Digital Culture Speaker Series Presentation: Kristina Andersen

Magic and Time

Technological objects have lost their established physical form, and the feasibility of new functionality increasingly relies on our willingness to believe in a magical unknown. My work is centered on the building of new objects based entirely on imagined technologies. They are built from candy and cardboard, and other increasingly ridiculous materials, and they do not really matter in themselves. Instead, for the purpose of the investigation, they embody a fear or a desire in a form that allows me to try it out, live with its potentiality and rehearse living in this hypothetical future. They facilitate a kind of risk-taking; they provide a temporary space in which I can be changed and change. And then what makes a tentative interface a potential instrument is perseverance and time, the continued work of living and playing with it until it finds its use. 

Bio:

Kristina Andersen is an artist and researcher based at STEIM (Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music) in Amsterdam. She works with electronics and reclaimed materials to create unusual devices and experience, but her work is primarily concerned with how we can allow each other to imagine our possible (technological) futures through the making of exploratory objects. She is principal researcher on GiantSteps — a collaboration between Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Johannes Kepler Universität, Native Instruments, Reactable and Red Bull Music Academy funded by the European Union. She is mentor and senior researcher at the Patchingzone and teaches the combined MA between STEIM and Sonology in Den Haag as well as maintaining her own practice.