Upcoming collaboration with Design Museum: Intimacy exhibition
Intimacy situates at the intersection of novel politicization and digital disruption of fashion. The exhibition situates at the intersection of novel politicization and digital disruption of fashion. It updates our understanding of Finnish clothing and accessory design into the 2020s, exploring the intimate relationship between the body and the clothes we wear and introducing visitors to the creative design process, from initial sketches to the finished products. The exhibition also highlights the impact of digitalization and datafication on the work of the designer as well as the mechanisms through which fashion is manufactured, distributed and consumed. The exhibition is based on extensive research on the work of the most prominent Finnish fashion designers of the 2020s and beyond, as well as that of the more anonymous designers behind contemporary work uniforms and wearable technology.
Intimacy is curated by Professor Annamari Vänskä together with post-doctoral researcher Jenni Hokka and PhD-researcher Natalia Särmäkari from Aalto University. The exhibition is also part Year of Research-Based Knowledge 2021, the theme year of Academy of Finland.
The exhibition will feature at the Design Museum from 08/10/2021 to 13/03/2022. More information can be found on the Design Museum website.
Previous events:
The problem with sex in social media
All three talks from the seminar on 23.10.2020 can now been seen here!
Sexual content is moderated on most social media platforms. At the same time, the diverse shapes that sexual content takes and the multiple roles that sexuality plays in the everyday lives of social media users mean that this no simple issue.
Our seminar brings together an international group of experts to address the different stakes involved in publishing and moderating sexual content in social media. Speakers include a representative of Facebook, a scholar exploring sexual cultures in social media, and a public health expert. Moving from the overall rationale of social media community standards to the perceived value of sexual communication and questions connected to sexual rights, we ask why, how and where sex poses a problem and what social consequences all this entails.
Friday, 4 December 2020, 14-16 pm, EET
Christine Grahn: How community standards work
Grahn is Facebook’ Public policy manager, Finland, since almost 6 years. Before that, she worked in the Swedish Government Offices, as well as the European Parliament
Katrin Tiidenberg: Sex and platform power
Tiidenberg is a social media researcher working at the Baltic Film and Media School of Tallinn University in Estonia. Her most recent books include Sex and Social Media (written with Emily van der Nagel) and Metaphors of Internet (edited with Annette Markham).
Nalubega Ross: Sexual Rights and Digital Intimacies: A proposed framework for intimate exchanges online
Nalubega Ross is a researcher at Arizona State University studying the multiple contexts in which refugees have to learn about sex and how this affects sexual and reproductive lives.
What’s intimate about data?
All three talks from the seminar on 23.10.2020 can now been seen here!
What’s intimate about data flows? Who tracks what or whom? Why should we care?
Digital media is, especially in these times of social distancing, infrastructural in how we navigate the obligations of work, studies and social life. Devices, apps and services both generate and leak data as we message, do searches, post on social media, track our number of steps or match with someone on a dating app. All kinds of daily routines give rise to data shadows reflective of our habits, likes and intimate attachments.
Our seminar asks, what is at stake in data-driven technologies both shaping and invading everyday life.
The invited speakers are the world’s leading experts within the fields of research on intimacy, data and the digital world.
Program, 23.10.2020, 10:00-13:00 EET
Susanna Paasonen, University of Turku, “Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture”
Susanna Paasonen’s work focuses on internet research, affect theory and sexuality. She is the PI of Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture.
Deborah Lupton, University of New South Wales, “More-than-Human Data Intimacies”
Deborah Lupton has a background in sociology and media and cultural studies. She is the author/co-author of 17 books and editor/co-editor of six book collections, as well as many chapters and articles, ranging across such topics as health and medicine, food, the body, the emotions and affect, risk, parenthood, digital technologies and cultures of data.
Irina Shklovski, University of Copenhagen, “The Perils of Visibility: Why the digital world is inevitably creepy”
Irina Shklovski seeks to answer how to design to exploit technology’s usefulness without exploiting its users. This drives her research in three areas: privacy and creepy technologies, ethics and responsibility in innovation, and how to address the sense of powerlessness people experience in the face of massive personal data collection.
Minna Ruckenstein, University of Helsinki, “Self-Tracking and the Limits of Intimacy”
Minna Ruckenstein works as an associate professor at the Consumer Society Research Centre and the Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities. Her research group explores digitalization/datafication by highlighting emotional, social, political and economic aspects of current and emerging data practices.