Sam Kinsley

The techno-anthropological virtual

sam — Tue, 15 May 2012 11:56:11 +0000

Over on our technophilia blog I recently posted this short introduction and translation of Christian Fauré’s recent commentary on the concept of the virtual:

Last week Christian Fauré, of Ars Industrialis, posted a new blog post concerning what he has called the techno-anthropological virtual. The main substance of his argument, I suggest, is that the conceptualisation of the virtual that we can understand through the work of scholars such as Bergson, Deleuze and Stiegler is founded on technics, as a default of origin for the human. We must therefore understand the virtual in relation to the human as a techno-anthropological issue – it is realised through processes of exteriorisation, as mnemotechnics, and thus intimately bound up with the ways in which human development (becoming) has extended beyond the body-environment relationship and is tied to the creation of organised inorganic matter. The techno-anthoropological virtual is the potentialities that emerge in the associated milieu of trans-individuation, the becoming of assemblages of bodies, technologies and environments, and is concretised in the recording of traces, as language. For humans, then, ‘the virtual’ is the means by which ‘the real’ is articulated and enunciated.

I have created a rough translation of Christian’s post that I hope may be of interest, particularly in light of my recent comments on Digital Studies & virtuality and Patrick’s translation of Stiegler’s articulation of the ‘immaterial’ and ‘hypermaterial’, please find it below.

I have written my own clarifications or queries of terminology in square brackets.

The techno-anthropological virtual

There are different regimes of the virtual: the cosmic virtual (the acorn is potentially an oak), the physical virtual (stone is potentially a statue) and the metaphysical virtual (being, the real, the possible). However, to understand the virtual through current affairs requires another scheme of the virtual, one that we can call techno-anthropological.

This techno-anthropological perspective is part of a French tradition of thought that goes from [Andre] Leroi-Gourhan to Bernard Stiegler, through [Gilbert] Simondon and Gilles Deleuze.

At the heart of this current of thought, is the postulate that what is called ‘human’ is absolutely not something stable, once and for all, and that this is central to its ‘identity’. This approach is anthropological in the sense that the question of what is human can be learned from the processes of hominisation [becoming human or constituting the human].

However, this process of hominisation is itself learned from what Leroi-Gourhan has called the ‘processes of exteriorisation’. Actually, the term ‘externalisation‘ is perhaps a misnomer in that it implies some form of pre-existing interiority, as such, in the human mind, before becoming properly externalised – projected into the exterior – which can be seen in the first tool and in the cave paintings in Lascaux.

The process of externalisation can be understood through the analogy of the cinematographic process in which the intimacy of [internal] conscious thought is projected on to the canvas of the exterior. In other words, the partition between interior and exterior is not played out a priori, it establishes itself through the process of externalisation.

By the same token, the writing process does not simply consist of writing down words and phrases that are already in the brain: it is only in writing that we can understand our capacities and ‘internalise’ in turn what has been ‘externalised’. The externalisation process in turn leads to a process of internalisation, which we have both inherited and produced in digital technologies, [and so] we must now ask ourselves what digitally virtual technologies we want in return. This is the issue of Digital Studies.

Technics is what accompanies and concretises (in language, in writing, in the system of technical objects) through the process of externalisation that gives to us all prostheses that are – as Bernard Stiegler likes to remind us – a ‘necessary default’ [of being, 'having yet to begin being' Technics and Time 1 p. 114]. The human is in default, a default of any quality necessary to be in the world ['a flaw in being' Technics and Time 1 p. 193], yet it is from this default that the technical nature of the hominisation process is manifested with all its technical necessity.

If I am insistant on this kind of exteriorisation process – which is a technical process and vested in technology today – it is because it is that which produces the techno-anthropological virtual, which principally interests us here. This virtual, as noted by Deleuze, is absolutely not opposed to the real, it constitutes a filter or developer (in the chemical sense of the term [the chemical catalyst that allows film to develop]) through which we are granted an ‘augmented’ vision of the real. To go further, the virtual is what we retain, that which guides us and which we interpret as the real. The real is always overdetermined by our technics of virtualisation, the foremost forms of language within contemporary means of writing the digital.

As Westerners, we would not survive more than a few days in the Amazon jungle, unlike the peoples that we call ‘primitive’. The reason is that we do not have the same kind of virtual filter: where we cannot distinguish anything amongst the abundant vegetation, they can see the opportunities and the dangers, and ‘read’ the jungle (in the same way that we say that the Inuit have a richer vocabulary for snow in all its forms). However, the reverse is also true, a ‘primitive’ in Paris probably will not survive in our urban jungle, with its codes and signs (a situation exploited in a number of comedy films, such as ‘An Indian in Paris’ or ‘Mr Pignon in the Amazon’).

In this sense, the virtual is that which gives proper meaning to reality; which allows us to interpret it and sets it within the order of signification. The virtual condition of the representation of things gives us calendarities [the institution of calendar temporalities] cardinalities [the ways in which we orientate ourselves according to specific axes such as compass points] that allow us to guide ourselves, and, in this way, religions are cultures are entirely consistent with a history of virtualisation techniques [perhaps the technics of virtualisation].

Language is thus a virtualisation technique. The virtual is always that which speaks and enunciates the real. This speech and this enunciation is of the order of the technics of writing which are at the same time mnemotechnics, the technics of memory.

There was a virtual graphics within the Lascaux caves, a virtual hieroglyphics with the Egyptians, cuneiform with the Mesopotamians, the alphabet with the Greeks, the printing press with Gutenberg, then analogue photography, audio and video [recording] of the 19th and particularly the 20th centuries. In the present there is a digitally encoded virtual, in Silicon, and which is the subject of what we, in Ars Industrialis, call ‘Digital Studies’, and these studies are attached to a particular stage of evolution of technical systems in a ‘general organology’.

However, why is there not an industrial politics of virtual technologies in Europe and particularly in France? There is certainly a cross section of causes, but if a form of virtual autonomy has been gained by delineating the possible (cf. Bergson), our recent times have tended to dilute this in what we, in Ars Industrialis, have called the fable of the immaterial; a fable which has introduced the digital as being an ‘immaterial virtual’, that is, that is has no reality. One hundred years of work and of research show this to be rubbish, even before we come to Bergson. Thus, by using the word ‘immaterial’, we can only place the virtual in opposition to the real, and we have already seen that the virtual is not only composed with the real but it is also over-determined, in the sense that it is through the virtual that the real is enunciated and spoken.

Technicity and the Virtual

sam — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 16:20:07 +0000

On the 19th of April I contributed to the ‘virtual space‘ event held by Passenger Films, combining short talks and film screenings that addressed the theme of ‘the virtual’. Passenger Films is a series of public events initiated by Amy Cutler, a cultural geographer at Royal Holloway, and supported by UCL UrbanLab, that combine talks and film screenings. I had the privilege of speaking alongside Rob Kitchin, Director of the National Institute of Regional and Spatial Analysis (Republic of Ireland) and co-author of ‘Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life‘.

I gave a talk entitled ‘Technicity and the Virtual’ that aimed to provide an overview of some of the ways in which human geographers have addressed the idea of the virtual, as digital mediated activity or computer-mediated communications, tied together through the concept of technicity.

Geographies of the ‘virtual’

Geographers have been, I argue, relatively swift at investigating digitally mediated forms of experience. With the advent of the world wide web, in the early 1990s, several geographers began exploring and studying potential and reality of computer-mediated communications. Work by geographers such as Mike Batty, Nick Bingham, Stephen Graham, Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin amongst others offered some interesting insights into what was variously being described as ‘cyberspace’, the ‘information superhighway’ and the ‘virtual’.

My own interest in these matters stems from a fascination with possibilities opened up by computation. Following a degree in digital art and a brief sojourn as a web developer, I conducted research for my Masters dissertation on the metaphor cyberspace and our understanding of the novel forms of social connection afforded by the, then, popular social networking system MySpace. As I suggested in that work of 2006:

In struggling to accommodate the rapid intersection and integration of the globally networked, computer-mediated communications systems that are the Internet within everyday life we have adopted a variety of analogies and metaphors to make sense of the new mechanisms of communication the Internet has afforded. As a variety of literature has shown metaphorical conceptualisation is at the heart of our efforts to make sense of the world, which has in the case of computer-mediated communications and the Internet resulted in ‘a plurality of clashing, resonating and shocking metaphors’ (Pile, 1994: 1817). Spatial metaphors are a convenient means to understand new technologies but have proved dominating concepts in the unfolding of computer-mediated communications and the Internet. This veritable cacophony of spatial metaphors – ‘cyberia’, ‘cyberspace’, ‘information superhighway’, ‘I-way’, ‘the matrix’, amongst others – has been formed, adopted and suplemented by a variety of commentators and academics.

Interestingly, as we read lists, such as above, of past terms for the internet or mediated communication it is striking how dated they quickly became. The technologies have moved on, rather quickly, the interaction mechanisms have diversified, and the range of digital media devices we have accepted into everyday life have all had some influence on the ways in which we describe our use of communications technologies. The cyberpunk dream of ‘jacking in’ to an-other space has been somewhat superseded, if not refuted, by our increasing and diverse use of mobile digital media technologies.

More broadly, we can understand the appeal to an abstract sense of spatial potential, or liminality as ‘the virtual’, which has been broadly adopted to colloquially refer to the spatial experience of digital media. While the imagining of ‘the world in the wires’ has some popular currency, as form of cartesian spatial imagination, there are broader understandings of the virtual that are useful here. In his 2003 book ‘The Virtual‘, Rob Shields outlines a range of meanings for the virtual. We might thus variously understand the virtual as:

Memory – and our spatial experience mediated thereby.
‘Real but not concrete’ – forms of potential present in the world that have not become consistent in our experience.
The sense in which people and things can be ‘almost-so’ or ‘almost-there’.
The in-betweeness of ‘metaxis’ or ‘liminality’ – that is familiar with the digital but also the thresholds that exist between public/private space, for example.
Simulation – particularly in the ways in which, following philosopher Jean Baudrillard, the simulation is treated as ‘more real than real’.

We can see then how the complication of the virtual as ‘cyberspace’ is founded not only in the diversification of the material ways of experiencing digital media but also in the variety of ways in which we can think about what that mediation is and how we variously perform it. The task is, increasingly, to describe and explain forms of agency and entities that have their origin with us but that have become autonomous and apparently foreign and yet they have a significant influence on our spatial perception.

For the purposes of my talk at the Passenger Films event I identified three particular themes of work in human geography that can be understood to address the idea of virtual space. These are, broadly, the ‘automatic production of space’, spatial mediation or mediality, and spaces of calculation.

Automatic production of space

In a 2002 paper, Nigel Thrift and Shaun French described ‘more and more of the spaces of everyday life come loaded up with software… that are installing a new kind of automatically reproduced background’ that they describe as the ‘automatic production of space’. Thrift has variously examined digital art, software and ‘intelligent’ environments in terms of the various constructive apparatuses that formulate our spatial experience with and through technologies. This has been significantly augmented and extended by the work of Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin, who have over a course of years developed an agenda for studying what they have come to call code/space, the now widespread automatic production of space.

In their recent book, Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life, Kitchin and Dodge offer a wealth of examples of the forms and formulations of Code/Spaces, as automatically produced spaces contingent on code, and ‘coded spaces’, that are imbued with software but do not depend upon it. Incidentally, Rob Kitchin has provided the notes to his talk that offer more details of their conceptualisations of code/space.

Since the 1990s, Stephen Graham has developed a range of work that has provided compelling critical reflections upon the increasing agency of digital communications technologies and their infrastructures. Cities are at the centre of Graham’s work, with examinations of infrastructure for telecommunications networks, associated policy, the forms of socio-economic development thereby developed and the ongoing shifts in spatial experience of the city engendered by the growth in digital media technologies. More recently, Graham has shifted focus to examine how the rationales for technological urban development have a strong relationship with military technoscience.

In a 1998 paper, ‘The end of geography or an explosion of place?‘, Graham expresses the ‘powerful role of spatial and territorial metaphors’ that anchor discourses of information technology (in the late 1990s). He offers three broad categories of spatial imagination of technically mediated spatial experience:

Appeals to a substitutive or transcendental form of experience, whereby ‘cyberspace’ affords the ability to move out of or beyond the body – following author William Gibson’s coining of ‘cyberspace’ as a ‘consensual hallucination’ that escapes the body.
Expressions of a co-evolution of social and electronic spaces that maintain a cartesian difference between the physical and the digitally virtual.
Articulations of re-combinative, topological, understanding of socially constructed forms of spatiality that are ‘sociotechnical’ (i.e. linkages between ‘heterogeneous’ actors, including humans, machines, technology, texts, money and others, formulate spatial experience).

Graham, and many others, have identified the problematic form of Cartesian dualism (mind/body split) implied by the first category, which also somewhat underlies the second also, and the uncritical technological determinism that often accompanies this somewhat fanciful race away from our embodied existence.

There are, of course a range of other enquiries into automatic productions of space, including children’s experience of mobile media (Jones et al.), air travel (Budd and Adey) and much more (please see my Bibliography for studies of code/space). Outside of geography, there have been popular articulations of ‘pervasive’ or ‘ubiquitous’ computing by writers such as McCullough and Greenfield, and the growth of ‘Digital Humanities’ research offer further insights, see David Berry’s work particularly.

Mediation/mediality

Embodied forms of (inter-) mediation of everyday life and various (specific) activities with and through technology have been the focus of geographical enquiry. In particular, there have been explorations of how technologies such the web (Valentine, Holloway and Bingham), maps (Crampton, Zook and Graham), social media (Wilson) and video games (Ash) play a role in the contemporary spatial understandings of everyday life. Equally, outside of geography there have been investigations into the role of restraining and surveillance technologies (Troshynski et al., Wood), such as, what ‘wirelessness’ means to our experience of everyday life (Mackenzie).

Technologies for mapping have a long history in the mediation of our understanding of space and place (see, in particular: the work of Jeremy Crampton and Gunnar Olson’s ‘Abysmal‘), with Geographical Information Systems (GIS) being the computational development of cartographic technology and technique. A range of work has been conducted around the meaning and uses of GIS, critical reflections on the techniques and technologies, and the ways in which non-specialists and publics can participate in mapping.

Social media have also, more recently, emerged as a site of concern for geographers interested in our social spatial understanding of our everyday lives, and in particular the environs of the city. Matt Wilson has offered some useful observations about the forms of technically mediated ‘conspicuous mobility’ that form emergent cartographies of everyday life. In addition to geographical study, social networking systems have featured as a central concern in discussions around how our capacity for attention is mediated.

The phenomenological relationship between body and screen in the act of playing video games has been identified by James Ash as fruitful locus of geographical enquiry. Ash has variously investigated the affectual responses, spatial awareness and temporal sensibilities that emerge and are refigured by video gameplay.

Spaces of calculation

The growth of networked information and communication technologies has augmented the techniques and technologies of calculation and governance that are employed to control, regulate and secure spaces. Geographers have variously tackled this issues in terms of (for example): access, government, security and surveillance. Digital communications, information and media technologies can be understood as a part of the ongoing development of political arithmatic, population statistics and political economy.

Governance has been addressed as a technological concern in terms of the constitution of ‘technology’ zones to encourage production, network infrastructures, civic engagement and regulation of digital reproducibility. In a wide-ranging analysis of the increasing importance of networked information technologies, Andrew Barry’s ‘Political Machines‘ covers a diverse range of concerns. While technology development has moved on apace since the publication of this book, the critical engagement with the role of technology in politics, and vice versa, remains valuable. The protocols of network technologies have themselves been the topic of analysis in the work of media theorist Alexander Galloway, who has addressed the ways in which logics of computation have at their heart the principals of control and not, as net evangelists might argue, freedom. Thus with the increasing importance of network technologies in everyday life, (computational) protocols are becoming more influential.

Access to and the security of regulated places has been studied as an prevalent form of the automatic production of space, as code/space. Both Budd and Adey and Kitchin and Dodge have identified the airport as the securitised code/space par excellence. Airports are entirely contingent upon the affordances of code, with almost all of the functions of the airport as a complex facilitated and controlled by software. In our more mundane quotidien spaces we can also look to electronic access systems for transit and building entry, as well as to the automated management of infrastructures for energy, water and waste for examples of coded systems of management and control (see Kitchin and Dodge 2011 for more discussion).

Technicity

Central to all of the investigations of ‘virtuality’ or technical mediation I have reviewed above, I argue, is a slightly hidden or, at least, assumed understanding of the nature of our relation with and through technology. A useful way of thinking about what technology is and does in relation to the human is the concept of ‘technicity’. Geographers have broached the concept of technicity from a few perspectives, largely drawing on theoretical resources associated with phenomenological understandings of being. There are broadly two ways we can understand technicity:

‘the productive power of technology to make things happen’ -Kitchin and Dodge 2011
the ‘co-constitutive milieu of relations between the human and their technical supports’ – Crogan & Kennedy 2009

First, following Kitchin and Dodge’s articulation of the concept (drawing on the work of Adrian Mackenzie), we can understand technicity as the power technologies have, both on their own and in combination with the human body, to make things happen in the world. We can accordingly understand the automated agency of software and other technologies in the production of code/space as a form of technicity..

Second, following my colleagues Patrick Crogan and Helen Kennedy, we can think of technicity as the ways in which humans and technology mutually co-constitute one another in an ongoing formulation of associated milieu. The reciprocal arrangement does not have the human at its centre but is a form of ‘trans-individuation’ whereby the human and technical individuals concretise in relation. Technicity in this sense is not a capacity but an emergent form of relation through which we come to understand ourselves and our technical supports.

Further to the second definition, following the philosopher Bernard Stiegler, we can also understand technicity as the absence, or aporia, of origin for the human. As I have previously observed, the interesting resolution of this aporia is that the mental interior is only recognized as such with the advent of the technical exterior – or, our conscious self-knowledge is only possible with the ability to externalise thought as language and gesture. Stiegler explains this aporia of origin as a paradox:

‘The paradox is to have to speak of an exteriorisation without a preceding interior: the interior is constituted in exteriorisation’ (Stiegler, Technics and Time 1).

Technicity can be thought of as a double-bind between being both constitutive and a supplement of ‘the human’. Therefore, the interior and exterior, and with them the contemporary understanding of the experience of being human and what we understand to be technology, are mutually co-constituted.

We can accordingly understand technicity as the relation between the human and the technical that facilitates our externalisation of memory, recorded not only for our own use but also for transmission, both through space but also across time. As Stiegler suggests these forms of ‘retention’ precede us and yet they are a part of us, there are forms of retention that were created long before the birth of an individual and yet that person can access them as a form of ‘cultural memory’. Thinking through this relationship between the interior and exterior affirms the relationship between actual and virtual, the virtual is always and already twinned with the actual.

Thinking beyond code

To conclude my brief exploration of geographical investigations of ‘the virtual’ I invited the audience to consider the very material constituents and consequences of the technologies and systems that facilitate our contemporary interactions with and through what can be understood as the digitally ‘virtual’.

If we attempt to think contemporary digital media ‘ecologically’, in terms of the widest variety of constituent entities that enable their production, use and maintenance, we might ask the following questions:

What are the material constituents? How are they made?
What are the ethical and political implications?

Whereas those in the West might be tempted to unproblematically assume the existence of a ‘knowledge economy’ founded in the growth of ‘immaterial labour’, there remain very real physical labour issues in the parts of the world where technologies are manufactured. Equally, as Sy Taffel has raised, many of the digital media technologies require rare earth metals that are mined in politically troubled countries (further explorations of these issues is available at followthethings.com).

We also might attempt to attend to the ‘others’ that form part of digital media system. Rather than focus our studies solely on the ‘expert’ producer and the somewhat passive ‘consumer’, we should perhaps be looking to the ways in which digital media trouble such distinctions. Whereas in the industrial economy the ‘proletariat’ had very limited access to the means of production, digital media open out some new opportunities for what the philosopher Bernard Stiegler has called an ‘economy of contribution‘. Consumers or users are empowered, in particular ways, to produce new forms of media and participate in the production of organisations and events without some of the traditional barriers to access. The technologist Christian Fauré has articulated this as the difference between ‘employment’ and ‘work’. A person is employed when they labour only to receive remuneration, they ‘work’ for interest or because of enthusiasm. In an economy of contribution then, facilitated by digital media, it has been suggested that we are invited to become ‘amateurs’, literally ‘lovers of an activity’, in the mutual production of the web. There remain, of course, significant cultural, political and spatial questions – and these are, of course, the emerging objects/subjects of ongoing geographical enquiry.

A graphic record of my talk at 10 things I learnt – Design Wales

sam — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:50:15 +0000

Last Friday, 9th March 2012, I gave a talk as part of the ’10 things I learnt’ event convened by Design Wales Forum, held at the Welsh Millennium Centre. I was talking about ’10 things I have learned about anticipating technology futures’. I gave some short provocations based on some of my research and drawing on the work of Julian Bleecker (Near Future Laboratory). I’ll try and provide a write-up soon.

Today I received a tweet from @_auralab who has created some ‘sketch notes’ of the event. Here’s what Laura made of my talk! -

Click through to the Flickr stream of Laura Sorvala

The beginnings of a ‘Design Fiction’ bibliography

sam — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:10:30 +0000

On Friday 10th February I will be talking about ‘design fiction’ for the Pervasive Media Studio’s lunchtime talk series. ‘Design Fiction’ describes ways of using storytelling techniques, especially in the form of video, to make speculative design ideas feel real. I have collected together the various resources from which I have drawn my materials for the talk into a preliminary bibliography that may be of use to others interested in the topic. Please find it below:

Bannon, Liam, 2011, “Reimagining HCI: toward a more human-centred perspective” Interactions 18 (4), pp. 50-57.

Bardram, Jakob, Bossen, Claus, Lykke-Olesen, Andreas, Halskov Madsen, Kim, Nielsen, Rune, 2002, “Virtual Video Prototyping of Pervasive Healthcare Systems”, in Proceedings of the 4th conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques, SIGCHI: ACM, London pp. 167-177.

Bergman, Eric, Lund, Arnold, Dubberly, Hugh, Tognazzini, Bruce, Intille, Stephen, 2004, “Video visions of the future: a critical review”, in CHI ’04 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, ACM, Vienna, Austria, pp 1584-1585.

Bleecker, Julian, 2009, “Design fiction: A short essay on design, science, fact and fiction”, Near Future Laboratory, Los Angeles, CA,

Bleecker, Julian, Nova, Nicolas, 2009 A synchronicity: Design Fictions for Asynchronous Urban Computing. The Architectural League of New York, New York, NY.

Buxton, Bill, 2007 Sketching User Experiences: Getting design right and the right design. Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA.

Dourish, Paul, Bell, Genevieve, 2008, “‘Resistence is Futile’: Reading Science Fiction alongside ubiquitous computing” Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, forthcoming.

Halskov, Kim, Nielsen, Rune, 2006, “Virtual Video Prototyping” Human Computer Interaction 21 pp. 199-233.

Johnson, Brian David, 2009, “Science Fiction Prototypes Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying about the Future and Love Science Fiction”, in Intelligent Environments 2009 – Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Intelligent Environments, Callaghan, V., Kameas, A., Reyes, A., Royo, D., Weber, M. (Eds.), IOS Press, Barcelona pp. 3-8.

Johnson, Brian David, 2011, “Love and God and Robots: The Science Behind the Science Fiction Prototype “Machinery of Love and Grace””, in Workshop Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Intelligent Environments Augusto, J. C., Aghajan, V., Callaghan, V., Cook, D. J., O’Donoghue, J., Egerton, S., Gardner, M., Johnson, B. D., Kovalchuk, Y., López-Cózar, R., Mikulecký, P., Ng, J. W. P., Poppe, R., Wang, M. J., Zamudio, V. (Eds.), IOS Press, Nottingham pp. 99-127.

Jones, Matt, 2011, “The Robot-Readable World” accessed online at http://berglondon.com/blog/2011/08/03/the-robot-readable-world/

Jones, Matt, 2011, “”Sometimes the stories are the science…”" accessed online at http://berglondon.com/blog/2011/11/21/sometimes-the-stories-are-the-science…/

Jones, Matt, 2012, “Gardens and Zoos” accessed online at http://berglondon.com/blog/2012/01/06/gardens-and-zoos/

Kinsley, Samuel, 2010, “Representing ‘things to come’: feeling the visions of future technologies” Environment and Planning A 42 (11), pp. 2771-2790.

Kirby, David, 2008, “Hollywood Knowledge: Communication Between Scientific and Entertainment Cultures”. In: Cheng, D., Claessens, M., Gascoigne, T., Metcalfe, J., Schiele, B. (Eds.) Communicating Science in Social Contexts: New models, new practices. Springer, London, pp. 165-180.

Kirby, David, 2010, “The future is now: Diegetic prototypes and the role of popular films in generating real-world technological development” Social Studies of Science 40 (1), pp. 41-70.

Kirby, David, 2011 Lab coats in Hollywood: science, scientists and cinema. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Larsen, Larry, 2009, “Inside Microsoft’s 2019 Vision Video” accessed online at http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/LarryLarsen/Inside-Microsofts-2019-Vision-Video/

Schulze, Jack, 2010, “Media Surfaces: Incidental media” accessed online at http://berglondon.com/blog/2010/11/03/media-surfaces-incidental-media/

Sterling, Bruce, 2009, “Design Fiction” Interactions 16 (3), pp. 20-24.

Tognazzini, Bruce, 1994, “The “Starfire” video prototype project: A case history”, in Computer Human Interaction 1994, Adelson, B., Dumais, S., Olson, J. S. Eds) ACM Press, Boston, MA, pp 99-105.

Vertelney, Laurie, 1989, “Using Video to Prototype Interfaces” SIGCHI Bulletin 21 (2), pp. 57-61.

Zeller, Ludwig, 2011, “What You See Is What You Don’t Get: Addressing Implications of Information Technology through Design Fiction” Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6770 pp. 329-336.

I have also generated an EndNote formatted file of this bibliography, which is available here.

A bibliography of Stiegler’s work in English

sam — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 09:00:10 +0000

Following Ben Robertson’s lead, and courtesy of Daniel Ross’ Twitter stream (and with his permission), here is a complete list of Bernard Stiegler’s work translated into English. Many of these translations are by Ross (notably Acting Out, For a New Critique of Political Economy, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations and The Decadence of Industrial Democracies). Not included, apparently, are several unpublished works.

My sincere thanks to Dan Ross for posting this information and to Ben Robertson for marshalling it into a single place. I have tried to identify the translators where possible and provide links where they may be meaningful. I was introduced to Stiegler’s work by my colleague Patrick Crogan and it has proven useful to my research, and indeed Robertson’s, this bibliography is very timely and tremendously useful, I hope it is to you too.

For more on Dan, who directed the fantastic The Ister and wrote Violent Democracy, see his Wikipedia page.

Derrida, Jacques, Stiegler, Bernard, 2002 Echographies of Television: filmed interviews. Polity, Cambridge.

Stiegler, Bernard 1993 “Questioning Technology and Time” Tekhnema 1: 31–44.

Stiegler, Bernard, 1996 “Persephone, Oedipus, Epimetheus” Tekhnema 3 pp. 69-112.

Stiegler, Bernard 1998 Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. trans. Beardsworth, R., Collins, G., Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.

Stiegler, Bernard 2002 “Derrida and technology: fidelity at the limits of deconstruction and the prosthesis of faith”. In: Cohen, T. (Ed.) Jaques Derrida and the humanities: a critical reader. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 238-270.

Stiegler, Bernard 2006 “Philosophising by Accident“, Public 33, pp. 98-107. (An excerpt from Acting Out).

Stiegler, Bernard 2006 “Within the limits of capitalism, economizing means taking care” (available from: http://arsindustrialis.org/node/2922)

Stiegler, Bernard 2006 “To Take Care” trans. Arnold, S., Crogan, P., Ross, D. (available from: http://arsindustrialis.org/node/2925)

Stiegler, Bernard, 2006 “Spirit, Capitalism and Superego” trans. Collins, G. (available from: http://arsindustrialis.org/node/2928)

Stiegler, Bernard, 2007 “Anamnesis and Hypomnesis: The Memories of Desire” Technicity, Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, pp. 15-41.

Stiegler, Bernard, 2007 “Technoscience and reproduction” Parallax 13 (4), pp. 29-45.

Stiegler, Bernard, 2009 Acting Out. trans. Barison, D., Ross, D., Crogan, P., Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.

Stiegler, Bernard, 2009 Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation. trans. Barker, S., Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.

Stiegler, Bernard, 2009 “The Magic Skin; or, The Franco-European Accident of Philosophy after Jacques Derrida” Qui Parle 18 pp. 97-110.

Stiegler, Bernard, 2009 “Teleologics of the Snail: The Errant Self Wired to a WiMax Network” Theory, Culture & Society 26 (2-3), pp. 33-45.

Stiegler, Bernard, 2009 “The Theater of Individuation: Phase-Shift and Resolution in Simondon and Heidegger” trans. Lebedeva, K., Parrhesia 7 (46-57).

Stiegler, Bernard, 2010 Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. trans. Barker, S., Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.

Stiegler, Bernard, 2010 For a New Critique of Political Economy. trans. Ross, D., Polity, Cambridge.

Stiegler, Bernard, 2010 Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise. trans. Barker, S., Stanford University Press, Stanford.

Stiegler, Bernard, 2010 “The Carnival of the New Screen”. In: Snickars, P., Vonderau, P. (Eds.) The YouTube Reader. National Library of Sweden, Stockholm, pp. 40-59.

Stiegler, Bernard, 2010 “The Industrial Exteriorisation of Memory“, Critical Terms for Media Studies, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 64-87.

Stiegler, Bernard, 2010 “New Industrial Temporal Objects”. In: Earnshaw, R., Guedj, R. (Eds.) Frontiers of Human-Centred Computing, Online Communities and Virtual Environments. Springer Verlag, London, pp. 45-460.

Stiegler, Bernard, 2010 “Telecracy against democracy” trans. Ross, D., Cultural Politics 6 (2), pp. 171-180.

Stiegler, Bernard, 2011 The Decadence of Industrial Democracies. trans. Ross, D., Polity, Cambridge.

Stiegler, Bernard, 2011 “Desire and Knowledge: The Dead Seize the Living” trans. Collins, G., Ross, D. (available from: http://arsindustrialis.org/desire-and-knowledge-dead-seize-living)

Stiegler, Bernard, 2011 “The digital as a bearer of another society” Digital Transformation Review, pages 43-50.

Stiegler, Bernard, 2011 “Pharmacology of Desire: Drive-based Capitalism and Libidinal Dis-economy” New Formations 72 pp. 150-161.

Stiegler, Bernard, 2011 “The Pharmacology of Spirit”. In: Elliott, J., Attridge, D. (Eds.) Theory after ‘theory’. Routledge, London, pp. 294-310.

Stiegler, Bernard, 2011 “The Tongue of the Eye: What ‘Art History’ Means”. In: Khalip, J., Mitchell, R. (Eds.) Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, pp. 222-236.

Stiegler, Bernard, 2012 Re-Enchantment of the World: The value of the human spirit vs. industrial populism. trans. Arthur, T., Continuum, London.

Stiegler, Bernard, forthcoming Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals. trans. Ross, D., Polity, Cambridge.

Stiegler, Bernard, Crogan, Patrick, 2010 “Knowledge, Care and Trans-Individuation: An Interview with Bernard Stiegler” Cultural Politics 6 (2), pp. 157-170.

Stiegler, Bernard, Hallward, Peter, Gaston, Sean, 2007 “Technics of decision” Angelaki-Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 8 (2), pp. 151-168.

Stiegler, Bernard, Hubaut, Sandrine, 2007 “The True Price of Towering Capitalism: Bernard Stiegler Interviewed” Queen’s Quarterly 114 pp. 340-350.

Stiegler, Bernard, Lemmens, Peter, 2011 “This System Does Not Produce Pleasure Anymore: An Interview with Bernard Stiegler” Krisis 2011 (1), pp. 33-41.

Stiegler, Bernard, O’Gorman, Marcel, 2010 “Bernard Stiegler’s Pharmacy: A conversation” Configurations 18 (3), pp. 458-476.

Stiegler, Bernard, Venn, Couze, Boyne, Roy, Phillips, John, Bishop, Ryan, 2007 “Technics, Media, Teleology: Interview with Bernard Stiegler” Theory, Culture & Society 24 (7-8), pp. 334-341.

I have created an EndNote file for these references, which you can download here. See also the Wikipedia page for Bernard Stiegler, where there is a fairly comprehensive list of Stiegler’s work as well as a list of secondary literature that addresses his work.

A preliminary bibliography for studies of Code/Spaces

sam — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:11:53 +0000

I have begun writing down some thoughts about the co-production of space and place between the human and the technical (for me, following Stiegler, neither pre-exists the other) that Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin have usefully labeled “Code/Space”. This is not, of course, the only form of spatiality that are associated with the performance of ‘technicity’ in everyday life, but it is a useful category for description. I have prepared a first cut from my EndNote database and added some additional references from Kitchin & Dodge’s “Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life” that may be of interest and/or useful to others. Please find it in plain text below.

[Update 31/01/12: Following a post to the 'crit-geog-forum' list I have received some really helpful emails and so I have updated this bibliography.]

Abba, Thomas, 2009, “Hybrid Stories: Examining the future of transmedia narrative” Journal of Science Fiction Film & Television 1 (2), pp. 59-76.

Adey, Peter, 2004, “Secured and sorted mobilities: Examples from the airport” Surveillance and Society 1 (4), pp. 500-519.

Adey, Peter, 2009, “Facing airport security: affect, biopolitcs and the pre-emptive securitization of the mobile body” Environment and Planning D: Society & Space 27 (2), pp. 274-295.

Amin, Ash, Thrift, Nigel, 2002 Cities: Reimagining the Urban. Polity, London.

Andrejevic, Mark, 2005, “Nothing comes between me and my CPU: smart clothes and “ubiquitous” computing” Theory, Culture & Society 22 (3), pp. 101-119.

Applewhite, Ashton, 2002, “What knows where you are?” IEEE Pervasive Computing 1 (4), pp. 4-8.

Ash, James, 2009, “Emerging spatialities of the screen: video games and the reconfiguration of spatial awareness” Environment and Planning A 41 (9), pp. 2105-2124.

Ash, James, 2010, “Teleplastic technologies: charting practices of orientation and navigation in videogaming” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35 (3), pp. 414-430.

Ash, James, 2010, “Architectures of affect: anticipating and manipulating the event in processes of videogame design and testing” Environment and Planning D: Society & Space 28 pp. 653-671.

Ash, James, 2012, “Technology, Technicity and Emerging Practices of Temporal Sensitivity in Videogames” Environment and Planning A 44 (1), pp. 187-203.

Aurigi, Alessandro, De Cindio, Fiorella (Eds.), 2008 Augmented Urban Spaces: Articulating the Physical and Electronic City. Ashgate, Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT.

Barnes, Tervor J., Hannah, Matthew, 2001, “The place of numbers: Histories, geographies, and theories of quantification” Environment and Planning D: Society & Space 19 (4), pp. 379-383.

Barry, Andrew, 2001 Political Machines: Governing a technological society. Athlone, London.

Bell, Genevieve, 2004, “Intimate Computing?” Internet Computing 8 (6), pp. 91-93.

Bell, Genevieve, Dourish, Paul, 2007, “Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Notes on ubiquitous computing’s dominant vision” Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 11 (2), pp. 133-143.

Bennett, C. J., 2001, “Cookies, web bugs, webcams and cue cats: Patterns of surveillance on the world wide web” Ethics and Information Technology 3 (3), pp. 195-208.

Berry, David M., 2004, “The contestation of code: A preliminary investigation into the discourse of the free/libre and open source movements” Critical Discourse Studies 1 (1), pp. 65-98.

Berry, David M., 2011 The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age. Palgrave, London.

Bingham, Nick, 1996, “Object-ions: From technological determinism towards geographies of relations” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14 (6), pp. 635-657.

Bingham, Nick, 2001, “Digital places: living with geographic information technologies” Ecumene 8 (2), pp. 227-229.

Britcher, Robert N., 1999 The limits of software. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.

Budd, Lucy, Adey, Peter, 2009, “The software-simulated airworld: anticipatory code and affective aeromobilities” Environment and Planning A 41 (6), pp. 1366-1385.

Castells, Manuel, 1996 The Rise of the Network Society. Blackwell, Oxford and Cambridge, MA.

Clough, Patricia Ticiento, 2000 Autoaffection: unconscious thought in the age of teletechnology. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN.

Crampton, Jeremy W., 2007, “The biopolitical justification for geosurveillance” Geographical Review 97 (3), pp. 389-403.

Crampton, Jeremy W., 2009, “Cartography: Maps 2.0″ Progress in Human Geography 33 (1), pp. 91-100.

Crang, Michael, 2002, “Between places: Producing hubs, flows, and networks” Environment and Planning A 34 (4), pp. 569-574.

Crang, Michael, Crosbie, Tracie, Graham, Stephen, 2007, “Technology, time-space, and the remediation of neighbourhood life” Environment and Planning A 39 pp. 2405-2422.

Crang, Michael, Graham, Stephen, 2007, “Sentient Cities: Ambient intelligence and the politics of urban space” Information, Communication and Society 10 (6), pp. 789-817.

Crogan, Patrick, 2010, “Bernard Stiegler: Philosophy, Technics and Activism” Cultural Politics 6 (2), pp. 133-156.

Curry, Michael R., 1997, “The digital individual and the private realm” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87 (4), pp. 681-699.

de Goede, Marieke, Randalls, Samuel, 2009, “Precaution, preemption: arts and technologies of the actionable future” Environment and Planning D: Society & Space 27 pp. 859-878.

Dodge, Martin, Kitchin, Rob, 2005, “Code and the transduction of space” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95 pp. 162-180.

Dodge, Martin, Kitchin, Rob, 2005, “Codes of life: Identification codes and the machine readable world” Environment and Planning D: Society & Space 23 (6), pp. 851-881.

Dodge, Martin, Kitchin, Rob, 2007, “”Outlines of a world coming into existence”: pervasive computing and an ethics of forgetting” environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 34 (3), pp. 431-445.

Dodge, Martin, Kitchin, Rob, 2007, “The automatic management of drivers and driving space” Geoforum 38 (2), pp. 264-275.

Dodge, Martin, Kitchin, Rob, 2009, “Software, objects, and home space” Environment and Planning A 41 (6), pp. 1344-1365.

Dourish, Paul, 2004 Where the action is: The foundations of embodied interaction. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Dourish, Paul, Bell, Genevieve, 2007, “The infrastructure of experience and the experience of infrastructure: meaning and structure in everyday encounters with space” environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 34 (3), pp. 414-430.

Dourish, Paul, Bell, Genevieve, 2011 Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Fraser, Alistair, 2007, “Coded spatialities of fieldwork” Area 39 (2), pp. 242–245.

Fuller, Matthew, 2003 Behind the blip: Essays on the culture of software. Autonomedia, New York, NY.

Fuller, Matthew, 2005 Media Ecologies. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Gabrys, Jennifer, 2011 Digital Rubbish: A natural history of electronics. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI.

Galloway, Anne, 2004, “Intimations of Everyday Life: Ubiquitous computing and the city” Cultural Studies 18 (2/3), pp. 384-408.

Galloway, Anne, 2010, “Locating media futures in the present – or how to map emergent associations or expectations” Aether: the journal of media geography 5a pp. 27-36.

Galloway, Anne, Ward, Matthew, 2006, “Locative media as socialising and spatialising practices: learning from Archeology” Leonardo Electronic Almanac 14 (3/4).

Galloway, Alexander R., 2004 Protocol: How control exists after decentralization. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Galloway, Alexander R., Thacker, Eugene, 2007 The exploit: A theory of networks. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN.

Giddings, Seth, 2007, “Playing with nonhumans: digital games as technocultural form”. In: de Castells, S., Jensen, J. (Eds.) Worlds in Play: international perspectives on digital games research. Peter Lang, London,

Giddings, Seth, 2007, “Dionysiac machines: videogames and the triumph of the simulacra” Convergence 13 (4), pp. 417-431.

Gold, Rich, 2007 The Plenitude: Creativity, innovation and making stuff. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Graham, Mark, 2010, “Neogeography and the Palimpsests of Place” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 101 (4), pp. 422-436.

Graham, Mark, 2011, ” Cloud Collaboration: Peer-Production and the Engineering of the Internet”. In: Brunn, S. (Ed.) Engineering Earth. Springer, New York, NY, pp. 67-83.

Graham, Mark, Zook, Matthew, 2011, “Visualizing Global Cyberscapes: Mapping User Generated Placemarks” Journal of Urban Technology 18 (1), pp. 115-132.

Graham, Stephen, 1998, “The end of geography or the explosion of place? Conceptualising space, place and information technology” Progress in Human Geography 22 (2), pp. 165-185.

Graham, Stephen, 2004, “Beyond the ‘dazzling light’: from dreams of transcendence to the ‘remediation’ of urban life” New Media and Society 6 (1), pp. 16-25.

Graham, Stephen (Ed.), 2004 The Cybercities Reader. Routledge, London.

Graham, Stephen, 2005, “Software-sorted geographies” Progress in Human Geography 29 (5), pp. 562-580.

Graham, Stephen, Marvin, Simon, 2001 Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities
and the Urban Condition. Routledge, London.

Graham, Stephen, Thrift, Nigel, 2007, “Out of order – Understanding repair and maintenance” Theory Culture & Society 24 (3), pp. 1-25.

Greenfield, Adam, 2006 Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing. New Riders, Berkeley, CA.

Haggerty, Kevin, Ericson, Richard, 2000, “The surveillance assemblage” British Journal of Sociology 51 (4), pp. 605-622.

Hayles, N. Katherine, 1999 How we became posthuman: virutal bodies, in cybernetics, literature and informatics. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Hayles, N. Katherine, 2009, “RFID: Human agency and meaning in information-intensive environments ” Theory, Culture & Society 26 (2-3), pp. 47-72.

Hillis, Ken, 1998, “On the margins: the invisibility of communications in geography” Progress in Human Geography 22 (4), pp. 543-566.

Ito, Mizuko, Okabe, Daisuke, Matsuda, Misa (Eds.), 2005 Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile phones in Japanese life. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Jones, Owain, Williams, Morris, Fleuriot, Constance, 2003, “‘A New Sense of Place?’ Mobile ‘wearable’ information communications technology devices and the geographies of urban childhood” Children’s Geographies 1 (2), pp. 165-180.

Kindberg, Tim, Barton, John, Morgan, Jeff, Becker, Gene, Caswell, Debbie, Debaty, Phillipe, Gopal, Gita, Frid, Marcos, Krishnan, Venky, Morris, Howard, Schettino, John, Serra, Bill, Spasojevic, Mirjana, 2000, “People, places, things: Web presence for the real world”, in Proceedings of the Third IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (WMCSA’00), IEEE Computer Society

Kindberg, Tim, Chalmers, Matthew, Paulos, Eric, 2007, “Urban Computing” IEEE Pervasive Computing 6 (3), pp. 18-20.

Kitchin, Rob, Dodge, Martin, 2006, “Software and the mundane management of air travel” First Monday 11 (9).

Kitchin, Rob, Dodge, Martin, 2011 Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Kitchin, Rob, Kneale, James, 2001, “Science fiction or future fact? Exploring imaginative geographies of the new millennium” Progress in Human Geography 25 (1), pp. 19-35.

Kneale, James, 1999, “The virtual realities of technology and fiction: Reading William Gibson’s cyberspace”. In: Crang, M., Crang, P., May, J. (Eds.) Virtual Geographies: Bodies, spaces, relations. Routledge, London, pp. 205-221.

Kuniavsky, Mike, 2010 Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design. Elsevier, Burlington, MA.

Leyshon, Andrew, 2009, “The software slump? Digital music, the democratisation of technology, and the decline of the recording studio sector within the musical economy” Environment and Planning A 41 (6), pp. 1301-1331.

Ling, Rich, 2004 The Mobile Connection: The cell phone’s impact on society. Elsevier, Sa Francisco, CA.

Ling, Rich, 2008 New Tech, New Ties. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Lyon, David, 2003, “Surveillance as social sorting: Computer codes and mobile bodies”. In: Lyon, D. (Ed.) Surveillance as social sorting: Privacy, risk and digital discrimination. Routledge, London,

Mackenzie, Adrian, 2002 Transductions: Bodies and machines at speed. Continuum, London.

Mackenzie, Adrian, 2003, “Transduction: invention, innovation and collective life” (available from: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/mackenza/papers/transduction.pdf) accessed: 18/08/07.

Mackenzie, Adrian, 2005, “Untangling the unwired: WiFi and the cultural inversion of infrastructure” Space and Culture 8 (3), pp. 269-285.

Mackenzie, Adrian, 2006 Cutting code: software and sociality. Peter LAng, New York, NY.

Mackenzie, Adrian, 2009, “Intensive movement in wireless digital signal processing: From calculation to envelopment” Environment and Planning A 41 (6), pp. 1294-1308.

Mackenzie, Adrian, 2010 Wirelessness. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Mackenzie, Adrian, in press, “More parts than elements: how databases multiply” Environment and Planning D: Society & Space 44.

Manovich, Lev, 2001 The Language of New Media. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Marvin, Carolyn, 1988 When old technologies were new: Thinking about electric communication in he late Nineteenth century. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Massumi, Brian, 1998, “Sensing the virtual, building the insensible” Architectural Design(133), pp. 16-25.

McCullough, Malcolm, 2004 Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing and Environmental Knowing. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

McCullough, Malcolm, 2007, “New media urbanism: grounding ambient information technology” environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 34 (3), pp. 383-395.

Mitchell, William J., 1995 City of bits: Space, place and the infobahn. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Mitchell, William J., 2003 Me++ The cyborg self and the networked city. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Paulos, Eric, Foth, Marcus, Satchell, Christine, Kim, Younghui, Dourish, Paul, Hee-jeong Choi, Jaz, 2008, “Ubiquitous Sustainability: Citizen Science and activism”, online (http://www.urban-atmospheres.net/Ubicomp2008/), Seoul, South Korea.

Paulos, Eric, Honicky, R.J., Goodman, Elizabeth, 2007, “Sensing Atmosphere”, in ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2007) Sydney, p in press.

Pickles, John, 2004 A history of Spaces: Cartographic reason, mapping and hte geo-coded world. Routledge, London.

Pinder, David, 2005 Visions of the city: Utopianism, power and politics in twentieth century urbanism Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.

Popper, Deborah E., 2007, “Traceability: Tracking and privacy in the food system” Geographical Review 97 (3), pp. 365-388.

Rheingold, Howard, 2002 Smart Mobs: The next social revolution. Perseus, Cambridge, MA.

Robins, Kevin, 1995, “Cyberspace and the world we live in”. In: Featherstone, M., Burrows, R. (Eds.) Cyberspace, cyberbodies, cyberpunk: cultures of technological embodiment. Sage, London, pp. 135-155.

Rode, Jennifer A., 2006, “Appliances for whom? Considering place” Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 2-3 (90-94).

Shepard, Mark (Ed.), 2011 Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Star, Susan Leigh, Ruhleder, Karen, 1996, “Steps towards an ecology of infrastructure: Design and access for large information spaces” Information Systems Research 7 (1), pp. 111-134.

Star, Susan Leigh, Strauss, Anselm, 1999, “Layers of silence, arenas of voice: The ecology of visible and invisible work” Computer Supported Cooperative Work 8 pp. 9-30.

Stefik, Mark J., 1996 Internet dreams : archetypes, myths and metaphors. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. ; London.

Sterling, Bruce, 2005 Shaping Things. Mediawork Pamphlet Series, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Stiegler, Bernard, 1998 Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. trans. Beardsworth, R., Collins, G., Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.

Stiegler, Bernard, 2010 Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. trans. Barker, S., Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.

Stocker, Gerfried, Schöpf, Christine (Eds.), 2003 Code: the language of our time. Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, Germany.

Streitz, Norbert A., Kameas, Achilles, Mavrommati, Irene (Eds.), 2007 The disappearing computer: interaction design, system infrastructures and applications for smart environments. Springer, Heidelberg.

Thacker, Eugene, 2001 Hard code: narrating the network society. Alt-X, Boulder, CA.

Thomas, Douglas, 2005, “Hacking the body: code, performance and corporeality” New Media and Society 7 (5), pp. 647-662.

Thrift, N., 2003, “Closer to the machine? Intelligent environments, new forms of possession and the rise of the supertoy” Cultural Geographies 10 (4), pp. 389-407.

Thrift, N., 2004, “Remembering the technological unconscious by foregrounding knowledges of position” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22 (1), pp. 175-190.

Thrift, N., 2004, “Movement-space: the changing domain of thinking resulting from the development of new kinds of spatial awareness” Economy and Society 33 (4), pp. 582-604.

Thrift, N., 2004, “Electric animals – New models of everyday life?” Cultural Studies 18 (2-3), pp. 461-482.

Thrift, N., 2005, “From born to made: technology, biology and space” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (4), pp. 463-476.

Thrift, N., 2006, “Donna Haraway’s dreams” Theory Culture & Society 23 (7-8), pp. 189-+.

Thrift, Nigel, 2010, “Halos: making room in the world for new political orders”. In: Braun, B., Whatmore, S. (Eds.) Political matter: technoscience, democracy and public life. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, pp. 135-174.

Townsend, Anthony, 2000, “Life in the real-time city: mobile telephones and urban metabolism” Journal of Urban Technology 7 (2), pp. 85-104.

Townsend, Anthony, 2007, “Seoul: birth of a broadband metropolis” environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 34 (3), pp. 396-413.

Turkle, Sherry, 1995 Life on the screen : identity in the age of the Internet. Simon & Schuster, New York ; London.

Want, Roy, 2010, “An Introduction to Ubiquitous Computing”. In: Krumm, J. (Ed.) Ubiquitous Computing Fundamentals. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, pp. 1-36.

Wellman, Barry, 2001, “Physical place and Cyberplace: The rise of personalised networking” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25 (227-252).

Wellman, Barry, Haythornthwaite, Caroline A. (Eds.), 2002 The internet in everyday life. Wiley, Chichester, UK.

Wilson, Matthew, 2011, “Data matter(s): legitimacy, coding, and qualifications-of-life” Environment and Planning D: Society & Space 29 (5), pp. 857-872.

Wilson, Matthew, 2011, “‘Training the eye’: formation of the geocoding subject” Social & Cultural Geography 12 (4), pp. 357-376.

Wood, Andrew, 2003, “A rhetoric of ubiquity: Terminal space as omnitopia” Communication Theory 13 (3), pp. 324-344.

Wood, David M., 2008, “Towards Spatial Protocol: The topologies of the pervasive surveillance society”. In: Aurigi, A., De Cindio, F. (Eds.) Augmented Urban Spaces: Articulating the physical and electronic city. Ashgate, Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT, pp. 93-106.

Zook, Matthew, Dodge, Martin, Aoyama, Yuko, Townsend, Anthony, 2004, “New Digital Geographies: Information, Communication, and Place”. In: Brunn, S. D., Cutter, S. L., Harrington Jr., S. L. (Eds.) Geography and Technology. Kluwer, Dordrecht, NL, pp. 155-178.

Zook, Matthew, Graham, Mark, 2007, “Mapping DigiPlace: geocoded internet data and the representation of place” environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 34 (3), pp. 466-482.

Zook, Matthew, Graham, Mark, 2007, “The Creative Reconstruction of the Internet: Google and the Privatization of Cyberspace and DigiPlace” Geoforum 38 (6), pp. 1322-1343.

Zook, Matthew, Graham, Mark, Shelton, Taylor, Gorman, Sean, 2010, “Volunteered Geographic Information and Crowdsourcing Disaster Relief: A Case Study of the Haitian Earthquake” World Medical and Health Policy 2 (2), pp. 7-33.

I have also created an EndNote export formatted file for the above, available here.

Alexander Galloway on Deleuze & computers

sam — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 14:27:03 +0000

I am indebted to @furtherfield for posting a link to the blog communication+1, which has a YouTube video of Alexander Galloway giving a talk, at the at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (December 2nd, 2011), on ‘Deleuze and Computers’.

The inimitable Galloway identifies Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control” as a highly significant piece of thinking about life in a digitally mediated society. The talk is really interesting and I have reproduced below most of the post from communication+1, including the YouTube video:

Abstract:
Could it be? Could it be that Deleuze’s most lasting legacy will lie in his “Postscript on Control Societies,” a mere 2,300 word essay from 1990? Such a strange little text, it bears not the same Deleuzean voice so familiar from his other writings. Cynics will grumble it falls short of the great books of ’68-’69 or the radical collaborations with Félix Guattari during the 1970s. In the “Postscript” he indicts capitalism by name. He raises his wrath against corporations and television shows. Yet his frame includes the culture at large, not just the mode of production. He talks about snakes and surfers and other features of the dawning millennium. He references such figures as Roberto Rossellini, Paul Virilio, Franz Kafka, and most importantly Michel Foucault. He tells us exactly what is wrong with the business sector, as well as with the prisons, schools, and hospitals. It reads almost like a manifesto, the “Manifesto on Control Societies.” In this talk we will investigate the last few years of Deleuze’s life, a period in which he elaborates, however faintly, an image of what it means to live in the information age.

This talk was made possible by the UMass Graduate School, the University Libraries, UMass Free Culture, and the Department of Communication.

Recorded by JC Sawyer, produced by Zach McDowell

Reading Bernard Stiegler

sam — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 14:13:18 +0000

I am slowly but surely working my way through Bernard Stiegler’s writings, and really enjoying doing so. These notes are just a way of distilling some the themes I’ve encountered and I haven’t posted anything for a while on this blog. My understanding of Stiegler’s work, such as it is(!), is in large part thanks to my colleague Patrick Crogan, with whom I have been convening a Stiegler reading group at UWE. We have a blog at: technophilia.wordpress.com – which is worth checking out!

The philosopher Bernard Stiegler addresses the problem of being as the need to have learnt the experience of being to recognise it. For Stiegler, this is only possible through a process of exteriorisation. Our experience of being is therefore not merely a product of memory but is achieved through the processes of mnemotechnics: the ‘technical prostheses’ through which memory is recorded and transmitted across generations, and which is never limited to individual minds. Without this sense of memory, Stiegler argues, the human would not be possible.

However, there is something of a ‘chicken and egg’ situation with this ontological position that Adrian Mackenzie identifies as the ‘aporia of origin’: the human, or experience of being human, is not possible without the technical and vice versa. The interesting resolution of this aporia is that the mental interior is only recognized as such with the advent of the technical exterior. Stiegler explains this aporia of origin thus: ‘The paradox is to have to speak of an exteriorisation without a preceding interior: the interior is constituted in exteriorisation’ (Technics and Time 1). Thus technicity is a double-bind between being both constitutive and a supplement of ‘the human’. Therefore, the interior and exterior, and with them the contemporary understanding of the experience of being human and what we understand to be technology, are mutually co-constituted.

The forms of exteriorization Stiegler calls ‘tertiary retention’ are not simply the recording of inner process and sensory/experiential memory, but ‘long-term’ memory, which stretches across generations. Material examples of tertiary retention include things like libraries (and the various ways we may understand archives), oral lore, and the various technological means of recording memory, making it available ‘outside’ of any individual. This is not only limited to representational mechanisms either. The acts of manipulating the world, such as working or enclosing land, leaving traces of technically mediated living that can be recognised as such. So, we might contend that wheel tracks carved into a landscape over time are a form of tertiary retention too.

Stiegler argues that to be human (or dasein) is constituted through ongoing processes of individuation. This concept derives from Stiegler’s reading of Simondon, another French philosopher of technology, who posits that the constitution of individuality, and our awareness of being an individual being, is formed by processes of individuation, which are ongoing and never quite complete. Individuation is always and already a process of phenomenological and ‘psychic’ coming to know the world, through the various mental, sensory and physiological means by which we capture the world and it captures us. Individuation, for Stiegler, is pretty much always a trans-individuation between entities. It is through others (especially people and things) that we understand the world and ourselves. As Stiegler asserted in a talk at Tate Modern in 2004:

“The “I”, as a psychic individual, can only be thought in relationship to a “we”, which is a collective individual: the “I” is constituted in adopting a collective tradition, which it inherits, and in which a plurality of “Is” acknowledge each other’s existence.”

Technologies are crucial in these processes of individuation. From language onward, the human and the technical are co-constituted. It is only through the exteriorisation of memory as ‘rentention’ that humanity knows itself. Stiegler understands this as forms of retention. Primary retention is conscious thought, secondary retention is linguistically framed memory and tertiary retention is the inscription of knowledge in the world. This isn’t just writing, but also any changing of the world around ourselves. It is through this ‘technical’ understanding of the world that we understand the passage of time.

As James Ash cogently points out in a forthcoming paper: how the ‘now’ is established is contingent upon and relative to the technologies and practices of a specific locality. There are of course other forms of time consciousness but how the ‘now’ is experienced is shaped through technology and technical knowledge. These understandings of the ‘specious present’ are made durable through tertiary retentions that are taken up in habits and cultural forms.

The fixity of particular ways of knowing is understood by Stiegler, through an expansion of Derrida’s work, as Grammatisation: the processes of describing and formalizing human behaviour into logos: representations such as letters, pictures, words, writing and code, so that it can be reproduced.

For example, as Matt Wilson and I contended in a recent conference paper: the visual language, terminology, and ways of making people, places and things discrete and codified employed by foursquare is a system of grammatisation. As a brief illustration: ‘recommendations’ are orientated towards activities of consumption; ‘check-in specials’ are similarly oriented; and the categorisation of places that may be identified is also biased towards commercial activity.

Grammatisation processes are, according to Stiegler a form of pharmakon. Following Plato’s dialogues, a pharmakon is both a poison and a cure – a form of recipe, substance or spell. In Phaedrus, Plato uses the concept of the pharmakon as a play of oppositions: poison-remedy, bad-good etc. For Plato, writing itself is a pharmakon, both a means of recording thought but also a producer of forgetfulness. Any pharmkon therefore is both a ‘poison’ and ‘cure’. So, for example, in the case of the grammatisation effects of foursquare, they too can have both positive and negative effects/connotations. Novel forms of collectivity may be engendered but the modes of interaction are limited.

However, Stiegler argues in his more activist writings that the rise in media technologies means a form of detrimental effect on our capacity for attention. He argues that we have somewhat moved away from the deep attention of cultural engagement and the positive production of desire, to hyper attention and the stochastic flitting of attention across many media. As my colleague Patrick Crogan has recently argued, Stiegler introduces his account of digital technologies by characterising the contemporary era as one in which the tendency toward the industrialisation of memory approaches. Stiegler argues, not least in his paper at the conference Paying Attention, that our collective experience of how we become individuals, or ‘trans-individuation’:

“has become the object of industrial technology, based on a social engineering, where attention and relational technologies develop via social networks etc. This social engineering has as its goal… the capacity to render [the social relation itself] industrially discretable, reproducible, standardisable, calculable and controllable by automata.”

Whether intended or not, the ‘social engineering’ of the corporatised ‘social web’, in which we are all enrolled as producers of value i.e. attention, is a direct attempt to (re)condition the technics of attention.

In a reworking of the concept of proletarianisation, Stiegler suggests that rather than losing ‘savoir-faire’ (the embodied knowledge of how to make/do) to technical apparatus, as Marx argued of the industrial revolution, the consumer is losing ‘savoir-vivre’ (knowledge of how to live), which is being replaced by apparatus, which are the products of the media industries.

So, processes of proletarianisation in the contemporary ‘knowledge’ economy are, according to Stiegler, causing the loss of faculties of self-critique. Social media technologies, and those technologies of the ‘programming industries’ that lead to the loss of ‘savoir-vivre’ are, according to Stiegler, ‘psychotechnologies’. Alexander Galloway describes psychotechnologies as: “games, computers, SMS, etc.; these constitute part of the culture industry; often construed as normatively negative”.

As a result of this line of argument, Stiegler, and colleagues, argue that:

“in our current epoch electronic technologies, monopolized until now by the economic powers emerging from the 20th century as psychotechnologies at the service of behavioural control, must become nootechnologies, that is, technologies of spirit, at the service of de-proletarianization and of the reconstitution of savoir-faire, savoir-vivre and theoretical knowledge.”

Bernard Stiegler’s way of thinking through these themes and his writing addressing not only the metaphysical or ontological conditions of the technicity of being but also the contemporary and urgent political issues around living in a developed (particularly capitalist and technological) society is impressively ambitious and rather inspiring. It is also worth noting that Stiegler puts his money where his mouth is, he has given up his cushy job as director of the Institute for Research and Innovation at the Georges Pompidou Centre and founded the Ecole de philosophie d’Epineuil-le-Fleuriel (the school of philosophy at Epineuil-le-Fleuriel) in central France, to aid in the education of high school students studying for their Baccalaureat, to deliver a public summer school, and a doctoral seminar, also made available online. Additionally, Stiegler is a founding member of the Ars Industrialis association, which campaigns to: “reconstitute a political project as bearer of a new affirmation of the role of public power, namely: to make a technical becoming into a social future.”

This summer/autumn I will be…

sam — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 11:34:41 +0000

I have written anything on this blog for quite a while so I thought I’d redress the deficit (a word for our times!) of content by simply explaining what I’m up to.

I’m hoping to give a talk at the UK lab of a prominent technology company, concerning research conducted with Patrick Crogan on the economy of attention. Through meetings with key researchers at that company, the visit will also inform my research fieldwork in Silicon Valley in September/October. More of which shortly…

I will attend the Royal Geographical Society’s annual international conference in September. I’m giving two papers and serving as a committee member in the RGS History & Philosophy of Geography Research Group. The first paper, co-authored with Matthew Wilson (U. Kentucky), concerns the material practices of using location based services. The second paper addresses the tension between contemporary understandings of neural plasticity and the commodification of human attention, especially in relation to pervasive media. Both of these papers will be subsequently submitted to journals to be considered for publication. I’ll put up details on this blog as and when this happens.

During the months of September and October 2011, I will carry out in-depth fieldwork investigating understandings of the future of computing and associated innovation practices within research and development facilities in Silicon Valley (California). The research is funded by a British Academy Small Grant. This is research that will follow on from my PhD work. The exciting advance with this project is that the data gathered will inform knowledge exchange activities with the Pervasive Media Studio network of artists and small/start-up technology companies. This work will also lead to further conference papers and publications. Stay tuned!

Public Objects – the networked city and civic responsibility: Adam Greenfield

sam — Tue, 10 May 2011 10:56:24 +0000

Re-posted from the Digital Cultures Research Centre blog.

Last night DCRC in collaboration with Bristol Festival of Ideas and the Pervasive Media Studio hosted a talk by Adam Greenfield, which he titled “On Public Objects: connected things and civic responsibility”. During the talk Adam suggested that a significant question before us now is that of ‘networked urbanism’, the increasing range of ordinary things and places in the city that are identifying themselves to global information networks or being identified by them. Clare Reddington, Director of iShed and the Pervasive Media Studio, created a Storify feed during the talk which contains lots of images and links to aspects of Adam’s talk – it is an excellent precis of the talk.

I’d like to offer a brief account of the talk, also drawing upon Adam’s recent essay “Beyond the ‘Smart City’.”

The argument of Adam’s talk was forged upon the theoretical impetus of Marxian scholar Henri Lefebvre’s contention of the right to the city. We are, according to Greenfield, living in a ‘networked now’ in which people are comprehensively instrumented with network communications technologies, even, and especially, in the developing world. We operate with ‘locative’ and ‘declarative’ media, through which devices elicit geo-located information or people themselves announce their locations or activities. In turn, these media are leveraged by commercial interests by performing analytics such as ‘sentiment analysis‘. There are also an emerging range of declarative objects, such as London’s Tower Bridge, which has been endowed with a Twitter account to declare “I am opening for…” and “I am closing after…”. Greenfield argued that objects are increasingly gathering, processing, displaying, transmitting and sometimes physically acting upon data.

Adam’s principal argument, therefore, is that we need a new theory (and jurisprudence) for networked objects. Throughout the latter part of the talk Adam offered some observations about the ‘morality of objects’ such as a Finnish road sensor, a Japanese vending machine that profiles customers, and networked bollards that limit access to the Ramblas in Barcelona. For Adam, it is necessary to find a new way of conceiving of things we encounter in public space. He offered a working definition of ‘Public Objects’ as: “any artifact located in or bounding upon public rights-of-way”, “any discrete object in the common spatial domain intended for the use and enjoyment of the general public”, “any discrete object which is de facto shared by and accessbile to the public, regardless of its ownership or original” intention.

We are asked to consider what happens when power resides not in the material manifestations of the network, as in the physical ‘public objects’, but in code. Adam gave the example of software updates that facilitate new functionality, about which members of the public are not informed but could be seen to infringe their rights – for example: the addition of facial recognition pattern matching software to municipal CCTV systems without the public being informed.

Adam closed his talk by arguing that public objects, as defined above, must be open and usable by citizens. This openness, he argued, should be figured through APIs (open interface platforms that allow people to interact with them); it should involve “read” and, sometimes, “write” access to data streams, so that people can access the data that public objects gather and sometimes be able to write into it; and that public objects should be non-rivalrous and non-excludable, i.e. in economic theory, they should be public goods.

In conclusion, Adam argued that we should be acting against the capture of public space by private interests and acting towards a revitalised public sphere.

This talk was recorded by Watershed and will shortly feature on dshed and in the DCRC Vimeo feed - check back with our blog for details soon!