Join us this Thursday, February 1st, from 14-16 hrs (German time) for the last RUSTLab lecture of this winter term. Femke Snelting (The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest) will present her work on “Counter Cloud Imaginaries”. This event is organised in collaboration with the CRC “Virtual Lifeworlds” and will take place in the Collaboration Space GB 8/129.
The expansionist, extractivist and financialized modes of The Cloud deeply affect our aesthetics, how we organise, and care for resources. Now our dependency on The Cloud seems intractable, it is time to imagine different infrastructures for collective life with and without computation. Counter Cloud Imaginaries center trans*feminist and anti-colonial server practices and organise collectively towards joyful, systemic techno-political change.
Femke Snelting develops projects at the intersection of publishing, trans*feminism, and Free Software. In various constellations, she works on re-imagining computational practices to disinvest from technological monoculture and the regime of The Cloud. With Miriyam Aouragh, Seda Gürses and Helen Pritchard, she runs The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest, a trans-practice gathering of activists, artists, engineers and theorists on what computational infrastructures do to collective life. With Jara Rocha, she edited Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence (Open Humanities Press, 2022). The publication results from a collective disobedient research project which interrogated the concrete and at the same time fictional entities of “bodies” in the context of volumetric technologies. In the research project Ecologies of Dissemination she develops, together with Eva Weinmayr, feminist and decolonial approaches to Open Access. Femke regularly teaches at New Performative Practices (Stockholm University of the Arts) and supports artistic research at MERIAN (Maastricht). She also contributes to Nubo, a cooperative which provides locally hosted, Open Source digital services.
Location: on campus (Collaboration Space GB 8/129) and Zoom
Zoom Link
PW: RUSTlab
You will find additional resources and information on this term’s guiding theme Best Futures here on our website.