Doctoral Research Colloquium
Keynote: Dr. Tamara Kneese (Program Director, Climate, Technology and Justice, Data & Society)
February 28, 2025
4:00 - 6:00 p.m.
SME 149, Structural & Materials Engineering, UC San Diego
Free & Open to the Public! Light catering will be provided.
The Doctoral Research Colloquium features talks by PhD students who have recently advanced to candidacy along with a keynote lecture by a speaker who has influenced their practice. The colloquium is a public forum where the excitement and energy of newly launched dissertation projects are shared with the broader local community through sustained dialog with a senior scholar in the field.
3:45 p.m. - Welcome and Coffee
4:00 p.m. - Keynote Lecture: "Is the Cloud Dead?" Dr. Tamara Kneese
Program Director, Climate, Technology and Justice, Data & Society
5:00 p.m. - PhD Panel: Johnnie Chatman, Coral Pereda Serras
Respondents: Professors Benjamin Bratton, Lisa Cartwright, Malik Gaines
6:00 p.m. - End
Tamara Kneese is the director of Data & Society’s Climate, Technology, and Justice program. Previously, she led Data & Society’s Algorithmic Impacts Lab (AIMLab). Building on the participatory impact assessment frameworks developed at AIMLab, she is the principal investigator of a NSF ReDDDoT planning grant that will engage the communities most impacted by AI’s infrastructures, including data centers, to go beyond technical measurements of carbon emissions. Before joining D&S, she was lead researcher at Green Software Foundation, director of developer engagement on the green software team at Intel, and assistant professor of media studies and director of gender and sexualities studies at the University of San Francisco. Tamara’s research juxtaposes histories of computing and automation with ethnographies of platform labor. Her first book, Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond, was published by Yale University Press in 2023. Her work has been published in academic journals including Social Text, the International Journal of Communication, and Social Media + Society and in popular outlets including LARB, The Verge, Wired, and The Baffler. In her spare time, Tamara is an organizer with the Tech Workers Coalition. She holds a PhD from NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication.
Johnnie Chatman
A Palimpsest of Nature — Traversing a Social History of Landscape Photography in the American West
Nature is not a neutral space but one in which multiple temporal histories —violent, capitalistic, spiritual, and aesthetic – overlap. With the invention of the camera in the mid-19th century, the environmentalist movement and landscape photography in the United States disengaged itself from questions of culture, race, and identity in order to focus on the aesthetic relationship between the camera and nature. As photography sought to garner public interest and sentiment by turning the landscape into a site of spectacle, these actions have created a network of paths, master narratives, and myths, interconnecting the medium with history, capital, and tourism. My presentation will explore the role of nature in the “American West” as a site for social critique and the effects of colonialism and Western expansion on conceptions of what and where nature exists. Bridging theoretical inquiry with cultural observation, my paper and photographic practice treat landscape photography not as an isolated pictorial expression but as an ideological framework interwoven with notions of identity, memory, and culture.
Respondent : Lisa Cartwright
Biography: Johnnie Chatman is a research-based artist, scholar, Katzin fellow and doctoral candidate in Art History & Art Practice at UC San Diego. His research explores and interweaves American history and visual culture with the history of photography and theories of landscape. His research and artistic practice interconnect by analyzing the “American West” as a geographical, cultural, and economic crossroads defined by complex connectivity. Chatman’s artwork has been featured in exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Fraenkel Gallery, and SF Camerawork. His work can be found in many museum collections, such as at the Center for Creative Photography, Crocker Art Museum, Harvard Art Museums, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Coral Pereda Serras
Shadow Spaces: Exploring Perception of Contingency in Artificial Intelligence, the Body and Magic
As technological corporations race to release competing models of artificial intelligence, the perception of intelligent systems as inscrutable, mysterious and uncanny is re-emerging in public discourse and mainstream cultural epistemologies. As such, the term “blackbox of AI” is often used to refer to the opaqueness and lack of accessibility of the inner workings of these systems.
The impact of not knowing what occurs between an input and output of an algorithmic system is therefore hard to qualify which poses socio-cultural, material and economic risks. This research compares these contingencies to magical processes and embodied experiences of intelligence. What role does risk as a process of both possibility and instability play in these heterogenous forms of knowledge-making?
Grounded in theories of posthuman feminism, history of computation, and speculative design fictions, this project hopes to contribute to the efforts that envision ethical, sustainable and responsible AI futures. By juxtaposing popular perceptions of magic, visual representations of non-human and human bodies and mainstream cultural models of AI—whether they evoke reluctance, fear, awe, or intrigue—the research crafts a framework to both challenge and demystify the notion of the blackbox of technology.
Respondent: Benjamin Bratton, Malik Gaines
Biography: Coral (she/her) is a research-based new media artist and designer from Barcelona and Madrid, Spain. She holds an MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an MA in Photography and Design from Elisava Barcelona and a BA in Communication from IE University, Spain. Her work has been exhibited at Fundació Vila Casas in Barcelona, at Twisted Oyster Film Festival and Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, Illinois, among others. She has been featured in publications such as Vassar Review, the Present Tense Pamphlets edited by the Block Museum at Northwestern University and LoosenArt. She has participated in residencies at the Arquetopia Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art, SÍM Residency in Reykjavik, Iceland and Leonardo@Djerassi Resident Artist Program. She is currently a PhD candidate in Art Practice at UC San Diego.