Event

IndustryThursday Talk

DI Webinar – Helen Pritchard

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Computation Otherwise: Carbon Endings and Regenerative Practice

Dr. Helen V. Pritchard i-DAT, University of Plymouth/The Institute of Technology in the Public Interest

As a response to the endings of carbon-based energy there have been many techno-utopian solutions for communities––grounded within imaginaries of survival, repair and resilience. Such emerging imaginations and politics remain powerfully attached to the image of the individual and their “smooth life” maintained by computational infrastructure and continuous energy. Instead, in this talk we will discuss working towards modes of regenerative practice, informatics for carbon endings, indeterminacy and the de-presencing of technosolutionism. In particular engaging with collaborative projects that attempt to practice a “computation otherwise” through sensing, hotspotting, and queering damage. I will discuss our work on pollution sensing with Citizen Sense; the Underground Division a collective research project on techniques, technologies and infrastructures of subsurface rendering and their promises; the project “Regenerative Energy Communties” in which artists, designers and farmers work together on regenerative imaginaries for energy; and the work of “The Institute of Technology in the Public Interest”.

Bio

Helen Pritchard is an artist-designer and geographer. Their work considers the impacts of computation on social and environmental justice 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. They are also a co-organiser of The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI), together they convene communities to hold computational infrastructures to account and to create spaces for articulating what technologies in the “public interest” might be. They are an associate professor in Queer Feminist Technoscience & Digital Design at i-DAT, University of Plymouth, a visiting researcher with Citizen Sense, and a research fellow at Goldsmiths University of London in the department of Computing. They are the co-editor of “Data Browser 06: Executing Practices”, published by Open Humanities Press (2018), “Science, Technology and Human Values: Sensors and Sensing Practices” (2019) and the forthcoming anthology “Plants by Numbers: Art, Computation and Queer Feminist Technoscience”.

https://www.helenpritchard.info

https://twitter.com/Helen_Pritchard

https://www.instagram.com/helenvpritchard/

Running Order

16.00 – Welcome by Chris Speed

16.05 – Talk by Helen Pritchard

16.50 – Q&A

17.00 – End

* Please note that this webinar will be recorded *

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Online on Zoom