Head of Research IXDM, Professor
Professor Helen V. Pritchard is an artist-designer, geographer, activist and queer love theorist. Their work considers how computational infrastructures and digital media impact social and environmental practice. Helen works with participatory and creative practice methods for co-research, drawing on trans*feminist and queer approaches. Their research addresses how practices configure the possibilities for life—or who gets to have a life—in intimate and significant ways. As a practitioner they work together with companions to make propositions and designs for environmental media, regenerative energy and computing otherwise, developing methods to uphold a politics of queer survival and practice.
Since 2013, Helen has been a member of Citizen Sense, an award winning group investigating the relationship between technologies and practices of environmental sensing and citizen engagement: And, since 2020 a co-organiser of The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI), together they convene communities to hold computational infrastructures to account and to create spaces for articulating what technologies in the “public interest” might be. With TITiPI they are the principal investigator on the CHANSE funded project ‘SOLiXG’. They are also co-investigator on the Swedish Energy Agency funded project ‘Regenerative Energy Communities’, working at the intersections of energy design and agro-ecology.
They are the co-editor of ‘Data Browser 06: Executing Practices’ (2018) and ‘Sensors and Sensing Practices’ (2019), the manual Infrastructural Interactions: Survival, Resistance and Radical Care (2022) the forthcoming (2023) anthology ‘Plants By Numbers: Art, Computation and Queer Feminist Technoscience’ and the Future Media Series for Goldsmiths Press.
Helen is Professor and Head of Research IXDM, HGK Basel, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland FHNW. They also hold an associate professorship in Queer Feminist Technoscience at University of Plymouth.
Helen also teaches on the MA Experimental Design at IXDM.