Sofia Boschat Thorez is a researcher, educator and cultural worker whose focus is on digital infrastructures and knowledge organisation systems. Her current interests mostly involve finding modes of collective learning and organising, outside of digital extractivism, alongside strategies to divest from infrastructural oppression.
She can be reached at heysofia[at]tuta[dot]io, has a mastodon account and an instagram account (for now).
She can be reached at heysofia[at]tuta[dot]io, has a mastodon account and an instagram account (for now).
Affiliations
* Teaching Critical AI literacy in the Arts Numériques department @ St Luc ESA, Brussels* Lecturer, graduation supervisor and member of the Critical ICT group @ the Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam
* Member of Varia Rotterdam South's center for everyday technology
* Member of the Infra-Resistant group
Projects, commissions, research
* The past walks beside us, whispering its unfinished tales research support w/ TITiPI, Miriyam Aouragh, Omar Jabary Salamanca and Karl Moubarak.* Doing Data Justices: A collective, trans-disciplinary search for more pluralistic citizenships and doing the digital differently w/ researchers from Leiden University, Erasmus University and TU Delft.
* Nvidia Complicit Chips Reader in collaboration with Helen Pritchard and Femke Snelting for the Complicit Chips worksession
* Rotterdamse Belhuizen, a research project on the rise and demise of call shops for migrant communities and access to technology in Rotterdam /w Cristina Cochior and Julia Bande.
* Living Archives: co-leading of a research group on living archives for the Going Hybrid project, looking into the future of hybridity in the cultural field together with the Institute of Network Cultures, the hhmm, MU and Hackers and Designers
* Vernaculars come to matter editor of a collection of contributions and reflections on the relationship between computing, standardisation and knowledge organisation (notably through natural language processing), together with Cristina Cochior and Manetta Berends
* Memory as Palimpsest? (essay for publication) w/ Sofia Boschat-Thorez - Pub. PUB Sandberg Instituut
* Monoskop and Naked on Pluto as a case study for trans-institutional public documentation of online artworks (with Dušan Barok and Aymeric Mansoux)
* Lead developer for Banner Repeater’s Digital Archive of Artists' Publishing (including server administration, wikibase deployment and application development using Flask)
* Publication of Archiving complex digital artworks together with Dušan Barok, Annet Dekker, David Gauthier and Claudia Röck https://doi.org/10.1080/19455224.2019.1604398
* Pushing Scores: concept, architecture, development and design of an archive for De Player’s long term project on graphic scores in music, “Pushing the score”, together with Cristina Cochior
* Collaborative Archiving of Digital Art: a work session held at the Uva during the Digital Methods Winter School /w Annet Dekker, Dušan Barok and Claudia Röck. The group investigated the use of version control software for the preservation of born digital artworks
* Cultural matter: UBERMORGEN at LIMA Amsterdam. Research on the documentation, distribution and reexhibition of complex research based born digital artworks, in charge of the UBERMORGEN's Chinese Gold casestudy. Tasks also involved presenting the research with Hans Bernhard, designing the exhibition publication, making and editing an interview of the artists and the redaction of a paper on the research with recommendations.
* Mining the Cloud a practice based exploration of the origin, evolution and spreading of the metaphor of the Cloud in computing by extracting contexts of use from the archive of Wired magazine together with Manetta Berends.
Workshops
*Miscalculating Risk series On surveillance technologies in the Netherlands, from law enforcement to higher education /w Sanne Stevens, Cristina Cochior, Antye Guenther, Erasmus SocTalk*Colonial infrastructures series is a series of worksessions looking at systems reinforcing colonial dynamics and pressures around us /w amy pickles, Cristina Cochior and Clara Balaguer. Guests have included Arthur Asseraf, Miriyam Aouragh, Yasmine Boudiaf, Denzel Weerkamp, Chinouk Filipe and Learning Palestine
* Digital Autonomy and Infrastructure session and participation to closing panel for the Garage School of prepping Otherwise of CLiP#7 (Collective Learning in Practice) at Kunstinstituut Melly.
* Digital Infrastructural Resistance hosting of a session on digital autonomy and collective organisation in the context of Survival Infrastructures, a day of gathering where different activists and grassroots organisations shared their skills and engaged in conversations about collective power at Geemal op Zuid in Rotterdam.
* Glamorous Refusal (in a world of Tech Bros, become a Data Diva): A workshop to develop glamorous, humorous and flamboyant strategies to empower workers in contesting Big Tech’s data extractivism. This workshop was created in collaboration with Cristina Cochior for Antye Guenther’s Data Diva training programme at Buitenplaats Brienenoord.
* Interplanetary File System Unearthed, a workshop on network protocols characteristics in relation to decentralisation (with collective experimentations using the IPFS protocol) /w Cristina Cochior for WDKA and Varia
Talks, presentations...
* Conversation on mediated pedagogies for the lecture series Radical pedagogies organised by Claire Tio and Christoph Brunner from the Erasmus School of Philosophy /w Maxime Hackermann (online)* Presentation of Resistant Energy research project with Karl Moubarak, Miriyam Aouragh and Omar Jabary Salamanca (in diverse configurations) at SPUI and De Appel (Amsterdam) and the Critical Media Lab (Basel)
* Big Tech, Killer Robots and the Genocide in Gaza a presentation mapping out the Hogeschool Rotterdam’s institutional connections to militarised technology through Big Tech entanglements for the RUAS Studium Generale /w Dr. Samer Abdelnour (University of Edinburgh)
* Presentation of the Doing Data justices research at the Governance of Migration and Diversity conference (Leiden)
* Anti colonial Tech, a conversation with TITiPI on Cloud infrastructures' role in military and oppressive operations and creating new forms of colonialism
* Collective and non-extractive digital infrastructures presentation at AI Infrastructures for Civil Society and the Arts with Cristina Cochior (online)
* VLTK (Vernacular Language TookKit) presentation /w Cristina Cochior at the Connecting Otherwise H&D Summer Academy (Amsterdam)
* Presentation of the Mining the Cloud research (about the emergence of the concept of Cloud computing) during the Tangible Cloud collective worksession and contribution in the form of an interview interview
* Presentation of Computer vision Mnemosyne research for Sami Hammana at the plotting data publication launch at Framer Framed
* The Social in the Media /w Roel Roscam Abbing, Manetta Berends, Silvio Lorusso and Sofia Boschat-Thorez at ODD, Bucharest (on the practices of Varia)
* Presentation of research on Version Control Systems for Archiving Complex Digital Artworks at the yearly American Institute of Conservation conference /w Annet Dekker, Dusan Barok and Claudia Roeck
Publications
* The Palestine Shadow Library @ Monoskop by the Fuzzy Mirror Network* The print at home version of the the Critical ICT group's Zine about Microsoft
* The past walks beside us, whispering its unfinished tales w/ TITiPI, Miriyam Aouragh, Omar Jabary Salamanca and Karl Moubarak.
* Nvidia Complicit Chips Reader /w Femke Snelting and Helen Pritchard
* Resistant Infra zine - a list of alternatives to services provided by companies complicit in the genocide in Palestine
* Tangible Cloud Publication by Antoine Gelgon, Alexandre Leray, Marianne Plano and Romain Marula
