Our research

Infrastructures of communication increasingly influence both lived experience and the sustainability of industrialised societies. 

The challenges faced by society — of delivering social justice and preventing ecological collapse in an increasingly monopolised world — need interdisciplinary collaboration. Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics (CIIP) brings together artists, theorists, curators, and activists whose work adopts a critical perspective on the politics of contemporary media. Our approach combines practice-based and scholarly methods. This enables alternatives to be articulated and provocations to be performed. 

We collaborate with arts organisations, other research groups, and academics from other fields. This allows our research to reach diverse audiences within and beyond academia through publications, exhibitions, talks, and performances. 

2024-2025 Research Theme

Our research theme for 2024-25 is 'University as Infrastructure'

In this project, we will collaboratively diagram the data and software systems on which all Universities have become dependent. Both students and staff spend increasing time inputting, updating, checking, and actioning information stored in outsourced databases. These actions produce value for external software providersMany of these are ultimately owned by private equity firms. 

This diagramming exercise is a means to visualise Higher Education’s integration into platform logistics and economies of data profiteering. We will take our lead from the practices of Mark Lombardi, Suzanne Treister and Vladan Joler (among others),

The project is a collaboration with members of the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI, London South Bank University) and the Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (DARC, Aarhus University).