This echo reflects the persistence of historical violence, traces the pathways of technological progress, and underscores the cultural capacity for resistance in all its necessary forms. By examining the inherent contradictions between humanity and objectification, Nelly will also address broader questions surrounding technology, revealing how systems of power shape—and are shaped by—the tools they wield. Technology's development is not only entangled with histories of domination, but its inherent contradictions persist in current technological discourses. These contradictions must be deconstructed if we are to imagine alternative futures. Ultimately, this talk invites listeners to reconsider how systems of control can paradoxically give rise to cultural and sonic forms of resistance, emphasizing the transformative power of creativity and collective reimagining.
Chair: Johannes Bruder
Biography
Nelly Y. Pinkrah is a research assistant at Technical University in Dresden, Germany with the Chair for Digital Cultures. She is interested in black studies, media & technology, poetics & politics, critical pedagogy & practice and speaks, writes and workshops for magazines, organizations and institutions. Her doctoral thesis about Édouard Glissant, (constructions of) histories of technology and liberation is finished at Leuphana University Lüneburg. With her colleague Michelle Pfeifer she is running the critical pedagogy project «School of (Un)Thought» with which they are also part of the international network ASchool. Nelly is a member of the German Forum Antiracism Media Studies (FAM) and the DFG Network »Gender, Media, Affect«. She is co-editor of Critique and the Digital, Zürich: diaphanes/Chicago UP, together with Erich Hörl and Lotte Warnsholdt (2020). Most recent: «After Opacity. A Turn Towards Langauge, Again», in: Clara Herrmann, Elise Misao Hunchuck, Maya Indira Ganesh (eds.), 2024: The AI Anarchies Book, Berlin: Akademie der Künste.
Chair
Dr. Johannes Bruder is the Head of the Critical Media Lab Basel and co-leads the MAKE/SENSE PhD Program at the Basel Academy of Art and Design, FHNW. He studies the speculative and imaginary aspects of infrastructures – sociological models, psychological mechanisms, and affective potentials encoded in infrastructural designs ranging from algorithmic systems to financial markets to pipelines. He has contributed to events and exhibitions incl. Transmediale, the Anthropocene Curriculum, the Solar Biennale, the Beijing Art and Technology Biennial. His writing has been published by Routledge, MIT Press, Open Humanities Press, Valiz, MQUP, and Bloomsbury, as well as in journals such as ST&HV, Discourse, culturemachine, and Digital Culture & Society. Johannes has a strong interest in experimenting with research methods, knowledge practices, alternative pedagogies and modes of documenting that unsettle disciplinary paradigms and render research in the humanities operational in real-world contexts.