Ksenia Fedorova is a university lecturer at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society. Within the Modern and Contemporary cluster of LUCAS, she is affiliated with the Environmental Humanities sub-cluster.

More information about Ksenia Fedorova

Ksenia Fedorova is a media and media art researcher, holding PhD in Cultural Studies with Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory (University of California Davis) and Ph.D in Philosophy/Aesthetics (Ural Federal University, St.Petersburg State University, RU).

She is the author of Tactics of Interfacing: Encoding Affect in Art and Technology (MIT Press, 2020) and the co-editor of Media: Between Magic and Technology (2014, in Russian, short-listed for the national Innovation and Kandinsky awards) and a special issue of Artnodes Journal Theorising Media Art in Light of STS (co-edited with Silvia Casini, 2025). Her other publications include articles in Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Media & Culture Journal, Acoustic Space, Dialog of Arts and other journals, as well as edited volumes, such as Worlding the Brain. Neurocentrism, Cognition and the Challenge of the Arts and Humanities (2023), Aesthetics in Dialogue: Applying Philosophy of Art in a Global World (2020), Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime (2017).

In 2007-2011, she was an initiator and curator of the “Art. Science. Technology” program at the Ural branch of the National Center for Contemporary Arts (Ekaterinburg, RU). Ksenia has been a recepient of fellowships from Fulbright Foundation (2005-2007), IFA (2010), Danish Agency for International Education (2011) and Davis Humanities Institute (2015-2016). Prior to joining Leiden University in 2020 she was an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Art and Visual History at Humboldt University in Berlin working on a project “Neurointerfaces, Mental Imagery, and Sensory Translation in the Digital Age”.

Fields of interest

• media art theory and history
• art&science
• media theory
• aesthetics
• philosophy of technology
• digital culture
• science and technology studies
• creative research, phenomenology
• visual culture and curatorial studies
• posthumanism and sustainability studies

Research

Ksenia’s research interests encompass media and media art theory and history, aesthetics, philosophy, science and technology and cultural studies, with a specific focus on the effects of new technologies on human perception and interaction. Most recently, her research concentrates on the questions of epistemic and social value of art&science interactions, interdisciplinary methods of knowledge production, nonhuman intelligence (both natural and artificial) and forms of its embodiment, as well as artistic discourse on sustainability and innovation. Other interests include the issues of transmediality, proprioception, augmented and virtual reality, diagrammatic modeling, affective computing, speculative design, and posthuman ecologies.   

Her earlier work addressed the effects of technological mediation through the notion of the technological sublime. Today digital technologies become the pertinent context for the experience of something that exceeds our capacity for sensible comprehension. The claims of machinic intelligence to represent something about us that escapes our cognitive abilities confront us with the alien within ourselves, that undermines the stability of the human position as a subject of aesthetic experience.

Ksenia’s book, Tactics of Interfacing, tackles the problem of communication and translation of affect via feedback interfaces in media art and technoculture. The book considers the effects of the psychological mechanisms of projection and recognition in the context of algorithmic procedures in digital simulation. Operation of feedback is fundamental for human cognition and perception, and given today's technological capabilities, it acquires critical ethical and political connotations: by allowing technology (such as biofeedback or machine vision) to help us to look back at ourselves we create versions of ourselves that are easier to interpret computationally, loosing access to more nuanced and complex array of affective life. In this book, the material of artistic practice is placed in dialogue with the broader theories of the "self", mediation and interactivity.

Ksenia’s current research follows roughly 3 thematic tracks. One implies engagement with STS (science and technologies studies) methodologies in reflections on the role of (media) artistic thinking and its epistemic potential both in general and specifically in evaluating contribution of art and design in addressing climate crisis. Another track is informed by the concept of ‘sense acts’ that she coined to bring in focus the role of sensory perception in cognitive processes, such as decision-making. This project looks at manifestations of sentience at the level of the organic and the inorganic, analyzing artistic research projects cutting across the fields of biosemiotics, analog computing, cybernetics, sensor media and (post)phenomenology. The third track builds up on the second one and considers aspects of material embodiment, or corporeality of ‘nonconscious cognition’ (K.Hayles). This trajectory is inspired by a collaborative project with LIACS “Exploring the Gap between Embodied Cognition and Generative AI” (supported by the KIEM grant).

See Ksenia’s publications at https://leidenuni.academia.edu/KseniaFedorova.

Teaching

Ksenia teaches at a variety of programs, including BA Art, Media and Society (seminar Art & Technology), BA Urban Studies (Advanced Qualitative Methods), MA Art and Culture (Art, Science and Technology: Transdisciplinary Connections), and via the RMeS/National Research School for Media Studies (ResMA seminar Matters of Media). She also serves as an academic coordinator of LDE Minor Responsible Innovation, teaching one of the thematic courses (Creative Visions for Regenerative Futures) and couching student project groups. She supervises BA and MA student theses at Art History department, as well as students of ResMA Art, Literature and Media.

Publications

‘In Dialogue with Nonconscious Cognition and Expressions of the Commons’, in After Human? New Networks between Art, Science, and Religion, ed. Kerstin Borchhardt, in a book series Linzer Contributions to Art History and Philosophy, De Gruyter, forthcoming in 2025.

‘Aesthetics of the ‘Homunculus’ of Science: Artistic Approach to Physiological Research in New Anthropology’, in Wahrnehmungskräfte – Kräfte wahrnehmen. Dynamiken der Sinne in Wissenschaft, Kunst und Literatur, ed. Frank Fehrenbach, Laura Isengard, Gerd Mathias Micheluzzi and Cornelia Zumbusch, 167-193. De Gruyter, 2024.