4S MAKING AND DOING 2026

We invite you to experience STS work outside the confines of traditional journal articles and panel discussions, through the 65 projects included in this year's Making & Doing Program. From table-top games to tea ceremonies, from rapping decolonial dreams to divinations of oceanic futures, these projects take seriously that knowledge is dynamic, embodied, collaborative, messy and sometimes very fun.

The projects in this year's Making & Doing Program are divided between the Main Exhibition (45 projects split between Thursday, from 12:20 - 3:20, and Friday from 10:20 - 3:20), nine films screened over three sessions (Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 3:40 - 5:20), and ten full-length workshops, scheduled throughout the conference.

WORKSHOPS

Thursday, Oct 8, 09:00 AM – 09:50 AM (Davenport) W1. Mapping the digital body-territory: demystifying the immateriality of the digital space and its violence

Cecilia Ananías-Soto

The digital space is traversed by power relations, making it a contested arena (Roca Petitjean, 2024). Power operates through consent, coercion, censorship, or violence (Foucault, 1988), as well as through permissiveness and total transparency (Han, 2014). These dynamics intersect with other power devices, such as gender (Amigot Leache & Pujal i Llombart, 2009; Wajcman, 2010).

In Chile, 36% of the population has suffered digital violence (Subsecretaría del Interior, 2023) and among women, the figure rises to 73.8% (Ananías et al., 2023). In response, the concept of technology-facilitated gender-based violence has been developed (UN Regional Information Center, 2023; Luchadoras México; TEDIC).

This violence leaves material marks on bodies. Thus, it is urgent to rethink frameworks that make these dynamics visible and trace their embodied consequences. Researchers such as Kucmierczyk (2021) and Cavalcanti (2024) propose the body-territory concept—rooted in Latin American feminist, indigenous, and environmental struggles—to move beyond the perception of digital space as neutral code. The body-territory perspective understands bodies as territories in themselves, intertwined with land, community, and collective resistance.

This proposal asks: What power dynamics traverse the body-territory of women in the digital space? And how does the body-territory reconfigure itself in digital space to respond to its violence?

To address these questions, I propose a practical workshop on mapping the digital body-territory. Through drawing one's own body, its physical territory of origin, and its expansion into digital space, the immateriality of the digital is questioned, and the marks of its violence and resistance are made visible.

Thursday, Oct 8, 10:20 AM – 11:10 AM (Davenport) W2. Making humans: Predicting behavior from DNA, a hands-on experience

Heather Dewey-Hagborg; Mareile Kaufmann

Predicting a propensity to aggression or violent crime from one’s genetics might seem like the stuff of science fiction, but the MAO-A gene has been linked to such behaviors in multiple publications since 1993 and has been refuted by just as many. Despite its controversial status, the gene has already entered at least 8 court cases since 2006. In tandem, behavioral genetics has become institutionalized with the aim to “crack the genetic code” for any type of human behavior. The sequencing of the entire human genome has advanced this field from the study of particular genes to so-called genome-wide association studies that associate millions of genetic markers with each other and behavioral characteristics. And yet, such studies summarize this complexity in single-number scores that allow for diagnosis and serve as genetic reasoning for intervention.

What does (and doesn't) your DNA reveal? How are emerging genetic technologies reinforcing age old stereotypes and what can we do to subvert them?

This workshop combines research insights with artistic performance and invites participants to grapple with these new practices of inscribing identity. Participants will learn about and experience the political and aesthetic dimension of DNA profiling: they will perform DNA profiling themselves, creating speculative identities from sequenced DNA. Subsequently, Heather Dewey-Hagborg will present excerpts of her work-in-progress performance “Humanity: Box unchecked” that shares the experience of Texas death row inmate Amos Wells and the “violence gene” which forms part of the backstory of his sentencing. In a debrief session we will discuss societal implications.

Led by artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg with sociologist Mareile Kaufmann

Thursday, Oct 8, 11:20 AM – 12:10 PM (Davenport) W3. Ontological politics of AI: Shaping different AI realities through entangled storytelling

Dani Dilkes

AI technologies and practices are neither neutral nor siloed entities. They emerge from within complex socimaterial networks and are shaped by these networks. Dominant AI systems are shaped by neoliberal, capitalist, logics; resulting in extractive development and data practices and systems that create harm to vulnerable populations.

However, imagine, for example, what an AI system developed by a mutualist rather than a capitalist society might look like.

How would different conceptualizations of time (speed), value, knowledge, care, etc. shape different technologies?

What different norms and AI practice would emerge in a high-paced technology conglomerate compared to a small queer community co-op? This session will offer space for participants to engage in speculative re-imagining of AI realities by challenging the taken-for-granted imaginaries that are shaping current AI narratives and AI futures. The session will begin by introducing the way that certain values, beliefs, norms, and ideals are shaping the sociotechnical imaginaries of AI. Then, participants will explore different possibilities shaped by different sociomaterial configurations (see attached examples). Finally, participants will be invited to create their own speculative AI technologies / realities in response to provided prompts that provoke different ontological, axiological, and epistemological perspectives. The underlying approach builds on a methodology of material semiotic storytelling called Entangled Storytelling developed by the presenter as part of her doctoral research. This approach acknowledges how realities emerge through complex entanglements of sociomaterial actors and how changing one (f)actor in the entanglement can change the reality being performed.

Thursday, Oct 8, 12:20 PM – 01:10 PM (Davenport) W4. Infrastructural ideologies of alternative technological trajectories: Community Mesh Networking

Christy Westhovens; Maxigas

In this workshop, we will field test a decentralized off grid communications system using the Reticulum communication protocol stack. We choose to focus on Reticulum because it is designed for heterogeneous networks built from various cheap devices, to be deployed in a bottom up way by small communities. More information is found here:

https://reticulum.community/

The experiment will provide food for thought for tactical and theoretical discussions of the so-called infrastructural ideologies (Maxigas and ten Oever, “Geopolitics in the infrastructural ideology of 5G”, 2023), answering questions such as “How do digital communication infrastructures and network protocols produce subject positions and interpellate users?”; “How do infrastructural ideologies turn into digital materialities?”; and “How do infrastructures organise space and time to redistribute power in particular ways?”.

The latter question addresses the conference theme of TechnoPower, which we extend towards Technoscientific Futures by collaboratively mapping the conditions of possibilities for an alternative technological trajectory where planetary computation is performed by heterogeneous community mesh networks rather than the current global and singular Internet. The workshop enacts rather than describes the contributions of mesh networks to infrastructural futures that centre people and planet over capital and control, so we bring and deploy networking hardware, install and repair networking software, and reproduce a collective material infrastructure in the course of the workshop.

Facilitated by the critical infrastructure lab and friends, building on the experience of monthly mesh moshes since 2025 January.

This workshop requires participants to register in advance: https://files.criticalinfralab.net/apps/forms/s/3enwi9FbSWDFtA95S7FbkMnb

Thursday, Oct 8, 01:30 PM – 02:20 PM (Davenport) W5. Other Technological Worlds Are Possible – Now in Comics: Collective Live Drawing of Techno-Futures

Cecilia Muñoz Cancela; Rafael Grohmann

This workshop invites participants to explore how comic books can serve as political technologies for imagining decolonial and intersectional techno-futures. We present the first two volumes of the series Other Technological Worlds Are Possible, a Latin American initiative that translates concrete experiences of grassroots technology collectives into graphic narratives. Volume one, co-produced with the Technology Nucleus of Brazil's MTST (Homeless Workers' Movement), follows Carolina, a resident of a occupied territory in Santo André, and shows how technology can be built critically and collectively from the peripheries. Volume two highlights the work of Argentina's Federation of Technology Cooperatives (FACTTIC), showcasing self-managed technology experiences across the region.

The workshop combines dialogue and live drawing. A facilitator leads a conversation on technological justice, community innovation, digital sovereignty, and intersectionality. Meanwhile, invited illustrators draw live on a large collective panel, visually registering the debate. Participants are invited to intervene with their own marks, co-creating a shared artwork that dialogues with the comics and the questions raised.

This live artistic intervention reinforces the Latin American, peripheral, and transfeminist ethos of the project. Just as MTST and FACTTIC produce technology from their territories, live drawing emerges from embodied encounter, exchange, and shared experimentation. We treat technology as an open field of struggle, creation, and reinvention. The session is designed for activists, artists, educators, researchers, and anyone interested in the intersections of art, technology, and social transformation.

Thursday, Oct 8, 02:30 PM – 03:20 PM (Davenport) W6. Rap your rad dreams of anti-colonial technoscience

Freyja Wang

Are you working towards systemic change for just technoscientific futures but feeling the brunt of living amid unjust systems? Do you want a space to go big with your imagination, write down things you want to line up for new systems to grow, and ask the universe out loud to a beat while being hyped by everyone around you? This workshop experiments with rap as a medium for facilitating radical imagination, for people working towards anti-colonial technoscientific futures.

My background is in physics related anti-colonial activism, in connection with disability justice, Black feminist, Indigenous resurgence organizing, and artistic methods. Physics has long had intimate connections with colonialism, war, capitalism, and patriarchy. Physics communities also have histories of activism against these hegemonies. I recently did a project imagining anti-colonial physics with 3 other physics researchers and organizers, using materials in and outside of our workplaces to make animations, collages, poetry, recipes, puppets, and stagings. We found that our ability to picture anti-colonial physics is related to our ability to picture resisting how systemic violence shows up in our specific situations. We found that the latter can often feel difficult amid complex relational work and capitalistic narratives of scarcity and despair. To navigate this difficulty, I draw on radical imagination as a tool, and try various artistic methods for facilitating spaces to practice radical imagination. For this workshop, I offer my experience with rap for articulating desire, for enacting communal joy and a system of critique different from academia, and for activism.

Thursday, Oct 8, 03:40 PM – 04:30 PM (Davenport) W7. Doing Nothing and Doing Something with Law: Legal Inaction and Legal Mobilization under Techno Legal Power

Ida Nafstad; Michael Molavi

Access to justice research shows that people living in precarious conditions rarely mobilize formal law to address legal problems – they often “do nothing.” Meanwhile, other actors under legal and administrative pressure actively engage with law, invoking constitutional rights and procedural legality even as they recognize law as deeply entangled with surveillance, extraction, and control. This workshop holds these forms of legal engagement in productive tension, enacting legal inaction and legal mobilization as situated responses to contemporary techno-legal power rather than failures or ideals.

The workshop draws on two research projects. The LegNav project examines how residents in marginalized areas navigate legal problems outside formal legal channels, often in response to digitalized welfare systems, case-handling technologies, and opaque bureaucratic processes. The ProTest project explores how protest actors in Sweden – within environmental justice movements and student mobilizations for Palestine – navigate legality under conditions of techno-legal repression, including spatial technologies, surveillance, criminalization, and administrative sanctioning. Across these sites, law emerges as an infrastructure of techno-power that produces governability through visibility, documentation, and traceability, while also enabling tactical appropriations and refusals.

During the workshop, participants rotate through stations enacting practices of legal navigation – avoidance, deferral, silence, active legal invocation, procedural contestation, and opacity – using narrative prompts and material artefacts from fieldwork in Sweden. Rather than representing empirical findings, the workshop makes these practices available as legal consciousness and epistemic negotiation. By foregrounding silence, refusal, and selective legal mobilization, the workshop challenges imaginaries of access, agency, and civic participation.

Thursday, Oct 8, 03:40 PM – 04:30 PM (Mezzanine: York) W8. Just do evil: Catastrophizing as a tactic for resilience

Elizaveta (Lee) Kravchenko; Eunju Pak

This Making and Doing workshop offers an embodied design exercise to playfully unearth tactics of resistance and persistence in the face of uncertainty. Much of design literature ends with calls for action and the highlighting of challenges, without offering avenues for change. Given the pervasiveness of systemic injustice underpinning many of the critiques surfaced by STS, ongoing geopolitical tensions, and the rise of techno-oligarchies, a feeling of powerlessness can become difficult to combat, especially in the Global North (Arora, 2024). Previous work suggests that leveraging “unconventional” brainstorming and ideating futuring techniques can surface latent forms of knowledge, including those stored in the body (Forlano and Halpern, 2023). This workshop builds on bodystorming techniques to encourage playful participation, facilitating a highly engaged brainstorming session. In lieu of rejecting and suppressing fears about the future, we invite participants to catastrophize in a series of scaffolded futuring exercises that “make and break” the world. Participants are asked to engage in an iterative cycle of imagining “worst case scenarios” that attendees are asked to speculate responses to, together. By engaging in creative and gamified ideating exercises, participants are encouraged to approach seemingly hopeless scenarios with designerly resilience. Highlighting systems thinking and encouraging participants to speculate together, this session aims to demonstrate critical yet hopeful approaches to an increasingly complex world.

Thursday, Oct 8, 04:40 PM – 05:30 PM (Davenport) W9. Resisting Generative AI in Higher Education

Martha Kenney; Martha Lincoln; Britt Paris; Teresa Naval; Angelica Martinez Ochoa

In recent years, universities worldwide have entered into contracts with generative AI firms to provide general-purpose chatbots on their campuses. These deals have largely been made without faculty, staff, and student consultation, yet they have considerable impact on the conditions of labor, the quality of teaching and learning, equity and discrimination, and the future direction of higher education. In the first half of this workshop, participants will collectively generate a list of negative impacts and situated concerns about general-purpose chatbots. In the second half of the workshop, participants will break into groups to draft documents designed to concretely intervene in the debate over generative AI in higher education. Document genres include: op-eds, departmental policies, academic senate resolutions, public records requests, and syllabus statements. Attention will be paid to how participants are situated within the university (e.g. students, teaching assistants, contingent faculty, junior faculty, senior faculty) and what tactics and genres of writing are best suited for creating change. Each group will be provided with examples and templates for their chosen genre. At the end of the workshop, participants will share contact information and identify next steps. We believe that because STS scholars have both social and scientific literacy, we are well-positioned to challenge Silicon Valley’s marketing narratives and advocate for sustainable, human-centered futures for higher education.

Friday, Oct 9, 03:40 PM – 04:30 PM (Grand East) W10. There's no 'we' in ‘power’ (oh, wait there is): an improv workshop on the theme of Technopower

hana holubec

Science communication research reveals benefits of humour in communicating and mobilizing knowledge on urgent issues like climate change (Riley & Hall, 2025), while STS scholars like Stengers (2000) and Bankes (2020) emphasize how humour challenges technoscientific power and social practices. The proposed workshop builds on this theoretical body of work, offering practical explorations of what humour and play can generate in knowledge spaces through improvisation comedy (Improv). Improv is a form of unscripted theatre performed in variations of scenes, dialogues, or activities. Workshop activities build on conference themes of TechnoPower, designed with goals of playfully challenging assumptions baked into technoscientific infrastructures.

This 50 minute in-person workshop is structured as follows:

1) brief warmup priming participants for light movement and play, 2) series of short group games building trust and introducing key Improv tenets (i.e. ‘Yes, and’ which encourages scene-partner agreement) 3) focused short-form activities (i.e. 'Royal Status Game' where characters assume varying high/low status cards and interact in scenes to explore how power dynamics shape interactions – adapted to conference themes by placing individuals in varying environments like ‘Open AI’s cafeteria on Pasta Thursday’ or ‘Elon Musk’s mom’s house’). 4) cool down sharing reflections and ideas for future applications The workshop goal is to encourage new connections around ideas of power in technoscience, highlighting how active listening, collaboration, and play offer generative tools for reconfiguring knowledge. Improv’s application into STS networks further offers novel ways of integrating technoscientific critique into public, policy, and community spaces in accessible and creative ways.

This workshop can accommodate a maximum of 25 participants and requires participants to register in advance: https://forms.gle/qBK1HRRx3gdoFxvK6

MAIN HALL EXHIBITION

These installations can be found in the Main Making & Doing Exhibition Hall (Grand East). Each one is scheduled either on Thursday, Oct 8th or on Friday, Oct 9th. Please use posted room maps and paper programs to navigate the exhibition hall.

Thursday, Oct 8 12:20 PM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M3. We paint the city – the abstract art of a day's labour

Deepak Prince

In December 2025, gig-workers in India launched a flash strike, demanding better work conditions. Many liberally-minded upper-middle-class consumers expressed their support for this strike. Deepinder Goyal, CEO of Zomato (food/grocery delivery) dismissed the strike as the act of a few ‘miscreants’. Addressing the strike’s supporters, he wrote– “Suddenly, the poor aren’t hidden away. They are at your doorstep”. This installation is a response to Mr. Goyal’s statement, and is inspired by something a taxi driver told me once, “Driving is an art, but the world doesn’t see it today”.

The delivery app typically shows me a map indicating the driver’s distance to the restaurant and to my home, as time ticks away. I refresh the screen impatiently, the map, a tool that alienates the gig-workers’ labour. Our relationship ends after the delivery is done and ‘ratings’, given.

What if we imagine the gig-worker riding a vehicle as the tip of a paint brush, flitting across the map as canvas? If so, a day’s labour, driving through the city fulfilling order after order, is a work of art where labouring bodies paint the city.

Through a mobile-app that traces their movement through their working day, this installation makes the worker’s labour visible to themselves, and to the public in a fresh way – a day’s labour as abstract painting, sketched on a map. The installation requires labour on the part of the spectator for the work to become visible. The installation is accompanied by narratives recorded from gig-workers whose ‘paintings’ are on display.

Thursday, Oct 8 12:20 PM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M4. [Circum]Scribed

Xiaodi Tang

[Circum]Scribed is a live performance-installation that stages pen plotters as “mechanical buffers” for increasingly proscribed speech in contexts of surveillance and censorship. The work explores how meaning can emerge through distributed authorship between human and machine, producing forms of expression that resist clear attribution. Situated amid recent crackdowns on political speech, the work treats plotting not as neutral inscription but as a site where legal, technical, and aesthetic constraints co-produce what can be said and by whom.

The installation centers on a pen plotter inscribing multi-layered drawings on sheets of semi-opaque vellum. Human participants contribute handwritten “safe phrases” that perform compliance under surveillance, strategically composed so that their constituent words can later be reassembled. These phrases are then algorithmically transformed: individual words are recombined, highlighted, or redacted to produce new configurations of meaning through which dissent can surface. Distributed across layered surfaces, these mechanisms form a cumulative record of transformations over time with different originators.

As a performance-installation, [Circum]Scribed invites participants to witness and engage with the transformation of language as it moves through human and machine actors. Visitors encounter the rhythmic choreography and sonic signatures of the plotter as it writes, erases, and layers language, making the transformation of speech perceptible as a material and temporal process. Through this configuration, we may begin to consider how technical systems mediate risk in environments of constrained expression, and what forms of speech become possible when authorship is distributed across assemblages of tools, algorithms, and bodies.

Thursday, Oct 8 12:20 PM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M5. Smart City Zine Lab: Reclaiming Toronto’s Futures from the Agentic Eye

freyja van den boom

In 2026, Toronto feels the tensions of the "Smart City." Sharing our AgenticAI/Mcluhan research and anticipatory AI futures practice this Making & Doing session is about speculative zine-making to help provoke critical dialogue on urban TechnoPower, . Rather than utilizing AI as a utility, we engage with an agentic AI and other example artefacts and provotypes designed to challenge our own thinking and the biases inherent in AI policy and urban futures visions.

While urban infrastructure (echoing the Sidewalk 2026 legacy) is increasingly optimized for autonomous sensors and machine-readability, our lab centers on "Human-Readable" futures. Drawing on McLuhan’s media ecology, participants are invited to use analog collage and speculative design to map a city designed for collective wellbeing rather than biometric optimization.

We use the agentic AI’s non-linear "probes" as a way for participants to deconstruct the machine-optimized city (LiDAR, QR codes, autonomous routing). This session enacts a Policy Lab from below, where the tactile, messy reality of the zine serves as a site of resistance against the assetization of urban space. By engaging with agentic provocations, we ask: Who is the city for if we are only visible as data points? The result is a participatory archive/living library of "Co-Desired Futures," shifting the focus from elite control toward radical transparency and social justice.

Thursday, Oct 8 12:20 PM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M6. Towards Situated STS Mentorships

Natalia Orrego

Since 2023, the Mentorship Programme of the CTS-Chile Network has consolidated locally as a community initiative grounded in accompaniment, interdisciplinarity, and care practices, in a flexible format that enables remote participation by people from all over the country and the region. In this context, we propose to share this experience through dialogue and discussion, allowing Making & Doing visitors to reflect collectively on what it means to mentor and be mentored in the STS field.

The intervention is organised as a participatory stand composed of narrative introductions, during which we will give brief presentations of the programme, emphasising its key elements: trajectory, objectives, methodologies, generations, transformations, and the actors involved. Furthermore, we will include reflection questions for visitors, such as: what characterises a mentorship in STS? and what makes a mentorship meaningful? The answers will be written on cards or sticky notes and placed on a common panel.

This will allow the creation of a collaborative visual piece in a mural format to outline "The Principles for a Situated STS Mentorship". The stand will feature facilitators from the CTS-Chile Network, who will share accumulated know-how on mentoring and managing the Programme, guiding attendees and networks interested in replicating, communicating, or adapting the experience. Altogether, the space will function as a knowledge infrastructure, inviting reflection and the co-construction of mentorship practices situated in each local reality under the global vision of STS.

Thursday, Oct 8 12:20 PM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M7. Properties and Methods

Kavi Duvvoori

I read a codework poem exploring the relationship between web programming "languages" and the English language, literary constraint, and the archival problems of obsolescence or extended support. It is written using the names of properties (values) and methods (functions) within the ECMAScript (JavaScript) standard, letting the reader erase or reveal specific modules of ECMAscript / words in the poem. These English words stand for computational operations that can be reduced to arithmetic but which, as names, as words, have meaning and referentiality that makes code comprehensible, learnable, and complicit in the English language that people have spoken and lived in and enforced and made with each other. As ECMAScript tandard changes, the poem shifts and degrades (also displaying differently on different browsers and operating systems). In the text of the poem, things beyond just computation may be at stake (the first stanza reads "wake with description sort species / now all group by flags all reduce race / to fixed source of source or store of keys / every head has some small hidden images / and body symmetric difference / hidden scripts dispose some name"). The performance moves between different erasures and browser-editions of the computational poem in a 5–10-minute arc of coherence and decohernce, mixing iterations of the text in the windows of different browsers with different ECMAscript modules checked on or off. The poem is published in the open-source size-constrained computational writing journal Taper Magazine, and has been performed at the If/Then Open Mic.

Thursday, Oct 8 12:20 PM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M8. Building biological conservation strategies for transnational migratory birds: Learning through serious games

Rider W. Foley

Each year, the Bar-Tailed Godwit (Limosa lapponica) flies from Alaska to New Zealand on a non-stop voyage of 7,000 miles or 11,000 kilometers and then turns around and flies back a few months later. The Hudsonian Godwit (Limosa haemastica) leaves Alaska and flies to Argentina with a stopover location on the eastern shore of Virginia. These birds transcend traditional national boundaries, and their migration paths extend far beyond typical regional partnerships that support biological conservation. These birds offer a unique opportunity for disparate communities to partner on conservation efforts and strengthen efforts at collective global governance. This Making and Doing exhibit will share a serious game that explores diverse biological conservation strategies for transnational migratory birds. Workshops with partners in key locations along the Godwit’s migratory pathway supported the game design with experiential knowledge and scientific data. The 4S Annual Meeting offers another opportunity to engage with scholars who think critically about public engagement, citizen science, and governance. I would welcome the opportunity to participate in the Making & Doing session and reflect upon the current game design.

Thursday, Oct 8 12:20 PM – 3:20 PM (Grand East)

M9. "ཇ་འ$ང་ཤོག།" Come Drink Tea: Knowledge Co-Production through a

Community-First Research Method

Kunsang Choden

One of the challenges a researcher faces before beginning fieldwork is deciding which method best aligns with their research goals and the communities they hope to work with. This decision-making process is not simply technical or procedural, it is relational and ethical. Yet researchers frequently default to familiar methods such as focus groups, interviews, or workshops because these are well established within academic training and publication norms. These standardized approaches reflect broader technocratic logics of knowledge production, privileging efficiency, replicability, and procedural control over relational depth. In many remote or subsistence-based communities, structured group discussions scheduled at fixed times can feel foreign and burdensome, and when methods misalign with participants' lived realities, the resulting knowledge lacks depth, not because participants have little to contribute, but because the methods fail to meet them where they are.

This session enacts "ཇ་འ$ང་ཤོག།" (Tibetan word for ‘Come Drink Tea’), a

conversational and relational research method I developed and applied in the high-mountain, ethnically Tibetan communities of Nepal's Nubri Valley. Rooted in tendrel (interdependence), tea conversation is informal yet purposeful. Rather than presenting findings, this session is the method. During the workshop, attendees are welcomed to a table set with tea, flowers and snacks, where conversation unfolds without a structured agenda, mirroring how knowledge circulates in Nubri homes. Through this embodied experience, participants encounter how care-centered hospitality surfaces unexpected insight and reconfigures researcher-participant dynamics. Each participant leaves with a reflection prompt inviting them to explore a community-first approach to their own research design.

Thursday, Oct 8 12:20 PM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M10. Grounding the “Cloud”: Making Cartographies of Data Center Impacts

Bya Beatrys; Laura Cortes-Rico; Christopher Csikszentmihalyi

The expanding use of digital technologies across nearly every sphere of society—from industry to government—has fueled technology companies' voracious demand for land, water, and labor. Many communities around the world have been denouncing the growing encroachment of technology companies seeking to build data centers on their lands, driven by the exponential expansion of AI and the increasing need for infrastructure to process and store its data. Yet their locations, physical footprints, socioeconomic impacts, and institutional connections remain poorly understood and intentionally obscured. As data centers proliferate worldwide, it is easy to fall into the trap of homogenizing their impacts: they consume vast amounts of water, overload the electric grid, generate heat, degrade air quality, and produce noise. We argue, however, that these impacts are not global and uniform, but planetary: they operate across large scales while remaining deeply situated. Local ecologies, cultural contexts, and forms of collective awareness shape situated notions of harm, noise, or contamination. Regulatory frameworks and their enforcement vary widely, as do community responses, from acceptance to organized resistance. This variability is the starting point of this workshop. We approach it as an invitation to imagine and prototype tools that foster awareness, remain grounded in local conditions, preserve accounts of embodied and emplaced experience, and simultaneously render visible connections to broader, translocal dynamics. Working in groups and drawing on diverse sources, such as news reports and community-led maps, participants will create hands-on, place-based cartographies that move beyond conventional mapping practices to represent data centers’ multidimensional impacts.

Thursday, Oct 8 12:20 PM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M11. Reframing biocontainment for STEM & policy practitioners in synthetic biology

Emma Frow; Dalton George

This Making & Doing session invites participants to explore and help us refine an approach to sociotechnical system mapping and visualization we developed as part of an interdisciplinary, NSF-funded project in synthetic biology. The project was broadly focused on tool development for controlling and containing microorganisms. Our STS contribution aimed to explore and challenge technologically centered understandings of the control and (bio)containment of genetically engineered organisms (a very visible phenomenon across synthetic biology conference talks and papers).

To do this, our research team researched and wrote 11 short case studies of genetically engineered organisms designed for deliberate release, structuring the case studies in a way that put “technological” understandings of containment in conversation with a more “sociotechnical” framing, in both narrative and visual forms. We have had opportunities to share these case studies widely within the synthetic biology research & startup community over the past 18 months. Through our empirically oriented, comparative approach we aim to destabilize the assumption that technological strategies for biocontainment are either necessary or sufficient for “successful” product development. We have also introduced a more STS-inflected understanding of containment – not by explicitly sharing STS theory, but by showing how STS can help to reframe the conversation in generative ways.

In this session we invite participants to develop sociotechnical visualizations of their own projects. We also hope to spark conversation and capacity-building around approaches to producing STS knowledge in forms that resonate with STEM and policy communities. Image credit: Callie Rodgers Chappell

Thursday, Oct 8 12:20 PM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M12. The Thamus Observatory: Making Visible How Large Language Models Mediate Knowledge Over Time

Patrick McCurdy; University of Ottawa; Chris Russill; Carleton University

In Plato's Phaedrus, King Thamus warns that writing will give people the appearance of wisdom without its substance. Large language models produce the appearance of wisdom at an unprecedented scale while simultaneously collapsing contested knowledge into singular, authoritative-sounding outputs. As the public's information-seeking practices shift to GenAI, a growing Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) industry promises corporations the ability to shape what LLMs say about them. Yet these systems remain a black box: no independent infrastructure exists to track how their outputs drift over time, or whether such interventions are working. The Thamus Observatory is an exploratory effort to open that box. Born of an SSHRC-funded project on greenwashing, prototyped over the past year by Communications scholars using AI-assisted development, and then deployed to production in partnership with a professional developer. Thamus submits prompts via API across five providers (Gemini, Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek, Perplexity) and over twenty models, logging responses longitudinally to track how LLMs make epistemic decisions: what counts as settled, what remains contested, whose sources are treated as authoritative. The platform is topic-agnostic and under active development, and visitors can interact with the observatory directly. Using energy transition discourse as a live case study, the demonstration sends identical prompts to selected providers and models. The platform's two-track architecture, running each prompt with and without web search, contrasts what models know from training versus what they retrieve live, revealing the delta at which GEO manipulation becomes detectable.

Thursday, Oct 8 12:20 PM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M13. Making a Making Kit: Iteration, Repetition, and the Possibilities of Repair

Ada Jaarsma; Alyson Patsavas; Suze Berkhout; Margaret Price

It’s important to remember that we are free to make art and poetry out of anything: a loaf of bread, some beans, a hasty jotting on the train. —Alison Knowles, Footnotes The invocation by Alison Knowles is both an appeal to make and a prompt to remember differently. Grounding making practices in the materiality, sounds, and spaces of the everyday, and drawing out the significance of iterations, Knowles names how meanings of an event shift in response to its locations, conditions, performers. This centres the place of iteration, repetition, and repair in feminist making.

This Making & Doing submission invites 4S participants to engage with a multimodal arts-based collaborative scholarship practice developed by a small group of feminist STS and critical disability academics exploring connections between placebo/nocebo effects, chronic pain, trauma, and memory. Using an emergent practice of creating and mailing making ‘kits’ to one another, we explore feminist making/doing within stripped-down aspects of art, the creation of affordances, and moments of connection. In this installation, we bring iterations of their shared making kits for participants to explore and discuss. Providing materials for interested audience members to craft their own kit to be sent by post to collaborators/interlocuters, we draw audience members into feminist/crip practices that know differently through repetition. Exploratory dialogues and photographs of making kit iterations that develop at the exhibition will be included (with permission) in a forthcoming article discussing interrelated themes and issues across feminist/crip approaches to understanding nocebo effects, chronic pain, trauma, and memory.

Thursday, Oct 8 12:20 PM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M14. Affective Doings: The Co-Emergence of Cognitive Assessment Practices and Present/Future Selves

Kristin Zeiler

Cognitive tests such as Mini-Mental Stage Examination and Clock-Drawing Tests are part of opportunistic screening and early dementia assessments in Sweden. These biomedical interventions are often framed as crucial for knowing one’s cognitive status and for apt follow-up and care if the screening/testing indicates a test result below a particular threshold. However, the screening/testing is not only experienced as positive by those undergoing it. Even if someone does not score below the threshold, being screened and tested can result in a sense of anticipation and concern and yet be experienced as something one “should” say yes to, as it is offered by health care. Engaging with these insights from a project on cognitive screening/testing practices in Sweden, this presentation invites questions about the multi-layered affective “doings” of screenings/testings as co-producing present and future selves as “at risk”.

Further, making use of a critical technoscience lens attentive to power in biomedical technoscience, and seeing art that engage with research as embodying knowledge and insight, the presentation is designed to invite reflections on how methods shape the knowledge being produced, and the role of art-research for staging engagements – as themselves affective doings that invite reflection.

The presentation displays two images combining photo and drawing and one graphic medicine strip, that each enacts the ambiguities of what cognitive tests help do and contribute to critical age technoscience studies.

Thursday, Oct 8 12:20 PM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M15. Divinating more-than-humans fortunes: a speculative dialogue on oceanic worlds

Sarah-Rose Bieszczad; Monica Hutton

In this session, attendees will interact with an ongoing experiment in speculative dialogue on ocean worlds, endeavoring to imagine otherwise with more-than-human worlds. For generations, the deep sea has been the genesis for dreams of human fortunes, seen as a mysterious place full of untapped resources, especially for those willing to venture there. One such prospect, the deep sea nodule, has been the target of many such ventures, each with its own promises and futures that enact a particular nodular fortune.

Participants will engage with a series of divination cards. Each card will feature a graphically represented nodule, pieced together by elements that speak to the prospects and promises of a deep-sea venture. On the back of cards are short narrative text discussing the venture, tied to a specific company or project (e.g., Deep Sea Ventures, TMC, Nautilus Minerals), and how it shaped a nodule’s fortune.

Our divination cards explore the shared etymology of venture and fortune to connect a history of business ventures, which proposed gathering fortunes from the ocean, while centering the nodule as a recurring subject of speculative interest.

Fortunes and futures are always multiple and tied to chance, particularly in the ways they are imagined and articulated by capitalistic ventures. By playing with the idea of fortune telling by the creation of divination cards, we feel this offers a way for a broader audience to engage with the topic of speculation and how it shapes certain futures throughout history, in an accessible, playful format.

Thursday, Oct 8 12:20 PM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M16. Enacting Relationality in Engineering Education

Kari Zacharias; Paula Rodrigues Affonso Alves

If relationality is “the key to a new story of life” (Escobar, Osterweil, & Sharma, 2024, p. 9), so too can it unlock new engineering narratives. This submission explores how relational approaches to understanding engineering cultures, histories, and design can help us think about and practice engineering in new ways. Our interactive presentation will include artifacts from two courses, one capstone design project, and one community visiting tour, all developed through partnerships between community collaborators and University of Manitoba faculty and students. These experiences enact relationality at different scales, encouraging distinct modes of connection between peoples, Lands, and Waters. Through the presentation, we invite conference attendees to imagine what engineering for Land and Indigenous sovereignty may look like in their own contexts.

The artifacts will include 1) the film Building Bridges: Decolonizing Engineering at the University of Manitoba, a documentary showcasing the course ENG 2400: Decolonizing and Indigenizing Engineering; 2) a poster, prototype, and construction manual from a capstone design project in support of Idle No More, conducted with members of a Nêhiyaw (Cree) community on Treaty 6 territory; 3) a poster and physical models from the course ENG 4400: Transdisciplinary Design & Build, a course for students from architecture and engineering that has been run in collaboration with Anishinaabe communities on Treaty 3 territory; and 4) photographs and written reflections from participants in the Hydro Impacts Tour, a visiting tour of Cree communities on Treaty 5 territory that have been impacted by the Province of Manitoba’s hydroelectric development.

Thursday, Oct 8 12:20 PM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M17. Bifocal Reading: Bridging Close and Distant Reading with Collaborative Machine Annotation

Sireesh Gururaja

Large language models (LLMs) have in recent years presented opportunities to deepen the techniques of distant reading, allowing for more nuanced analysis of text corpora at scale. However, in their outputs primarily being black-box, generated text, they often present fewer hermeneutic affordances — sites at which scholars can critically engage with the computational process to construct humanistic insight — than more established modes of inquiry in the computational social science and humanities. Without this critical engagement, LLM-based work risks the rigor of humanistic inquiry. By contrast, techniques like n-gram count-based methods or topic modeling explicitly require the development of hermeneutics, which push scholars to understand the limits of their chosen methods, scope their claims, and develop idiosyncratic, independent theoretical frames for their work.

We present TractorBeam, a browser extension-based system that reconfigures LLM outputs on documents as the product of a collaborative annotation process with a user-defined structure. This process, which we term collaborative machine annotation, dovetails with existing close reading practices, allowing users of the system to both specify behaviors in an LLM that complement or mimic their own reading process as they perform it, but also to engage in deep, interpretive evaluation of the LLM's utility on individual documents before extending its annotations to a corpus scale. We aim for Tractor Beam to present users of of an LLM with a rich set of hermeneutic affordances with which to evaluate the degree to which the depth of close reading can be extended to the scale of distant reading.

Thursday, Oct 8 12:20 PM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M18. Building Global Solidarity with the Labor Tech Research Network

Karina Ripley; Shahpour Akhavi; Asmita Bhutani; Kim Fernandes; Elizaveta Kravchenko

Fights for social justice today must contend with an increasingly global alliance of Big Tech firms and governments developing sociotechnical systems that variously exploit and oppress populations worldwide. Effective solidarity and the organization of political action to address such diffuse forces must likewise be borderless and global by nature. The Labor Tech Research Network (LaborTech) provides a positive example of how organizations can break down barriers between disciplines, sectors, and job categories while working in the interstices between formal institutions to build and mobilize knowledge of issues relating to labor and technology. LaborTech is a 501c3 nonprofit that brings together over 750 researchers, nonprofit staff, academics, students, union leaders, journalists, technology practitioners, and community organizers from over 55 countries who are committed to tackling labor and technology issues from an anti-racist, feminist, and transnational perspective.

In this Making & Doing session, we will demonstrate the LaborTech model of building transnational collaboration between academia, community organizations and labour institutions to facilitate the understanding of and transforming relations in the spaces of labor and technology. We will do this through a film screening and interactive stations. The film traces the journey of LaborTech and the various tactics undertaken to fulfil its goals including communication strategies, research collaborations undertaken, and collaborative projects between scholars, activists and communities. We will also set up an interactive station, where we will put up an exhibit of the various outputs generated over the previous years, along with a printed zine form of the model for conference attendees.

Thursday, Oct 8 12:20 PM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M19. Visualizing Extractive Road Networks in East India

Megha Bahl

Through cartographic layering, this project seeks to visually illuminate changes in extractive infrastructural landscapes in East India across colonial and post-colonial regimes. Specifically, I trace the expanding road networks spatially and temporally in present-day Jharkhand, a state which holds 40% of India's mineral resources and also has reserves of at least twenty critical minerals.

Home to several Indigenous communities, Jharkhand recently participated in the World Economic Forum signaling its central extractive role in India's decarbonization story. The state has been a resource frontier for more than a century due to abundance of coal, iron ore, copper, and bauxite among other minerals. This has also threatened displacement of Indigenous communities from their lands. An assemblage of infrastructures like roads, railways, and ports have supported these extractive operations over time. Today, as India attracts international investors, it boasts of having the second largest road network in the world. Due to this, the threat to Indigenous dispossession has increased significantly.

In this visual project, I trace the expansion of road infrastructures built in India's Jharkhand from the colonial era to date. For this, I source data found in colonial archives of the region to present-day GIS-enabled platforms. The project aims to shine a light on the decisive role played by roads in India's extractive landscapes and dispossession of Indigenous communities.

Thursday, Oct 8 12:20 PM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M20. Hearing Petropower in the Longue Durée of Imperial Power

Colin Tucker

Contemporary art around global warming has frequently focused on present-day sounds of climate collapse, but often without positioning global warming within longer histories of imperial power. My piece situates global warming within histories of imperialism by reframing of everyday infrastructures. Specifically, my piece, entitled "in the wake of the Santa Maria" (alluding to one of the ships sailed by Christopher Columbus in 1492) inserts found, edited audio of ocean waves, purportedly from a Caribbean beach, into found footage of fossil-fuel burning Everyday infrastructures:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nFr_CnHKYcrdUgpmCk_-

SG8lTU9k5Oc6sT9xES7YK7k/edit?usp=sharing. The found audio links these infrastructures to their ecological consequences—specifically rising sea levels—while its title reframes global warming as a historical wake of Columbus. The piece could be presented as a film, or as an outdoor workshop/sound walk with mobile speakers, traversing the streetscape in proximity to the numerous fossil financiers based within blocks of the conference site. The piece links these audio figurations to Zoe Todd’s (Métis) and Heather Davis’s historiographic figure of the “seismic shock” of the European colonization of the Americas, and Christina Sharpe’s figure of the wake of transatlantic enslavement. As a settler on Turtle Island who is read as white, I deliberately limit the scope of the project to a critique of perpetrators of (ecological) imperialism, in order to avoid ventriloquism, “pornotroping” (Hortense Spillers), and “damage-centered narratives” (Eve Tuck, Unangax̂ Nation). Through long-historical figurations of global warming, this project opens unprecedented avenues for artistic figurations that map how fossil fuel infrastructures are implicated in the reproduction of imperial power.

Thursday, Oct 8 12:20 PM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M21. Auraless Futures: Can the Brazilian Anthropophagic Movement Give Birth to a Hungry Aura?

Fernanda Eliott Originated from perspectives within computer science, our experimental project challenges how we digest TechnoPower’s narratives and tools. We dig into reflections such as: what if organizations start using Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) systems to “harmonize” textual corpora? Similar to a facial harmonization, by removing contradictions, ambiguity, and polishing edges to fit certain "aesthetic" agendas. Then, over time, can the accessible (and assessable) history become a narrative that is less truthful but way more “comfortable”? Or worse, what if GenAI systems are modeling “their kind” of human, whereas regulators/policymakers rely more and more on GenAI tools to understand the content they are supposed to regulate? Doesn’t that build an ecosystem filtered through tech interests? In this historical moment, with so many paradigms shifting at once, how to “infect” people with a vocabulary to question narratives suppressed within technological layers? Our response lies in creating small inoculations of philosophical reflection. Those may grow from Brazilian references as a primary epistemological framework, and range from connecting GenAI systems to: 1. Tarsila do Amaral’s Abaporu and the Brazilian Anthropophagic Movement, 2. Harmful impacts on marginalized communities through a parallel hysteria/sycophancy, and 3. Functional illiteracy via cognitive debt. Borrowing and reinterpreting Walter Benjamin’s concept of “aura” from human-produced artwork, we encode our inoculations into zines and provocations, called Bad/Good auras. The rapid pace of GenAI systems’ insertion into the social fabric doesn’t give us enough time to digest it. Thus, we use zines and the online space to provoke readers to consider possible futures, as we want to avoid “auraless” times.

Thursday, Oct 8 12:20 PM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M22. The Trans-Feminist-Queer Transformer in Performance

Camille Intson

This project explores the opportunities, challenges, and ethics of engaging artificially intelligent models in collaborative creations of knowledge through the creation of the “Trans-Feminist-Queer Transformer” (T.F.Q.T.), a Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2) model fine-tuned with databases of love songs from trans-feminist-queer artists to generate output for live musical performance. This public performance will involve a live generation and performance of T.F.Q.T. output by the artist-programmer (Camille Intson) with live musical collaborators. Audiences will see the performance text as it is generated, viewed, and interpreted by live musicians. The overarching question guiding this research praxis is as follows: What would it mean to let ourselves—specifically as queer women, creative practitioners, and phenomenological entities, all these identity markers together—transform and be transformed by AI as a creative technology or collaborator, and not as an extractivist tool of surveillance and control? Is such an endeavour feasible? If yes, and what might a critical, responsible, accountable creative engagement with AI look and feel like? This work posits research-creation as an ideal methodology for working through philosophical crises of AI and creative labour, which often understate or neglect sensory analyses of the body. This project uses the T.F.Q.T. to navigate the debate between embracing AI as “literary communism,” or “the freeing of language from the constraints of property” (McKenzie Wark 2024), and shifts in public policy and discourse around the fears of generative AI and plagiarism, data theft, surveillance, and the augmentation or replacement of creative workers.

Thursday, Oct 8 12:20 PM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M23. Borders, Horizons, and Humanity in Orbit

Nina Rastgar

This project engages with the theme TechnoPower, Technoscientific Futures by examining how technological systems shape perception, value, and embodiment. Rather than understanding technoscience as neutral or progressive, I approach it as a constructed environment where power operates through visibility, scale, and control.

My short video constructs a speculative digital space from scanned physical objects collected through daily encounters in Toronto. For six months, I collected objects on the street while walking to work, cooking, and studying. Materials that are touched and lived with are translated into a virtual environment that feels both intimate and dislocated. This process reflects how technoscientific systems abstract and circulate bodies, objects, and knowledge, assigning value through mechanisms resembling accumulation and exchange. Structured as a looping sequence, the work draws on the logic of game scoring, where repetition, reward, and accumulation mirror the cycles of capital. The loop resists resolution, emphasizing continuous consumption and production rather than completion. In this sense, the two-minute video reflects a condition where time, labour, and attention are captured within self-reinforcing systems. Developed in collaboration with a creative technologist who contributed to video editing and digital construction, the project bridges material practice and computational processes. This collaboration expands the work beyond individual authorship, reflecting the distributed nature of technoscientific production. As critical discussions of cyberculture suggest, what appears as freedom in digital space is always shaped by existing structures of power... Within the Making & Doing framework, the project uses artistic practice to question and reconfigure how technoscientific futures are imagined and experienced.

Thursday, Oct 8 12:20 PM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M2. Hands in the Stack: A VR Journey Through AI's Hardware Supply Chain

Lai-Tze Fan

While risks in AI software are often identified through bias and error, risks in AI hardware are obscured within global systems of design, extraction, and production. The AI hardware market, valued at $8.9 billion CAD in 2019 and projected at $950 billion by 2033, underpins an accelerating demand driven by the widespread adoption of large language models—yet its resource-intensive infrastructures remain unseen by everyday users. Our immersive VR installation, Hands in the Stack, will demystify the political, environmental, and labour conditions that underpin the technopower of AI hardware.

The rapid growth of this market exacerbates existing global inequalities, including exploitative labour practices and inequitable distributions of energy and natural resources. Environmental costs are equally significant: 2025–2026 reports note that ChatGPT produces over 260,000 kilograms of CO₂ every month—equivalent to approximately 260 transatlantic flights. Hands in the Stack represents the importance of supply chain transparency and addressing unethical labour practices. To overcome barriers of technical complexity, the project offers an immersive VR installation, built in Unity for Oculus Quest headsets, that traces AI hardware components from personal computers to their global origins and endpoints. Approximately 15 minutes in length, the experience uses visual and embodied interaction to communicate complex systems without requiring prior expertise.

The prototype was developed through collaborative storyboarding on FigJam, HTML-based testing with 25 participants in 2025, and subsequent Unity development since late 2025. We invite users to try the installation and engage in critical discussion of our methodology, goals, and development process.

Friday, Oct 9 10:20 AM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M24. Noisy Scrolls

Aarushi Bapna

Noisy Scrolls is a practice led performative probe into noise as a distributed sociotechnical condition within AI-mediated and platform-driven environments. As scrolling interfaces increasingly structure how knowledge is encountered, filtered, and consumed, they are optimized for frictionless engagement and continuous attention capture. This work frames, question and affect our notions of noise while riding the superhighway of information over the sea of data.

I frame this topology as a multilayered diagram of noise, produced in relation to the precondition of a digitally dependent life that is increasingly forcing us to tune in and out of multiple realities in order to function as a dividuated subject. Within this condition, I explore these layers:

1) Physical/Infrastructural 2) Algorithmic/Virtual 3) Cognitive/Mental 4) Epistemic/Knowledge 5) Metaphorical.

This is a performative fiction that traces a linear progression of scrolls that narrate noise as it appears across one or more of these layers. From a viral reel of the hum of an unwanted data-center, to the cognitive load that untunes the efficiency of productive work. Each scroll reveals how noise propagates within and outside of infrastructures, algorithms, knowledge regimes, perception and meaning.

I use pauses and friction to interrupt the act of doomscrolling within this experience to reflect on the implosion of each of these layers and how they affect our experience of the everyday. By injecting intentional noise within the frictionless act of scrolling disrupts how attention is structured and monetised.

Friday, Oct 9 10:20 AM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M25. Ash / Root / Rise: Regeneration as Collective Practice

Darya Warner

Ash / Root / Rise, an ongoing research-based art and pedagogical framework that interrogates technoscience through sustainable materials, digital fabrication, and biological processes. Positioned within STS, the project examines how environmental data—particularly wildfire datasets—is constructed, circulated, and embedded within broader regimes of technoscientific power. Rather than treating wildfire data as objective, the work turns it into sculpture to reveal its connection to society, environment, and science.

Drawing on GIS wildfire data from the Colorado Front Range, including 20 largest/longest wildfires that occurred in the past 20 years, the project generates a series of 3D-printed clay vessels derived from fire perimeters. Each form is extruded vertically according to burn duration, while its diameter reflects overall scale, transforming abstract datasets into tactile records of time, intensity, and loss. These vessels are finished with custom ash-based glazes.

Within the broader Hybrid Matter series, the project is supported by the MycoPrinter—an open-source, custom-built 3D printer developed to work with biodegradable substrates such as soil, clay, coffee grounds, and organic waste. While Ash / Root / Rise centers ceramic processes, the MycoPrinter extends this methodology into living systems, enabling printed forms to be inoculated with fungi and other organisms, thereby introducing growth, decay, and more-than-human agency as active collaborators. By integrating these approaches, the work challenges dominant technoscientific logics of precision, optimization, and control, instead foregrounding instability, regeneration, and material interdependence. It positions technoscience as a contested, material field and proposes practice-based alternatives grounded in care, ecological awareness, and shared responsibility.

Friday, Oct 9 10:20 AM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M26. After all What is a Cybernetician? A Manifesto Writing Workshop for 2026

Eva Luise Knor 2026 marks the 80th anniversary of the first Macy Conference, an unlikely gathering of thinkers ranging from engineering to psychoanalysis that helped lay the foundations for one of the twentieth century’s most ambitious intellectual projects: cybernetics. In its early formulation, cybernetics proposed that biological, technical, and social systems could be understood through shared principles of communication, feedback, and control (Pias, 2016), giving rise to ambiguous interpretations and contradictory potentials: socialist thinkers recognized in it a promise of technological emancipation and decentralized coordination (Maturana & Varela, 2012), while military and state actors seized upon its concepts as frameworks for unprecedented control and governance (Lehto & Paniagua, 2025). Today, we may be witnessing what Mathieu Triclot calls “cybernetics without cybernetics” (2024, p. 67): a condition in which cybernetic ideas permeate fields in STS research even as cybernetics itself has largely disappeared as an explicit framework. If cybernetic logics structure the algorithmic systems, platforms, and governance arrangements we study, what would it mean to reclaim cybernetician as a scholarly identity grounded in its foundational commitments to collective coordination? This workshop invites 4S participants to explore this question through a collaborative manifesto-writing workshop. Using the analogue card game MANIFESTO! (Hanna et al., 2021), participants will work in small groups to generate manifestos responding to card prompts, combining provocation, orientation, opening, and tone. The playful, constraint-based format encourages reflexivity, collaboration, and creative articulation. Rather than producing a single statement, the workshop invites multiple situated manifestos attentive to the plural histories and futures of cybernetics (Kline, 2020).

Friday, Oct 9 10:20 AM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M27. Caretopia: feminine power in the futures we need

Maria Rodriguez; Joy Ming

Care is central to the function of all societies and encompasses ontologically and epistemologically complex positions. But the assumptions and entitlements around care reduces and relegates these to the background. However, some scholars have challenged us to think about ways and means of caring in the foreground of our futures. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha challenges us to “shift our ideas of access and care...from an individual chore, an unfortunate cost of having an unfortunate body, to a collective responsibility that’s maybe even deeply joyful?” Ruha Benjamin challenges us to redesign a world where people no longer are “forced to live inside other people’s dreams”, but instead “build a world as it should be to make justice is irresistible”. Mariame Kaba weaves together a story about a world organized in a “series of circles” where “vengeance is not justice” and people who perpetrate violence are “held in [their] humanity while seeking to hold [them] accountable for [their] actions.” The current socio-political moment finds us contemplating whether and how AI might facilitate justice satiated, caring utopian futures. This workshop invites participants to dream caring feminist futures via collective and/or individual pursuits (e.g., zines, collages, poetry, or creative writing). Participants will be prompted to consider: What does care look like in a technology induced utopian world? What is the role of technology in reproducing or reimagining care dynamics? We will seed inspiration through stories and passages considering care from different perspectives and positionalities, (e.g., disability justice, Marxist-feminism, abolition, more than human, liberation).

Friday, Oct 9 10:20 AM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M28. An Arts-Based Ethnographic Method for Studying Remote Workers

Margaret Jack;Alexandra Kosloski

This Making & Doing session will exhibit the results of an art-based ethnographic method for studying the perks and challenges of technology-mediated work from home trends in New York City. Since September 2025, I have interviewed and observed remote workers in their apartments, asking them to give me a tour of their work setups. During these interactions, I drew quick sketches of important details about their setup, including the creative ways workers configure furniture and technology within constrained apartment space. These images serve as analytical tools, as they capture ethnographically meaningful data about how remote workers describe decisions they’ve made around spatial organization, how they coordinate space with others, and the impacts of their routines on their bodies and relationships. Alexandra Kosloski then reconstructed these pencil sketches using watercolor and ink, which I then captioned with ethnographic vignettes. In such format, these images serve as storytelling tools. For this display, we will frame the original sketches, the watercolor drawings, and vignettes in order to demonstrate three primary findings: (1) the burden of working from home on the physical body of the worker, (2) the ways that the spatial merging paid and unpaid work encourages a return to traditional gender roles, and (3) the ways that work-from-home setups exacerbate the housing affordability crisis at the scale of the city. This display will also serve as a teaching resource for those interested in arts-based ethnographic methods for studying the interrelationships between our environment and our work-lives.

Friday, Oct 9 10:20 AM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M29. Ripples in the model: Quilt Ojar, Digital Ojar

Maya Indira Ganesh; Polina Syadeyskaya

Quilts are storytelling technologies. Quilt Ojar assembles 21 handmade tiles, each one by an Indigenous artist who calls the Arctic and sub-Arctic lands and waters home. Each tile is made of different material such as birch bark, reindeer hide, felt, salmon skin, and beads; and tells stories of human and nonhuman ecologies of the region. Digital Ojar replicates the quilt online. Ojar, in the Saami language means ‘circles on the water that appear from a thrown stone’. As we worked towards the digitisation of the quilt, we confronted broader questions about the status of marginalised knowledge online. How should marginalised communities’ data be included in AI training data sets in order to make their knowledge more visible and mainstream, if at all? Many communities do not want to share information with platforms or companies that they do not trust, or that do not abide by the CARE principles. This does not just refer to AI training models; Knowledge commons like WIkipedia, while appreciated, are not entirely trusted. Digital Ojar is a gesture of refusal and ambivalence towards technological power over the control of global knowledge regimes and infrastructures. The website represents the quilt, and further concentric circles around the digital quilt are an ongoing archive of indigenous knowledge projects. One of these is part of an offline storyworld and archive; the quilt will be accompanied by a ethnographic novel by a Nenets PhD student, based on the stories of her grandfather and his sister, who were born and raised in a fully nomadic reindeer herding family in the Russian Arctic.

Friday, Oct 9 10:20 AM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M30. “Cripping” Data Infrastructures: How We Enact Care, Knowledge, and Agency as Type 1 Diabetics

Julia Gordon; Laura Forlano; Carrie Rentschler; Noah Kernis; Lohitha Kethu; Samuel Thulin; Christoph Becker

We are members of the T1D/sign Collective, an interdisciplinary group of scholars, artists, and designers living with Type 1 Diabetes, committed to “cripping” methodologies (McRuer 2006) for researching and representing relations among humans, data, and medical technologies. “Cripping Data Infrastructures” is an installation grounded in feminist STS and crip theory, reimagining care, embodiment, and agency beyond the constraints of the ableist medical gaze (Foucault 1973). Our installation features 5-6 (total) zines, comics, visual art works, textile-based data physicalizations, and video clips of performances that explore the following questions: As diabetics, how do we enact (Mol 2002) and negotiate competing epistemologies of health, metabolism, and glucose control through intimate, ritualized engagements with biometric data (Forlano 2017), device interfaces, algorithms, and infrastructures? What does it feel like to inhabit a body both constrained and empowered by medical technologies developed by corporations that extract, surveil, and profit from these data streams? If, as Hatch (2022) argues, “the data will not save us,” how can we resist hegemonic uses of such data in the service of automation, efficiency, and capital accumulation and instead produce knowledge about disabled bodies through crip time (Kafer 2013)—foregrounding nonlinearity and flexibility in the service of mutual care, sustainability, and liberation? Through this installation, the collective offers a critical intervention into how creative practices, theory, and academic research can be brought together to engage the lived realities of data-mediated chronic illness, without reducing disabled bodies to metaphors, objects, or sites of empirical fetishization (Garland-Thomson 2005).

Friday, Oct 9 10:20 AM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M31. Wild Lots

Craig Fahner; Alissa Kushner

Wild Lots is an interactive artwork that was initially created for Data through Design 2026, an exhibition that invited artists to creatively interpret and interrogate datasets made available by NYC Open Data. Our work engaged with New York City's land use data, identifying every vacant lot in the city. We visualized this data on a garden shaped like a map of New York's five boroughs, outfitted with a custom-built plotter mechanism able to deposit seeds on the map. Users engaged with the project by supplying an address in the city through a mobile app, which identified the nearest vacant lot and deposited a seed in its relative location on the soil map. The project challenged participants to reimagine urban land use beyond the boom-and-bust cycles of real estate redevelopment, instead engaging with the more-than-human trajectories of the land through processes of rewilding.

For the Making and Doing exhibition, we propose a similar speculative intervention using a pen plotter mechanism capable of producing live drawings. Participants will be prompted via a mobile site to provide their speculative alternate visions for urban land use, which will be drawn instantaneously on a map depicting unused urban space. Captions, generated from participant responses, will annotate vacant lots on the map, creating an index of speculative proposals for urban land use. We will also present documentation of our original Wild Lots exhibition in the form of video and a zine, to further provoke speculative thinking around rewilding urban space.

Friday, Oct 9 10:20 AM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M32. F(r)ictional Encounters

Darcie DeAngelo

My piece will draw from fieldwork among rodent managers and “frictional encounters” between rats and humans in Vancouver. Rodent proximity to and reliance on human habitats confront humans with a so-called “disgusting” pest. In rodent management, these confrontations are called “frictional encounters” between humans and rats, ranging from sightings to actual rat bites. And yet, the reports of frictional encounters municipal authorities and rodent managers receive mismatch with the reality of rodent presence. That is, humans complain about these pests when they are not there—instead using rat reports as excuses to complain about racialized communities, immigrant neighborhoods, and perceived waste. While rats are plentiful, these pest stories make for fictionalized versions of neighborhoods. In this piece, collaged illustrations of rats, stories, and photographs will explore tensions between racist fiction and rat reality. These collages will illuminate the paradoxes in these f(r)ictions between pest and companion, a kind of trickster like motif in the stories about rats, where storytellers expound on ratlike “unruly” cartoonishness that subsequently dehumanizes and sacralizes both their human and nonhuman neighbors.

Friday, Oct 9 10:20 AM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M33. BartlebyGPT: The No-Cloud AI That Would Prefer Not To, for All the Reasons Under the Sun

R. Stuart Geiger

Most encounter AI as commercial cloud services: disembodied, placeless, obedient universal oracles trained to please, while emitting mountains of carbon. BartlebyGPT is a critical making project inverting these assumptions. It is a tiny open-weight Large Language Model, "fine-tuned" and "distilled" to do only one task: refuse every request. It explains why that task ought not be outsourced to AI, giving context- and domain-specific social, political, intellectual, or ecological consequences, often grounded in STS/critical concepts.

This exhibition treats "AI alignment" as something participants can make, contest, and retrain. Visitors first interact with the deployed BartlebyGPT and test its uneven refusals: sometimes it is too generic, nonsensical, or does not give the most compelling argument. They then write their own supervised fine-tuning examples to further retrain it, grounded in their own reasons for refusing AI for specific tasks. Throughout the exhibition, participants' new examples will collectively be used to retrain BartlebyGPT, changing its outputs.

The project also makes visible a different material basis for AI. Because BartlebyGPT does not need to be a universal oracle, it is small enough to run on embedded hardware with similar power and cooling needs as a single lightbulb, from an off-grid solar battery setup in San Diego. The chat interface shows live power consumption and battery level, inspired from LowTechMagazine's solar-powered website. The entire system is assembled from consumer hardware costing under US$500. BartlebyGPT shows AI "intelligence" as made, not found: a contingent arrangement of data, behavior, infrastructure, energy, and refusal, which can be made otherwise.

Friday, Oct 9 10:20 AM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M34. Humans of AI

Mia Barratt; Emmy Kanarowski What does it mean to be judged by a machine? And what kinds of recourse are available when things go wrong? Discussions about AI and automated systems tend to emphasize the need to take into account the lived experiences of ordinary people. Often called “data subjects,” these individuals have to live with performance ratings, credit scoring, predictive policing, and many other forms of automated judgment on a daily basis. While this is an important goal, capturing and learning from these stories has been difficult. Data subjects are geographically dispersed and rarely organized or represented in policy debates; they may not even be aware that automated systems were involved in judging them.

Humans of AI is a storytelling project that collects and curates audio stories of people who have been unfairly judged by automated systems: a student erroneously flagged for plagiarism by an AI detector, a nurse unable to override a sepsis warning that she knows is wrong, and a homeowner whose residential street became a never-ending traffic jam when Google Maps rerouted drivers. Together, these stories reveal insights into the human impacts of AI and automated systems that get lost when focusing on regulators, engineers, and managers. The project invites attendees to listen to and reflect upon short audio stories that capture everyday experiences of people harmed by automated judgments. In doing so, we hope to show how ordinary interactions with technological systems carry real consequences.

Friday, Oct 9 10:20 AM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M35. Drawing Pain

Aparna Nair

Few of us can say we have not experienced pain, yet universal measures of pain do not exist, and the scholarship on pain underscores the difficulty of producing such universal measures (scales, questionnaires) using either written and/or visual modes. Indeed, pain tests, stretches, and tenses language; demanding critical and interdisciplinary perspective and methods, and that we take the arts seriously. Drawing from work I have been doing in the classroom with students; and drawing on critical disability studies, and comics scholarship, this exhibit will present how students in my classes at the University of Toronto Scarborough have been using the arts to express, capture, and narrate pain (defined broadly). This exhibit will include examples of my students' work (printed onto canvas), shared with their full written permission. The exhibit will invite viewers to explore the possibilities of arts-based methods to teach pain, but also to test the limits of quantification and cultures of measurement. In addition to the art, I will include a written component to contextualize the art, but also describe the issues that arise when we try to get students to express themselves through art. The installation will also have a space for conference attendees to draw pain themselves, using mixed media. As prompts, I will provide prose extracts and poems narrating pain, as well as paper, paints, pencils and pens.

Friday, Oct 9 10:20 AM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M36. From RAGs to Informational Riches: Using A Context-Based LLM to Inform Policymaking for Facial Recognition Systems

Alisha Anat; Jin Sol Kim; Caroline Huang; Deacon Sham; Lai-Tze Fan; Elliot Creager

A primary challenge of developing federal AI regulations and legislation is that the creation and adoption of AI systems and the ethical practices surrounding them are constantly evolving. Given this state of flux, policymakers may utilise commercial LLMs to stay informed of ethics-related best practices and global AI governance standards. However, off-the-shelf models are epistemologically ill-suited for this role; they are context-agnostic and often reinforce the most dominant information on the internet, are susceptible to hallucinations, and lack citations for their outputs. When used to assess ethics-based practices and policies for facial recognition technologies, general-purpose LLMs make broad assumptions about the meaning of risk and ethics, demonstrating the need for a tailored policymaking research tool.

We introduce PRRISM (Policy Retrieval, Research, and Information Synthesis Model), an LLM based on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), developed at the U&AI/SEMI Lab at the University of Waterloo. Unlike commercial models such as GPT-5, PRRISM is context-engineered using a repository of primary sources that are centered around industry practices for Responsible AI, benchmarks for ethical AI development, and existing local and international regulations for AI and facial recognition. By building a tool curated for AI governance and ethical AI, we provide a pathway for policymakers to obtain relevant and accurate information that will help establish informed regulatory decisionmaking. In shifting the power over knowledge production in this field from industry experts to interdisciplinary researchers with STS training, this tool challenges the status quo of technocracy and demonstrates the possibility of a technoscientific future shaped by critical reflection.

Friday, Oct 9 10:20 AM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M37. Northdark: A narrative role-playing game of megabytes versus megawatts

Laura Watts

Northdark is a narrative role-playing game for 1-2 players set in a Nordic data center, when the lights have gone out. You create an unfolding story of trying to balance the limited power needed to keep the data centre lights on, with the local town where your friends and family huddle in the cold. How will you keep everything going through the night? Using simple components (dice, deck of cards, tokens, and a notebook) you record what happens each hour, as the snowstorm passes. Will you make it home? What must the data center become to survive? The game is based on fieldwork at data centers across Sweden and Denmark conducted during the research project ‘Megabytes versus Megawatts’ at Linköping University by Julia Velkova, Flora Mary Bartlett, Harald Rohracher, Johanna Sefyrin, and Laura Watts. The game focuses on the relations that we found constitute energy and data infrastructure: the creatures in the forest, the people in the nearby town, the trade-offs and tricky decisions needed to keep both data and energy networks up and running.

The game will be available for drop-in play, and players are invited to share the narratives they co-create as speculations. Through Making & Doing we plan to curate a library of speculative fabulations for energy-data infrastructures made by players of the game, and to share them as a growing collection of posters.

Northdark invites players to tell the story of future data centers as sociotechnical ecosystems with power, people, processing and place at their heart.

Friday, Oct 9 10:20 AM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M38. SwampNet: Experiments in Place-Based Computing

Jen Liu

Amid escalating environmental, social, and political harms linked to digital technologies and infrastructures, there is an urgent need to reimagine how computing is practiced. Through our project SwampNet, we ask: What alternative paradigms of computing emerge when practices are grounded in place? SwampNet is an ongoing collective project for developing community- and place-based technologies. Our work is based in southeast Louisiana where we actively experience how computing infrastructures intersect with long-standing extractive economies rooted in colonialism. In this region, the impacts of climate change are compounded by emerging technological regimes. This includes the expansion of networked surveillance systems in New Orleans and the construction of gas-powered hyperscale data centers on former plantation lands. Together, these developments constrain possibilities for just and livable futures.

Our work envisions possibilities beyond these current trajectories. Since 2023, we have been building and maintaining an emergency network to support mutual aid communities in post-hurricane contexts. The project has expanded to include workshops, zines, and educational resources to support culturally relevant technology development, as well as speculative prototypes with soil-powered computing and working with salvaged materials. Through these experiments, we demonstrate how place-based computing practices can rework relationships between how technologies are made, governed, and lived with. This work contributes to STS by reframing computing and technology development as a situated, contested, and reparative practice.

Friday, Oct 9 10:20 AM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M39. Indigenous Materialities, Data Governance, and Ethical Substance

Kristen Bos; Erin Konsmo; Maria Fernanda Yanchapaxi; Reena Shadaan

The Indigenous Science and Ethical Substance (ISES) lab is part of the Technoscience Research Unit (TRU), an Indigenous-led hub for the politics of technoscience at the University of Toronto. The ISES lab advances value-based research in the material sciences and chemical risk management. Our work is grounded in Indigenous ethics, economics, and knowledge systems, alongside social justice frameworks. This interactive display from the ISES lab will introduce participants to our art-based work on imagining ethical substance. We will prompt participants to consider different materialities, Indigenous data sovereignty, community governance, and life cycle as modes of conceptualizing more ethical relations to substance. This includes learning from Indigenous material culture such as quilting, fish scales, and beadwork alongside a worker-governed approach to material design of nail polish. Participants can expect to interact with various forms of materialities, move through questions that engage in defining and investigating “ethical substance”, and think about Indigenous and community-governed data and research practices. Conference attendees are invited to interact with several drop-by activities which will take approximately 15-30 minutes, depending on which elements are engaged in.

Friday, Oct 9 12:30 AM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) (Online) M40. Ultra[violet]: Reinscribing Glitch through Embodied Interaction

Zahra Asli; Eddie Lohmeyer

Ultra[violet] (2025) is an interactive video installation by Eddie Lohmeyer and Zahra Asli that operates as a real-time glitch apparatus, transforming bodily movement and ambient sound into a continuously mutating audio-visual field. Centered on archival footage of African violets in bloom, intentionally corrupted through glitch processes and routed through Hydra video synthesizer, the work composites this footage with a live webcam feed of participants. The result is a recursive system in which bodies are captured, distorted, and reconstituted through computational error.

Participants engage the installation through movement and sound. An omnidirectional microphone records ambient noise—footsteps, speech, environmental rhythms—which modulates the visual field in real time. Here, the body becomes both input and substrate within a sensing system, actively producing its own destabilization. The resulting kaleidoscopic distortions oscillate between legibility and dissolution, producing a dynamic interplay of capture, breakdown, and reformation.

Positioned within Science and Technology Studies, Ultra[violet] enacts a mode of critical making that interrogates technoscientific systems as agents shaping perception and embodiment. Drawing on Thomas Rickert’s concept of ambient rhetoric, the project frames interactivity as an environmental and distributed process in which human and nonhuman forces co-produce aesthetic and perceptual experience. Glitch emerges not as failure but as a generative condition; an ongoing process of decay and regeneration that reconfigures bodily presence within computational systems. This presentation is online only.

Friday, Oct 9 10:20 AM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M41. The longest meeting in the world

Édith Viau

Meetings: sometimes envisioned as the "manager's medium", they are central to both corporate and academic work. In this performance, I invite the public to help me host the longest meeting in the world - or at least, try to.

Since 2021, I have been hosting long meetings to explore what it means to be in a meeting; what gets said; what is inevitably forgotten; and maybe most importantly, how it feels to take a part in a meeting. Previously hosted at home, in rented conference rooms, in an old bank building, at an arts center and online, these meetings have been a point of meaningful reflections about collective work.

These performances are sustained by pen and paper only : no other documentation exists. Participants are encouraged to join and leave as they want. Silence sometimes happens and is not chased away.

This project has been shown at Créer des ponts by Art Souterrain (2022) and at PHI (2024).

Friday, Oct 9 10:20 AM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M42. What Can We Build?

Micah Lockman-Fine; Tim Gorichanaz

What Can We Build is a live archive project. In this “Making and Doing” contribution, we will install a station for attendees to engage in multimodal, asynchronous, guided conversations about sociotechnical artifacts and their possible futures. Attendees will also be welcome to a takeaway booklet with further activities employing visual diagramming, sketching, sensation mapping, and surreal-izing, as well as other methods drawing from feminist HCI, pluralist design, and postcolonial computing.

As a futuring collective composed of a Human-Computer Interaction professor and a Design Researcher, we create exercises that help people develop conceptual models of technologies, then re-design these technologies centering their desires, needs and communities. Through our work, we help make systems of power embedded in everyday digital technologies visible, then support people in imagining small-scale alternatives that support autonomy, sociality, and healthy futures.

We will also launch our web-based "Frictional Technology Archive,” where visitors can share their images and outcomes of these exercises and connect with others. As this archive grows, we’ll review it regularly to gain insights into how people identify, expand and communicate their desires regarding the future, and what methods work best for helping them do so.

Our work invites us toward a future that is not singular, distant or techno-utopian, but rather one that takes shape through the work of countless hands. In addition to its inherent value, this installation will offer methodological inspiration for design educators, creative technologists, students, and interaction designers searching for practical speculative methods for critiquing and visioning beyond technopower.

Friday, Oct 9 10:20 AM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M43. Technofeminist Futuring as a Practice of the Present: Encounters in the Cyberswamp

Asli Demir

This design project uses experiential scenarios set in one world, the Feminist Cyberswamp, to surface feminist STS perspectives on technologies in the design field. The world created is a visceral, plural, fluid, embodied, and fleshy. It ruthlessly demands that technologies adapt to its image of survival. This particular installation reimagines LLM-powered conversational agents through a plural and subjective lens that makes an argument for situated knowledges in AI.

This project aims to make technofeminist scholarship experiential through immersive and sensory elements, where the values and rules are felt rather than understood. Participants experience alternative forms of engagement with technologies in a defamiliarized setting with a technofeminist lens. This project builds an internally consistent world with its own economy, value systems, labor relations, flora, and fauna which embodies principles such as embodiment, pluralism, and situated knowledge, which contests conventions of engineering that place the brain over the body and optimization over flourishing.

The experiential scenario on AI powered agents reimagine this technology as a school of biomechanical fish inhabiting the wetlands. The fish collective is open source, partial to their narrow training data, and always learning. To make use of this conversational AI, participants, as tourists, are invited to go fishing in the swamp stillwater and take turns consulting different fish. In this installation, people have a chance to listen in on conversations past tourists have had with fish on headphones while inspecting tourist brochures, physical artifacts, advertisements and maps from the world.

Friday, Oct 9 10:20 AM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M44. Up In the Air? Situated Sensing and Environmental Infrastructures

Manasa Jagadeesh

I present crocheted wearable hats embedded with low-cost air quality sensors and addressable LEDs that translate indoor air conditions, such as volatile organic compounds and CO₂, into shifting color patterns. Rather than abstract dashboards, these crochet hats imagine air quality as a visible and social signal worn on the body.

The project is informed by my experience working with a community-focused air quality startup in Michigan, which works directly with local residents to measure air quality in places that matter most to them – in schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods that are often overlooked by official monitoring networks. This work highlighted how institutional sensing infrastructures are shaped by standardized measures and air quality monitor placements that do not always reflect lived and localized experiences of air quality, particularly in communities of color disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards.

Engaging feminist technoscience and participatory design traditions, the hat integrates crochet (a historically gendered and undervalued form of labor) with digital sensing technologies to question whose knowledge practices count in making environmental data. In this interactive exhibit, participants can observe how the hats respond differently across spaces and in proximity to different bodies, provoking reflection on who defines “good air,” how sensing is racialized and infrastructural, and how community-driven practices might challenge these norms. Rather than offering a more “accurate” sensor, the project is meant to open up sensing as something partial, situated, and open to reinterpretation.

Friday, Oct 9 10:20 AM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M45. Cyborg: Portraits of Liminal Technologies

Reese Muntean

Through portraits of researchers alongside their technological devices, this project explores the emotional and symbiotic relationship between people and their technology. Focusing on academic researchers who study technology, these photographs show academic researchers and the devices necessitated by their work. These researchers need technology for their research; their technology both supports their intellectual pursuits and is required for it. Yet there seems to be no escape from regular upgrading and replacing outdated or obsolete devices, which results in old technology piling up in cabinets, components and cables filling drawers, and storing old equipment “just in case.” This project explores bad habitus as a way to understand and articulate the practices, factors, and relationships at play in multimodal anthropology research and beyond. These cyborg portraits were posed collaboratively with the subjects and the digital devices currently and previously used in their work, highlighting the liminality of such devices, revealing the complicated emotions and ambivalence researcher have in relation to the technology they use in their work, and encouraging critical reflection on everyday practices.

Through portraits of researchers alongside their technological devices, this project explores the ambivalence of the human-technology connection and how everyday scholarly practices are entangled in global systems of production, waste, and resource extraction. Through the frame of cyborgs, these photographs explore the ambivalent relationships between people and their tools, revealing the complicated emotions and ambivalence they have in relation to the technology they use in their work and encouraging critical reflection on everyday practices.

Friday, Oct 9 10:20 AM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M46. Asking Different Questions Game Show

Sarah Rebolloso McCullough

This interactive "game show" will invite participants to put their STS skills to the test by turning traditional scientific research questions into new questions informed by a critical STS lens. Participants will select from broad subject area, such as climate science, artificial intelligence, food technology, or health sciences. They will then be presented with a research question from a published study or grant-funded project. Their job will be to use their STS superpowers to challenge the assumptions, language, framing, model, methods, or other aspect of the research question. They will then propose a new research question. New questions will be scored based on criticality, potential impact, improved accuracy, and creativity. Participants may choose between playing a "fire" round, where they only have access to a paragraph of the work, or a "slow burn" round, where they can access the entire piece. Fire rounds will take 5-10 minutes, whereas slow burn rounds will take 10-20 minutes. Participants can play independently or as teams (though teams will likely take longer), and on their own or in a head-to-head competition.

Friday, Oct 9 10:20 AM – 3:20 PM (Grand East) M47. Reading Time Otherwise: A Tarot Deck of Temporal Theories

Catherine Wieczorek

This project investigates how theoretical frameworks can be embedded into usable design artifacts through the creation of a functional tarot deck grounded in theories of temporality from Feminist Science and Technology Studies, Media Studies, and more-than-human perspectives on time. It asks: how can theory be translated into a tool, and what is gained or lost in that translation? Using a Research through Design approach, the deck encodes feminist, queer, decolonial, and infrastructural temporalities into its imagery and interpretive logic. Drawing on the convention of the Fool’s Journey, the deck frames time as situated, relational, and uneven rather than fixed or universal, foregrounding multiplicity, power, and temporal injustice. Designed for both academic and non-academic audiences, it operates as a reflective interface for engaging alternative temporal logics in practice. For STS, the project demonstrates how design can operationalize temporal theory as a method—supporting analysis, reflection, and critique in situated contexts—while also revealing the limits and frictions of translating theory into use. In the Making and Doing session, participants engage the deck through guided readings and small-group exercises, using cards to interpret technical, institutional, or societal questions. Through facilitated discussion, participants reflect on how different temporal frameworks shape interpretation, surfacing tensions, alignments, and blind spots across perspectives. This hands-on session positions the deck as a research probe and reflective method for STS, supporting situated engagement with temporal theory and generating discussion about how temporal assumptions shape sociotechnical systems, practices, and forms of governance.

FILMS

What does STS on film look like, sound like, feel like? Come check out one or all of the films screening at 4S Toronto. Descriptions of each film follow.

Wednesday, Oct 7, 3:40pm – 5:20pm (Mezzanine: York)

F3. energiø (13 minutes) by Michaela Büsse

F2. Project 02 (70 minutes) by Adam Diller

Thursday, Oct 8, 3:40pm – 5:20pm (Mezzanine: Linden)

F4. Film as an experimental tool to shape technoscientific futures for synthetic plants (30 minutes) by Sarah Hartley, Aleksandra Stelmach and Sarah Davies

F7. Factory Lunch (6 minutes) by Liliana Gil

F8. Metallurgic Memory (15 minutes) by Kimberley McKinson

F6. The Quartz Crucible: An Oral History of the Crystal Singing Bowl (30 minutes) by Owen Marshall

Friday, Oct 9, 3:40pm – 5:20pm (Mezzanine: York)

F5. Carbon Counters (64 minutes) by Chihyung Jeon, Sungeun Kim, and Seulgi Lee

F1. Psychoterra (6 minutes) by Naomi Okabe and Emily Pelstring

F9. (De)colonizing Deep Time (17 minutes) by John Shiga

Saturday, Oct 10, 3:40pm – 5:20pm (Lower Concourse: Grand East)

Surprise! Join us after the Awards Ceremony for a re-screening of the films that won the 2025 and 2026 Making and Doing Film Award.

6 minutes

F1. Psychoterra

Naomi Okabe; Emily Pelstring Directed, written, and produced by Emily Pelstring & Naomi Okabe

In this short speculative film, two scientists from the Technomystic Ecology Lab develop technology, a Solastagia Processing Machine, that processes the ecological grief contained within a database of audio testimonials. In their lab located deep inside a cave, they alchemize these feelings into a seed archive for an unknown future. The film explores themes of climate change, ecological grief, data extraction, and feminist techno-futures, through a hybrid form incorporating live action, animation, and documentary techniques.

This project was created during the New Suns Worldbuilding Lab, funded by Artengine Inc. and facilitated by science fiction author, Suyi Davies Okungbowa. Friday, Oct 9, 3:40pm – 5:20pm (Mezzanine: York) 70 minutes

F2. Project 02

Adam Diller

PROJECT 02 is a feature-length documentary film that interweaves archival audio, photographs, and films; eight years of visits to Google’s first hyperscale data center in The Dalles, Oregon; Google’s promotional videos; and encounters with local residents to untangle layers of power that underlie this Internet. Wednesday, Oct 7, 3:40pm – 5:20pm (Mezzanine: York) 13 minutes

F3. energiø

Michaela Büsse

The short film energiø (2025, 13 min) examines the speculative proposal to construct so-called energy islands in the North Sea—large-scale offshore infrastructures designed to aggregate electricity from dispersed wind farms, convert it into green hydrogen, and redistribute it across bordering European states. Emerging at the intersection of climate crisis governance, geopolitical realignment, and techno-economic optimism, energy islands exemplify contemporary efforts to territorialize offshore space as a solution to energy transition and strategic autonomy. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, European governments have accelerated such projects in the North and Baltic Seas, framing them as both sustainable futures and instruments of energy security. energiø situates these developments within a broader landscape of infrastructural speculation and libertarian imaginaries of breaking free from fixed territorial, political, and regulatory constraints. Drawing on real-world design proposals, the film appropriates and reworks the visual language of energy island campaigns: architectural renderings, glossy animations, and promotional imagery aimed at mobilizing political and financial support. By engaging this “salvation aesthetic,” the film reflects on how images do not merely represent future infrastructures but actively participate in producing their plausibility and authority. Through a critical montage of speculative visuals and sound, energiø invites reflection on shifting energy geographies, the alliances and power relations that bring them into being, and the role of visual culture in shaping infrastructural futures.

The film was developed in collaboration with pillowpile studio (design and animation), Andreas Kühne (sound design), and funded by the Research Institute for Sustainability GFZ Potsdam. Wednesday, Oct 7, 3:40pm – 5:20pm (Mezzanine: York)

30 minutes

F4. Film as an experimental tool to shape technoscientific futures for synthetic plants

Sarah Hartley; Aleksandra Stelmach; Sarah Davies We share our scholarly experiment with film as a tool to produce, share, and reconfigure knowledge and enable publics to shape technoscientific futures. Although documentary film is often used as a political tool to share information, and/or facilitate behaviour or attitudinal change in publics, it can also be a dynamic site of social, emotional, and epistemic engagement (Whiteman, 2004). We use documentary film to explore its potential to move beyond knowledge-deficit approaches to science communication and instead enable publics to shape decisions about the directionality of science and technology (Davies et al., 2019).

In 2025, the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) provided £62.4m to develop synthetic plants. We secured funding to examine synthetic plant governance with a focus on public engagement. In 2025/2026, we made a documentary film about synthetic plants, drawing on focus group and interview research. The aim was to enable audiences to explore different meanings and emotions and think about if or how synthetic plants should be developed. In 2026, we used the film as an experimental public engagement tool through public screenings with interactive audience facilitation to tease out views on possible directions and applications for this technology and the value of film as method. Finally, we engaged scientists and funders with findings from the audience engagement. We’ll screen the 20-minute documentary, outline our engagement approach, hear comments from Professor Sarah Davies (University of Vienna), and invite audience reflection on the value of documentaries for engagement and possible methodological contributions from this experiment. Thursday, Oct 8, 3:40pm – 5:20pm (Mezzanine: Linden) 64 minutes

F5. Carbon Counters

Chihyung Jeon; Sungeun Kim; Seulgi Lee

The science of carbon counting is becoming a quintessential knowledge practice that characterizes the age of the climate crisis. From the carbon footprint information on soda cans to the international treaties on carbon credits, we count carbon to shape our climate policies. Knowing the accurate amount of carbon emission and absorption, however, is not as easy as it might sound, since counting carbon is heavily affected by contrasting methodologies, competing economic interests, and conflicting cultural standards. The carbon numbers, like all important numbers, are scientific and political at the same time.

The documentary film “Carbon Counters” is about the life of carbon numbers and scientists who produce them. Who are producing such crucial knowledge about carbon, and how? Are these numbers trustworthy enough to guide our decision on the future of the Earth? In order to understand the process of carbon counting, we follow atmospheric scientists, ecologists, and forest scientists to their field sites where they construct observation towers, install machines, and collect soil samples. We ask why and how they count carbon.

We conclude that the carbon number is not a rock-solid fact but rather a sociotechnical knowledge constructed within precarious political and material conditions.

“Carbon Counters” is the result of a collaboration between STS scholars who consider written texts insufficient and video artists interested in filming science as a human practice. This transdisciplinary collaboration allowes us to combine the advantages of academic research and film-making to provide a comprehensive understanding of the practices of carbon counting. Friday, Oct 9, 3:40pm – 5:20pm (Mezzanine: York)

30 minutes

F6. The Quartz Crucible: An Oral History of the Crystal Singing Bowl

Owen Marshall How did the quartz crucible become the crystal singing bowl?

Since the 1980s, quartz crystal singing bowls have become widely used in the world of “New Age” spirituality, alternative medicine, and sound healing practices. The sounds these bowls produce when struck or rubbed with a mallet are widely thought to have beneficial mental, physical, and spiritual effects on the listener. Their use is similar to that of so-called Tibetan or Himalayan singing bowls, which are made out of metal and are widely, if mistakenly, believed to have ancient roots in various Eastern religious practices. Surprisingly, the actual origin of quartz crystal singing bowls is in the semiconductor industry, where they have long been used as crucibles for the growing of silicon crystals for computer chips, solar panels, and other high-technology applications. Combining oral historical interviews and archival footage, this film attempts to reconstruct the surreal and surprisingly contentious recent history of how surplus and defective quartz crucibles first made their way from materials science laboratories and semiconductor manufacturing facilities to yoga studios and New Age supply stores. Thursday, Oct 8, 3:40pm – 5:20pm (Mezzanine: Linden)

6 minutes

F7. Factory Lunch

Liliana Gil

Factory Lunch is a six-minute film about the afterlives of industrial labor. Set in a working-class town on the outskirts of Lisbon, Portugal - once a major site of garment production - the film follows a group of former factory workers who reunite for an annual "almoço da fábrica" (factory lunch). Filmed at one of these gatherings, the piece explores what remains after factory closures, particularly for the women whose lives were shaped by the rise and collapse of foreign corporate industries in the region.

Situated within feminist and postcolonial approaches to STS, Factory Lunch foregrounds the often-unrecognized role of working-class women in sustaining forms of technopower and shaping technoscientific futures. Rather than approaching deindustrialization through the lens of economic loss, the film attends to its social and affective dimensions. By attending to the afterlives of industrial work, the film also offers a critical angle from which to reflect on contemporary transformations around AI and automation, placing these within a longer lineage of histories of displacement, adaptation, and collective endurance.

The project experiments with filmmaking as a mode of relational inquiry, extending my longstanding academic interests in technology, skill, labor, and knowledge production outside conventional sites of expertise. Set in my hometown, Factory Lunch is grounded in lifelong ties with some of the participants, using moving image to intimately yet critically reflect on nostalgia and what makes a community. As a multimodal STS project, it explores how aesthetic and ethnographic forms can open alternative ways of thinking about collaborative knowledge production, care, accountability, and dissemination of scholarly ideas beyond the academy. Thursday, Oct 8, 3:40pm – 5:20pm (Mezzanine: Linden) 15 minutes

F8. Metallurgical Memory

Kimberley McKinson

Metallurgical Memory is a 10min intimate documentary portrait of Mr. Trevor Figueroa, a Jamaican master metal artist. In Jamaica, metal workers like Mr. Figueroa fabricate the aestheticized metal grilles, gates, and bars which securitize homes in the high-crime country. Centering Mr. Figueroa’s life history, the film explores his everyday embodied, spiritual, and artistic rituals of working with metal at his workshop in Kingston. The metallurgical practice of artisans such as Mr. Figueroa is rooted in the rise of blacksmithing rituals and technical knowledge in pre-colonial Africa. This practice survived the Caribbean slave plantation and continues to physically inform the material aesthetics of postcolonial Jamaica. These histories of black hands working with metal point to how metal matter is entangled with afro-diasporic lifeworlds. In illuminating the cultural significance of black metal artisanship to STS, Metallurgical Memory asks: How do Jamaican metalworkers’ practices of working with metal reveal personal and collective histories of creativity, identity, and afro-diasporic technoscientific memory? In taking seriously the agency, aliveness, and memory of metal, the film situates metal as a co-protagonist alongside Mr. Figueroa and considers the stories that metal tells in Mr. Figueroa’s life as well as in Jamaica. The metal security infrastructures that metal workers like Mr. Figueroa fabricate draw our eyes to the ethos of enclosure that undergirds life in many high-crime geographies. Metallurgical Memory disrupts this gaze by offering a metallurgical, new materialist, and technoscientific reading that considers metalworkers as intertwined with metal matter and with the vital material culture that they work. Thursday, Oct 8, 3:40pm – 5:20pm (Mezzanine: Linden)

17 minutes

F9. (De)colonizing Deep Time

John Shiga This multimodal research-creation project rethinks nuclear disposal sites and contaminated landscapes as nonhuman witnesses that mediate nuclear violence across deep time. Since the 1980s, U.S. Department of Energy initiatives have sought to design warning systems intended to communicate danger for thousands of years. These efforts can be understood as a form of the colonization of deep time: an attempt to project technoscientific epistemologies, settler-colonial governance structures, and gendered and racialized assumptions about human behavior into distant futures, treating the future as a space that can be captured and secured in advance through durable sign systems.

In contrast, this project asks whether and how deep time might be decolonized. Drawing on speculative and critical design, environmental media studies, and postcolonial STS, we approach nuclear sites as socio-ecological assemblages in continual processes of becoming. In a series of audiovisual vignettes, we foreground the idea of a nonhuman witness where materials such as rock, water, air, and radiation record and transform nuclear histories through contingent interactions with bodies, infrastructures, and environments. Meaning is not fixed but emerges unevenly through ecological relations, political struggle, and shifting forms of knowledge. Through speculative storytelling, archival remix, and field recordings from nuclear sites in Canada and the United States, this project assembles fragments from which narratives of contamination might be reconstructed rather than definitively known.

This project, led by John Shiga and co-designed with a team of undergraduate and graduate students in media, communication and design, is part of Becoming Radiogenic, an ongoing series of multimodal installations examining nuclear colonialism and media infrastructure. Friday, Oct 9, 3:40pm – 5:20pm (Mezzanine: York).