Jonathan W. Y. Gray

CUAK 2026 - an unconference about being creative with computers, 26th June 2026

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 09:33:00 +0100

On Saturday 27th June 2026 there will be CUAK 2026 - a “Creativity Unconference At King’s”, organised by Mike Cook and supported by the Centre for Digital Culture that I codirect with Zeena.

Further details can be found here and copied below. 🦆

CUAK 2026 🦆

(Creativity Unconference At King’s)
A friendly unconference for London’s digital creativity communities

27th June 2026, Bush House, London

Register for Event

Welcome!

CUAK is a one-day, free event held at King’s College London, aiming to bring together people from across London interested in digital creativity, making weird stuff with computers, and having fun building artistic and creative communities! CUAK is an unconference meaning that we have no fixed schedule - you can turn up and take a slot in our schedule to give a talk, run a panel, teach a tutorial or do a performance!

Date: Saturday 27th June 2026, 10am - 5pm

Location: Bush House (South-East Wing), Strand, London WC2R 1AE (Google Maps)

CUAK 2026 is generously supported by the Centre for Digital Culture, and the Department of Informatics’ Creativity Hub at King’s College London. It also benefitted from input from many London creative communities including Pattern Club and London? Live? Coding? - thank you all! And a huge thanks to James Walker for copyediting and reformatting this welcome page.

Theme

Our theme for 2026 is tools. Digital creativity happens in lots of weird ways - sometimes with fancy professional software, but usually with busted old copies of art tools from the 90s, weird hacked-together custom software made for just one person, or repurposed apps that were designed for one use but found a new creative purpose in the right hands. We want to share this knowledge around London and learn what tools mean to you!

We’re hoping most sessions will be related to this theme in some way (but don’t be shy to pitch anything you want to share with us related to making stuff, creativity and the arts). We encourage people to get into this theme however they like, but here are some of the things we hope to see:

Tutorials and Workshops - here’s a tool I use, and here’s how you can use it

Use and Misuse - how people use weird tools for things they weren’t intended for

Making and Breaking - accounts of people making tools for their own purposes, what they learned

Wishes - what tools don’t exist, but could? What is your dream tool and what does it let you do?

Inspiration - what are your favourite tools that aren’t for art? What stories do you know about tools from the past?

Jamming - let’s make a tool right now! Let’s use one right now! Let’s make a mess together!

Nothing is too obvious, too boring or too normal. The event is going to be full of people from different backgrounds and fields and levels of experience - whatever you want to share, come and share it, someone will appreciate it!

These are only guides - if you have a session you want to propose, just turn up and propose it! We are open to anything digital creativity related.

Format

‘Unconference’ can mean slightly different things in different places. CUAK is inspired by the old Gamecamp unconference in London.

The unconference will start in our main room, with a big whiteboard with the schedule mapped out on it, full of empty slots.

We have three other rooms besides the main room, and each has its own schedule.

Write your name and a title on a slot, and it’s yours!

Before each block, you can (optionally) pitch your session to the main room.

Head to the room when the slot starts and run your session!

You can use the session for a talk, with slides or without, or a workshop, a panel, a performance, you can have a session where everyone just sits quietly and play to some calming music. Whatever you want to pitch, you can come and do it.

FAQs

I’m a bit nervous/new to this!

We want this to be fun and open for everyone. If you want any advice or support in advance of the event, please contact us. On the day we will be tagging some slots with special labels - for example, one timeslot will be for Obvious Stuff Only to encourage people to pitch ideas that they think are ‘too simple’ or ‘too obvious’. We hope these labels ease the pressure on pitching things! We’ll also have longer and shorter slots, so you can grab 10 minutes if something longer is a bit too daunting.

The main room will always remain as a quiet space to return to if none of the sessions interest you, or if you want to talk quietly with people or share things/make things. If you have any concerns about this format, please get in touch too!

Do I need to prepare?

Nope! In fact, we hope you won’t. It’s completely fine to prepare slides or a talk or something fancy, but we also love it when people get inspired and excited from a morning conversation, and suddenly pitch a session idea for the afternoon! So don’t worry if you want to run a session but aren’t sure what on - just bring yourself and a kind attitude.

Can I prepare?

Oh, of course! Please feel free to bring slides along, props, a small theatre troupe (please register tickets for your troupe members as required). The rooms we have available should all have projectors with HDMI input, and seating (some rooms have seating that can be easily rearranged).

Can I really do anything?

A worrying question for sure but: no! We have to make sure we leave the rooms as we found them, so please leave the foam cannons at home, and we have to be considerate to other people in the building so although we encourage you to perform and show stuff off, we might not be able to crank the noise to algorave levels. If you have any doubts about what you want to do, just ask us!

Is Generative AI welcome?

We don’t want to host any sessions about generative AI at CUAK. This means sessions that are about the use of LLM-driven tools, and any other related technology (sessions about composite tools are okay, so if you want to talk about Adobe Illustrator, please come and do so, but don’t do a talk about Adobe Illustrator’s generative AI features).

While there are lots of reasons people might want to give sessions about generative AI (including critiquing it), many of the creative London communities we are inviting don’t welcome the use of these tools, and we want to respect that in creating a space for them to meet and talk. The impact of this technology on the livelihoods and work of artists and creatives around the world means their presence at CUAK would also not be in keeping with the values and intentions of the space.

There are lots of places around London throughout the year where generative AI is welcomed and can be discussed! CUAK just isn’t one of them. Thanks for understanding and respecting this choice.

Safety

We want CUAK to be a safe and enjoyable experience for everyone. This means that we won’t tolerate any harassment of attendees, and will ask people to leave if they do not comply with our requests to stop harassing behaviour. Harassment includes, but is not limited to, verbal insults or bigotry, inappropriate physical contact, unwelcome sexual attention, or intimidation.

If you experience or witness someone experiencing something that you think is in violation of our safety guidelines, please report it to one of the event organisers or nominated safety volunteers. These volunteers will be pointed out at the start of the event.

If you have any concerns about these guidelines, or the safety of the event as a whole, please reach out to us.

Getting Here

The nearest tube stops are Temple (District Line) and Holborn (Central and Piccadilly Line). It’s a 15 minute walk over the bridge from London Waterloo. The entrance for the event is Bush House South East, on the Strand. Find a map here.

Registration

Tickets are free, but necessary as we need to provide a full ticket list of attendees to security. Please only register for this event if you plan on coming along!

Please note we have some funding for tea and coffee, but we are not providing a lunch - there will be a long lunch break to go out and eat locally with other attendees.

Register for Event

Where do chatbots live? Analog meme-making workshop in Amsterdam, 6th July 2026

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0100

Look forward to joining this meme-making workshop on “Where do chatbots live?”, organised by Natalia Stanusch and the Slow AI project in Amsterdam on 6th July.

Further details are copied below. ✨

Call for Participation:

Where do chatbots live?
Analog meme-making workshop
July 6, 2026 at 13:00 – 16.00h
The Hmm, NDSM-plein 125 (NDSM Wharf)
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
https://tinyurl.com/4tdmnrjj

Deadline for registration: July 4, 2026

Slow AI and Natalia Stanusch invite you to this material playground in which we map out the material and relational side of chatbots. Through analog meme-making, we will collectively explore, map, and challenge the assumptions embedded in conversation-based AI systems like health bots, assistants like Copilot, Meta AI, and many others we encounter daily. We will then co-create (counter)imaginaries of chatbots, with two lines of inquiry to guide us:

LOCALITY/MATERIALITY: Where do chatbots ‘live’? We define and explore the infrastructures, both physical and imaginary, that sustain chatbots’ seeming intangibility and invisibility. We will map out how different ‘localities’ of chatbots relate to the material processes behind them – such as computing and data flows – and how our intuitive understandings map onto them.

RELATIONALITY: How do users define a chatbot’s role and agency? We explore how we, as users, relate to chatbots through what we share, feel, and expect when we engage with them. We will map out how different relational metaphors, expectations, and emotional exchanges frame these interactions, often granting chatbots a form of agency.

We will conclude by weaving these perspectives together: Does the “where” and “who” change the “what” of a human-chatbot conversation? How does (the way we imagine) a chatbot’s materiality shape its role in our lives? And, how can we reshape the way we relate to and understand chatbots to align with the critical counterimaginaries that might emerge during the session?

—

SLOW AI is a research project that aims to foster a critical, ethical, and sustainable relationship with AI by reimagining how we engage with these technologies in our societies, helping us speculate alternative presents and futures with AI technologies. (NWA.1418.24.036)

Natalia Stanusch, a PhD candidate at ASCA, University of Amsterdam, is a researcher at AI Forensics and a research lead for AIxDesign’s “Slow AI” project. Natalia’s work builds on the traditions of critical data and algorithm studies, digital methods, and visual culture.

In collaboration with HvA, Rietveld Academie, and ARIAS Amsterdam and generously funded by the Centre of Expertise Creative Innovation, Slow AI aims to contribute to a more equitable and sustainable technological landscape.

session on critical AI practices at Digital Humanities Today: Critical Inquiry with and about the Digital conference, 23-26th June 2026

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0100

Last autumn I shared the call for proposals for a conference on Digital Humanities Today: Critical Inquiry with and about the Digital at King’s College London.

I’m involved in organising a session on “critical AI practices” at the conference at 0930-1100 on Friday 26th June. This is co-convened with Tobias Blanke (Amsterdam), Liliana Bounegru (KCL), Sal Hagen (Amsterdam), Noortje Marres (Warwick), Sabine Niederer (Amsterdam), Donato Ricci (Sciences Po) and Daniela van Geenen (Siegen), together with other colleagues at the Public Data Lab.

The full programme can be found here and further details about our session are copied below.

As well as catching up with many friends and colleagues, I’m also excited that I’ll finally be able to meet my namesake Jonathan W. Gray who is giving a talk on “Rebuilding a Commons: From Black Twitter to Bluesky’s Blackademics” in the 1130-1300 that same Friday. We’ve been in touch for a while about the many Jonathan Grays - but it is the first time we’ll be meeting IRL. ✨🌌

Critical AI practices

What are the prospects of “critical AI practices” grounded in digital arts and humanities research? This panel proposal draws together critical AI, data and Internet researchers to explore how the notion of critical technical practice might inspire contemporary critical and creative engagements with machine-learning technologies.

Originating in ‘endogenous critique’ of symbolic AI, critical technical practices (CTP) have been characterised as those which have “one foot planted in the craft work of design and the other foot planted in the reflexive work of critique” (Agre, 1997). This notion has been adopted and adapted by many fields and communities of practice – re-envisaging critique in relational terms (van Geenen, van Es & Gray, 2023). How might CTP be re-activated, re-equipped and pluralised to address challenges posed by current paradigms of deep-learning and data-intensive AI and their consequences?

In keeping with the theme of this event, critical AI practices can be envisaged as those which support critical inquiry both with and about AI technologies. They explore how capacities of machine learning may be reoriented in light of critical research on AI and its social, cultural, economic and ecological consequences – from biased datasets to polluting data centres to extractivist economies. How might critiques of AI grounded in decolonial, feminist and Indigenous scholarship inform not only refusing AI, but ways of engaging with it differently?

This panel examines different approaches to critical AI practices through a review of a range of practices and projects in these areas, as well as underpinning theories – drawing on research from across the Public Data Lab research network and the Deep Culture project at the University of Amsterdam. It aims to support those interested in critical AI practices to gather and learn from each other – re-imagining and recomposing the epistemic and societal possibilities of AI beyond the platforms, infrastructures and logics which currently predominate.

The panel is proposed by Tobias Blanke (Professor of AI and Humanities; University of Amsterdam), Liliana Bounegru (Senior Lecturer in Digital Media, Culture and Society, King’s College London), Jonathan Gray (Reader in Critical Infrastructure Studies, King’s College London), Sal Hagen (Postdoctoral researcher in Deep Learning and Digital Methods, University of Amsterdam), Noortje Marres (Professor in Science, Technology and Society, University of Warwick), Sabine Niederer (Professor of Visual Methodologies, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences), Donato Ricci (Head of Design Research, médialab, Sciences Po, Paris), Daniela van Geenen (PhD Candidate, University of Siegen), together with colleagues from the Public Data Lab.

References

Agre, P. E. (1997). Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI. In Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work. Psychology Press.

van Geenen, D., van Es, K., & Gray, J. W. (2023). Pluralising critical technical practice. Convergence, 30(1), 7–28. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231192105

summer events at the Centre for Digital Culture

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0100

A roundup of some summer events at the Centre for Digital Culture which Zeena posted on the DIGITAL-CULTURE mailing list. 🌃🌕✨

[- - - - - - - ✄ - - - snip - - - - - - - - - -]

The Centre for Digital Culture at King’s College London is hosting lots of events this month, and we’d love to see you there. Details and registration links below.

Warm wishes, Zeena Feldman and Jonathan Gray https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/cdc

## June 2026 at the Centre for Digital Culture 💕🔥👾

Towards Equitable AI through Culture: A Workshop on Methods for Embedding Authentic Cultural Perspectives in AI
Tue 16 June 11:00 to 16:00
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/kingscollegelondoncentrefordigitalculture/2230472

Investigation Walkthrough with Dabanga & Bellingcat: Child Soldiers on TikTok in Sudan’s Civil War
Tue 16 June 16:00 to 18:00
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/kingscollegelondoncentrefordigitalculture/2246286

Data Governance, Data Politics & Public Data from the Global South: In Conversation with Silvana Fumega
18 Jun 15:00 to 17:00
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/kingscollegelondoncentrefordigitalculture/2240988

Digital Investigations as Counter-maps? Aesthetic, Epistemic, and Participatory Solidarities in OSINT
Tue 23 Jun 14:00 to 16:00
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/kingscollegelondoncentrefordigitalculture/2262520

Growing feminist technocultures - an evening with Woman Open Tech Lab
Fri 26 Jun 17:00 to 19:00
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/kingscollegelondoncentrefordigitalculture/2257014

Creativity Unconference at King’s: A friendly unconference for London’s digital creativity communities
Sat 27 Jun 10:00 to 17:00
https://www.possibilityspace.org/cuak

Reverse Contradictionary Workshop: Language, AI and Creative Resistance
29 June 16:00 to 18:00
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/kingscollegelondoncentrefordigitalculture/2230477

Workshop: Developing Games for Worker Organising
30 June 11:00 to 17:00
https://luma.com/zybtlrk1

[- - - - - - - ✄ - - - snip - - - - - - - - - -]

growing feminist technocultures - an evening with Woman Open Tech Lab, 26th June 2026

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 01:30:00 +0100

Looking forward to growing feminist technocultures - an evening with Youjin Jeon from Woman Open Tech Lab (Seoul) on Friday 26th June 2026.

You can find out more and register here. The event blurb is copied below.

Join us for an evening with Woman Open Tech Lab on growing feminist technocultures , co-organised by the Centre for Digital Culture, Digital Investigations Lab and London Permacomputing Club.

“Hi, I’m Youjin Jeon, an artist and educator based in Seoul. In 2017, I founded WOMAN OPEN TECH LAB, a community that brings together art, technology, and feminist perspectives through workshops, exhibitions, and publications. My work explores how technologies shape everyday life and influence the ways we relate to one another. I’m looking forward to meeting people in London and sharing conversations with anyone interested in art, feminism, and technology. During this gathering, we’ll use the Code Meal Kit card set as a starting point for conversations and exchanges.”

jeon youjin is an artist who began her career in film scoring before expanding her practice into sound art, performance, and sculpture, experimenting with new media technologies. She is a member of Seoul Express, an artist collective that explores new forms of narrative through media-based works. In 2017, she founded WOMAN OPEN TECH LAB in Seoul, which engages with technology from a feminist perspective and seeks to cultivate non-hierarchical technological cultures. She co-curated the public art project Zero Makes Zero and served as the director of The Technology for Resistance. Since 2021, through the publishing project Fem Tech Talk, she has been producing books and writings that examine technology through an interrogative approach, embracing diverse perspectives.

WOMAN OPEN TECH LAB. Based in Euljiro, Seoul’s historic manufacturing district, the community organizes exhibitions, lectures, workshops, and collaborative projects that explore the social, cultural, and political dimensions of technology. Bringing together perspectives from art, feminism, critical media studies, and maker culture, it creates opportunities for collective learning, critical discussion, and experimentation. Through public programs and community initiatives, it fosters dialogue around contemporary technological issues and supports more inclusive and equitable approaches to technology.

Code Meal Kit is an interactive workshop convening critical conversations and collecting questions on technocultures that grew out of the 12th Seoul Mediacity pre-Biennale Station. Code Meal Kit is made to encourage gathering of more than 1 person for finding ways to talk, debate, focus, understand and identify critical issues.

This workshop is co-hosted by Liliana Bounegru and Jonathan Gray. It grew out of gatherings and exchanges around the K-Platforms project. It aims to support feminist technocultures as well as growing connections between groups and spaces in London and Seoul.

public data cultures at the Book Society collective, Seoul, 10th June 2026

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0100

I’m much looking forward to joining the the Book Society collective for a talk about Public Data Cultures as well as my broader research, practice and collaborations. The event will take place on Wednesday 10th June 2026. The blurb for the event is copied below. Further details and the registration link can be found here.

I was invited after meeting up with Kyung Yong Lim who founded the independent publishing house Mediabus with Helen Jungyeon Ku in 2007. The Book Society collective, a book and project space, was established in 2010. They also organised Publishing as Method: Ways of Working Together in Asia gathering publishers, artists, curators, collectives, distribution spaces, and designers to contextualise and reflect on small-scale publishing practices across Asia.

I was introduced to Kyung Yong Lim by Guhong Min, who set up the media arts learning community New Order in 2016 - which is now based at PIE. Jeon Youjin from Woman Open Tech Lab had suggested meeting Guhong Min on a recent visit to the lab. Jisu Lee had also suggested contacting Guhong Min when we visited Birdcall last year.

It is inspiring to be learning about this mushroom network of interconnected scenes and spaces in Seoul - as well as a bit about their histories. We are exploring ways to grow connections with adjacent and associated groups in London. More on this soon! 🌌🌕✨

공공적 데이터를 구성하기 - 조나선 그레이 토크

일시: 2026년 6월 10일 수요일 오후 7시 장소: 더북소사이어티 회현 신청: 다음 링크를 통해 신청

더북소사이어티에서 《퍼블릭 데이터 컬처스 Public Data Cultures》의 저자이자 연구자, 큐레이터인 조나선 W. Y. 그레이 Jonathan W. Y. Gray를 초청해 이야기를 나누는 시간을 마련합니다.

《퍼블릭 데이터 컬처스》는 오늘날 공공 데이터가 어떻게 우리의 삶과 사회를 구성하는지 탐구하는 책입니다. 기후위기 그래프, 지도와 앱, 협업 스프레드시트, 공공 기록 등 다양한 데이터들이 어떤 방식으로 생산되고 공유되며, 또 어떻게 정치와 문화, 공동체의 문제와 연결되는지를 다룹니다. 이 책은 데이터를 단순한 기술적 자원으로 바라보는 대신, 참여와 연대, 상상력을 만들어내는 문화적 실천으로 접근합니다.

이번 토크에서는 책의 주요 내용과 함께 Public Data Lab 등 조나선 그레이가 진행해온 다양한 리서치와 예술 프로젝트들도 함께 소개될 예정입니다. 데이터와 기술, 출판과 리서치, 예술과 사회적 실천 사이의 관계에 관심 있는 분들에게 흥미로운 자리가 될 것입니다.

조나선 W. Y. 그레이는 킹스칼리지 런던 디지털 인문학과의 연구자이자 Public Data Lab 공동 설립자입니다. 데이터와 디지털 인프라가 우리가 세계를 인식하고 살아가는 방식에 어떤 영향을 미치는지 연구해오고 있으며, 예술가, 디자이너, 활동가들과의 협업을 통해 다양한 프로젝트를 진행하고 있습니다.

studying internet culture - a digital methods co-learning workshop at Seoul National University, 8-9th June 2026

Thu, 28 May 2026 01:00:00 +0100

How can we use the Internet to study the Internet? How can features of the web and online platforms be used to study digital culture? How to study histories of the web, the dynamics of social media, the cultures of apps and the politics of search engines?

We will have a co-learning workshop on digital methods for studying internet culture at Seoul National University at 2-4pm on 8-9th June 2026. We will gather to explore tools, methods, and conceptual frameworks for studying the web and online platforms.

The workshop will provide an opportunity for hands-on exploration of a wide range of digital methods and approaches, such as interface critique, platform historiography, search as research, the walkthrough method, social media analysis and more. We will look at how prominent Korean platforms such as Naver and Daum evolved over time. Participants will learn how to use free and open source tools for gathering and doing qualitative research with collections of online materials - including 4CAT, web archives, browser extensions, and other open source tools.

The workshop is organized as part of the k-platforms project, a collaboration between King’s College London, Seoul National University, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST), Birdcall and the Public Data Lab to support collaborative research on South Korean digital media landscapes and how they are being shaped by the development of apps, platforms and AI.

The workshop will be facilitated by Liliana Bounegru, Chamee Yang at SNU, Jisu Lee at Birdcall and myself. Further details and registration form can be found here. A call for participation is copied below.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

인터넷을 연구하기 위해 인터넷을 어떻게 활용할 수 있을까요? 웹과 온라인 플랫폼의 특성을 디지털 문화 연구에 어떻게 활용할 수 있을까요? 웹의 역사, 소셜 미디어의 역학, 앱의 문화, 검색 엔진의 정치를 어떻게 연구할 수 있을까요?

6월 8-9일, 서울대학교에서 인터넷 문화 연구를 주제로 2일간의 공동학습 워크숍을 개최합니다. ✨🐰🐨🦔🐢🐬 이 워크숍은 서울대학교, 킹스 칼리지 런던, 한국과학기술원(KAIST), 버드콜(Birdcall)이 협력하는 K-플랫폼 프로젝트의 일환입니다.

자세한 내용 및 등록 양식은 여기 에서 확인하실 수 있습니다.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

how can we use the internet to study the internet? how can features of the web and online platforms be used to study digital culture? how to study histories of the web, the dynamics of social media, the cultures of apps and the politics of search engines?

on 8-9th june we’ll have a two-day colearning workshop at Seoul National University on studying internet culture. ✨🐰🐨🦔🐢🐬 this is part of the K-platforms project, a collaboration between SNU, King’s College London, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST) and Birdcall.

further details and the registration form can be found here.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

workshop with Birdcall on redrawing Korean media landscapes

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:25:00 +0100

As part of the K-platforms project, we will have a workshop on redrawing Korean media landscapes with Birdcall in Seoul at 2-4.30pm on 3rd June 2026 (a public holiday due to the local elections in South Korea).

This follows a visit to see Jisu Lee at Birdcall last summer. Since then we’ve been keeping in touch - and looking for ways to collaborate and exchange between overlapping scenes and spaces in Seoul and London.

We also caught up with Jisu at the (salt) art space in Aewol, Jeju - together with Elliot Cost co-editor of the Internet Phone Book and co-founder of HTML Energy, who was doing a residency with (salt) and birdcall.

At the workshop we will explore creative and participatory approaches for understanding Korean platform cultures and histories. The workshop call can be found here and copied below.

6/3(수) ‘K-플랫폼의 풍경’

2000년대의 인터넷, 네이버와 다음은 어떤 모습이었을까요? 왜 어떤 버튼은 사라지고, 어떤 배너는 점점 커졌을까요? 이번 워크숍에서는 인터넷 아카이브 @interenetarchive 의 웨이백 머신에 저장된 네이버와 다음의 연도별로 살펴보며, 인터페이스와 기능이 어떻게 변화했는지, 그 변화가 문화·기술·경제·정치적으로 갖는 의미와 이에 따른 개인적 경험들을 나눕니다.

*이 프로그램은 버드콜, 서울대학교, KAIST, 킹스칼리지 런던, 퍼블릭 데이터 랩이 함께하는 K-플랫폼 연구 프로젝트의 일환으로 진행합니다.

• 진행

양차미 @donnaland_77(서울대학교 언론정보학과 조교수)

Liliana Bounegru @lbounegr(킹스 칼리지 런던 디지털 미디어·문화·사회학과 부교수)

Jonathan W. Y. Gray @jwyg(킹스 칼리지 런던 비판적 인프라 연구교수)

• 시간과 장소

날짜: 6월 3일(수)

시간: 오후 2시 - 4시 30분

장소: 서울시 종로구 자하문로 12길 10-7, 1층 버드콜

• 대상(5명)

인터넷, 인터페이스의 역사에 관심 있는 사람• 언어 영어로 진행하며 한국어 통역을 제공합니다.

• 참여비 무료

• 신청 버드콜 프로필 링크의 신청서 제출

• 기타 문의 및 제안 mail@birdcall.online

June 3 (Wed) the media landscapes of Korean platforms

What did the Internet, Naver, and Daum look like in the 2000s? Why did certain buttons disappear, while others grew larger? In this workshop, we will examine Naver and Daum year by year using the Wayback Machine on the Internet Archive @interenetarchive. We will explore how their interfaces and functions have changed, the cultural, technological, economic, and political implications of these changes, and personal experiences related to them.

This program is conducted as part of the K-Platform research project, a collaboration between Birdcall, Seoul National University, KAIST, King’s College London, and the Public Data Lab.

• Faciltators

Chamee Yang @donnaland_77 (Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, Seoul National University)

Liliana Bounegru @lbounegr (Associate Professor, Department of Digital Media, Culture and Sociology, King’s College London)

Jonathan W. Y. Gray @jwyg (Reader, Critical Infrastructure, King’s College London)

• Time and Place

Date: June 3 (Wed)

Time: 2:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Venue: Birdcall, 1F, 10-7, Jahamun-ro 12-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul

• Target Audience (5 people)

People interested in the history of the Internet and interfaces • Language: Conducted in English with Korean interpretation provided.

• Participation Fee Free

• Application Submit your application form via the Birdcall profile link

• Other Inquiries and Suggestions

mail@birdcall.online

article on "the datafied web" in Internet Histories

Mon, 18 May 2026 12:13:00 +0100

An article on “the datafied web” that I co-authored has just been published in the Internet Histories journal.

The article builds on exchanges at the 6th RESAW conference on the “datafied web” last year. At the conference I gave one of the keynotes on Public Data Cultures alongside Nanna Bonde Thylstrup who gave a keynote on technographies of data loss. In the article Nanna and I are in conversation with Miglė Bareikytė, Carolin Gerlitz, Sebastian Giessmann, Anne Helmond, Ian Milligan and Valérie Schafer.

We discuss the datafied web in relation to ad tech, deepfakes, AI slop, bots, leaks, trolls, bubbles, link rot, fintech, OSINT, data loss, software decay, venture capital, platform labour, web archives, DIY websites, surveillance architectures, payment systems, recommendation algorithms - as well as how to study, historicise and recompose these arrangements.

In my contributions I discuss four interrelated senses of the datafied web: (1) early web counters and quantification cultures, (2) databases as website backends, (3) networked webs of data (APIs, knowledge graphs, the semantic web), and (4) the web as training data for AI.

In the exchange I focus on situating the datafied web and understanding how things got to where they are in order to feed imagination about how they might be organised differently, drawing inspiration from the work of artists, activists and collectives such as varia.zone, Systerserver, the School for Poetic Computation and the School of Machines.

Thanks again to Sebastian, Valérie and all involved in organising RESAW and the special issue for inviting me to be part of this. ✨

Bareikytė, M., Gerlitz, C., Giessmann, S., Gray, J. W. Y., Helmond, A., Milligan, I., Thylstrup, N. B., & Schafer, V. (2026). The datafied web: A round-doc discussion. Internet Histories, 0(0), 1–16. doi: 10.1080/24701475.2026.2671555

Following the 6th RESAW conference held at the University of Siegen in June 2025, we extended the conversation through follow-up discussions with selected participants, including both keynote speakers, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup and Jonathan W. Y. Gray. This round-doc discussion brings them into dialogue with Miglė Bareikytė, Carolin Gerlitz, Sebastian Giessmann, Anne Helmond, and Ian Milligan, creating a space for interdisciplinary exchange. It re-examines the notion of the datafied web by situating it historically and methodologically. By mobilizing insights from a range of fields, the discussion broadens the conceptual and methodological approaches and tools available for studying the datafied web.

'bring your own website' at Connection Established: Digital Folklore and Web Craft, The Photographers' Gallery, London

Fri, 01 May 2026 09:00:00 +0100

I recently went to Bring Your Own Website, an event hosted by Anne Lee Steele as part of Connection Established: Digital Folklore and Web Craft at The Photographers’ Gallery.

I enjoyed visiting the Connection Established exhibition back in March with Annet Dekker, a researcher and curator at the University of Amsterdam, who has a longstanding expertise in new media art, its curation and its conservation. It was great to be able to browse the exhibition and talk with Annet about situating what was shown in the exhibition in relation to longer histories of the web, net art and digital culture.

Connection Established is curated by artist, writer and researcher Kendal Beynon together with artist and curator Sam Mercer who produces the Digital Programme at The Photographers’ Gallery. It draws on Kendal’s research on digital folklore and DIY internet communities with London South Bank University.

The exhibition explores the resurgence of interest in DIY internet aesthetics and zine making against a backdrop of the rise of AI and social media platforms, as well as their associated social and environmental costs - from data centre pollution to political polarisation to privacy concerns.

It was accompanied by Ghost in the Loop, an accompanying online exhibition with 6 experimental artworks exploring content that is “no longer made specifically for human audiences”, including pieces from Celune Acheampong, Linden Derichs, Mariana Marangoni, Martyna Marciniak, Shaheer Tarar and Valia Lolidou.

Kendal and v buckenham created an interactive quiz where visitors could select options and get a printed receipt inviting them to explore a DIY web culture or practice relevant for them - such as permacomputing, zine-making, web crafting, wiki pages, personal homepages and feminist servers. This was accompanied by an invitation to share online spaces and memories and add these to a wall.

On one wall there were screenshots from many groups, people and projects related to the exhibition’s themes - such as aesthetics wiki, Alt Text as Poetry, everest pipkin, varia.zone, cristina cochior, slashdiv, tendernet’s Imagining Feminist Interfaces and many more.

Another wall displayed artefacts such as a piratebox on a Raspberry Pi with a digital zine library, a screen with the downpour app for making games, and copies of merritt k’s LAN Party book and the Internet Phone Book.

A few weeks later, I went along to Bring Your Own Website with Liliana and Joana. In keeping with the exhibition’s ethos, this gathered artists, writers, technologists and others to share their DIY websites and web crafting practices.

The event was hosted by Anne Lee Steele, who drew on the spirit and structure of the Internet Phone Book to gather these websites and practices. By this time, the exhibition wall had filled up with many receipts with online spaces and memories.

Anne started by introducing herself, her projects and her practices through her website. She shared her recent html review piece on walking to Baekdusan, her internet walking tours, her research on open ecosystems, her interactive installation elegies for oil spills as well as her longer term work on poetic tactics to counter extraction.

She went onto introduce Internet Phone Book - “an annual publication for exploring the vast poetic web”, co-edited by Kristoffer Tjalve and Elliott Cost. She spoke about this in relation to the history of phonebooks and the development of the web.

Then we moved into a sharing session. This combined websites shared by participants with sites selected using the Internet Phone Book’s “Dial-a-site” page, with numbers suggested by participants. Sam Mercer made a desktop spread of websites that participants had created.

This included sharing of websites from:

the London Permacomputing Club and its activities - presented by Ana, Isobel and friends
Alix Wiesser - including her text-based game The Cottage
Y is greater than X from Célune Gabriella Ama Acheampong - a website which shows “man” if the window is larger than 640 pixels, and “woman” if less than 640 pixels
the School of Commons - and a bit about its history, projects and activities
plasticdino and kitty’s artistic practice
Abdelkawy Abdou including the mosaic.aa game and an interactive website to explore cultural locations in London
an online zine maker to make it easy to lay out 8 images into a printable zine (which also reminded me of the Electric Zine Maker and other resources we have been gathering as part of “zine-making as method”)
Beneath Our Footsteps - an interactive, collaborative artwork from compiler.zone

I presented this website, including about its design, cookies and carbon, as well as various artistic practices and experiments - such as data not found, everything in the forest park, forestscapes, vclip, wilding and buffering.

The event closed with a disco from Sam Mercer and then we all went to a place nearby to chat and catch up. 🌕

Some further links

Acheampong, C. & Derichs, L. & Marangoni, M. & Marciniak, M. & Tarar, S. & Lolidou, V. (2026) ‘Ghost in the Loop’, The Photographers’ Gallery: Unthinking Photography.
Beynon, K. (2023). Virtual Gardens: Cultivating Care through Reclaimed Digital Environments.
Beynon, K. (2024). Zines And Computational Publishing Practices: A Countercultural Primer. A Peer-Reviewed Journal About, 13(1), 23–36.
Connection Established - online guide with interviews and reading list
Tjalve, K. and Cost, E. (2025) The Internet Phone Book.