About the Digital Culture Unit

The problems of computing are increasingly those of the social and of the modes of meaning, interpretation, cultural expression, and organization that have been core to the humanities in the last two millennia. At the same time, computing has become central to the activity of thought and communication and both computing and the humanities find themselves reconstituted.

The Digital Culture Unit aims to open up the question of humanities-sciences interfaces. Indeed, the shift to computing as a meta-discipline means a change in the whole settlement of relations between existing disciplines, and thus of the nature of the university.

By understanding computational media as core to the contemporary culture we will develop new genealogies of relation between art and science, producing new methods and fields such as software studies and critical technical practice and an emphasis on posthuman perspectives.

The Digital Culture Unit is active in computational aesthetics as they are manifest in contemporary art, architecture, design, music and literature as well as in everyday life. Equally, we aim to track, understand and experiment with the ways in which technological forms of life create new political junctures in social media, networked media and emerging technical forms.

We are interested in speculative work that experiments both with cultural studies and the nature of the digital: pushing or swerving the field in new directions which point at future modes of aesthetics, animality for instance, but also media systems, of thought, automation, of socialities, social computing, politics (the feminization of work and of the matrix, gender and race) and economy.

The Digital Culture Unit combines both research and teaching, offering distinctive PhD and MA programmes, whilst wishing to contest these terms we are interested in both ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ and welcome enquiries from applicants for these programmes throughout the year.

We are currently working with the Goethe Institute London, Arcadia Missa Gallery and the Institute of Contemporary Arts on the Lunch Bytes series of talks of digital art, aesthetics and politics.