Dr. Lucie Kolb will become Professor of Critical Publishing at the Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures (IXDM) at the HGK Basel from 1 January 2025, where she will be active in research and teaching and co-head the PhD programme Make/Sense.
The HGK Basel is happy to welcome Dr. Lucie Kolb as a Professor for Critical Publishing at the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures (IXDM) at the Basel Academy of Art and Design (HGK Basel) from January 1, 2025.
The search committee, led by Prof. Dr. Claudia Perren (Director), unanimously chose Dr. Lucie Kolb. Members of the search committee were: Dr. Winnie Soon (External Expert, Associate Professor of Art and Technology, University College London), Prof. Matthias Böttger (Head of Institute IXDM), Prof. Dr. Helen Pritchard (Head of Research, IXDM), Florence Le Bégue (Member MOM), Guillemette Legrand (PhD Student), Christoph Haering (Member of the University Board) and Nadja Brunazzi (HRV).
Prof. Dr. Lucie Kolb studied for her bachelor’s degree in Media Art and Fine Arts in Zurich, Basel, and Buenos Aires (2005-2008). She completed her Master of Fine Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts (2010) and earned her PhD at the Institute for Art and Cultural Sciences at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2017). In her publication titled Study, not Critique (Transversal Texts 2018), she explores forms of artistic research through publications since the 1970s and examines what can be learned from them for today’s critical art and design research. With the co-founding of Brand-New-Life (2015), she created a multilingual open-access publication platform between art, art criticism, and research to give space to the complexities and ambiguities of worlds in transition.
Lucie Kolb currently leads two research teams at IXDM: the SNF project Sharing Knowledge in the Arts (2023-2027) and the swissuniversities funded research project Critical FAIRness (2023-24). Both projects combine art historical and media studies approaches with archiving and critical infrastructure practice. They also deal with experimental forms of open-access publishing and practices of sharing and reusing research data in art and design.
Lucie Kolb regularly presents the results of her research at international conferences like EASST (Amsterdam, 2024), SHARP (Reading, 2024), DARIAH (Basel, 2024) and publishes them in open-access publications such as Culturemachine (2024), Critical Infrastructure Studies & DH (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2025) and Politics of Open Infrastructure (De Gruyter, forthcoming 2025) as well as exhibitions and events such as Reading the Library (Sitterwerk, 2021) and Wir publizieren (Kunsthalle Bern, 2020).
Lucie Kolb collaborates locally and internationally with many research partners to support the development of knowledge infrastructures for art and design research. For the research database and digital archive of cyberfeminist and net-critical practices of the 1990s, these include: Rhizome, New York; Open Science Lab, TIB - Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library, University of Hannover; Digital Humanities, University of Bern; Center for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University. Lucie Kolb has been involved in many working groups and committees in the field of Open Science and Open Education, including the coordination group for the Swiss National Open Research Data Strategy Council (2022-23) and the Hybrid Education Community (since 2023). She has also been a reviewer for the “Handbuch zur Erstellung von diskriminierungsfreien Metadaten für historische Quellen und Forschungsdaten der Universität Basel” (2024) (Handbook for Creating Discrimination-Free Metadata for Historical Sources and Research Data at the University of Basel) and has been a board member of the “Gesellschaft für künstlerische Forschung Deutschland” (Society for Artistic Research Germany) (since 2023). For her commitment to open education and research-based teaching, she was awarded the FHNW Fellowship (2022-24).
In the area of Critical Publishing, Lucie Kolb is interested in investigating and developing knowledge infrastructures such as libraries, collections, and archives. She also examines mechanisms and structures that create social injustice in knowledge organizations and explores how collective work can provide a foundation for common infrastructural imaginaries. At HGK Basel, Prof. Dr. Lucie Kolb will mainly be active in research and teaching (in BA Process Design and MA Transversal Design) at IXDM, and will co-lead the institute-wide PhD programme Make/Sense. She brings 14 years of teaching and research experience from universities in Vienna, Karlsruhe, Lucerne, Bern, Zurich, and Basel.
In its current development HGK Basel is increasingly focusing on contemporary, high-quality study programmes, that strengthen research, teaching, and collaborations. Diversity, sustainability, and current social transformations play a significant role in this. With Prof. Dr. Lucie Kolb, HGK Basel has gained another dedicated professor who knows how to act excellently in this thematic spectrum.
The date of Prof. Dr. Lucie Kolb’s inaugural lecture will be announced later.
Prof. Dr. Lucie Kolb’s contact details can be found on the here.