National University of Singapore

Faculty Member, Communications and New Media

Assistant Professor

National University of Singapore

About

Denisa Kera is Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore where she is also a fellow of the Asia Research Institute (STS cluster) and Tembusu college.
Her present research brings together history of science, philosophy and design, and combines issues and methodologies  from Science Technology Society (STS) studies and interactive media design. She is trying to create design probes and tools for deliberation and public participation in science. She follows and supports science community labs and alternative R&D places (Hackerspaces, FabLabs) across the world with a special focus on DIYbio movements, consumer genomics and various citizen science projects. The ethnographic research of these participative and design oriented forms of R&D is combined with genealogical interest in the origins of tinkering culture in the 16. century mechanical arts, early visions of Academy of sciences and discussions between science and alchemy.
Current design projects focused on food and the use of critical probes to reflect upon issues in food studies: Secret Cooks Club www.secretcooks.org and FoodMatch www.foodmatch.org.
Previous design project (2008 - 2010): real time video & heritage (Living Avatars Network: outsourcing experiences in real time), real time video as ethnographic methodology.
Teaching and Research interests in Interactive Media Design, Science and Technology Studies and topics in Digital Culture and Art.

Past:
Extensive experience as a curator of exhibitions and projects related to art, technology and science: ENTER2 (2005) "Game Art", ENTER3 (2006)  "Artists in Labs" http://www.enter3.org, "TransGenesis: festival of biotechnology and art" (2006 - 2007) http://www.transgenesis.cz, SCART (2004 - 2008) http://www.scart.cz, C2C (2006 - 2008) http://www.c2c.cz.
Research associate at the Center for Global studies, Academy of Sciences in Prague (2006 - 2008), doing research on posthumanist theory and globalisation, technological acceleration and evolution.
Assistant Professor of New Media Studies (2004 - 2008) which she helped establish at Charles University in Prague.
Visiting lecturer in the PhD. programme at the Faculty of Architecture, Technical University in Prague, and several digital art related programmes.
Career in various internet start-ups as marketing director (1996 - 2000).

Education:
Ph.D. in Information Science from Charles University (2006), MA in Philosophy (1999).
Ph.D. thesis (New media theory as ontology of the computer code) examines the concept of performativity in relation to computer codes and analyses the different attempts to define new media theory and to reflect upon emergent technologies.
MA thesis (The development of contemporary philosophy in the 20th century: paradigms of language, text, hypertext and multimedia) positions new media theory in the context of continental philosophy.

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