Synthetic Imaginaries: The Cultural Politics of Generative AI

University of Siegen | 8–12 September 2025 | extended deadline for submision: 30 June 2025

Synthetic Imaginaries: The Cultural Politics of Generative AI is an international event that will explore the cultural, political, and methodological dimensions of generative AI and synthetic media through a combination of conference talks, hands-on workshops, and collaborative projects. Topics include deepfakes, avatars, cultural biases in training data, feminist and postcolonial critiques, and the aesthetics of AI-generated content.

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About | Program Highlights | Proposal Submission | Venue | Program | Contact

About the Autumn School

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI), big data processing, and synthetic media has profoundly reshaped how culture is produced, made sense of, and experienced today. To ‘synthesize’ is to assemble, collate, and compile, blending heterogeneous components into something new. Where there is synthesis, there is power at play. Synthetic media—as exemplified by the oddly prophetic early speech synthesizer demos—carry the logic of analog automation into digital cultures where human and algorithmic interventions converge. Much of the research in this area—spanning subjects as diverse as augmented reality, avatars, and deepfakes—has revolved around ideas of simulation, focusing on the manipulation of data and content people produce and consume. Meanwhile, generative AI and deep learning models, while central to debates on artificiality, raise political questions as part of a wider social ecosystem where technology is perpetually reimagined, negotiated, and contested: What images and stories feed the datasets that contemporary AI models are trained on? Which imaginaries are reproduced through AI-driven media technologies and which remain latent? How do synthetic media transform relations of power and visibility, and what methods—perhaps equally synthetic—can we develop to analyze these transformations? 

The five-day event at the University of Siegen—organized by the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centers Media of Cooperation and Transformations of the Popular together with the Center of Digital Narratives in Bergen, the Digital Culture and Communication Section of ECREA and the German National Research Data Infrastructure Consortium NFDI4Culture—explores the relationship between synthetic media and today’s imaginaries of culture and technology, which incorporate AI as an active participant. By “synthetic,” we refer not simply to the artificial but to how specific practices and ways of knowing take shape through human-machine co-creation. Imaginaries, in turn, reflect shared visions, values, and expectations—shaping not only what technologies do but how they are perceived and made actionable in everyday life. 

The event opens with a one-day conference and moves into hands-on workshops and collaborative projects. With multiple opportunities for exchange across disciplines, we encourage especially early-career researchers and PhD students to present their ideas during the conference and join a project led by international facilitators and data designers. We invite submissions of short abstracts (max. 500 words) for presentations engaging with questions and provocations related—but not limited—to topics such as: 

Critical data studies perspectives on AI: how data infrastructures, labeling, and curation shape the outputs we call “synthetic”; Cultural afterlives of training data: how racialized, gendered, or colonial imaginaries persist in synthetic media outputs; Methodological uses of GenAI: the politics that we buy in when repurposing AI as a method, from inherited bias to epistemic tensions; Synthetic personhood and likeness: exploring deepfakes, AI-generated avatars, and the power of (in)authenticity; Online cultures and platforms: how AI-generated content circulates across platforms—from memes and art to fan fiction, music, and poetry; Postcolonial and feminist critiques of AI: challenging universalist assumptions in generative models and interrogating whose knowledge is made (in)visible; Clichés, formulas, and repetition in GenAI outputs: how AI-generated stories and images rely on familiar tropes, visual styles, and narrative conventions; The aesthetics of noise in AI-generated content: repetition, glitch, randomness, and their role in producing or disrupting meaning; GPTs as infrastructural components: how generative pretrained transformers operate as configurable, customizable, and task-oriented agents embedded in platform infrastructures; Prompting and/as probing: prompting as a form of critical intervention, shaping co-authorship, sense-making, and research design; The ethics of training AI: from historical records and religious texts to indigenous cosmologies and oral traditions—what are the implications of using culturally sensitive knowledge to train generative models? Generative AI and Memory: synthetic media as a means of reimagining the past—through deepfake testimonies, interactive historical simulations, and other forms of computational memory-making; Generative AI in activist contexts: can AI be used for resistance or reimagining community—in the face of its environmental footprint and complicity in extractive systems? 

Program highlights

The event blends three complementary formats:

Mix questions!

Monday, 8 September

Day one begins with a keynote by Jill Walker Rettberg and opens space for emerging questions—think of it as an idea hub. Accepted abstracts will be grouped into thematic sessions curated by the organising team. Presenters will be connected via email ahead of time to coordinate their contributions. Each presentation will be set to 10 minutes to allow ample time for discussion, collective thinking, and exchange. The emphasis is on dialogue, not polished conclusions.  

Mix methods!

Tuesday, 9 September-Thursday, 11 September 

The next three days—featuring a workshop by Gabriele De Seta and an artistic intervention by Ángeles Briones and DensityDesign Lab—are about exploring new methods—hands-on! We invite you to join a team of interdisciplinary scholars and data designers in probing new methodological combinations. Each of our project teams will present a research question alongside a specific method to be collaboratively explored. Participants will not only learn how to design prompts and work with AI-generated text and images but also how to critically account for genAI models as platform models. All projects draw on intersectional approaches, combining qualitative and quantitative data to explore the synthetic dimensions of AI agency—whether as content creator, noise generator, hallucinator, research collaborator, data annotator, or style imitator. Please bring your laptops. The project titles will be announced soon. 

Synthesize!

Friday, 12 September  

The final day is dedicated to sharing, reflecting, and synthesizing the questions, methods, and insights developed throughout the week. Project teams will present their collaborative processes, highlight key takeaways, and discuss how their ideas and approaches shifted through hands-on experimentation with methods.

Proposal Submission

Please submit your proposal (max. 500 words) outlining how your work aligns with the event’s theme by 30.06.2025, using this form. Please note that the number of participants will be limited to maintain focused and engaging discussions. All submissions will be peer-reviewed.

The event is free of charge, though attendees are responsible for arranging and covering their travel and accommodation in Siegen. Limited travel support is available (two to three stipends ranging from €500 to €700). Early-career researchers and PhD students are invited to apply; stipends will be awarded by the NFDI4Culture consortium based on the strength of the justification, particularly concerning critical ethical engagement with AI research data, as well as the distance and cost of travel. Short summaries of the presented work will be published on the NFDI4Culture website.

A certificate of participation will be issued for both the conference presentation and the hands-on workshop sessions.

Updated Timeline with extended deadline:
Submit your proposal by 30 June 2025.
Notification of acceptance by July 15 2025.
Registration by August 1 2025.

Venue

Universität Siegen
Campus Herrengarten
AH-A 217/18
Herrengarten 3
57072 Siegen

Contact

Dr. Elena Pilipets
elena.pilipets[at]uni-siegen.de
ecreadigitalculture[æt]gmail.com

The Autumn School is organized by the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centers 1187 Media of Cooperation and 1472 Transformations of the Popular together with the Center of Digital Narratives in Bergen, the Digital Culture and Communication Section of ECREA and the German National Research Data Infrastructure Consortium NFDI4Culture.

Wie „smart“ ist Ihr Zuhause?

Eine Forschungsstudie von Stephan Habscheid, Dagmar Hoffmann, Tim Hector, Niklas Strüver (alle Universität Siegen, SFB 1187)

Das Projektteam von B06 „Un-/erbetene Beobachtung in Interaktion“ sucht Teilnehmer*innen für ihre Forschungsstudie zu „Smart Homes“. Sie haben ein „Smart Home“ oder wollen sich bald erste Smart Home-Geräte anschaffen? Dann nehmen Sie an der Forschungsstudie teil!

→ Zur Website des Teilprojekts B06

Über die Studie

Wir wollen mehr über Ihren ‚smarten‘ Alltag erfahren. Um nähere Einblicke in den Alltag mit smarten Geräten zu erhalten, möchten wir Sie bei der Einrichtung und Nutzung Ihrer Smart Home-Geräte begleiten und auf Video aufzeichnen. Die Ergebnisse und Daten nutzen wir ausschließlich zu Forschungszwecken. Die gesammelten Daten werden nach höchsten datenschutzrechtlichen Standards vertraulich verarbeitet. Bei Veröffentlichungen wird auf eine strenge Anonymisierung bzw. Verfremdung der Teilnehmer*innen geachtet.

Für die Studie suchen wir

• Haushalte mit Smart Speaker, smarten Küchengeräten (z.B. ein Thermomix), vernetzter Elektronik (z.B. Glühbirnen, Thermostate, Türschlösser oder Steckdosen), digitalen Energiekontrollen für ein Solarpanel oder ähnlichen Geräten/Anwendungen
• Haushalte, die noch keine solchen Geräte einsetzen, aber die Anschaffung planen und uns bei der Einrichtung und Nutzung dessen mitnehmen möchten.

Bei einer Teilnahme bieten wir Ihnen eine Aufwandsentschädigung, die je nach Umfang der Teilnahme zwischen 30 und 180 Euro betragen kann.

Bei einer Teilnahme erwartet Sie:

• Die Video-Aufnahme der Nutzung von Smart Home-Geräten in bestimmten Situationen, z.B. beim Kochen und Spielen, bei alltäglichen Unterhaltungen oder bei Besuchen von Freunden und Bekannten.
• Wenn möglich die Video-Aufnahme der Ersteinrichtung von Smart Home-Geräten (Auspacken, Installation, Verbinden mit dem Smartphone und Platzierung in der Wohnung).
• Die Erfassung aller Smart Home-Anwendungen in Ihrer Wohnung sowie verschiedene Interviews mit Ihnen sowie mit anderen Haushaltsmitgliedern.
• Um die Verbindung zwischen dem Smart Home-Gerät und Ihrem Smartphone zu ermitteln soll außerdem in bestimmten Situationen ein Screen-Recording durchgeführt werden.

Kameras und Audio-Aufnahmegeräte werden von uns zur Verfügung gestellt.

Teilnahmevoraussetzungen: Alle Mitglieder Ihres Haushaltes müssen mindestens 16 Jahre alt sein.

Kontakt

Bei Fragen schreiben Sie gerne eine Mail an das Projektteam: ipa-studie[æt]uni-siegen.de.

Download Postkarte

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Co-Design Workshop on “Social Interaction in Semi-Automated Traffic”

by Shadan Sadeghian (University of Siegen) and Md Akib Shahriar Khan (University of Siegen)

Are you interested in sharing your experiences, ideas, and perspectives on communication and collaboration in evolving traffic systems? We seek participants for our user study on „Co-Design Workshop on Social Interaction in Semi-Automated Traffic“, led .

Central Information

Da️te: Wednesday, March 5, 2025
Time: 1.00 pm – 4.30 pm
Location: University of Siegen,  Kohlbettstraße 15, 57072 Siegen

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About the workshop

This Co-Design Workshop will explore how road users – pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, and others – interact in semi-automated traffic environments. Through creative and interactive activities, participants can share their experiences, ideas, and perspectives on communication and collaboration in evolving traffic systems.

Who can participate?

How to apply?

To appreciate your time and contributions, participants will receive a compensation of €40. Spots are limited, so please register as soon as possible using the following link: ➞ register here. 

Selected participants will be contacted with further details.

“Media Climate Justice: Research, Skillsharing, Hacking”

organisiert von Julia Bee (Ruhr-Universität Bochumd) und der Arbeitsgruppe Research at Risk

Wie prägen Medien unser Verständnis der Klimakrise? Welche Rolle spielen sie für Aktivismus und politische Mobilisierung? Die Spring School „Media Climate Justice: Research, Skillsharing, Hacking“ lädt vom 11. bis 13. April 2025 in Bochum dazu ein, diese Fragen praxisnah zu diskutieren. Die Spring School bietet Workshops, Inputs und Vernetzungsmöglichkeiten für alle Interessierten aus Wissenschaft, Journalismus, Aktivismus und Kunst.

➞ Summer School Webseite

Zentrale Infos

AI Methods: From Probing to Prompting, 4-7 February, 2025 

The Collaborative Research Center 1187 “Media of Cooperation” organizes the one-week winter school at the University of Siegen and invites graduate students, postdoc researchers, and media studies scholars interested in the intersections of AI methods, digital visual methodologies, visual social media, and platforms. The Winter School aims to explore questions centering on the implications of AI methods for new forms of sense-making and human-machine co-creation. Please register via the registration form until December 15 2025.

About the Winter School

As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies rapidly evolve, the ways in which we perceive and process information are fundamentally changing. The shift from computational vision, recognition, and classification to generative AI lies at the core of today’s technological landscape, fueling societal debates across different areas—from open-source intelligence and election security to propaganda, art, activism, and storytelling. 

Computer vision, a sophisticated agent of pattern recognition, emerged with the rise of machine learning, sparking critical debates around the fairness of image labelling and the deep-seated biases in training data. Today, models like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and more recently, Grok are not just recognizing—they are generating patterns, synthesizing multimodal data from websites, social media, and other online sources to produce oddly familiar and yet captivating results. This shift introduces significant ethical questions: How can we critically repurpose the outputs of AI models that are always rooted in platform infrastructures? Which methodological challenges and creative possibilities arise when the boundaries between context and scale become indistinct? Are patterns and biases all there is? And how about scaling down? 

The one-week winter school at the University of Siegen organized by the Collaborative Research Center “Media of Cooperation” invites participants to explore these questions centering on the implications of AI methods for new forms of sense-making and human-machine co-creation. The winter school is practice-based and brings together conceptual inputs, workshops, and sprinted group projects around two collaborative methods: probing and prompting. 

Probing involves repurposing AI systems to explore their underlying mechanisms. It is a method of critical interrogation—for example, using specific collections of images as inputs to reveal how contemporary computer vision models process these inputs and generate descriptions. Probing not only serves to problematize the hidden architectures of AI but also allows us to critically assess their different ‘ways of knowing’—how can alternative computer vision features such as web detection or text-in-image recognition help us contextualize and interpret visual data? 

On the other hand, prompting refers to the practice of engaging GenAI models through input commands to generate multimodal content. Prompting emphasizes the participatory aspect of AI, framing it as a tool for human-machine co-creation, but it also shows the models’ limitations and inherent tensions. AI-generated creations captivate us, yet they also pose the risk of hallucination or what philosopher Harry Frankfurt might call “bullshit”— statements the models confidently present as facts, regardless of their detachment from reality.

The first day of the Winter School will be hybrid. Project group work will be taking place on site.

Program highlights

Participants will have the opportunity to explore and attune these methods to different research scenarios including tracing the spread of propaganda memes/deepfakes, analyzing AI-generated images, and ‘jailbreaking’ or prompting against platforms’ content policy restrictions. A blend of research practice and critical reflection, the winter school features

a keynote by Jill Walker Rettberg (University of Bergen) on “Qualitiative methods for analysing generative AI: Experiences with machine vision and AI storytelling”

two hands-on workshops on mixed techniques for probing and prompting facilitated by Carlo de Gaetano (Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences), Andrea Benedetti (Density Design, Politecnico di Milano), Elena Pilipets (University of Siegen), and Marloes Geboers (University of Amsterdam) 

two project tracks intended to combine AI methods with qualitative approaches and ethical data storytelling.

Track 1 “Fabricating the People: Probing AI Detection for Audio-Visual Content in Turkish TikTok” led by Lena Teigeler and Duygu Karatas (both University of Siegen)

Track 2 “Jail(break)ing: Synthetic Imaginaries of ‘sensitive’ AI” led by Elena Pilipets (University of Siegen) and Marloes Geboers (University of Amsterdam) 

Track I: Fabricating the People: Probing AI Detection for Audio-Visual Content in Turkish TikTok

Lena Teigeler & Duygu Karatas

Several brutal femicides in Türkiye in 2024 led to a wave of outrage, showing in protests both on the streets and on social media. The protesters demand the protection of women against male violence, measures against offenders and criticize the government under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for not standing up for women’s rights, as demonstrated, for example, by Türkiye’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention in 2021. One of the cases leading to the protest was allegedly connected to the Turkish “manosphere” and online “incel” community. The manosphere is an informal online network of blogs, forums, and social media communities focused on men’s issues, often promoting views on masculinity, gender roles, and relationships. At the core of these groups often lie misogynistic, and anti-feminist views. Many groups foster toxic attitudes toward women and marginalized groups. Incels, short for „involuntary celibates,“ are one subgroup belonging to the broader manosphere, formed by men who feel unable to form romantic or sexual relationships despite wanting them, often blaming society or women for their frustrations.

The project investigates how the cases of femicide are discussed and negotiated in Turkish TikTok by protesters and within the manosphere and explores how these videos make use of generative AI. The use of AI in video creation can range from entire scene generation, over the creation of sounds or deepfaking, to editing and stylisation. The project takes a sample of TikToks associated with the recent wave of femicides as the starting point and makes use of AI methods for two purposes: 1) To detect the usage of generative AI within a sample of TikToks with the help of image labeling. This can range from fully-generated images, videos or sound, to the usage of tools and techniques used within the creation and editing process. We compare different models for detection purposes. 2) With the help of Web Detection, we trace the spread of videos and images across platform borders and content elements that are assembled or synthesized within TikToks.

The aim of the project is to create a cartography of AI based methods for the investigation of audio-visual content. It is part of the DFG-funded research project “Fabricating the People – negotiation of claims to representation in Turkish social media in the context of generative AI”.

Track II: Track 2 Jail(break)ing: Synthetic Imaginaries of ’sensitive‘ AI 

Elena Pilipets & Marloes Geboers 

The rapid evolution of AI technology is pushing the boundaries of ethical AI use. Newer models like Grok-2 diverge from traditional, more restrained approaches, raising concerns about biases, moderation, and societal impact. This track explores how three generative AI models—X’s Grok-2, Open AI’s GPT4o, and Microsoft’s Copilot—reimagine controversial content according to—or pushing against—the platforms‘ content policy restrictions. To better understand each model’s response to sensitive prompts, we use a derivative approach: starting with images as inputs, we generate stories around them that guide the creation of new, story-based image outputs. In the process, we employ iterative prompting that blends “jailbreaking”—eliciting responses the model would typically avoid—with “jailing,” or reinforcing platform-imposed constraints. Jail(break)ing, then, exposes the skewed imaginaries inscribed in the models‘ capacity to synthesize compliant outputs: The more iterations it takes to generate a new image the stronger the latent spaces of generative models come to the fore that lay bare the platforms‘ data-informed structures of reasoning.

Addressing the performative nature of automated perception, the track, facilitated by Elena Pilipets and Marloes Geboers, examines six image formations collected from social media, which then were used as prompts to explore six issues: war, memes, art, protest, porn, synthetics. In line with feminist approaches, we attend specifically to the hierarchies of power and (in)visibility perpetuated by GenAI, asking: Which synthetic imaginaries emerge from various issue contexts and what do these imaginaries reveal about the model’s ways of seeing? To which extent can we repurpose generative AI as a storytelling and tagging device? How do different models classify sensitive and ambiguous images (along the trajectories of content, aesthetics, and stance)? 

Facilitators will combine situated digital methods with experimental data visualization techniques tapping into the generative capacities of different AI models. The fabrication and collective interpretation of data with particular attention to the transitions between inputs and outputs will guide our exploration throughout. Participants will learn how to: 

• Conduct “keyword-in-context” analysis of AI-generated stories to identify patterns or “formulas” within issue-specific imaginaries (where, who/what, and how).
• Perform network analysis of AI-generated tags, where input keywords are tags for the original images and output keywords are tags for AI-regenerated images.
• Design prompts to generate canvases that synthesize vernaculars of different transformer models. 

The project builds on our earlier work, developing ethnographic approaches to explore cross-model assemblages of algorithmic processes, training datasets, and latent spaces.

Registration

Please register via the form above until December 15. Your registration will be confirmed by December 20, 2024. Participation is limited to 20 people.

Venue

University of Siegen
Campus Herrengarten
Herrengarten 3
room: AH-A 125 
57072 Siegen

Contact: Elena Pilipets

Official call for abstracts

„En/Countering Tracking: Resisting spatiotemporal media operations in computational culture“

The deadline for submissions is September 15, 2024.

Countering tracking has become a key form of resisting the logics of computational culture. Subversive encounters have emerged in recent years as counterpoints to the hegemonic logics of web infrastructures (Christl and Spiekermann 2016), platform labor (Heiland 2021) and racial capitalism (Russell and De Souza 2023). These attempts to counter tracking take forms that range from investigative visualizations (Fuller and Weizman 2021) or provoking glitches in tracking infrastructures (Leszczynski and Elwood 2022) to uncovering web-based tracking (Sharelab 2015), building counter-infrastructures for labor resistance (Qadri and D’Ignazio 2022), or using sensors and satellite images for critical investigations (Ballinger 2023; Boyd et al. 2018).

Countering tracking becomes a resistant media operation itself, disentangling hegemonic spatiotemporal regimes and their socio-political forces. These forms of countering tracking challenge existing theoretical approaches to the critical analysis of tracking and open up new perspectives on subversion and resistance in computational culture. How is countering tracking by means of tracking possible in different contexts and in relation to software, infrastructures and aesthetics?

We invite critical encounters through and of tracking, enabling new perspectives on computational infrastructures, software, (non-)human aesthetics and operative interactions, by means of theoretical reflections, critical making or activism. We aim at gathering submissions that 1) render existing tracking operations perceivable; 2) disrupt tracking infrastructures; or 3) operationalize tracking itself for resistance. The special issue invites theoretical, conceptual and performative approaches from fields such as media studies, visual studies, artistic research, sociology and critical geography to address the question of how tracking becomes a repressive, subversive or activistic media operation. 

Topics and projects might include:  

• Inventive methods that repurpose tracking infrastructures, sensors, software and data to research computational culture
• Detailed empirical and critical studies exploring the relations of en/countering tracking in computational culture
• En/countering tracking in labor resistance and platform capitalisms
• Critical theoretical conceptualization of tracking or countering for the study of computational culture
• Critical explorations of the chronopolitics, timescapes and spatiotemporal regimes of tracking
• Activist media, countersurveillance, tactical media, decolonial, (glitch) feminist and resistant epistemologies of tracking
• En/countering relations between political economy, racialized capitalism and tracking
• Visual cultures, (in-)visualities and aesthetics of en/countering tracking
• En/countering tracking in media art and artistic activism

Schedule:

750-word abstracts should be emailed to en_countering_tracking@uni-bonn.de by September 15, 2024. Abstracts will be reviewed by the special issue editors and the Computational Culture editorial board.

Any queries can be addressed to the special issue editors at: en_countering_tracking@uni-bonn.de

Official call for contributions | Call for contributions PDF

“The Datafied Web”:
6^th RESAW Conference (5-6 June 2025, Siegen University)

The deadline for submissions is 15 October 2024.

Do you remember the beginnings of early metrics in the 90s, the birth of web counters, those digital pioneers that marked and started to quantify the pulse of online activity, the novelty of seeing website visits measured in real-time, eye-catching graphics becoming the currency of online attention, and the early days of companies like Webtrends, Urchin and DoubleClick?

We invite scholars, researchers, web archivists to contribute to the 6th RESAW conference on the topic of “The Datafied Web”, through a historical lens. We would like to delve into the historical roots, trends, and trajectories that shaped the data-driven paradigm in web development and to examine the genealogies of the datafied and metrified web. Historical studies of trajectories towards a databased web and the emergence of platform-driven mobile ecosystems are very welcome, as well as case studies for instance related to the development of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and the evolution of data-sharing practices. Uncovering the early forms of analytics software, their origins, and the role they played in shaping the web landscape, and examining the historical context, aesthetics and role of web counters, analytics tools, mobile sensing and other metrics may also help us deepen our understanding of online interactions, past publics and audiences, and their (uneasy) trajectories. “The datafied web” also raises questions related to methods and (web) archives allowing to research this evolution: what are for instance the challenges and methodologies involved in archiving the metrified and increasingly mobile web, including the back-end infrastructure?  

This theme also invites us to trace the historical trajectory of data surveillance and the evolution of data capturing practices on the web. Complementary are issues related to the historical development of tracking mechanisms, cookies, and the creation of digital footprints, as well as the evolution of companies relying on metrics, and the development of financialized web spaces and their implications. By investigating historical controversies and debates surrounding the increasing datafication of the web and uncovering historical instances of innovative data use or resistance practices against the datafication of the web, this conference also aims at reconstructing vivid and key debates that are transversal to the history of the web. How did the datafied web provide for the sensory media environments that we are now living in?

Finally, we wish to discuss innovative research methodologies for uncovering the historical dimensions of the datafied and metrified web, as well as methods that are approaching web archives as data (from an archiving and research perspective) and explore them through distant reading, metadata, seed lists, and other methods. Plus, we want to encourage everyone to think about datafication as a practice of sensing and sense-making that creates, sustains, and undermines media environments.

Theme scope and conference topics of the RESAW Conference

We encourage submissions addressing the conference theme ‘Histories of the Datafied Web’ through the following themes:

Infrastructures

• histories and genealogies of the datafied and metrified web, including its platformization within capitalism(s)
• aesthetics and design of the early metrified web
• the rise of data surveillance and data capture as an industry
• histories of APIs, data-sharing, and advertising technologies
• the rise of web counters, web analytics, and other web metrics
• histories of trackers, cookies, digital footprints, etc.

Publics

• methods and approaches towards audience of the past web
• historical controversies surrounding the datafication and platformization of the web
• histories of uses of data or practices of resistance to datafication and platform economies
• the rise of the financialization of the web, and its political economy
• histories of automation, virality, and popular practices on the web

Archives

• archiving the metrified web and back-end infrastructure of the web
• methodologies for writing histories of the datafied and metrified web
• web archives as data (archiving and documentation, distant reading, use of metadata, seed lists…)
• web archiving data practices and challenges

After the conference, the organizers will invite relevant contributors to participate in a special issue of Internet Histories related to the topic “The Datafied Web”. 

Submissions that explore other aspects both within and outside of the general conference theme, are also welcome.

Submissions for the RESAW Conference

The deadline for submissions is 15 October 2024.

Submissions are welcome from all fields and disciplines, and we would particularly encourage postgraduate students and early career researchers to participate. We also encourage contributions that highlight non-Western and non-hegemonic developments. Contributions on practical challenges of web archiving in current moments of crisis are also very welcome.

Possible formats

• Individual papers of 15 minutes (500-word abstract).
• Panel sessions consisting of three individual papers of 15 minutes, introduced by a chair (500-word abstract for each paper, a brief 300-word description of the purpose of the panel).
• Other unconventional proposals like sessions of lightning talks, roundtables, etc., are welcome (300-word abstract).
• A session “My PhD in 5 Minutes” is foreseen (please apply by providing a 300-word abstract).

Acceptance of submissions is based on double-blind peer review.

Possible formats for the pre-conference day

• Submissions related to web archives are welcome from all fields and disciplines, and we would particularly encourage workshops related to tools, hands-on, as well as training sessions and demos.
• A whole pre-conference (500-word abstract)
• Workshops, demos and other formats related to web archives practices, methods, tools, demos (500-word abstract, specifying the expected duration)

Submissions

The deadline for submissions (including the pre-conference day) is 15^th October 2024.

To submit a proposal :
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=resaw2025

Timetable

• 15 October 2024: Deadline for submissions
• 15 December 2024: Notifications of acceptance
• 25 January 2025: Programme
• March 2025: Registrations open (fees: 90 euros for advanced scholars, 50 euros for PhD students)
• 4 June 2025: Pre-conferences and demos
• 5-6 June 2025: Conference at Siegen University

The RESAW conference is organized by the CRC 1187 Media of Cooperation in collaboration with the RESAW Conference Committee

The conference is funded in part, by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) – Projektnummer 262.513.311 – SFB 1187 Medien der Kooperation and in part by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR), [INTER/DFG/23/17960744/DIGMEDIA].

Call for contributions PDF

Special Issue edited by Marcus Burkhardt, Jonathan Kropf,  Carsten Ochs, and Tatjana Seitz

[Download CfP as PDF]

Digital technologies are widely considered to be drivers of innovation and solutions for small and grand challenges alike. From this perspective “the digital” appears to be problematic only because there is still too little of it: insufficient broadband infrastructures, too few digital services in public administration, too little digital transformation in and of organizations, insufficient digital learning and teaching, too few skills to make meaningful use of the potentials offered by digital technologies etc. Consequently, policy makers, technologists, and businesspeople alike frequently call for more digitization. The capacity to accumulate, analyze and utilize data is seen as a key factor in leveraging the potentials of digital innovation, e.g. in the context of artificial intelligence and the rearticulation of services as well as business models as data-driven or data-based. Data is often hailed as the new oil in such contexts whereas critics seek to expose this metaphor as a “capitalist-colonialist fantasy” that sustains “the myth of perpetual economic growth” (Taffel 2021).

The success of many of today’s most valuable companies (according to market capitalization) is based on the intensification of data “capture” (Agre 1994) and its economic exploitation. Google effectively turned the web and its users’ behavior into data, Facebook datafied social interaction, and Amazon drove the datafication of consumption to name just a few prominent examples. With the proliferation of smart devices such as smartphones, smart watches, and smart speakers as well as the ongoing push toward smart cities humans, technologies, and environments got entangled in ever more complex yet seemingly frictionless infrastructures of datafication and data-based as well as machine learned computation. This absence of friction has become a defining yet problematic characteristic of our present socio-technical condition. It conceals the contradictions, power asymmetries, and polarizations with which digital cultures are imbued. Unlike in industrial societies in which workers directly faced those contradictions in factories and mining plants, human actors are unlikely to directly sense the wielding power of the digital regime (Agre 1995). It therefore only seems consequential when Shoshana Zuboff in her seminal The Age of Surveillance Capitalism calls upon users: “Be the Friction” (2019). However, to counter corporate digital domination it is of equal importance to identify and carefully analyze the ongoing conflicts, crises and controversies as well as to envision alternative designs of the digital. 

The special issue Frictions: Conflicts, Controversies and Design Alternatives in Digital Valuation seeks contributions that critically engage with the contradictions and ambivalences in and of digital cultures. It is based on the premise that the material, practical, and semiotic frictions occurring in the socio-digital realm can be understood as value conflicts that may or may not come up to the surface of discursive attention and treatment. The special issue seeks to explore how these clashes are provoked by (the interfering of) processes of valuation (Dewey 1939; Heuts/Mol 2013; Mau 2017; Kropf/Laser 2019; Nicolae et al. 2019; Srnicek 2021) that operate on various, analytically distinguishable, layers:

• Practices of self-evaluation and evaluation directed by others (e.g. self-tracking, liking others, ranking services, scoring objects etc.)
• Inscription of values into infrastructures (e.g. like buttons, privacy settings, automated decision making, citizen scores etc.)
• Value creation (e.g. digital marketing, ad-auctions, end-to-end-measurement, assessment of data value, business modeling, functioning of data markets etc.)

It is of utmost importance to note that the processes and layers in empirical practice occur in an entangled, interlaced, and fused fashion. It is precisely for this reason that they are prone to produce value clashes, for in empirical practice there are always different, sometimes incompatible or even incommensurable, „economies of worth“ (Boltanski/Thévenot 2006) in operation. Couched beneath the impression of frictionlessness are therefore conflicts (material-practical contradictions between processes of valuation) and controversies (discursive articulation of contradictions between processes of valuation) that indicate viable alternatives to design the socio-digital world (reconciling or dissolving conflicts by privileging specific processes of valuation instead of others).

We would like to call for contributions that theoretically discuss and empirically unpack the frictions that pervade digital cultures. Paper proposals may address the following questions (without being limited to these):

• How do processes and practices of valuation intersect, act together, reinforce each other, counteract, clash etc. in empirical practice?
• In which empirical fields are value conflicts to be identified and how do they play out and manifest, within as well as between the different layers?
• How are value conflicts being made visible, accounted for, and negotiated in controversies, who does and who does not participate in these controversies or is even excluded from the discourse, and what is the impact of these controversies?
• Which concepts, theories, and/or methodologies can be used to fruitfully investigate into and analyze value conflicts and controversies?

• Which design alternatives are and have been tested? Are there already established alternative modes of conciliating value conflicts?
• What are the conditions that need to be met for alternative design models to be successful?

When submitting an abstract, please specify under which of the following categories you would like to submit your paper:

1. Field Research and Case Studies (full paper: 6000-8000 words). We would like to call for articles that discuss empirical findings concerning practices of valuation, the way they entangle, the conflicts they produce, the controversies they encite, and the design alternatives they elicit.
2. Methodological Reflection (full paper: 6000-8000 words). We would like to call for contributions that reflect on the methodologies for the investigation into conflicts and controversies of valuation, as well as into design methodology. These may include, for example, critical evaluation of methods and concepts, field reports of projects implementing design methods etc.
3. Conceptual/Theoretical Reflection (full paper: 6000-8000 words). We would like to encourage the submission of contributions that reflect on the conceptual and/or theoretical dimensions of valuation, value conflicts, controversies, and design alternatives. As our general interests lies in the entanglement of different varieties of valuation, we are particularly interested in concepts and theories focusing on the interplay of practices of valuation.  
4. Entering the Field (2000-3000 words). This experimental section presents initial and ongoing empirical work. The editors have created this section to provide a space for researchers who would like to initiate a discussion about emerging (yet perhaps incomplete) research material and plans, as well as methodological insights. Please feel free to suggest experiments.

If you are considering the publication of a paper in the special issue this is the procedure to follow:

• Initial abstracts (max. 300 words) and a short biographical note (max. 100 words) are due on: 30.04.2023
• Authors will be notified by 31.05.2023, whether they will be invited to submit a full paper
• Full papers are due on: 31.10.2023
• Notification to authors of referee decision: 15.01.2024
• Final version due on: 29.02.2024
• Final notification: 31.03.2024

This issue is edited by Marcus Burkhardt, Jonathan Kropf, Carsten Ochs, and Tatjana Seitz. Please send your abstract and short biographical note directly to frictions[æt]sfb1187.uni-siegen.de. 

Digital Culture & Society is peer-reviewed and a delayed open-access journal. All contributions are made available in open access 12 months after the initial publication without charging article processing fees.

(mehr …)

‘Digital Twins’ are currently the most important drivers of the fourth industrial revolution. The technical products and processes that are becoming ever more complex are now developed and tested in the virtual sphere before they emerge in the ‘real’ world. Future artifacts and practices are first produced as software models and simulated as so-called digital twins. The paradigm of digital media technologies is therefore subject to fundamental change through the prevalence of digital twins in industry and research: the digital is no longer a real-time virtual representation of a real-world physical object: it is exactly the opposite and concurrently much more than that, allowing the analysis of future performances of objects without the physical presence of the objects. Digital twinning therefore promises not only the potential of making futures predictable through recognition and correlation of virtual and physical (Chun 2021), but the ability to do so without physical counterparts.

Whether or not the counterpart already exists in the real world or will only exist in the future is almost insignificant, as it’s simply a matter of engineering and marketing decisions. Digital twins make clear that the real world is just one possible realization of the primarily virtual world. At the same time, digital twins and other haunting ‘data doppelgangers’ allow overarching data exchange and cooperation. They are more than pure data, proving once more that so-called “raw data” does not exist (Bowker 2005; Gitelman 2013). Digital twins consist of technical and social models of acting objects, and integrate various embedded sensors related to vital areas of functionality that make things and processes sense-able (Gabrys 2019). Digital twins can therefore also include simulations and services, asking anew if there is anything worldly which may must remain “uncomputable” (Galloway 2021).

To date, theoretical concepts of digital twinning consist of three levels that are based on one another: first, a physical object or process; second, a vivid digital model of that object/process; and third, data streams between both entities: the physical and virtual world(s). As such, the theoretical concepts of digital twinning reference Harold Garfinkel’s research on mock-ups as models for representing and assessing social phenomena (Garfinkel 1943 [2019]). Cooperative data, running through production and operational chains as a digital thread, form the real and virtual world(s). Thus, they are the focus of our discussion on digital twins.

Datafication in the analogue era followed a different logic than do today’s processes, with all their entanglements and interdependencies with and within the ‘real’ world. Human bodies, system processes, and their data traces und virtual models are deeply intertwined in current postdigital – or rather, more-than-human (Lupton 2019) – media cultures. It is surely not a new idea that data and the technologies of its collection, storage, circulation, and evaluation are shaping how societies and individuals see themselves. But it is a novelty that processes of datafication within the context of digital twins and their future predictions and simulations of behavior – mostly systems behavior but also human purchasing and movement behaviors, with their political implications – are fundamentally changing the methods of planning production processes and products. Technologies of digital twinning ask once more how data practices affect and mold decision-making within institutions (Vertesi 2020).

Digital twinning is no longer restricted to single entities – like objects being studied – but allows for modeling complex chains of co-operations, thus making it a central driving force in the ongoing digital revolution. If the ‘data self’ is not a subordinate virtual correlate of actual human beings and processes, but is deeply interwoven and in interaction with the physical, then the same holds true for digital twins: they are not mere virtual re-presentations and simulations of actual physical processes and things, but, on the contrary, are constitutive for them – resulting in scenarios where they do not rely on physical models or have physical counterparts at all. This might fundamentally change the way that agency is distributed across physical and virtual actors: data models are becoming more and more decisive and more-than-human spaces like the “dataverse” and other “360°” immersive media (Stiegler 2021) make clear that neither the physical nor the virtual are separate or even stable categories, nor are the ‘physical’ and the ‘digital twin.’ Implementations of spaces in which individuals and (their) data twins collide, such as the metaverse or Second Life, are evermore a social reality.

Taking the digital twin as an analytic lens, we also try to understand aesthetics, politics, genders and economies of ‘digital doubles.’ These new symptoms of postdigital data cultures differ from previous motifs of doubles, e.g. literary doppelgangers as in the work of E. T. A. Hoffmann, among others. Selfies are emblematic of digital data cultures and their visual regime (Eckel et al. 2018), as are avatar images in avatar-based gaming (Klevjer 2022), since they are no mere pictorial representations but digital images of self-perception and self-modeling. They stand as digital doubles exemplary for the self in extended realities (XR), the self-embodiment in digital spheres, and the continuum between offline and online (Coleman 2011). Similar to digital twins, digital ‘doubles’ even without a physical ‘original’ can unfold influence, literally, as virtual influencers or actors such as Hatsune Miku demonstrate.

Media practices of doubling and storing the self might have predigital histories (Humphreys 2018). But only digital tracking applications can be regarded as real-time feedback loops that influence human behavior. This can be seen positively since it transforms the way humans self-optimize, e.g. their athletic behavior, as shows the quantified self-movement. But it can also be critically reflected from a political standpoint, since it evokes a shift from individuals to ‘dividuals’ and an interpretation of human beings as conglomerates of sensor technology, flesh, and data doubles within surveillant assemblages (Haggerty and Richard 2000).

To account for this complex technological situation and its social impacts, the planned conference will bring together researchers from different fields: engineering and social science, informatics and media studies. The aim is to understand concepts and technological practices of digital twins and ‘twinning’ that are not restricted to purposes of system and production monitoring, maintenance and simulation – that is, processes of digital engineering. We will expand its scope to include real-time interrelations of digital data acquisition and simulation, on the one hand, and the physical performance of humans, things, and systems, on the other.

Digital twins and doubles draw our attention to the central medial, technical, and social challenges posed by digitization. Yet, to date, only rudimentary research has been conducted into its cultural and social impact. The conference on “Digital Twins & Doubles: Data of Cooperation” aims to change this.

We are seeking abstracts (500 words) for submissions until January 31, 2023 (to be sent to info[æt]sfb1187.uni-siegen.de, subject: “Conference Digital Twins”), that might address – but are not limited to – one or more of the following topics:

• how is data agential (in digital twinning)?
• interrelations and interdependencies between physical and digital twins and doubles
• politics, (data) economies, and technologies of digital twinning and doubling
• boundaries in the modeling of twins
• (de)central places of twinning: where is it to be done, and by whom?
• twinning as labor: precarious work and/or precarious for workers?
• how do AR and VR contribute to twinning?
• histories of twinning: from science fiction, to NASA, to the public?
• future digital practices of twinning
• imaginaries and aesthetics of twinning and data doubles, potentials of real-time blueprints
• living in multi-sensored environments, smart building infrastructures, and digital cities
• case studies of digital threads: critical reflections on full product lifecycle traceability and live surveillance/monitoring
• gendering and aesthetics of avatars
• selfies and the practices of digital doubles
• challenges and difficulties of data governance, data rights, and data sustainability
• sensor ecologies and their impact on digital twinning
• media and social theories of digital twinning
• socio-cultural consequences of the fourth industrial revolution
• digital methods, ethnographic, and ethnomethodological approaches for further research on digital twinning
• applications for digital twins in the industrial and consumer metaverse

Submission of complete contributions up to January 31, 2023 are to be sent to info[æt]sfb1187.uni-siegen.de.

Venue: University of Siegen, July 17-19, 2023.

Annual Conference of the Collaborative Research Center (SFB 1187) „Media of Cooperation“