‘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“

Bereits vor Ausbruch der Covid19-Pandemie haben David Stark und Noortje Marres die fortwährende Ausweitung von Testverfahren als eine Signatur von test societies beschrieben. Sie konzentrierten sich dabei auf das wechselseitige Verhältnis von Test und Gesellschaft(en). Denn Tests finden nicht allein nur in Labor und Werkstatt, Büro oder Studio statt, sondern in sämtlichen Lebens- und Arbeitsbereichen. Doch in welchem Verhältnis stehen Medien und Tests – historisch, in der digitalen Gegenwart, politisch und methodologisch?

Wir schlagen vor, Tests als offene Situationen zu verstehen, in denen mittels etablierter oder sich erst während des Testens etablierender Maßstäbe soziotechnisch Entscheidungen ermöglicht werden. Mit Tests wird das Neue und Unerwartbare nicht nur erkundet, sondern medial registriert, identifiziert und klassifiziert. Auf diese Art und Weise werden situierte Daten als Fakten generiert, die wiederum Entscheidungen ermöglichen. Dadurch transformiert der Test das Getestete und seine Umgebung. Für einen medienkulturwissenschaftlichen Begriff des Tests gilt: In den Mikroentscheidungen des verteilten und verteilenden Testens steht das Soziale selbst auf der Probe. Der annoncierte Themenschwerpunkt von Heft 29 untersucht deshalb medienhistorische wie gegenwärtige Praktiken und Techniken von Testgesellschaften und fragt, wie sich Medien und Tests wechselseitig konstituieren – ob als Sinnestest, Testbild oder Testton, Probedruck, Testvorführung, Pilotfilm, Betaversion, Test technischer Objekte und Abläufe, forensische Analyse, Wissensprüfung oder biomedizinische Zertifizierung.

Besondere Aufmerksamkeit sollen die Politiken des Testens erfahren. Testgesellschaften können kontrollgesellschaftliche Elemente enthalten, doch die Politiken von Testsituationen entfalten sich auf unterschiedliche Weisen. Anstelle direkter Überwachung dominiert das permanente monitoring. Neben der Frage, wie mit Tests Entscheidungen getroffen und Zukünfte (un)möglich gemacht werden, sollen auch die beteiligten Akteur_innen und deren Handlungsmacht problematisiert werden. Wer verfügt einen Test? Wer hat Mitsprache an Kriterien und Bedingungen? Ist eine Testsituation für alle Beteiligten überhaupt als solche erkennbar? Gerade im Kontext digitaler Plattformmedien ist dies häufig nicht der Fall. Verfahren des datenbasierten Testens kennzeichnen technisierte und digitalisierte Lebenswelten – spielerische und situierte Praktiken, mit denen opake Medientechnologien angeeignet werden («unboxing», YouTube as Test Society), aber auch großflächige Tests, die vom Stresstest des Finanzsystems über die datenintensive Sozialforschung großer Plattformen und agile Entwicklungsstrategien (ehemals Perpetual Beta) bis zur allgegenwärtigen Einrichtung von Technologien maschinellen Lernens reichen. Man könnte von einer steten Ausweitung des soziotechnischen Testens sprechen, die auch Crashtests, experimentelle Smart Cities oder die Gesundheitsvorsorge umfasst.

Kein Medium ohne Test, kein Test ohne Medien. In datenintensiven Mensch-Maschine-Netzwerken wird fortwährend geprobt und getestet. Die wechselseitige Verfasstheit von Medien und Tests erzeugt dabei eigene Herausforderungen für medienwissenschaftliche Kritik und Methoden. Während der individualisierte Turing-Test als Mythos künstlicher Intelligenz weiter tradiert wird, werden mögliche kollektive Test- und Prüfverfahren verteilten maschinellen Lernens kontrovers diskutiert, etwa unter dem Stichwort der algorithmic accountability. Wie kann die Medienkulturwissenschaft ubiquitäres Testen in seinen verschiedenen Facetten empirisch nachverfolgen? Wie kann sie kritisch in entsprechende Debatten intervenieren? Und was bedeutet dies für medienwissenschaftliche Methoden?

Wir laden dazu ein, die Medien, Mediatoren und Situationen des Testens einer genauen Prüfung zu unterziehen. Besonders willkommen sind Beiträge, die die Medialität des Testens anhand konkreter Fälle untersuchen und sich deren Politiken zuwenden. Inwiefern sind Medien grundlegend für Testpraktiken und zeitlich begrenzte Test-Situationen? Inwiefern ist umgekehrt das Testen konstitutiver Bestandteil von Medien und deren Praktiken? Auf welchen biologischen, physikalischen, bürokratischen und sensorischen Test- und Prüfverfahren beruhen Medien? Wie schreiben sich die Medien und Mediatoren des Testens in Wahrnehmung, Sozialität, Geschlecht und Kulturtechniken ein? Ebenso interessiert uns, wie Institutionen und Plattformen, aber auch Situationen und Praktiken über die anhaltende Proliferation des Testens und seiner Datenpraktiken entscheiden. Wie lassen sich Testgesellschaften durch ihre öffentlichen Kontroversen – wer testet wen unter welchen Bedingungen – verstehen? Welche Testverfahren stehen im Widerstreit zueinander und gibt es alternative Testpraktiken und -kulturen? Wie lässt sich der Zusammenhang von Medien und Tests als politische Frage denken? Wie sähen demgegenüber die Konturen einer Poetik des Testens aus? Schließlich: Wie testet die Medienwissenschaft ihre Thesen?

Einreichung kompletter Beiträge bis zum 28. Februar 2023.
Stylesheet und Call unter www.zfmedienwissenschaft.de.

Ideen für mögliche Beiträge können sehr gern vor dem Einreichen der ausgearbeiteten Texte mit der Schwerpunktredaktion besprochen werden. E-Mail für inhaltliche Rückfragen: sebastian.giessmann[æt]uni-siegen.de, carolin.gerlitz[æt]uni-siegen.de.

Schwerpunktredaktion: Sebastian Gießmann, Carolin Gerlitz

University of Siegen, March 10 and 11, 2022 (abstracts submission deadline: April 15, 2021) Editors: Axel Volmar, Olga Moskatova, Jan Distelmeyer

The COVID-19 pandemic has reorganized existing methods of exchange, transforming comparatively marginal technologies into the new normal. Video conferencing in particular has become a favored means for spatially distributed forms of communication and collaboration without physical copresence. Corresponding apps and their infrastructures proliferate, leading to a widespread adoption of video conferencing in various societal domains, such as work, education, leisure, friends and family. This sudden omnipresence of video conferencing has already provoked a burst of reactions in recent months, with the rise of Zoom coming to stand for new practices of networked, synchronous online sociality. Scholars have discussed, for instance, Zoom’s physical effects (e.g., “zoom fatigue”), privacy issues, malicious practices (e.g., “zoom bombing”), and split-screen aesthetics. Despite this attention, however, video conferencing remains relatively understudied in media studies. The “Video Conferencing: Practices, Politics, Aesthetics” anthology therefore takes the current situation as a point of departure for examining the mediality of video conferencing, while expanding the scope of the examination beyond the context of the pandemic to address video conferencing as a medium more broadly.

Video conferencing establishes connections and mediations whose analysis requires the consideration of different levels and their interrelation. Its mediality prompts to interrogate the complex interplay of materiality and software, platform structures and economies, education and society, and the aesthetics of encounters and their associated practices and technical procedures. The focus on the conditions, procedures, and effects of mediation raises questions both technical and cultural, political and aesthetic, and historical and topical. What socio-technical and practical needs does video conferencing respond to, and which practices and conditions, conversely, are produced by video conferencing in the first place? What political, socioeconomic, and cultural contexts are operative or altered in the process? To what extent are new opportunities of access, participation, and spanning distances opened up, or the conditions of being-with narrowed? And finally, what aesthetic forms are being generated, passed on, or modified?

To address these questions, the anthology puts emphasis on media processes and configurations that constitute video conferencing and structure its practices, politics, and aesthetics. As an umbrella term, “video conferencing” includes diverse and historical applications, such as image and video telephony, telepresence, and visual communications, and thus demands attention to the specific meanings and media practices it acquires in different contexts. Although the anthology is broadly conceived, it especially encourages proposals that engage approaches in media studies and related disciplines, such as media theory, film and television studies, critical infrastructure studies, science and technology studies, software and platform studies, critical theory, cultural studies, and interface studies. These diverse approaches share an interest in issues of mediation and together enable a comprehensive account of the complexity of video conferencing as a media phenomenon. In this respect, the use of the gerund is also programmatic: in contrast to the noun “video conference,” the progressive form “video conferencing” deliberately stresses the procedural, praxeological, and agential aspects of the subject.

The collection seeks proposals that engage with the mediality of video conferencing by connecting material from case studies to fundamental theoretical questions. Of particular interest are media theoretical perspectives that can shed light on how the current boom in video conferencing challenges the prevalent understandings of digitally networked media,

possibly by interrelating different areas, ecologies and scales. Therefore, we particularly look forward to discussions regarding the role and significance of video conferencing in relation to other media and media practices. We also welcome proposals focusing on the impact of video conferencing on social and cultural stratifications, reflecting on the nonnormative or artistic uses of video conferencing or intertwining the aesthetical issues of video conferencing with issues of privacy and data-driven economies. In addition, papers may explore the ways in which video conferencing systems alter or influence the relations and tensions between technologies and modes of use, circulations and infrastructures, public and private spheres, individuals and collectives, proximity and distance of encounters, and audiovisual and other data practices.

Given that video conferencing represents a global phenomenon designed to cross borders yet bound to specific territorial conditions and local contexts, the anthology aims to gather international perspectives that may expose the different conditions prevailing in different regions of the world. Therefore, we particularly look forward to proposals from colleagues based outside Europe and North America.

Please send your abstract in the range of 500 to 700 words (including a short bibliography of three to five items) and short biography by April 15, 2021, to videoconferencing-anthology[æt]sfb1187.uni-siegen.de. (Authors who are unable to keep the submission deadline due to COVID-19-related problems may however arrange an individual extension with the editors.)

The selected contributors are invited to submit draft chapters, which will be discussed at an authors’ workshop. Depending on the global pandemic situation, the event will either take place at the Collaborative Research Center Media of Cooperation at the University of Siegen, Germany, on March 10 and 11, 2022, or will be held online. The anthology will be published by the German Transcript Publishing and distributed in the United States by Columbia University Press.

Timeline and Submission Deadlines:

• Initial abstracts due: April 15, 2021
• Author notification due: May 15, 2021
• Draft chapters (5,500–7,000 words) due: December 15, 2021
• Authors’ workshop (incl. feedback and internal review of draft chapters): March 10–11, 202

Detailed information (PDF): Download

Ausgabe 1/22 der Navigationen nimmt den Titel der Zeitschrift beim Wort und adressiert die aktuelle Forschung zum Themenfeld der Navigation aus medienkulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive. Dabei soll ein Überblick über das Feld, seine Forscher*Innen und deren Ansätze, Methoden und Theorien gegeben werden. Die Ubiquität so genannter smart devices im Postdigitalen zum Ausgangspunkt nehmend, will das Heft nach aktuellen Medienpraktiken und -techniken ziviler und militärischer Navigation sowie ihrer methodischen Untersuchung und (Re-)Modellierung fragen. Dabei dürfen epistemologische Perspektiven nicht fehlen, die rezente navigatorische Praktiken und Techniken in ihrem historischen Wandel untersuchen und damit die variablen, mitunter divergenten Bedingungen und historisch-randständigen Ausgestaltungen des Navigationellen – also erfolgreiche wie gescheiterte Medien, Infrastrukturen, Praktiken und Standards – mitberücksichtigen.

Um Einreichung aussagekräftiger Abstracts (max. 7.000 Zeichen) inkl. einer kurzen biographischen Info wird bis zum 28.02.21 an max.kanderske[æt]uni-siegen.de sowie christoph.borbach[æt]medienkomm.uni-halle.de gebeten. Sollten es die Umstände bis dahin erlauben, werden im Juli 2021 die beteiligten Autor*Innen ihre Texte in einem vom SFB 1187 „Medien der Kooperation“ veranstalteten Autor*Innen-Workshop an der Universität Siegen zur Diskussion stellen. Weitere Informationen zur Zeitschrift Navigationen. Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturwissenschaften unter https://www.universi.uni-siegen.de/katalog/zeitschriften/navigationen/

Detaillierte Informationen (PDF): deutsch / english

Siegen, Germany, 5-8 May 2021

The phrase “off the grid” is commonly understood to refer to the voluntary decoupling from established infrastructure networks such as electricity, water or gas supply. The implication is one of material independence and a self-sufficient lifestyle. Going “off the grid” means making yourself invisible by rebuking the social and technological structures that normally organize our lives. It is entering, or returning to, uncharted territory. The grid from which you disappear is often imagined like a web that we are woven into, at once providing security – of cultural connectivity, opportunities to work, or societal participation – while also limiting individual, political or technological agency.

The grid also speaks to the geographic coordinate system, an all-encompassing global structure which makes it possible to accurately locate any point on earth. This unified grid represents a dominant ordering principle for everything “locatable”. It is part of the technological infrastructure of many platforms, services and applications which fall under the definition of geomedia, most prominently the Global Positioning System (GPS). In this regard, “off the grid” is a move away from such Cartesian notions of space towards a situated relational account of (quotidian) practices carried out with, through, or in relation to, geomedia.

Going off the grid has also been seen as a form of renunciation of the conveniences of the late capitalist (media) world in order to lead a supposedly slower, less stressful and eventually less superficial life – as inspired by the transcendentalism of the likes of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. But with so many people relying on the grid for purposes of work and entertainment in recent times, what does this mean for our relation to geomedia? What does going off the grid look like now? This presupposes, of course, that there is ipso facto a grid – an infrastructure – which one can connect to freely at any time. But a great number of people do not get to choose to decouple from the grid – a fact that speaks to questions of access to the socio-material infrastructures underpinning geomedia and associated communities and practices.

Arguably, practices of surveillance and countersurveillance concern the implicit or even involuntary participation in corresponding infrastructures. Here, optimization for a range of tasks and activities routinely involves a certain kind of surveillance; a default setting in the running of all kinds of media platforms used for navigation, video streaming or online gaming. In this, surveillance is wrapped up with profit-seeking practices, and the extraction of value from the ‘data fumes’ of platform users, who enter a form of “cooperation without consensus” as they stream movies, hire taxis, host videoconferences, ride public transport, or go on dates. In these various iterations, surveillance might look different, and/or be practiced in distinct ways to traditional forms of state or corporate surveillance, increasingly dependent on technological protocols and standards that not only underpin the grid but also govern our use of geomedia. One consequence is that the relation between private and public spheres is transformed, and introduces new questions of governance, exploitation and marginalization. It is of crucial importance, who is online, and who is offline might as well not exist. Yet these optimization processes are also subject to countermeasures that constitute new modes of existence – from anonymous accounts and the use of VPNs, to location spoofing, and other tricks and techniques to hide, erase, or obfuscate user activity and location.

Yet the grid is not all-encompassing, nor all-powerful. Whilst countersurveillance efforts resist, fight back and oppose, alternative geomedia projects imagine the grid differently – sometimes even plotting its demise. From community broadband initiatives, to independent media organizations, post-capitalist streaming platforms, and citizen science projects; there is a continued, concerted effort to build alternatives to state-based, or company-owned geomedia, operating at various scales from the hyperlocal to the global. Through these efforts, organizers and participants question the foundations of our collective social and technological infrastructures, redefining what it is to care, share, distribute, cultivate or reallocate funds, resources, opportunities and ideas – bringing new geomedia, and new imaginaries of hope (or perhaps fear), into existence.

Annual Conference 2020
Pandemic Cooperation: Media and Society in Times of Corona
University of Siegen | 27-28 October 2020

While the political reactions to the spread of COVID-19 worldwide have led to disruptions and interruptions of firmly established chains of cooperation in many areas of everyday life, the ongoing development offers unique opportunities for researchers to investigate the highly dynamic socio-technical effects of the corona crisis from various angles, more than ever drawing on the ethnomethodological “unique adequacy requirement” in motion. We are witnessing a controversial public debate about the appropriate measures to contain the health risks, but also the economic, political and social consequences of the pandemic. At the same time, all manner of socio-technical infrastructures are being subjected to considerable stress tests: from the basic healthcare infrastructure and logistics for food and daily consumer goods, to the digital communications infrastructure and issues of privacy protection. Far-reaching restrictions to contact and curfews, travel restrictions, geopolitical distortions, increasing requirements for domestic, elderly and child care work, very acute health risks to citizens – the CRC 1187 understands these developments as a large-scale and unanticipated social breaching experiment that renders visible the everyday ongoing accomplishments of interactional practical infrastructures and technical infrastructures alike. The annual 2020 conference brings together scholars and practitioners from various fields to develop an understanding of the unfolding crisis in media and social theoretical terms.

Thus, instead of asking what the long-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic might be for society, politics, the economy or the planetary environment as a whole, the CRC annual conference 2020 aims to closely investigate the (micro-)social dynamics and infrastructural experiments unfolding at the present time. The assumed ubiquity of an invisible pathogenic agent affects practices of cooperation on various scales: from the pragmatic interactional challenges of navigating public space while wearing a breathing mask and maintaining distance from other people, via expressions of solidarity towards risk groups (in isolation) and vocal public protests against governmental restrictions on mobility and personal freedom, up to the dimension of international political cooperation between nation-states and supra-national entities. At the same time, a multiplicity of data-intensive media infrastructures and control mechanisms are rapidly being developed to keep track of the spread of the pandemic, to mitigate its effects locally and globally and to offer alternatives to established routines of social cooperation: these range from digital monitoring tools like smartphone contact tracing apps, to escalating innovations of video-conferencing and sensor-based crisis infrastructures comprised of drones and cobots, among others. The intertwined dynamics of publics and infrastructures are accompanied by a deluge of data that serves as the foundation for political decision-making and – in the form of data visualizations distributed widely via social media – as public knowledge resources to reorient individual and collective opinions and behaviors. However, at the same time, the corona virus SARS-CoV-2 is shaping new communities of practice and making the cooperation conditions within a society visible, e.g. when we see how the phylogeography of a virus shapes the conditions and triggers breachings of interactional spaces.

Topics for contribution might include, but are not strictly limited to

• Practices of living and working under corona conditions: from contact restrictions and social isolation to technology-supported integration and its risks and failure – in public and private spaces, in families, work environments and in caring communities
• Cooperative media technologies and practices put to the test: the development of contact tracing apps, trials on monitoring social distancing rules with the help of drones, the boom of collaborative robotics in workplace environments, the employment of chatbots for corona support infrastructures
• The role of data in managing and mediating the pandemic: disputed facts, fake news and disinformation, new metrics and forms of data visualization, as well as challenges to data-based journalism and new formats of science communication like podcasts made by virologists and science influencers
• The unfolding and breaking of Corona Boundary Objects as infrastructural and public media: We highly welcome case studies and critiques of statistics, dashboards, visualizations, certificates, apps, issues, conspiracy theories, and masks
• Disruptions to microsocial interactional infrastructures, bodily techniques and relationships of trust between co-present social actors, due to new social distancing rules and the widespread wearing of masks in public spaces
• Investigating claims of digital sovereignty in relation to an ongoing dependence on global supply chains and coordinated technology developments
• Attempts to document the crisis in situ and in actu: Corona blogging, (auto-)ethnographic Corona diaries, social media analysis with digital methods and tools
• Exploring methodological challenges to ethnographic research in an ever-changing global pandemic: exploring alternatives to traditional fieldwork and participatory research designs, inventing, adjusting and evaluating digital tools
• Historicizing COVID-19 in relations to former pandemics, their infrastructural and public responses to medical necessities, and the social and economic responses to a global spread of diseases
• …

The CRC 1187 “Media of Cooperation” welcomes contributions by early-stage and senior researchers from various disciplines, from practitioners such as journalists, data analysts, hackers and representatives of public institutions and associations, to artistic interventions dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and its socio-technical implications. The conference will most likely itself be affected by ongoing travel and contact restrictions, which is why it will explore new ways of combining pre-recorded virtual talks, moderated online discussion groups, and possibly selected face-to-face (or possibly: mask-to-mask) formats to bring together an international range of scholars, activists, artists and practitioners to investigate the challenges of pandemic cooperation.

Please send your abstract of approx. 300 words and a short biographical note to Dr. Timo Kaerlein by June 30th, 2020. Please indicate which form of presentation you would like to give (video, slides-and-text presentation, artistic format) and which time zone you will be presenting from.

More information will soon be found HERE…

Artistic, creative and activist contributions on “Infrastructures of Money” are invited to be send to moneylab[æt]uni-siegen.de by 31 December 2018.

More information about the event and specific themes, you can find here and also here.