„Die Aktivitäten des SFB 1187 sind auf eine kooperative und divers angelegte Forschungs- und Diskussionskultur ausgerichtet. Einen zentralen Fokus bildet die chancengerechte Karriereförderung von Wissenschaftler*innen in frühen Karrierephasen.“
Wie verändern digitale Technologien Gesellschaft und (internationale) Politik und wie ist Widerstand möglich?
Jahrestagung des Sonderforschungsbereichs „Medien der Kooperation“ untersucht digitale Macht und neue Formen demokratischen Handelns
KI, Kriege und Rechtsruck stellen aktuell drängende Fragen. Sie alle sind mit digitalen Medientechnologien verbunden. Die Jahrestagung verbindet sozialen Medien, Robotik und KI mit Geopolitik, Künstlicher Intelligenz und der Macht sozialer Medien.
Der Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) 1187 „Medien der Kooperation“ erforscht die Rolle von Medien und digitalen Technologien für gesellschaftliche Zusammenarbeit. Die diesjährige Jahrestagung des Sonderforschungsbereichs trägt den Titel „Politics of Cooperative Sensing. Techfascism, War, Geopolitics, and Resistance“ und bringt Wissenschaftler*innen, Filmschaffende, Journalist*innen und Aktivist*innen zusammen, um den Blick auf die politischen Bedingungen digitaler Kooperation zu richten.
Soziale Netzwerke und künstliche Intelligenz (KI) prägen, wie politische Ereignisse vermittelt und öffentliche Debatten geführt werden. Digitale Plattformen werden dabei zur Verbreitung von Desinformation und für politische Einflussnahme genutzt. Ihre technischen Strukturen eigen sich besonders dafür, (algorithmische) Diskriminierung sowie rechte, rassistische oder antifeministische Desinformationskampagnen gezielt zu verbreiten und zu stärken. Die Tagung untersucht diese Entwicklungen ebenso wie die Möglichkeiten, ihnen durch Protest und politischem Engagement zu begegnen.
Digitale Medien sind längst mehr als Werkzeuge der Kommunikation. Sie beeinflussen, welche Informationen sichtbar werden und wer öffentliche Debatten prägen kann. Gleichzeitig beruhen sie auf technischen Infrastrukturen, die Ressourcen benötigen und mit Fragen nach Klimafolgen und Überwachung verbunden sind. Die Vortragenden fragen deshalb nicht nur nach neuen Formen digitaler Macht, sondern auch danach, wie Menschen Technologien kritisch nutzen können.
In sieben Vorträgen, drei Workshops, zwei Filmvorführungen und einer Lecture Performance erörtern die Beitragenden aus Siegen, Köln, Bochum, Dortmund, Duisburg, Essen, Weimar, Hamburg, Mariupol, Kyiv, Teheran, Dublin und Berlin verschiedene Aspekte dieser Thematiken. Die internationale Tagung verbindet Perspektiven aus Medienwissenschaft, Theaterwissenschaft, Kulturwissenschaft, Erziehungswissenschaft und Soziologie mit Positionen aus Dokumentarfilm und Investigativem Journalismus. Die politischen und gesellschaftlichen Folgen digitaler Technologien werden so aus unterschiedlichen Fachdisziplinen diskutiert.
Besondere Höhepunkte des Programms sind die Lecture Performance „Fault Line: Survival as Unrest“ von Azadeh Ganjeh sowie zwei Panels zu aktuellen politischen und gesellschaftlichen Fragen, etwa dem Zusammenspiel von Technologiekonzernen und faschistischen Bewegungen sowie der Frage, wie geopolitische Konflikte mithilfe verschiedener Medientechnologien dargestellt und verhandelt werden. Das erste Panel „Technocooperations“ untersucht, wie digitale Plattformen, Infrastrukturen und KI Arbeitsbedingungen, politische Debatten und gesellschaftliche Beziehungen verändern. Das zweite Panel „Sensory Conflicts and Mediated Wars“ fokussiert Themen wie Überwachung und digitale Infrastrukturen im Kontext des russischen Angriffskriegs gegen die Ukraine.
Zwei Filmvorführungen ergänzen das Programm um persönliche und dokumentarische Perspektiven auf Krieg, Gewalt und Widerstand. „War Songs“ erzählt als dokumentarisches Musical anhand von Liedern und Melodien die Geschichte von Krieg und Pazifismus in Mariupol. „Teen Angst“ begleitet neun junge Ukrainerinnen, die mit ihren Smartphones ihren Alltag während des russischen Angriffskriegs dokumentieren. In persönlichen Geschichten von Angst, Trennung, Hoffnung und Widerstandskraft gibt der Film Einblicke in das Erwachsenwerden unter den Bedingungen des Krieges.
Ein besonderer Anlass ist außerdem die Abschiedsvorlesung von Prof. Dr. Erhard Schüttpelz, die mit einer Laudatio von Prof. Dr. Rembert Hüser verbunden ist.
The 2026 annual conference of the Collaborative Research Center 1187 “Media of Cooperation” explores the politics of cooperative sensing and sense-making in a time marked by geopolitical and climate catastrophes, anti-democratic backlashes and the rise of authoritarian regimes—all of which are phenomena closely intertwined with increasing datafication, generative AI developments, and the growing power of Big Tech.
Around the world, we find ourselves confronted with these complex entanglements, whose environmental, political and societal costs are distributed unevenly. While digital technologies enable new forms of cooperation, their energy consumption also contributes to environmental disasters. At the same time, it is precisely these digital technologies and infrastructures that are increasingly becoming sites of violence, from algorithmic discrimination to gendered and racialized forms of harassment and disinformation.
Against this backdrop, the annual conference examines how cooperation is being reshaped in today’s sociotechnical environments. It explores how various alliances—between states and Big Tech companies on the one hand, and between researchers, activists, artists, and communities on the other—negotiate the possibilities and limits of public action and perception. How do media and data practices contribute to new forms of control and how are they challenged via digital protests or anti-tech initiatives? And how can cooperative practices and protests also enable resistance and democratic engagement?
Bringing together scholars, activists, artists, filmmakers and journalists, the conference invites participants to inquire into the politics of media, data, and sensory practices, and to explore the role of cooperative forms of sensing and sense-making.
The conference is organized around three key thematic areas:
Area 1: Digital Power and Techfascism In this section, we examine emerging alliances between governments, technology corporations, and far-right digital cultures. It focuses on current formations of violence and power: the cooperation between governments and Big Tech on the one hand, and the rise of the global far-right enabled by deregulated social networks on the other. Topics include digital violence, disinformation campaigns, the affective politics of online communities, techfascisms, and debates around digital sovereignty.
Area 2: Sensory Conflicts and Mediated Wars This area explores how contemporary conflicts, from wars to geopolitical tensions, are experienced, mediated, and interpreted through digital technologies. It addresses major geopolitical and media-technological shifts, including the digitally mediated forms of witnessing wars and conflicts, as well as the fundamental expropriations of land, water, and resources underpinning digital media, which become visible through practices of extractivism, and the sensory confusion produced by disinformation and generative AI.
Area 3: Resistance, Cooperation and Democratic Practices Alongside critical diagnoses discussed in the other two areas, this part of the program highlights practices of resistance and democratic engagement from activist research and digital anti-facist initiatives. The third section therefore explores interventions in the radicalization and fascistization of societies, how scholars and universities can act together with civil society to counter anti-democratic processes in which Big Tech and other corporations are actively implicated.
As part of the annual conference, Prof. Dr. Erhard Schüttpelz will deliver his farewell lecture, which will include a laudatory address by Prof. Dr. Rembert Hüser. The farewell ceremony will be held in German.
Venue
University of Siegen
Campus Unteres Schloss
US-S 001 / 002
Obergraben 25
57072 Siegen
Der Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB 1187) „Medien der Kooperation“ begrüßt vier neue Mercator Fellows: Azadeh Ganjeh, Olga Gorinuova, Maija Hirvonen, Christopher Salter und Jürgen Streeck. Diese herausragenden Wissenschaftler*innen werden dieses Jahr ihre wissenschaftliche Expertise und innovativen Forschungsansätze in den SFB 1187 einbringen.
Über das Mercator Fellowship am SFB 1187
Um die wissenschaftliche Zusammenarbeit im Forschungsverbund zu stärken, vergibt der SFB 1187 Mercator Fellowships an herausragende Wissenschaftler*innen aus dem In- und Ausland. Mercator Fellows forschen für eine längere Zeit und enger Zusammenarbeit mit einem oder mehreren der am SFB 1187 beteiligten Teilprojekte zu Fragestellungen rund um digitaler, datenintensiver Medien. Zusammen mit den regulären Mitglieder verfolgen unsere Mercator Fellows das gemeinsame Ziel, interdisziplinäre Ansätze weiterzuentwickeln und das Forschungsprogramm des SFB mitzugestalten. Die Aufnahme dieser renommierten Forschenden stärkt nicht nur das internationale Netzwerk des SFB 1187, sondern fördert auch den Wissens- und Ideentransfer, der für die digitale Gegenwartsforschung am SFB von zentraler Bedeutung ist.
Das Mercator Fellowship ist ein Modul im Rahmen der Förderprogramme der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft und dient dazu, einen intensiven und langfristigen Forschungsaustausch zu ermöglichen.
Azadeh Ganjeh is a performance artist, scholar, dramaturg and activist, and a member of the collective Rebel-Ist-hah!. Born in Tehran, Iran, she holds a Master’s degree in theatre directing from Tehran Art University and received her doctorate in 2017 in philosophy with a focus on theatre studies from the University of Bern.
Azadeh specialises in socially engaged and site-specific performances, participatory productions, performative interventions in urban space, and community theatre for socio-political empowerment. Her research interests include narratives and politics of the stage, the performativity of public events, the performative interaction of body and space, emancipation through the performing arts, aesthetics of performativity and space, and activism in performance art.
After working as a professor at the University of Tehran, she taught at numerous European universities and has been working since April 2022 as a researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Media, Theatre and Popular Culture at the University of Hildesheim. In October 2024, she took up the professorship for Performative Arts in Society at the University of the Arts in Society in Ottersberg, where she combines artistic practice with critical research on performance and social change.
Olga Goriunova is Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is a cultural theorist, working across technology, philosophy and aesthetics. Her latest book, Ideal Subjects. The Abstract People of AI (2025) explores how data and artificial intelligence abstract people into new kinds of subjects. The questions of subjectivation in relation to art and technology have been central to her work. Her previous book, Bleak Joys. Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility (co-authored, 2019) explores aesthetics, ethics and ecology during times of multiple crises. This work traces connections between large scale systems such as ecologies, technical infrastructures or mechanisms of calculation and processes of subjectivation. Her first book Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet (2012) conceptualises aesthetic and political engagements with technology at the dawn of the World Wide Web, proposing the concepts of organisational aesthetics and art platforms to understand collective art practices and art movements of the 1990s and early 2000s. This book is based on her work as a co-organiser of software art repository Runme.org and a co-curator of software art festivals (four editions of the Readme festival between 2002 and 2005 in Moscow, Helsinki, Aarhus and Dortmund) and other exhibitions. She edited or co-edited four Readme publications, the most significant of which is Readme. Software Arts and Cultures (Aarhus University Press, 2004). She is also the editor of Fun and Software: Exploring Pleasure, Pain and Paradox in Computing (2014) and a co-founder and co-editor of Computational Culture, a Journal of Software Studies.
Prof.‘in Dr. Maija Hirvonen
Professor for German language, culture and translation
Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences | Language Studies | German
Maija Hirvonen is a full professor in German language, culture and translation at the Languages Unit of the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences of Tampere University. She leads BA, MA and PhD studies in German linguistics and translation. She is director of Langnet, the Network of Doctoral Programmes in Language Sciences in Finland, and sits on the steering board for Plural (the multidisciplinary research centre for languages and cultures). She co-leads the Tampere Accessibility Unit and the Multimodality in Translation and Interpreting research group.
Her research specialisms include:
accessibility (esp. audio description)
multimodal and intermodal translation and interpreting
blind-sighted and other asymmetrical interaction
teamwork
distributed/interactive intelligence and the interface of cognition and interaction
Jürgen Streeck conducts research in the field of multimodal interaction, focusing in particular on the coordination of language, gesture and gaze, as well as the social meaning of actions in communication. He has contributed to the development of multimodal interaction research and engages with the connections between language, music and orality, particularly in hip-hop. His academic work has been recognised with several awards, including the Georg-Gottfried-Gervinus Fellowship (2013–2014). He was a Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies and at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) in Bielefeld.
Streeck received his doctorate in 1981 from the Free University of Berlin in linguistics and has been Professor of Communication Studies in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin since 2013. Previously he was Associate Professor in the same department and also held a professorship in linguistics at the Free University of Berlin. In addition, he has held visiting professorships and fellowships at universities including the University of Oldenburg, the University of Vienna and the University of Utrecht.
Among his major publications is the 2009 book Gesturecraft: The Manu-facture of Meaning, in which Streeck examines how hand gestures in communication represent and interpret the world, drawing on microethnographic research and theories of cognition and interaction. In the 2017 volume Self-Making Man: A Day of Action, Life, and Language, Jürgen Streeck analyses how a car mechanic in Texas constructs his social world and identity through gestures, language and actions in communication.
Prof. Dr. Christopher Salter
University Research Chair in New Media, Technology and the Senses
Chris Salter is an artist, University Research Chair in New Media, Technology and the Senses, Professor of Computation Arts in the Department of Design and Computation Arts, Co-Director of the Hexagram Network for Research-Creation in Media Art, Design, Digital Culture and Technology, Director of Hexagram Concordia and Associate Director, Milieux Institute for Arts,Culture and Technology.
Salter studied economics and philosophy at Emory University and received his Ph.D. in theater directing and dramatic theory/criticism at Stanford University where he also worked and researched at CCRMA (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics). At Stanford, Salter studied with former Brecht assistant Carl Weber as well as pioneers of digital synthesis John Chowning, Max Matthews and Chris Chafe. In the 1990s, he collaborated with theater director Peter Sellars and choreographer William Forsythe/Frankfurt Ballet. He was visiting professor in music, graduate studies and digital media at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) before joining Concordia University’s Faculty of Fine Arts in 2005. He was also Guest Professor at the KhM in Cologne in 2010 and is continuing Guest Faculty at the Masters program in Media Arts History, Institute für Bildwissenschaften,Donau University, Krems, Austria.
Salter’s large scale installations, performative environments and research focuses on and challenges human perception, merging haptic, visual, acoustic and other sensory phenomena. Exploring the borders between the senses, art, design and new technologies, his immersive and physically experiential works are informed by theater, architecture, visual art, computer music, perceptual psychology, cultural theory and engineering and are developed in collaboration with anthropologists, historians, philosophers, engineers,artists and designers.
His work has been shown at major international exhibitions and festivals in over a dozen countries including the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale (Venice), Wiener Festwochen (Vienna), Berliner Festspiele/Martin Gropius Bau (Berlin), Musée d’Art Contemporain (Montréal),National Art Museum of China (Beijing), Lille 3000 (Lille), Chronus Art Centre (Shanghai), Fondarie Darling (International Biennale of Electronics Arts – Montreal),HAU3 (Berlin), Laboral Centro de Arte y Creacion Industriel (Gijon, Spain),Nuit Blanche (Paris), Vitra Design Museum (Germany), EXIT Festival (Maison des Arts, Creteil-Paris), STRP Biennale (Eindhoven), Ars Electronica (Linz), Pact Zollverein (Essen, Germany), CTM (Berlin), Villette Numerique (Paris),TodaysArt (the Hague), Todays Art.jp (Tokyo), Meta.Morf (Norway), MoisMulti(Quebec), Transmediale (Berlin), Place des Arts (Montréal), Elektra(Montréal),the Banff Center (Banff), Dance Theater Workshop (New York), V2(Rotterdam), SIGGRAPH 2001 (New Orleans), Mediaterra (Athens) and the Exploratorium (SanFrancisco), among others.
Salter is a regular presenter at national and international conferences, has given over 100 invited talks at universities and festivals worldwide and has sat on many juries including the Prix Ars Electronica among others. In addition to his artistic work, he is the author of the seminal book Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (MIT Press, 2010) and Alien Agency: Experimental Encounters with Art in the Making (MIT Press, 2015).
We are excited to invite you to this summer’s Lecture Series on “Cooperative Methodologies – Studying Sensory Media and AI”. Inspired by Simon Garfinkel’s notion of “ongoing accomplishment”, we invited eight guest speakers to explore research methods and situations methodologically.
The lecture series “Cooperative Methodologies – Studying Sensory Media and AI” addresses methodological problems that emerge from studying media as an “ongoing accomplishment” (Garfinkel). The central premise is that methods cannot be treated as external instruments applied to pre-given objects. Rather, research situations are constituted through the entanglement of media and tools, technical and human sensing, and research practices. Methodological reflection thus focuses on the conditions under which knowledge is cooperatively produced and problematised.
A key challenge is the multiple situatedness of digital and sensor-based media. Practices are locally embedded yet generate and connect multiple situations through infrastructural distribution, real-time synchronization, and scalability. Micro-situations must therefore be analyzed in relation to infrastructures of sensing and sense-making, data publics and stakeholder constellations, and the interplay of human perception with technical sensor systems. This requires methodological designs that combine approaches capable of tracing cross-scale relations and controversies.
Furthermore, the lecture series is concerned with the methodological status of digital tools and AI systems within research practice. Tools for collecting, sharing, analysing, and visualising data inscribe their own ordering capacities into research. With sensor data and AI outputs, these effects intensify: classifications, recommendations, and model biases shape what can be observed, archived, and interpreted. The series situates these dynamics within debates on performativity, inscriptions, bias, and interface methods, while emphasizing that they emerge in entangled sensory research practices involving human and non-human agencies.
Finally, the lecture series inquires into how methodological choices distribute attention and agency: they determine which experiences count as data, which forms of sensing become legible, and which publics are addressed and which are excluded. Accordingly, the series approaches methods as political arrangements that govern participation in knowledge-making – asking whose voices enter datasets and models, whose interpretations shape analytic pipelines, and whose concerns remain unaccounted for. Cooperative methodology may require making conflicts over categories, metrics, and evidentiary standards explicit, accountable, and revisable.
Lectures & Speakers
We invited eight international guest speakers from media studies, social science, economics, informatics, linguistics, science and technology studies as well as art and activism. They come from the Netherlands, Finland, Iran, USA, Germany and Great Britain.
Location: University of Siegen, Herrengarten 3, Room: AH-A 217/18
Streaming: via Webex
Time: Wednesdays, 2:15 AM – 3:45 PM CET
How to Register
All events take place in hybrid form (on-site and via Webex). No registration is required if you would like to attend on-site. To attend the lecture online via Webex, please register here →
