Uncertain Archives

Kristin Veel, Associate Professor, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. KV’s research has since her PhD (Cambridge 2008) focussed on the imprints of information and communications technology on contemporary culture. She has published extensively on database culture, surveillance and transparency. Since 2013 she has worked on the project Calm Surveillance (FKK grant/Sapere Aude). Also she is co-organiser of the research network Negotiating (In)Visibilities. She has published the monograph Narrative Negotiations: Information Structures in Literary Fiction (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009) and is co-editor of ten collected volumes and special journal issues. KV is PI on the Uncertain Archives project and is in particular interested in the intersections of narrative theory and the epistemological and hermeneutical implications of big data archives.
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Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Associate Professor, PhD, Department of Management, Society and Communication, Copenhagen Business School. NT’s PhD (Copenhagen, 2014) examines the form and function of mass digitization projects from a macro-political and cultural political perspective. Dominant themes in her dissertation are notions of network power, cultural memory, the public sphere and privacy. The Uncertain Archives project will build upon NT’s extensive expertise in the field of big data, while her component allows her to develop her thinking about the centrality of algorithms as a new form of information governance, in order to examine their logic and cultural/discursive framing: on the one hand as simple and neutral mathematical formulations, and on the other as powerful and often black-boxed forms of control.
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Daniela Agostinho is a visual and cultural theorist whose research is concerned with representations of historical violence, from colonialism to contemporary warfare, with a particular focus on feminist and decolonial perspectives on visual and digital culture. She is a postdoc affiliated with the Uncertain Archives research group. She studied Media and Culture Studies in Lisbon and Berlin. She holds a PhD (2014) in Culture Studies with a dissertation on the photographic records of Ravensbrück women's concentration camp, in which she discussed the relation between visibility, archival reason, gender and disciplinary power. Before joining Uncertain Archives as a postdoc, she was a Lecturer in the MA in PhD programs in Culture Studies at Catholic University of Portugal. Her main areas of interest are Cultural Theory, Visual Culture, Feminist Theory, Film and Moving Image Studies, and Digital Culture. She currently works on the politics of digitization of colonial archives, the visual culture of remote warfare, in particular drone warfare, and cultural theories of big data, in particular feminist and post and decolonial critiques of datafication. In addition to Uncertain Archives, she is affiliated with two networks: Algorithmic Software Cultures and Research Network on Drones and Aesthetics.

Annie Ring is Lecturer in the School of European Languages, Culture and Society at University College London. Her research is concerned with topics of surveillance and subjectivity in modern German and comparative culture, and she teaches modern German and comparative literature, film and thought. She is co-investigator of the Uncertain Archives research group based at University of Copenhagen and co-investigator of the UK-based German Screen Studies Network, and she organises the biennial Picturing Austrian Cinema Symposium at University of Cambridge. She is the joint editor with Kristin Veel and Henriette Steiner of the Brill volume Architecture and Control (2018) and her monograph, After the Stasi (2015; 2nd ed. 2017), is published by Bloomsbury in paperback. Her other publications include essays on Harun Farocki’s deployment of film archives; surveillance and complicity in German workplace documentaries; very late GDR film; the critical spectatorship of porn and theories of the archive by Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari.
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Anders Søgaard, Department of Computer Science. AS has carried out groundbreaking research on the algorithms that underlie machine translations such as Google Translate and he continues to work on issues concerned with natural language processing, machine learning, and philosophy of science. For Uncertain Archives, AS and the CST will develop software on the basis of select sections of the Wikileaks archives, which can be regarded as a prime example of an uncertain archive. The results will provide empirical material both for academic publication and for release in the planned newspaper articles. Moreover, the aim of our collaboration with CST and AS is to provide the group with a forum that can deepen our understanding of the technology underlying the theoretical and cultural effects that Uncertain Archives addresses.
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Catherine D'Ignazio is an Assistant Professor of Civic Media and Data Visualization in the Journalism Department at Emerson College, a Faculty Director at the Emerson Engagement Lab and a Research Affiliate at the MIT Center for Civic Media. Her work focuses on data literacy, feminist technology and civic art.  D'Ignazio has co-developed a suite of tools for data literacy (DataBasic.io), developed custom software to geolocate news articles and co-organized the MIT "Make the Breast Pump Not Suck" Hackathon in 2014 and 2018. Her art and design projects have won awards from the Tanne Foundation, Turbulence.org, the LEF Foundation, and Dream It, Code It, Win It. Her work has been exhibited at the Eyebeam Center for Art & Technology, Museo d’Antiochia of Medellin, and the Venice Biennial.
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Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld, Postdoc, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. In her artistic research PhD Time in the Making: Rehearsing Reparative Critical Practices (Copenhagen, 2015), KDH explored how to transform the reparative critical practice (Sedgwick 2003) from a performative and literary hermeneutic practice, towards artistic practices and a digital image in itself. Through the production of multichannel video installation KDH argues that the reparative critical practice styles new forms of subjectivity through a complex engagement with affect, materiality and time. For Uncertain Archives KHD will develop the video essay Pixels that Matter, Or, Data Gift, Data Theft (work title). Paraphrasing Judith Butler’s books Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ and Frames of War KDH KDH will continue to explore questions of reparation in relation to the material, temporal and affective aspects of digitization of archival material, to explore the following question: Who counts as a pixel? & When is a pixel grievable? KDH will explore these questions in relation to the current digitization of The Danish National Archive’s contested material, which Denmark gathered during its 250 years as a colonial power and trader of enslaved people in the US Virgin Islands (Previously the Danish West Indies from 1691 – 1917).
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Kristoffer Ørum is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and organiser based in Denmark. Through lectures, internet projects, exhibitions, interventions and teaching it is his goal to explore the many complex narratives of the everyday. He hopes to challenge existing systems of knowledge and technology through deliberate misunderstanding and misreading of these narratives. In this effort he draws equally from abundant sources of pseudo-scientific knowledge and established critical theory in an attempt to create new associations and narratives for familiar objects and phenomena. Ranging from the complexity of the internet, or economic terms, to the labels of store bought products.
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Pepita Hesselberth is Lecturer in Film and Literary Studies, and Digital Media, at Leiden University. She is the author of Cinematic Chronotopes (Bloomsbury 2014), and co-editor of Compact Cinematics (Bloomsbury 2016), and Legibility in the Age of Signs and Machines (Brill 2018). She is currently working on her project on Disconnectivity in the Digital Age, for which she received a fellowship from the Danish Council for Independent Research, and was appointed as a research fellow at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen (2015-2018). 

Ekaterina Kalinina is a postdoctoral researcher at Department of Art and Cultural Studies  at Copenhagen University, Denmark. She completed her Ph.D.in Media and Communication Studies with the project ‘Mediated post-Soviet nostalgia’ at  Södertörn University, Sweden. She worked as a research fellow at Swedish National Defence University researching on the questions of Russian  patriotism, biopolitics, nostalgia and national identity. Ekaterina Kalinina is also actively engaged in practice based research and works as a project manager at the Swedish organization Nordkonst, where she manages cultural projects and conducts research on cross-cultural artistic practices and intercultural communication. She is currently finishing her project on Hip Hop culture in Russia. She is also a founding member of the International Media and Nostalgia Network. Her current project ‘Uncertainty of Digital Archives: Exploring nostalgia and civic engagement’ investigates the role of affective mnemonic experiences, such as nostalgia, in triggering social mobilisation in digital and physical environments.

Alexander Taylor is a social anthropologist based at the University of Cambridge. He works at the intersection of digital anthropology, media archaeology, and the history of technology. His research concentrates on the material and temporal dimensions of data storage and security. He conducted his fieldwork in data centres across the UK and Europe, exploring how data centre security and resilience is enacted in practice. He is also interested in the social, material and environmental costs of cloud infrastructure and has acted as a consultant and advisor on these issues for a range of organisations, including the United Nations, Mozilla, the BBC, Channel 4 (UK) and ABC News. He is an Editorial Assistant for the Journal of Extreme Anthropology and a founding member of the Social Studies of Outer Space (SSOS) Network, a research network joining social scientists working on topics related to Outer Space. He is also a founder of the Cambridge Infrastructure Resilience Group, a cross-disciplinary research network that brings scholars together with industry leaders, security practitioners and policymakers to explore critical infrastructure protection in relation to emerging global catastrophic risks. His articles have appeared in journals such as The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Ephemera, and Culture Machine. His research interests include: data, technology, futures, outer space, techno-apocalyptic narratives, digital preservation, pre-digital nostalgia, critical infrastructure protection, and existential risk. He is also interested in the ethical, legal and security implications of cloud storage in relation to ethnographic practice and has written about this for Anthrodendum.

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Katarzyna Wac,  Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Human Centered-Computing at the Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and an Invited Professor at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, affiliated with Stanford University since 2013. Dr. Wac leads Quality of Life Technologies lab researching how mobile and emerging sensor-based technologies can be leveraged for an accurate, longitudinal personalized assessment of the individual’s behaviour and Quality of Life, as they unfold naturally over time and in context, and the improvement of the latter. She draws on new emerging models from Computer Science incorporating examination, diagnosis and treatment of daily life as an “organ” – much like a cardiologist examines heart. Her research appears in more than 100 to date peer reviewed proceedings and journals in computer science, human-computer interaction and health informatics. She is a PI and co-PI in several European (AAL and H2020), Swiss National Science Foundation projects and Stanford Medicine projects. She contributes to the ITU European Regional Initiative for mHealth. In 2015 she has been a TEDMED Research Scholar. She is also a Senior Member of ACM and of IEEE. Current/ past research projects (all of which are related to uncertain archives somehow): in the area of digital health and quality of life technologies: http://www.qol.unige.ch/research.html

Naja le Fevre Grundtmann holds an MA in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London and an MA in Modern Culture from the University of Copenhagen. Her PhD project “Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas: An Iconology of Difference” will be an investigation of how a pluralistic reading of Warburg’s Atlas might inform a contemporary digital discourse.
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Ece Elbey holds a degree in Industrial Engineering with a background of engineering experience. She worked as a research assistant in Media Department at İstanbul Bilgi University where she received her Master of Arts with a thesis on social media bots. Her work aims to investigate and speculate the role of intervention of bot accounts on transforming the notion of public emerging through social media platforms. Her research interest is situated at the intersection between digital technology and culture. During her PhD in University of Copenhagen, she will be working on investigating cultural dynamics through mundane practices of artificial intelligence based conversational agents and personal assistants from a feminist technoscience perspective. She believes that the computational skills she obtains as data mining, analysis and visualization in Python and R will have strong contribution to her research methodologically.

The Uncertain Archives group is indebted to the student assistants that have worked with us throughout

• Charlotte Johanne Fabricius
• Sayuri Nakata Alsman
• Johan Lau Munkholm
• Naja le Fevre Grundtmann