Johannes Bruder

Head of the Critical Media Lab Basel (CML) of the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Culture (IXDM) at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland. He studies the speculative and imaginary aspects of infrastructures - sociological models, psychological mechanisms, and affective potentials encoded in infrastructural designs ranging from algorithmic systems to financial markets to pipelines. He is currently most interested in imaginaries of energy, the physical realities that these imaginaries install, and the management of energies, physical and affective. The latter involves an interest in structures of feeling and tactics of disaffection. He has contributed to Transmediale, the Anthropocene Curriculum, Reset Modernity! at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM), and to the Energy Show at Het Nieuwe Instituut, among others. His first book Cognitive Code. Post-Anthropocentric Intelligence and the Infrastructural Brain (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019) is based on fieldwork in neuroscience laboratories and provides deep insights into the bio-politics of contemporary machine learning. Johannes has a strong interest in experimenting with research methods, knowledge practices, alternative pedagogies and publication formats that unsettle disciplinary paradigms and render research in the humanities operational in real-world contexts.