The first annual conference of the Digital x Data Research Centre
03-04 July 2025, Keyworth Centre, London South Bank University.
FREE to all, but please book a place through Eventbrite.
Keynotes by Orit Halpern (Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures, Technische Universität Dresden) and Ezekiel Dixon-Román (Professor of Critical Race, Media, and Educational Studies, and Director of Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Advanced Study, Columbia University). Further contributions from Oliver Cronk (Scott Logic), Bernard Keenan (UCL), Connal Parsley (Kent), Sol Pérez Martínez (ETH Zürich), Astrid Wynne (Techbuyer Europe) and Compiler. Organised by Geoff Cox, Ozan Kamiloglu, Kasra Kassai & Igea Troiani (LSBU).
The conference explores the coming together of infrastructure and interdisciplinary methodologies, to tease out some of the nuances of positions, to explore methods that cut across disciplinary borders, and offer new epistemic insights.
Infrastructure has emerged over the past decades as a core concern for most disciplines – concerning basic facilities such as transportation and urban design, resource supply such as water, electricity, digital technologies, knowledge and data structures – and extended to almost everything in order to situate phenomena that form part of the underlying structures of states and economies.
Attention to infrastructure helps to stress wider relational properties and how power is distributed among them, as part of the hidden substrate that binds not only includes devices and networks but also logistics, shared standards and laws. Commentators recognize that infrastructure has become a medium of information and mode of governance, operationalized through actions that determine how objects, and data about individuals, group actors and places are captured, organized, analysed and circulated.
How do different disciplinary traditions approach the concept of infrastructure, and what can we learn from the intersection(ity) of positions?
Schedule
Thursday 03 July (Keyworth Lecture Theatre A unless otherwise stated)
15:00 – 17:00 Workshop (Keyworth-119)
Hyperlocal Hotspot – Compiler
> Book workshop
17:30 Registration
18:00 – 19:30 Welcome to conference & Keynote lecture
Planetary Design: On the emerging logics of Generative AI – Orit Halpern
> Book this lecture
19:30 Food & drinks (Keyworth Mezzanine)
Friday 04 July (Keyworth Lecture Theatre A)
> Book all day event
09:30 Registration & welcome
10:00 – 11:00 Keynote lecture
Diffractive Politics: Accelerationism, Computation, & the Political – Ezekiel Dixon-Román
Break (Keyworth Mezzanine)
11:30 – 12:30 Infrastructures of Political Values, convened by Ozan Kamiloglu
Paradigms of Intelligence as Infrastructure for Political Value in Human-AI Decision-Making – Connal Parsley
Infrastructures and Space-making in Legal Thought – Bernard Keenan
Lunch (Keyworth Mezzanine)
13:30 – 14:30 Infrastructuring Architecture Knowledge, convened by Igea Troiani
Digital tools for Inclusive Architectural Histories: Closing the gaps with AI? – Sol Pérez Martínez
Break (Keyworth Mezzanine)
15:00 – 16:00 Reimagining AI and IT for Sustainable Infrastructure, convened by Kasra Kassai
Striving for more Sustainable AI Architecture – Oliver Cronk
Designing out Waste in IT systems – Astrid Wynne
16:15 – 17:00 Discussion
18:00 After the DxD conference, all are invited to attend an evening book launch organised by the Building Future Communities Research Centre. Book separately here: ‘Beautiful Lives’ by Stephen Unwin – book launch.
Abstracts
Planetary Design: On the Emerging Logics of Generative AI
– Orit Halpern
We arguably live in a new age of planetary design. From the training of large language models on billions of users to the rise of synthetic biology and bio-materials, life is becoming a medium for experimenting with technology at every scale. This talk traces a history of planetary design and investigates how the new logics of AI governance both extend and challenge earlier histories of globalization, colonialism, and modernity in design.
The effort to design at scale is not new. We might, for example, consider colonial terraforming projects, Fascist ideas of the ‘new man’, Communist collectivization, and cybernetic ideas of spaceship earth, among many other practices and imaginaries of social planning and design. This talk argues, however, that while contemporary technical practices and corporations may borrow from these pasts, the contemporary ideas and practices of design grounded in AI and notions of planetarity are radically new, and mark a separation from these legacies. This talk will engage these questions and ask what forms of humanistic inquiry are necessary to critically engage our contemporary planetary infrastructures?
Diffractive Politics: Accelerationism, Computation, & the Political
– Ezekiel Dixon-Román
This keynote begins from the backdrop of technopolitical process. The keynote will share some notes on the potential implications of the ongoing political discourse in the US, what he characterizes as a form of libertarian anarcho-capitalist desire. These are notes on the volatility of the political condition thus disjunctured by the instability of the prevailing and unfolding political order or disorder. The keynote will speak to the conjuncture of the COVID19 pandemic and what was conditioned then to anticipate the accelerationist agenda of this moment; an anarchic transformation of capitalism with the interest of pushing capitalism to its entropic limits. The Trump/Musk political discourse and desiring machine will be unpacked speaking to the role of technology and the play of time and the speed of life and why this matters for equity and justice in AI. Finally, Dixon-Román will introduce the quantum physic theory of diffraction and what it might offer for thinking of the infrastructures of the political, or what he calls a diffractive politics. This keynote offers how the computational apparatuses of AI can be understood as diffractive apparatuses and what might be the potential for an other-wise diffractive politics of contestation.
Infrastructures and Space-making in Legal Thought
– Bernard Keenan
Drawing on recent work with Alain Pottage, I take up the question of how infrastructural change can transform the dominant spatial and governing logic of an era via a reading of Carl Schmitt’s concept of Grossraum, and its later re-articulation as nomos, showing that, perhaps surprisingly, electrification was the hidden socio-technical engine and inspiration for these concepts. Rather than the mythic jus tellurium that Schmitt was keen to present, nomos included in itself an occluded technicity that later thinkers who have taken up the concept as a way out of cybernetic logic often overlook. At a time when ‘smart’ infrastructures generate a surplus of potential couplings and interfacial logics, we suggest that legal and critical theory should pay attention to what is excluded when cybernetics thinking is uncritically deployed.
Paradigms of Intelligence as Infrastructure for Political Value in Human-AI Decision-Making
– Connal Parsley
Definitions of artificial intelligence are premised on an implicit or explicit idea of human intelligence. As such, they also entail a latent account of both the human-technology relation, and political value. This paper focuses on AI’s ‘locations, politics, material-semiotic specificity, and effects’ (Suchman 2023) in a legal setting. I will suggest that current debates on legal responses to the widespread adoption of algorithmic decision-making in administrative government have paid insufficient attention to paradigms of intelligence. Drawing on work in progress with Conor Heaney, the paper will argue that a conception of intelligence is an infrastructure that binds an understanding of decision to an image of material decision processes, and to a cohort of concepts that are understood as useful for its evaluation. The paper will cover three ‘paradigms’, gradually becoming more speculative: ‘singular’, ‘collective’ and ‘transindividual’. The singular paradigm presupposes (legal) decision-making as a media-neutral cognitive-rational determinatio operable—and reviewable—by individual humans. The emphasis on reasoning also underlies the project of the ‘legal singularity’; the supposed computational perfection of legal knowledge and its automated determination, while current instituted political values serve to guard and facilitate that operation. A second, ‘collective’ paradigm of intelligence is currently emerging in projects such as the Collective Intelligence Project (CIP) and Lab42, with a much more sophisticated, decentralising approach to AI development, governance and decision processes. However, I argue, ‘collective’ intelligence retains a liberal democratic understanding of ‘values’ as deriving from pre-existing individual human preferences, which are to be more optimally aggregated in the name of a collective ‘humanity’. The third paradigm ‘transindividual’, takes up a concept from Simondon’s work. How might a transindividual analysis of material-technical changes in decision agency suggest future directions for both the processes and normative underpinnings of government decision-making?
Digital tools for Inclusive Architectural Histories: Closing the gaps with AI?
– Sol Pérez-Martínez
Architecture and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are two fields marked by gender disparities with negative real-world implications. On one hand, architecture remains a male-dominated profession despite a continued rise of female students globally, often resulting in buildings and cities that fail to accommodate diverse needs. On the other hand, AI tools are mainly created by men with data representing mostly male online use, mirroring existing social biases. Recent research confirms that gender-specific perceptions of AI are widening this digital gap, with women across all ages and contexts—professional, academic, and everyday life—using AI less than men and consequently losing out on the productivity boost provided by these new tools. In this scenario, where AI tools are trained with biased datasets and used more often by men, there is a risk of reinforcing architecture’s current limitations. In this talk, I explore how digital tools can help create more inclusive architectural histories, diversify the datasets for machine learning, improve data management and offer new uses for AI in architecture. Drawing on my work at Women Writing Architecture 1700–1900 (WoWA), I argue for a creative and critical integration of digital humanities as an opportunity to integrate the multitude of voices that have not been part of history until now.
Striving for more Sustainable AI Architecture
– Oliver Cronk
There is more than one way to architect AI. Despite what some very large players in the tech industry would have you believe brute force isn’t the only answer. In this short talk I will be calling out how UK and Europe can use its constraints to push for more responsible AI innovation. We have the opportunity to host AI in a way that has a lower impact (and in fact even energy re-use benefits). In order to do this we must more beyond group think and embrace a diverse range of approaches to AI architecture. Ones that are appropriate for the use case being solved and its nuanced specifics (such as data privacy / sovereignty) rather than a blanket approach. Decentralised, edge architectures used along side centralised approaches is going to be key to pragmatic AI infrastructure.
Designing out waste in IT systems
– Astrid Wynne
Worldwide server shipments reached approximately 12.1 million units last year; PC sales totalled 255.5 million units. This results in almost 12.2 tonnes of CO2e emissions at a conservative estimate. With hardware shipments on the rise, this is set to be an even larger problem in the future. But does it have to be this way? This presentation explores ways research teams are figuring out how to do more with less, using data to drive decisions on extending product life through reconfiguration, reallocation and real time repairs.
Workshop: Hyperlocal Hotspot
– Compiler
Join digital art collective Compiler (Tanya Boyarkina and Oscar Cass-Darweish) for a hands-on workshop exploring the vital roles and potentials of localised, offline networks. They will demonstrate how a Raspberry Pi can be configured as a Wi-Fi router to function independently from the internet. Based on collective decisions made in the workshop, this network will serve as a shared environment to exchange messages, images and other live reactions over the duration of the conference. Looking at the histories of PirateBox, Dead Drops, and other forks/adaptations of these tools, we will trace how they have reacted to changes in browser capabilities and specifications over time. The session will highlight the potential of artistic methods to uncover useful and unexpected directions for these technologies, framing DIY approaches as critical interventions in dominant systems of data circulation and control. The workshop aims to foster a collaborative space for speculative making, critical dialogue, and shared reflection on the role of digital infrastructures in local DIY practices and actions that can positively impact wider society.
Speakers
Orit Halpern is Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures at Technische Universität Dresden. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design. She completed her Ph.D. at Harvard. She has held numerous visiting scholar positions including at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, IKKM Weimar, and at Duke University. Her first book Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason (Duke UP 2015) investigates histories of big data, design, and governmentality. Her latest book with Robert Mitchell is The Smartness Mandate (MIT Press 2023), a genealogy of our current obsession with smart technologies and artificial intelligence.
Ezekiel Dixon-Román is Professor of Critical Race, Media, & Educational Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he is the Director of the Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Advanced Study. He’s co-founder of the Institute in Critical Quantitative, Computation, & Mixed Methodologies and co-founder of the Critical Computation Bureau. His research seeks to make cultural and critical theoretical interventions toward rethinking and reconceptualizing the technologies and practices of quantification as mediums and agencies of systems of sociopolitical relations whereby race and other assemblages of difference are byproducts. He is the author of Inheriting Possibility: Social Reproduction & Quantification in Education (2017, University of Minnesota Press). He also co-guest edited “Alternative Ontologies of Number: Rethinking the Quantitative in Computational Culture” (2016, Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies), “Control Societies @30: Technopolitical Forces and Ontologies of Difference” (2020, Social Text Online), and most recently “Dialogues on Recursive Colonialism, Speculative Computation, and the Techno-Social” (2021, e-flux journal). He is also a co-editor of the Duke University Press book series, “Anima: Critical Race Studies Otherwise”, a member of the Social Text Editorial Collective and the Communication, Culture & Critique Editorial Collective, and associate editor of the 2023 and 2025 volumes of the Review of Research in Education. He is currently working on a book project that examines the haunting formations of the transparent subject in algorithmic governance and the potential for transformative technopolitical systems.
Bernard Keenan is a lecturer in the Faculty of Laws, UCL. His research focuses on the intersection of surveillance, national security, technology, and human rights.
Connal Parsley is Reader (Associate Professor) in Law and a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at Kent Law School, University of Kent.
Sol Pérez Martínez is an architect, researcher and educator. Her last public building in Chile motivated her research about equality and education in architecture, focusing on the experiences of women, children and marginalized groups. She holds master’s degrees in architecture and architectural history, and a PhD in Architecture & Education from the Bartlett School of Architecture and the Institute of Education, UCL. Sol has taught at The Bartlett and Universidad Católica de Chile and lectured internationally, including at the Whitechapel Gallery and Nottingham Contemporary. Currently she is a postdoctoral fellow at ETH Zürich in the project Women Writing Architecture 1700-1900.
Oliver Cronk is the Technology Director at Scott Logic, leading on emerging and sustainable technology. He also runs a podcast and global architect community called Architect Tomorrow. Oliver has extensive experience in a variety of systems engineering, architecture and strategy roles across software, energy, government, telecoms, banking and professional services. Oliver spent 4 years working at an Energy and Climate change consultancy working with UK and European government agencies. Oliver is leading on the Tech Carbon Standard – an open source approach for Sustainable Technology at Scott Logic – which looks at pragmatic ways to reduce software’s impact.
Astrid Wynne is Head of Sustainability, AI and Automation at Techbuyer, a sustainable IT solutions provider specialising in enterprise IT hardware. She is a Chartered Environmentalist, registered Sustainability trainer and author of a number of peer reviewed papers on energy efficiency, circular economy and carbon reporting. She also worked with the Circular Economy for the Data Centre Industry (CEDaCI) project, which was led by London South Bank University.
Compiler is a collective for digital art, curation, and critical technical practice, implemented in institutional and alternative spaces. It is led by Tanya Boyarkina and Oscar Cass-Darweish. The group’s artistic and curatorial practice investigates socio-political challenges in digital culture, where the possibilities of digital art, curation, learning, and research are explored as part of a process of discovery through technological experiences. They aim to create accessible works and events through which audiences with different levels of technical awareness can delve deeper into digital technologies that shape day-to-day experience. Topics covered include cybersecurity, surveillance, and environmental conditions.
Credits
Conference organised by Geoff Cox, Ozan Kamiloglu, Kasra Kassai and Igea Troiani (Digital x Data Research Centre), with support from Yasmine Boudiaf and Tim Fransen. Supported by London South Bank University.
The DxD25 identity and logo uses Meta-the-difference-between-the-two-Font, a typeface designed by Dexter Sinister in 2010 after MetaFont, a digital typography system originally programmed by computer scientist Donald Knuth in 1979.
