exhibition Radioscapes Symposium at the Noorderlicht Biennale, Groningen
August 31, 2025 at Noorderlicht Biennale, Akerkhof 12, 9711 JB Groningen
Organisers
- Christy Westhovens
- Noorderlicht photography biennale
- critical infrastructure lab
- Kunstpunt Groningen
We constantly move through a sea of radio signals. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cell towers and satellites form an invisible landscape that permeates our everyday lives. These electromagnetic waves shape how we communicate, move and live together — and yet, we never see them.
With Signals of you, her installation at the Tschumipavilion, Christy Westhovens makes this hidden network tangible. The red panels respond to Bluetooth signals emitted by our devices, revealing how we continuously broadcast digital traces. The pavilion becomes an archive of daily presence, showing how infrastructure and behaviour together shape urban space.
The Radioscape Symposium offers a deeper exploration of this work. Bringing together artists, scholars and critical voices, we will reflect on how radio signals construct public space. What role do we play in these digital environments? Who has access to these invisible layers, and who is excluded? And what does it mean to render such ubiquitous but hidden signals visible?
Programme
- 12:00—13:00 Visit: Noorderlicht Biënnale, Niemeyerfabriek, Paterswoldeweg 43, Groningen
- 13:30—14:30 Data walk and visit Signals of you, Het Tschumipaviljoen van Kunstpunt, Hereplein, Groningen
- 16:00—18:00 Symposium, Noorderlicht, Akerkhof 12, Groningen
- Introduction by Christy Westhovens
- Roundtable with artists, researchers and guests
- Discussion with Q&A
A manifesto has been released in conjunction with the event.
Photos by Sebastiaan Rodenhuis.
This program is made possible through funding of Mondrian Foundation, Fonds 21, Stimuleringsfonds voor Creative Industrie.
Lineup
- Arthur Elsenaar >> Artist and teacher at ArtScience Interfaculty,
Hogeschool der Kunsten Den Haag (KABK/KonCon)
- Christy Westhovens >> Artist and researcher, Technology, Performance and
Society research unit, University of Music and Theatre Munich (HMTM)
- David Gauthier — moderator >> Artist and Assistant Professor of
Computational Media and Arts, Utrecht University (UU)
- Gabriel Pereira >> Assistant Professor in AI & Digital Culture, University
of Amsterdam (UvA)
- Juli Laczkó >> Artist and teacher at HKU Media, Image and Media
Technology, Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht (HKU)
- Maxigas >> Co-principal investigator, critical infrastructure lab;
Assistant Professor of Computational Methods, Utrecht University (UU)
- Niels ten Oever >> Co-principal investigator, critical infrastructure lab;
Assistant Professor, European Studies, University of Amsterdam (UvA)
- Pawan Seshadri Venkatesh >> CTO, UrbanVind
Photos by Sebastiaan Rodenhuis.
open reading group infrastructure reading group
bi- weekly tuesday session 16:00 – 17:00 cest/cet* (once every two weeks)
facilitated by niels@criticalinfralab.net
meet up here: https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/6365963924
take notes here: https://pad.criticalinfralab.net/unz6CPM9SpieqIlkXf-Oqg
sign up for the mailinglist here (don’t forget to click the link in the confirmation email):
https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/infrastructure-readinggroup
and a calendar event
July 8th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Introduction and Chapter 1
July 22nd – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 2
August 5th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 3
August 19th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 4
September 2nd – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 5
September 16th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 6
September 30th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 7
October 14th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 8
October 28th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 9
November 11th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 10
November 25th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 11
December 9th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 12
December 23rd – The Invisible Weapon – Chapters 13, 14, 15
books we still hope to read (someday):
- Becker, Adam – More everything forever
- Carp, Alexander C. – Technological Republic
- Carse, Ashley – Beyond the Big Ditch
- Chabra, Deb – How Infrastructure Works
- Dalrymple, William – The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company.
- Deudney, Daniel – Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity.
- Frieman, Catherine J – An archeology of innovation
- Graham, Stephen, and Marvin, Simon – Splintering Urbanism
- Knox, Hannah, and Penny Harvey – Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise.
- Long, Pamela O. – Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome.
- Negri, Antonio – The End of Sovereignty
- Swenson, Edward – Infrastructures of Religion and Power: Archaeologies of Landscape, Ritual, and Semiotics.t
previous books read in this reading group:
- European Objects – Brice Laurent
- Lifelines of our Society – Dirk van Laak
- The Apple II Age – Laine Nooney
- Telegraphic Imperialism – Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury
- The Smartness Mandate – Orit Halpern
- Technology of Empire – Daqing Yang
- News from Germany – Heidi J.S. Tworek
- balkan cyberia – viktor petrov
- how not to network a nation – benjamin peters
- technologies of speculation – sun-ha hong
- the closed world – paul edwards
- four internets – kieron o’hara & wendy hall
- what is wrong with rights – radha d’souza
- digital design and topological control – parisi
- golden age of analog – galloway
- countering the cloud – luke munn
- medium design – keller easterling
- reluctant power – rita zajác
- between truth and power – julie cohen
- the question concerning technology in china – yuk hui
/* We use CEST between the last Sunday of March until the last Sunday of October, then we switch back to CET
open reading group environment reading group
bi- weekly wednesday session 16:00 – 17:00 cet (once every two weeks)
facilitated by fieke@criticalinfralab.net
meet up here: https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/5689070082 | sign up for the mailinglist here and add you reading suggestions here.
Upcoming readings:
Book: AI Infrastructures and Sustainability: Expanding Perspectives on Automation, Communication and Media edited by Anne Mollen, Fieke Jansen, Sigrid Kannengießer, and Julia Velkova. Email fieke@criticalinfralab.net for a copy of the chapters
– Sept 9 – Introduction and ‘Follow the Thing AI’ by Anna Valdivia
– Sep 23 – ‘Amazonia’s Place in AI: Minerals and Mining as the Cradle of Infrastructuring‘ by Débora Leal, Max Krüger and Sigrid Kannengießer and ‘Growing the Cloud at the “Corner of the Atlantic”‘ by AIIago Bojczuk.
– Oct 7 – ‘Aligning Energy Grids, Clouds and Public Values in Sweden‘ by Julia Velkova and ‘Aquaculture, AI, and the Planetary Domestication‘ by Patrick Brodie
– Oct 21 – ‘The Cruel Optimism of the Sustainable Cloud‘ Hamsini Sridharan and ‘Narratives of indispensability and infrastructural solutionism of AI companies‘ Salla-Maaria Laaksonen and Meri Frig
– Nov 4 – ‘Alliance or Self-reliance in New Geopolitical Technosphere‘ Malgorzata Winiarska-Brodowska and ‘Discursive Infrastructuring of AI in Russia‘ Olga Dovbysh
– Nov 18 – ‘Entangled sustainabilities‘ Anne Mollen and ‘Not Seeing the Data for the Trees‘ by Gerwin van Schie and Inte Gloerich
– Dec 2 – ‘Responsiveness and AI in Environmental Governance‘ Jędrzej Niklas and ‘AI Infrastructures, Total Mobilisation and Decomputing‘ Dan McQuillan
– Dec 16 – ‘More compute for a burning planet?‘ by Fieke Jansen and Niels ten Oever and ‘The Good Infrastructure‘ by Johanna Sefyrin and Julia Velkova
previous books and articles read in this reading group:
– pollution is colonialism by Max Liboiron
– myth of green capitalism by Katharina Pistor
– from moore’s law to the carbon law by Daniel Pargman, Aksel Biørn-Hansen, Elina Eriksson, Jarmo Laaksolaht, Markus Robèrt
– solarities; seeking energy justice by After Oil Collective
– the value of a whale by Adrienne Buller
– after geoengineering: climate tragedy, repair, and restoration by Holly Jean Buck
– against crisis epistemology by kyle whyte
– discard studies: wasting, systems, and power by Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky
– An alternative planetary future? Digital sovereignty frameworks and the decolonial option by Sebastián Lehuedé
– ‘Socialism is not just Built for a Hundred Years’: Renewable Energy and Planetary Thought in the Early Soviet Union (1917–1945) by Daniela Russ
– Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador by Thea Riofrancos
– The Security–Sustainability Nexus: Lithium Onshoring in the Global North by Thea Riofrancos
– The Internet Shutdown and Revolutionary Politics: Defining the Infrastructural Power of the Internet by Michael Truscello
– The world wide web of carbon: Toward a relational footprinting of information and communications technology’s climate impacts by Anne Pasek, Hunter Vaughan, and Nicole Starosielski.
– Shifting from ‘sustainability’ to regeneration by Bill Reed
– A Digital Tech Deal: Digital Socialism, Decolonization, and Reparations for a Sustainable Global Economy by Michael Kwet
– We Need To Rewild The Internet by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon
– Beyond Wiindigo Infrastructure by Winona LaDuke and Deborah Cowen
– How ‘Green’ Computing is Opening Up a New Frontier in Arctic Norway by Janna Frenzel
– A resourcification manifesto: Understanding the social process of resources becoming resources
– What might degrowth computing look like? + Strategies for Degrowth Computing
Water justice and technology. The Covid-19 crisis, computational resource control, and water relief policy
– Draft paper on IETF; framing environmental concerns and sustainability solutions by Fieke Jansen + Solar Protocol: Exploring Energy-Centered Design
– Draft dissertation chapter about the ITU and IETF work on environment-related standards by Kimberly Anastacio
– ‘The compost engineers and sus saberes lentos: a manifest for regenerative technologies‘ by Joana Varon and Lucía Egana
– Afterlife and decolonial relations’ and ‘Chemical Regimes of Living’ Michelle Murphy ‘
– Elemental infrastructures for atmospheric media: On stratospheric variations, value and the commons by D. McCormack and The Elements of Media Studies by N. Starosielski
– On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales by Anne Tsing
– Towards Planet-Proof Computing: Ten Key Elements EU Data Centre Sustainability Policy Should Take Onboard by Jessica Commins and Kristina Irion.
– Toxic politics: Acting in a permanently polluted world by Max Liboiron, Manuel Tironi, and Nerea Calvillo ‘
– Air as Medium by Eva Horn
– Elemental infrastructures for atmospheric media: On stratospheric variations, value and the commons by D. McCormack
– Saturation: An elemental politics’ (introduction) by Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz
– Climatic media: Transpacific experiments in atmospheric control (introduction) by Yuriko Furuhata
event The Politics of AI: Governance, Resistance, Alternatives September 2025
On 18th September 2025 the symposium ‘The Politics of AI: Governance, Resistance, Alternatives’ will take place at Goldsmiths, University of London. You can register for the symposium here. The symposium is part of the BRAID project Sustainable AI Futures, which is mobilising interdisciplinary perspectives on AI and the environment, including the social life of AI environmental governance tools.
The rapid expansion of AI and computational infrastructure raises critical questions on whether we are governing AI responsibly, and if that is even possible at all. Contemporary governance regimes reduce social and environmental impacts to mere issues of quantification of harms and management of resources. Even if we track down an elusive number for its carbon emissions or water usage, how can we reconcile that with AI’s complex, messy and highly uncertain social impacts? What are AI’s sociopolitical effects, and how do we begin to notice, imagine, manage, or measure these effects?
This symposium aims to consolidate researchers approaching questions of AI’s implications for sustainability, public interest technology, and economic justice across multiple disciplines. While there is a proliferation of research and public discourse around the central role that AI is playing in governance and infrastructure across multiple political contexts, the siloed approaches that exist across these disciplines have not been able to account for the complex global dimensions of AI politics and contestation across its value chain. This event invites researchers approaching these questions from different angles to propose ways in which we can come together to assess AI’s impacts in more systematic and comprehensive ways.
As a response to the current wave of AI development and deployment, concepts like responsible AI, sustainable AI, and AI governance have proliferated to manage these impacts at the point of design and consumption. We invite exploration of the nuances of these different approaches, as well as different national and regional contexts. However, despite the best intentions, these practices often end up reinforcing the very logics that they seek to question due to a lack of comprehensive assessment of global AI supply chains. As AI becomes more embedded in collective economic futures, how deeply are its core logics entangled with structural shifts – from green capitalism and the twin transition, to austerity, war, and accelerationism?
If alternative visions of AI are possible, what do they look like and what questions do they raise? What could AI look like if designed and operationalised outside dominant commercial and geopolitical frameworks? What possibilities emerge when we centre justice, sustainability, democracy, and decoloniality in AI development? How might the answers be different in different places around the world?
If AI should be resisted rather than governed, then where, how, by whom, with what resources and strategies? What precedents and projects of organising a resistance to AI exist, and what can we expect from the future? Where are the leverage points? If we reject the idea that AI is inevitable, what are the alternatives, and what new ethical, political, and epistemological questions do such alternatives raise?
We invite scholars who centre issues of power, equity, (in)justice, governance and resistance in AI infrastructures in their research to submit a 300-word abstract for this symposium. If accepted, you will be expected to give a 20-minute presentation.
