Bethany Crawford is an artist-researcher working with digital technologies to interrogate the shifting existential paradigms of the digital age within a framework of post-humanist theory, new materialism and traditional philosophy. She works from a protracted-body-assemblage of human and technics, collaborating with written words, camera and sound equipment, moving image, animation software and artificial intelligence, as a method to reflexively analyse the affective drives that compel technical production from the very nexus of the human-technical relation. Her current creative practice propositionally considers pleasure as an influential affective force with the potential to exceed and pervert the contemporary economic structures of technical production.
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Bethany is currently a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. She is a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam department of Media studies, and a tutor at Leiden University for the Social and Ecological Justice Activism in the Visual Arts minor. Bethany graduated from the University of Amsterdam with a Media Research Masters and holds a Masters of Art Praxis from the Dutch Art Institute. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in Moving Image from the University of Brighton.
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She is a co-founder and the creative director of the Fuck Healing (?) collective. The collective implemented a summer program of events in 2023 titled “Fuck healing (?): The Insomniac Dreamers” at OT301 in Amsterdam, which was supported by Amsterdam Fonds der Kunst, Netherlands Institute of Cultural Analysis, Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis and the Mondriaan Fonds.
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Bethany’s creative research trajectory “Pleasuring Technics” is supported by the Mondriaan Fonds. Her book, Redefining Eternity: Interfacing Immortality in the Digital Corporate World was published in 2021 with the publishing house Academica Press. She was recently commissioned by Aalto University, Finland, to develop a curriculum and creative work in response to the “Data Vitality: Soft Infrastructures and Economies of Knowledge” programme.
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Bethany’s research project ‘The evolutionary concrescence of Bethany Crawford” was supported by the Creative Europe I-Portunus scheme and has been exhibited in Berlin, Helsinki, Brighton, Amsterdam and Sardinia. Recent presentations of research include Fuck Healing (?): the Insomniac Dreamers at OT301, Fuck Healing(?): Living the Wounded Life at Treehouse NDSM, Hotel Maria Kapel, Hoorn, The Netherlands and The Wonders of Possible, IX° LMDP International Festival of theatre art and new technologies, Kyberteatro, Italy. The Fuck Healing (?) Collective have a written contribution in the forthcoming publication Resistance, Activism and Health with the Oxford University Press and an additional text forthcoming in the edited collection Digital Exhaustion with Intellect publishers.
Learn more about Bethany Crawford's written MA thesis (DAI, 2019): Interfacing Immortality: Redefining Eternity in the Socio-Economic Corporatocracy of the Digital
Learn more about Bethany Crawford’s 20 minute presentation The evolutionary concrescence of Bethany Crawford for "AEROPONIC ACTS - growing roots in air" DAI's 3 day performance lecture marathon, May 2019 at Silent Green in Berlin.
Bethany Crawford returned to DAI to report on the AEROPONIC ACTS 2020 ~ Bend It! (Radio Kootwijk, The Netherlands). In 2024 she became a member of our Admissions Committee.
