Gioacchino Orsenigo is a visiting PhD student who joins the research program and the department of Digital Design and Information Studies for the Autumn 2023. Working at the University of Napoli L'Orientale, Gioacchino is part of TRU (Technoculture Research Unit) research group and of “Ecologie Politiche del Presente” (a Napoli-based group that gather environmental activists and researchers with a focus on the souths). His research that also links directly with the Environmental Media and Aesthetics program focuses on the narratives and discursive dispositives of the so-called Twin transitions (ecological and digital), drawing on contemporary cultural and media theory such as Parikka’s work alongside Sean Cubitt and Elizabeth Povinelli. 

Gioacchino explains: “My intent is to investigate how mainstream Western discourses on technological “progress” (which tend to represent the technical object as separate and unrelated to ecologies and as a surrogate “slave”) contribute to producing and legitimizing an invisibilized space, where to keep reproducing forms of recursive colonialism and extractivism. A “non-living” space from which to extract resources and low-cost labor and, at the same time, confine the toxicity produced by Western production system. The research therefore intends to think about some concepts such as mineral, toxicity, exhaustion and waste, not only as ecological but also political and social conditions and discuss the link between technological object and materiality and between technologies and ecologies, in an anti-colonial perspective.”

He will be presenting some of this work also in the Digital Aesthetics Research Centre lunch seminars in October.