Detoxifying the environment across temporalities

Jan 30 2023

In this presentation, I document four different environmental making and doing projects that I am working on across four different temporalities or scales. The point of presenting them all collectively is to note the interdependence of short-term stopgap interventions and long-term utopic projects for detoxifying the atmosphere.

The Trial Balloon: buoyancy, embodied media, and patchy planetarity

Jan 30 2023

Trial Balloon is built to transit contesting, patchy, interwoven territories, aerial vistas and earthly visages. It enables us to view surfaces of the earth not from above, but from below—not as a disinterested observer gazing down from the Archimedean Point of aerial transcendence, but as an ant or an Atlas caught beneath the glittering, elemental enormities of a planetarity we've only begun to grasp.

Collaborative Research Toolkit: a copyleft resource for the co-design of research processes

Jan 30 2023

The 'ColMeth' toolkit consists in a series of canvas and additional offline artifacts that can help science teams and communities of interest to collaboratively: (1) brainstorm about concerns, issues and areas of interest for a research process; (2) select possibilities about specific topics, according to different criteria; (3) co-develop and discuss research questions and refine them; (4) generate diagrams and 'prototypes' of experiments and inquiry processes and (5) identify and coordinate specific tasks and needs related to the management of research.

Face-off! Platform versus Self: A photobooth experiment

Jan 30 2023

In this photo booth installation, we encourage conference participants to playfully engage with the sociotechnical relation of self / platform. We seek to deconstruct and playfully reconstruct possible sensemaking processes involved in negotiating self-categorization. The experiment serves as an interactive way to explore the continual and precarious dynamic of agential relation among elements of socio-technical design.

Getting a Sense of the Place: Navigating FemTechNet’s Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Workbook

Jan 30 2023

The FemTechNet Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Workbook is a Scalar publication that provides scholarly resources for students, educators, activists, and community members. This presentation offers three ways to navigate the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Workbook (as author, teacher, and student), and investigates some of the challenges inherent to working with technology while thinking through structural inequalities associated with discourses of embodiment.

Rethinking Citizen Science through doing Citizen Science

Jan 30 2023

In our workshop we will create a small participatory citizen science project, devising a methodological bridge between science/engineering and STS. The team members will be given scientific and engineering instruments and will then conduct research on their immediate environment, then have a dialogue about the research process and how the participants should receive credit. This workshop aims to be a first step for moving away from making critique and into doing citizen science.

(T)racing Eyes and Hearts: An Installation to Explore the Physiology of Empathy

Jan 30 2023

Eye movements and heartbeats are two examples of meaningful physiological reactions in humans. How different are they when we experience the same event? Without consciously realizing it, we respond physiologically in ways that can be measured and visually represented. The visualizations produced with this installation provide a representation of such subconscious movements in our heart rate, respiratory rate and Galvanic skin, or sweat, response.

Biomaterial Matters: Fitting Humans into Cocoons, A Speculative Prototype

Jan 30 2023

This speculative prototype in the form of a cocoon engages with research about the history of silk and silkworms in Japan around science and technology studies themes such as pasts and future(s), cosmopolitanism and regionalism, authenticity and adaptation, human and non-human, real and artificial, and gender.

Handholds: making sense of bodies through slaughter

Jan 30 2023

This multimedia film installation focuses in on the material interactions between hands, hides and knives to make sense of animal slaughter as a material-semiotic process. On the kill floor of a small U.S. animal slaughterhouse, butchers use knives to separate pig hides from bodies. In the process of skinning and disassembling, the animal’s body takes shape, becoming knowable and known in new ways.

Making Sensible in 360°

Jan 30 2023

I will present a series of four 360° videos, which explore issues of infrastructure, race, expressive culture, and technology in a city in the midst of crisis and celebration. I will reflect on the videos in an artist statement on compromise and collaboration in the encounter between radically diverging ideas about temporality, representation, and the politics of making sensible.

Our Driverless Futures: Speculating Moral Dilemmas of Self-Driving Cars

Jan 30 2023

By unpacking potential eventualities and contestations into narrative form, “Our Driverless Futures” attempts to raise humanistic concerns beyond solutionist framings of ambiguous new technologies, question the “view from nowhere” of moral algorithms, and encourage discussions of alternative, equitable and inclusive modes of public transportation

STS Olfactorium

Jan 30 2023

How do we engage places of scientific work when they are articulated through olfactory features of experience? We deal with the issue by stepping off the printed page. We thus exhibit a multisensory installation that imaginatively combines historical records on Eleanor Gamble’s first olfactorium, with visual, odorous, tactile and audio fragments of laboratory life collected during our study.

QEERI’s Science Majlis

Jan 30 2023

Organized by the Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute (QEERI) the monthly public forum aims to engage the Qatari publics (professionals, students, and scientists) to discuss QEERI-related scientific topics relevant to the country. This STS Making and Doing project is a video created by one student co-researcher (a communications major) to portray a Science Majlis event. Footages of the movie were shot in the fall of 2016.

Tracing Design Ecologies

Jan 30 2023

What does the phenomenon of design look like from the perspective of data? This Making and Doing exhibit showcases a series of data visualizations created by defining, collecting and visualizing digital traces of processes of socio-technical design.

What it is to see: a simulation of artificial vision

Jan 30 2023

Visual prostheses are a type of brain machine interface (BMI), a genre of devices that has been heralded as “the next step in human evolution.” This simulation is part of a larger project in which I combine institutional ethnography and critical phenomenological methods in the context of the neuroscientific experiment in order to create a sensory ethnography of the bionic eye. With it I seek to enact new ways of gaining and conveying ethnographic knowledge through the mobilization of experimental methods and collaborative engagement.