School of Advanced Studies
University of Tyumen
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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.

Ksenia Fedorova

Research Interests:

The research focuses on how new technologies affect our perception and ways of thinking, including understanding of the self and its relationship with the world. Ksenia earlier work addressed the effects of technological mediation through the notion of the technological sublime. Today digital technologies become the pertinent context for the experience of something that exceeds our capacity for sensible comprehension. Yet, it works differently than the classical sublime. The claims of machinic intelligence to represent something about us that escapes our cognitive abilities confront us with the alien within ourselves that undermines the stability of the human position as a subject of aesthetic experience.

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.

Key Terms:

  • Media art
  • Aesthetics
  • Media theory and history
  • Interface
  • Science and technology studies
  • Affect theory
  • Artificial intelligence
  • Sensory translation
  • The “inhuman”
  • Science-art