The Design Research Lab is a network of people, organisations, and non-human agents engaged at the intersection of technologies, materials, and social practices. Our aim is to design socially and ecologically sustainable tools, spaces, and knowledge that support people’s participation in a digital society – based on common principles of inclusiveness and respect for the planet. This puts the basic democratic right to take part in the digital sphere into practice. We start our research from individual lifeworlds and the needs of minoritized groups, beyond consumer majorities.
We are an interdisciplinary team of designers, researchers, tech-enthusiasts and critical thinkers from Berlin University of the Arts, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, as well as Einsteincenter Digital Future (ECDF).
In this Virtual Colloquium session artist Nadia J. Armstrong will hold a presentation titled “The Digital Poetics of Contemporary Making: Locating virtual agency with visual artist and STS researcher Nadia J. Armstrong“. An artist’s talk of sorts, that reflects on how visual artist Nadia J. Armstrong’s practice and the wider network of digital practices in the creative industries can work towards deconstructing and reevaluating digital social fabrics, hierarchies & constraints of contemporary society. Through the lens of three of Armstrong’s previous works and a discussion of her research, we will seek out & study some of the technocratic power struggles and surveillance mechanisms that the global network of Fortschritt produces. During the session the group will navigate between considering the materiality of telecommunication networks, reframing our capacity for digital agency and imagining speculative world-building techniques that can challenge the forced logics of digital colonialism.
Nadia J. Armstrong is an Irish visual artist and researcher working with performance, 3D composition, AI and expanded video installation. She creates immersive audiovisual experiences that question the agency of our cyber identities and highlighting the socio-political contestation of social space.
Armstrong is a fully-funded interdisciplinary PhD researcher with the National College of Art & Design, Dublin and the Science Foundation Ireland’s CONNECT Centre for Future Networks & Communications. Armstrong’s work has been exhibited across Europe. Most recently, Armstrong participated in a discussion panel at transmediale 2024 at the Haus Der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Her multichannel video piece, RENDER ME TENDER (2023) was exhibited at RENDR festival in Belfast last March.
Armstrong’s work is supported by the Irish Arts Council, Accenture Ireland and the Science Foundation Ireland. For more visit: nadiajarmstrong.com.
Please find below the Zoom link to join, which will be the same for all online sessions this semester: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82954605489?pwd=VP3XBDzVogeuQtLWaXbWEFpm9ObxiQ.1
Meeting-ID: 829 5460 5489
Kenncode: 079532