While certainly timing in many research fields, digital platforms studies often suffer from a narrow perspective, stemming from the dichotomic view that is embedded in the modernist rationality. Holding on to given, traditional dichotomies – such as material/immaterial, natural/artificial, and even hard and soft sciences – risk hindering any attempt to critically study and consciously inhabit digital platforms, which are at once ambiences and agents. Attempts to locate the shifting relationship between users and platforms within outdated hierarchical architectures, fail to capture the complex entanglements between human and non-human actors, data-driven (bio)politics and emerging tensions between autonomy and auto-regulation.

For instance, the emergence of an algorithmic space of agency from the user-side, which may look like self-imposed routines of control and expectations, may also materialize into self-visibility as sabotage, exposure as friction or hyper-performance as glitch. Either way, this tension itself rescales the processes of bodily quantification and numerical self-visibility, too often paraphrased through the lexicon of standardisation and massification. Therefore, agency has to be rethought beyond the binaries of compliance and dissent, and platforms are to be approached as terrain of struggle, ambivalent ambiences and technopolitical ecologies where visibility itself becomes a site of negotiation.
How can we integrate the acknowledgement of multiple sites of surveillance and discipline, both exogenous and endogenous, with a more through understanding of power dynamics and asymmetries in contemporary platform ecology?

Responding to this urgency, our Winter School aims to function as a laboratory for reflection and practice – or praxis. For us, this commitment extends beyond simply “getting our hand dirty” (though we probably will): through this initiative, we aim to embrace our positions as young researchers by stepping outside certain logics of knowledge production – such as the frantic pursuit of learning aims and deliberables. Instead, we hope to initiate a collective and generative process with the participants and lecturers, engaging together in rich moments of theoretical discussion, methodological exploration, collective imagination, and artistic re-enactment.

This Winter School responds to the need for a different mode of inquiry. Hence, we propose the walkthrough method as a protocol for critical and embodied gesture, capable of tracing the experiential infrastructures, user pathways, and aesthetic-political cues that govern our digital routines. While the walkthrough allows us to engage in a dis-assembling effort of platforms semiotic elements, through Art Based Research it is possible to embrace the affirmative dimension that, in our view, could be part of critical platform studies, as it is inherent of critique.

We invite PhD students, early-career researchers, artists, and independent scholars who are curious to explore:

•  New ways of studying platform logics from the inside out
• Tactics of self-visibility and algorithmic resistance
• Critical and experimental applications of the walkthrough method
• Situated and post-disciplinary approaches to digital inquiry
• Artistic, speculative, and collaborative methodologies

The school will combine:

• Morning seminars with scholars and artists
• Afternoon workshops and platform walkthroughs
• Collective moments of methodological reflection
• Performative and artistic re-enactments
• Informal dialogues and co-theorization