The Institute of (im)Possible Subjects
Project Description
This collective aims to construct a knowledge commons through and about media and technoscapes, framed by women’s voices and experiences.
The Institute of (im)Possible Subjects (IiS) is a transnational feminist collective of artists, writers, and researchers. The collective opens multiple spaces and modalities for learning and knowing, including artists’ projects, visual and sound experiments, in-person guest lectures, public workshops, video installations and screenings, as well as online experiments in participatory knowledge sharing and annotation. IiS has been working together collaboratively since 2013 on scholarly, artistic, and educational endeavors, with an emphasis on engaging and sharing transnational feminist and im/migrant perspectives across disciplines, institutions, and global territorial boundaries.
The collective pursues questions like:
- What are the relationships between digital spaces and global racialism/racism, gender, and labor politics?
- How do we trans nationally exchange visual cultures and social justice through media and technoscapes?
- In what ways could contemporary artists and researchers intervene to (re)define landscapes of knowledge?
Primary Researchers
Dalida María Benfield
Director
Research and Programs
Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research, United States
Project Posts
/Living in/ A Methodology of Transgressiveness/
What’s the value of transgressiveness? The Skagen Institute annual conference offers opportunities you never thought you needed. Jannek Sommer offers a small riff in this post.
Speculating with predictive memory-making: The (Black) Box of Memories
At EASST, we used speculative science-fiction to think about current and future algorithms for memory-making. Through a fictional story and its analysis, we discuss the “black-box” metaphor, the business/entrepreneurial aspect of algorithms, and the conception of predictive memory-making.
Glitch Memory: Raising Ethical Questions
At Godsbanen, we retell a woman’s story, one year after she donated her memory to MoRM. On three screens, excerpts and meta-conversations are mutated and glitched algorithmically to raise questions about data degradation and the illusion of the representational archive.
The Sound of Forgetting: Improvisation, experimentation and bricolage
(This blogpost is part of a series of that will be posted in the six days leading up to the Museum of Random Memory: The Sound of Forgetting, happening in Cardiff/UK and Cork/Ireland. See all blogposts in the series.) Over two days (21-22 May 2018), the Museum of...
The Un-archivable and the Sound of Forgetting
As we scavenged through public repositories to build the base for our sound installation, we didn’t have any trouble finding stuff. But we struggled to find ways of adequately including or representing memories that are not archived, or could never be archived.
Structures of Feeling and the irreducible quality of lived social experience
The “Sound of Forgetting” means leaving the commonsensical, datafied understanding of data and acknowledging there is another sense of experiences that might not be at all apparent/heard. Raymond Williams’ idea of “structures of feeling” attempts to conceptualize the irreducible quality of lived social experience.