Digital Cultures Seminar investigates how digital systems shape knowledge, bodies, and worlds through critical theory and creative practice. Across six sessions combining lecture-performances and collaborative workshops, students explore topics such as platform theory, cyborg anthropology, and digital infrastructures. Through the creation of “tool-essays”, participants analyse and speculate on the cultural, material, and ecological dimensions of software, hardware, and networks, merging research, critique, and design.
“High-tech culture challenges this dualism in intriguing ways. It’s not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what is body in machines that resolve into coding practices. Insofar as we know ourselves in both formal discourse (for example, biology) and in daily practice (for example, the homework economy in the integrated circuit), we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras” The Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway, page 11.
The seminar’s six sessions will intertwine a series of lecture-performances¹ with the development of a tool-essay² to interrogate how digital systems shape knowledge, bodies, and worlds. Both formats approach digital cultures through critical doing, insisting on the inseparability of “the digital” universe from our modes of practice.
We will delve into issues such as how The Internet Exists on Planet Earth (i.e., material infrastructures, resources, and labor), Platform Theory, Cyborg Anthropology, the Digital Self, Digital Differences, and Worldbuilding. In parallel we will develop a series of tool essays. First by choosing a piece of software, hardware, or a platform and developing an “anatomy of [___]” research visualization, building on Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s work on technology’s interwoven histories and infrastructures. This will then form the substrate for groups to propose a tool-essay on an existing or speculative tool (software/hardware/platform).
Throughout the workshop, students will:
The layers of Google Maps This research visual presents the evolution of mapping through the lens of Google Maps, inspired by the work of Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, Calculating Empires. The work divides the evolution of data leading to the creation of Google Maps into three layers: Mapping the Planet, Mapping the Data and … Read more
The research visualisation map shows the meaning, value, and governance of land shift as it transitions from the physical world into the metaverse. It treats land not as a static material object but as a socio-technical construct whose definition changes with different forms of infrastructure, ownership systems, and human–technology relationships. In the physical world, land … Read more
In the age of digital urbanism, cities are no longer understood only through streets, buildings, or neighbourhoods—they are interpreted, navigated, and governed through layers of pixels, data points, and algorithmic models. Our visualization project, Cities in Pixels: Mapping, Moving and Meaning in the Digital Era, examines this transformation using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as its … Read more
A genealogy and spatial analysis of Wi-Fi technologies since 1970 Many digital technologies do not only float in a “cloud.” People may use and not see these systems during their day-to-day life, but we learned in our digital cultures course that these technologies are grounded in material systems with real environmental footprints and nuanced social … Read more
