Helen V. Pritchard is Professor and Head of Research IXDM, HGK Basel, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland FHNW, where they teach on the MA Experimental Design. They also hold an associate professorship in Queer Feminist Technoscience at University of Plymouth.
Helen is an artist-designer, geographer, activist and queer love theorist. Their work considers how computational infrastructures and digital media impact social and environmental practice. Helen works with participatory and creative practice methods for co-research, drawing on trans*feminist and queer approaches. Their research addresses how practices configure the possibilities for life—or who gets to have a life—in intimate and significant ways. As a practitioner they work together with companions to make propositions and designs for environmental media, regenerative energy and computing otherwise, developing methods to uphold a politics of queer survival and practice.
Since 2013, Helen has been a member of Citizen Sense, an award winning group investigating the relationship between technologies and practices of environmental sensing and citizen engagement: And, since 2020 a co-organiser of The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI), together they convene communities to hold computational infrastructures to account and to create spaces for articulating what technologies in the “public interest” might be. With TITiPI they are the principal investigator on the CHANSE funded project ‘SOLiXG’. They are also co-investigator on the Swedish Energy Agency funded project ‘Regenerative Energy Communities’, working at the intersections of energy design and agro-ecology.
They are the co-editor of ‘Data Browser 06: Executing Practices’ (2018) and ‘Sensors and Sensing Practices’ (2019), the manual Infrastructural Interactions: Survival, Resistance and Radical Care (2022) the forthcoming (2023) anthology ‘Plants By Numbers: Art, Computation and Queer Feminist Technoscience’ and the Future Media Series for Goldsmiths Press.
Helen was previously the Head of Digital Art and lecturer in Computing at Goldsmiths University of London, and the subject lead for Digital Design in the school of Art, Architecture and Design at University of Plymouth where she was the head of the MRES Digital Art and Technology. As an artist and academic Helen has given keynotes, public talks and has shown work internationally including FACT (UK), Furtherfield (UK), Tetem (NL), Sonic Acts (NL), Tate Exchange (UK),transmediale (Germany), DA Fest International festival of Digital Art,(Bulgaria), Spacex (UK), Microwave Festival (Hong Kong), ACA Florida, (USA),Arnolfini Online (UK). Helen received her EPSRC funded post-disciplinary PhD across Geography, Art/Design and Computing from Queen Mary University of London, Dept of Geography .
Previous research projects include:
Infrastructural Interactions. Funded by Human Data Interaction:Legibility, Agency, Negotiability’ Network Plus, UK EPSRC.
Technology in the Public Interest. Funded by Research Communities Funding: COVID-19 / Quintin Hogg Trust
Multispecies Methods for Solidarity Stories — Using Multispecies Digital Storytelling for Sustainable Change by engaging with Decolonial and Anti-Racist Strategies in collaboration with Cassandra Troyan (Linnaeus University). Funded by Linnaeus University. Internationalization grant 20/21
Bionic Natures. Funded by Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH).
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