The Critical Data Lab is a space for digital critiques and critiques of the digital.

People

Co-Directors

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  Anna-Verena Nosthoff

  Anna-Verena Nosthoff is a social theorist and a critical theorist of (Big) tech. She is currently a visiting researcher at Princeton University, and a permanent affiliated researcher at the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam. Prior to that, she was a research fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society and a lecturer at the University of Vienna and at FU Berlin. Anna has published on the digital transformation of the public sphere, the power of Big Tech, the politics of social media, the platform economy, as well as critical theory, the philosophy of technology and the history of cybernetics, in international journals such as Cultural Politics, Culture, Theory & Critique, Thesis Eleven, Digital Culture & Society (forthcoming), Critical Research on Religion, Jahrbuch Technikphilosophie, Leviathan, Behemoth, Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft and various edited volumes. Anna is the author of „Die Gesellschaft der Wearables“ („The Society of Wearables“, co-authored with Felix Maschewski). Besides her academic work, she works as an essayist for, a.o., ZEIT (Online), Die Republik, NZZ, FAS, Philosophie Magazin, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, Jacobin, Public Seminar and Internazionale.

   

  Twitter: @annanosthoff

  Email: anna-verena.nosthoff@criticaldatalab.org

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  Felix Maschewski

  Felix Maschewski is a literary, media and cultural theorist (HU Berlin) and Co-Director of the Critical Data Lab. Currently he is affiliated researcher at the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam). Prior to that he held visiting and teaching positions at FU Berlin and at Princeton University. Apart from his academic writing (such as in Behemoth, Leviathan, Thesis Eleven, Digital Culture & Society (forthcoming) and other journals), he regularly writes essays for Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, Republik, NZZ, Wirtschaftswoche, Philosophie Magazin, ZEIT Online, Taz, Jacobin among others. His most recent book is Die Gesellschaft der Wearables (co-authored with Anna-Verena Nosthoff, Nicolai 2019). He is also co-editor of the Behemoth special issues „Futures of Critique in the Digital Age“ and „Algorithms and Alterity“ (forthcoming 2022).

   

  Twitter: @fmaschewski

  Mastodon: mastodon.social/@fmaschewski

  E-Mail: felix.maschewski@criticaldatalab.org

Institutional Host

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  Shintaro Miyazaki

  Shintaro Miyazaki has been junior professor of Digital Media and Computation (tenure track) at the sub-department for Media Studies of Humboldt University of Berlin since 2020 and Senior Researcher at the Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel since 2014. His recent book is “Digitalität tanzen” (transcript, 2022).

Affiliates

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  Jan Groos

  Jan Groos is a researcher, filmmaker and podcaster. He studied fine arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and is currently working on a PhD thesis on ‘Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Algorithmic Governance’ at the Centre for Sociological Theory (CST) at Kiel University. Jan runs the podcast Future Histories (www.futurehistories.today) as part of his extended research practice.

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  Paola Lopez

  Paola Lopez is a mathematician by training. Combining a mathematical perspective with legal philosophy, science and technology studies and gender studies, she is currently working on an interdisciplinary PhD thesis at the Institute of Legal Philosophy at the University of Vienna. She is also a visiting researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society. In her research, she focuses on data-based algorithmic systems and their epistemic limitations as well as on their implications for equal treatment and questions of justice.

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  Dominik Piétron

  Dominik Piétron is a research associate at the Department of Social Sciences at Humboldt University of Berlin. He works on the political economy of digital capitalism with a special focus on data and infrastructures. He is a member of the Alliance Digital City Berlin which seeks to promote democratic debate around digitization conflicts at the municipal level.

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  Magdalena Taube

  Magdalena Taube is professor of Digital Journalism at the Macromedia University of Applied Sciences in Berlin and editor-in-chief of the internet newspaper Berliner Gazette. She is the author of Disruption des Journalismus (2018) published by Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam and co-editor of numerous readers, including A Field Guide to the Snowden Files (2017) published by Diamondpaper, Berlin and Invisible Hand(s) (2020) published by Multimedijalni institut, Zagreb.

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  Roberta Fischli

  Roberta Fischli is a PhD Candidate at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, currently visiting the University of California Berkeley. Her research analyzes new forms of power in the digital economy and what this means for our idea of freedom. She holds a Masters Degree in Political Science (with a special focus on Political Economy and Philosophy), and a Bachelors Degree in Political Science and Modern History from the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Her work has been published in the European Journal of Political Theory, Morals and Machines, Republik, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and Philosophy Now.

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  Ann-Kathrin Koster

  Ann-Kathrin Koster holds a Masters Degree in Political Science (with a special focus in Political Theory) and Gender Studies. Her research interests lie particularly in the field of democratic theory, theories of the political, and the interrelationship between technology and democracy. From 2020 to 2022, she was a fellow at the Schaufler Lab@TU Dresden. Currently, she is a research associate at the research group „Technology, Power and Domination“ at the Weizenbaum Institute, Berlin.

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  Sebastian Berg

  Sebastian Berg is a research associate in the group “Democracy & Digitalization” at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society and member of the research group “Politics of Digitalization” at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, with previous visiting and research positions at FU Berlin and Princeton University. He works on ideas of democratic digitalization, the political theory of data-based analysis and intervention techniques, and the cybernetization of democratic representation. In his doctoral project he examines the genealogy and contemporary political datafication in the context of democratic representation.

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  Roland Meyer

  Roland Meyer is a media and visual culture scholar with a research focus on the history and theory of digital image cultures. His most recent book Gesichtserkennung (Wagenbach 2021) deals with the cultural and social implications of automated facial recognition. In his current research, he focuses on digital image archives, navigable images, and the media archeology of augmented spaces. Currently, Roland is a researcher in the SFB 1567 Virtual Lifeworlds at Ruhr-University Bochum and lives in Berlin. Twitter: @bildoperationen

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  Lotte Warnsholdt

  Lotte Warnsholdt is a cultural and media theorist, working on questions of temporality and critique in digital cultures. She studied European ethnology, minority studies, law and cultural studies at the University of Copenhagen, University of Hamburg and Leuphana University Lüneburg. She has recently completed her doctoral thesis, in which she examines the genealogy of predictive media and asks the question of how prediction challenges the conditions of the modern project of critique. Lotte has published on algorithmic governmentality, critique and (media) history.

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  Rafael Dernbach

  Rafael Dernbach is a researcher in media studies and future studies at the Locarno Film Festival Chair for the Future of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts at Università della Svizzera italiana. His research is in the medial construction of futures and emerging media environments. He works on the question of how cinematic and post-cinematic experiences frame anticipations of the future. Previously, he worked as Director of Emerging Narratives at fischerAppelt advisors in Berlin, where he established a research unit on narrative strategy and foresight practices. He was a researcher and strategist at Europe’s first future museum Futurium in Berlin. In 2018, he completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge as a Bill and Melinda Gates Scholar on the post-cinematic art of Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl and Neil Beloufa. He was a visiting researcher at Princeton University in 2016 and at Freie Universität Berlin in 2015.

Extended Network

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  Tobias Matzner

  Tobias Matzner is professor for „Media, Algorithms, and Society“ at the department of media studies at Paderborn University in Germany. His work combines theories of (digital) media and technologies with approaches from political philosophy, cultural studies, and social theory.

  Recently, his research has been focused on the entanglement of technology with concepts of subjectivity, affect, and autonomy — with a particular focus on algorithms and machine learning. Earlier (and related) research has been dealing with normative theories of privacy. Before joining Paderborn University Tobias has been working at the Internatial Centre for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities in Tübingen and at the department of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York as a Feodor Lynen Fellow of the Humboldt-Foundation.

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  Eugenia Stamboliev

  Eugenia Stamboliev is a media scholar and critical philosopher at the University of Vienna. She works on ethical and political issues of artificial intelligence and algorithmic/data structures. Her current fellowship deals with the influence of complex algorithmic structures (like covid models) on democracy. She holds degrees in Legal Studies, Communication and Media Studies, and Philosophy, but her thinking is also shaped by her studies in German-Jewish poetry, her father’s obsession with Michel de Montaigne, her mother’s socialist thinking and her polyglot upbringing.

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  Geert Lovink

  Geert Lovink is the founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures and Professor of Art and Network Cultures at the University of Amsterdam. As theorist, activist and net critic, Lovink has made an effort in helping to shape the development of the web. Geert Lovink is the author of many books, including Uncanny Networks (2002), Dark Fiber (2002), My First Recession (2003), Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012), Social Media Abyss (2016), Organisation after Social Media (with Ned Rossiter, 2018), Sad by Design (2019), and Stuck on the Platform (2021).

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  Wessel Reijers

  Wessel Reijers is a philosopher, specialised in philosophy and ethics of technology, hermeneutics, and responsible innovation. Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna and previously he was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, in Florence. Wessel’s research focuses on the political philosophy of blockchain technology and the Social Credit System, the intersection between citizenship and cybernetics, and developing a hermeneutic theory of technology. He has co-authored two books, Narrative and Technology Ethics (Palgrave) and Interpreting Technology (Rowman and Littlefield) and has a book titled Blockchain Governance forthcoming (MIT Press).

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  Maxim Keller

  Maxim Keller is a research associate at the Rat für Digitale Ökologie (Council for Digital Ecology) and works at the various social and political intersections the digital transformation engenders. As a PhD student in the DOK program at the University of St. Gallen, he is exploring past episodes of resistance to information technologies, looking to gain historical insight that also matters for understanding the current workings and issues of the «digital civil society».

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  Özgün Eylül İşcen

  Özgün Eylül İşcen is an affiliated research fellow at the ICI Berlin and a lecturer at Humboldt University. She holds a PhD in Computational Media, Arts and Cultures from Duke University. Her current research builds upon the idea of counter-futuring while focusing on the geopolitical aesthetic of smart urbanism within the context of the Middle East. (Photo Credit: Claudia Peppel)

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  Timo Seidl

  Timo Seidl is a post-doc at the University of Vienna’s Centre for European Integration Research. He holds a PhD from the European University Institute with a thesis on the comparative political economy of digital capitalism. In his research, Timo looks at how ideas and institutions as well as politics and power shape the digital transformation of economies and societies, with a particular focus on the role of the European Union. You can find out more about Timo’s work here.

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  Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss

  Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss is a cultural and media theorist, educator and feminist. Her main areas of research evolve around feminist epistemologies of science and technology, specifically with a focus on emerging informational systems subsumed under the umbrella term Artificial Intelligence. Previously, she has worked on digital acts of (feminist-intersectional) solidarity within the DFG-funded RTG Minor Cosmopolitanisms where she received her doctoral degree from the University of Potsdam and the English and Foreign Language University Hyderabad. She is a member of the editorial collective of kritisch-lesen.de and a board member of Diffrakt. Zentrum für Theoretische Peripherie. Sara lives and works in Berlin. Twitter: @mme_smo

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  Michael Kemmerling

  Michael Kemmerling is a political economist at the Cologne Center for Comparative Politics and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. He works on business power in digital(ized) capitalism and studies how digitalization changes the power resources, political preferences, and influence strategies of digital and non-digital firms.

Affiliates
and Extended Network