critical infrastructure lab

At the 10th European Communication Conference ECREA 2024, Communication & social (dis)order, Fieke Jansen will talk about imagining spaces of governing AI infrastructures.

About the panel:

The hype around generative AI, like ChatGPT, is gaining increasing attention in media and communication research with a focus on transformations in communication and human-machine-interaction. This panel reorients these discussions towards an interrogation of the infrastructures, practices, and more-than-human relations that sustain the operations of technologies that go under the label of “AI”.

Questions that regard the socio-ecological relations and their far reaching implications to justice, environments, and infrastructures that emerge from practices of use and development of “AI” remain insufficiently discussed in media and communication studies, despite landmark work in critical data studies and Machine Learning that reveals the exploitation of resources, nature and humans caused by the production, training, and maintenance of especially so-called large language models (LLMs) (Crawford 2021; Bender et al., 2021). This work makes imperative to bring the analysis of relations between AI infrastructures, questions of sustainability and emerging forms of disorder to the core of concerns for research of digital cultures and communication.

This panel discusses AI infrastructures in relation to questions of sustainability. It explores approaches, empiric objects and the multi-valent implications of AI developments in different contexts, contributing to research on infrastructures in media and communication studies and interdisciplinary research on the socio-ecological implications of AI technologies, aspects of sustainability and global injustices.

The individual papers propose approaches to deconstruct norms embedded within AI development and application with relevance for socio-ecological justice through the application of sociological practice theory (paper 1); to analyse emergent frictions and inequalities at the intersection between transforming digital and energy infrastructures (paper 2). They also critically assess the expanding terrains of “green extractivism” of the digital industries that claim to solve sustainability issues through the application of data-intensive technologies exemplified by the case of aquaculture (paper 3) and explore spaces of governance as imagined by civil society actors that counterpose narratives of AI and efficiency (paper 4). All panel contributions demonstrate how investigating the multiple human and more-than human materialities, infrastructures, and practices that sustain AI are productive for deconstructing narratives of AI technologies, especially in relation to matters of socio-ecological justice, while also addressing questions of power, agency, inequalities, and multiple forms of disorders. The panel equally addresses media and communication research’s responsibility to conduct transformative research on AI infrastructures (paper 5), when being confronted with the need for a great socio-ecological transformation.

Please take a look at the schedule here.

More information about the conference can be found on the ECREA 2024 website.

Talk in the panel BP3: Reimagining Data (in Bangalore location), Friday 09:00 CEST, 12:30 IST, room B-RM R305.

The proposed panel brings together scholars and artists for methodological reflections on data walk as an empirical method and social practice. Data walk as a method emerged recently as a creative method employed by academics and artists for a variety of purposes from public engagement and project-based education to artistic research, or as a means of data collection for straightforward empirical studies. Loitering in urban public spaces of data infrastructures as a way to check our assumptions about more abstract notions of data power is the sensitivity that may connect these approaches. Nonetheless, the sensitivities go back historically and philosophically to the works of Walter Benjamin on the flaneur, the Situationist International on psychogeography, and to hacker practices such as wardriving.

After the fervent period of experimentation that describes the last few years, does it make sense now to discuss classical methodological issues such as canonisation, normative criteria, or the affordances and limitations of the interpretative power of the data walk methodology? In other words, what is a programmatic data walk? What is a successfully performed data walk? What data walks are suitable to address what epistemological questions? Which uses are there for data walks in academic life and artistic research?

A symposium on the topic is to be held Sprint 2025 at the University of Utrecht, bringing the results of the discussion at the data power conference to dedicated practitioners.

More about the Data Power conference and the programme.

Clingendael en Internet Society nodigen je uit voor een online paneldiscussie op maandag 8 juli over huidige stand van zaken rond digitale soevereiniteit. Panelleden zullen met elkaar én met deelnemers in gesprek gaan over de vraag: “Digitale soevereiniteit: zin of onzin?” Ofwel: wat is het nut en de noodzaak van digitale soevereiniteit? Wat zijn de belangrijksteuitdagingen om het in de praktijk te brengen?

Programma

Het panel bestaat uit

• Bert Hubert, Onafhankelijk technologie-expert
• Corinne Cath, Technische Universiteit Delft
• Martijn Lucassen, Ministerie van Economische Zaken en Klimaat
• Paul Brand, Stratix
• Diana Krieger, Soverin (ntb)

De sessie wordt ingeleid door Ruben Brave (Internet Society, internetpionier) en gemodereerd door Maaike Okano-Heijmans (Senior Research Fellow Clingendael, programmaleider Geopolitics of Technology and Digitalisation)

Date: 08 July 2024 14:00 – 14:45

For more information about the event, please check Clingendael website.

You can sign up here (in Dutch)

The GIG-ARTS (Global Internet Governance Actors, Regulations, Transactions and Strategies) conference is a European annual multidisciplinary academic venue to present and discuss developments in Global Internet Governance (GIG) and their implications in and beyond this field of research. It is one of the outcomes of the GIG-ARTS project.

Paper Panel Session 3: Multistakeholderism and Digital Sovereignty

Infrastructural Sanctions, the War in Ukraine, and EU Digital Sovereignty
Niels ten Oever, University of Amsterdam; Clément Perarnaud, Brussels School of Governance; John Kristoff, University of Illinois Chicago; Max Resing, University of Twente; Moritz Müller, University of Twente; Arturo Filastò, Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI); Cris Kanich, University of Illinois Chicago

Date: 3-4 June 2024

Please find more information and abstracts of presentations on the GIG-ARTS webiste

This workshop, organized by the project B02 „Control/Space“ at the Collaborative Research Center 1265 at TU Berlin, explores different spatial changes and dynamics of the Internet infrastructure using the notion of refiguration, which presents a concept of tensions between four key spatial figures and spatial logics: the place, the territory, the network, and the route. These tensions allow for the explanation of key conflicts in contemporary modernity. Conference book with full programme available.

Maxigas (critical infrastructure lab): Media ecologies, infrastructures and environments: Infrastructure walk as a methodological approach

Or, things we learned from infrastructure walks.

The critical infrastructure lab held a series of “infrastructure walks” in
Amsterdam and Berlin, exploring the visibility of digital infrastructures
deployed in public spaces. I situate the methodological approach in
relation to other practices addressing key conflicts in contemporary urban
life that immerse observers within the spatial figures and spatial logics
of urban radioscapes. Subsequently, I highlight the methodological
advantages of the infrastructural walk compared to similar approaches.
Then, I report on the empirical and theoretical results obtained from the
walks. In short, the infrastructure walk experience is a good basis for
rethinking the key concepts of media infrastructures, media environments
and media ecologies.

Industrial standards can be mobilised as an analytical grid to structure
the urban experience of radioscapes. The insights thus generated
correspond to counter-mapping the spatial control exercised over and
through the electromagnetic spectrum in urban spaces. Such work exposes
the reconfiguration of power relationships in the city through emerging
technologies and legacy protocols. Infrastructure walks address the
question of what media technologies may mean “after all”, that is in the
context of the life world, lived experiences and action possibilities of
end users as embodied citizens.

Slides download