My official introduction to Science and Technology Studies (STS) began at 4S Honolulu: Sea, Sky, and Land: Engaging in Solidarity in Endangered Ecologies in 2023. Encouraged by my advisor, Afroditi Psarra, I participated in the conference with two artist projects: Moon Tapestry and a version of Vagina Chorus. I had two main motivations: (1) to understand academic conferences and presentation formats as an artist, and (2) to visit Honolulu. It wasn’t until I arrived at the conference that I noticed the acronym “STS” was frequently used. Only later did I realize that Science and Technology Studies was an established field of study.
This introduction to STS—both its terminology and methodologies—offered me new ways of seeing and making sense of the world. As a practicing artist, my work since 2017 has investigated the politics of knowledge production through the infrastructures of science, technology, culture, and society. Recurring themes include gendered experiences, embodied ways of knowing, material processes and craft, storytelling as both history and forecast, and the notion of being human as part of a data infrastructure. The interdisciplinary perspectives of STS have provided a productive framework to better understand what drives my artistic research and expression, as well as to theorize and reinterpret work I had already done.
I officially enrolled in the STSS certificate program at the University of Washington in Autumn 2024, under the supervision of Anna Lauren Hoffman and later Daniela Rosner. However, my coursework and artistic practice in this area began in Winter 2022, if not earlier. I have since collected artifacts from both within and beyond the certificate program.
❉ STSS Coursework
❉ STS Informed Art Practice
❉ Art and STS Pedagogy
❉ STSS Extracurriculars
❉ STS Informed Art Practice
❉ Art and STS Pedagogy
❉ STSS Extracurriculars
STSS Coursework
STSS 591: Science, Technology, and Society Studies in Action (micro seminar)
Autumn 2024
Autumn 2024
Facilitated by Professor David Ribes, the course provides an advanced introduction to science, technology, and society studies. Includes topics of active research interest in history and philosophy of science; social studies of science; science and technology policy; and ethics and equity issues. "Policy" was at the center of the readings. The final product of the course was a paper on "Science and Policy" in which we were asked to follow a topic about science that was developing at a policy level. I used this prompt as an opportunity to reflect on two areas of interest: 1) using the concept of "boundary object" to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration and pedagogy between media arts and environmental science, and 2) considering the metaphor, materiality and ownership over the internet and cloud infrastructure via examination of technical protocols, standards and white papers.
Key Texts
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3rd ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. Sorting Things out: Classification and Its Consequences. 1. paperback ed., 8. print. Inside Technology. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008.
GWSS 503: Feminist Research And Methods Of Inquiry
Spring 2022
Spring 2022
Taught by Professor Cricket Keating, the course provides an overview of feminist methodological issues and dilemmas and a variety of research techniques and methods, addressing ethical, political, and epistemological issues related to feminist methodology. The course emphasizes feminist research as a deeply interdisciplinary endeavor, one that necessitates an appreciation for a variety of research approaches so that students develop the capacity to produce (and to learn from), in the words of Donna Haraway “both vertical deep studies and lateral, cross-connecting ones.” This course introduced to me the concept of knowledge production, which later developed into a self-aware interest in STS. I used the context of this course to theorize a milestone project of mine, Vagina Chorus. The 40-page reflection became an important document to new iterations of the work, such as The Lost Genital Department: An Opera and the Vagina RPG Making and Doing Workshop I led at 4S Honolulu.
Key Texts
Simpson, Leanne. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Indigenous Americas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Mignolo, Walter D. “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference.” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 1 (January 1, 2002): 57–96. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-101-1-57.
ANTH 473: Anthropology Of Science And Technology
Autumn 2024
Autumn 2024
This course by Professor Celia Lowe is an introduction to key conceptions and ways of understanding science and technology in society. Of central concern for this course is understanding how science is more than a mirror of nature. In addition to reading several ethnographic texts by anthropologists on the practices of science and technology, we considered such issues as: how science is presented in the media; how science does or fails to engage with issues of social justice; and how to make technology more inclusive. Together, the readings and assignments provide frameworks for examining what it means to study science, technology, and data from humanistic and social scientific perspectives. My primary reflections from this course concern non-western scientific modes of knowing and being, embracing indigenous perspectives and more-than-human point of views, which are foundational to my ongoing works with biological arts and bacterial intelligence.
Key Texts
Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Edited by Jonas Salk. Princeton University Press, 1987. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400820412.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. London: Penguin Books, 2020.
Boellstorff, Tom. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. First new edition paperback. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015.
GEOG 595: Geographies of Technocapitalism (and Resistance)
Autumn 2024
Autumn 2024
This course by Professor Erin McElroy provided an opportunity to think together around intersections of capitalism and technology globally, historically and in the present. The course facilitates critical reflections on the role of place and space in technocapitalist formations, with additional focus on interdisciplinary and ethnographically grounded methodological approaches to knowledge production. Attention to capital, race, gender, and empire undergird conversations and readings throughout. This class helped me develop my research agenda and book project Technopoetics of the Cloud which examines the metaphors, aesthetics and affects of clouds and the cloud infrastructure.
Key Texts
Oldenziel, Ruth. “Islands: The United States as a Networked Empire.” In Entangled Geographies, edited by Gabrielle Hecht, 13–42. The MIT Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8357.003.0003.
Larkin, Brian. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42, no. 1 (October 21, 2013): 327–43. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412-155522.
STS Informed Art Practice
Commit to Memory, Know it will Perish
July - August, 2025
King County Gallery 4Culture, Seattle, Washington
July - August, 2025
King County Gallery 4Culture, Seattle, Washington
The installation examines the fragility and transformation of memory within biological and technological systems, considering how human information can be preserved when inserted as DNA molecules into other living organisms—as long as the host remains alive. Exploring artist Cecilia Vicuña’s claim that “writing creates forgetfulness, weaving creates memory,” I investigate the tensions between encoded information and embodied sensation, between human data and microbial behavior, asking, how is knowledge held or lost? The exhibition unfolds through living, decomposing, and metabolizing installations that resist stable meaning.
Key Text
Szymanski, E. A. (2018). Who are the users of synthetic DNA? Using metaphors to activate microorganisms at the center of synthetic biology. Life Sciences, Society, and Policy. 14(15). doi:10.1186/s40504-018-0080-3
The installation explores the intersections of memory, materiality, and technological infrastructure through embodied engagement. The work invites participants to situate themselves in physical entanglements: to position their bodies before a camera that cannot document their inner state, to hold in their hands a forever chemical that outlasts them, to ingest molecular information without decoding it. The act of doing—tying knots, cutting threads, savoring ephemeral moments—becomes an alternative archive, resisting the cloud’s forgetfulness.
Key Text
Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Amercias. 3. print. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
Technopoetics of the Cloud / Teach the Machine Something About Cloud
October 2024, Soil Artist Run Gallery, Seattle, Washington
May 2025, ISEA, Seoul, Korea
October 2024, Soil Artist Run Gallery, Seattle, Washington
May 2025, ISEA, Seoul, Korea
Technopoetics of the Cloud explores how the concept of the cloud has been negotiated across various knowledge domains—meteorologically, aesthetically, computationally, and infrastructurally. Building on the inquiries of my installation Teach the Machine Something About Cloud, this ongoing research project investigate how different disciplines, cultures, and desires shape—and are shaped by—our engagement with the cloud. Combining ethnographic interviews, artistic performative interventions, literature reviews, and global perspectives, I will examine how this abstract, shapeless phenomenon manifests across contexts and disciplines.
Key Text
Daston, Lorraine. “Cloud Physiognomy.” Representations 135, no. 1 (August 1, 2016): 45–71. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2016.135.1.45.
Ground Ensemble / Expanding Ground / Meshing Grounds
September 2023 - ongoing
Electronic Textile Camp / Sound Scene Festival 2024
September 2023 - ongoing
Electronic Textile Camp / Sound Scene Festival 2024
Meshing Ground is a movement-based, participatory performance where fifty or more participants collectively “lace” an open field by interweaving paths with yarn carried on their torsos. As they interlace, participants create a sprawling lace pattern, formed by aesthetic and relational intersections, defining both intricate paths and open spaces, or “holes.” The holes, central to lace-making, symbolize layered histories—from fragile marks of wear on fabric to symbols of power through decorative cloth. Inspired by the complex craft of bobbin lace, where individual threads form self-supporting designs, each participant in Meshing Ground acts as a self-organizing “bobbin” or “pin.” Together, they create an evolving social fabric. Drawing on Audre Lorde’s idea of social “love,” Meshing Ground invites reflection on how individuals, bound by their histories, might “embellish” shared spaces and imagine pathways forward through a coalition of interwoven lives and perspectives.
Key Text
Dahl, Sonja. “Whitework: The Cloth and Call to Action.” Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings, July 24, 2019. https://doi.org/10.32873/unl.dc.tsasp.0026.
Moon Tapestry is a 28-day offline calendar designed for tracking and visualizing Basal Body Temperature (BBT) using thermochromic textile technology. Each day’s BBT input activates heating elements within the tapestry, causing moon phase patterns to emerge, creating a temperature curve that reveals bodily events like ovulation and menstruation for those familiar with symptothermal birth control. Holding only 28 days of data, it contrasts sharply with typical FemTech devices that collect and centralize biometric data on cloud servers. Rejecting digital dependence, Moon Tapestry is a low-tech, open-source alternative that keeps intimate data private. It invites users to reclaim their data’s meaning without for-profit algorithms, offering a speculative vision of FemTech rooted in craft, domesticity, and women’s tactile knowledge. Displayed openly as an ornament, the tapestry is both private and highly visibile, creating a physical, aesthetic connection to one’s cyclical changes. Its deliberate, craft-based design encourages curiosity, care, and a hands-on approach to understanding the evolving body, challenging sleek, data-driven FemTech norms with an emphasis on embodied, personal insight.
Key Text
Hong, Sun-ha. Technologies of Speculation: The Limits of Knowledge in a Data-Driven Society. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2020.
Art and STS Pedagogy
Intertidal Innovators
Summer 2024, University of Washington
Instructor
Summer 2024, University of Washington
Instructor
The hybrid art and science program teaches intertidal ecology and targets middle and early high school students. On the science side, focusing on intertidal ecosystems, we teach about food web connectivity, the role of kelp and algaes as nurseries for juvenile fish, and how highly adaptable organisms, like mussels, are overextended. The intertidal is the space between their homes and the ocean, allowing for an education that is relatable and relevant, and focused on the holistic understanding of the ecosystem.
The art curriculum provides conceptual and technical guidance to support 11 participating youths in co-creating a collective, geolocated multimodal storytelling experience that is meant to be experienced in context, on location. Using digital cameras, audio recorders, editing softwares, GPS-enabled smartphone apps and principals of game design and social practice, students learn to create documents and artifacts of and about the intertidal zones. These mediated representations animate and augment the place, encourage place-based feeling, sensing, caring as an alternative to habits of consuming media contents passively, remotely, gesturally.
Most ocean education and outreach programs target students with significant financial means, even though disadvantaged communities of color suffer disproportionate effects of climate change. General access to outdoor spaces is also regularly reserved for those with the greatest means, perpetuating exclusionary practices around knowledge and familiarity, and access comes with safety concerns for marginalized populations. Our goal is to create a learning environment that centers our students’ lived experiences with climate change in a safe and supportive community.
This project aims to model bobbin lace-making using automata, combining traditional fiber art with computational techniques. Bobbin lace is a 500-year-old practice where artists braid threads into complex patterns, using repeated elements called backgrounds, grounds, or fillings. Traditionally, creating lace requires high levels of manual skill and experience. By translating lace-making techniques into automated rules, we can represent the steps of the craft as computational processes. This work involves breaking down lace patterns into algorithmic steps and applying principles from automata theory, such as states and transitions, to capture the precise and repetitive actions that lace-making requires.
This research will inform Ground Ensemble, a group dance project initiated by artist Althea Rao (DXARTS, University of Washington) that reimagines bobbin lace on a human scale, with performers acting as “lace bobbins.” In Ground Ensemble, participants will use choreographed movements to weave a social lace, exploring how individuals contribute to a shared social fabric. Each performer, like a bobbin, will contribute to the flexible and open-ended structure of lace, creating spaces of both visibility and invisibility through entangled actions.
To support this, student will design an automata model (a simple programming language) for bobbin lace that reflects how the local movements of individual dancers affect the global pattern. This computational approach will aid in generating choreography by simulating a self-organizing system. Thus, students will learn about the kinds of automata used for modeling parallel and distributed systems.
Student Github: https://github.com/raghavip03/bobbin_lace/tree/raghavi/main
Poster Presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1d9EfTTvgLZARY-g1PEMY5rI6C0LFaxWFj0bBIXTWRac/edit?slide=id.g358907d571f_3_130#slide=id.g358907d571f_3_130
Art Worlds of STS by Professor Daniela Rosner
Winter 2025
Grader / Teaching Assistant
Winter 2025
Grader / Teaching Assistant
I served as the Grader / Teaching assistant for Professor Daniela Rosner's Art Worlds of STS. This course reads across works—essays, exhibition catalogs, zines, and book excerpts—that bring artistic approaches, practices, and performances in conversation with science and technology inquiries, with a focus on minoritarian knowledge production within the arts. With tenderness and conviction, we examine how the artists support generative refigurings of scientific phenomena with and through their connection with relatives. The relational perspectives, often informed by Indigenous knowledge practices and performances, offers a radical refiguring of technoscience for those who engage it.
STSS Extracurriculars
Technopoetics of the Cloud
upcoming Open Panel at 4S Seattle
ISEA 2025
upcoming Open Panel at 4S Seattle
ISEA 2025
I am organizing an open panel at 4S Seattle in September 2025. The theme of the panel came out of my ongoing research, which I have presented a work-in-progress version at ISEA 2025.
The term “cloud” has become nearly unsearchable on the internet. Googling “cloud” now returns a mix of cloud-themed artifacts — cloud computing infographics, cloudy skies, and hybrids of both. These search results reflect the increasingly blurred boundaries of the “cloud” as a technopoetic concept. Studying the poetic function of “cloud” across discourses allows us to parse the hierarchy of cloud’s dominant significations as the cloud infrastructure continues to produce technical functions and aesthetic affect (Larkin 2013).
In classical Chinese poetry, clouds are depicted as free and evasive (Wang 758). Renaissance painters saw clouds as a subject defying linear perspective (Peters 2016). Meteorologists have classified and even attempted to manipulate clouds (Howard 1802, Nie et al. 2017, Erfani et al. 2024), while computer graphics researchers find volumetric clouds difficult to express algorithmically (Vyatkin et al. 2023). In addition to these varied cultural representations, clouds serve as an underlying metaphor within “The Cloud,” a vast networked system of hard drives, servers, routers, and fiber-optic cables (Hu 2016).
While“cloud” implies lightness, transparency and ubiquity, the information infrastructure it represents is material and concrete (Johnson 2019), requiring extensive energy and labor (Monserrate 2022, Wang 2020), subject to national and imperial controls (Oldenziel, 2011) and fueled by of technocaplitalist aspirations (Sadowski 2019, Kneese 2023). This open panel invites original contributions to explore how cultural, historical, and technological frameworks shape our understanding of the ‘cloud,’ examining its role as both a metaphorical and material infrastructure in the digital age.
In classical Chinese poetry, clouds are depicted as free and evasive (Wang 758). Renaissance painters saw clouds as a subject defying linear perspective (Peters 2016). Meteorologists have classified and even attempted to manipulate clouds (Howard 1802, Nie et al. 2017, Erfani et al. 2024), while computer graphics researchers find volumetric clouds difficult to express algorithmically (Vyatkin et al. 2023). In addition to these varied cultural representations, clouds serve as an underlying metaphor within “The Cloud,” a vast networked system of hard drives, servers, routers, and fiber-optic cables (Hu 2016).
While“cloud” implies lightness, transparency and ubiquity, the information infrastructure it represents is material and concrete (Johnson 2019), requiring extensive energy and labor (Monserrate 2022, Wang 2020), subject to national and imperial controls (Oldenziel, 2011) and fueled by of technocaplitalist aspirations (Sadowski 2019, Kneese 2023). This open panel invites original contributions to explore how cultural, historical, and technological frameworks shape our understanding of the ‘cloud,’ examining its role as both a metaphorical and material infrastructure in the digital age.
Commit to Memory
May 2025, PLASMA Speaker Series, University at Buffalo
May 2025, PLASMA Speaker Series, University at Buffalo
PLASMA (Performances, Lectures, and Screenings in Media Art) brings to Buffalo celebrated theorists and artists who are exhibiting in some of the world’s most renowned museums and galleries, and writing on the cutting edge of new media theory and expression. In this talk I explored how digital media shapes storytelling and knowledge production. Drawing from my research and creative practice, I examine how data-driven technologies encode power and bias, and how artists and scholars can intervene through critical media practices. I discuss projects that engage with performative and material data practices, participatory storytelling, and computational processes, demonstrating how emergent narratives can challenge dominant paradigms and model resistance and meaning-making.
I presented a pedagogical reflection on my teaching in Intertidal Innovators at Civic Art Lab in October 2024 (New York, NY). This interdisciplinary program combined environmental science, digital arts, and youth education, and was designed to engage students from underrepresented communities in exploring the relationship between intertidal ecosystems and artistic expression. The collaborative process among marine scientists, artist scholars, and the youth participants exhibited symptoms of incommensurability—defined by Thomas Kuhn as the condition of “lacking a common measure”—similar to those found in scientific communities governed by competing paradigms. However, as the program unfolded, the land itself emerged as a boundary object, facilitating a shared storytelling process that bridged the divides between these disparate perspectives.
Moon Tapestry: Idiosyncratic. Inefficient. Not powered by AI. a menstrual cycle tracker
4S Honolulu: Femtech, Health Data, and Landscapes of Surveillance Panel
4S Honolulu: Femtech, Health Data, and Landscapes of Surveillance Panel
Experts connected with PETRAS are calling for regulatory action after their research found security and privacy concerns in female-oriented technologies (FemTech) such as period –tracker mobile apps, and fertility and menopause smart devices are being used beyond health and medical clinics. Their findings have exposed a lack of research and guidelines for developing cyber-secure, privacy-preserving and safe products. Through an open call process, I was invited to join an artist cohort of 5 groups to respond to scientific research on the privacy, security, and ethics of female-oriented technology. Moon Tapestry was produced for the CyFer research project, which culminated in an exhibition at the Royal Holloway, University London. I presented this project at 4S Honolulu as part of the Femtech, Health Data, and Landscapes of Surveillance panel.
Vagina Unlimited is a multi-player role play game. I developed this game in 2023 and have led variations of this game as making and doing workshops at HASTAC 2023 and 4S Honolulu. Vagina Unlimited is a mutual-aid fellowship where vaginas who have chosen to walk off their human embodiments help one another find power in their visions and adapt to new lives.