Infrastructural Heat

Nora Almeida is an urban swimmer, social practice artist, educator, and activist based in Lenapehoking. Her work explores intersections of ecological investigation, spatial disruption, and urban autonomy. Recent public artworks—Last Street End in Gowanus (2021), Land Use Intervention Library (2022), Open Water (ongoing), and Creek: Two Cavities of the Heart (ongoing)—focus on relationships between people and environmentally disturbed waterfront spaces. Her art and research involves methods including: performance, installation, stewardship, oral history, public printmaking, counter-mapping, and somatic movement.

Nora was a 2023-2024 Climate Justice Fellow with Culture Push, a 2022 Water Connector with Works on Water, and a 2021 Social Practice CUNY Faculty Fellow. She works at the City University of New York, volunteers at Interference Archive, and is a printmaking apprentice at Shoestring Press. She is co-founder of the Hydrofeminist Map Collective. Her book, The Social Movement Archive, co-authored with Jen Hoyer, was published in 2021.

Steven Chodoriwsky is a Canadian designer, artist, writer, and educator. His research-centered practice engages with performance and interdisciplinary platforms, pedagogical models, and speculative acts of reading and writing with the built environment. His projects employ a diverse range of media including site-specific installation, workshops, publishing actions, theatre pieces, and audio-visual artifacts.

Based in Salt Lake City, he is Assistant Professor in the Division of Multi-Disciplinary Design at the University of Utah. Prior to this, he taught at Cal Poly Pomona, Cornell, and at the University at Buffalo, where he held the Peter Reyner Banham Fellowship. He was educated in architecture at the University of Waterloo and the Tokyo Institute of Technology. He has also held art/design research positions at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, and the Center for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu.

Chodoriwsky has exhibited and performed work at venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, de Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam, and the Suzuki Company of Toga International Theatre Festival, Japan, among others. With curator Julie Niemi and designer Chris Lee he is a member of Collective Question, a working group that studies structures of resistance through archival research and exhibition production. He also publishes experimental documents for organizations and ad hoc occasions under the loose moniker Edits.

Claire Dickson is a vocalist, composer, improviser, and producer practicing emergent embodied songwriting. She considers song to be an artistically flexible modality that can encompass poetry, melody, harmony, rhythm, theater, philosophy, and any other idiom catalyzed by voice. Her work utilizes microphones, pedals, synthesizers, field recordings, acoustic instruments, and draws from lineages of improvisation, extended vocal technique, sampling, and deep listening. She creates interdependently with the Berlin and New York experimental music communities as an improviser. She graduated from Harvard in 2019 with a BA in Psychology and Music and has released two albums, Starland (2022) and The Beholder (New Amsterdam Records, 2024).

Zachary Furste is an artist, scholar, and permanent lecturer in New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He works on theories and histories of technical media, artistic research, and technology in the arts. His multimodal practice draws from archival techniques, digital forensics, software infrastructures, and the history of aesthetics.

In experimental websites like compressions.cc, postal.media, i-o.tv, thermostat.tv, iiil.li, and cybersyn.cc, he explores how the technical layers of the internet condition knowledge and social value.

Alongside his research and creative practice, Furste is a systems developer at the Digital Methods Initiative, where he works on the infrastructure behind the DMI’s suite of tools for internet research.

Furste holds a PhD from Harvard University. Previously, he has held fellowships at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, University of Southern California, and Carnegie Mellon University.

fields harrington (b. 1986) is a Brooklyn-based artist whose practice spans sculpture, performance, video, photography, drawing, and writing. harrington investigates the political, social, historical, and economic forces shaping the production of empirical knowledge, with a particular focus on science. His work critiques how ideologies—such as racism and the enduring financial logic of slavery—have shaped scientific practices that uphold systems of oppression. By revealing the intersections between knowledge production and the abstraction of power, harrington challenges the construction, transmission, and weaponization of knowledge.

harrington has a BFA from the University of North Texas, an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, and studied at San Antonio Community College. He was a participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program. He has presented solo exhibitions at the David Salkin Gallery, KAJE, Petrine, and Y2K Group. He has exhibited in group shows at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Galerie Thomas Schulte, Parsons School of Design, 52-07 Flushing Avenue, and Automat Gallery. fields harrington was an L.A.B. researcher in residence at The Kitchen in collaboration with The School for Poetic Computation and participated in the research residency Site to be Seen at RAIR.

Jessica studied Textile Design at the Rhode Island School of Design and Comparative Literature (Africa/Asia) at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Her PhD, awarded by the University of Edinburgh is published under the title Yvonne Vera: The Voice of Cloth (kalliope paperbacks: 2008). She is editor of In the Loop: Knitting Now (Black Dog: 2010), The Textile Reader (Berg: 2012 / second edition Bloomsbury: 2023) and author of Warp & Weft (Bloomsbury: 2012). Her editorial and curatorial project Cultural Threads (Bloomsbury: 2015) was accompanied by a travelling exhibition Migrations (2015–17).

Jessica edited PARSE Journal issue 18 Thinking in Motion and co-edited issue 19 Powers of Love with Jyoti Mistry, issue 15 Violence: materiality with Ole Lützow-Holm and issue 11 Intersections with Kristina Hagström-Ståhl and Jyoti Mistry. Recent writing includes the Afterword to Humanitarian Handicrafts: History, Materiality, Trade (Manchester University Press: 2024), “Toward a Minor Textile Architecture” in Entangled Histories of Art and Migration (Intellect: 2024) and “Crafting Extremes in Andreas Eschbach’s The Hair-Carpet Weavers” in Text/Techne (Bloomsbury: forthcoming). From 2020-2023 she was the Rita Bolland Fellow at the Research Centre for Material Culture, the Netherlands and is currently Professor of Craft at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg and Professor II at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design.

She was PARSE Editor-in-Chief during 2024 and 2025.

Hsuan Hsu received his PhD in English from UC Berkeley. He is a Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, where he works in the fields of American literature and culture, environmental humanities, critical ethnic studies, sensory studies, and cultural geography. His publications include Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge, 2010), The Smell of Risk (NYU, 2020), Air Conditioning (Bloomsbury, 2024), and articles in journals such as American Literary History, ISLE, Panorama, Camera Obscura, and Jump Cut. He has on the editorial or advisory boards of several journals, including Literary Geographies, American Literature, Genre, Multimodality and Society, and Venti: Air, Experience, Aesthetics. He has received fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. He is currently completing a short book on Olfactory Worldmaking and co-editing (with Ruben Zecena) a special issue of Senses and Society on the topic of Migrant Sensoria.

Cathryn is Editor-in-Chief of PARSE, and currently a senior lecturer in Fine Art at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, teaching and supervising at masters and doctoral level. Cathryn is a spatial theorist with a particular focus on interiors and processes of interiority across micro and macro scales. They are currently writing a book which considers how interstellar spatial phenomena can help to spatialise the ethics of artistic research. 

Cathryn has co-edited issue 17 of PARSE on Citations. 

Onkar Kular is Professor of Design at HDK Valand, Academy of Art & Design, University of Gothenburg. His practice has been disseminated internationally through commissions, exhibitions, education and publications. He has guest-curated exhibitions for The Citizens Archive of Pakistan, Karachi, and the Crafts Council, UK. He was Stanley Picker Fellow in 2016, Artistic Director of Gothenburg Design Festival in 2017, Co-Artistic Director of Luleå Art Biennial in 2022 and curator of the sonic festival, Bass Cultures, How Low Can You Go! Falkenbergs teater, Sweden in 2023. He is the co-editor of Urgent Pedagogies Journal Issue #6, Earthed Imagination (2023) and Urgent Pedagogies Journal Issue #9, The Right to design (2024).

Dr. Friederike Landau-Donnelly [she, they] is an intersectional political theorist, urban sociologist and cultural geographer. She is interested in political theories of conflict, and the ways in which public spaces are contested. Through empirical and artistic research in places like Vancouver, Berlin, Leipzig, Linz, Vienna and Malmö, Friederike theorizes different modalities of conflict in cultural policy and governance arrangements amongst commissioned and self-instructed artists, artist collectives, policymakers, and local communities. Friederike has developed and taught undergraduate, graduate and PhD-level courses in a variety of disciplines such as human geography, spatial planning, arts and design, political theory and sociology. As co-editor of publications such as Handbuch Kulturpolitik (Handbook of Cultural Policy, Springer, 2023), Konfliktuelle Kulturpolitik (Conflictual Cultural Policy, Springer, 2023), and [Un]Grounding – Post-Foundational Geographies (transcript, 2021), Friederike has contributed to create an understanding of the conflictual underpinnings of the production of space and culture. Friederike publishes poetry as #PoeticAcademic: https://friederikelandau.com/poeticacademic/  

Gerrie van Noord is an editor/curator of publications and educator who has been involved with PARSE Journal since 2016. Her practice focuses on publications as sites for articulation in relation to both artistic and curatorial practices, and she is particularly interested in expanded understandings of collaboration. For Artangel she produced the ‘Afterlives’ publications (1997–2002) and for Book Works she commissioned the ‘Fabrications’ series of co-publications (2006-09). She was managing editor of the critical anthologies The Curatorial Conundrum: What to Study? What to Research? What to Practice?(2016), How Institutions Think: Between Contemporary Art and Curatorial Discourse (2017) and Curating after the Global: Roadmaps to the Present (2019), as well as Between the Material and the Possible: Infrastructural Re-examination and Speculation in Art (2022). She worked with Olivia Plender on the book Rise Early, Be Industrious (2016) and a website of the artist’s entire body of work (2021) and edited Curling Up with Reality (2021), a selection of Isabel Nolan’s writing. Moist recently she co-edited Kathrin Böhm: Art on the Scale of Life (with Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson, 2023), Not Going It Alone: Collective Curatorial Curating (with Paul O’Neill and Elizabeth Larison, 2024) and Curious (with Paul O’Neill, 2024). Gerrie was a Visiting Lecturer on the MFA at the Glasgow School of Art (2003–15), Associate Lecturer on the MA Arts Policy & Management at Birkbeck, University of London (2006–19) and is now Tutor (Research) on the MA Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, London. She has a PhD from Birkbeck, University of London (2021).

Natalie Novik is a spatial practitioner, researcher, and educator based in Sweden. Her work centers on urban commoning, collective care, and socially engaged architecture, exploring how multiple subjectivities are embodied in the spaces we inhabit. She has worked as an urban planner and design consultant, focusing on dialogue processes; created site-specific installations as a member of the Creature Collective, and co-founded  Studio REplay. Her practice incorporates urban curating through ficto-critical methods, games, speculative narrations and cartographies, assemblages and scores. She holds a master’s degree in Architecture and Planning Beyond Sustainability from Chalmers and is pursuing a PhD in artistic research at HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design. Her research examines spatial practices from the margins, particularly maintenance and repair as a form of spatial activism.

Sara Sassanelli is co-founder of Alice Agency and Associate of CONDITIONS studio programme. Until 2024, they were Curator of Live at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) where they programmed across dance and electronic music, with a focus on emerging artists. Their work explores collective and enthusiastic cultures that form around raving and how these manifest in multidisciplinary practices. Their most recent ICA programme, this dark gleam (2024), showcased artists engaging with formal technique, social dance, pop culture, and punk sensibilities. Currently, they are collaborating with Eve Stainton, Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, Billy Bultheel, and Jose Funnell, among others. Previously, they have worked at Tate, Goldsmiths, and the Royal Academy of Arts, and have programmed events at Ormside Projects, Somerset House Studios, Southwark Platform, Guest Projects, Arts Admin, Fierce Festival, and Block Universe. They programme across dance and electronic music.

Recent programming includes: NX FUIMO by Tamara Alegre (2024), GONER by Malik Nashad Sharpe (2024), Afterlife by Louis Schou Hansen (2024) IMPACT DRIVER by Eve Stainton (2023), minus one series (2022 – 2023), Dykegeist by Eve Stainton (2021), The Last Breath Society by Martin O’Brien (2021), Rave Trilogy by Rebecca Salvadori (2020) The Tender Interval: Studies in Sound and Motion (2020), a convening exploring the transformational qualities of sound and dance practices and an all-night takeover of ICA by collective INFERNO (2020 & 2023).

Ram Krishna Ranjan is a lecturer in Film at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg. He works at the intersection of research, pedagogy and film practice. His educational background is in Economics, Media and Cultural Studies, Fine Art and Film. In his work, he critically explores decolonial and postcolonial perspectives and the intersectionality of caste, class and gender. He has made several films on these issues. His latest, Fourth World, delves into the various facets and stages of a creative-collaborative practice that attempted to foreground and engage with Dalit experiences of the Bengal famine of 1943.

Becky Shaw is an artist researcher and Professor in Fine Art Practice at Birmingham City University. She led the Sheffield Hallam University art and design PhD programme from 2015-2024,and co-led Static Gallery, Liverpool 2000-2006. Becky makes live, collaborative artworks that examine the tension between individuals and social structures, in institutions of ‘public good’ including healthcare, education, utilities and work. Works examine a specific assemblage of people, structure and time, with movement often functioning to unsettle the institutional apparatus. Commissions include for City of Calgary Water Services, Sarah Wigglesworth Architects, Guys and St Thomas Hospital, Walsall Art Gallery, Sainsbury Centre, Grizedale Arts and Amstelveen Art Incentive Prize. Currently, Becky is exploring what artists bring to interdisciplinary research teams. This includes Infrastructure as Culture with Sophie Hope (et al), Justheat (CHANSE fund, 2022), Odd: Feeling Different in the World of Education (2018-2022) and Things of the least (AHRC exhibition fund, 2023-2026).

Cara Tolmie spends much of her time oscillating between contexts as an artist, musician, performer, DJ, pedagogue and researcher. Her practice at large investigates the complexity of the bind between the voice and body – of how voice can traverse internal and external realities of both the sounder and listener and how it can research various qualities of embodiment, both pleasurable and disorienting. She is currently finishing a PhD at Konstfack, Stockholm, in critical sonic practice. 

Marina Otero Verzier is an architect and researcher whose work sits at the intersection of critical spatial practices, ecology, technology, and activism. In 2022, she received the Harvard GSD’s Wheelwright Prize for a project on the future of data storage. She is a Lecturer in Architecture at Harvard GSD and Dean’s Visiting Assistant Professor at GSAPP, Columbia University, New York, where she leads the ‘Data Mourning’ clinic, an educational initiative focused on the intersection between digital infrastructures and climate catastrophe. She collaborated with the Supercomputing Center of the DIPC to develop alternative models for storing data, such as the project Computational Compost, first presented at Tabakalera. Otero was also invited by the Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge, and Innovation to participate as an expert in the development of Chile’s first National Data Centers Plan, together with “Resistencia SocioAmbiental – Quilicura” and other local communities on the front lines of extractivism. Otero was the Head of the MA Social Design Masters at Design Academy Eindhoven (2020-2023) and  Director of Research at Het Nieuwe Instituut (2015 to 2022). She  has curated exhibitions such as ‘Wet Dreams’ at Mayrit, CentroCentro (2024), ‘Compulsive Desires: On Lithium Extraction and Rebellious Mountains’ at Galería Municipal do Porto (2023), ‘Work, Body, Leisure’ at the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2018), and ‘After Belonging’ at the Oslo Architecture Triennale (2016).  Otero is the author of En las Profundidades de la Nube (2024), a book on data storage and sovereignty in the AI era. The book proposes new paradigms and aesthetics for data storage, integrating architecture, preservation, and digital culture.  She has co-edited Automated Landscapes (2023), Lithium: States of Exhaustion (2021), More-than-Human (2020), Architecture of Appropriation (2019), Work, Body, Leisure (2018), among others.