About

Afroditi Psarra is a researcher whose work encompasses a diverse range of topics related to sound, radio, and embodied ecologies. Her projects include exploring ventriloquism, transmission ecologies, and the intersection of sound and space through works such as Ventriloquist Ontology, Listening Space, and Embodied RF Ecologies. Psarra's practice involves engaging with complex systems like fractal antennae, radio transmissions, and the cultural implications of sound technologies. Her artistic and scholarly pursuits extend into the realms of soft art, radio aesthetics, and the cultural dimensions of transmission, as evidenced by her series 'The Culture' and projects like Memory Overlay and Soft^Articulations. Psarra's work often investigates the relationship between sound, technology, and embodied experience, contributing to contemporary discourse in media arts, sound studies, and experimental radio. Her diverse portfolio reflects a commitment to exploring the boundaries of sound and radio as mediums for cultural and technological inquiry.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Human–computer interaction
• Art
• Advertising
• Psychology
• Multimedia
• Business
• Epistemology
• Cognitive psychology
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• Resistive Threads: Electronic Streetwear as Social Movement Material

  Designing Interactive Systems Conference · 2024-06-29 · 14 citations

  article

  Informed by legacies of textile activism, we design Resistive Threads as a wearable probe to investigate potential roles and trajectories of electronic streetwear in US urban social movements. Resistive Threads is an interactive denim jacket that refashions the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s (Dis)location Black Exodus print zine. The jacket plays audio stories, poetry, and music from embedded speakers when interactive patches sewn with conductive thread are tapped upon. Examining the artifact with 10 community organizers and partners, we find that augmented streetwear may take on the role of a housing organizing instrument or speculative garment. In turn, we discuss how we might learn from textile histories and solidarities to recognize—not rehearse—damage-centered research. We close with a reflection on what makes the electronic aspect of e-textiles meaningful to social movement practice and performance.

  PublisherDOI

• Shaping lace: Machine embroidered metamaterials

  2024-07-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access

  The ability to easily create embroidered lace textile objects that can be manipulated in structured ways, i.e., metamaterials, could enable a variety of applications from interactive tactile graphics to physical therapy devices. However, while machine embroidery has been used to create sensors and digitally enhanced fabrics, its use for creating metamaterials is an understudied area. This article reviews recent advances in metamaterial textiles and conducts a design space exploration of metamaterial freestanding lace embroidery. We demonstrate that freestanding lace embroidery can be used to create out-of-plane kirigami and auxetic effects. We provide examples of applications of these effects to create a variety of prototypes and demonstrations.

  PublisherDOI

• Convenors’ Note – Interactive and Performative Textiles

  Journal of Textile Design Research and Practice · 2024-05-03

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Kirigami Antennas

  2023-10-07 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  With the progression of technology as integrated into daily life, physical tech has become increasingly embedded or hidden from the user’s view. Because of this design change, many of the aesthetics that previously defined everyday technology have disappeared from the public eye. Our ability to connect the capability of technology with the spacial world it utilizes has disappeared with it. This notion is especially true for antenna design. An object that was once visible on cars, houses, and phones is now so embedded in the devices that use it that its technology is essentially formless. Kirigami Antennas is a research exploration centering on e-textile meta-materials, designing antennas that are cognizant of their use and relation to space. This collection of antennas are not embedded nor hidden. They instead borrow from the art of Kirigami to re-insert themselves into the 3D space from which they receive their signals. Through experimentation with Kirigami antenna shapes, we are able to design freestanding lace antennas that effectively received electromagnetic signals at a wide range of frequencies, picking up AM, FM, and HAM radio, along with other data transmissions. Kirigami Antennas provides a space for experimentation with antennas as objects that help us reach and search through space.

  PublisherDOI

• Slanted Speculations:

  Designing Interactive Systems Conference · 2022 · 14 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science

  Over the past few years, AI bias has become a central concern within design and computing fields. But as the concept of bias has grown in visibility, its meaning and form have become harder to grasp. To help designers realize bias, we take inspiration from textile bias (the skew of woven material) and examine the topic across its myriad forms: visual, textual, and tactile. By introducing a slanted experience of material and therefore of reality, we explore the translation of fraught machine learning algorithms into personal and probing artifacts. In this pictorial, we present nine pieces that materialize complex relationships with machine learning; ground these relationships in the present and the personal; and point to generative ways of engaging with biased systems around us.

  PublisherDOI

• Justice-oriented Participatory Electronic Textile Making

  2022-08-15 · 7 citations

  article

  Participatory Design and Participatory Textiles Practices have only recently begun to address their shared roots in notions of solidarity and community-building, as well as movements towards more just worlds. With this workshop, we hope to address, unpick, and strengthen them, by building an interdisciplinary and international community. Our workshop will focus on the processes involved in Participatory Design and Participatory Textiles Practice rather than outcomes, allowing us to acknowledge the need for continuous work and effort, project and relationships maintenance, and so on; and allowing us to appreciate that this work may never be complete. We will do this through fostering shared spaces of knowledge dialogues through the process of making, un-making, and re-making our projects metaphorically and physically.

  PublisherDOI

• Moving Design Research: GIFs as Research Tools

  2021-06-28 · 9 citations

  articleSenior author

  Animated GIFs are often viewed as a nod to early internet culture or as tools for digital communication, but in this pictorial, we highlight a new use of GIFs, as tools for design research. We walk through four case studies from our own research that exemplify GIFs used throughout the design process as empirical probes, prototypes, communication tools, and finalized artifacts. By conducting a collaborative, reflexive analysis of these cases, we present an annotated portfolio of the goals, crafting and aesthetic choices of our GIFs and how creating GIFs added to our research. We conclude by noting that both the aesthetics of movement and the rich, concise, and contextualized nature of gifs added to our depth of thinking and ability to communicate speculative and imaginative concepts. Finally, we also suggest that research dissemination, especially for design research, would be enriched by supporting more diverse knowledge-production artifacts such as GIFs.

  PublisherDOI

• Sensing Textures

  International Symposium on Wearable Computers · 2021 · 8 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Human–computer interaction
  • Computer Science

  Sensing Textures: Tactile Resistance is a collection of eight swatches comprised of e-textile sensors and actuators that probe ideas around the politics of crafting handmade technological artifacts. By engaging hands-on with the production of these artifacts, this work aims to reflect on alternative modes of world-building that allow for speculation about how bespoke technology can look and feel like when it is highly personalized. These eight swatches explore different crafting techniques while responding to personal narratives, questions about how we perceive the world and how we embody the making of technology collectively in a critical manner.

  PublisherDOI

• Voices and Voids: Subverting Voice Assistant Systems through Performative Experiments

  Creativity and Cognition · 2021 · 13 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science

  Responding to concerns such as privacy, surveillance, and the commodification of personal data with regards to voice assistants, this artistic research focuses on creating performative artifacts and vignettes that challenge artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies. By allowing AI voice assistants to listen to our most private conversations, we become receptive to their mediated care, while forgetting or ignoring how much these automated interactions have been pre-scripted. With our project Voices and Voids, we reclaim, examine, and ultimately transcode these voice assistant data through interdisciplinary performance and Post-Internet Art. In this paper, we thematically describe 12 vignettes which represent embodied and sonic experiments using a combination of design, data-driven art, cyber crafts, found-object and traditional percussion instruments, spoken word, and movement. We conclude with a discussion of how the experiments worked as a multifaceted whole, and how we used interdisciplinary methods as a central approach.

  PublisherDOI

• Listening space

  2019-09-05 · 13 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Listening Space is an artistic research that was born during the eTextile Spring Break camp that took place in upstate New York at the beginning of April 2019. Following their previous explorations of ecologies of transmissions and wanting to experiment with Software-Defined Radio, the authors, setup a DIY satellite tracking station and aimed at intercepting the NOAA weather satellite audiovisual transmissions. During the course of three days, they observed five satellite passes, intercepted successfully three transmissions and decoded the audio signals into images which they later knitted in order to create a textile archive of the transmissions. Conceptually the project seeks to explore transmissions ecologies as raw material for artistic exploration, to understand and re-imagine in poetic means, representations of audio and images broadcasted from space, while regarding knitted textiles as a physical medium for memory storage and archiving.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Pauline Vierne

  Technische Universität Berlin

  3 shared

• Shary Kock

  3 shared

• Ioana Popescu

  Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism

  3 shared

• Vitalii Shupliak

  3 shared

• Milie John Tharakan

  3 shared

• Ionut Patrascu

  3 shared

• Tincuta Heinzel

  Loughborough University

  3 shared

• Hillevi Munthe

  3 shared

Labs

• Afroditi Psarra LabPI

Education

• PhD in Image, Technology and Design, School of Fine Arts

  Complutense University of Madrid

  2014

• BFA in Fine Arts and Art Sciences, Department of Fine Arts and Art Sciences

  University of Ioannina

  2005

Awards & honors

• 2019 Bergstrom Award for Art & Science