RUSTlab Lectures

This summer term 2025 we present to you our 13th round of RUSTlab Lectures. Come and join us for these exciting talks and discussions around this term’s guiding theme Drawing together on four dates in the summer term – online and on site. The lectures take place 14-16 hrs German time.

As a fundamental practice of making marks on a surface, drawing is a bedrock to a broad variety of artistic and scientific procedures. Since the 30,000-year-old animal paintings in Chauvet Cave, drawing is a heterogeneous mode of human practice that includes doodling, narrating, planning, mapping, as well as pulling things together or apart. As a mode of research, drawing facilitates both exploring and focusing in on specific aspects. ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’, an old proverb suggests, and indeed, drawing has the potential to convey stories that cannot be put into words. On the other hand, drawing necessarily implies an element of pickiness, of selection, because it’s impossible to reproduce the complexities of contexts in full in a picture. A drawing is not the subject.

Anna Gonzalez Suero will present “From drawing to storying,” a feminist autoethnography exploring artistic identity. The second lecture will be delivered by Maxime Le Calvé, who will discuss “An Anthropology of/with virtual reality,” focusing on digital ethnographic experiments with active materiality. Jeannette Pols from the University of Amsterdam will talk about “In search of the unexpected,” exploring experiments that bridge art, science, and audiences. Finally, Mace Ojala from the RUSTlab will conclude the series with “Wow PDF is such an assemblage,” delving into the networklike, rhizomatic, and unstable aspects of the Portable Document Format. Come by!

List of the speakers for the summer term 2025:

22.05.2025, 14-16 hrs Anna Gonzalez Suero (Bauhaus University Weimar): From drawing to storying: A feminist autoethnography of artistic identity

26.06.2025, 14-16 hrs Maxime Le Calve (Humboldt University Berlin): An anthropology of/with virtual reality: Digital ethnographic experiments with active materiality

17.07.2025, 14-16 hrs Jeannette Pols (University of Amsterdam): In search of the unexpected: Experiments between art,
science and audiences

24.07.2025, 14-16 hrs Mace Ojala (Ruhr University Bochum): Wow, PDF is such an assemblage: Let’s talk about
networklike, rhizomatic and unstable aspects of the
Portable Document Format

Download this PDF with a detailed description of our summer 2025 guiding theme.

All lectures will be on-site at the RUSTlab as well as live on ZOOM.

Address: MB 4/165 Campus Ruhr University Bochum
Zoom Link for the meetings
Password: RUSTlab