Jochem Gerardus Kootstra – Antidisciplinair cyborg.
I have been called a chameleon, because of my never-ending curiosity, eagerness, creativity and interdisciplinary mind-set who can quickly adapt to different situations – with a smile. This helps me to act as an effective and compelling mediator between disciplines, focused on cross-disciplinary and future-minded research on the intersection and interplay between technology and society as one of global society’s grand challenges. Because of it, I gained strong social, emotional, technical and analytical skills, which help me to bring humans and nonhumans together in the field of Science, Technology & Society Studies and New Materialism. Within my research and interests, I explore the interplay between technology and society, objects and subjects, nonhumans and humans as fundamentally a relational matter. But I also recently gave a lecture on the porn-industry. Never stop exploring.
My main expertise:
- Tech & design
- Digital culture
- The augmented human
- Human-centered AI
- Inclusive design
- Smart cities, smart villages, smart homes & smart citizens
My fascination with technology and the nonhuman machine began the first time I watched X-Men and wondered if I could fly and cut a tree with my laser beam eyes. Unfortunately, both did not really work out. But my fascination for what technology could mean for our human existence has always been on my mind. Thinking about our relation to technology growing up, I have changed my mind constantly of what I am, what I want to do, what I want to be—and I still do. Therefore, the most difficult, and annoying, question you could ask me is: who are you? Because, where do I start really? So, instead of turning into a broken record, a machine, I tried to answer this question time to time more creatively, just to be a bit of a pain in the ass. I started to identify myself with Wikipedia: “If I would have a Wikipedia page (I do not—yet), you could spend years on my fictive page clicking on all the related links intertwined in the content, going through layers and layers of pages; which will go on endlessly, you will just never stop clicking—like forever scrolling down a Facebook timeline. I am an interconnected system that is too complex of a structure and too rapidly changing for any single person to even read. I am an evolutionary, fluid process of entanglements.” Yes, that confuses a lot of people who immediately walk away from me. Yet, Wikipedia became the reference for all my researches regarding human-tech relations, and for me as a ‘person’.