Apps & affect – Fibreculture 25

This issue of Fibreculture on “apps and affect” from last year (2015), stemming from a conference of the same name, has some fairly substantial looking contributions from interesting people. These include a conversation between Alexander Galloway & Patricia Ticineto Clough, the ‘algorithmic agartha‘ paper by Nandita Biswas Mellamphy & Dan Mellamphy I’ve linked to before and (of particular interest to me at the mo) a paper by Melissa Gregg on speculative labour & app development. It’s edited by Svitlana Matviyenko, Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Alison Hearn, and Andrew Murphie.

Introduction

In William Gibson’s recent futurist novel The Peripheral, the planet has been devastated by a massive eco-techno-political catastrophe (‘the jackpot’) but remaining inhabitants are still able to enjoy the luxury of activating digital devices simply by tapping their tongues on the roof of their mouths. This touch is sufficient to set into play systems that communicate across space and time – enabling the establishment of connections back in time, for example, to people closer to our own present-day, for whom mobiles are still (somewhat) separate from the body. Thirty years ago, in his first novel Neuromancer, Gibson immortalised cyberspace with the account of what now sounds like an amazingly clunky process whereby the hero ‘jacks-in’ to virtual reality. But in The Peripheral the process of translation and transition into networks is streamlined – occluded, internal, intimate and implanted – right at the tip of the tongue.

This issue of the Fibreculture Journal explores a moment along this hypothetical trajectory by investigating the contemporary intersection of ‘Apps and Affect’, publishing papers from a conference of that name organised in October 2013 by faculty and students at Western University (specifically from its Faculty of Information and Media Studies and Center for the Study of Theory and Criticism). By recognising apps as objects that are related to the constitution of subjects, as a component of biopolitical assemblages, and as a means of digital production and consumption, our conference aimed to make an intervention in what had – since the announcements of the App-Store and the iPhone3 in 2008 – been a largely technical and rather technophiliac public discussion of apps.

Isn’t it paradoxical, we asked, that instead of becoming ‘transparent’ and ‘invisible’ – as envisioned by the thinkers of ubiquitous computing decades ago – the app-ecosystem manifests itself as permanent excess: excessive downloads, excessive connections, excessive proximity, excessive ‘friends’-qua-‘contacts’, excessive speeds and excessive amounts of information? How does the app as ‘technique’ (Tenner), indeed as ‘cultural technique’ (Siegert) and as ‘technics’ (Stiegler), channel our ways of maintaining relations with/in the media environment? Do the specific and circumscribed operations of individual applications foster or foreclose what media theorists call the transformative and transductive potential of collective technological individuation (Simondon)? How might we think about the social, political and technical implications of this movement away from open-ended networks like the internet towards specific, focused, and individualised modes of computing? Do apps represent ‘a new reticular condition of trans-individuation grammatising new forms of social relations’ (Stiegler) or do they signal instead the triumph of ‘regulatory’ networks over ‘generative’ ones (Zittrain)? If apps are micro-programs residing by the hundreds and thousands on cell-phones, mobile-devices and tablets, and affects are corporeal excitements (and depressions) running beneath and beyond cognition, what is the relation of apps to affects?

– See more at: http://twentyfive.fibreculturejournal.org/#sthash.6y9K3uyP.dpuf

21 December, 2015

Interesting new paper: Performing the sharing economy – Lizzie Richardson

This new article in Geoforum [paywall] by Lizzie Richardson (@LizzieCIRich) looks really good – I’ve only skim read it so far but looking forward digging in 🙂

Performing the sharing economy

Lizzie Richardson

Here’s the abstract:

The sharing economy converges around activities facilitated through digital platforms that enable peer-to-peer access to goods and services. It constitutes an apparent paradox, framed as both part of the capitalist economy and as an alternative. This duplicity necessitates focusing on the performances of the sharing economy: how it simultaneously constructs diverse economic activities whilst also inviting the deconstruction of ongoing practices of dominance. Such performances hold open the question of what the (sharing) economy is, suspending it as a space for both opportunity and critique. Drawing on participant observation at a sharing economy ‘festival’ and analysis of the vocabularies of online platforms, the paper outlines three performances of sharing through community, access and collaboration. It argues through these performances that the sharing economy is contingent and complexly articulated. It has the potential to both shake up and further entrench ‘business-as-usual’ through the ongoing reconfiguration of a divergent range of (economic) activities. Whilst offering an antidote to the narrative of economy as engendering isolation and separation, the sharing economy simultaneously masks new forms of inequality and polarisations of ownership. Nonetheless, the paper concludes in suggesting that by pointing to wider questions concerning participation in, access to and production of resources, the sharing economy should not be dismissed. Instead, it should serve as prompt to engage with ‘digital’ transformations of economy in the spirit of affirmative critique that might enact the promise of doing economy differently.

3 December, 2015

Imogen Heap on inventing new [blockchain] contracts for publishing/selling music digitally

This interview/article in Forbes with Imogen Heap offers an interesting insight into what some artists are beginning to think about in relation to how on earth one creates a ‘fair’ mechanism of reward/recognition of work as an artist in a world where one’s work is subject to near infinite digital reproducibility.

This, to me (in my naivety), seems to represent one of the more compelling and believable implementations of what the blockchain can enable. It’s worth checking out Heap’s articulation of Mycelia (the blockchain powered music publishing system she hopes to help create).

For years I’ve been so frustrated with the deep opacity of the music industry stopping me from really making the most out of my career and connecting the dots. The ‘black boxes,’ the NDAs, the endless contracts and statements. In the last few years, auditing labels and publishers seems to have become the norm, as it’s apparent how consistently the books don’t match up. You can pretty much guarantee you’ll find something, but it’s not always intentional; it’s just the deals, trigger points, and percentages are so complex – even more when mergers and acquisitions occur – that it’s hard to get it right every time, if you’re human!

[Mycelia…]

Its success will come from the adoption of millions of music lovers. A grand scale ongoing, collective project like no-other. To document, protect and share that which we love and build a place for it to grow, enabling future generations of artists to blossom as well as honouring those of the past.

Open source, a living, breathing, smart, decentralised, transparent, adaptable, useful, shining home for our love of music. A home which allows creativity to flow, connect and facilitate collaboration on so many levels, many of which just haven’t been possible. With this grand library of all music forming the basis upon which all music businesses from digital radio to tour bookings can then grow and thrive from. Empowering the artists, turning and landing the industry finally on its feet.

Inspired by the largest living organisms on earth, ancient, unseen, core to life itself, Mycelium (plural Mycelia) can stretch for miles, beneath the surface.

Each artist acting like its own Mycelium, in full animated dialogue with others on the global network.

Mycelia is huge, as it holds all music related information ever recorded anywhere ever ever ever but this organism stretches across our planet between hundreds of thousands of personal computers. It is the world’s greatest and most treasured library and it belongs to the two collective parties who solely make music complete. The music makers and their audience.

Read the whole piece here.

3 December, 2015

Reblog> New Book – Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn

Interesting new book highlighted by Colin McFarlane, including contributions by Rob Kitchin (and team) and Jennifer Gabrys…

New Book – Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn

Andrés Luque-Ayala, Simon Marvin and myself have just published a new edited book on the ‘smart city’ debate. The book, Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn? (Routledge), is a critical examination of the claims, drivers, imaginaries and consequences of smart city discourses.

As we all know, there is an incredible amount of hype and noise made about smart cities, much of it by multinational corporations like IBM and Cisco in their effort to sell expensive ‘urban solutions’. In this book, we sought to take this debate on by bringing together a group of critical, international and interdisciplinary researchers. Smart urbanism

The book examines how smart city initiatives are being rolled out, and makes a series of arguments that seeks to advance a critical research agenda. It finds, for example, that the discourse is often in reality a justification for the latest round of neoliberal development and displacement. It finds a common tendency to place far too much faith in technology, with far too little attention to the actual urban context. It also finds that most of the time, and despite high profile cases such as Rio’s control room, the smart city discourse is little more than discourse, bolstered by pervasive imagery that globally circulates and effectively constitutes a powerful form of marketing.

But the book also finds openings in the smart city discourse, including in the actions of social movements, civil society groups, and critical researchers to use or promote digital technologies in more socially and ecologically relevant ways. In these efforts, it is urbanism and social justice that inform whether or not digital technologies are useful, as opposed to the positivist view that technology can be added to cities awaiting ‘enhancement’ through sensors, dashboards and real-time data management. But as the book shows, it would be far too simple to argue that there is an ‘alternative’ smart city discourse that opposes a ‘mainstream’ discourse, partly because the various overlaps between what may initially appear mainstream and alternative, and partly because many critical initiatives with digital technology reject the entire smart city discourse altogether while others seeks to reframe it.

Here’s the list of contributors and chapter titles:

IntroductionAndrés Luque-Ayala, Colin McFarlane and Simon Marvin
Smart cities and the politics of urban dataRob Kitchin, Tracey Lauriault and Gavin McArdle
IBM and the visual formation of smart citiesDonald McNeill
The smart entrepreneurial city: Dholera and a 100 other utopias in IndiaAyona Datta
Getting smart about smart cities in Cape Town: Beyond the rhetoricNancy Odendaal
Programming environments: Environmentality and citizen sensing in the smart cityJennifer Gabrys
Smart-city initiatives and the Foucauldian logics of governing through codeFrancisco Klauser and Ola Söderström
Geographies of smart urban powerGareth Powells, Harriet Bulkeley and Anthony McLean
Test-Bed as urban epistemologyNerea Calvillo, Orit Halpern, Jesse LeCavalier and Wolfgang Pietsch
Beyond the corporate smart city?: Glimpses of other possibilities of smartnessRobert G. Hollands
ConclusionsColin McFarlane Andrés Luque-Ayala and Simon Marvin

1 December, 2015

Reblog> 10 bitcoin myths

This is worth a read, from The Institute of Network Cultures:

10 Bitcoin Myths

By Eduard de Jong, Geert Lovink and Patrice Riemens

“Pigs will fly, but not in the next 100 million years.” Johan Sjerpstra

1. “Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer system.”

In order to transfer value from one Bitcoin account to another, the owner of bitcoins uses the services of a collective of operators known as ‘miners’ who validate the transaction on the Bitcoin distributed database also known as “the ledger.” The relationship between these operators and an individual user, i.e. owner of bitcoins, is hence one between merchants and customer and not one of equals. Only miners are, and then only operationally speaking, peers, since they all perform the same software program. However, they are also, and mostly, in competition which each other because they need revenue to pay for the equipment they operate. Also, any time an update to the database is made, only a single miner is actually adding the transaction records with bitcoin value transfers to the ledger, and gets the financial rewards for doing this. In this way, the incentive for miners to support each other is limited, and one cannot speak of a peer-to-peer relationship in the traditional sense.

Over the time Bitcoin has been operational the inherent hierarchical relation between miners and users has become more pronounced by an ever rising technical and financial barrier to becoming a miner. Investments and operating costs of the necessary equipment rise in tandem with the continuously increasing difficulty of adding a new record to the database that is built into the bitcoin protocol.

Conclusion: Bitcoin is not a peer-to-peer system, but an on-line merchant-customer transaction market place.

2. “Bitcoin does away with intermediaries and fees.”

To make a payment using bitcoins a Bitcoin user needs a “Bitcoin exchange” and these exchanges charge a fee. The sole exception is if the user is a data base operator (a.k.a miner), having aggregated some bitcoins by mining and exclusively pays other users that have decided to keep bitcoins.

There is an other intermediary in Bitcoin, the operators of the distributed data base, the Bitcoin miners. A miner also needs to charge for its labor and expenses. For the time being, a miner is rewarded with newly created bitcoins–that is why updating the database is called ‘mining’. By design, the available amount of bitcoins that can be mined is restricted, and it is expected to be exhausted somewhere around 2040. After exhausting the lode miners can only earn money by explicitly charging a fee.

Conclusion: De-facto, Bitcoin users need to engage services of intermediaries and do pay fees for their transactions.

3. “Bitcoin is an alternative currency.”

An alternative currency, by definition, is designed to _entirely_ displace and replace existing currencies. Complementary currencies intend to _partially_ displace and replace existing currencies, usually in a local setting.

By design, Bitcoin is an alternative currency. Real world observation however, shows that most transactions in bitcoins translate, either at the point of purchase, or at the point of sale, in transactions in existing currencies. Only miners can create bitcoins, non-miners need to acquire them, usually by way of purchase.

In practices Bitcoin transactions are often intended to avoid high transfer fees or bypass local restrictions in making international payments. In such cases, bitcoins are purchased, swiftly change hands, and are just as fast converted again in another currency. In this cash-in Cash-out scheme Bitcoin operates then as a facilitator in the circulation of existing currencies and not as a replacement of these. Cash-in cash-out has been shown the most common mode of operation in bitcoins. A Bitcoin transaction can also be speculative in purpose, to hoard bitcoins expecting a raise in their value. In this case bitcoin can be considered an alternative to other currencies, comparable to an speculative investment in dollars or in commodities, like iron ore, gold or grain.

Conclusion: Bitcoin does not actually operate as an alternative currency.

4. “Bitcoin is not a fiat currency.”

In practice, acceptance of Bitcoin payments takes place before the (irrevocable) recording of the transaction in the distributed database. That is, without formal confirmation of its validity. Apparently, the parties involved in payments in bitcoins _believe_ in their eventual recording. The payee therefore trusts the _eventual_ availability of received funds.

This looks distinctly similar to the way traditional instruments of payments, such as coins, banknotes and bank transfers, operate. The users trust, based on experience and social convention, the correct operation of the system such that received funds are available for further spending. This ‘systemic trust’ in traditional, fiat, currency is underpinned by a mix of technical features such as hard to copy bank notes, fraud detection software in financial institutions and government imposed and enforced regulations.

Conclusion: Where in practice the ‘systemic trust’ in Bitcoin is no different from that of traditional currencies, Bitcoin operates _de facto_ as a fiat currency.

5. “Bitcoin is anonymous.”

The central database with transactions in bitcoins is publicly accessible. This is an essential Bitcoin design property to, at least in theory, allow any party to participate as processing node (miner) in order to get involved in updating the distributed database. The parties in a transaction are identified by unique numbers, and a payment transaction is linked through this number to the transaction wherein the spend value was received.

But as most Bitcoin transactions effectively constitute a payment in traditional currency at one end or the other, or both, they involve well known parties that exchange bitcoins for and against these currencies, the Bitcoin exchanges. Hence, payments in bitcoins can be traced as the value flows between these exchanges. Identification to the humans involved in a payment, e.g. by law enforcement, are therefore _potentially_ possible.

Conclusion: Bitcoin is not an electronic form of cash and does not protect privacy.

6. “Bitcoin is secure and cannot be hacked.”

Security for electronic payments has several parts: first to make sure that only the rightful owner can make a payment, secondly to make sure that the intended recipient actually receives the moneys paid and finally that only money can be paid that is actually owned by the payer and hence can not be spend twice.

In the Bitcoin sphere a payer uses a password to initiate a payment from her computer. The password unlocks a private cryptographic key stored on the computer to send cryptographically protected messages to be recorded in the Bitcoin database to make the payment. Yet, computers can be hacked, and a hacker can gain control of the private key and hence initiate a fraudulent payment. A loss of the private key, for instance by a crashed hard disk, does not just lose access to the money, it actually loses all the moneys controlled. Indeed one of the design features of Bitcoin is that payments, once made, cannot be reversed or recalled.

For the ordinary user, this represents a much higher level of risk than in traditional banking, where losing the bank card or PIN does usually not result in losing the whole balance held in the bank account.

On the functional side, the operators of the processing nodes in the distributed implementation of the shared Bitcoin database use an protocol, to agree on the next version of the database. This is required to correctly incorporate the payment transactions made since the last update. The software in each of the processing nodes must verify the correctness of the transactions by inspecting previous transactions where the payer has received the value to be spend. Yet, servers can be hacked (e.g. with a virus) and the continued operations can therefor not be guaranteed.

By design, the blockchain protocol does not guarantee that all past transactions remain stored for ever or can be available to each of the processing nodes (miners) for inspection in a fail-safe way. The protocol does also not guarantee that a processing node actually verifies the transactions it records. The blockchain protocol cannot prevent that fraudulent transactions get recorded, and does not provide a way to remove or correct fraudulent transactions.

Conclusion: using Bitcoin is more risky than the traditional payment infrastructure.

7. “Bitcoin operates without trust.”

Bitcoin literature is adamant that the Bitcoin set-up successfully substitutes ‘objective’ ‘algorithmic’ trust for less reliable, because human error and trickery-prone, ‘subjective’ institutional or political trust.

As described previously, the blockchain protocol used to synchronize updates to the Bitcoin central database (or ledger) does not guarantee the correctness of the updates made. Most processing nodes that update the database, use the same open source implementation, the Bitcoin ‘miner’ program. This program includes verification of transactions, but transaction verification by the miner program might be compromised either accidentally, by a software bug, or maliciously, e.g. by a virus, or by a miner intent on undue gains. Users engaging in Bitcoin transactions implicitly trust that the miner programs continues to operate correctly, that the equipment is protected against virus attacks and that the miners will not subvert it.

Also, protection of the stored value at the level of the individual owner is not very strong in the Bitcoin set-up. As a consequence, Bitcoin service providers have emerged offering enhanced payment security, in the form of managing their clients’ wallets. This service can be provided both online and with physical tokens like smart cards. Making use of ‘wallet providers’ evidently entails trust in the continued correct and honest operations of the online service or of the physical device.

Conclusion: Bitcoin substitutes one form of ‘subjective’ trust in traditional institutions for another in new organizational forms.

8. “Bitcoin is politically neutral.”

British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, in a famous ‘last words’ speech against the Euro, affirmed that decisions about money and currency are all essentially political in nature. In this context politics must be understood as more than what politicians do, essential politics is about the citizens and the state they live in. The decision that is embodied in Bitcoin’s design to limit the issuable volume of bitcoins to 21 million units can only be seen as political.

Other characteristic Bitcoin features, such as it rewards for early adopters and big operators, its essentially deflationary and hoarding-inducing nature (also due to the designed scarcity of bitcoins), its rejection of regulatory oversight and consumer protection and of state intervention generally, all resonate with political beliefs of “techno-libertarians”. Conversely, it is difficult to imagine how Bitcoin could effectively function in a capitalism-unfriendly political dispensation.

Conclusion: like any other monetary system, Bitcoin, in its technical design reflects explicit or implicit political choices.

9. “Bitcoin is a sustainable system.”

The whole Bitcoin set-up is, and especially the functioning of the distributed implementation of its central database with the compute-intensive blockchain protocol, is dependent on increasingly sophisticated and trouble-free network infrastructure resulting in an ever increasing consumption of resources. This clearly is at variance with the ever more forceful, and inescapable calls for less consumption, foremost in the energy sector.

Conclusion: Bitcoin does not fit well in the required transition to sustainability. This contrasts with traditional financial institutions that can reduce energy consumption a pace with improvements in IT technology.

10. “Bitcoin can scale to world size.”

Both the limited number of possible units of bitcoins and inherently severe technical limits to the operational speed of the blockchain protocol pose such insurmountable obstacles to a global economy that would run exclusively with bitcoins. In the absence of governance of bitcoin, even a technical modification to increase transaction capacity are very hard to implement.

For consumer payment transactions, for instance, it is hard to conceive how the blockchain protocol in Bitcoin can be made to operate effectively at the same speed and volume as systems maintained by, e.g., VISA, Mastercard, AmEx, JCB and such.

As shown in Argentina or Greece Bitcoin can be useful in some specific situations. In these cases it has been a mediator between traditional monetary systems. For Bitcoin to ‘scale up’ to a true global scale, while maintaining (a semblance of) stability and security would for quite some time to come require such large amount of resources as to defeat any short or medium term perspective of attainability.

Conclusion: As Yanis Varoufakis, the economist and former finance minister in Greece, formulated it: “Bitcoin is not capable of ‘powering’ an advanced, industrial society.”

Amsterdam, November 30, 2015

(The authors thank Boudewijn de Kerf for a quick review, while keeping
full responsibility for the substance of the argument.)

30 November, 2015

*.exe ~ Executions: conversations on code, power & death (version 0.1)

This event in Aarhus, this week, with Wendy Chun and Geoff Cox as ‘keynotes’ looks really good!

Executions: conversations on code, power & death (version 0.1)

Keynote presenters: Wendy Chun and Geoff Cox

Venue: Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS) | HÃ¸egh-Guldbergs Gade 6b, bygning 1630, Aarhus

When: December 3rd and 4th, 2015

This event investigates the cultural, material and political implications of execution. Software permeates our environment. We co-exist in an increasingly datafied present in which algorithms and abstract coded processes execute across different scales, materialising and operating at the micro and macro levels of our actions.

The aim of this event is to open up the concept of execution, both from a particular perspective of code and its execution, and more generally towards a wider discussion in relation to datafied culture and everyday life. How can we understand the affective, embodied, performative, programmed processes of execution in the world today? By gathering together researchers working with diverse artistic practices, we hope to encourage a critical curiosity and engagement with the theme of execution.
Topics will include:

execution as power / execution as decision / execution as performed instruction set / execution as enunciation / execution as critique / execution as temporal performance / execution as participation / execution as cruelty / indigestion/incorporation as execution / tuning as execution
In autumn 2015 and spring 2016, two-day events will take place (in Aarhus, Denmark and Malmö, Sweden respectively) that include keynote talks by Wendy Chun (Brown University) and Geoff Cox (Aarhus University), as well as workshops on the theme of execution.

These events are instantiations of an on-going discussion by the critical software thing group, a collection of researchers with a common interest in exploring, reflecting on and working with code.

See the dedicated wiki for more…

23 November, 2015

“The dictatorship of data” (on BBC R4)

Just caught up with a programme aired on BBC Radio 4 last week called “The Dictatorship of Data“, presented by their Security Correspondent Gordon Corera. The role of the presenter certainly inflects the tone of the programme. It focuses on the growth in the collection of data, as the wholesale capture of data exhausts and meta-data from our devices and public platforms, and thus how that collection and then aggregation both allows and then presents problems for forms of surveillance.

It is an interesting programme insofar as it offers a general introduction to several key issues. The discussion of the geopolitical responses to the uses of social media platforms and how Russia in particular wants to capture some of that capability (particularly in relation to SORM) is good, and it mostly draws on the authors of a book that sounds good: “Red Web“. Likewise, there’s some entertaining and perhaps disquieting discussion of ‘The Hacking Team‘, purveyors of malware to governments. Again, this is understandably figured in geopolitical terms.

However, I’d say it is slightly wide of the mark in terms of the discussion offered of the prospects of social media enabling some kind of authoritarianism. The way it is discussed takes as it’s assumption that people are faithfully reporting their actual opinions, ‘real’ events and so on and that they are individuals (and not bots) – as though social media are some kind of unproblematic ‘social sensing platform’. Now, some will argue that there is a way to somehow ‘solve’ the ‘biasing’ of the sample represented by a given social media platform’s population and I’m no statistician so… meh. I remain skeptical that any kinds of claim about ‘representivity‘ are particularly meaningful.

I think those who want a more nuanced viewpoint on some of these issues probably ought to checkout Louise Amoore‘s The Politics of Possibility and her papers following on from this, likewise it’s worth checking out both David Murakami Wood and Francisco Klauser‘s work on surveillance too (of course, there’s more – but you have access to a search engine 😉 ).

19 November, 2015

Event> The Politics and Economics of Attention (14/12)

Both Clive Barnett and I will be speaking at the sixth seminar in the Behaviour Change & Psychological Governance series (funded by the ESRC) which is being held at the University of Bristol on the 14th of December.

I’ll be revisiting some of the things Patrick Crogan and I wrote about back in 2012 in the themed issue of Culture Machine we co-edited following an ESF-funded conference on attention in 2010. My move forward is probably being a little more critical in my thinking about what constitutes the process of valuing attention (critically reflecting on why a Labour Theory of Value might not quite fit) and thinking (with the work of Bernard Stiegler) about how the socio-technical systems that attempt to economise (something that gets called) attention are a kind of pharmakon (an indeterminacy, originating from the idea of a drug as both poison and cure). By looking at some examples I hope to offer some suggestions about how we might understand what’s going on (in networked technology systems in particular) when an attempt is made to place a financial value on ‘attention’.

18 November, 2015

CFP> Streams of Consciousness: Data, Cognition and Intelligent Devices, Apr 2016

This looks interesting:

Streams of Consciousness

Data, Cognition and Intelligent Devices

21st and 22nd of April 2016

Call for Papers

consc

“What’s on your mind?” This is the question to which every Facebook now responds. Millions of users sharing their thoughts in one giant performance of what Clay Shirky once called “cognitive surplus”. Contemporary media platforms aren’t simply a stage for this cognitive performance. They are more like directors, staging scenes, tweaking scripts, working to get the best or fully “optimized” performance. As Katherine Hayles has pointed out, media theory has long taken for granted that we think “through, with and alongside media”. Pen and paper, the abacus, and modern calculators are obvious cases in point, but the list quickly expands and with it longstanding conceptions of the Cartesian mind dissolve away. Within the cognitive sciences, cognition is now routinely described as embodied, extended, and distributed. They too recognize that cognition takes place beyond the brain, in between people, between people and things, and combinations thereof. The varieties of specifically human thought, from decision-making to reasoning and interpretation, are now considered one part of a broader cognitive spectrum shared with other animals, systems, and intelligent devices.

Today, the technology we mostly think through, with and alongside are computers. We routinely rely on intelligent devices for any number of operations, but this is no straightforward “augmentation”. Our cognitive capacities are equally instrumentalized, plugged into larger cognitive operations from which we have little autonomy. Our cognitive weaknesses are exploited and manipulated by techniques drawn from behavioural economics and psychology. If Vannevar Bush once pondered how we would think in the future, he received a partial response in Steve Krug’s best selling book on web usability: Don’t Make Me Think! Streams of Consciousness aims to explore cognition, broadly conceived, in an age of intelligent devices. We aim to critically interrogate our contemporary infatuation with specific cognitive qualities – such as “smartness” and “intelligence” – while seeking to genuinely understand the specific forms of cognition that are privileged in our current technological milieu. We are especially interested in devices that mediate access to otherwise imperceptible forms of data (too big, too fast), so it can be acted upon in routine or novel ways.

Topics of the conference include but are not limited to:

data and cognition
decision-making technologies
algorithms, AI and machine learning
visualization, perception
sense and sensation
business intelligence and data exploration
signal intelligence and drones
smart and dumb things
choice and decision architecture
behavioural economics and design
technologies of nudging
interfaces
bodies, data, and (wearable) devices
optimization
web and data analytics (including A/B and multivariate testing)

Please submit individual abstracts of no longer than 300 words. Panel proposals are also welcome and should also be 300 words. Panel proposals should also include indvidual abstracts. The deadline for submissions is Friday the 18th of December and submissions should be made to cimconf@warwick.ac.uk. Accepted submissions will be notified by 20th of January 2016.
Streams of Consciousness is organised by Nathaniel Tkacz and Ana Gross. The event is supported by the Economic and Social Research Council.

18 November, 2015

Performing the Humanities at 24 fps, Gay Hall in conversation with Stelarc

This is worth a watch:

Performing the Humanities @ 24 fps: Part 1

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…