Past activities

Archives are instruments and sites of memory that intertwine past and present, here and there, in dizzying ways. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of the archival collections that were culled from the Danish rule over the US Virgin Islands. While the archival material – and the colonial regime that produced it – is often framed as things of “the past”, the working of the archive also shows how the past nevertheless remains a present fact in both the former colonies as well as former colonial regimes.

We will discuss these issues with artist La Vaughn Belle in relation to her ongoing archival work, focusing on questions of authority, authenticity and subjectivity.   

La Vaughn Belle is a leading multidisciplinary artist from the US Virgin Islands whose work has centered around creating narratives that challenge colonial hierarchies and narratives. She holds a MFA from the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, Cuba and an MA and BA from Columbia University in NYC. She has taught Humanities and Visual Arts at the St. Croix campus of the University of the Virgin Islands. Her work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions throughout the Caribbean, the USA and Denmark such as the Museo del Barrio in NY, the Havana biennial, the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art in Copenhagen and the Whim Plantation Museum in St. Croix. Over the last 10 years her work has focussed on the colonial legacy of the US Virgin Islands. Having changed hands seven times, the longest being Denmark and the last being the United States the question of coloniality has been a central theme in her work. She looks at history, architecture and other aspects of  material culture to create a space to explore collective narratives, memory and identity. Her work is often presenting alternative narratives of resistance and agency and the power of the imagination to redefine our understanding of our world.

We live in strange times. Isis, an international terrorist organization, uses kitten pictures to soften its public image. A right wing ideologue rises to the U.S. presidency via Twitter, a media platform that miniaturizes public speech and thrives on one liners. Meanwhile, nations wage war using tiny flying cameras that are also bombs, and the iconic symbol of resistance is a pink knitted hat with ears.

Join us for an afternoon of presentations and discussion with an international group of cultural critics. And learn about two important new books: Compact Cinematics (Bloomsbury) andThe Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness (Routledge). At 17.00, following the presentations, there will be a wine reception.

The modern world is into data, but what is out and what is coming out of data? Facts and figures, to be sure, but what else? New methods for seeing, acting and shaping our world? New cultural forms, experiences and artefacts?

Where are the political subjects of Big Data?

Prof Evelyn Ruppert, Goldsmiths, University of London

I pose the question of where are the political subjects – who I will refer to as data citizens - of Big Data in two senses. The first concerns conceptions of and relation between online and offline lives, and between ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ spaces. To pose the question of where are data citizens involves problematizing these conceptions and then asking where is the space of their becoming? The second concerns conceptions of agency and power and assumptions that subjects are either controlled or free. To pose the question of where are data citizens involves problematizing this binary and then asking through what processes do data subjects become data citizens? Those are my questions for my talk and they start from the proposition that studies of Big Data are proliferating, yet we lack concepts for framing and interpreting what these mean for political subjectivities and their relation to the data that are generated and interpreted. My objective is to provide a theory of digital acts and digital citizens that builds on this proposition to provide an approach that attends to the uncertainties of political subjectivity that involve power relations between and amongst embodied subjects who act through the Internet and in doing so are part of the making of data. By attending to this uncertainty I seek to articulate the potentialities and possibilities of acting and what this means for how we come to interpret Big Data.

The Not-So-Enigmatic Signifier

The psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche proposes the concept of the "enignmatic signifier:" the subtle, typically unconscious, powerfully conflictual messages communicated to the child by its mother, messages that the child must then struggle to translate in its own mind. In this talk I want to look at some of the not-so-enigmatic signifiers that proliferate in bureaucratic contexts, and ask about what sorts of unconscious dynamics may be at work there.

Room 27.0.47, University of Copenhagen at Amager

Digital technologies are changing our past, present and future. This seminar presents critical perspectives on issues including mass-digitization of cultural heritage, machine reading and bits-to-atoms transformations such as 3D-printing. Cultural, social and legal implications of applied digital technologies will be considered by the speakers who cover a broad range of disciplinary expertise.

Sign-up required at slt231@alumni.ku.dk. Reading material will be distributed to participants beforehand. 

In this workshop, we begin to explore aspects of love in the context of the contemporary postdigital milieu. Perhaps ‘love’ today no longer pertains to the totality favoured by modern disciplinary societies. Or its penchant for simplified binary opposition that suggested our absent half be located in order to become complete. If love can be thought as a way that bodies are consensually disciplined toward economic and social goals of the state, then it latterly describes increasingly episodic, precarious, discrete, or distributed conditions.

Attendance is free. Please sign up with nannab@hum.ku.dk.