Helen V. Pritchard

From Citizen Sensing to Collective Monitoring: Working through the Perceptive and Affective Problematics of Environmental Pollution (2016)

Helen Pritchard and Jennifer Gabrys

Citizen sensing, or the practice of monitoring environments through low-cost and do-it-yourself (DIY) digital technologies, is often structured as an individual pursuit. The very term citizen within citizen sensing suggests that the practice of sensing is the terrain of one political subject using a digital device to monitor her or his environment to take individual action. Yet in some circumstances, citizen sensing practices are reworking the sites and distributions of environmental monitoring toward other configurations that are more multiple and collective. What are the qualities and capacities of these collective modes of sensing, and how might they shift the assumed parameters—and effectiveness—of citizen sensing? We engage with Simondon’s writing to consider how a “perceptive problematic” generates collectives for feeling and responding to events (or an “affective problematic”), here through the ongoing event of air pollution. Further drawing on writing from Stengers, we discuss how the “work” of citizen sensing involves much more than developing new technologies, and instead points to the ways in which new practices, subjects, milieus, evidence, and politics are worked through as perceptive and affective commitments to making sense of and addressing the problem of pollution.

Performative Apparatus and Diffractive Practices: An Account of Artificial Life Art (2015)

Jane Prophet and Helen Pritchard 

Drawing on our own art/science practices and a series of interviews with artificial life practitioners, we explore the entanglement of developments at the artistic edges of artificial life. We start by defining key terms from Karen Barad's agential realism. We then diffractively read artificial life together with agential realism to discuss the potential for interventions in the field. Through a discussion of artificial life computer simulations, ideas of agency are problematized, and artificial life's single purposeful actor, the agent, is replaced by agential, an adjective denoting a relationship rather than a subject-object duality. We then seek to reinterpret the difficult-to-define term “emergence.” Agency in artificial life emerges through what Barad calls entanglement, in this case between observers and their apparatus, a perpetual engagement between observations of a system and their interpretations. The article explores the differences that this diffractive perspective makes to artificial life and accounts of its materialization.

Data Browser 06: Executing Practices (2018)

eds. Helen Pritchard, Eric Snodgrass and Magda Tyzlik-Carver

This collection brings together artists, curators, programmers, theorists and heavy internet browsers whose practices make critical intervention into the broad concept of execution. It draws attention to their political strategies, asking: who and what is involved with those practices, and for whom or what are these practices performed, and how? From the contestable politics of emoji modifier mechanisms and micro-temporalities of computational processes to genomic exploitation and the curating of digital content, the chapters account for gendered, racialised, spatial, violent, erotic, artistic and other embedded forms of execution. Together they highlight a range of ways in which execution emerges and how it participates within networked forms of liveliness.

Thinking with the Animal Hacker: Articulation in Ecologies of Earth Observation (2013)
Helen Pritchard 

Through developments in cloud-computing, data streaming and bio-sensing, the ubiquities of data practices are re-configuring how we imagine and come together with non-humans and the biophysical world. This paper emerges from embedded arts-based research in the ‘Environmental Virtual Observatory’ a large scale project in which distributed sensors monitor and upload ‘non-human’ environmental processes to a cloud computing infrastructure. In the ‘Environmental Virtual Observatory’ Dairy Cows staring down remote cameras or peaks in river flow bring us face-to face [through the network] with non-humans. If we consider these events not as measuring or writing the other, but instead as co-writing with articulate non-humans, then the question arises of how we might think with and from non human animal-writers in order to “speculate, imagine, feel, build something better”(Haraway 2008, 92). In this paper I tentatively introduce the figure of the ‘Animal-Hacker’ to consider the articulation of nonhuman entities in these computational ecologies. If we address the ‘Animal-Hacker’, not as a passive object of observation, but as co-creating computational environments, how might we consider the non human animal? If we are serious about forms of engagement with non humans, can we engage with the ‘Animal-Hacker’ as a possible invitation to reconsider a possible introduction to other-worlding?

Trace Fossil Fobu-1379 (2015)

Helen Pritchard

This is the scene, a computer travels back in time. A dolphin falls in love with a computer. A computer falls in love with a dolphin. A computer falls in love with a computer. Two Earth dolphins are launched as Cosmodolphins in the cyberspace or dream-machine of the computer and wake up in the future as a feminist geographer, engaging us in a felt sense of causality.

A transgenic fish falls in love with a computer. A computer falls in love with a transgenic fish. A feminist geographer falls in love with the asthmatic luminous woman of Pirano whose breasts emit a blue glow. A transgenic fish from the past goes into suspended animation and winds up either becoming Donna Haraway or taking Donna Haraway’s place at a critical juncture.