Kristoffer Gansing

Kristoffer Gansing

Professor
Department of Design Faculty of Arts and Humanities
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I am Professor in Design, specializing in Visual Communication at the Department of Design at Linnaeus University. My work spans digital and post-digital culture, curating, artistic research, media theory, and transdisciplinary practice. I am particularly interested in moving beyond representational forms in favor of a humble epistemology of agency and socio-cultural change through artistic practice as a form of situated, enacted, and performative knowledge. Currently, I am working on artistic research into small-scale and non-extractive media infrastructures and developing the framework of material speculation as a methodology in art and design.

Between 2020 and 2023, I was a Professor of Artistic Research at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, where I headed the three-year project, The International Center for Knowledge in the Arts. This professorship included coordinating and developing artistic research across seven national Higher Arts Education schools in Denmark, spanning Visual Art, Film, Music, and Performing Arts. Starting in autumn of 2023, I have also held a Visiting Professorship at the Department for Art & Media Technology at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. Here I form part of the research group Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics.

Prior to this, I was the artistic director of the transdisciplinary digital art and culture festival transmediale, in Berlin, directing nine editions from 2012 to 2020. This included festivals such as BWPWAP - Back When Pluto was a Planet (2013), afterglow (2014), Capture All (2015), and End to End (2020). As part of this work, I also took part in (co-) developing and managing a residency program for artistic research, an online journal, festival publications, as well as fundraising and communications.

I was awarded my PhD in Media and Communication from K3 – School of Arts & Communication, Malmö University in 2013 (Faculty of Culture & Society). My MA was in Film Studies (University of Karlstad and Lund), and I also hold a degree in cultural production from K3/Malmö University.

 

Teaching

At LNU and the Department of Design, I mainly teach the 2nd and 3rd years of the BFA in Visual Communication and serve as an examiner on the students’ final projects. My approach to the subject of Visual Communication is highly transdisciplinary, as it’s a field that practically interacts with the whole of society. I encourage the students to take a critical, speculative, and playful approach, seeing their future role as one of possibly transforming the field of visual communication in response to changing ecological, technological, and social spheres.

I have previously taught widely across BA and MA programs, predominantly at K3, School of Arts & Communication, Malmö University. Here I conducted courses and supervised final projects for MAs in Cultural Production, Media & Communication Studies and I also developed and ran a stand-alone course called Networked Digital Storytelling.

Students will benefit from my transdisciplinary expertise in film, media, and digital cultures, but in my experience, they only truly progress when they feel empowered to take responsibility and ownership over their learning process. Humility and responsiveness are key words in my teaching style, while I provide students with analytical tools for critical reflection to provoke their thinking and practice in new directions. I want to empower the students to develop a media literacy that is transversal, developing a historical awareness and covering the multidimensionality of meanings across the technological, social, and environmental, as well as leading to an integration of theory and practice. This transversal approach characterizes my research and teaching and ultimately has a transformative aim, aligning practice with an aesthetic realm of both sensing and doing the world otherwise, extending beyond taken-for-granted understandings and deployments of art, design and media.

Research

My current research focuses on the techno-aesthetics of infrastructure in audiovisual network culture and artistic research, combining organisational, technological, and artistic concerns. Inspired by the work on techno-aesthetics by French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, I explore an aspect of aesthetics that involves sensorial and material engagement, which is useful for practice-based research rather than more reception and interpretation-oriented approaches. This has also resulted in the collaborative artistic research project A Video Store After the End of the World (2023) and its closely related follow-up The Great Netfix (2024-) with artist-researcher Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter, which unfolds as a material speculation on alternatives in automation and media infrastructures.

The projects mentioned above build on some of my earlier research and artistic practice, which have often dealt with low-tech and non-linear approaches to contemporary digital culture. My PhD thesis, Transversal Media Practices (2013), included two practice-based case studies on how media archaeological and activist art practices reconfigure linear conceptions of technological development. It was awarded Dissertation of the Year at Malmö University and was innovative in its use of practice-based artistic methodologies in Media Studies. Additionally, the thesis bridged otherwise separate disciplines, such as art and cultural studies, medium theory, media archaeology, and practice-based research, the latter including curating, artistic interventions, and collaborative cultural production.

Commissions

I am part of the Leadership group as well as the "Professors' Kollegium" at the Department of Design.

Outside of LNU, I have worked as a reviewer for The Swedish Research Council (grants in artistic research) and internationally as a reviewer of higher arts education and research environments. I have been a jury member of numerous grants and residencies in art and culture, for organisations such as Berlin Senate for Culture & Europe, Goethe Institute, Region Kronoberg and Framtidens Kultur. As part of my work at The International Center for Knowledge in the Arts, I managed a funding program for artistic research of the Danish Culture Ministry. I have been part of the Working Group „Digital Platform“ of the European Alliance of the Academies since 2020 and between 2019-2023, I was Advisory Board Member of the Center for Art & Urbanistics (ZK/U – Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik) in Berlin.

I am a main editorial board member, Duke University Press: Cultural Politics Journal. Member Advisory Board, Open Humanities Press, Series MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW (Ed. Prof. Joanna Zylinska) and Advisor/Reviewer for "A Peer-Reviewed Journal About" (Digital Aesthetics Research Centre), Aarhus University.

In addition, I peer-review for different journals and conferences within my field of expertise.

Publications

Selected publications

Article in journal (Refereed)

Article in journal (Other academic)

Article in journal (Other (popular science, discussion, etc.))

Chapter in book (Refereed)

Chapter in book (Other academic)

Collection (editor) (Other academic)

Doctoral thesis, monograph (Other academic)

Conference paper (Refereed)

Conference paper (Other academic)