Biography
Helen V. Pritchard is an artist-designer, geographer, activist and queer love theorist. Their work considers how computational infrastructures and digital media impact social and environmental practice. Helen works with participatory and creative practice methods for co-research, drawing on trans*feminist and queer approaches. Their research addresses how practices configure the possibilities for life—or who gets to have a life—in intimate and significant ways. As a practitioner they work together with companions to make propositions and designs for insurgent intersectional practice, regenerative media and computing otherwise, developing methods to uphold a politics of queer survival and practice. Since 2020 they are 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. Helen is Professor and Head of Research IXDM, HGK Basel, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland FHNW, where they teach on the MA Transversal Design and contribute to Critical Media Lab. They are the co-editor of ‘Data Browser 06: Executing Practices’ (2018) and ‘Sensors and Sensing Practices’ (2019), Queering Damage:methodologies for partial reparations… or not (2018/2022); the manual Infrastructural Interactions: Survival, Resistance and Radical Care (2022) the anthology ‘Plants By Numbers: Art, Computation and Queer Feminist Technoscience’ (2023) and the Future Media Series for Goldsmiths Press.
Image: Backstage at The Kitchen Network 2023, photo by Laura Fiorio CCBYNCSA