Matthew Allen (Harvard, US)
Matthew Allen is a PhD candidate in the History and Theory of Architecture at Harvard University. His dissertation analyzes how concepts and techniques from abstract art and concrete poetry made their way into the discipline of architecture through computer programming in the 1960s and how a culture of programming spread in the 1970s and 80s. One aspect of this research has to do with thinking about levels of abstraction and the media involved in scaling up and down between such levels. Allen holds a Master of Architecture degree from Harvard University and Bachelor degrees in Physics and Comparative History of Ideas from the University of Washington. He has taught architecture at the University of Toronto and worked for several small firms including MOS and Preston Scott Cohen Inc.
Hannah Cohen (Harvard, US)
Ranjodh Dhaliwal (UC Davis, US)
Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal earned his undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Indore, studied English at the University of Chicago, and is now pursuing his PhD in English, with a designated emphasis in Science and Technology Studies, at University of California, Davis. His work interrogates the different modes and scales of representation (such as narratives, visual images, and video games) in the history of computing. By investigating the technical implementations, cultural imaginaries and aesthetic affordances of algorithmic production in the arts, sciences, and popular culture, his dissertation looks at the contested histories and theories of virtual reality, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence, asking how computational media render the world around us.
Cindy Heine (Siegen, Germany)
I hold a BA-degree in Comparative Literature and Philosophy and completed my MA at the University of Erfurt in Literary Studies and Comparative Literature. Currently, I am a PhD student in the DFG research Group Locating Media at the University of Siegen. My dissertation “On the road in one’s own room – The literary conception of interior space around 1900” is situated between the fields of literature, spatial theory, cartography, mobility studies, practice theory, architecture and history. By means of four french novels I analyse the representation and conceptualisation of everyday places and practices. With a focus on scaling I elaborate different perspectives. The mapping of a room might seem strange, but at the same time raises questions about scale and scaling used in cartography. I also venture into the field of mobility studies and practice theory by asking how and when mobility is perceived as such. In my latest presentation I focused on the “Spaces of the In- Between” in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel À Rebours.
Philip Hüpkes (Vechta, Germany)
Philip Hüpkes is currently employed in the research project „Narratives of the Anthropocene in Science and Literature“, funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation) and based at the University of Vechta. Simultaneously, he is engaged in a PhD-project on “Scalar Media- Ecologies. Scaling, Experience, Time” (working-title). He had studied Romance languages and literatures and English studies (B.A.) as well as Media- and Cultural studies (M.A.) at the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf and at the Università degli studi di Roma ‘La Sapienza’, and was employed as an undergraduate assistant at the Institute for Romance languages and literatures and as a tutor at the Department for Media- and Cultural studies during his study time. His research interests include the mediality of earthly materials and geologic processes, cultural techniques of scaling, process-philosophy, and the implications of the Anthropocene-concept regarding a (i) a planetary perspective, (ii) the scale of deep time, and (iii) human agency. He has written several articles and presented papers on his research topics at conferences at Bath Spa University, University of Siegen, and University of Vechta.
Peter Kudenov (NC State, US)
Peter Kudenov is a doctoral candidate at North Carolina State Unviersity in Communications, Rhetoric, and Digital Media working on his dissertation. His work focuses on relationships between Deleuzian problematics and engineering practices, the asignifying and signifying axioms and practices related to the production of software, and the history of software engineering. He has worked as a software engineer for over 15 years on a variety of projects with various languages and tools with different scopes and has actively designed and implemented algorithms for scalable processes and applications serving few to many simultaneous clients and connections.
Joo Yun Lee (Stony Brook, US)
Joo Yun Lee is a curator and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History and Criticism at Stony Brook University,working on the intersection of art, science, and technology in contemporary art and visual culture. Her research, which crosses the regional boundaries, focuses on the technological modes of production, distribution, and reception of technical images, intermedia performance and installation, sound art, and architecture from the 1960s to the present. She is finishing a dissertation titled “Sensible Communities: The Viewer’s Experience in Ryoji Ikeda’s Audiovisual Installation and Performance of Data Composition” and her recent research shows a special interest in the artistic practices that offer a new speculative-sensible experience and a critical understanding of the legibility and governance of datafied society. She was awarded Fulbright Graduate Study Award and was a 2013-2014 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, and teaches at the Pratt Institute in New York. Before starting her doctoral work in art history, she was an assistant curator at the Seoul Museum of Art and was in charge of the Seoul International Media Art Festival. She was also an editor of AliceOn (aliceon.net), South Korea’s first web magazine and networking channel on media art and culture.
Elisa Linseisen (Bochum, Germany)
Elisa Linseisen is Assistant Researcher at the Institute of Media Studies of the Ruhr-University Bochum since October 2014 and member of the DFG Research Group Media and Mimesis based at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Having studied German Literature at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich from 2008, she graduated in 2013 with the master thesis about a media theoretical approach on 3D movies (published in 2014 as “3D. Filmisches Denken einer Unmöglichkeit”). She is currently writing on her Ph.D. thesis about an aesthetic theory of and media philosophical focus on high definition images. Her fields of research include digital visuality, format theory, film- and media philosophy and image theory.
Joan Lubin (UPenn, US)
Joan Lubin is completing her PhD in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She isis the 2017-2018 John Money Fellow for Scholars of Sexology at the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research in Bloomington, Indiana. In the fall she will begin a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship in science and literature at Cornell University in the English Department and the Society for the Humanities. Her dissertation, “Social Science Fictions,” examines the aesthetics of scientism in cold war American culture. Each chapter identifies a site of representational negotiation at the interface of the literary and the social scientific to show how the question of scale animated attempts to repurpose mathematical formalism in the service of social realism and develop modes of narrative representation for an age of statistical aggregation. Her research has been published in the edited collection Scale in Literature and Culture (Palgrave, 2017).
Kyveli, Mavrokordopoulou (EHESS, France)
Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou is a PhD candidate funded by the Onassis Foundation at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris. Her dissertation examines contemporary philosophical and artistic representations of the geological longue durée. Building on nineteenth-century geological discourses as a “matrix” for representing the geological deep past, she explores to which extent this can be converted into a future longue durée. She is devoting part of her work to the cognitive and representational challenges posed by the deep future of long-term nuclear waste storage. This lead her to organize the interdisciplinary program “Nuclear Waste Weeks” at the Environmental Humanities Center, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. She studied art history at the theoretical department of the Athens School of Fine Arts and earned her master degree in aesthetics at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne.
Veronica Peselmann (Bielefeld, Germany)
Veronica Peselmann holds a post-doc position at the Department of Art History at the University of Bielefeld/Germany. Her project examines artists’ books from the late 20th century that refer to contemporary historical events and challenge the ‘format’ of a book. The project focuses on the interdependency of format, scaling, handling, and political and historical subject. Veronica Peselmann completed her PhD in art history at the Freie Universität Berlin, which examined the art historical concept ‘ground’ and its semantic and material implications. Focusing on the work of Camille Corot and Gustave Courbet the project endeavored to show how transformations in painting materials correspond to the understanding and conception of painting in the late 19th century. As a Fellow at the Getty Research Institute/Los Angeles in 2015-2016 she was part of the annual theme ‘art and materiality’. Veronica Peselmann studied Art History, Literature, History and Media Studies in Konstanz (Germany) and Warsaw (Poland). Her research interests are Art in the 19th and 20th centuries, concepts and theories of painting, concepts of usage and handling, material culture, art and technology.
Jennifer Pranolo (Berkeley, US)
Jennifer Pranolo’s research focuses on the history and theory of film and photography, aesthetics, and new media. Her current project rethinks an aesthetics of photographic space in the information age. Tracing the evolution of the photograph as a site for constructing novel spatial models for looking at and thinking about the world, it examines the transformation of scale as a point of bodily orientation within contemporary photographic practice in order to reframe a theory of the subject as an “interactive” agent. She holds a PhD in Film and Media from the University of California, Berkeley and was a Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Fellow with the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Amherst College.
Peter Raccuglia (Yale, US)
Anna Rick (Siegen, Germany)
Sarine Waltenspül (ZHdK, Switzerland)
Sarine Waltenspül studied Philosophy, History of Art and Cultural Analysis at the Universities of Basel and Zurich and at the Humboldt University of Berlin. She just defended her dissertation with the title Cinematographic Models in Transfer at the Institute for Media Studies at the University of Basel. Since 2017 she is co-leading the SNFS-research project Images of Air and Light: The Moving Image and the Camera as a Scaling and Analytical Instrument (2017–2021), based at the Research Focus on Transdisciplinarity (fsp-t) at Zurich University of the Arts. Before that she was involved as a PhD candidate in the SNFS-research project Size Matters – The Scales of Models (2013–2016) and has been a publishing manager at Hungerkünstler Verlag (2007–2013).