About us
The Institute appeared in March 2020 as a bugreport. We decided to bring together our resources and build a temporary institution that can address, engage in and resist the disruptive and inequitable impact of complex global technology regimes and infrastructures. We meet regularly to discuss current developments, develop research threads, respond to questions from colleagues and comrades, and work on commissioned projects. We are registered as a non-profit association in Brussels, Belgium.
An overview of the activities of the Institute is here and you can find work in progress on our wiki.
Funding
Our current work on Digital infrastructures and the reconfiguration of sovereignty and imagined communities (SoliXG) is funded by CHANSE (Collaboration of Humanities and Social Sciences in Europe) and UKRI-AHRC (UK Research and Innovation, Arts & Humanities Research Council). Previous research has been funded by: Human Data Interaction: Legibility, Agency, Negotiability’ Network Plus, UK EPSRC and Research Communities Funding: COVID-19 / Quintin Hogg Trust.
Partners
The Institute for Technology in The Public Interest is associated with Friends of the earth Europe, The Underground Division, Our Data Bodies, Constant, Citizen Sense, CS and Regenerative Energy Communities.
Board-members
Miriyam Aouragh
Reader at Communication And Media Research Institute (CAMRI) at the University of Westminster, London.
Miriyam began research about the implications of the internet in Palestine. She studies techno-political evolutions during outbreaks of mass revolts in the Middle East and North Africa (Second Intifada 2000, the Arab Uprisings 2011, the Second Wave protests 2016). She received the Rubicon grant in 2009 and a Leverhulme grant in 2011, she continued to research the counter-revolutionary and imperial role of internet and technology. As a media anthropologist, she combines ethnographic offline methodologies (long term participant observation and interviews) with critical theory and media analyses. Her work is published in several books and journals including her own monographs Palestine Online (IB Tauris 2011) and her forthcoming Mediating the Makhzan (2021). She teaches Middle East politics, Critical theory of the internet and Global media. She is a member of the editorial board of Historical Materialism.
Seda Gürses
Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, TU Delft.
Seda is a member of 'the Institute' and Constant, as well as a member of the faculty in the Department of Multi-Actor Systems at TU Delft. Her work focuses on privacy enhancing and protective optimization technologies (PETs and POTs), privacy engineering, as well as questions around software infrastructures, social justice and political economy as they intersect with computer science. She is also a member of the team that developed DP3T, one of the proposals for COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps. http://vous-etes-ici.net
Femke Snelting
Femke develops projects at the intersection of design, feminisms, and free software. In various constellations she explores how digital tools and practices might co-construct each other. She is member of Constant, association for art and media based in Brussels. Constant generates performative publishing, curatorial processes, poetic software, experimental research and educational prototypes in local and international contexts. With Jara Rocha she activates Possible Bodies, a collective research to interrogate the concrete and at the same time fictional entities of bodies in the context of volumetric technologies. With the Underground Division (Helen Pritchard and Jara Rocha), she studies the computational imaginations of rock formations. Femke teaches at XPUB (experimental publishing master, Rotterdam). http://snelting.domainepublic.net
Helen V. Pritchard
Institute for Experimental Design and Media Culture, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland FHNW, Basel/ University of Plymouth
Helen’s work considers the impacts of computation on social and environmental practice and how these impacts configure the possibilities for life—or who gets to have a life—in intimate and significant ways. As a practitioner they work together with others to make propositions and designs for computing otherwise. With TITiPI they are the co-principal investigator on the CHANSE funded project ‘SOLiXG’, and co-investigator on the Swedish Energy Agency project ‘Regenerative Energy Communities’, working at the intersections of energy design and agro-ecology. They are the co-editor of ‘Data Browser 06: Executing Practices’ (2018) and ‘ Sensors and Sensing Practices’ (2019) and the forthcoming (2023) anthology ‘Plants by Numbers: Queer Feminist Technoscience’. http://www.helenpritchard.info/
Associated member
Jara Rocha
Jara Rocha are an interdependent researcher-artist. They are currently involved in several disobedient action research projects, such as Volumetric Regimes (with Femke Snelting), The Underground Division (with Helen Pritchard and Femke Snelting), and Vibes & Leaks (with Kym Ward and Xavier Gorgol). They are also part of the curatorial team of DONE programs at Foto Colectania, Barcelona and teach film studies (MA) at the Escola Superior de Cinema i Audiovisuals de Catalunya, Barcelona, as well as at the Körper, Theorie und Poetik des Performativen Department at Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart, Stuttgart. Rocha works through the situated, mundane, and complex forms of distribution of the technological with an antifascist and trans*feminist sensibility. Their main areas of study have to do with the semiotic materialities of cultural urgencies. The Cell for Digital Discomfort (CfDD) is interested in developing practices that would go toward something like “solidary discomfort” by circulating questions and experiments that deal with turbo-capitalist domination, linear solutionism, and seamless operations. CfDD wants to stay with the unease despite too-comfortable modes of infrastructural becoming, in order to intersectionally imagine ways to refuse compliance with totalitarian innovation, and to do so in a more explicit conversation with crip techno-science, anti-colonialism, queer struggles, and environmental justice.
Website built with Pico CMS. Font: Work Avec, OSP