Ksenia
Fedorova
Bio:
Ksenia Fedorova is a media art researcher and curator. She is currently completing her PhD in Cultural Studies at the University of California Davis with the dissertation titled “Feedback Interfaces, Encodings of Affect in Media Art and Technoculture”. She holds Ph.D in Philosophy/Aesthetics (St.Petersburg State University, Ural Federal University, RU), MA in Art History (University of Colorado, Boulder), and MA in Philosophy (Ural State University). Ksenia’s research interests encompass media art theory and history, aesthetics, philosophy, techno-cultural studies, science and technology studies, visual culture and curatorial studies. She is the co-editor of Media: Between Magic and Technology (2014, in Russian, short-listed for the national Innovation and Kandinsky awards, 2014) and an author of more than 30 articles (including in Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Media & Culture Journal, Acoustic Space, Dialog of Arts). In 2007-2011, she was an initiator and curator of the “Art. Science. Technology” program at the Ural branch of the National Center for Contemporary Arts (Ekaterinburg, RU). Ksenia has taught classes on media and media art theory and history in Russia, the U.S. and Austria and participated in numerous international conferences.

Research Interests:
Ksenia’s current research concentrates on the problem of communication and translation of affect via feedback interfaces in media art and technoculture. Operation of feedback is fundamental for human cognition and perception, and given today's technological capabilities, it also becomes a critical ethical and political issue: by allowing the technology (such as biofeedback or machine vision) to help us to look back at ourselves we delegate it a certain agency over often sensitive and private data. Particularly, the researcher considers the effects of the psychological mechanisms of projection and recognition in the context of algorithmic procedures in digital simulation (link 1, link 2). Ksenia bases her observation on the material of artistic practice placed in dialogue with the broader theories of the "self", mediation and interactivity.
Her other interests include the issues of transmediality, proprioception, augmented and virtual reality, locative media, diagrammatic modeling, affective computing, speculative design, wearable technology.