“everything is a matter of distance"
In relation transmediale's 2025 theme, the annual research workshop, organised by the Digital Aesthetics Research Center (Aarhus University) in collaboration with transmediale, will reflect on how current networked, technological environments are designing, capturing, and capitalising on ways of being social. Under the title everything is a matter of distance, it will relate to the temporalities of always-on and FOMO, to the aesthetics as ways of sensing distance and proximity and to the possibilities for resistance and critique.
The Uruguayan poet Cristina Peri Rossi painfully states that, in love as in boxing, everything is a matter of distance. The elliptic, gelatinous relationship between proximity and distance is the central dynamic for this DARC research workshop for transmediale 2025. Our interest in these notions unfolds through data and software culture: from production of proximity in personalisation, algorithmic advertising, targeting, and obligations of self-expression to carving out potentials of distance too, such as in being-in between data. Proximity is managed through techniques of approximation, of statistical modes of patterning identities, collectivities, and affective modes of attachment to corporate infrastructure. Distance is the usual preferred term for critical vocabularies, but we are always already immersed in such approximations as we are involved, addressed, captured in platforms and other interfaces of affective persuasion. What then are the best ways critical digital culture research can do in manoeuvring this situation from platforms to infrastructures, from interface to aesthetics, from love to boxing?
The workshop will engage with historical and contemporary tropes of distance as they pertain to digital culture, while collectively developing a sense of what methods, which critical tools, and what kind of conceptual traditions help to reframe the nuances in proximity and distance. It will turn to writers such as Johanna Drucker (2018), who argues for a designed dynamics of cognitive resonance that produces a feeling of "within-ness and "among-ness" and Olga Goriunova (2019) to help in this task while aiming to discover our own route through data and software culture. Like Goriunova, the workshop will explore the interest in how distance can be mobilised as a resource as well, including how “digital subjects also offer sites of reinvention, liberation, and play.”
This workshop invites proposals that discuss questions of distance and/or proximity and how they relate to how we consume and are consumed by platforms, interfaces, and late-capitalist politics, or for example, how we render distance visible and criticisable through research practices, social collective systems, and aesthetic production. The workshop continues the DARC tradition of researching with and through AI, data, art and design methodologies, and software studies. The workshop will analyse, experiment with and contemplate alternatives to current infrastructures of distance and proximity in current platform culture, generative AI, critical data, de-colonial practices, environmental aesthetics, as well as the persistent corporate, even militarised takeover of networked being and the potentials for resistance and critique.
Participants will be expected to:
Attend an online preparation meeting on Dec 17, 2024
Produce research essays (of 1000 words) by Jan 10, 2025
Exchange ideas online up to Jan 28, 2025
Attend an in-person workshop in Berlin on Jan 29-31
Including 10 minute presentation of contribution as part of transmediale programme and collective production of published short texts ("proceedings")
Deadline for submissions: 24 Nov, 2024
Notification of acceptance: 2 Dec, 2024
For the application, the following brief descriptions are required:
Biography (100 words)
Details of current research project (100 words)
Intended contribution/abstract and relevance to workshop (200 words)
Credits for full participation (PhD students): 2 ECTS (credit giving institution: Aarhus University).
The workshop is specifically targeted toward PhD/early career researchers, and welcomes submissions from researchers from inside/outside the academy, including artists, designers, and curators.
There is also the possibility for participants to build on their short contributions a longer paper (of 5,000 words) for peer-review and publication in APRJA (http://www.aprja.net ) with a tentative deadline of April 7, 2025.
Participation is free, but participants (or ideally their institutions) are expected to cover their travel and accommodation costs.
The DARC workshop is led by scholars from the Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (DARC) at Aarhus University. For queries, contact Dr Pablo Velasco pvelasco[at]cc.au.dk.
The workshop is organised by the Digital Aesthetics Research Center (Aarhus University) in collaboration with transmediale. The workshop is also supported by SHAPE Digital Citizenship project at Aarhus University and the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (London South Bank University).