Steffen Köhn
Biographic Data
| ID | 74993 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Steffen Köhn |
| GIVEN NAMES | Steffen |
| FAMILY NAME | Köhn |
| SIGNATURE | KÖHN S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Aarhus University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6260-4462 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 14 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Grinding Choices
This article presents an experimental ethnography of Cuba’s encounter with Axie Infinity, a cryptocurrency-based play-to-earn (P2E) game, through the form of a choose-your-own-adventure (CYOA) gamebook. By embedding branching choices, stats, and risk meters, the format mirrors the contingent decisions Cuban players faced as they sought to turn digital labor into survival strategies amidst pandemic disruptions, sanctions, and infrastructural scarc…
Island in the Net
An exploration of Cuba’s emerging digital culture and Cubans’ creation of grassroots networks, digital black markets, and online spaces for public debate Until just a few years ago, Cuba was one of the least-connected countries in the world. But as digital technology has become increasingly available, Cubans have found inventive ways to work around such remaining barriers as slow speeds, high costs, and inadequate infrastructure. In Island in the…
Monetary disorder
This article develops monetary disorder as an analytic for understanding how state-led efforts to stabilize monetary systems can unintentionally produce new forms of fragmentation, informality, and moral uncertainty. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Havana between 2020 and 2025, I show how Cuba’s recent reforms – monetary reunification, the expansion of digital financial controls, and the legalization of private microenterprises – have genera…
Virtual Pets, Real Precarity
This article examines how Axie Infinity , a play‐to‐earn crypto game, became a precarious source of income for young Cubans amid an ongoing economic crisis. Against the backdrop of the COVID‐19 pandemic, intensified US sanctions, and a destabilizing currency reform, Cuba has faced severe shortages, runaway inflation, and growing social unrest. In this context, Axie Infinity offered an unexpected digital lifeline: Players could earn income by batt…
Game design as multimodal intervention
The mobile video game PakeTown presents an ethnographic depiction of the history of alternative media distribution in Cuba. It is a joint project between a multimodal anthropologist and a Cuban media artist working with ConWiro, an independent Cuban game studio. We discuss our game as a multimodal intervention that generated new conversations with our research participants, new modes of collaboration, as well as new knowledge about our field that…
Swap It on WhatsApp
The inhabitants of Cuba's capital, Havana, are using semipublic group chats on messaging applications such as WhatsApp and Telegram to access food, hygiene products, medication, and other basic necessities during times of scarcity. This has been especially prevalent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Such chat groups created digital spaces in which locals swap scarce goods and share vital information about the availability of products in the governmen…
Fragile connections
To compensate for their lack of internet access, Cuban video game enthusiasts and programmers have built vast grassroots computer networks, the biggest of which, SNET (Street Network), at one point connected tens of thousands of households across Havana. This vernacular infrastructure generated not only new means of access but also new relations between people and fostered new political subjectivities. SNET is heavily shaped by a local cultural i…
Digital Environments
Digital technology already has permeated the physical world. Devices such as smartphones, tablets or wearables and online venues like virtual worlds and social networks have penetrated every part of our lives. The contributions to this volume apply innovative forms of ethnographic research to the digital realm. They examine the emergence of new online communities around Greenlandic news blogs or Malaysian LGBT Facebook groups, the rise of transna…
Digital Environments
Digital technology already has permeated the physical world. Devices such as smartphones, tablets or wearables and online venues like virtual worlds and social networks have penetrated every part of our lives. The contributions to this volume apply innovative forms of ethnographic research to the digital realm. They examine the emergence of new online communities around Greenlandic news blogs or Malaysian LGBT Facebook groups, the rise of transna…
Ballhaus, Edmund (Hrsg.)
Anthropos , Seite 212 - 213
Screening Transnational Spaces
This article explores experimental approaches to the representation of space and place in anthropology. Drawing on examples from the history of visual anthropology, it will show how (implicit or explicit) anthropological conceptions of space are inscribed in the construction of cinematic space in ethnographic films. Drawing on examples by Wilma Kiener and Aryo Danusiri, the article tests the idea that the practices of contemporary experimental fi…
Sensate, A Journal for Experiments in Critical Media Practice
Anthropology concerns itself with experimental modes of knowledge transmission at least since the ́crisis of representation` in the 1980s. Since then, much as been written and thought about the potentials of audio-visual media and (with the advance of digital technologies) hypermedia representation. Most often, however, these discussions remained on the theoretical level and were published in the traditional formats of papers and journal contribu…
Organising complexities
This article explores a new configuration of contemporary video art and anthropology by introducing three recent multi-screen video installations (Solid Sea 01: The Ghost Ship by Multiplicity, Sahara Chronicles by Ursula Biemann and A Tale of Two Islands by Steffen Köhn) that are all concerned with the transnational movement of people. It discusses how such installation art might propose new possibilities for the organisation of ethnographic mate…
Swap It on WhatsApp
The inhabitants of Cuba's capital, Havana, are using semipublic group chats on messaging applications such as WhatsApp and Telegram to access food, hygiene products, medication, and other basic necessities during times of scarcity. This has been especially prevalent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Such chat groups created digital spaces in which locals swap scarce goods and share vital information about the availability of products in the governmen…
Fragile connections
To compensate for their lack of internet access, Cuban video game enthusiasts and programmers have built vast grassroots computer networks, the biggest of which, SNET (Street Network), at one point connected tens of thousands of households across Havana. This vernacular infrastructure generated not only new means of access but also new relations between people and fostered new political subjectivities. SNET is heavily shaped by a local cultural i…
Digital Environments
Digital technology already has permeated the physical world. Devices such as smartphones, tablets or wearables and online venues like virtual worlds and social networks have penetrated every part of our lives. The contributions to this volume apply innovative forms of ethnographic research to the digital realm. They examine the emergence of new online communities around Greenlandic news blogs or Malaysian LGBT Facebook groups, the rise of transna…
Organising complexities
This article explores a new configuration of contemporary video art and anthropology by introducing three recent multi-screen video installations (Solid Sea 01: The Ghost Ship by Multiplicity, Sahara Chronicles by Ursula Biemann and A Tale of Two Islands by Steffen Köhn) that are all concerned with the transnational movement of people. It discusses how such installation art might propose new possibilities for the organisation of ethnographic mate…
Sensate, A Journal for Experiments in Critical Media Practice
Anthropology concerns itself with experimental modes of knowledge transmission at least since the ́crisis of representation` in the 1980s. Since then, much as been written and thought about the potentials of audio-visual media and (with the advance of digital technologies) hypermedia representation. Most often, however, these discussions remained on the theoretical level and were published in the traditional formats of papers and journal contribu…
Organising complexities
This article explores a new configuration of contemporary video art and anthropology by introducing three recent multi-screen video installations (Solid Sea 01: The Ghost Ship by Multiplicity, Sahara Chronicles by Ursula Biemann and A Tale of Two Islands by Steffen Köhn) that are all concerned with the transnational movement of people. It discusses how such installation art might propose new possibilities for the organisation of ethnographic mate…
Screening Transnational Spaces
This article explores experimental approaches to the representation of space and place in anthropology. Drawing on examples from the history of visual anthropology, it will show how (implicit or explicit) anthropological conceptions of space are inscribed in the construction of cinematic space in ethnographic films. Drawing on examples by Wilma Kiener and Aryo Danusiri, the article tests the idea that the practices of contemporary experimental fi…
Ballhaus, Edmund (Hrsg.)
Anthropos , Seite 212 - 213
Digital Environments
Digital technology already has permeated the physical world. Devices such as smartphones, tablets or wearables and online venues like virtual worlds and social networks have penetrated every part of our lives. The contributions to this volume apply innovative forms of ethnographic research to the digital realm. They examine the emergence of new online communities around Greenlandic news blogs or Malaysian LGBT Facebook groups, the rise of transna…
Digital Environments
Digital technology already has permeated the physical world. Devices such as smartphones, tablets or wearables and online venues like virtual worlds and social networks have penetrated every part of our lives. The contributions to this volume apply innovative forms of ethnographic research to the digital realm. They examine the emergence of new online communities around Greenlandic news blogs or Malaysian LGBT Facebook groups, the rise of transna…
Swap It on WhatsApp
The inhabitants of Cuba's capital, Havana, are using semipublic group chats on messaging applications such as WhatsApp and Telegram to access food, hygiene products, medication, and other basic necessities during times of scarcity. This has been especially prevalent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Such chat groups created digital spaces in which locals swap scarce goods and share vital information about the availability of products in the governmen…
Fragile connections
To compensate for their lack of internet access, Cuban video game enthusiasts and programmers have built vast grassroots computer networks, the biggest of which, SNET (Street Network), at one point connected tens of thousands of households across Havana. This vernacular infrastructure generated not only new means of access but also new relations between people and fostered new political subjectivities. SNET is heavily shaped by a local cultural i…
Game design as multimodal intervention
The mobile video game PakeTown presents an ethnographic depiction of the history of alternative media distribution in Cuba. It is a joint project between a multimodal anthropologist and a Cuban media artist working with ConWiro, an independent Cuban game studio. We discuss our game as a multimodal intervention that generated new conversations with our research participants, new modes of collaboration, as well as new knowledge about our field that…
Grinding Choices
This article presents an experimental ethnography of Cuba’s encounter with Axie Infinity, a cryptocurrency-based play-to-earn (P2E) game, through the form of a choose-your-own-adventure (CYOA) gamebook. By embedding branching choices, stats, and risk meters, the format mirrors the contingent decisions Cuban players faced as they sought to turn digital labor into survival strategies amidst pandemic disruptions, sanctions, and infrastructural scarc…
Island in the Net
An exploration of Cuba’s emerging digital culture and Cubans’ creation of grassroots networks, digital black markets, and online spaces for public debate Until just a few years ago, Cuba was one of the least-connected countries in the world. But as digital technology has become increasingly available, Cubans have found inventive ways to work around such remaining barriers as slow speeds, high costs, and inadequate infrastructure. In Island in the…
Monetary disorder
This article develops monetary disorder as an analytic for understanding how state-led efforts to stabilize monetary systems can unintentionally produce new forms of fragmentation, informality, and moral uncertainty. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Havana between 2020 and 2025, I show how Cuba’s recent reforms – monetary reunification, the expansion of digital financial controls, and the legalization of private microenterprises – have genera…
Virtual Pets, Real Precarity
This article examines how Axie Infinity , a play‐to‐earn crypto game, became a precarious source of income for young Cubans amid an ongoing economic crisis. Against the backdrop of the COVID‐19 pandemic, intensified US sanctions, and a destabilizing currency reform, Cuba has faced severe shortages, runaway inflation, and growing social unrest. In this context, Axie Infinity offered an unexpected digital lifeline: Players could earn income by batt…
Computer Science (6 works) · Ethnography (5 works) · Anthropology (4 works) · Art (4 works) · Cuban History and Society (4 works) · Digital Games and Media (4 works) · Political science (4 works) · Politics (4 works) · Sociology (4 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (3 works)