Miglė Bareikytė - Maintenance of the media technology
Sensing Urban Matter: Fantasies of Seamless Interoperability
Image: Miglė Bareikytė
This is the 2nd event in the series of four weekly online talks Fantasies of Seamless Interoperability.
The talks are organized by the Future Architecture fellows – Hanna Husberg and Agata Marzecova (the art-science collaborative Towards Atmospheric Care), and explore how collective environmental and social imaginaries, hopes, and fantasies are shaped through invisible, yet material and very influential, infrastructure and novel ecosystems emerging at the nexus of political economy, communication technologies and the atmospheric medium in its role as a carrier of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Situating the Internet through the three angles of labor, geopolitics and critique Miglé Bareikytė's talk 'Materiality and maintenance of the media' will present her fieldwork research in Lithuania's telecom industry. In her fieldwork, Bareikytė carried out interviews, observed telecom workers in the company Telia Lietuva as well as carried out archival research within Lithuania's telecom industry. This research aimed to situate and ground what is often perceived as an abstract, immaterial digital media technology - the Internet - in a place that is often neglected in Western-oriented discourses of digitalisation not for the sake of nationalist celebration, but to explicate and complicate narratives around labor, geopolitical imaginaries and critique in a post-socialist realm by taking fieldwork participants utterances and practices seriously. The fieldwork developed between 2017-2018 resulted in her PhD thesis and the upcoming book ‘The Post-Socialist Internet: How Labor, Geopolitics and Critique Produce the Internet in Lithuania’ with transcript Verlag.
The talk will take place online on September 22, 2021, at 19:00 EET (GMT +3).
Event LINK
Registration is not compulsory, but if you like to hear from us regarding this talks series, please register here: REGISTRATION
The series Fantasies of Seamless Interoperability is part of Architektūros fondas' programme Sensing Urban Matter, which takes place within the Future Architecture platform and European Architecture programme 2021, is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and a strategic partner Lithuanian Council for Culture. Media partner – Lithuanian national television and radio.
Miglė Bareikytė is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Siegen, interdisciplinary research project “Organizing Human-Nonhuman Cooperation”. She is interested in situated research of the development and usage of digital technologies as well as their anticipatory claims. Her current research focuses on the topics of algorithmic accountability, geopolitics of AI, and (digital) media ethnography. Her broader research interests comprise infrastructural politics, representation, and distribution of power in Europe. In October 2020, she defended her PhD thesis at the Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Research Training Group “Cultures of Critique” on the topic of situated Internet infrastructure research in post-socialist Lithuania that will be published in January 2022 at Transcript Verlag in English language. Miglė Bareikytė holds degrees in Media studies, Communication Studies, and Political Science from Free University of Berlin, Vilnius University and Vytautas Magnus University.