Visit to Potsdam
From December 2023 to January 2024, Eduardo Luersen had the opportunity to join the Institute of Arts and Media at the University of Potsdam as a visiting scholar. He told us about his enriching and fruitful stay.
One of the primary objectives of the stay was to foster connections with fellow researchers and institutions in Germany working in media and ecology, in particular with Professor Birgit Schneider at the University of Potsdam and the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. Projects and research groups in which Professor Schneider is involved, such as Re-imagine Climate Communication; Weather Reports / Wind as Media, Model, Experience; Sensing: The Knowledge of Sensitive Media; and Analysing Networked Climate Images, are at the forefront when it comes to articulating research on visual studies and ecological thinking, which are important dimensions of the research agenda I am developing with the Cloud Gaming Atlas project.
Circular panorama of the Commons building and the Neues Palais during wintertime at the University of Potsdam.
Catalogue of the Image Ecology exhibition at the C/O Gallery.
Our collaboration involved several meetings, at which Professor Schneider shared insights from her current and past projects and I presented my ongoing work and project plans. We discussed her expertise on qualitative visual studies methods, including phenomenological approaches towards weather and climate imagery and nature writing experiences, and exchanged ideas on essays and visual catalogues related to these procedures.
As one of the outcomes of our collaboration, Professor Schneider was invited to give a lecture at the University of Konstanz during the next winter semester as part of the New Directions in Cultural Inquiry event series organised by the Centre for Cultural Inquiry (ZKF). We have also planned a potential collaboration for a visual essay in the scope of a grant proposal I recently submitted.
Invited by Professor Schneider, I also participated in an event with her seminar students at the C/O Gallery in Berlin, in which we engaged with the group exhibition Image Ecology and students presented their insights into some of the artworks. In the form of photographs, videos and installations, the exhibition presented twelve contemporary artistic responses to anthropogenic interventions on environmental systems. The artworks were articulated through four themes – Energy, Material, Labour, and Waste.
In the framework of the stay, I also attended exhibitions and performances related to my current and previous work: at the Berlin Art Laboratory, I attended Saša Spačal’s exhibition Terra Xenobiotica, a biomedia project involving the training of AI neural networks to recognise pollution on soil chromatograms. The pieces explored poetically how perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) such as Teflon, informally called ‘forever chemicals’, permeate airport soil. At the Silent Green in Berlin, I attended the More Strange Things exhibition, which presented a series of sound art pieces and multimedia performances from the Art and Media study programme at Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). I also visited the permanent exhibitions at the Computerspielemuseum in Berlin and looked at its curatorship of gaming culture developments and its large collection of game hardware and entertainment software artifacts. Additionally, I went to the Museum of Communication Berlin, which houses exhibits of undersea telegraph cables and a pneumatic tube system. These are both primary examples of technical systems for networked information exchange that exemplify, respectively, the pre-digital precursors of intercontinental and intraurban technical media. Most of these visits satisfy an interest I have had since the early years of my doctoral studies in the so-called media archaeology of technical communication systems – a subarea close to my ongoing projects and which I have discussed in research papers and lectures.
Entrance to the More Strange Things exhibition at the Silent Green in Berlin.
Exhibit of a section of a transoceanic telegraph cable at the Museum of Communication Berlin.
In December, I also had individual meetings with researchers based in Berlin connected to DIGAREC (Digital Games Research Centre), Macromedia University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, the Media Studies Department at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU), the Greening Games project at Cologne Game Lab, the Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montfort University in Leicester and the Gamification Lab at Leuphana University Lüneburg. As the most consolidated research connections that I have established during my career so far are across the Atlantic, all the aforementioned interactions aimed to foster my academic network in Germany and establish initial contacts for potential forthcoming collaborations. Besides, during my everyday work I met researchers connected to Professor Schneider’s research activities at the Brandenburg Centre for Media Studies (ZeM) and discussed further with Jan Distelmeyer, Professor of History and Theory of Technical Media at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, who shared some of his previous work on critiques of digitalisation with me. I engaged with his work in more depth in a research paper that I recently submitted to an anthology organised by the University of Applied Sciences Vienna, exploring the environmental entanglements of data-processing facilities for cloud gaming applications. The insights gained during these discussions with different researchers in media and game studies also contributed to refining that perspective, as outlined in a grant proposal that I recently submitted to the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Sections of the Atlas of MediaThinking and MediaActing in Berlin (2016), edited by Kristin Moellering and Leon Strauch in collaboration with Stefanie Rau, published by UdK Berlin and the transmediale festival. There was a copy of it in my office at the University of Potsdam.
Additionally, during the lull between Christmas and the end of the year, when university activities were paused, I conducted fieldwork in the region. Over the course of ten days, I explored the external premises and surrounding locales of two data centres situated in Berlin’s industrial districts, as well as two others located near Dahme-Heideseen Nature Park in Brandenburg. In this exploratory research, it became evident how the cloud establishes its facilities at exurban perimeters, normally near airports, powerplants, or important logistical hubs composed of warehouses, highways, container handlers, ports, and package routing networks. Most data centre campuses are built as modular futuresque pavilions in quite peripheral areas. These pathways enable the cloud to handle very physical objects in a manner that is analogous to how it processes data chunks. The robust non-computing equipment of data centres, their external air conditioners and the generators necessary to sustain the 24/7 capacity to stream services to a wide host of users, stands out in the landscape, contrasting but also overlapping with small village houses and the regional vegetation in the countryside. This fieldwork activity fed into a presentation I gave in Potsdam, but also provided preliminary work for a new project proposal that I plan to submit in September.
A highlight of the research visit was the Earthbound Networks workshop organised by Professor Schneider and Professor Distelmeyer at the ZeM. The workshop delved further into concepts and images related to cloud-based entertainment software and streaming platforms, and I had the opportunity to give a talk on the physical infrastructure of the cloud and the environmental imageries of digitalisation. The event also provided an opportunity to discuss with peers about methodological aspects of my fieldwork research.
Throughout the research visit, I remained involved in activities in Konstanz through email exchanges with colleagues and participation in Jour fixe meetings. Returning to Konstanz in January, I resumed ongoing project proposals and articles, as well as other academic duties, including co-organising a grant writing support group meeting at the Zukunftskolleg.
Presentation at the Earthbound Networks workshop at the ZeM.
Overall, the research visit was a fulfilling and scientifically enriching experience, which facilitated valuable networking activities and provided subsidies to further advance my research agenda at the present time and in forthcoming months. I am very grateful to the Zukunftskolleg for funding it! I look forward to having critically engaging collaborations with scholars I have met during the visit in order to keep developing a comprehensive perspective at the crisscrossing of ecology, visual studies and media sciences.