Kristin Veel

As Professor of Aesthetic Technology Studies at the University of Copenhagen, my research examines the interplay between digital technologies, everyday life, and cultural imagination. I investigate how emerging technologies become entangled with perception, affect, intimacy, and social relations through everyday practices, and how such entanglements leave lasting traces in cultural history. Across my work, I am particularly attentive to invisibility, latency, and uncertainty as defining conditions of datafied and technologically saturated lifeworlds – conditions that are not only technical, but experiential, ethical, and cultural.

Grounded in aesthetic and cultural theory, my research spans film, art, literature, architecture, design, and everyday practices. I understand aesthetics not as a question of style or representation alone, but as a mode of attending to perception, sensation, and lived experience, and as a site where questions of responsibility, care, and power become tangible. Methodologically, I work across theoretical analysis, qualitative and ethnographic research, and practice-based artistic and speculative approaches. This combination allows me to address both the sensory and infrastructural dimensions of technology, and to explore how technological systems are lived with, negotiated, and contested over time.

A recurring strand in my research examines surveillance cultures and the ways monitoring and sensing technologies become embedded in ordinary environments over time, often through processes that remain unnoticed or unfold gradually. This includes work on data archives, urban infrastructures, and more recently the home as a site where technologies are negotiated through everyday practices of care, coordination, and attention. Through the research programme HomeCTRL, I explore how shared and networked domestic technologies participate in shaping intimate infrastructures, often in ways that only become visible when they accumulate or come into friction with existing relations.

Within this broader line of inquiry, my current project on Technology-facilitated Violence and Abuse (with Kassandra Wellendorf, Sofie Henze-Pedersen, Brigitte Dragsted, Maya Dyval Bayraktar, funded by Offerfonden) addresses a specific and urgent manifestation of these dynamics. The project investigates how everyday technologies can be implicated in coercive control and psychological violence in close relationships, and how such practices are enabled through processes of invisibility, temporal delay, and the redistribution of responsibility. Developed in close collaboration with crisis centres and the police, the project combines quantitative and qualitative research with cultural analysis, while remaining grounded in a wider research agenda concerned with how technologies are lived with, sensed, and negotiated across different contexts.

In parallel, I am also co-PI on several large collaborative research projects. These include Human–AI Collaboration: Imaginaries, Interventions, Interfaces  (with Søren Pold, Malthe Stavning Erslev and Kristoffer Ørum, funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark), which explores artistic and design-based approaches to generative AI, and The Aesthetics of Bio-machines and the Question of Life (with Kathrin Maurer, SDU, funded by Velux Foundation), which investigates how emerging bio-machinic technologies challenge established distinctions between the living and the non-living.

Alongside this work, I co-lead the interdisciplinary research hub INTERSECT at the University of Copenhagen, together with Henriette Steiner. INTERSECT fosters collaboration across the arts, humanities, social sciences, and design, with a shared focus on urban environments, landscapes, communities, and social justice, and serves as a platform for collaborative research that takes everyday life, care, and lived experience as central analytical concerns.

I am committed to fostering inclusive, caring, and collaborative research environments, and I welcome dialogue and collaboration with scholars, practitioners, and institutions within and beyond academia. I understand humanistic research not only as a means of analysing technology, but as a necessary space for sustaining attention, responsibility, and shared reflection in technologically saturated societies.