Technologies in Question takeover

CSM's Technologies in Question Community of Practice co-lead Betti Marenko, with guest speaker Matthew Fuller

This talk reflects on plasticity beyond material substance, approaching it as a form of techno-adaptability across technological, cultural, and embodied systems. Drawing on critical and creative practices, it considers how artists work with technologies such as databases, software, and knowledge infrastructures, and how these shape embodied experience. Framed by the Technologies in Question (TiQ) Community of Practice, the session opens up shared questions around embodiment, technologies, and power. It also marks the launch of the 2026 Technologies in Question seminar series, Anatomies Unbound: Bodies De-Coded, setting the tone for the conversations to come.

Matthew Fuller - Structured Queries, Artists use of Databases

Databases were a hot topic in about 1971. Nowadays they sit in the background as the backbone of ‘AI’ and internet platforms. Databases are often used as mechanisms of order and rationalisation, epitomising the splitting of measurement from feeling. But, at certain points, can quantity tip over into quality? Moreover, can their ordered and ordering qualities, and their foundational role in numerous social forms, provide a grounds for their experimental reworking?

This lecture will look at artists who see databases as a context in which to intervene and invent, as a site of sociability, and a space of counter-investigation. Work to be discussed includes: Kristoffer Gansing and Linda Hilfling Rittasdatter; Tomas Percival; Yoha; Pad.ma; Forensic Architecture; Rybn.org.

The event will be held onsite at Central Saint Martins for UAL students & staff only.

External attendees can watch the event broadcast live on YouTube.

A link will be sent prior to the event start date.

Please select the relevant ticket at the bottom of this page.

About the guest speaker:

Matthew Fuller is Professor of Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. His books include How to Sleep: The Art, Biology and Culture of Unconsciousness (Bloomsbury 2018), How to Be a Geek: Essays on the Culture of Software (Polity 2017), with Olga Goriunova, Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility (Minnesota 2019) and with Eyal Weizman, Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth (Verso 2021). He is a member of the editorial collective of ‘Computational Culture, a journal of software studies’ http://www.computationalculture.net/

About Technologies in Question:

Betti Marenko is Reader in Design and Techno-Digital Futures at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, where she directs the Hybrid Futures Lab, a platform for design research at the intersection of philosophy, technology, and future-making, and leads the research group Technologies in Question. Her work explores uncertainty as a critical resource for imagining and designing new modes of being alive. She is the author of The Power of Maybes: Machines, Uncertainty and Design Futures (Bloomsbury, 2025), co-editor of Deleuze and Design (2015) and Designing Smart Objects in Everyday Life (2021). Her new research project, Uncommon Ground, focuses on translation and transdisciplinarity as technologies for planetary diplomacy.

Technologies in Question (TiQ) is a Community of Practice of creative practitioners, makers, theorists, and researchers — thinkerers — who interrogate technologies as active forces shaping how bodies move, materials behave, practices form, and futures are imagined, where creativity is both constrained and expanded.

Operating as a transdisciplinary laboratory for critical and creative practice, TiQ creates spaces to work imaginatively with technologies. Through initiatives such as New Utopias for Planetary Computation — a three-day research hackathon bringing together CSM staff, students, and technical teams (September 2025) — TiQ asks what kinds of technologies can be envisioned, designed, and practiced for worlds still to come.