An Aesthesia of Networks: Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology
Abstract
The experience of networks as the immediate sensing of relations between humans and nonhuman technical elements in assemblages such as viral media and databases.
Today almost every aspect of life for which data exists can be rendered as a network. Financial data, social networks, biological ecologies: all are visualized in links and nodes, lines connecting dots. A network visualization of a corporate infrastructure could look remarkably similar to that of a terrorist organization. In An Aesthesia of Networks, Anna Munster argues that this uniformity has flattened our experience of networks as active and relational processes and assemblages. She counters the “network anaesthesia” that results from this pervasive mimesis by reinserting the question of experience, or aesthesia, into networked culture and aesthetics.
Rather than asking how humans experience computers and networks, Munster asks how networks experience—what operations they perform and undergo to change and produce new forms of experience. Drawing on William James's radical empiricism, she asserts that networked experience is assembled first and foremost through relations, which make up its most immediately sensed and perceived aspect. Munster critically considers a range of contemporary artistic and cultural practices that engage with network technologies and techniques, including databases and data mining, the domination of search in online activity, and the proliferation of viral media through YouTube. These practices—from artists who “undermine” data to musicians and VJs who use intranetworked audio and video software environments—are concerned with the relationality at the core of today's network experience.
... Populating our imaginary as powerful and uncanny, algorithms harness considerable attention and have been the object of intense scrutiny. These key technical objects of datafication transform the ever-growing storage of captured data into an actionable and valuable resource, enabling a purposeful and generative articulation of datapoints that is often framed on the grounds of calculability and predictability (Mackenzie 2015;Mühlhoff 2021;Munster 2013). Over the past decade, the burgeoning of algorithmic techniques coined as deep learning (DL) has posed new challenges, particularly when it comes to understanding the functioning of these highly opaque technical objects. ...
... cat/dog, woman/man, jail/release. For this reason, DNNs are often framed on the grounds of predictability (Mackenzie 2015;Mühlhoff 2021;Munster 2013), to stress how algorithmic data processing "disambiguates diversity and uncertainty to make the target individual [or input] 'fit into an actionable category'" (Mühlhoff 2021: 10). The need to bottleneck the relations between datapoints into an actionable output, and the way this output recurs in the training of the model amounts to "the condensing of multiple potentials to a single output" (Amoore 2020: 20). ...
The proliferation of AI systems across all domains of life as well as the complexification and opacity of algorithmic techniques, epitomised by the bourgeoning field of Deep Learning (DL), call for new methods in the Humanities for reflecting on the techno-human relation in a way that places the technical operation at its core. Grounded on the work of the philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon, this paper puts forward individuation theory as a valuable approach to reflect on contemporary information technologies, offering an analysis of the functioning of deep neural networks (DNNs), a type of data-driven computational models at the core of major breakthroughs in AI. The purpose of this article is threefold: (1) to demonstrate how a joint reading of Simondon’s mechanology and individuation theory, foregrounded in the Simondonian concept of information, can cast new light on contemporary algorithmic techniques by considering their situated emergence as opposed to technical lineage; (2) to suspend a predictive framing of AI systems, particularly DL techniques, so as to probe into their technical operation, accounting for the data-driven individuation of these models and the integration of potentials as functionality; and finally, (3) to argue that individuation theory might in fact de-individuate AI, in the sense of disassembling the already-there, the constituted, paving the way for questioning the potentialities for data and their algorithmic relationality to articulate the unfolding of everyday life.
... While liveness defines a potential for affective engagement in a political event it disregards the multiple temporalities which digital media actually enable (cf. Munster 2006Munster , 2013. The relaying capacities of digital media allow for both live amplification and temporal shifts before and after the event. ...
... While liveness defines a potential for affective engagement in a political event it disregards the multiple temporalities which digital media actually enable (cf. Munster 2006Munster , 2013. The relaying capacities of digital media allow for both live amplification and temporal shifts before and after the event. ...
Is there an option to oppose without automatically participating in the opposed? This volume explores different perspectives on dissent, understanding practices, cultures, and theories of resistance, dispute, and opposition as inherently participative. It discusses aspects of the body as a political instance, the identity and subjectivity building of individuals and groups, (micro-)practices of dissent, and theories of critique from different disciplinary perspectives. This collection thus touches upon contemporary issues, recent protests and movements, artistic subversion and dissent, online activism as well as historic developments and elemental theories of dissent.
... Interestingly, social media and climate change as complex systems or forms share some characteristics, most importantly emergent agency irreducible to experiences, actions, and moral of individuals (see Dawson and Mäkelä 2020). Social media virality is an emergent phenomenon, not intended or controlled by any one individual user, partially reliant on "node" influencers, media outlets and algorithmic manipulation yet possessing a significant amount of opaqueness and randomness (see, e. g., Munster 2013;Nahon and Hemsley 2013;Roine and Piippo 2022;Sampson 2012). As summarized by Marie-Laure Ryan, "[e]mergence, in its strongest form, is a property of phenomena that we do not fully understand: how the individual elements of a system organize themselves into larger functional patterns without the top-down guidance of a controlling authority" (Ryan 2019: 42). ...
The article calls for narratives that would accommodate the collision of two complex forms: climate change and social media. Science communication is currently on the lookout for personal stories that make climate change concrete and relatable for both decision-makers and the general public; similarly, climate activism on social media increasingly draws from personal experiences. Yet climate related stories going viral on social media often end up fostering political polarization and stark moral positioning instead of collective climate action. Building on Caroline Levine’s work on new formalism, I argue that this problem results from the collision between (1) climate change and (2) social media as complex forms that challenge the centrality of embodied experience and individual agency, and (3) the prototypical experiential story as a non-complex form. I analyze some viral climate change stories and focus particularly on experientiality, easily shareable masterplots, and moral positioning.
... Ahelyett, hogy azt kérdezné, milyen tapasztalatokat tesznek lehetővé számunkra a hálózatok, Munster azt a kérdést teszi fel, hogy: "Hogyan tapasztalnak a hálózatok? Milyen műveleteket hajtanak végre a hálózatok és milyen változásokon mennek keresztül annak érdekében, hogy megváltoztassák és létrehozzák a tapasztalat új formáit?" (Munster 2013, 6 -kiemelés az eredetiben) Rögtön hozzá is teszi, hogy furcsa lehet, hogy a hálózatok tapasztalatáról beszél és nem az emberekéről. Ez azonban nem jelenti sem a hálózatok antropomorfizálását, sem pedig az emberi fogalmának (és az emberi szempontoknak) az elvetését. ...
... We are equally inspired by a body of scholarship in media and cultural studies which has shown the importance of network imagination, arguing that networks are material and metaphorical infrastructures of sensibility that mediate and narrow our experience of the world (Terranova, 2004;Galloway and Thacker, 2013;Munster, 2013). According to Patrick Jagoda, for example, networks are realities that exist at the edge of sensibility. ...
The 'last mile' is not only a powerful metaphor of contemporary life, but also the tangible site of a challenge, whether for governments reaching their citizens, or companies their customers. In urban Africa, this challenge is compounded by the fragmented material condition of cities. As a result, a growing number of tech companies have been compelled by the possibility of creating digital platforms that address the unique logistic configurations of African cities, often enrolling informal systems, such as motorcycle taxis, to address spatial and economic fragmentation. Through the perspective of three Nairobi-based startups that incorporate motorcycle taxis into their last-mile platforms, this paper illustrates how processes of 'algorithmic suturing' knit together the loose ends of splintered urban networks thanks to platform business models that visualize the last mile as a site of optimization. In parallel to common understandings of suturing within African infrastructure debates, which foreground makeshift practices of the urban poor, this paper argues that algorithmic suturing is a speculative endeavour through which urban fractures are made legible as sites of value. By stitching city fragments, these platforms envision large data-driven urban economies which interface informal mobility networks and the shifting urban demographic of the lower-middle classes.
... Indeed, data about embodied activity, once digitized and uploaded, can become part of a quite different form of digital embodiment. Digital data about bodies circulates along complex and diverse paths (see also Casetti 2015;Munster 2013;Rubinstein and Sluis 2008). Data from social media posts and from apps that track physical activity and bodily health are available not only to the app users. ...
... Ainsi, plutôt que d'explorer avec Vincent des modes d'imagination et de matérialisation de ces processus à mi-chemin entre nos pratiques, je restais accroché à ceux que j'avais assimilés et qui organisaient fortement mon expérience de la frontière. Comme le précise un certain nombre d'auteurs (Deleuze 1986 ;Munster 2013 ;Ingold 2004Ingold , 2016, les métaphores visuelles formatent les objets que nous sommes censés décrire et analyser tout comme elles organisent les rapports que nous entretenons avec eux. Nous avions beau parler la même langue, nous ne mobilisions ni le même système de conventions, ni les mêmes cadres symboliques pour aborder la question des frontières et, je me demande aujourd'hui si nous parlions véritablement des mêmes objets. ...
... Research on affect and social media is a rapidly growing field (Paasonen, et al., 2015;Parikka, 2010;Sampson, et al., 2018). and has focused on various affective dimensions, including how social media facilitate rapid processes of affective contagion, virality, political mobilisation and crowding (Knudsen and Stage, 2012;Munster, 2013;Papacharissi, 2014;Sampson, 2012); how social media platforms offer new (safe) spaces where affect can be expressed in cultural communities based on shared norms, ideologies, discrimination or existential crises (Benski and Fisher, 2013;Döveling, et al., 2018;Raun, 2012); and how social media platforms themselves become able to track and respond to the moods and affects of users due to new forms of artificial intelligence and sentiment analysis (McStay, 2018). The scholarship on illness, social media and affect is of course more limited (Stage, 2017;Stage, et al., 2020;Tucker and Goodings, 2017). ...
In contemporary media culture, social media have become important publics of care for young people with a serious illness. While much previous research has focused on the positive aspects of online support networks, this article investigates the affective experience of what we call ‘ugly media feelings’, such as envy, shame, annoyance, irritation and scepticism, based on an in-depth interview study of 25 young Danish cancer patients’ (aged 15–29) experiences of social media. We argue that ugly media feelings can be analysed, firstly, as indirect revelations of the communicative ideals and media investments that young cancer patients make when they turn to social media during their illnesses and, secondly, as entangled with media cultural changes that have created new affectively unpredictable spaces for interacting about serious illness outside home and health institutions.
... Zudem haben Netzwerkdiagramme die Tendenz, sich über räumliche Gegebenheiten und Unebenheiten zu erheben (Opitz 2017). Die Topologie der Knoten und Kanten ist ein hochgradig abstrahierter Raum -der sich deshalb auch gut für techno-kapitalistische Imaginationen globaler Umspannung und Erschließung eignet (Munster 2013;Tellmann et al. 2012). Symbiosen lassen sich demgegenüber nicht in ähnlicher Weise von ihrem Milieu ablösen, sie sind schwer delokalisierbar. ...
Einleitung: Symbiose als Theoriefigur– Fünf Thesen
... Les cartographes ont certes fourni un grand nombre de documents qui permettent de figurer les chemins empruntés et empruntables par les habitants en déplacement (Farrauto, Ciuccarelli, 2011). Prolongeant cette volonté de représenter des pratiques, les raffinements les plus contemporains des travaux en visualisation de données (Manovich, 2010) ont introduit le réseau en tant que figure maîtresse (Lima, 2011 ;Munster, 2013)1. Se sont développés, des réseaux mobiles et immobiles, afin de représenter les flux de voyageurs, de marchandises, d'informations qui percolent dans les espaces urbains2. ...
Le travail de représentation est au cœur de la démarche scientifique (Latour, 1986), et plus particulièrement des études urbaines (Söderström, 2000 ; Chapel, 2010). Les représentations engagent la définition de manières de percevoir les réalités urbaines, en participant à leur visibilité. Le travail sur les représentations est indispensable pour dégager des principes inhérents aux études urbaines, mais aussi pour les prolonger. Or, au sein de celles-ci, se développent depuis une dizaine d'années les études de la mobilité. Les études de la mobilité s'attachent tant à questionner les infrastructures que les pratiques habitantes. Pourtant, si les réseaux de transport, les plans de gares routières, et, par exemple, les projets d'architectes pour aéroports, sont fortement travaillés, diffusés et possèdent une histoire conséquente, la question de la représentation de la mobilité paraît moins évidente. Les cartographes ont certes fourni un grand nombre de documents qui permettent de figurer les chemins empruntés et empruntables par les habitants en déplacement (Farrauto, Ciuccarelli, 2011). Prolongeant cette volonté de représenter des pratiques, les raffinements les plus contemporains des travaux en visualisation de données (Manovich, 2010) ont introduit le réseau en tant que figure maîtresse (Lima, 2011 ; Munster, 2013)1. Se sont développés, des réseaux mobiles et immobiles, afin de représenter les flux de voyageurs, de marchandises, d'informations qui percolent dans les espaces urbains2. Néanmoins, si les réseaux introduisent à l'étude des flux d'individus, l'expérience habitante reste négligée (O'Rourke, 2013), c'est-à-dire que la mobilité au-delà du déplacement et des transports d’entités atomisées reste bien peu visible. Elle est pourtant d'autant plus importante que les paradigmes dominants la mobilité (Urry, 2000), et plus généralement les études urbaines, se concentrent sur les pratiques habitantes (De Certeau, 1990 ; Illich, 2005 ; Rapoport, 1969 ; Lynch, 1996 ; Norman, 2002). Or, celles-ci restent le plus souvent invisibles, par manque de travail de représentation des entrelacements entre composantes de l'environnement et habitants.
... Early databases were hierarchical, like a library catalogue, with new categories inserted as sub-categories of the major terms. That has not been the case in database design since at least the 1990s (Munster 2013). Relational databases have dynamic topologies because what they value most is not the item of data but the relations between data (and a search is also a piece of data about new relations being formed between existing data and previous relations). ...
Through an overview of historical medals, logos, poems, paintings and engravings, imagery that picks at the gap between the persistence of the local and the deracination of the global enterprise, the article focuses on the visual imaginaries employed to mythologize and to make sense of the reach and power of global media, noting in particular the reduction of land and sea to blank canvases on which communication media superimpose their networks. The article serves as a genealogy of Internet cartography and infographics, attending to the problematic relations between text, numbers, diagrams and pictures and their displacement of environments and localities.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are not only blockchain-based digital assets; they are theatrical practices taking shape between social bodies. Understanding the theatricality of NFTs provides a way to account for the criticism directed at them. NFT critiques often purport to focus on underlying politico-economic ideologies but, in actuality, reveal deep-seated antitheatrical anxieties recontextualized for the digital realm.
This article examines how Deleuzean philosophy can inform the design and analysis of Virtual Reality (VR) narratives, focusing on the concepts of becoming, assemblage, and immanence. The research addresses the question: How can VR narratives foster ethical reflection and participant engagement, particularly on issues of social justice and representation? Through a post-qualitative methodology and narrative analysis of four VR films – ‘Notes on Blindness’, ‘Clouds Over Sidra’, ‘The Key’, and ‘Giant’ – the study demonstrates how VR enables participants to engage in processes of becoming-other, provoking sensory and emotional transformations. These films illustrate how VR narratives allow for co-creation, ethical reflection, and empathy by immersing participants in complex ethical dilemmas related to disability, trauma, and displacement. Based on these findings, the article proposes an ethical framework for VR narrative design, emphasizing participant agency, immanent ethics, and the integration of social justice themes.
Disinformation has become rampant in India (and many other parts of the world) with increasingly serious consequences. Increasing communal conflict and the rise of post-pandemic conspiracies clearly illustrate this problem. In this context, I argue that disinformation is only one component in a network of affective politics produced by different kinds of media events. In other words, media events are affective spaces with event-making forms that signify their politics to intended audiences across contexts. Disinformation, then, is not ‘inside’ the information but is distributed affectively as part of media. The assassination of Praveen Nettar, a district-level leader of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party in coastal Karnataka, illustrates how an unplanned event became a series of media events through television and social media’s event-making forms. It was these media events that circulated rumours, suspicion and other forms of hatred and discrimination against Muslims. The latter part of the article locates these forms in terms of the history and sociopolitical context of coastal Karnataka. I build on literature from cultural and political anthropology, religion and media studies with a focus on the construction of media events. The article concludes with an emphasis on the importance of media events for scholars who wish to study disinformation in the context of increasing right-wing populism.
This chapter proposes a revision of traditional higher education delivery methods to create a more resilient and adaptive curriculum through a regenerative networked learning approach. This model emphasises the relational and processual nature of learning and challenges an institution-centred neoliberal approach to education. The chapter argues that a distributed global approach to learning is necessary for building a more regenerative and resilient model for higher education. Specific illustrations are drawn from Schumacher College, the UNDP Conscious Food Systems Alliance, Corridor Ecology and other models that integrate transdisciplinarity, interspecies listening, co-creation, collaboration, scaling, and considering the complex dynamics of socio-ecological systems. A regenerative learning model grounded in place-based knowledge and experiential practice is proposed as key for the future of higher education.
This chapter continues the question of machine vision in the previous chapter. The concept of negative machines is examined. The idea of a Dark Universe is raised in relation to racism. I also review the difficulties between the tensions between digital and analog. There is a discussion on the postcinema which raises the importance of C.S. Pierce’s ‘firstness.’ I review Galloway’s stance on digitalization and analog tensions.
Aesthesis, the classical term for sensing and perceiving, is at the heart of innumerable problems that plague global society. The purpose of this article is to open a conversation on aesthesis. We survey the roots and relevance of aesthesis as a direct albeit contested relation and engagement with the world and with Others. From its pre-Socratic origins, aesthesis has been both a pragmatic, somatic concept, prompting a re-evaluation of the distinction between experience and abstraction. We trace its ongoing repression from Plato through ‘western’ theories of formal Aesthetics. Drawing on a relational interpretation of Protagoras’ aesthesis, we argue that modern pragmatists and radical empiricists, as well as more contemporary critics of the ‘colonization’ of aesthesis (Mignolo and Vasquez) by formal Aesthetics recognize and develop the relational and ethical aspects of aesthesis. We consider the role of the body, affect, and of the intangible or virtual qualities of aesthesis. The ethics of obligations (Weil) in the polis (Arendt) shows how aesthesis informs politics despite its repression in favour of moral and legal norms. We argue this is relevant to contemporary crises such as xenophobia and ecocidal climate warming.
This article fragments and processes Debris , a project developed to formalise the creative recycling of digital audio byproducts. Debris began as an open call for electronic compositions that take as their point of departure gigabytes of audio material generated through training and calibrating Demiurge , an audio synthesis platform driven by machine learning. The Debris project led us down rabbitholes of structural analysis: what does it mean to work with digital waste, how is it qualified, and what new relationships and methodologies do this foment? To chart the fluid boundaries of Debris and pin down its underlying conceptualisation of sound, this article introduces a framework ranging from archaeomusicology to intertextuality, from actor-network theory to Deleuzian assemblage, from Adornian constellation to swarm intelligence to platform and network topology. This diversity of approaches traces connective frictions that may allow us to understand, from the perspective of Debris , what working with sound means under the regime of machine intelligence. How has machine intelligence fundamentally altered the already shaky diagram connecting humans, creativity and history? We advise the reader to approach the text as a multisensory experience, listening to Debris while navigating the circuitous theoretical alleys below.
In recent civil and political turmoil in Turkey, Thailand, and Hong Kong, protesters and activists have had to negotiate attempts from ruling regimes to censor news industry journalists and shut down access to messaging services and popular social network sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. In these sites of protest, the vantage points through which activism and conflict can be organized and encountered visually are multiplying and relocating. But to what extent do camera mounted drones alter the field of protest and signal a new camera consciousness? Drone vision offers an illustrative extension of an autonomous, motile, and indirect visuality that moves beyond the device-armed social media connected body within the protest zone. While the drone may constitute a new tool in the arsenal of either activists or police, its use also signals the shifting technical scope of a camera consciousness in which control over motile, GPS-located, and airborne wireless camera technologies becomes just as vital to the scene as control over the streets and over social media activity. The drone’s motility, its autonomous vertical and lateral movement differentiates it from the mobile camera as it generates distributed modes of vision across a number of bodies, devices, and platforms, not merely as spectacle, but as a new mode of relational experience.
Networks have risen to prominence as intellectual technologies and graphical representations, not only in science, but also in journalism, activism, policy, and online visual cultures. Inspired by approaches taking trouble as occasion to (re)consider and reflect on otherwise implicit knowledge practices, in this article we explore how problems with network practices can be taken as invitations to attend to the diverse settings and situations in which network graphs and maps are created and used in society. In doing so, we draw on cases from our research, engagement and teaching activities involving making networks, making sense of networks, making networks public, and making network tools. As a contribution to “critical data practice,” we conclude with some approaches for slowing down and caring for network practices and their associated troubles to elicit a richer picture of what is involved in making networks work as well as reconsidering their role in collective forms of inquiry.
The article discusses transformations in William Gibson’s employment of the theme and poetics of the Wunderkammer from his two early novels, Neuromancer (1984) and Count Zero (1987), to Zero History (2010), his last-but-one novel. The exploration of Gibson’s representations of various Wunderkammer collections and arrangements in these books reveals his ever more pronounced recourse, over time, to the culture of curiosity as a diagnostic instrument. By interrogating the changing function of the Wunderkammer in Gibsons’ oeuvre, along with all its early-modern and contemporary associations with curiosity, it is possible to tease out the complexity of the writer’s evolving view of the duality, and the fusion, of the digital and the material, as well as his keen understanding of how the late capitalist market functions. Through his diagnostic representations of various cabinets of curiosities, Gibson reverses tendencies governing the transformations of the Wunderkammer as a collection of curia from the 16th to the 18th century, as well as overturning the relationship between the collection as a representation of available knowledge and the desire to create synthetic life. Gibson’s novels, which represent postdigital reality by analogous means, can thus be designated as postdigital analog writings that, according to Michael Punt, give expression to contemporary consciousness formed “in the Wunderkammer.”
Towards the end of Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), the main character Arthur Morgan contracts tuberculosis. The videogame is set in the United States in 1899, a time when many died from the respiratory infection. The videogame does not provide a cure for the disease, nor does it show when the contagion happens. It is presented as the consequence of an invisible action. Combining auto-ethnographic analysis with (para-)textual readings, in this article, I articulate my engagement with the game and with YouTube videos in which players claim to have identified a strategy to save Arthur. I argue that these paratextual practices address, without fully resolving, an effective response that originates from an unresolved reading of the videogame ( Consalvo, 2016 ; Genette, 1987 ). The videos on Arthur’s sickness remediate (in the double sense of restoring upon and healing) players’ agency ( Bolter and Grusin, 1999 ). I argue that this imagination of a restoration of the player’s agency insists on two levels: a narrative level, interpreted as a navigable database of events, and on the environment, seen as a ‘gamespace’ of resources and non-player characters to exploit or keep at distance ( Jennings, 2019 ; Stang, 2019 ; Anikina, 2020 ; Wark 2007 ). The duration of the auto-ethnography overlaps with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. The article concludes by exploring some recent mediations of the virus, observing how they restore a view of human agency that runs parallel to that which players of Red Dead Redemption 2 have articulated in a much more marginal context. The case studies, although diverse in nature, gravity and scale, shed light on the variety of contexts in which agency is negotiated, on the affective potential of these negotiations, and on the pervasiveness of white and able-bodied normativity in contemporary digital culture.
[Abracadabra: lines! Pitfalls of network visualizations not only in the horizontal art history]
The article analyses the symbolism on network visualizations with a focus on the so-called horizontal art history. It shows that this symbolism can obscure the proper application and assessment of network models. The horizontal art history is particularly prone to this because it is based on a metaphorical juxtaposition (with Western “vertical” art history) which is similar to the juxtaposition that cocreates the network symbolism – (visual) juxtaposition of networks and hierarchies. The article demonstrates effects of this symbolism with the examples of the network diagram from the exhibition Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925 (MOMA, New York, 2012) and the uncritical acceptance of this diagram by some proponents of the horizontal art history.
Considered in its articulation with an idea of “slow” cinema, the label “fast cinema” suggests three characteristics: fast-paced action, hyperkinetic cinematic style, and irreflexive consumption. Not only does fast cinema suggest these three characteristics, however, it also suggests that they directly correspond to each other so that, in a “fast” film, fast-paced action would be seamlessly rendered through “fast” cinematic enunciation and this rendering would necessarily result in an escapist, ready-to-consume film product. It is more by this correspondence, I think, than by any of these elements on its own that a certain understanding of “fast” cinema is established. Against this understanding, through a variety of contrasting examples, the article argues that the impression of fastness and that of slowness are both the matter of a tension between different temporalities and a complex combination of heterogeneous film elements, and that the articulation of “fast” and “slow” cinema itself depends less on the formal characteristics of different kinds of film than on a disciplinary understanding of spectatorship, which pretends to derive from these formal characteristics different and unequal forms of film experience.
Ποιος είναι ο αντίκτυπος της (ανα-)μεσοποίησης του φυσικού και κοινωνικού κόσμου από τα πληροφοριακά συστήματα; Πως διερευνούμε τον ρόλο των βιο-πληροφοριακών και τεχνο-κοινωνικών μέσων στην εργασία, στη πολιτική, στις κοινωνικές σχέσεις, στη συγκρότηση του σώματος, στην άρθρωση της υποκειμενικότητας, στη γνώση, και στις πλανητικής κλίμακας μετατοπίσεις στο περιβάλλον και τη διακυβέρνηση;Το παρόν κείμενο - αντι εισαγωγικού σημειώματος - φιλοδοξεί να θέσει κάποιες βάσεις που θα σκιαγραφούν ένα θεωρητικό και επιστημολογικό πεδίο για τη διεπιστημονική προσέγγιση των πολιτισμικών μετασχηματισμών του 21ου αιώνα. Το κείμενο επιχειρεί να χαρτογραφήσει το αντικείμενο του περιοδικού όπως αυτό σημαδεύεται από τους πολιτικούς μας χρόνους, και από την ανάδυση νέων (έμβιων και μη) τεχνο-κοινωνικών μορφών ζωής και των τεχνικών διακυβέρνησής τους.
Post-Internet art represents a challenge to previous artistic concepts that tended to view the utilization of networked digital technologies as either the fulfillment of utopian fantasies of ego destruction, or the dystopian realization of a posthuman nightmare. Post-Internet art oscillates between these two extremes, making use of numerous interrelated networks that are decentralized in nature. Formal schooling is generally centralized, and art education tends to operate in a similar manner within this system, regardless of attempts to substantially change the structure of the field. A comparison of these two different systems might offer art educators opportunities to rethink practices that have been virtually unaffected by decentralization.
Oliver GRAU elucidates in his chapter “Digital Art’s Political Impact: Time for Hard
Humanities!” that digital Media Art has a multifarious and complex potential for expression and visualization, thematizing complex challenges for our life and societies like globalization and ecological crises, the image and media revolution, the virtualization of financial markets, and new extremes of surveillance of human communication. For a better understanding of complex digital imagery we need to discover and describe correlations in the mechanisms – artistic, imaging, and visualization strategies – that generate it both inside and outside Media Art, as well as the impact of such mechanisms for society both present and potential. Due to its loss and missing representation in our public collections, digital art also represents a burning issue for culture politics; therefore the article proposes a concerted strategy to integrate it into our memory institutions.
In a 1954 essay Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton coined the term homophily to describe similarity-based friendship. They based their findings on friendship patterns among neighbors in a biracial housing project in the United States, using a combined quantitative and qualitative, empirical and speculative analysis of social processes. Since then homophily has become a guiding principle for network science: it is simply presumed that similarity breeds connection. But the unpublished study by Merton, Patricia S. West, and Marie Jahoda, which grounds Lazarsfeld and Merton’s analysis, and the Merton and Bureau of Applied Social Research’s archive reveal a more complex picture. This article engages with the data traces in the archive to reimagine what enabled the residents of the studied housing project to live in difference, as neighbors. The reanimation of this archive reveals the often counterintuitive characteristic of our imagined networks: they are about removal, not addition. It also opens up new imagined possibilities for a digital future beyond the hatred of the different and online echo chambers.
The article employs post-hegemonic theory to reframe how power operates within online cultures. To that end, it investigates a digital marketing campaign for a Polish clothing brand, Reserved, and its reception in social media. Examining over one thousand comments on Facebook, it argues that while the initial viral success abruptly turned into public outcry, the actual response was much more varied, encompassing a multiplicity of different feelings and immediate orientations, not necessarily congruent with the backlash. In this sense, the shifting balance of power was not contingent on the emergence of a public consensus that challenged corporate hegemony, but pertained to the arrangement of affective intensities to habituate the multitude to the networked media environment. Consequently, the article approaches Reserved’s campaign and its online reception as involving a series of corporeal attunements that re-territorialized multiple and incongruent affective flows into established networked structures and corresponding relations of power.
Sonification and desonification -- for communication integrity
Cognitive fusion to engage with information complexity and overload
Transformation of linear information into a songbite
Memescapes engendered and sustained by multidimensional soundscapes
Information transfer possibilities of blackbird singing capacity
Noopolitics and memetic warfare within the noosphere
Engaging with a memespace of paradoxical complexity
Ways of looking at ways of looking -- in a period of invasive surveillance
Post-modern challenge to simplistic binary framing of the other
Imaginative composition of ways of looking or listening
Embodying a multiverse of uncertainly ordered incongruity
Thirteen ways of apprehending blackbird song
Imagining future communication integrity enabled by aesthetics
Could we flow knowledge faster and better? Why is this a problem in the first place? How can we tackle it technologically? What could be a prototype solution? This work unifies these questions in the outline of a single, refutable paradigm of noodynamics - the study of knowledge flows - and nooconomics, the economy of knowledge. This paradigm will answer the question “Why”. Neuroergonomics (“brain ergonomics”), and biomimicry, will be summoned in answer to the question “How”. Their contribution will follow from the simplest knowledge flow equation that is proposed in this work. Two original optimisation problems are also posed in software neuroergonomics and biomimetics: the Mindscape and Serendipity Problem. A case of theoretical neuroergonomics, or neuroergonomics ex ante is proposed with the study of Hyperwriting, a written grapheme-loceme association, or a glyphic method for externalising spatial memory. Its application to the design of user interface will finally found neuroergonomic design, or neuromimicry, with the example of a collegial interface to augment multiscale knowledge flows: Chréage. The anatomy of this prototype mindscape will be the conclusion of this work, and its answer to the question “What”?
This investigation in contemporary art presents itself as a cartographic diagram on the development of the artistic project Celestial Landscapes and extends in a poetic and conceptual itinerary from cloud to nebula, presenting concepts and artistic and multimedia works created from the proposition of three dimensions of the celestial landscape: Sky-Behind, Full Sky and Sky-Beyond. The methodological basis of the research was established as an artistic and affective cartography, using as main references Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Suely Rolnik and Cássio Hissa. During this journey, poetic references about works by Hiroshi Sugimoto, James Turrell, ARTiVIS, teamLab and other artists and collectives are presented to establish a relationship with the conception and development of the pieces created in photography - Vertizonte and In Stricto Linea, video - Following the Yellow Bus, generative sculpture - A-Cumulus, and interactive installations - SkyLoopSpace and SkyFIE. This set of works is effective in an artistic thinking centered on the relationship between Art, Science, Nature and Technology that is done as a practice based on lightness and cosmicity as opposed to the Anthropocene. It is praxis focused on subjectivities and also the incorporation of a maker, collaborative and co-creative process.
This paper explores the forms of sociality that are implicit in discussions about a range of smart projects in one actually-existing smart city. Current scholarship on smart cities focuses almost entirely on their digital infrastructure and on the figure of the ‘smart citizen’. This paper argues that smart city projects also emerge and develop through specific understandings of the social. The paper explores understandings of smart sociality by analysing nearly sixty interviews with a wide range of actors involved in smart city projects in the UK city of Milton Keynes. Implicit in those interviews are three overlapping but distinct forms of smart sociality, which the paper terms sociological, neoliberal and cybernetic. The paper argues that it is important to engage both empirically and theoretically with these three understandings of the social in relation to smart, because they suggest that the reconfiguration of human activity assumed in smart city discourses is more diverse than most current scholarship acknowledges. The paper concludes by arguing that if this diversity is to become a critical resource, urban scholarship must give more empirical and conceptual attention to cybernetic forms of sociality in particular.
This practice-based thesis questions how interactive media artworks affect the way audiences engage with the past. It considers contemporary art’s ‘impulse’ towards archives within the context of the age of Big Data. At a time when society is generating more information than ever before, this thesis explores how artists working with interactive databases can contribute novel systems and aesthetic experiences in order to carve new ways into and through archives. This thesis brings into dialogue practical and theoretical discoveries made along the journey of reimagining an oral history archive through the system of an immersive responsive installation. It argues that interactive artworks can allow for an embodied, exploratory and generative engagement with archival material. Further, it suggests that such processual and emergent accounts of the past are appropriate ways of modelling the world and its archived traces in a digital era characterised by swathes of stored data and fluctuating information flows. As critically interdisciplinary work across the fields of new media art and history, this research also suggests the value of such experimental methodologies for rethinking traditional approaches to archives with a view to generating aesthetic and affective, rather than factual and textual, engagements with the past.
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