observations – Page 41

19 October, 2015

Ash, Kitchin, Leszczynski on what ‘digital’ means for geography

Saw this only this morning, blogged over on The Programmable City website. Looks like a fairly comprehensive description of a set of issues within geography.

New paper: Digital Turn, Digital Geography?

James Ash, Rob Kitchin and Agnieszka Leszczynski have published a new paper entitled ‘Digital Turn, Digital Geography?‘ available as Programmable City Working Paper 17 on SSRN.

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the relationship between the digital and geography. Our analysis provides an overview of the rich scholarship that has examined: (1) geographies of the digital, (2) geographies produced by the digital, and (3) geographies produced through the digital. Using this material we reflect on two questions: has there been a digital turn in geography? and, would it be productive to delimit ‘digital geography’ as a field of study within the discipline, as has recently occurred with the attempt to establish ‘digital anthropology’ and ‘digital sociology’? We argue that while there has been a digital turn across geographical sub-disciplines, the digital is now so pervasive in mediating the production of space and in producing geographic knowledge that it makes little sense to delimit digital geography as a distinct field. Instead, we believe it is more productive to think about how the digital reshapes many geographies

I would say, having only skim-read the paper, that it does sort of perpetuate a disquiet I’ve felt for some time about how a particular ind of discursive regime, with a particular set of power brokers, is being built around the “geographies” prefixed with ‘algorithmic’; ‘data’; ‘digital’… perhaps there are some others… and what that might mean… maybe its just that there are only a few people that actually write stuff about this and they all know each other… anglophone geography is after all quite a small discipline. Maybe I’m a part of that too, with the little I’ve written on the subject. However, its evident in other disciplinary contexts too, such as the way in which particular people seem to be the leading lights in ‘digital sociology‘.

Maybe I’m just performing my own anxiety about career, struggling to write myself and being on probation in an institution with rather lofty expectations, but maybe there’s also something to my observation about the politics of being a researcher of a modish subject. Perhaps people who do stuff on the ‘anthropocene’ and anthropogenic climate change feel similarly, perhaps not… Perhaps I’m also damaging my own ‘career’ by blogging like this. Who knows… I certainly don’t mean it as a slight to the authors of the above paper, or anyone else.

“How I learned to stopped worrying and to love discipline“

14 October, 2015

Reblog> “Sex, annotation and verité totale” Kurenneimi’s Archival Futurism

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…

“Sex, annotation, and verité totale”: Kurenniemi’s Archival Futurism

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.

Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History: Erkki Kurenniemi in 2048, eds Krysa and Parikka

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.

Endorsements

“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

9 October, 2015

Reblog> New paper: Locative media and data-driven computing experiments @syperng & @robkitchin

A really interesting paper by Sung-Yueh Perng, Rob Kitchin and Leighton Evans, definitely worth a read.

New paper: Locative media and data-driven computing experiments

Sung-Yueh Perng, Rob Kitchin and Leighton Evans have published a new paper entitled ‘Locative media and data-driven computing experiments‘ available as Programmable City Working Paper 16 on SSRN.

Abstract

Over the past two decades urban social life has undergone a rapid and pervasive geocoding, becoming mediated, augmented and anticipated by location-sensitive technologies and services that generate and utilise big, personal, locative data. The production of these data has prompted the development of exploratory data-driven computing experiments that seek to find ways to extract value and insight from them. These projects often start from the data, rather than from a question or theory, and try to imagine and identify their potential utility. In this paper, we explore the desires and mechanics of data-driven computing experiments. We demonstrate how both locative media data and computing experiments are ‘staged’ to create new values and computing techniques, which in turn are used to try and derive possible futures that are ridden with unintended consequences. We argue that using computing experiments to imagine potential urban futures produces effects that often have little to do with creating new urban practices. Instead, these experiments promote big data science and the prospect that data produced for one purpose can be recast for another, and act as alternative mechanisms of envisioning urban futures.

Keywords: Data analytics, computing experiments, locative media, location-based social network (LBSN), staging, urban future, critical data studies

The paper is available for download here.

9 October, 2015

McKenzie Wark’s Critical Media Theory syllabus on Public Seminar

On the Public Seminar website, McKenzie Wark has written about a new Autumn course he’s teaching at the New School in NYC. He matches up each week’s class with a recent blogpost addressing the book they’ll be reading. Looks like a great exploration of what media is and how we can critically interrogate its/their role in what it is to be human…

Critical Media Theory

This semester (fall 15) I’m teaching Critical Media Theory (GLIB 5600) in the Liberal Studies program at the New School for Social Research. Critical Media Theory looks at a series of key texts that define pathways for thinking about media.

They are critical in the sense of aiming to delineate limits to how existing media function, and in pointing towards an expanded potential for what media could be. We start with some acknowledged classics, although hopefully not all of them will be too familiar. The we look at some recent texts that map out a range of approaches in media studies today.

The notes for the lectures will all be available here on Public Seminar. The students in the class can read the lectures before class, so we can get through the lecture part fairly quickly and on to discussion. I will be modifying and adding to the lecture notes as we go.

For anyone else who wants to follow along, here are the topics and links to the lecture notes for each week.

Read the rest of McKenzie Wark’s syllabus on the Public Seminar website…

8 October, 2015

Excellent piece on why smartphone ownership is not a measure of poverty

I saw this piece in the New Statesman thanks to retweets on Twitter.

@HackneyFoodbank blog in the @NewStatesman today on the poverty line and smartphones http://t.co/Y6E3TJq7jK

– Liza Cucco (@lizacucco) October 8, 2015

In the article No, having a smartphone doesn’t mean you’re not poor on “The Staggers” column/blog Liza Cucco, manager of Hackney Food Bank, clearly articulates why using smartphone ownership, and even internet access, as a measure of poverty is a red herring:

Successfully navigating 21st century Britain without interconnectivity is near to impossible; I know this, because despite stereotypes, many foodbank clients don’t actually have smartphones or even email addresses. Those who do have smartphones are not ignorant, they are savvy, choosing to allocate very limited resources to the ubiquitous multi-tool of our time, keeping essential streams of communication open. The moment a phone can’t be topped up or a contract must be cancelled is devastating to a person’s opportunity.

…

Regular internet access is essential to register for benefits, apply for most jobs (and respond in timely manner to emails offering interviews), to access course information in your studies, manage your bank account, communicate with your child’s school or make an appointment at your doctor’s surgery. In our immediate society, you are expected to be available at all times. Constant access may seem a necessity to a businessman, but it is just as important, if not more, to a cleaner on a zero-hours contract who must be available for work at the last minute, navigating to anywhere they need to be and keeping on top of online timecards to ensure they are paid for their work.

8 October, 20158 October, 2015

Reblog> The Facebook Liberation Army at Discovery Festival: live deleting of facebook accounts

From the Institute of Network Culture blog… This is a nice playful response to the ways in which we can see uses of social media as ‘work’:

The Facebook Liberation Army at Discovery Festival: live deleting of facebook accounts

On Friday 25 September the Facebook Liberation Army made fresh calls to arms at the Discovery Festival in the science centre Nemo, Amsterdam.

Armed with pamphlets, zines and instructions on how to leave Facebook the resistance came disguised as Mark Zuckerberg. Many new rebels were enlisted in the Facebook Liberation Army and alternatives to social media platforms were discussed.

As well as offering advice on alternatives to Facebook the army also presented zines from The immaterial Labor union – a collective aimed to galvanize the workers of Facebook – initiated by Lidia Pereira. The evening was a resounding victory with even some people deciding to deactivate their Facebook accounts right their and then, serving to go on with their lives without negotiating Facebook’s terms of service.

7 October, 20157 October, 2015

Reblog> Sheep Time? – @annegalloway on the technics of breeding sheep

Good stuff from Anne –– watch the video!

I think the reciprocal negotiation of what might a kind of ‘species time’ between our different measurements of change (diurnal, seasonal etc.) and the corporeal (generational) changes in the animals bodies is really interesting –– offers an insight into the temporalities of particular kinds of interspecies ‘biopower‘ (or maybe it’s not ‘biopower’ [pace Foucault] ..? This is an interesting argument too).

Sheep Time?

I’m always trying to figure out new ways of doing remote presentations so I was pretty excited when I was invited to prepare something that could be continually broadcast (or looped) during the Temporal Design: Surfacing Everyday Tactics of Time Workshop @ Design Informatics, Edinburgh University, 28 September, 2015.

Here’s what I did:

[ Sheep Time from More-Than-Human Lab on Vimeo. ]

And here’s some of the Twitter conversation about it:

5 October, 2015

Reblog> CFP: Deleuzian Geographies

CFP: Deleuzian Geographies

Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting,
March 29-April 2, 2016
San Francisco, California

“We do not yet know the thought of Deleuze. Too often, whether hostile or adoring, we act as if his concepts were familiar, as if it were enough that his concepts simply touch us in order for us to understand them without spelling them out, or as if we had already made a survey of their promises” (Zourabichvili, 2012: 139)

This session speaks to the ever-growing engagement with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze in geography and the social sciences. The session will take stock of how Deleuzian (and Deleuzeo-Guattarian) concepts – such as affect, assemblage, becoming, de/re/territorialisation, difference, event, individuation, the minor, and the molecular – have been taken up in geography, productively amplifying key problematics that stage both new conceptual openings and new points of contestation (Sharpe et al, 2014; Woodward and Jones III, 2005).

In particular, we seek papers that respond to Francois Zourabichili’s (2012) call to (re-)engage Deleuze’s philosophy not as a revolution already-made, but instead as a force of creative encounter. Following Deleuze, what are the evaluative terms and stakes of thinking currently emerging in the contact zones of, for example, politics, aesthetics, science, the economy, ethics, and ecology (Ruddick, 2010; Doel and Clarke, 2007; McCormack, 2007; Hynes, 2015; Bonta and Protevi, 2004). We welcome papers then from across the field of geography that explore how Deleuze’s concepts participate in events of thinking that displace extant fields of intelligibility, generating new terms for modifying the conditions of the problems posed by society today. We offer the following ‘conceptual problematics’ and ‘terrains of contestation’ as possible suggestions of some themes that papers might address:

Conceptual problematics:
– Vital materialism and ecologies of nonorganic life
– Dispositions, tendencies, inclinations
– Ethics and the affective production of bodies
– Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism and alternative theorizations of subjectivity
– Earth-thinking: geophilosophy and chaosmosis
– Space after Deleuze: the ‘fold’ of topological thinking and the critique of interiority
– Art after Deleuze: encounters in cinema, music, literature etc.
– Politics after Deleuze: micropolitics and desire

Milieus of contestation:
– Deleuze’s differential ontology: coherence in becoming as opposed to that in being?
– New materialisms and a philosophy of the event: theorising matter as tendency, disposition, inclination as opposed to object-oriented, phenomenological and networked theories?
– The politics of affect: thinking an affective politics through the evental lens of singularities, thresholds and individuations as opposed to those that think these politics through objects, conditions, and atmospheres?
– Deleuze and research methodologies: what is the efficacy in experimenting beyond representation, beyond recognition?
– Deleuze and philosophy: are there different Deleuzes (Deleuze- Nietzsche, -Spinoza, -Bergson, -Simondon, -Whitehead) and how do they marry each to the other?

Please submit abstracts of 250 words or less to Andrew.Lapworth[at]bristol.ac.uk by Wednesday 21st October, 2015.

For more information and more general expressions of interest, please contact the session organizers:

Andrew Lapworth, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol
Andrew.Lapworth[at]bristol.ac.uk

Scott Sharpe, School of Physical, Environmental & Mathematical Sciences, UNSW@Canberra,
S.Sharpe[at]adfa.edu.au

JD Dewsbury, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol,
Jd.dewsbury[at]bristol.ac.uk

5 October, 2015

Haiku…from @ithke79

Cold room but warm seat,
Starting week reading Haiku,
Badly need coffee

Feeble I know, but here’s Keith Harris’ – he’s been writing them on his blog and I’ve enjoyed reading them… plus, we always need more coffee!

Haiku #6: Gray

Damn that sky is gray
Guess I’ll read some Althusser
And drink more coffee