Research Papers
Dialogue between two or more processes involves transformation at a systemic and structural scale. Other processes at work between the microbes, water molecules, and chemicals the human body encounters in the soil must be reduced to the physics of contact, the chemistry of ionic and covalent bonds, or the ecology of microbial populations in contact. Machine learning is off to a good headstart; how about studying more-than-human assemblages as they interact?
READThinking with the Forest: Roots and Routes for New Knowledges
Highlighting the significance of ecological knowledge practiced by farmers in Thailand, the paper explores how agroecology resists capitalist agriculture, supports farmers’ autonomy and generational knowledge, and fosters resilience and knowledge-sharing among communities.
Prejudiced, racist attitudes are, of course, still a part of this problem, but crucially, they are just one part. Global white supremacy is a far bigger structure – a political and economic system that transcends national borders and shapes most of the world. Problematising it this way implies a need for much bigger solutions than simply educating people out of their prejudiced attitudes. It means completely restructuring – or indeed dismantling – those economic and political systems that maintain the supremacy of whites over non-whites.
READProblematising ‘Right-wing Extremism’: Analysing White Supremacy and Government Responses to Racist Violence
This paper examines the responses of government ministers to the racist attacks in Oulu in the 2024 summer, Finland. It problematises the idea of ‘right-wing extremism’ as a security threat, explores some of the limitations and adverse effects of this problem representation, proposing new ways of understanding and responding to such violence.
Technological systems are never purely automatic or devoid of humanity. Computer vision, like all types of AI, is a combination of human and machine agency that results in tools and worldviews that do not simply appear as if by magic. Despite efforts by big tech companies, including Amazon, the creator of AMT, to promote the false notion that AI is fully autonomous, these and many other crowdworkers demonstrate that the reality is far more complex.
READFrom Human Hands to Machine Eyes: Retraining Computer Vision to “See”
Artistic researcher Bruno Moreschi has studied and collaborated with MTurkers in search of ways to rethink how we train computers to “see”. Despite their essential role in AI computer vision, these crowdworkers remain largely invisible and underpaid. His research aims to highlight their contributions and advocate for a more human-centered approach to machine training.
Nainsukh partakes of a fundamental contradiction common to movies dramatizing an artist’s work. On a basic level, the film is a self-confessed fiction based on paintings that have a concrete existence in the world. Recreating Nainsukh’s compositions with real people in real locations, however, its pro-filmic re-enactments possess an ontological reality that surpasses those of the events and personalities portrayed in the pictures. Nainsukh’s conversion of life into paintings and Dutta’s reconversion of these paintings back to life, but with a different shade of meaning, help install a critical distance between the two media.
READI’m not NAINSUKH, Nainsukh isn’t us: Artistic Process as a Cinematic Device
Exploring self-representation of visual artists and the history of the cinematic representations of artistic processes with artist biopic Nainsukh ( 2010) and its companion volume.
Through artistic research, Seascape of Imagination is an attempt to unravel the intricate ties between South Asian transnational craftmanship practice and the nuanced processes of decoration and labour, emphasising the boat engineering craftsmanship that survived colonial and nationalist modernity. A significant aspect of this project is challenging the prevailing modern distinctions between art and craft, especially when contextualising the act of painting as a decorative aspect of the shipbuilding done by members of the fishing community.
READSeascape of Imagination
‘Seascape of Imagination’ revisits the economic structures in Indian Ocean fishing ports and envisions a revitalised economic structure for Karachi’s Ibrahim Hyderi port, where imagination is intertwined with indigenous craftsmanship. The text here portrays an imaginative future—a fleeting yet delightful glimpse into a utopian future, a momentary paradise of tangible accessibility, a brief utopia, a brieftopia.
The practice of non-binary accounting is not new. Friends who “anexactly” rotate covering tabs for food and drink at bars, who do not keep a precise ledger delineating who owes what to whom, are constantly engaging in small-scale non-binary accounting practices. This text wonders whether a more rigorous formalization of the practice of non-binary accounting that is specifically geared towards subverting and dismantling binary accounting practices could be “scaled up”, so that communities and public institutions “splitting the tab” for large scale social initiatives can transact “anexactly”.
READAccounting Otherwise: Non-Binary Book-Keeping & Fugitive Public Financing
The practice of double-entry or binary accounting presumes and contributes to the systemic reproduction of creditors and debtors, haves and have-nots, privileging the former over the latter. The practice of non-binary accounting might enable us to subvert and dismantle the systems that reproduce such unequal relations.
Chronic pain is a notion created within biomedicine that reduces it to a biological process—dismissing the cultural, social, economic, political, and technological relations that shape it. As might be expected, this standpoint has not proven fruitful for its bearers or society at large. Bear in mind that chronic pain differs from a general understanding of pain because it is not merely a physical experience but has an all-encompassing sensory and emotional effect, as well as long-term transformations in the intellectual and agential capacities of the ones that bear it.
READBearing Chronic Pain: What Can Art Offer?
Through the generationally and formally distinct artworks of Frida Kahlo and Eugene Lee, this paper explores the potential of artistic expressions in revising deeper cognitive aspects of chronic pain to challenge, diagnose and comprehend chronic pain.
The lyrical “I” lifts the confessional weight of the European sciences of psyche and spirit that pressure the speaker of the artistic research text to disclose even the most minor or derailing failures of the project so as to follow the “true” curve of the journey. I confess. I think I have done this myself, and the unsatisfying feeling it left me with is what is driving this text.
READThe “I”s of Artistic Research
This essay considers the lyrical dimension of artistic research and the research dimension of the lyric poem. Tracing multiple aesthetic, poetic, and political uses of the singular first-person in research, a case is made for the layered lyrical “I” in Artistic Research writing, against the singular confessional “I”, the auto-“I”, the post-internet “I” or the absent experimental or avant-garde “I”.
Systems and structures that prescribe most societal functions today, including the production and presentation of art, have little consideration for bodies performing these functions. Let us acknowledge these disparities and allow them to guide our ways of being and acting ethically.
READEmbodied Curating: Attuning the Body From Artistic to Political
As embodied beings, physically and materially embedded in the world, our capacities to connect, be attentive, and be engaged are linked to our bodily states. However, the systems and structures that prescribe most societal functions today, including the production and presentation of art, have little consideration for the bodies performing these functions. Let us acknowledge these disparities and allow them to guide our ways of being and acting ethically.
The diversity of the Filipino diasporic experience is often left unaddressed and conveniently reduced to give way to a cohesive idea of identity. How do we go back? And should we do that at all?
READA Displacement, a Discomfort, a Translocation
The diversity of the Filipino diasporic experience is often left unaddressed and conveniently reduced to give way to a cohesive idea of identity. The importance of return is shaped by the multiple forms of the diaspora. How do we go back? And should we do that at all?
Collaborative methodologies can open research to plural knowers, knowledges, and ways of knowing which institutions stand to gain social and racial capital and good assessments of diversity and inclusion practices. But can such collaborations be truly reciprocal? What do the co-researchers gain, and who decides on the terms and potential gains of co-researching?
READCreating Critical Tools Through Romani Vernacular Storytelling
Collaborative methodologies can open research to plural knowers, knowledges, and ways of knowing which institutions stand to gain social and racial capital and good assessments of diversity and inclusion practices. But can such collaborations be truly reciprocal? What do the co-researchers gain, and who decides on the terms and potential gains of co-researching?
Through everyday engagement with industrial materials and machines, workers often develop strong attachment and a sense of pride towards industries. However, increased care about the industry may influence workers’ estrangement from their bodily needs. As a result, they start prioritizing productivity over their health and well-being. I define intertwined relations of industrial attachment and self-damage as “destructive care.”
READProductive Bodies, Care and Destruction
Anna Varfolomeeva’s essay on the paradoxical parallels between more-than-human care and self-destruction in the realm of heavy industries.
