SESSION 4
Subsurface Sensing, Heated Atmospheres
18th June 2026 - 17:30 to 19:30 - Utrecht University Library City Centre (Room E0.32 - Digital Humanities Workspace)
Registration is required. You can do it via this link: Session 4 - Registration
In this session, we invite Suneel Jethani and Anastasia Kubrak to share their ongoing works that expose how extractivist logics flatten the complexities of bodies, environments, and data into tools of governance. Moving between atmospheric heat and subterranean materialities, the session interrogates how climatic and geological processes are sensed, modeled, and contested. We will discuss how the standardised metrics used by corporations and states can be hacked and rearticulated, turning data from a site of extraction into a critical medium for counter-representation.
Suneel Jethani examines the datafication of heat‑stressed bodies, showing how biosensing and real‑time monitoring operationalise extractivist logics through bodily heat, turning situated experience into quantifiable data while embedding new forms of surveillance and control. Anastasia Kubrak follows lithium as an elemental medium through two entangled histories - as a so-called critical raw material for the EU’s energy transition and as a psychiatric substance. Tracing extractive regimes across European semi-peripheral regions, she examines how 3D mineral deposit models aesthetically perform abundance, while communities and artists develop counter-visualisations in response.
Anastasia Kubrak
Lithium Baths and Electric Baths. Exhibition at Bagno Popolare. Credit: Nicolas Petit. (2026)
Suneel Jethani
Heat Synch: Biosensing and the data alterity of heat stressed bodies (Ongoing)
Anastasia Kubrak
On Bathing and Mining Grounds (Ongoing)
⇥ All sessions will take place in person. Unfortunately, at this time, online participation is not available.
⇥ Participants are welcome to attend individual sessions or the entire series.
If you would like to share a work-in-progress, propose a research question, or discuss an artistic project collectively, please email us at least one week before the session, s.lopescoelho@uu.nl, and anarroblesperez@gmail.com. Simply include a brief note about yourself and what you hope to explore during the session.
MOVING IMAGES POST-EXTRACTIVISM , A programme by Salomé Lopes Coelho