Collective Agency in an era of Authoritarian Automation: Artistic Research on Protest, Populism, Migration and the Computational Simulation of Crowds
REMESO, the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society, Linköping University, in collaboration with the Royal Institute of Art
Project participants, Anna Ådahl and Stefan Jonsson
Project period: 2022–2025
Funded by the Swedish Research Council, Vetenskapsrådet (P2021–01929)
www.collectiveagency.se
Anna Ådahl
Anna Ådahl is a visual artist and researcher working in various mediums such as film, installation, and performance. She uses the editing tools of assemblage and montage where found footage meets newly produced images, where ready-mades are used in spatial narratives and the body acting as an investigative tool in staged performances. Over more than a decade the notion and politics of crowds has been central in her artistic practice. Her fine art practice-based research, Inside the Postdigital Crowds, (2022), at the Royal College of Art in London addressed the aesthetics and politics of the digital conditions in which contemporary crowds are operated and governed.
anna.adahl@gmail.com
Stefan Jonsson
Stefan Jonsson is professor at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO), Linköping University. He holds a Ph.D. from the Graduate Program in Literature at Duke University. His research is transdisciplinary, with several books on modernism and modernity in relation to crowds, colonialism, nationalism, racism, migration, and diversity, such as A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions (2008) and Crowds and Democracy: The Idea and Image of the Masses from Revolution to Fascism (2013). In addition to Collective Agency, and linked to it, he is completing a project on political aesthetics in relation to collective protests.
stefan.jonsson@liu.se