Agenda

“Learning With” Workshop Series
Scaling the Microbe

Monday, March 30, 2026 | 14.00–18.00 
Aula B, Ca' Bottacin Dorsoduro 3911 30123 Venezia

Gloria Chan-Sook Kim in dialogue with Antonia Majaca Friedman,
Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

Gloria Chan Sook Kim is Associate Professor of Media and Culture at the University of California–Riverside. Trained in Visual Culture and Science and Technology Studies, her research examines the visual and epistemological problematics raised by complex crisis ecologies of the 21st century, such as emerging microbes, vulnerable ecosystems and infrastructures, and extreme climates. Kim’s monograph, Microbial Resolution: Visualization and Security in the Era of Emerging Microbes (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) develops a theory of “microbial resolution” to chart out a history of emerging microbes in ways that reframe the epistemological, political, and ontological stakes of vision in the 21st century. She has published numerous articles on topics in computation and culture, environmental humanities, and visual culture including: Salient, Object, Interesting: Operational Aesthetics and Machine Vision Interfaces (forthcoming, co-authored with Aubrey Anable); 99.9% Effective: Calculating Confidence and Consuming Trust in Antibacterial Promises, and Pathogenic Nation-Making. Kim’s current research examines machine learning technologies working amid extreme climate conditions. Her research has been awarded by multiple organizations including the American Council of Learned Societies, The Mellon Foundation, and the Society for Humanities at Cornell University.

A key pressure point of contemporary societies and politics has come up the inevitable emergence of yet unknown microbes. Emerging microbes surface as complex crisis objects of the 21st century. They are complex because they implicate multiple seemingly unrelated world systems, they unfold across ungraspable temporal and spatial scales, and they often herald unprecedented and unforeseeably catastrophic futures. These factors render emerging microbes objects that are critical to bring into view but that evade standard viewing instruments or established scientific knowledge forms.

In this session, we explore how emerging microbes and their futures in potentia become “scaling mediums” through which ecologies, world systems and infrastructures, and global and social relations are studied, felt, and experimented with. We think through a set of images, which use computational modes of seeing to transmute the inherent non-knowability of emerging microbes into view: algorithmically modelled futures, satellite-tracked wildlife, global logistics computing, and virus data banks.

In a dialogue moving across histories of vision, biomedical politics, aesthetics, world systems security, environmental ethics, and risk economics we probe the paradoxes and failures inherent in the project to bring microbial emergence into view as operable objects of world science and security. We explore the material and epistemological paradoxes represented by emerging microbes to reveal how they inflect twenty-first-century aesthetics and epistemologies, social and planetary politics, and world infrastructures and systems.

“Learning With” is an experimental workshop series and the primary methodology of the Radical Epistemologies cluster at NICHE, cultivating epistemic commoning within Venice’s transient conditions.

Registration: antonia.friedman@unive.it

Organized by HealthXCross ERC project led by Roberta Raffaetà, DFBC and by NICHE