Glasgow), Grow Tottenham(London) and the Dolphin Gallery(Oxford), and is the founder of GILT, a collaborative editorial project exploring questions of communicating Catholic Guilt in palpable form. She has written for and worked with publications/organisations including: iD magazine, the ISIS magazine, The Filmmaker’s Cooperative, The Mays Anthology, Common Ground Oxford, Empower her Voice, The Villager, and Polyester Zine.
  • Benjamin Gerdes
    2018/19 Fulbright Specialist

    Benj Gerdes is a Brooklyn, New York-based artist, writer and organiser working in film, video and other public formats, individually as well as collaboratively. He is interested in intersections of radical politics, knowledge production and popular imagination. His work often focuses on the affective and social consequences of economic and state regimes.
    Gerdes’s work has been exhibited and screened at venues including the Centre Pompidou (Paris), National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), New Museum (New York), Museum of the Moving Image (New York), REDCAT Gallery (Los Angeles), Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Tate Modern (London) and the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar. His writings have been published in October; The Journal of Aesthetics + Protest; Incite Journal of Experimental Media; Public; and Rethinking Marxism. With artist and filmmaker Lasse Lau, he is co-curator of the recent exhibitions Past is Not Post (Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art, 2017) and Rewriting Histories (Fotografisk Center, Copenhagen, 2015). His studies include Brown University, Hunter College–City University of New York and the Whitney Independent Study Program. Lectures and visiting artist engagements include California College of the Arts, NYU, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Duke, Cornell and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art, as well as teaching at Bard College, Parsons, Cooper Union and Long Island University.
Former team members:

Stephanie Polsky
(Postdoc Researcher - 2016/17)

Stefanie Wuschitz
(Postdoc Researcher - 2016/17)

CONTRIBUTORS

  • Joshua Portway and Lise Autogena ,  

    Joshua Portway is a UK-born artist and computer programmer and Lise Autogena, a Danish-born artist and Professor of Cross-Disciplinary Art at the Cultural Communication and Computing Research Institute (C3RI) at Sheffield Hallam University. Based in London, they have worked together since the early 90’s using custom built technology and visualisations of global real-time data to develop large scale multimedia installations, site-specific works and performances, usually in collaboration with organisations, communities and experts across many specialised fields.

    Recent projects include: Kuannersuit; Kvanefjeld, a film investigating the challenges of siting a uranium mine in Greenland, the difficult decisions and tradeoffs faced by a culture seeking to escape a colonial past and define its own identity in a globalised world (Bildmuseet, Sweden 2016), Cities like Plants, a robotic installation exploring how the regulatory systems underlying plant growth relate to principles of city planning (Cambridge University, 2016), Black Shoals; Dark Matter, a long term exploration into data visualisation and financial belief systems, visualising the financial markets as a planetarium, where stars representing companies on the world markets form constellations and galaxies depending on the movements on the markets. Live trading on the stars generate light, which provides food for an ecology of artificial life creatures that live and evolve amongst the stars (Somerset House, ArtScience Museum Singapore 2016, Nikolaj Kunsthal 2004, Tate Britain 2000). Untitled (superorganism) an installation simulating the phenomenon of the “ant mill”, a side effect of the self-organizing structure of certain ant colonies, where hundreds of thousands of ants can walk in a circle until overcome by exhaustion and, eventually, death (Abattoirs Museum 2014, ZKM 2015). Most Blue Skies, an enquiry into the changing psychological perceptions of the sky space. The project responds to real-time changes in the atmosphere using a complex system of satellite data acquisition and atmospheric simulations, in order to visualize and locate the currently ‘bluest sky’ in the world. (Domaine de Chamarande, 2012, Tensta Kunsthal, 2010, Nikolaj Kunsthal/COP15, 2009, Gwangju Biennial 2006) and Foghorn Requiem, a site-specific performance - a requiem for the lost sound of the foghorn, composed by Orlando Gough and performed by three brass bands, the Souter Lighthouse foghorn and fifty ships on the North Sea. Custom designed computer software and hardware dynamically compensates for time delays from horns being played on ships miles away from the listeners, allowing the timbral effects of distance and landscape to be directly incorporated into the music (Souter Lighthouse, North Sea, UK, 2013).

    autogena.org

  • Cecilia Wee and Dani Admiss ,  

    Dr Cecilia Wee FRSA is an independent curator, researcher and Tutor in the School of Communication, Royal College of Art. Cecilia produces projects that investigate the role of art and design in creating a more equitable society, particularly working with experimental sound, performance, visual art and design practices. Her research interests span cultural understandings of public space, financial and economic systems, relationships with technology, environmental change,organisational behaviour, security and dialogue. Cecilia is Chair of the Live Art Development Agency, trustee of Resonance FM and part of the core group behind the Radical Renewable Art and Activism
    Fund.

    Dani Admiss is a London based independent curator and researcher. Her projects focus on the exchange between art, design, technology and sociocultural production. She is an AHRC researcher with CRUMB, a network for those who 'exhibit' new media art, at the faculty for Art and Design at Sunderland University. Her research explores emerging types of curatorial practice, focusing on the phenomena of ‘world-building’, in the context of knowledge production, new subjectivities and critical infrastructures. Recent curatorial projects include, ‘AI in Asia’, Digital Asia Hub, Hong Kong, ‘Big Bang Data’ Somerset House, London, 'Digital Revolution' the Barbican Centre, London, and 'The Institute Effect' at 'Close, Closer' the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Portugal.

  • Matthew Fuller,  

    Matthew Fuller is the author of the forthcoming, How to Sleep, in art, biology and culture, (Bloomsbury, Autumn 2017) and How to be a Geek, essays on the culture of software (Polity, Spring 2017). Other titles include Media Ecologies, materialist energies in art and technoculture (MIT), Behind the Blip, essays on the culture of software and Elephant & Castle (both Autonomedia). With Andrew Goffey he is co-author of Evil Media (MIT). He is editor of books including Software Studies, a lexicon (MIT), and is a co-editor of the journal Computational Culture (http://www.computationalculture.net). He is Professor of Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London.

  • Jennifer Gabrys,  

    Jennifer Gabrys is Reader in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Principal Investigator on Citizen Sense, a project funded by the European Research Council (2013-2017). Her books include a techno-geographical investigation of environmental sensing, Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (University of Minnesota Press, 2016); and a materialpolitical analysis of electronic waste, Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (University of Michigan Press, 2011). Together with Gay Hawkins and Mike Michael, she has co-edited an interdisciplinary collection on plastics, Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic (Routledge, 2013). Prior to joining the Department of Sociology, she was Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the MA in Design and Environment in the Department of Design at Goldsmiths. She completed a PhD in Communication Studies at McGill University in Montreal, during which time she was engaged as a research fellow on the Culture of Cities and Digital Cities / Mobile Digital Commons projects. While in Montreal, she was also Researcher in Residence at the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, where she focused on archives from Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). Her work can be found at citizensense.net and jennifergabrys.net.

  • Paolo Gerbaudo,  

    Paolo Gerbaudo is a cultural and political theorist looking at the transformation of social movements and political parties in a digital era. He is the Director of the Centre for Digital Culture at King's College London and the author of 'Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism' (Pluto, 2012), and of the forthcoming volume 'The Mask and the Flag: Populism, Citizenism and Global Protest' (Hurst/OUP, 2017).

  • Stephen Graham,  

    Stephen Graham is Professor of Cities and Society at Newcastle University's School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape. He has an interdisciplinary background linking human geography, urbanism and the sociology of technology. Since the early 1990s Prof. Graham has used this foundation to develop critical perspectives addressing how cities are being transformed through remarkable changes in infrastructure, mobility, digital media, surveillance, security, militarism and verticality.

    Prof. Graham’s work has been extremely influential across a wide range of urban, technological, social and political debates across the world. It has been translated into twenty languages. His ten books include Splintering Urbanism; Telecommunications and the City (both with Simon Marvin); the Cybercities Reader; Cities, War and Terrorism; Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructures Fail; and Infrastructural Lives (with Colin McFarlane). Prof Graham’s 2011 book Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism was nominated for the Orwell Prize in political writing and was the Guardian’s book of the week. His latest research focuses on the political aspects of verticality and develops an explicitly three-dimensional perspective on the politics of geography and materiality both above and below the earth’s surface. Prof Graham’s major new book on this them- Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers (Verso) – was published in November 2016. Another Guardian book of the week, it was in the books of the year lists of both the FT and the Observer.

  • Ayesha Hameed,  

    Ayesha Hameed is an artist whose work explores contemporary borders and migration, critical race theory, Walter Benjamin, and visual cultures of the Black Atlantic. Recent presentations and performance lectures include Black Atlantis at ICA London (2015), Labour in a Single Shot, conference at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2015), at The Chimurenga Library at the Showroom, London (2015), Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities, Oxford (2015), Edinburgh College of Art (2015), at Goldsmiths MFA Lectures (2016), and Empire Remains (2016). A Rough History (of the destruction of fingerprints) has been screened or presented at Forensic Architecture at the House of World Cultures (Berlin) in 2014, at Social Glitch at Kunstraum Niederoesterreich Vienna (2015), at Pavillion, Leeds in 2015, at Qalandiya International Palestine Biennial (2016), at Ashakal Alwan/Homeworks Space Programme, Beirut (2016) and the Bartlett School of Architecture (2016). She is currently the Joint Programme Leader in Fine Art and History of Art at Goldsmiths.

  • Lev Manovich,  

    Lev Manovich is one of the leading theorists of digital culture worldwide, and a pioneer in application of data science for analysis of contemporary culture. Manovich is the author and editor of ten books including Cultural Analytics (forthcoming 2017), Instagram and Contemporary Image, Data Drift, ( Software Takes Command, Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database and The Language of New Media which was described as "the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan." He was included in the list of "25 People Shaping the Future of Design" in 2013 and the list of "50 Most Interesting People Building the Future" in 2014. Manovich is a Professor of Computer Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and a Director of the Cultural Analytics Lab. Lab's projects were funded and comissioned by Google, Twitter, New York Public Library, among others.

  • Louis Moreno,  

    Louis Moreno is a lecturer in the Department of Visual Culture and Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. He is also a member of the curatorial collective freethought who were one of the artistic directors of the 2016 Bergen Assembly in Norway.

  • Luciana Parisi,  

    Luciana Parisi is Reader in Cultural Theory, Chair of the PhD Programme (Centre for Cultural Studies), and co-director of the Digital Culture Unit (Goldsmiths, London). She has written Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (2004, Continuum Press) and Contagious Architecture. Computation, Aesthetics and Space (2013, MIT Press). She is currently researching the philosophical consequences of logical thinking in machines.

  • Irit Rogoff,  

    Irit Rogoff is a writer, teacher, curator and organisor. She is Professor of Visual Culture at Goldsmiths London University, a department she founded in 2002. Rogoff works at the meeting ground between contemporary practices, politics and philosophy. Curatorial projects have included A.C.A.D.E.M.Y. in Hamburg, Antwerp and Eindhoven and “De-Regulation with the work of Kutlug Ataman” (Antwerp, Tel Aviv, Berlin) and “Summit—Non Aligned Positions in Education Culture” in Berlin. Rogoff has written extensively on contemporary participatory arts practices and on arts expansions into the social through educational, activist and epistemological incursions. Her book on Seriousness (co-authored with Gavin Butt, Sternberg Press) appeared in 2015. Her current work is on new practices of knowledge production and their impact on modes of research, under the title of The Way We Work Now (forthcoming 2017).

  • Evelyn Ruppert,  

    Evelyn Ruppert is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She studies the sociology of data specifically in relation to how different kinds of digital data are constituted and mobilised to enact and govern populations. Evelyn is PI of a five-year European Research Council funded project, Peopling Europe: How data make a people (ARITHMUS; 2014-19). She is also Founding and Editor-in-chief of a SAGE open access journal, Big Data & Society: Critical Interdisciplinary Inquiries, launched in June 2014. Recent books are Being Digital Citizens (authored with Engin Isin) published in April 2015 (RLI International) and Modes of Knowing (edited with John Law) published in August 2016 (Mattering Press).

  • Beverley Skeggs,  

    Beverley Skeggs is Professor of Sociology, at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has published The Media; Issues in Sociology (1992); Feminist Cultural Theory(1995); Formations of Class and Gender (1997);Class, Self, Culture (2004); Sexuality and the Politics of Violence and Safety (2004)(with Les Moran) and Feminism after Bourdieu (2005)( with Lisa Adkins), and with Helen Wood, Reacting to Reality TV:Audience, Performance, Value (2012) and Reality TV and Class (2012.

  • Ravi Sundaram,  

    Ravi Sundaram is a Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi. In 2000 he founded the well-known Sarai programme at the CSDS along with Ravi Vasudevan and the Raqs Media Collective. Since then, Sarai grew to become one of India’s best-known experimental and critical research sites on media, spanning local and global sites. Sundaram is the author of Pirate Modernity: Media Urbanism in Delhi and No Limits: Media Studies from India (Delhi, 2013).

    Sundaram has co-edited the Sarai Reader series, The Public Domain (2001), The Cities of Everyday Life (2002), Shaping Technologies (2003), Crisis Media(2004). His recently edited No Limits: Media Studies from India came out in 2015.
    Sundaram’s essays have been translated into various languages in India, Asia, and Europe. He is currently finishing his next book project, Events and Affections: post-public media circulation.

  • Ignacio Valero,  

    Ignacio Valero, PhD
    California College of the Arts – San Francisco

    Education: PhD (Latin American/Environmental Studies/Cultural Geography/Intellectual History) University of California at Berkeley; Diploma (Development/Natural Resources) ITC-UNESCO Centre/ Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands; MAT (Sociology/Development/Education) University of Florida; B.S. (Economics/Sociology) Missouri State University.

    Experience: Currently: Associate Professor, Humanities and Sciences (Critical Studies/ Diversity Studies/Design/Fine Arts) California College of the Arts - CCA/San Francisco; Formerly: Dean, School of Fine Arts, CCAC; Director, Humanities and Sciences, CCAC; Presidential Environmental Advisory Council for the writing of the new Colombian Constitution; Acting Director/Deputy Director, Colombia’s Environmental Protection Agency-INDERENA; Latin American Coordinator, (Environmental Education, Technology, and Sustainable Development,) Centro Internacional de Formacion en Ciencias Ambientales - CIFCA /United Nations Environment Programme – UNEP, Madrid, Spain; General Coordinator, Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta Eco-Development Pilot Project; Environmental Consultant International Development Bank/ US Agency for International Development - USAID/ United Nations Development Program – UNDP/ Colombian National Planning Agency – DNP; Environment/Science/Technology Researcher, Colombian Science Foundation – COLCIENCIAS.

    Current Research Interests: EcoDomics/Political Economy/Political Ecology/Cultural Geography/Affective Labor/Biopolitics/Governmentality/Post-Government Governance; Commodity Aesthetic(s)/Media/Social Media/Epistemology of the Image/Post-Truth, Propaganda, Public Relations, and the Society of the Spectacle/Design Thinking; Science Fiction as Social Criticism/Social Movements/Aesthetic(s) of the Common(s).

    Recent Publications: “EcoDomics: Beyond Palm Trees, Orangeries and the Ecology of Illusions,” in Natasha Wheat’s Self Contained (Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, July 2010); “EcoDomics: Imagining a Way To Come Back to Our Senses,” in Farming 2050, Free Soil No. 1, January 2011; “The Picture(s) of Michael Jackson: Notes for a Faustian EcoDomics,” in Jaime Cortez with Tisa Bryant & Ignacio Valero, Universal Remote: Meditations on the Absence of Michael Jackson, January 2011; “10 ∞” Interview, A Variation on Powers of Ten, Edited by Futurefarmers with Elizabeth Thomas, Design Geoff Kaplan, General Working Group, Berlin-New York, Sternberg Press, co-published with Bildmuseet, Umeå University, Sweden, 2012; “EcoDomics, Gentrification, and the Aesthetic(s) of the Common(s),” in Asterisk San Francisco Magazine, Idea Issue, 2013; “EcoDomics and Cultural History: Valuing Art Labor Under Neoliberalism,” in Art Practical, Special Issue “Valuing Labor in the Arts,” 5.4, 2014; “How Free is Free?” in Ted Purves and Shane Aslan Selzer What We Want is Free: Critical Exchanges in Recent Art (Albany, NY: SUNY / CCA 3wattis,2014); “EcoDomics: Life Beyond the Neoliberal Apocalypse” in Peter Mortenbock, Helge Mooshammer, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, Informal Market Worlds (Reader): The Architecture of Economic Pressure (Rotterdam: nai010 Publishers, 2015).

  • Simon Yuill,  

    Dr. Simon Yuill is an artist, programmer and a researcher with Sociology, Goldsmiths, developing custom research software and working in the fields of Software Studies and Digital Sociology. He was the inaugural winner of the Vilém Flusser Theory Award (Berlin, 2008), has been a Research Resident at the Piet Zwart Institute (Rotterdam, 2005), Visiting Fellow at the University of Warwick (2013), and is a Visiting Research Fellow with the Digital Culture Unit at Goldsmiths College.