„The activities of the CRC 1187 are based on a cooperative and diverse culture of research and discussion. A central focus is the promotion of equal opportunities for researchers in the early stages of their careers.“
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
The Collaborative Research Centre (CRC 1187) “Media of Cooperation” welcomes four new Mercator Fellows: Azadeh Ganjeh, Olga Goriunova, Maija Hirvonen, Christopher Salter and Jürgen Streeck. These outstanding researchers will bring their academic expertise and innovative research approaches to CRC 1187 this year.
About the Mercator Fellowship at CRC 1187
To strengthen academic collaboration within the research network, CRC 1187 awards Mercator Fellowships to outstanding researchers from Germany and abroad. Mercator Fellows conduct research for an extended period in close collaboration with one or more of the sub-projects involved in CRC 1187, addressing questions relating to digital, data-intensive media. Together with the regular members, our Mercator Fellows pursue the shared goal of further developing interdisciplinary approaches and helping to shape the CRC’s research programme. The inclusion of these renowned researchers not only strengthens the international network of CRC 1187, but also promotes the transfer of knowledge and ideas that is of central importance to the CRC’s research into the digital present.
The Mercator Fellowship is a module within the funding programmes of the German Research Foundation and serves to enable intensive and long-term research exchange.
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 →
Challenges and affordances of doing media research with generative AI
This series explores the challenges and affordances of doing media research with generative AI. AI is not only a subject of media studies, but deployed to collect data, interpret texts, perform mult-modal analysis, and assist writing. But what happens when prompts, models, and training data enter the methodological core of media studies? On what grounds can we cooperate with AI in research? The seminar series Synthetic Methods takes these questions as its point of departure. It explores current practices, tools, approaches and issues of synthetic methods, asking how AI participates in producing, mediating, and interpreting knowledge.
In recent years, the tools and infrastructures of generative AI—large language models, multimodal systems, and computer-vision pipelines—have begun to blur the boundaries between data collection, analysis, and interpretation. AI does not simply assist researchers in automating tasks; it brings in its own epistemic logics, biases, and inscriptions. Text and image generation models suggest categories, segment data, or simulate field interactions. They act as synthetic interlocutors in ethnographic work, as co-coders in qualitative analysis, or as analytical lenses in cultural analytics. The series engages with these developments hands-on and conceptually, examining what it means to “do research with AI.”
At the centre of the series lies an interest in the distributed accomplishment of discovery between humans and AI. Instead of handing analytical capacity entirely to computational systems, we will explore how reasoning, interpretation, and sense-making can emerge collaboratively across human and AI agencies. Generative models may extend perception and imagination, but they also depend on human intervention, interpretation, and evaluative judgment. The sessions thus foreground research as a shared practice of translation and negotiation, where human reflexivity and AI inference together shape what counts as evidence, relevance, and insight. This distributed perspective opens the space to examine the affordances, issues, and evaluative criteria that govern scholarship when AI becomes part of the epistemic process: How can we maintain reflexive, critical and ethical orientations while experimenting with new, mixed agencies of knowing?
Over the course of the semester, the series will address a range of perspectives and practices. An initial session on infrastructures and AI ethics situates large-scale models within the political economies of cloud computing, highlighting questions of privacy, transparency, and data provenance. Subsequent meetings explore how AI reshapes established methodological domains: as an assistant in qualitative analysis and ethnography, as a writing companion and reflective mirror in academic text production, and as a tool for analyzing visual and multimodal materials. Participants will experiment with both commercial and locally hosted models, comparing their capacities and constraints.
Specific attention will be given to the question if and how synthetic methods require specific modes and practices of methodological reflexivity. The series does not treat models as neutral instruments but as infrastructures with their own histories, biases, and aesthetics. Engaging with generative systems thus becomes an exercise in distributed reflexivity: models, prompts, and humans co-produce insight. This distributed agency raises fundamental questions of authorship, responsibility, and transparency that reach beyond technical documentation. To “work synthetically” is to navigate this entanglement without surrendering critical distance—to cultivate a mode of inquiry that remains aware of its own mediations.
