Spatial Machinations
This is worth a watch:
This is the first part of an interview conducted and filmed by the artist Stelarc for the Alternate Anatomies Lab at Curtin University, Perth, Australia. The second part of the interview is avaiulable here. Other interviews in the series are available on the website of the Alternate Anatomies Lab here.
See also Hall’s piece in Culture Machine [open access] on “Pirate Philosophy“, discussed in the video…
A new issue of Parrhesia is out and it contains a new paper from Yuk Hui.
All catastrophes are algorithmic, even the natural ones, when we consider the universe to be governed by regular and automated laws of motion and principles of emergence.
It begins with this bold statement qualified through a reading of Aristotle that leads us to:
But these material, technological catastrophes are not examples of what I am proposing here to call algorithmic catastrophes. Algorithmic catastrophe doesn’t refer to material failure, but rather to the failure of reason.
And it is this form of catastrophe to which the discussion tends. Through a reading of the work of Bernard Steigler, in relation to Martha Nussbaum and Plato/Socrates, Hui argues that the history of Occidental philosophy has the techno-logical ‘accident’:
This resonates with the two senses of accident that we have explained above: on one hand, the revelation of substance through accidents, meaning the accidents become necessary; on the other hand, the overcoming of the irrational through reason.
Hui then expertly dissects understandings of accident and contingency in relation to what is thought of as ‘automatic’, which leads to this lovely passage:
As an engineer and designer, one has to be assured that it is normal to have a catastrophe. If catastrophe is thus anticipated and becomes a principle of operation, it no longer plays the role it did with the laws of nature. This use of anticipation to overcome catastrophes can never be completed, however, and indeed accident expresses itself in a second level of contingency generated by the machines’ own operations. Herein also lies the second difference between the algorithmic contingency and the contingency of laws of nature, which we would like to approach in the next section. It doesn’t mean that the algorithm itself is not perfect, but rather that the complexity it produces overwhelms the simplicity and clarity of algorithmic thinking. This necessity of contingency takes a different form from the necessity in tragedy and in nature…
Automisation then becomes the target of deconstruction, with a haunting of Virilio, explicated through the ‘Flash Crash’. Nevertheless, the tendency here is towards automation that exceeds the human capacity to react, as Hui has it:
The automation of machines will be much faster than human intelligence, and hence will lead to a temporal gap in terms of operation. The gap can produce disastrous effects since the human is always too late, and machines won’t stop on their own. In face of our inability to fully understand the causality, Wiener warns us that “if we adhere simply to the creed of the scientist, that an incomplete knowledge of the world and of ourselves is better than no knowledge, we can still by no means always justify the naive assumption that the faster we rush ahead to employ the new powers for action which are opened up to us, the better it will be.”
The paper moves on to consider a speculative aesthetics of the accident, through a reading of Meillassoux’s ‘speculative realism’. Just as Meillassoux attempts to reach back beyond the ‘ancestrally’ of the human, Hui argues that we are challenged by atomisation, in the figure of algorithms:
exteriorized reasons, where we find more and more that human reason is becoming less and less capable of understanding the system that it has succeeded in constructing.
Thus:
In the digital age, accidents in both senses come to the fore and beyond, as indicated by the contingency, the unknown, which also comes to the front.
…
The algorithmic catastrophe also resonates with current research on speculative reason, especially what Meillasoux proposes as the absolutization of contingency, which reinvents the metaphysical concept of contingency as necessity while it renounces the subjectivist approach towards knowledge. The celebration of speculative reason seems to be an appropriation of the catastrophic aesthetics of our time, where the unknown and black box become the sole explanations.
It is certainly an interesting, if dense, article and probably requires some knowledge of
I am left wondering, as a less-sophisticated non-philosopher, how one might square this argument with technics as the ‘horizon of all possibility to come and all possibility of a future’, pace Stiegler in Technics and Time – the computational ‘transindividuations’ (the becomings of trans-individual assemblages) that we initiate and cultivate through digital ‘industry’ may begin to probe their way into possibilities outside of our sensory or conscious capacities but they remain, at present, limited precisely by their foundation in a human phenomenological domain. Nevertheless, as Hui argues in his final paragraph:
it would be ignorant to just dismiss the algorithmic catastrophe as something from science fiction. The words of the physicists [Hawking et al. warning about the risks of AI] also remind us of Book III of Plato’s Republic, where the physicians return as guardians of the polis. Should these guardians be scientifically well-trained philosophers or philosophically trained physicians is not a question without importance, since it means a new pedagogical program and a new conception of responsibility. Beyond the reach of this single article, what Virilio proposes as a rethinking of responsibility remains largely undiscussed.
I probably don’t know enough of the references Hui is drawing upon to be able to offer a cogent response to this, but it is a very interesting article and worth a read [it is open access!].
Over on the LA Review of Books site there is a really interesting sort of ‘call and response‘ debate, in which Geoffrey de Lagasanerie (Prof. of Philosophy at ÉNS) and Edouard Louis (author) offer a manifesto for counter-acting a perceived capturing of politics by a kind of right-wing intellectualism (this was originally published in Le Monde, and translated for LARB), to which Bernard Stiegler (philosopher & activist) offers a forthright response (translated for LARB).
de Lagasanerie and Louis observe:
Against this massive political-intellectual dynamic [populism, Islamophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, antisemitism], a general mood is established. It would not be an exaggeration to say that there are many today who make their living off of this disarray and sadness. To experience politics, for most of us now, is to experience powerlessness.
and offer a kind of manifesto, or set of principles, in response: to refuse to recognise particular ideologues; to recognise refugees and racists alike as what they are rather than bow to a perceived deception; to ‘redistribute shame’ by making those on the far-right understand that their remarks are worthy of nothing but contempt; and finally: to intervene, wherever possible. They argue that:
…we cannot just lament the situation without questioning the means of creating new structures. In fact, all hope is not lost: the Zemmours and Houellebecqs are bent on denying what they really are, and lying. The left continues to dominate symbolically. In France, “intellectual right” remains an oxymoron, better still: an impossibility. We must at least rejoice in that.
In response, Bernard Stiegler opposes the sweeping generalisation of the identification of any kind of ‘intellectual’ which for him validates a kind of proleterianisation (after Marx) that is (in fact) a loss of knowledge (regardless of class position):
In the first place, for any thinking that claims to think powerlessness (and “to say things other than what is already agreed”), the common noun “intellectual” (“an intellectual,” “intellectuals”) must not only be the subject of critique, but should be scrupulously avoided. […] The figure of “the intellectual” is an unfortunate invention that unquestioningly internalizes the opposition between “manual workers” and “intellectuals,” […] Behind all this lies proletarianization, which today affects all forms of knowledge, and firstly as a destruction of knowledge – of how to live, do, and conceptualize.
Stiegler moves on to discuss how the issue of powerlessness not only stems from the issues that de Lagasnerie & Louis diagnose but are, further, entrenched and tied up with these forms of proletarianisation (losses of knowledge), in which even those apparently radical thinkers on the left are somewhat complicit (with a particular withering for Badiou). It is worth quoting at length here:
Geoffroy de Lagasnerie and Edouard Louis deplore the absence of intellectual debate. For my part I deplore that, like Manuel Valls, they have apparently never heard either of Pharmacologie du Front National or of States of Shock – in which I argue that so-called “post-structuralism” has significantly contributed, in France and elsewhere, to the legitimation first of neoliberal discourse and then libertarian discourse, the libertarians being those who are the practitioners of disruption.
This is occurring not only because “intellectuals” yield to the drive-based ideology of the extreme right as it continues to gain ground. It is because there is no thought of the present age worthy of the name – and here, where I am resolutely “on the left,” I would never say that such a thought “worthy of the name” would necessarily be on the left.
The “intellectuals,” whether of the “left” or the “right,” are stuck in an antiquated opposition between “intellectual” and “manual” that refers in a more profound way to the opposition between logos and tekhne against which Marx fought, and which he posited as the basis of the ideology that was then called “bourgeois.” This has largely been forgotten, in particular by the heirs of Althusser and firstly by Alain Badiou. For the consequence lies in the fact that, contrary to what Badiou’s hero, Plato, wants to prove, knowledge is always constituted by technics, which in so doing always constitutes a social relation.
In this forgetting of the technological composition (in all of the meanings of that word) of society and humanity we fail to recognise the context of what is variously (by politicians and technologists alike) referred to as ‘disruption’. Stiegler argues (somewhat) in passing here, and in greater detail elsewhere, that this is precisely what is stake in coming to know/understand the ‘anthropocene’. He discusses how this relates to contemporary feelings of powerlessness through the trope of entropy/negentropy – which he has been working with across various books (some of which have recently been translated and some which are still to be translated):
Entropy is becoming, devenir. Negentropy is what inscribes within it a future, avenir. Becoming and future have until today been confused. It is this confusion that makes us powerless, and it is what the impasse of the Anthropocene reveals. Such a perspective is also an immense building site for intellectual construction – open to all those who still have the ability to think for themselves, rather than vainly repeat received ideas.
These two articles are well worth a read, they offer an interesting counter-poise to anglophone debates about the multiple ‘crises’ in Europe (of refugees, of the rise of the far-right, of the capitulation of democracy to technocracy etc. etc.). Plus they’re good fun to read 🙂
Manifesto for an Intellectual and Political Counteroffensive by Geoffroy de Lagasnerie & Edouard Louis, translated by Adam Briscoe.
Power, Powerlessness, Thinking, and Future by Bernard Stiegler, translated by Daniel Ross.
This new book co-edited by Joasia Krysa and Jussi Parikka looks interesting…
Joasia is a curator and was one of my undergrad tutors in Plymouth on the Digital Art and Technology programme and convened some great events during her time there, not least the excellent Hybrid Discourse. It was events like that which contributed to my interest in postgraduate study…
I am very glad to announce that Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History: Erkki Kurenniemi in 2048 is out from the printers, hot off the (MIT) Press! Edited with curator, writer Joasia Krysa, the book focuses on the Finnish media art pioneer Kurenniemi, and is the key international collection on the curious thinker, sound and media artist-tinkerer, who became known for his remarkable synthetizers and archival futurism. Kurenniemi has gathered attention in the electronic music circles for a longer period of time, and with Documenta 13 he become known in the international art world too. His thoughts and work resonate with the work of other early pioneers; Simon Reynolds once called him a mix of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Buckminster Fuller, and Steve Jobs. In 2002, Mika Taanila directed the film The Future is Not What It Used to Be about Kurenniemi.
The book includes foreword by the eminent media archaeologist Erkki Huhtamo and a range of critical essays on digital culture, archival mania and media arts. Key academic and art writers address Kurenniemi’s work but also more: the condition of the archive and sound arts, sonic fiction and speculative futures of singularity are some of the key themes that run through the book with contributions by many established names in media studies, art and sound technologies. In addition, we included many of Kurenniemi’ own writings over the decades, including some interviews that elaborate his wider computational views of the world, including his thought: by 2040s, the human brain can be completely simulated. His archive plays a key role, like an actor in itself: the archive also featured as a key “object” as part of the earlier Kiasma exhibition and we included some snippets, as well as an extensive visual section.
Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History sits as part of the Leonardo-book series, edited by Sean Cubitt. The book was started by Krysa through her curatorial work at the 2012 Documenta 13 exhibition. It is thanks to Joasia that I am part of the project and she deserves major praise for her amazing eye for detail, enthusiasm and energy in driving this project, from a major exhibition to a book, and more.
Here’s a preview of the book’s table of contents and Huhtamo’s Foreword.
For review copy requests, or other questions, inquiries about the book, please get in touch! We are hosting some book events in Montreal, Helsinki, Berlin and London over the coming months but more info on those separately.
Over the past forty years, Finnish artist and technology pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi (b. 1941) has been a composer of electronic music, experimental filmmaker, computer animator, roboticist, inventor, and futurologist. Kurenniemi is a hybrid–a scientist-humanist-artist. Relatively unknown outside Nordic countries until his 2012 Documenta 13 exhibition, “In 2048,” Kurenniemi may at last be achieving international recognition. This book offers an excavation, a critical mapping, and an elaboration of Kurenniemi’s multiplicities.
The contributors describe Kurenniemi’s enthusiastic, and rather obsessive, recording of everyday life and how this archiving was part of his process; his exploratory artistic practice, with productive failure an inherent part of his method; his relationship to scientific and technological developments in media culture; and his work in electronic and digital music, including his development of automated composition systems and his “video-organ,” DIMI-O. A “Visual Archive,” a section of interviews with the artist, and a selection of his original writings (translated and published for the first time) further document Kurenniemi’s achievements. But the book is not just about one artist in his time; it is about emerging media arts, interfaces, and archival fever in creative practices, read through the lens of Kurenniemi.
“Sex, annotation, and verité totale: Kurenniemi is a missing mixing desk between so many interesting aspects of late-twentieth-century culture. No wonder he ends up offering us a new archival futurism!”
–Matthew Fuller, Professor, Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London
“Providing a long-overdue critical and historical introduction to the amazingly multifaceted work of media pioneer, visionary thinker, and self-archivist Erkki Kurenniemi, this book becomes both a media-archaeological excavation and engaging reflection on the challenges of writing media art history. The range of Kurenniemi’s fascinating practice–including electronic music composition, experimental filmmaking, robotics, and curation–defies traditional classifications, and calls for new historical narratives of media art. Started as a compilation of the long-term research that went into the exhibition of Kurenniemi’s work at Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, the volume combines highlights of his own writings and interviews with excellent contributions by scholars, contextualizing his archives, art, music, and vision.”
–Christiane Paul, Associate Professor, School of Media Studies, The New School; Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts, Whitney Museum
“This book is a major contribution not only to the unprecedented scientific and artistic imagination of Erkki Kurenniemi, but also to the whole research on media and ‘real time.’ The text unveils and critically presents the reader with a series of complex technological and artistic systems exploring the man-machine relationship under the assumption both do have consciousness. Kurenniemi’s work provides us with one of the most solid grounds to examine perception, the brain, the will to speculate and travel back and forth between several realms of knowledge. Kurenniemi is bold; this text is bold and a great contribution to new forms of studying risk taking in art and science.”
–Chus MartÃnez, Head of the Institute of Art, FHNW Academy of Art and Design
Tony Sampson has posted this, may be of interest to people who see this blog –
Wednesday 23rd March 2016
1-8pm
University of East London, Docklands Campus, Room EB. G.06
Call for 15min Presentations/Position Papers
Following on from the success of last year’s Affect and Social Media research symposium, the emotionUX lab in the School of Arts and Digital Industries at UEL, and in collaboration this year with Cass School of Education and Communities at UEL, will be hosting a second event continuing to explore the relation between social media, affect, feelings and emotions.
Numerous studies from various fields have described interactions with social media in terms of emotional, affective and feely experiences. It is claimed that habitual access to Facebook can have a negative impact on mood and subjective well-being (Kross et al, 2013). Likewise, emotional states experienced on social media can be transferred to others through emotional contagion, ‘leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness’ (Kramer, 2014). Similarly, positive emotions, like joy, are regarded as more likely to spread than negative ones (Berger and Milkman, 2010).
This year’s call for 15min presentations/position papers asks contributors to explore emotional, affective and feely experiences with social media. More specifically, we ask contributors to investigate how social media ‘work[s] in concert with bodies in the production of emotional and affective activity’ (Ellis and Tucker, 2015: 177).
We welcome proposals on a wide variety of themes that cross disciplinary boundaries. For example”¦
Please send a title, brief outline (100words) and institutional affiliation to t.d.sampson@uel.ac.uk and E.Theodotou@uel.ac.uk
| Activities | Deadlines |
| Abstract Submission | 15th December 2015 |
| Acceptance notification | 15th January 2016 |
| Registration for presenters | Details to follow |
| Registration for all participants | Details to follow |
Fees and registration
(Refreshments, after symposium drinks and nibbles and attendance certificate included in all registration types)
| Type | Fee |
| Presenters | Free |
| UEL students/academics | Free |
| External students | £3 |
| External academics/participants | £5 |
Please keep an eye out for follow up emails regarding registration
Updates will also appear on the Virality blog and EmotionUX news page
There some good articles (with some interesting contributions to debates on urban geographies) in the latest issue of Progress in Human Geography, including a brilliant article by my colleague Pepe Romanillos, I heartily recommend reading this:
Drawing upon resources from philosophy, sociology, history, and anthropology, this paper explores the possibilities of attending to geographies on the other side of life. After an introductory review of work on deathscapes and extant geographical reflections on absence and loss, the paper turns to consider three horizons in which geographers might extend their interrogations of different mortal conditions: mourning, the spatial politics of the dead, and corporeality. The paper concludes by reflecting on the disciplinary possibilities of responding to these empirical concerns at a time when we are often asked to cultivate all manner of lively geographies.
Derek Gregory points to this really lovely video from Opéra National de Paris and Julien Prévieux inspired by Gregoire Chamayou’s work on ‘schematic bodies and patterns of life’.
I love how the ideas have been translated into performance in such a provocative yet beautiful way – this really gets you thinking about, as Stiegler would put it, the grammatisation of gesture (see, in particular: For a New Critique of Political Economy, pp. 8-13): the sense in which the capture and retention of our movements feeds back into the ways in which institutions and apparatuses address us both as individuals (‘subjects’) and populations (and/or ‘markets’)…
Grégoire Chamayou writes to say that after our conversations in Irvine last year he has worked with an artist friend, Julien Prévieux (who won the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2014) and the Opéra national de Paris to turn his ideas about schematic bodies and patterns of life into a short film: Patterns of Life.
I’ve embedded it below, but if the link doesn’t work you can watch it here or on YouTube here. You will soon see why Anne Buttimer once described Torsten HÃ¥gerstrand‘s time-geography diagrams as a danse macabre. The subtitles are in French but the commentary is in English.
I find the combination of intellectual imagination and performance work absolutely compelling – see my comments on ‘Bodies on the line’ here, for example.
[via Keith Harris]
Here’s a call for the ‘Deleuze Studies‘ conference next year, with a nice, if broad, theme…
The creative and positive movement of differentiation, as a process of metamorphosis, underpins the concept of “becoming“ as a fundamental notion for Deleuze’s overall philosophy and particularly for the text he wrote with Guattari, Mille Plateaux. The notion of Becoming is to be understood as a verb rather than a noun –they write- it is not one, nor two, but something between-two, an interaction between two domains, a boundary and an escape line: it is the becoming-animal, the becoming-music, the becoming child, the becoming-woman. As a reaction against the Platonic idea of Being and Essence, the Becoming refers primarily to Nietzsche’s thought and to his notion of the “eternal return”. Since no living being can resist the becoming, the becoming must be a being in itself, a being that coincides with the process of coming back, in the sense of thinking “the same” from “the different”.
The deeper meaning of Nietzsche’s philosophy is to affirm the becoming not only as essential to life –since life is becoming, multiplicity, and fortune- but as something we need to accept and consciously affirm. To this extent, virtue is not renouncing to all passions but saying “yes” to life. In Deleuze’s last text, life is described as immanent and “unique”; no longer individual but completely impersonal, it is a “total power, a total bliss” It is from this starting point that philosophers – both in Italy and elsewhere – have started developing the idea of an “ontology of the present” – which sets itself as the aim of contemporary philosophy.
Following the path we have proposed, and even imagining something different, we welcome individual proposals for papers, panel proposals, as well as alternative approaches to presentation formats (such dialogues or performative pieces).
The conference will accept papers in English from across a very broad range of areas including, not limited to, the following:
Philosophy
Aesthetics and Artistic Practices
Architecture and Urban Planning
Film Studies
Digital Realm and New Media
Literature and Literary Criticism
Sociology and Politics
Gender Studies
Psychology
Education
Science
Abstracts should be 300-500 words and must include title and three keywords.
Biographical statements and affiliations should be approximately 100 words and must include contact information.
ABSTRACT SUBMISSION DEADLINE
December 15th, 2015
PAPER NOTIFICATIONS
We plan to notify the acceptances until February 15th, 2016
SEND TO
call@deleuzeconference2016.org
There’s a website with plenty of information: http://www.deleuzeconference2016.org
and here’s some blurb from it:
Deleuze Studies Conference is an initiative created by the Deleuze Studies Journal, the first of which was held in 2008 at Cardiff. The conference explores the themes related to the works of Deleuze and Guattari and brings together scholars from a wide variety of disciplines.
This year the Deleuze Studies Conference will take place in Italy, at the Department of Philosophy, Communication and Visual Arts of University of Roma Tre (11th-13th July), aiming to explore the concepts of Virtuality, becoming and life in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought.
The conference will be preceded by a Deleuze Camp (4th-8th July), a preliminary intensive research seminar.
Here’s an interesting call for papers from David Bissell and Francis Collins that’s been posted to Crit-Geog-Forum on the ways work is transforming travel and our uses of technology and vice versa, and how that is involved in shifts in how we perform other (perhaps all) aspects of our lives.
David Bissell, The Australian National University
Francis Collins, University of Auckland
The dynamics of labour has been approached through many different geographical perspectives. In this session we want to explore how the conceptual lens of mobility offers a powerful and provocative way of posing new questions and staging new problems about the practices and affectivities that produce experiences for labouring bodies. Labouring bodies are entangled in various forms of movement and stillness. They involve different configurations of timing, rhythm and habit. Going to work, for instance, for many involves commuting across cities and regions, migrating within and across territories, or undertaking forms of mobile work. There are also distinct temporalities to labour practices that intersect with these mobilities in all sorts of ways – the tenure of a work visa, the rhythms of the workday, or the connections between labour and the timing of lifestages.
Beyond these general assertions about the relationship between temporality, mobility and labour we observe emergent phenomena that are potentially reshaping these connections, inviting us to think them anew. On the one hand there has been a growth in longer-distance commuting as a constitutive feature of some working lives, manifest in mobile work lives, fly-in-fly-out labour, long distance living arrangements and the rise of global work. Similarly, in the realm of ‘migration’ we have witnessed a marked shift towards temporary and circular migration, both in the aspirations and subjectivities of migrants and the governmentalisation of migrant mobilities and lives through temporary migration regimes.
Together, these trends suggest that there might be some profound and intriguing reconfigurations happening in many workers’ lives. But what sorts of transformations are these new working and migratory practices giving rise to? For instance, the trends indicate that these new mobile working practices are changing bodies, changing relationships, changing family forms, changing place attachments, changing communities, and changing the very nature of belonging. This session aims to grapple with precisely these transformations of labour, life and place.
Disciplinarily, this session aims to forge a richer dialogue between mobilities research and migration studies in order to explore how these mobility practices are creating new kinds of subjects; how they are necessitating new kinds of skill; and how new kinds of relationships are emerging. We believe that these new mobile working practices invite analysis through the complimentary perspectives and theoretical resources that mobilities and migration research offers.
We therefore invite papers that explore the relationship between labour mobility and migration, temporality and affect. This could include a focus on the timing and rhythms of social sites like the workplace; the multiplication of labouring bodies through the governmentalisation of time at the border; subjective understandings of timing of lives and labour and its interrelationship with pasts, futures and presents. Other themes may respond to the following questions:
Abstract submission: Monday 19th October 2015
Please send abstracts of 250 words max to both David Bissell and Francis Collins. We will contact successful applicants by the 23rd of October 2015. Once selected participants must pay the registration fee and submit their abstracts online at the AAG by October 29th 2015.
Following on from the various discussions and reflections on geography’s disciplinary mobilisation of the idea/concept of ‘the anthropocene’ I thought I’d just link to a bunch of things Bernard Stiegler has written about/in response to the concept.
I cannot pretend to be totally on top of this work. Likewise, I am not totally sure I can buy into the argument Stiegler presents in these works but it is relatively interesting nonetheless…
These are all translated and made available by the inimitable Daniel Ross:
“The Anthropocene and Neganthropology“, lecture by Bernard Stiegler at Canterbury, 2014.
“Escaping the Anthropocene“, lecture by Bernard Stiegler at the University of Durham, January 2015.
“Automatic Society 1: The Future of Work – Introduction“, the Introduction to Stiegler’s latest(?) book Automatic Society 1: The Future of Work (another series apparently!). This has been published in the new journal La Deleuziana.