What is your professional background and what is your primary research area?

"I have a very mixed educational background. My main subject is literary history, but I also hold degrees in media studies and anthropology. During my studies, I spent time in Paris studying with one of the most prominent philosophers of the time. After graduating, I worked for a software company – it was a time when anyone with even a little technological knowledge could get a job in the industry. Later, however, I returned to Digital Design and Information Science to write a PhD thesis on computer games and the aesthetic and artistic dimensions of the interface. So, I've moved around quite a bit, but today I actively draw on all these experiences in my research.

I'm particularly interested in digital underground culture and how the computer has historically – and still today – served as a platform for the development of art and culture. It’s a field marked by innovation, but also by a critical approach to technological development: Is it taking us in the direction we want? How is it changing the conditions of production and work? How does it affect our senses and our experience of the world? Such questions have always been central to media art."

What is your ongoing SHAPE research project, 'Knowledge Servers', about?

"The project explores how knowledge is produced in interaction with technologies. Generative AI is a good example: you often hear how AI services mediate – or even produce – knowledge as a service to the user. In our project, we aim to examine the underlying infrastructure: what enables knowledge production in the first place? Often, these conditions remain invisible. For instance, as consumers, we rarely see the thousands of people who have reviewed and described images before a machine can recognize or generate them – people who often work far from our protected Western reality.

The production of knowledge involves many material, political, and organizational relationships, and the obscuring of these relationships can present a democratic problem. Knowledge production is not neutral – it creates inequalities and can prioritize certain cultural values over others.

However, we are not only interested in exposing the technology. Rather, we investigate the conditions behind it and how these can be made more sustainable and aligned with democratic awareness. This is why we are particularly interested in the experiments of digital underground culture in creating 'autonomous' systems. By autonomy, we don't mean technologies that function entirely independently, but systems where participants – often collectively – have a say and choose the dependencies they want to enter into."

What impact do you expect your project to have on society or your research field?

"Autonomy opens up new ways of thinking about technology – systems that are typically more peer-to-peer than client-server based, operating on a smaller scale with a focus on rights, diversity, and sustainability. We’ve worked with platforms for collective knowledge production such as libraries, text annotation tools, generative imaging, server development and operation, and more – often in collaboration with actors from Europe’s digital grassroots culture.

We have already seen several forms of societal impact. First, we’ve helped bring attention to this cultural field at one of Europe’s largest media art festivals, transmediale in Berlin. Second, we’ve developed servers and services that actually work and are in use by selected groups – often people working at the intersection of research and artistic practice. For example, we’ve created a publishing platform and a system we use to share and produce knowledge as a research group – with the possibility of involving others.

Finally, we’ve gained several insights that contribute to the academic understanding of digital culture – its mechanisms and the ways digitalization shapes our society. These insights are valuable in themselves, but they can also form the basis for a more critical awareness of digitalization and inspire new, alternative directions for technological development. In line with this, we will publish a 'how-to' / 'read-me' book next year in collaboration with our partners in grassroots culture."

In addition to the Knowledge Servers project, Christian Ulrik Andersen is working on the book Minor Tech, which explores how digital art and underground culture illuminate the environmental, cultural, and societal impacts of Big Tech from minority perspectives. The book is funded by Carlsberg. Read more here.