Kristin Veel | University of Copenhagen (original) (raw)

Books by Kristin Veel

A chronicle, a memoir, a reflection on the pandemic, and a cultural analysis of the new spatial, ... more A chronicle, a memoir, a reflection on the pandemic, and a cultural analysis of the new spatial, social, and epistemological forms that have arisen with it, this volume weaves together cultural history, aesthetics, and urban and digital studies. It looks at the particular ways in which the possibilities for touch, touching and being touched, both physically and affectively, are reconfigured by the pandemic. How are love, care, and humanity’s complex relationships with technology and nature played out in the interval between abandoned city centres and digitally mediated gatherings? How can we comprehend the reconfiguration of relationships through the human response to the pandemic as an experience that concerns us all but affects each of us in different ways? How do we think through the technological and material dependencies that the pandemic situation establishes? And how does this allow us to imagine the world beyond the pandemic—both utopian and dystopian? The essays in this book explore the new forms of intimacy and distance that are developing in the wake of COVID-19, offering a distinctive, topical analysis in the fields of urban and digital studies.

MIT Press, 2020

A cultural history of gigantism in architecture and digital culture, from the Eiffel Tower to the... more A cultural history of gigantism in architecture and digital culture, from the Eiffel Tower to the World Trade Center.

The gigantic is everywhere, and gigantism is manifest in everything from excessively tall skyscrapers to globe-spanning digital networks. In this book, Henriette Steiner and Kristin Veel map and critique the trajectory of gigantism in architecture and digital culture—the convergence of tall buildings and networked infrastructures—from the Eiffel Tower to One World Trade Center. They show how these two forms of gigantism intersect in the figure of the skyscraper with a transmitting antenna on its roof, a gigantic building that is also a nodal point in a gigantic digital infrastructure.

Steiner and Veel focus on two paradigmatic tower sites: the Eiffel Tower and the Twin Towers of the destroyed World Trade Center (as well as their replacement, the One World Trade Center tower). They consider, among other things, philosophical interpretations of the Eiffel Tower; the design and destruction of the Twin Towers; the architectural debates surrounding the erection of One World Trade Center on the Ground Zero site; and such recent examples of gigantism across architecture and digital culture as Rem Koolhaas's headquarters for China Central TV and the phenomenon of the “tech giant.” Examining the cultural, architectural, and media history of these towers, they analyze the changing conceptions of the gigantism that they represent, not just as physical structures but as sites for the projection of cultural ideas and ideals.

A selection of the papers given at the IMLR's Experimental Narratives conference has been publish... more A selection of the papers given at the IMLR's Experimental Narratives conference has been published as a special issue of the Journal of Romance Studies (16.1, 2016), entitled Reading Practices in Experimental Narratives, edited by Emanuela Patti. You can find the Introduction at the following link http://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/romance-studies/16/1/jrs160101.xml

The concept for this interdisciplinary collection was explored during the MHRA-sponsored conference Experimental Narratives: From the Novel to Digital Storytelling, held on 26 and 27 February 2015 at the Institute of Modern Languages Research (IMLR) and co-organised by Godela Weiss-Sussex, Jordana Blejmar, Sam Merrill and Emanuela Patti. The event explored the theme of ‘narrative experimentalism’ across languages, from the experimental literature of the 1960s to the most recent experiments of digital fiction. Case studies included avant-garde and postmodern experiments with the novel form, graphic novels, electronic hypertext fiction, game literature, participatory narratives, fan fiction and transmedia storytelling.

Adopting a comparative perspective across cultures, Reading Practices in Experimental Narratives gathers together contributions that address experimental fiction in both, and across, printed literature and digital media. The six articles investigate, in particular, innovative reading practices and how these are affected by the medium that conveys them. Topics include the interplay between author and reader in narratives where active user participation is not only afforded but also encouraged, remediation and transmedia practices, and readers’ expectations and desires.

Contributors: Emanuela Patti, Sabine Zubarik, William Docherty Halbert, Erika Fuloep, Kristin Veel, Giulia Iannuzzi.

Publications by Kristin Veel

Theory, Culture and Society, 2024

Today many homes are accessible from afar, with mobile phones functioning as remote controls for ... more Today many homes are accessible from afar, with mobile phones functioning as remote controls for technologies within the home. In this article we propose the 'leaky home' as a conceptual figure to understand how automated homes that leak through connected devices and sensors that collect, transmit, receive and share data are experienced and sensed by bodies within these distributed spaces. The leak brings together postmodern metaphors of fluidity and the 21st century discourse of information leaks, while maintaining infrastructural connotations of substances that shift domain in very tangible ways. By looking at a series of examples from media accounts and research conducted in Denmark, the UK, the USA and Australia, ranging from everyday family practices to digital coercive control, we explore how the care-control complex of the home is impacted by its leaky nature.

Surveillance & Society 20 (4), 2022

This essay provides an example of how practice-based artistic research can contribute to surveill... more This essay provides an example of how practice-based artistic research can contribute to surveillance studies. It does so by reflecting on the development of the installation HOMECTRL for The Danish Museum of Science & Technology. The installation offers speculative fabulations regarding how the Internet of Things (IoT) is rearticulating and transforming the home as a site of control, on a spectrum ranging from the mundane everyday use of robot vacuum cleaners to domestic abuse facilitated by IoT technologies. By sharing excerpts from narrative monologues that probe the question of where control is located, and still images that experiment with representing how technologies perceive their surroundings, the essay demonstrates that practice-based methods can open up understandings of the home as a distributed spatial structure permeated by smart technologies that have new abilities to access, control, and manipulate domestic space.

MAST - The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory, 2022

Understanding the attachment owners can feel to their robot vacuums, which also map and collect d... more Understanding the attachment owners can feel to their robot vacuums, which also map and collect data about their homes, is key to understanding the ambivalences involved in the integration of automated visualities in the home. Drawing on qualitative video interviews and observations of people interacting with their robot vacuums, this article

Big Data & Society, 2018

With slogans such as 'Tell the stories hidden in your data' (www.narrativescience.com) and 'From ... more With slogans such as 'Tell the stories hidden in your data' (www.narrativescience.com) and 'From data to clear, insightful content-Wordsmith automatically generates narratives on a massive scale that sound like a person crafted each one' (www.automatedinsights.com), a series of companies currently market themselves on the ability to turn data into stories through Natural Language Generation (NLG) techniques. The data interpretation and knowledge production process is here automated, while at the same time hailing narrativity as a fundamental human ability of meaning-making. Reading both the marketing rhetoric and the functionality of the automated narrative services through narrative theory allows for a contextualization of the rhetoric flourishing in Big Data discourse. Building upon case material obtained from companies such as Arria NLG, Automated Insights, Narrativa, Narrative Science, and Yseop, this article argues that what might be seen as a 're-turn' of narrative as a form of knowledge production that can make sense of large data sets inscribes itself in-but also rearticulates-an ongoing debate about what narrative entails. Methodological considerations are thus raised on the one hand about the insights to be gained for critical data studies by turning to literary theory, and on the other hand about how automated technologies may inform our understanding of narrative as a faculty of human meaning-making.

Journal of European Studies, 2010

Comparative Critical Studies, 2011

The German Quarterly, 2012

German Life and Letters, 2004

ABSTRACT This essay is concerned with the significance of the references to the internet in Grass... more ABSTRACT This essay is concerned with the significance of the references to the internet in Grass's recent novella Im Krebsgang. It examines recent public statements by Grass, including his Nobel Prize lecture of 1999, in order to expound the issues raised in Im Krebsgang. It ...

diacritics, 2003

The word "cyber" derives from the Greek word kybernan, which means "coxswain"... more The word "cyber" derives from the Greek word kybernan, which means "coxswain" and which is present in the English "cybernetics," meaning "control of information." The word itself thus harbors a notion of a mass of information that needs steering and which is situated in a certain ...

Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, 2018

Co-authored by Nanna Bonde and Kristin Veel. Introduction to a special edition of the Journal of... more Co-authored by Nanna Bonde and Kristin Veel. Introduction to a special edition of the Journal of Aesthetics and Culture.

Edited volumes by Kristin Veel

Architecture and Control addresses the urgent question residing at the intersection of architectu... more Architecture and Control addresses the urgent question residing at the intersection of architectural and cultural theory: how can the interplay between designed structures and practices of control foster an emergence of the unforeseen and the uncontrolled in post-2000 architectures and infrastructures?

Papers by Kristin Veel

Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt (Gilles Deleuze: 'Postscript on the Societies of C... more Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt (Gilles Deleuze: 'Postscript on the Societies of Control') Some of the most radical changes to the globalizing world are being written, not in the language of law and diplomacy, but in these spatial, infrastructural technologies (Keller Easterling: Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space) This book makes a critical intervention into the relationship between architecture and control at the turn of the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries. Its chapters trace how various kinds of architecture offer complex and often contradictory vehicles for establishing control. They also observe how certain kinds of architecture and infrastructure can allow for alternative modes of control to arise as well as forms of resistance. As a book about architecture and control in the present day, this is also inevitably a book about the virtual architectures of digital infrastructures and other technologies. As such, this book, the first in the series Architectural Intelligences, addresses familiar questions that lie at the intersection of architectural and cultural theory: how does the built environment condition the lives we lead? Which possibilities for living and communicating with one another do our surrounding architectures endow upon us? How may this interplay between conditions and possibilities be seen to restrict our potential for individual and collective experience in the present day? And ultimately, in what ways might such interplay through architecture and other kinds of designed structure be seen to (at times in spite of themselves) foster the emergence of the unforeseen, the uncontrolledor the otherwise-controlledin today's diverse and shifting present? The perspectives presented in the coming chapters stem from academic disciplines as diverse as architecture, critical theory, and film studies, and they intersect with concerns rooted in architectural, artistic, and political practice. Together the authors writing here argue that, despite the apparently fixed nature of the built environment, despite what we might term the architectures of control in our apparently ever-controlled present, a dynamic of change is nonetheless identifiable. We see this change in the emerging spatial designs and constructions and indeed in the less tangible but no less powerful infrastructural and digital designs that are so crucial to contemporary design and living. These latter infrastructures, we contend here, are beginning to compose alternative frameworks for responses to control, including articulations of more critical or playful modes of control, in the new millennium. These new articulations are tracked by the writers in this volume, who consider in turn factory design, military occupation, performative probings of privacy, theatre and film productions, and computational structures. As many of the essays featured in this book demonstrate, the dynamics of change in current architectures of public life make their mark on the built fabric of cities as well as on the processes of more private, everyday life that are shaped by the new technologies of digital culture. Importantly, the book demonstrates how these changes are being negotiated in aesthetic form in the most recent works of literature,

Qualitative Inquiry, Aug 5, 2018

This article explores forms of visuality in architecture in which symbolic and functional values ... more This article explores forms of visuality in architecture in which symbolic and functional values interlink by considering two visually striking and deeply symbolic landmarks that tower over their respective cities at the same time as their impact is related to the invisible wireless communication they facilitate. It contrasts cultural-theoretical responses to the Eiffel Tower (1889) with readings of the One World Trade Center (2014). In this way, we contour a theoretical framework to grasp the compounded forms of signification these towers embody and address the latent and invisible signification at work by turning to the work of the French philosophers Roland Barthes (1915-1980) and Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998).

MIT Press, 2020

Contributors: Emanuela Patti, Sabine Zubarik, William Docherty Halbert, Erika Fuloep, Kristin Veel, Giulia Iannuzzi.

Theory, Culture and Society, 2024

Surveillance & Society 20 (4), 2022

MAST - The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory, 2022

Big Data & Society, 2018

Journal of European Studies, 2010

Comparative Critical Studies, 2011

The German Quarterly, 2012

German Life and Letters, 2004

diacritics, 2003

Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, 2018

Qualitative Inquiry, Aug 5, 2018

surveillance and society, Nov 30, 2011

Transparent glass facades dominate much contemporary high-to mid-rise urban residential architect... more Transparent glass facades dominate much contemporary high-to mid-rise urban residential architecture. This article takes a closer look at life behind glass facades in contemporary surveillance culture. The aim is to illuminate how the material culture of contemporary architecture together with surveillance practices and technologies contribute to a remodelling our notions of the visible and the invisible. Whereas the architecture is determined by conditions and possibilities of what it means to be living behind glass facades, the novel Die 120 Tage von Berlin by the German author Lukas Hammerstein explores the complexities that this mode of living cause on a socio-psychological level. Through this dual track analytical strategy a complex set of connotations governing our understanding of visibility and invisibility will be uncovered.

Springer eBooks, Jul 3, 2013

The notion of the Smart City describes the city as a system of information and flow, one that, al... more The notion of the Smart City describes the city as a system of information and flow, one that, although complex and wayward, can be controlled, manipulated and optimised to increase efficiency in sectors such as transportation infrastructures, health care, etc. This way of thinking takes for granted that there exists something like a common goal of optimisation which would benefit the larger whole of the city and which would make purposeness and meaning come together in the built environment. It thus propagates a rhetoric that echoes modernist visions from the early twentieth century of betterment of culture through technology. What remains to be understood in a cultural-theoretical perspective, however, is what consequences this way of thinking has on the urban cultural level.

Cultural History and Literary Imagination, 2015

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, ... more The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.

Surveillance & Society

The Moral Uncanny in Black Mirror, 2020