Das Teilprojekt B05 „(Frühe) Kindheit und Smartphone“ lädt zu einem neuen Format ein, bei dem aktuelle Filme aus der laufenden Forschung des Projekts mit Textfragmenten aus Merleau-Pontys Klassiker „Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung“ zusammen betrachtet werden. Gemeinsam mit dem Mercator Fellow Jürgen Streeck werden die gezeigten Filmausschnitte und die phänomenologische Perspektive aufeinander bezogen.

Bitte melden Sie sich für die betreffende Veranstaltung an. Links zu den Filmen und Textauszügen werden eine Woche vor der Veranstaltung verschickt. Anmeldung bei Maria Espinosa Treiber unter: maria.etreiber[at]student.uni-siegen.de

Ein Sprachspiel zum ‚Animieren‘ als hervorbringende Interaktionspraktik

mit Jürgen Streeck (The University of Texas at Austin), Ehler Voss (Universität Bremen, Worlds of Contradiction) sowie Hendrik Bender, Jutta Wiesemann, Astrid Vogelpohl und Hoa Mai Trần (Uni Siegen, SFB 1187).

Anmeldungen bitte bis zum 20. Juni 2025 an Astrid Vogelpohl.

Zum Blicklabor ‚Animieren‘

Im digitalen Alltag von Kindern beobachten wir im Projekt „(Frühe) Kindheit und Smartphone“ vielfältige Interaktionen zwischen Wesen aller Art. Kinder gehen dabei in ihrem Tun spielerisch mit den Grenzen üblicher Kategorisierungen um. Ob etwas als lebendig, digital, menschlich oder tierisch gelten kann, erweist sich erst im Tun. ‚Etwas‘ kann mal dies, mal das sein, im ‚als ob‘ des Spiels. ‚Animieren‘ kam uns in den Sinn, als ein Begriff, der auf Interaktion als Prozess wechselseitigen Hervorbringens verweist, in dem permanent etwas zu etwas ‚gemacht‘ wird.

Eine animistische Weltsicht, die aus einer traditionell modernen Perspektive als kindlich (Jean Piaget, Das Weltbild des Kindes, 1926) oder primitiv (Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1871) angesehen wird, erfährt aktuell eine Umdeutung. Anthropologen wie Tim Ingold, die die Welt als in einem permanenten Prozess des Werdens befindlich ansehen, betrachten Lebendigkeit nicht als Eigenschaft von Personen, sondern vielmehr als „dynamic, transformative potential of the entire field of relations within which beings of all kinds, more or less person-like or thing-like, continually and reciprocally bring one another into existence“ (Ingold 2006, S. 10). So wird ‚Animieren‘ zu einem ‚doing‘ der Welterzeugung.

Im Blicklabor wollen wir anhand kurzer Filme aus unterschiedlichen Forschungsfeldern den Begriff ‚animieren‘ umspielen. Wir verfolgen dabei eine in unserer kamera-ethnographischen Forschungspraxis entstandene Orientierung an Wittgensteins Sprachspiel-Ansatz (grammatische Untersuchung), die wir in eine ‚zeigende Grammatik‘ umwandeln (Mohn, 2023). Indem wir Praktikenbündel (Schatzki 2002) und ihre Umgebungen identifizieren, wird ein Zugang zur jeweiligen Situierung von ‚Animieren‘ eröffnet. Das Spektrum an Situierungen wiederum bietet die Basis für eine praxeologische Konturierung von ‚Animieren‘ als Praxis und Begriff.

Programm

9:30 Come together

10:00 Begrüßung (Jutta Wiesemann)

10:10 Zum Hinschauen animieren – Die kurze Form als Grundlage kollaborativen arrangierenden Forschens (Astrid Vogelpohl)

10:20 Inter-Animation – Tactile Empathy, Mimesis, and Gesture (Jürgen Streeck)

Ich interessiere mich für die besondere Art von „Inter-Animalität“ und „Inter-Affektivität“, die wir mit anderen Lebewesen durch Berührung erreichen können, und wie diese Fähigkeit mit unseren umfassenderen mimetischen Fähigkeiten zusammenhängt. Der Mensch ist für seine außergewöhnliche Fähigkeit zur Nachahmung bekannt, und es wurde behauptet, dass Kultur durch „allgegenwärtiges Kopieren“ übertragen und akkumuliert wird. Ich interessiere mich mehr für die Tiefe der Mimesis als eine Form der Interkorporalität, d. h. für die Formen und Grade des gegenseitigen Empfindens, die verschiedene Formen der körperlichen Ko-Präsenz und Interaktion ermöglichen, und für die Rolle der „En-Kinästhesie“ (Stuart 2017) oder der kinästhetischen Resonanz dabei. Aufgrund der „phänomenologischen Reduktion“, die sie mit sich bringt, da sie den Zugang zu Worten oder psychologischen Zuschreibungen ausschließt, bin ich neugierig, wie Interaffektivität in Interaktionen mit nicht- menschlichen Tieren erreicht und erlebt wird.

10:40 Das Unsichtbare animieren – Medienpraktiken des Ghost Hunting (Ehler Voss)

Ghost Hunting ist eine mediumistische Praxis in der Tradition des Spiritismus, mit der in einer Mischung aus religiöser Anrufung, kommerzialisiertem Entertainment und wissenschaftlichem Anspruch mit gewöhnlich spielerischem Ernst versucht wird, Kontakt zu meist menschenähnlichen Geistern aufzunehmen und mit ihnen mehr oder wenig phatisch zu kommunizieren. Mit Hilfe des menschlichen Körpers und verschiedener technischer Mess- und anderer Geräte wird versucht, das Unsichtbare zu animieren, sich sichtbar, hörbar, fühlbar und identifizierbar zu machen. In einzelnen kurzen Filmsequenzen werden die Bündel der Praktiken nachvollzogen, mit denen der Kontakt sowohl ge- als auch immer wieder misslingt.

11:00 Animierende Blicke – Das Verhältnis von Blick und Bewegung in der Interaktion mit Drohnen (Hendrik Bender)

Drohnen in Form kleiner sensorgestützter und mit Kamera versehener Quadrocopter sind längst fester Bestandteil unserer alltäglichen Bilderwelten geworden. Jedoch gerade in der frühen Phase freizeitlich genutzter Drohnen war der Blick nicht auf die durch sie ermöglichten Aufnahmen gerichtet, sondern auf die Drohne selbst. Drohnen treten hier als agentische Medien in Erscheinung, die durch ihre selbständig ausgeführten Bewegungen – das Schweben, Manövrieren und Verfolgen – den Anschein eines Eigenlebens erregen. Doch was animiert die Drohne zu ihren Bewegungen? Was nimmt sie von ihrer Umgebung und ihren Nutzer*innen wahr? Und umgekehrt, was macht die Drohne mit ihren Nutzer*innen? Der Impulsvortrag stellt das Verhältnis von Blick und Bewegung in der Interaktion mit Drohnen in den Vordergrund und fragt, in welche Beziehung der Begriff des Animierens mit Ansätzen von Agentschaft gebracht werden kann.

11:20 Animierte, animierende Kindheiten – mehr-als-menschliche Interaktion (Astrid Vogelpohl und Hoa Mai Trần)

Kinder begegnen in ihrem Alltag zunehmend digitalen, animierten Figuren. Animierte Charaktere bewegen sich in Filmen über Displays und lassen sich in Spielen darüber bewegen, Roboterhunde und andere digitale Gegenstände, Dinge und Spielzeugbevölkern die Kinderzimmer. Angeregt durch diese Beobachtungen begann uns zu interessieren, wie, nicht nur in digitalen Settings, Akteure auf unterschiedliche Weisen miteinander interagieren, voneinander animiert werden und wie dabei etwas zu etwas ‚gemacht‘ wird. ‚Animieren‘ erscheint uns dabei als ein Begriff, mit dem sich die vielfältige wechselseitige Aktivierung/Stimulation sowie emotionale Affizierung und Aufladung in Interaktion analytisch fassen lässt.

11:40 Kaffee-Pause

12:00 Diskussion der Impulse zum „Animieren“

12:45 Mittagspause

13:30 – 14:30 Werkstattphase

14:30 Kaffeeepause

14:45 – 15:45 Bestandsaufnahme Animieren und seine Zeigbarkeit (Moderation Jutta Wiesemann)

15:45 Abschluss, Ausblick

Referenzen

Ingold, Tim (2006). Rethinking the animate, re-animating thought. Ethnos, 71(1), 9–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141840600603111

Mohn, Bina E. (2023). Kamera-Ethnographie – Ethnographische Forschung im Modus des Zeigens. Programmatik und Praxis. Transcript.

Piaget, Jean (1926). La représentation du monde chez l’enfant, Alcan: Paris 1926, 424 S. (dt. Das Weltbild des Kindes, Klett-Cotta: Stuttgart 1978, 311 S.)

Schatzki, Theodore. (2002). The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change. Bibliovault OAI Repository, the University of Chicago Press.

Tylor, Edward Burnett (1871). Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom: Volume 1. Cambridge library collection. Anthropology.

Abstract:

This conference addresses the interfacing of sensor-driven assistive technologies with embodied multisensoriality in interaction, investigating how and when Dis-Abilities are established and made relevant, as well as questioned or maintained within social practices and interaction orders. Drawing on Critical Disability Studies as well as on Conversation Analysis and Ethnomethodology, the conference aims at approaching “disabling worlds” in social, political, cultural as well as praxeological terms, instead of reproducing stereotypes and medical ascriptions of physical deficiencies to individuals – considering that, still, “disability remains a contested concept” (Seale 2024). Against this background, assistive technology (AT), and assistive sensor technologies in particular, play an ambivalent role in everyday practices between enabling participation and reifying marginalization, by promising to improve a person’s “functional capabilities,” while oftentimes relying on deficit models of interaction and technology for doing so. While other tensions might be mentioned (e.g., “specialist” versus “mainstream” technologies), alternative models should be considered as well, and be embedded in political agendas and infrastructural improvements (e.g., discussing “universal design,” enabling “access for all”). The conference invites empirical studies and theoretical re-specification of disabilities in interaction by viewing AT as “media of cooperation.” Just how do these media rely on embodied sensorial practices? And how are they ongoingly accomplished in social interaction? How does the body itself become a media of cooperation? To tackle these and related questions, the conference takes its cue from current research in ethnomethodological and conversation analytical studies of asymmetric and “atypical” interactions. Homing in on “sensing issues” in and around, if not against AT and assistive sensor (and action-enabling) technologies, the conference brings together a range of empirical studies to revisit and relocate – in short, respecify – the indicated issues, outlined ambivalences, lingering problems, and possible solutions. 

lead by Dr. Verena Molitor & Dr. Annika Kreikenbohm (city2science)

Part #3: Communication Strategies and Pathways to Impact

About the Science Communication & Public Engagement Series #1-4

Unfortunately, the event has to be canceled due to illness! We will keep you updated whether we can find an alternative date for Alina Gombert’s lecture.

“…then there are of course times when there are problems that can be resolved simply by turning something off and on again, or problems that suddenly resolve themselves within the next two days, for which no one really knows the reason, and then you hear nothing about it anymore.” [Interview 11:425]

This trained agricultural mechanic and precision agriculture specialist describes his experience in the repair of digital agricultural machinery. He describes a glitch, a shaky moment of malfunction, of self-questioning, that is quickly followed by business-as-usual. Taking such elusive and mundane experiences of glitch further,  glitch art, glitch feminism and even glitch epistemologies have mobilized the glitch to point at other issues. Glitch art is “about relaying the membrane of the normal, to create a new protocol after shattering an earlier one.” (Menkman 2011, 341). The curator and writer Legacy Russel coined the term glitch feminism, calling for interventions that challenge gender binaries (Russell 2020). Glitches have been understood as signals of discriminatory orderings and mobilized to “illuminate the ways that race and technology intersect in pernicious ways” (Broussard 2024, 4). Therefore, glitch epistemologies have been proposed as ways of knowing computational cities (Leszczynski and Elwood 2022).

But what can thinking with and through the glitch offer to research on digital agriculture?  What are the potentials and limits? What can be seen through the glitch and what not? Can glitches be a starting point to identify further questions for digital agriculture? Building on ethnographic work on practices of repair in digital agriculture, this talk will explore glitchy vignettes from agricultural repair shops.

Alina Gombert studied Sustainable Agriculture (B.Sc.) and Crop Sciences (M.Sc.) in Kleve, Bonn and Lyon. As an agricultural scientist, she worked from 2018 to 2023 at the Federal Research Centre for Cultivated Plants (Julius Kühn-Institut) and the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL). In her current work she is looking for bridges between the arts and the rural, between the agricultural sciences and the social sciences and between agriculture and feminism. As a part of the //KOMPOST ensemble, she explores emancipatory ruralities in northern Hesse. She is excited by the transdisciplinary perspectives opened up by Science and Technology Studies.

About the lecture series

In the lecture series Unstitching Datafication, artists, activists, and scholars explore how digital technologies can be un- and re-stitched by working on their seams. Moving beyond the destructive aspect inherent to unstitching seams and networks, they ask how social and economic relations have been and can be reconfigured by technology in the first place and be deconstructed and transformed through practices of hacking, queering, countering, and resisting datafication and data colonialism – be it through technical manipulations, artistic interventions, or activist action. Inspired by the seam ripper figure and historical forms of technological resistance, the lecture series shows how artists, activists, and scholars work along the edges and boundaries of digital systems. more ➞

led by Dr. Verena Molitor (city2science)

Part #2: Open Science and Open Innovation in Science Communication

About the Science Communication & Public Engagement Series #1-4

Topics can be submitted to the board meetings via the status representatives two weeks before the meeting at the latest. Invitations go out two weeks before the meeting. Funding applications must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation, cost estimate, detailed cost overview, and programme.

Applications  must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation and additional documents. For further information, please refer to the following templates. Please note that the tempolates are only available in German. For english versions please contact Dominik Schrey:

• Application for association
• Application for funding of a publication
• Application for funding of an event

The board meetings include reports, public topics, and various which are open to all SFB members. Personal and financial matters won’t be public and will be discussed after the public part. Webex links for online participation will be sent out on the previous Friday. Attendance on-site is possible. 

Digital protocols will be provided via sciebo. 

Call for Papers

In their new book, Data Grab, Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry argue that the role of data in society needs to be grasped as not only a development of capitalism, but as the start of a new phase in human history that rivals in importance the emergence of historic colonialism. This new form of ‘data colonialism’ gives shape to a social order based not on the extraction of natural resources or labor, but on the appropriation of human life through data. Resisting it will require strategies that decolonial thinking has foregrounded for decades.

Ulises A. Mejias is Professor of Communication Studies at the State University of New York at Oswego, recipient of the 2023 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship, and a Fulbright Specialist from 2021 to 2025. He is the author of Off the Network (University of Minnesota Press 2013) and, with Nick Couldry, of The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism (Stanford University Press 2019). He serves on the boards of Humanities New York (a National Endowment for the Humanities affiliate) and of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law.

About the lecture series

In the lecture series Unstitching Datafication, artists, activists, and scholars explore how digital technologies can be un- and re-stitched by working on their seams. Moving beyond the destructive aspect inherent to unstitching seams and networks, they ask how social and economic relations have been and can be reconfigured by technology in the first place and be deconstructed and transformed through practices of hacking, queering, countering, and resisting datafication and data colonialism – be it through technical manipulations, artistic interventions, or activist action. Inspired by the seam ripper figure and historical forms of technological resistance, the lecture series shows how artists, activists, and scholars work along the edges and boundaries of digital systems. more ➞

Experimental media artists are always entangled with the medium-specific materials they work with. They typically have to traverse and synthesise multiple mediated scales at once to repurpose or defamiliarise objects in order to make them speak, whether these scales be from voltages to music, bits to words, or pixels to perspectives. In this sense, media artists are engaged in capturing a material that in turn captures them, and ultimately captures the subjects the constructed artwork aims to address. An artwork is thus a site of ‘reciprocal capture’, to use a term from Isabelle Stengers, in that it undoes strict subject/object dichotomies. This is how artworks can be said to defamiliarise objects and give them a ‘voice.’ And it is not just objects that are defamiliarised but the ‘familiar subjects’ as well. So beyond being simply a savoir-faire, artwork making is a creative act that problematises and dramatises the familiar by shifting the attention and focus of our familiar questions/answers (e.g. Who/ what/ when/ where/ why/ how is our infrastructure? Who/ what/ when/ where/ why/ how are our mediated identities?, etc.).  

In this lecture, I will unstitch this way of dramatising ‘problems’ from how such dramatisation is articulated in certain spheres of academia: with empirical methods. In the field of (digital) Media and Cultural studies, there are many connections that could be drawn with the way I qualified what experimental media artists do and what methods supposedly do as well. Making an object speak is also a concern of method. That being said, the fragile and brittle ways in which ‘reciprocal capture’ is sustained in artistic practices are seamlessly re-captured by the (inter)disciplinary narratives that methods help articulate. Within these (inter)disciplinary narratives, methods harbour questions of legitimacy, which is to say they give these narratives abilities to disqualify works that do not fall within certain boundaries. Therefore, rather than collapsing the familiar distance between subject and object, methods’ mode of dramatisation reify a certain subject position that reinstates distances. 

One is thus entitled to ask: Who are the (distant) subjects methods create? Who decides when a method is a method? Taking stock of my own trajectory as an artist and academic, I will address these questions with some of my work and question the ‘methodological turn’ in my field, one that, I will argue, produces what Jean-François Lyotard calls ‘differends.’ Bio Dr. 

David Gauthier is Assistant Professor of Computational Media and Arts in the Media and Culture Studies department at Utrecht University. With a background in Mathematics, Media Arts and Sciences, and Cultural Analysis, Gauthier’s work fosters original means of studying objects and phenomena by making transdisciplinary connections between different modes of inquiry stemming from these cultural and scientific traditions. Influential to his scholarly work, Gauthier is also a practicing media artist. Through the production of artworks which have been commissioned by art institutions across Europe and North America, his engagement with computation spans cultural production and active participation in various cultural networks.  https://www.uu.nl/sta/dgauthier/ https://davidgauthier.info/

About the lecture series

In the lecture series Unstitching Datafication, artists, activists, and scholars explore how digital technologies can be un- and re-stitched by working on their seams. Moving beyond the destructive aspect inherent to unstitching seams and networks, they ask how social and economic relations have been and can be reconfigured by technology in the first place and be deconstructed and transformed through practices of hacking, queering, countering, and resisting datafication and data colonialism – be it through technical manipulations, artistic interventions, or activist action. Inspired by the seam ripper figure and historical forms of technological resistance, the lecture series shows how artists, activists, and scholars work along the edges and boundaries of digital systems. more ➞

Topics can be submitted to the board meetings via the status representatives two weeks before the meeting at the latest. Invitations go out two weeks before the meeting. Funding applications must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation, cost estimate, detailed cost overview, and programme.

Applications  must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation and additional documents. For further information, please refer to the following templates. Please note that the tempolates are only available in German. For english versions please contact Dominik Schrey:

• Application for association
• Application for funding of a publication
• Application for funding of an event

The board meetings include reports, public topics, and various which are open to all SFB members. Personal and financial matters won’t be public and will be discussed after the public part. Webex links for online participation will be sent out on the previous Friday. Attendance on-site is possible. 

Digital protocols will be provided via sciebo. 

Resolution Studies attempts to uncover how resolutions inform both machine vision and human perception. I believe it is incredibly important to unpack the ways in which resolutions organize our contemporary (technological) processes. Considering that resolutions do not only impose how or what gets run or seen, but also what images, settings, ways of rendering and points of view are forgotten, obfuscated, or simply dismissed or unsupported. In short: resolutions are not just a determination of how something or someone is run, read and seen, but also of who or what options are compromised and unresolved. 

Rosa Menkman is a Dutch artist and researcher of resolutions. Her work focuses on noise artifacts resulting from accidents in both analog and digital media.

About the lecture series

In the lecture series Unstitching Datafication, artists, activists, and scholars explore how digital technologies can be un- and re-stitched by working on their seams. Moving beyond the destructive aspect inherent to unstitching seams and networks, they ask how social and economic relations have been and can be reconfigured by technology in the first place and be deconstructed and transformed through practices of hacking, queering, countering, and resisting datafication and data colonialism – be it through technical manipulations, artistic interventions, or activist action. Inspired by the seam ripper figure and historical forms of technological resistance, the lecture series shows how artists, activists, and scholars work along the edges and boundaries of digital systems. more ➞

To register for the masterclass please send an email to the coordination.