Son[i]a #298
Helen Pritchard
This podcast is part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. We present this podcast in two different, complementary versions. The main one, composed, manipulated, and produced by Yoneda Lemma, and an extra version, that consists only of the unprocessed material of our conversation with Helen.
Interview and script by Roc Jiménez de Cisneros. Music commission and production by Yoneda Lemma.
Helen Pritchard is an artist and researcher operating in the more or less gray area in which computing intersects geography, design and cyberfeminist technoscience. Through her artworks, writing, talks and workshops, Pritchard seeks to articulate a different social political gaze on code and computation, based on the notions of co-research, radical pedagogy and participation as key strategies to “move away from the idea of the expert or the genius” and to bring forward questions about collective learning and knowledge production.
Since 2013 Pritchard has been a member of the European Research Council funded project “Citizen Sense” led by Dr. Jennifer Gabrys, focused on the developent of creative methods that use physical computing and sensing technologies to think through and develop new theories of citizen sensing.
Citizen Sense’s work is a constant reminder that hard data is not necessarily the end goal of environmental computing practices – it’s all about how that data is gathered, used, interpreted, owned and ultimately applied to real life scenarios beyond the spread sheets and pie charts. Likewise, her “Animal Hackers” project considers the entanglement of non-human animals, which she also refers to as “more-than-humans” with ubiquitous computing technologies.
In this podcast, Helen Pritchard discusses some of her works and collective projects, and talks about all sorts of double bonds. Orcas and sensors, fossils and fracking, alpaca and recipes, sheep and data infrastructures.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with researcher and activist Jara Rocha. We talk about research as an interdependent practice and we call for complexity. Along the way, we speculate on non-coercive forms of computation and consider some case studies from the collaborate project Possible Bodies and its spin-off, Underground Division.
Zach Blas
Zach Blas talks about utopian plagiarism, biometrics, life patterns, and unthinkable moments; about identity, opacity, and paranodes; about speculation understood in terms of usefulness, and about how we can go about conceiving sensual alternatives to the internet’s total mono-narrative today.