Veranstaltungsarchiv

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.

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

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

Building on and expanding discussions of the value of anonymity and pseudonymity in digital cultures in general, and in queer digital cultures in particular, this presentation explores notions of opacity as modes of resistance to dominating regimes of visibility on and beyond social media platforms. Across queer, postcolonial and digital media theorizing, opacity provides a way of thinking through the tension between the visible and the invisible, challenging the idea of public visibility and identification as that which drives data cultures and legitimizes marginalized sexual practices and expressions. Suggestive of discussions on tactical, queer uses of social media in terms of disconnection and reluctance, opacity affords yet another way of thinking resistance to platform power and user control.

Based on an ethnographic study of the Swedish digital BDSM, fetish and kink platform Darkside, this presentation discusses opacity in two ways: first, as a way of considering tactical uses of Darkside between modes of revealing and concealing, and second, as a way of conceptualizing the platform as a borderland between intelligibility and unintelligibility. The platform provides an opening for shared vulnerabilities and collective forms of secrecy reminiscent of what Clare Birchall (2021) calls “radical secrecy,” which in the context of Darkside grants both privacy and degrees of public kink visibility to its members. Birchall imagines radical secrecy – or “postsecrecy” – as a mode of collective resistance to both neoliberal transparency and secret state surveillance in datafied societies.

Opacity implies a lack of clarity; something opaque may be both difficult to see clearly as well as to understand. Drawing on Édouard Glissant (1997) and his idea of “the right to opacity” as a form of resistance to surveillance and imperial domination, a digital sexual politics of opacity could help provide recognition without a demand to fully understand sexual otherness, opening up for new modes of obscure and pleasurable sexual expressions and transgressions on social media platforms.

Jenny Sundén is Professor of Gender Studies at Södertörn University and a Guest Professor in Gender Studies, Uppsala University in Sweden. She has been a Visiting Scholar at University of California at Berkeley; University of Surrey; Peking University, Beijing; Hunter College (CUNY), New York City; and University of Turku. She currently focuses on digital sexual cultures, sextech, audio erotica, and the politics of pleasure. She is the PI of the research projects “Digital sexual health: Designing for safety, pleasure and wellbeing in LGBTQ+ communities” funded by Forte: Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (with Kath Albury and Zahra Stardust) and “Listening pleasures: Sexual health and audio fiction in a time of digital intimacy” funded by The Swedish Research Council (with Anna Hultman, Sara Tanderup Linkis and Linn Sandberg). She is the author of Material Virtualities: Approaching Online Textual Embodiment (Peter Lang, 2003), Gender and Sexuality in Online Game Cultures: Passionate Play (with Malin Sveningsson, Routledge 2012,) Who’s Laughing Now? Feminist Tactics in Social Media (with Susanna Paasonen, MIT Press 2020) and Hot connections: Why sexual platforms matter (with Susanna Paasonen and Katrin Tiidenberg, MIT Press forthcoming 2026).

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 ➞

lead by Dr. Annette Klinkert (city2science)

Part #1: Start the Dialogue, Open Up Science! – Introduction to Science Communication and Public Engagement

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

The term „Luddite“ is a pejorative that marks one as an opponent of emergent technology, and, by extension, the future that these new technologies bring to bear. This designation derives from the experience of the historical Luddites, who, according to popular myth, put up a doomed resistance to the Industrial Revolution in favor of remaining in a pre-industrial, pre-mechanical craft past through the technique of machine breaking. Recent historical treatments have sought to put the Luddite struggles in a more sympathetic light, rationalizing the destruction of machines as a component of labor struggle. But can analysis go further than a retroactive justification of Luddite praxis? Can we understand Luddite struggles, both historical and contemporary, not as attempts either to maintain an existing state of affairs or to retreat to an idyllic technological past, but as offering a positive vision of the future? This talk will sketch out these Luddite futures in the interest of developing a concept of Luddism that can act as a political challenge to dominant hypercapitalist technofutures as well as romanticized primitivist ones.

Gavin Mueller is an Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and a tutor in the Critical Studies program at the Sandberg Instituut. He is the author of Breaking Things at Work (Verso 2021) and Media Piracy in the Cultural Economy (Routledge 2019).

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 ➞

• Antrag auf Assoziierung
• Antrag auf Förderung einer Publikation
• Antrag auf Förderung einer Veranstaltung

Die Vorstandssitzungen enthalten Berichte, Themenpunkte und Verschiedenes, die für alle SFB Mitglieder öffentlich sind. Personenbezogene Anträge und Finanzen sind nicht öffentlich und werden nach dem öffentlichen Teil besprochen. Webex-Links für Online-Teilnahmen werden am vorherigen Freitag verschickt. Teilnahme vor Ort ist möglich.

Digitale Protokolle des öffentlichen Teils werden über sciebo zur Verfügung gestellt.

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

Wie wir die Klimakatastrophe und die damit verknüpften ökologischen Krisen wahrnehmen, hängt maßgeblich von deren medialer Verhandlung ab. Es ist also auch eine Frage der Medien, ob und wie sich Menschen für Klimagerechtigkeit politisieren oder mobilisieren lassen. Dies haben wir schon bei unserer ersten Spring School im Frühjahr 2024 zu Klima, Medien und Antifaschismus herausgearbeitet. Nun wollen wir unsere Bemühungen, Aktivismus, Journalismus, Kunst und Wissenschaft zu vernetzen, fortsetzen ­– und über die Analyse hinaus aktiv werden: Dieses Mal stehen besonders digitale Recherchepraktiken, Klimajournalismus und Klimaaktivismus auf Tiktok im Fokus: Wir lernen ein paar Skills zum Teilen! Für unser Programm haben wir u.a. die Klimaredaktion von Correctiv und das Recherchekollektiv Tactical Tech eingeladen. Wir beschäftigen uns mit Klimanarrativen, mit Migration und der rechtsextremen Vereinnahmung des Klimadiskurses. Außerdem gibt es einen Workshop zu Klimagerechtigkeitsfragen in der Lehre an der Uni. Neben Inputs und Workshops findet Samstagabend eine Performance statt. Danach hoffen wir, mit euch anzustoßen.

Alle Interessierten aus Uni, Aktivismus, Journalismus, Kunst und Zivilgesellschaft sind herzlich eingeladen! Journalist:innen, Rechercheinteressierte, Engagierte – spread the word & kommt gerne vorbei.

Der Workshop widmet sich

• Reflexion der eigenen Stärken, Interessen und Werte
• Strukturierung von Bewerbungsunterlagen
• Praktische Tipps für den Bewerbungsprozess

Zielgruppe: Studentinnen und weibliche Hilfskräfte des SFB, die kurz vor dem Studienabschluss stehen

Teilnehmendengrenze: 8 Teilnehmende

Dauer: 7,5 Stunden inkl. Pausen (9:00 – 16:30 Uhr)

Format: Online via Zoom & digitale Zusammenarbeit auf Miro

Workshopsprache: Deutsch

Anmeldung bis Mittwoch, 12.3. per Mail an Selina Seibt

Der Workshop wird geleitet von Julia Sommer → juliasommer.net

• Antrag auf Assoziierung
• Antrag auf Förderung einer Publikation
• Antrag auf Förderung einer Veranstaltung

Die Vorstandssitzungen enthalten Berichte, Themenpunkte und Verschiedenes, die für alle SFB Mitglieder öffentlich sind. Personenbezogene Anträge und Finanzen sind nicht öffentlich und werden nach dem öffentlichen Teil besprochen. Webex-Links für Online-Teilnahmen werden am vorherigen Freitag verschickt. Teilnahme vor Ort ist möglich.

Digitale Protokolle des öffentlichen Teils werden über sciebo zur Verfügung gestellt.

We are inviting participants to take part in a co-design workshop exploring interactions among road users in semi-automated traffic environments. This engaging session will provide an opportunity to share your experiences, ideas, and perspectives on how road users can communicate and collaborate effectively in evolving traffic systems.

WHO CAN PARTICIPATE?

We welcome everyone to apply! Whether you are a pedestrian, cyclist, driver, or simply interested in how people interact in traffic, your thoughts and experiences matter. 

No prior knowledge or expertise is needed—just a willingness to share your perspectives and ideas.

HOW TO APPLY

Interested participants must apply through the registration link. Selected participants will be contacted with further details.

Spots are limited, so apply soon!

For any queries, Please contact: Akib Shahhriar Kha

• Antrag auf Assoziierung
• Antrag auf Förderung einer Publikation
• Antrag auf Förderung einer Veranstaltung

Die Vorstandssitzungen enthalten Berichte, Themenpunkte und Verschiedenes, die für alle SFB Mitglieder öffentlich sind. Personenbezogene Anträge und Finanzen sind nicht öffentlich und werden nach dem öffentlichen Teil besprochen. Webex-Links für Online-Teilnahmen werden am vorherigen Freitag verschickt. Teilnahme vor Ort ist möglich.

Digitale Protokolle des öffentlichen Teils werden über sciebo zur Verfügung gestellt.

Program:

09:00 – 10:00 Hoa Mai Trần

10:00 – 11:00 Yarden Skop

11:00 – 12:00 Daniela van Geenen

12:00 – 13:00 Tatjana Seitz

13:00 – 14:00 Lunch at the Food Court

14:00 – 15:00 Vesna Schierbaum

15:00 – 16:00 Discussions on the writing retreat in July and potential topics for the CRC retreat in October

About | Program Highlights | Registration | Venue | Program | Contact

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

About the Winter School

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

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

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

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

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

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

Program highlights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lena Teigeler, Duygu Karatas & Sara Messelar-Hammerschmidt

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

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

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

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

Elena Pilipets & Marloes Geboers 

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

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

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

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

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

Registration

Registration closed.