Program
Three days, three themes, one lens: Visualizing Critique — 9–11 December 2026.
Day 1: Creativity
- 13:00 – 13:30 Registration & Welcome Snacks
- 13:30 – 14:00 Opening & Welcome
This workshop is designed to help data practitioners refine creative data concepts by letting their datasets guide their creative vision.
Participants will learn to leverage their data’s unique qualities and limitations through embarking on intensive, short-burst brainstorming sessions. These sessions will include method, material, and metaphor exploration, alongside strategies for creating emotional, empathetic, data-informed projects.
By bringing together their favorite elements from these exercises, by the end of this workshop participants will successfully generate “concept seeds” from which they can grow impactful data projects that are grounded in the reality of their data.
Stefanie Posavec
Data Visualization Designer & Artist
Stefanie Posavec is a designer, artist and author creating data-informed experiences across information design, data visualisation and public art commissions using a welcoming, participatory, and playful approach.
Her work has been exhibited at major galleries including the V&A (Kensington and Storehouse), the Design Museum (Designs of the Year 2016), Somerset House, the Wellcome Collection, Bletchley Park (all UK), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Exploratorium and MoMA (US), where her work is also in the permanent collection.
Her latest illustrated book I am a book. I am a portal to the universe, co-authored with Miriam Quick) has received multiple accolades, including winning the UK Royal Society’s Young People’s Book Prize. She has also co-authored two books that emphasize a handmade, personal approach to data: Dear Data and the journal Observe, Collect, Draw!
Day 2: Crises
- 09:15 – 09:30 Opening Day 2
The network map, the knowledge graph, the murder board… How do these familiar forms of information visualisation shape the data they convey — helping to express, explain, or enable flows of power and ideology? What are their limits in a time of information overload?
This workshop explores the situated material sociotechnical properties of these forms, drawing on historical political examples and artistic interventions. It also shows participants how to build such graphs, using open-source programming tools and publicly available data, with Ciston’s ‘AI War Cloud’ as a case study. No prior experience necessary; bring your computer and your ideas.
Sarah Ciston
Professor of Computational Thinking and Aesthetic Doing at Academy of Media Arts Cologne
Sarah Ciston is Professor of Computational Thinking and Aesthetic Doing at Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Their artistic research builds tools to bring intersectional, critical–creative approaches to machine learning. Winner of the 2025 Ars Electronica STARTS Grand Prize, they are the author of “A Critical Field Guide for Working with Machine Learning Datasets” and co-author of Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI (MIT Press, 2026).- 12:00 – 13:00 Lunch — Lobby PA building
This workshop draws on 20 years of US military contracting data to ask questions about knowledge, power, form and representation. Such data offers evidence of covert operations around the globe. But it also raises interpretative questions. How can we approach understanding of data when its scale is too large to be comprehensible? How do knowledge structures reflect complexity? What happens in the gaps between data and knowledge?
The discussion will look at historical as well as current practice-based responses to such questions, as well as presenting Black’s new publication with Edmund Clark, Cosmopolemos (2026).
Crofton Black
Investigative Journalist & Researcher at Lighthouse Reports
Crofton Black is a writer and investigator specialising in technology and security topics. He is a reporter and editor at the international collaborative newsroom Lighthouse Reports, and his range of practice spans OSINT, data analysis, interviews and fieldwork. He has taught classes in investigation techniques at University of the Arts London, Queen Mary University of London and UC Berkeley School of Law, among other places.
He has a PhD in medieval and Renaissance philosophy from the Warburg Institute, London, and was a postdoctoral Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin.
- Public discussion at display, a public space for digital practice in the center of Frankfurt. As a walk-in screen and interface, experimental laboratory, and community space, it is the perfect place to reach out to the community of Frankfurt.
- from 18:00 Social Event — Christmas Market at the Römer
Day 3: Connections
- 09:15 – 09:30 Opening Day 3
This is a space for students and interested community members to present the works and concept drafts they have developed in the connected courses — from the first concept seeds of the opening workshop to visual experiments and works-in-progress responding to this year’s theme, Visualizing Critique.
In an open gallery-walk format, we move from piece to piece, giving every project the room for questions, peer feedback, and collective reflection on what it means to visualize critique.
- 11:00 – 11:30 Short Break — Lobby PA building
In this workshop, we will examine how data is articulated in educational contexts. As a starting point, we will look at how the data aspects of AI and machine learning are starting to be researched and integrated in computing curricula. We could use any discipline to ground this starting point, but here it will be computing. Example curricula we will look at are the new CSTA (USA) computing standards, and the UNESCO student competency frameworks. A particular aspect for reflection will be how we move from a techno-centric view of data within computing education to a socio-technical view.
We will consider whether there is an ‘old view of data’, in computing education, say within computational thinking, and a new view that has been ‘revealed’ by the recent and rather abrupt introduction of free AI tools. Through this discussion we will explore opportunities and challenges to ‘routes’ to change related to what we might teach about, and with data, in computing education (and beyond). We will consider how to drive from the social context rather than react to impact and consider what this might practically mean in policy, curriculum development, teacher professional development and learning activity design and delivery.
Jane Waite
Computing Education Researcher at Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre
Jane Waite is a computing education researcher. She works with the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre at the University of Cambridge and also undertakes research with Professor Paul Curzon at Queen Mary University of London. Before her research career, she worked as a developer in the IT industry for twenty years and as a primary school teacher for ten. These experiences taught her how important it is to take a sociological view of technology education, and to work WITH teachers — supporting them to not just be ‘effective’, but to be authentic and see their value in society.
She has researched widely in K-12 computing education and published on the teaching of AI literacy, teaching with AI, computational thinking, design, culturally relevant pedagogy and primary pedagogy. At the Research Centre she leads projects investigating AI and data ethics, how we might teach about AI, and teaching programming with AI tools. She has recently advised on the CSTA standards in the USA and a range of UK Government-funded initiatives on computing and AI curricula.
Throughout this work, she is most interested in agency: how we help all those learning about computing and AI tools to understand their choices in the use of technology, and to have the confidence and true relevant skills to make critical and value-based decisions.