Welcome to a symposium on artistic research, media critique, and the platform condition, organised by Visual Narratives and Planetary Transformations Studio (VISTRANS*), part of the Digital Transformations research platform at Södertörn University.

How can artistic research and media critique operate as both a mode of resistance and a method of prefigurative world-building in a world governed by platforms? In which ways do these practices intervene in corporate, computational, and political infrastructures and affective regimes that shape individual and collective senses of scale, time, and agency on a damaged planet?

The symposium brings together artists and researchers Anna Ådahl and Benj Gerdes, followed by a keynote lecture and Q&A with internet theorist and media critic Geert Lovink. Lovink will share insights from his new book Platform Brutality and his long-standing practice of internet critique, and suggest alternatives for exiting the platform condition before it is too late.

This event is part of the launch of the research interest group Visual Narratives and Planetary Transformations Studio (VISTRANS*), co-led by Isabel Löfgren and mirko nikolić.


VISTRANS* explores the role of artistic and practice-based research in techno-social reimaginings of planetary transformations amid escalating technological, ecological, and political crises. It aims to create a shared space for trans- and post-disciplinary dialogue focusing on practice-based approaches to planetary urgencies. The group includes artistic researchers, scholars in the humanities, social and environmental sciences, art and media practitioners, and cultural institutions, with a focus on connecting perspectives from the global North and South.


Bios:

Anna Ådahl is a visual artist and researcher whose work explores how collective behavior is shaped, staged, and governed in contemporary society. Over more than a decade the notion and politics of crowds has been central in her artistic practice. Her fine art practice-based research, Inside the Postdigital Crowds (2022), at the Royal College of Art in London addressed the aesthetics and politics of the digital conditions in which contemporary crowds are operated and governed. Between 2022-2025 she conducted a postdoc and was running a funded (Swedish Research Council) practice-led fine art research project, in collaboration with Stefan Jonsson, at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society at Linköping University in collaboration with the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, titled Collective Agency in an Era of Authoritarian Automation. She is currently an affiliated researcher and artist across these institutions.

Benjamin Gerdes is an artist, writer, and organizer working in video, film, and related public formats, individually as well as collaboratively. He is interested in intersections of radical politics, knowledge production, and popular imagination. His work focuses on the affective and social consequences of economic and state regimes, investigating methods for art and cultural projects to contribute to social change. Gerdes’s projects emerge via multiple articulations from long-term research processes conducted in dialogue with activists, trade unionists, architects, urbanists, geographers, and archival researchers. Prior to coming to the Institute for Futures Studies, he was based at the Royal Institute in Stockholm, where he conducted research and led a professor group in fine art and moving image for 5 years.

Prof. Dr. Geert Lovink is a Dutch media theorist and internet critic. He leads the Institute of Network Cultures at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, which researches online video, memes, social media, search engines, Wikipedia, and value models in art and design. Lovink is the author of several widely translated books, including Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012), Social Media Abyss (2016), Sad by Design (2019), and Stuck on the Platform (2022). His work is translated into German, Italian, Spanish and other languages.

Registration: Free and open to all, but registration is required
Registration deadline: 17 May