Robert Willim will present his work with art probes as well as some work in progress, foremost a project called Extra Human. Art probes has been a way to further explore concepts and to use art as an instrument of evocation in relation to his research as a scholar of digital cultures and emerging technologies.

Extra Human is a performance, a sonic evocation moving between fragmented disarray, atmospheric ambience and words conveying reflections on contemporary digital cultures and media genealogies. It can be seen as a hybrid of electronic music and a kind of academic performance.

Robert Willim uses his own voice and body together with consumer electronics to create feedback loops and sonic amalgamations, evoking “human in the loop”-assemblages. It takes its conceptual point of departure in our contemporary world characterised by digitalisation, evoking how humans are ever more entangled in unfathomable systems of automation and technological distribution. The extra human is not equal with the posthuman, it is the human conjoined with technologies and organisations but also as part of more-than-human ecologies and geographies.

Extra Human is one of several projects related to the four-year research project Connected Homes and Distant Infrastructures. By art probing, by using a set of projects, hybrid procedures and techniques, Robert Willim aims to extend his methodological toolbox when researching the interplay between emerging technologies and complex and ungraspable infrastructures in relation to people’s experiences of domestic technologies and media.

Robert Willim is associate professor of ethnology, senior lecturer in digital cultures and artist, Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund University