Category: technicity

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Amateur philosophy – boundary 2 theme issue on Stiegler

Only just seen this. Issue 1 of volume 44 (2017) of boundary 2 is entitled Amateur Philosophy and concerns the work of Bernard Stiegler.

Within the issue are published the three lectures Stiegler gave in California in 2011 (one of which was published in Lana Turner). alongside this are pieces by a stellar cast of contemporary theorists, including: Claire Colebrook, Mark Hansen, Daniel Ross and Gerald Moore. Both of the two translators who have translated the majority of Stiegler’s work into English have pieces: Stephen Barker and Daniel Ross.

This seems like a fairly important contribution to anglophone engagements with Stiegler’s work…

Here’s the full table of contents.

You need a subscription to access the papers, let me know if you have any trouble…

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CFP> Journal of Peer Production Special Issue #11: CITY – Abstracts due 31 Jan 2017

CFP JOPP Special Issue #11: CITY – Abstracts due 31 Jan 2017

Editors: Penny Travlou, Nicholas Anastasopoulos, Panayotis Antoniadis

Call for papers

One of the welfare state’s key jurisdictions was to tend to housing and public space in benevolent ways. However, under the neoliberal dogma, commodification and gentrification threatens both the right to housing and the right to the city while in recent years, cities have become increasingly militarized and surveyed, resembling battlegrounds where freedom and democracy are under attack. At the same time, recent economic, political, and social crises have activated many counter-forces of resistance and creative alternatives for the grassroots production of food, health services, housing, networking infrastructures, and more.

The role of technology has been contradictory as well. On the one hand, the Internet has enabled some of the most remarkable peer production success stories at a global scale, such as Wikipedia and Free and Open Source Software, among many others. On the other hand, it has empowered huge corporations like Facebook and Google to fully observe and manipulate our everyday activities, and oppressive governments to censor and surveil their citizens.

At the city scale, technology offers opportunities for self-organization, like wireless community networks and numerous bottom-up techno-social initiatives, but also animates the top-down narrative of the “smart city” and the commodification of the “sharing economy as a service” provided by globally active platforms such as Airbnb and Uber. In this situation, peer production in space emerges as a vital bottom-up practice reclaiming citizen participation, and inventing new forms of community.

In this context, some core challenges arise:
– If we choose not tο rely on global players to provide peer production support at a local scale, how could different areas of peer production in the city, digital and physical, interact and support each other?
– What types of governance models can adequately support peer production in the city?

To address those challenges one needs to take into consideration the following:
– Lessons learned from the Internet and how they may be incorporated in the context-specific realities of the city.
– Knowledge-transfer methodologies across different localities.
– Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations (urban studies, media studies, sociology, architecture, cultural geography, informatics etc.).
– Possible collaborations and synergies between activists that fight for the “right to the city” and those that fight for the “right to the Internet”.
-Knowedge/experience transfer between non-urban settings (i.e. intentional communities, ecocommunities, the Transition movement, etc.) and the urban movements.
– Inquiry into research methods and methodologies to be developed and used for analysing ICT-mediated peer production in urban space.

This special issue aims to explore a wide variety of alternative and innovative peer practices, like urban agriculture, food sustainability, solidarity economy, right to the city movements, cooperative housing, community networks, P2P urbanism tactics, co-design practices and more, that are directly reflected in the production of urban space. We are particularly interested in novel combinations of theory, methodologies, and practices that can contribute to peer production in the city and enable new synergies between projects and communities.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:
– Urban commons and peer production
– Case studies of innovative peer practices approached from different perspectives
– Comparative case studies on patterns of commoning and think-global / act-local methodologies
– The regional dimension: examples from the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australasia
– Political issues of autonomy, hegemony, labour, gender, geopolitical and post-colonial perspectives
– Alternative forms of education and learning tools for promoting self-organization and community
– Innovative governance tools for peer production in the city
– Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary methodological approaches
– Urban studies and the right to the (hybrid) city
– Open source urbanism/architecture
– Recycling/upcycling vs buying: making, consuming or prosuming the city?

Important dates
Abstract submission: 31 January 2017
Notification to authors: 15 February 2017
Submission of full paper: 15 May 2017
Reviews to authors: 15 July 2017
Revised papers: 15 September 2017
Signals due: 10 October 2017
Issue release: October/November 2017

Submission guidelines
Abstracts of 300-500 words are due by January 31, 2017 and should be sent to city@peerproduction.net>. All peer reviewed papers will be reviewed according to Journal of Peer Production guidelines. See http://peerproduction.net/peer-review/process/. Full papers and materials are due by May 15, 2017 for review. Peer reviewed papers should be around 8,000 words. We also welcome experimental, alternative contributions, like testimonies, interviews and artistic treatments, whose format will be discussed case by case with the editors.

*This special issue was initiated during the Hybrid City III (Athens) conference and developed further during the IASC Urban Commons (Bologna) and Habitat III (Quito) conferences.

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“Masterclass with Melissa Gregg” at University of Bristol in Feb.

This looks really interesting. Mel Gregg has done some excellent work and is a good communicator so I’m sure this is a great opportunity…

Masterclass with Dr Melissa Gregg 

27th February 2017, 9:30–17:00

Dr Gregg is a leading world scholar in the field of gender, technology and critical management studies. She is best known for her ethnographic research of information professionals in the book Work’s Intimacy (Polity 2011), and as co-editor of the influential collection The Affect Theory Reader (with Gregory Seigworth, Duke 2010). Dr Gregg is currently working as a Principal Engineer at Intel Corporation and is exceptionally well placed to address the challenges in bridging the gap between organisational scholarship and practice.

This Masterclass is aimed at postgraduate students, academic staff and the wider community and will engage the participants in a critical, interdisciplinary debate on gender, subjectivity, organisations and organising. The day will be organised around recent themes in Dr Gregg’s work that explore technology, gender and culture in Silicon Valley; and methodologies for studying work and society.

Schedule for the Day

9.30-10.00am – Refreshments

10.00-11.30am – Counterproductive: The history of time management from a feminist perspective

11.30-12.00pm – Refreshments

12.00-1.30pm – Technology and the future of work

1.30-2.30pm – Lunch

2.30-4.30pm – Group Discussion: Gender, Culture and Methods

4.30-5.00pm – Refreshments Registration

The Masterclass is free and participants should register by emailing one of the organisers. Refreshments and lunch will be provided. Please also state any dietary requirements. Spaces are limited to 30 participants.

For further information, please contact one of the organisers.

 

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Reblog> Disrupting the Humanities: Towards Posthumanities – Special issue of JEP

Via Gary Hall

Disrupting the Humanities: Towards Posthumanities – Special issue of JEP

We are pleased to announce the publication of a special issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing: ‘Disrupting the Humanities: Towards Posthumanities‘, edited by Janneke Adema and Gary Hall.

‘Disrupting the Humanities: Towards Posthumanities’ consists of a selection of video articles by Johanna Drucker, Mark Amerika, Erin Manning, Monika Bakke, Endre Dányi, Lesley Gourlay, Silvio Lorusso, Niamh Moore, Karen Newman, SØren Pold, Craig Saper, Sarah Kember, and Iris van der Tuin.

It is available for free, open access, CC-BY, here:
http://www.journalofelectronicpublishing.org/

This special issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing is based on ‘Disrupting the Humanities’. This was a series of seminars exploring research and scholarship in a posthumanities context organised by the Centre for Disruptive Media at Coventry University in the UK. Disrupting the Humanities both critically engaged with the humanist legacy of the humanities, and creatively explored alternate and affirmative possible futures for the humanities. The series was accompanied by a wiki that is still available here: http://disruptivemedia.org.uk/wiki/

‘Posthumanities: The Dark Side of “The Dark Side of the Digital”’

Adema and Hall have written a 10,000 word opening essay, discussing the conceptual premises that underly this special issue. Engaging with various discourses around the digital humanities, the essay outlines the experimental mode in which the videos included in the issue have been edited – as well as pointing to the idea of “posthuman humanities”.
Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0019.201

A table of contents for this special issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing is provided below.

—–

Disrupting the Humanities: Towards PosthumanitiesThe Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP)

Volume 19, No. 2 winter 2016

Edited by Janneke Adema and Gary Hall

 

Contents

1  Maria Bonn, A Note From JEP

2 Janneke Adema and Gary Hall, Posthumanities: The Dark Side of “The Dark Side of the Digital”

PART ONE – Creating Posthumanities: Disrupting Humanities Methodologies

Part one of Disrupting the Humanities consists of a radical exploration of new posthumanist methodologies that take into account the agency of technologies and other non-human actants involved in modern forms of knowledge production.

3   Monika Bakke, Deep Time Environments: Art And The Materiality Of Life Beyond The Human

4   Lesley Gourlay, Posthuman Texts: Nonhuman Actors, Mediators and Technologies of Inscription

5   Niamh Moore, “Humanist” Methods in a “More-than-Human” World

6   Iris van der Tuin, Reading Diffractive Reading: Where and When Does Diffraction Happen?

PART TWO – Performing Posthumanities: Disrupting Humanities Aesthetics

Part two looks at the ways in which research is mediated and performed. It focuses on a reconsideration of the aesthetics of scholarship, including the “aesthetics of bookishness.” In doing so it investigates the potential of more post-digital, hybrid and multimodal forms of knowledge creation.

7   Erin Manning, 10 Propositions for Research-Creation

8   SØren Pold, Ink After Print: Literary Interface Criticism

9   Johanna Drucker, Diagrammatic Form and Performative Materiality

10  Silvio Lorusso, The Post-Digital Publishing Archive: An Inventory of Speculative Strategies

PART THREE – Circulating Posthumanities: Disrupting Humanities Institutions

Part three of Disrupting the Humanities provides a critical examination of how research is disseminated and shared, be it by publication to peers or to students in a pedagogical setting, or by adopting practices of radical openness and experimentation to challenge the normative and often print-based (neo)liberal humanist assumptions of how scholars in the humanities communicate.

11   Sarah Kember, At Risk? The Humanities and the Future of Academic Publishing

12   Endre Dányi, Samizdat Lessons: Three Dimensions of the Politics of Self-Publishing

13    Craig Saper, Disrupting Scholarship

14    Mark Amerika, Glitch Ontology (A Video Performance)

15    Karen Newman, The West Midlands as an ‘Electronic Super Highway’: BOM and the Emergence of New Art Infrastructures

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Affect & Social Media 3.0 CFP

Via Tony Sampson…

Affect and Social Media#3 2nd CFP

main2Call for presentations and artworks

Affect and Social Media#3

experience

engagement 

entanglement                                

Including the Sensorium Art Show (the sequel)

Event Date: Thurs 25th May, 2017

Venue: University of East London, Docklands Campus

Confirmed keynote: Prof Jessica Ringrose (UCL) 

https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/browse/profile?upi=JLRIN58

Call for 15min presentations and artworks

The organizers of A&SM#3 welcome proposals for 15min presentations and artworks that interpret and explore the affective, feely and emotional encounters with social media grasped through the following themes:

  1. Experience
  2. Engagement
  3. Entanglement 

Presentations and artworks can widely interpret each theme, but preference will be given to proposals that respond in two ways.

Firstly, the organizers are particularly interested in creative responses (academic and artistic) to recent social media events – the US election, for example. So proposals might address how the Trump win allows us to develop a fresh understanding of shared experiences, emotional engagements or new entanglements with social media.

Secondly, we ask presenters and artists to consider how their approach to affect and social media can be put to work in an education context. For example, how can the potential of affect theory reach out across teaching practices and develop novel understandings of the political nature and transformative possibilities of teaching.

The academic part of this call is open to experienced scholars, new researchers and postgrad students from across the disciplinary boundaries of affect studies and related areas of study interested in theorizing and working with emotion and feelings in a social media context. We welcome a good mixture of innovative conceptual and methodological approaches.

The Sensorium Art Exhibit will interweave the conference proceedings and bring it to a close with a special show, alongside free drinks and nibbles.

15min presentations and artwork proposals to: t.d.sampson@uel.ac.uk

Please include 200 word max description and short bio including academic affiliation and relevant links to previous work and/or website profile.

DEADLINE: Tues 28th Feb 2017.

Full registration details will be made available from 27th Jan via UEL event page.

https://www.uel.ac.uk/Events/2017/05/Affect-and-Social-Media-3

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In the best possible taste? or the intimate geographies of training the mouth as a technology

Someone clutching their neck because of the bad taste of a cup of coffee

I’m undertaking some new research, for which I have received a small pot of funding from the University of Exeter. So, exciting stuff! This combines my theoretical work on understandings of technology and mediation and my near-obsession with ‘speciality’ coffee. I hope that I will be able to say something interesting about the kinds of intimate geography of taste (of aesthetics, of gustatory experience) that are performed through ‘speciality coffee’. Please find below a brief outline. Of course – I’d very much welcome any comments, suggestions or opportunities to chat about the themes here and things you think I’m missing or getting wrong, so please do get in touch!

In the best possible taste?, or the intimate geographies of training the mouth as a technology

Taste is something we pay for. We can pay more for food and drink we think are ‘delicious’. In turn, this creates ways food and drink we find pleasurable comes to market. This project will explore the growth in ‘speciality coffee’ and its contingency on particular kinds of taste, which I posit have a range of subsequent economic and cultural consequences. I will explore the central role of techniques of tasting, known in the coffee trade as “cupping”, in the commodity chains of ‘speciality’ coffee. Claims have been made within the coffee trade and in the popular press (in particular by Jay Rayner in The Observer, 8th June 2014) that a shift in tasting practices and thus how coffee gets roasted and prepared has created a very specific taste experience. The hypothesis of this project is that an increasingly technical and quantitative approach to measuring what we call taste is affecting the gustatory experience of coffee.

The aim of this project is to investigate how this particular taste experience has been constituted: to ask how do professional coffee tasters reflect upon the training of their sense of taste? And: do specific technical gustatory practices of tasting create orthodoxies in judgments about taste? – if so, how?

The methods for this pilot project involve undertaking two empirical activities: (1) undergoing tasting training with the London School of Coffee and documenting this ethnographically; and, (2) interviewing and tasting coffee with key speciality coffee roasters to examine how tasting techniques are used in practice.

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When design fiction becomes the advert(?) Amazon Go and the refiguring of trust

I think I’ve been late to this. I saw the story about Barclaycard wanting to do “cardless” credit cards but, of course, Amazon want to vertically integrate. See the first video below. Interesting that this is incredibly similar to previous ‘envisionings’ of “the future” of retail/shopping. The first thing I thought was: ‘hang on, this is  Microsoft circa 2004’, see the second video below… and I’m sure there’s been others, not least from the likes of HP Labs… I wonder where patents lie on this stuff, cos that will be a big bargaining chip.

This is interesting though insofar as, when I was writing about the Microsoft Office Labs videos in 2008/9, the ‘future’ they figured was always positioned at some distance, it was certainly not explicitly stated that this is something you should definitely expect to happen, more a kind of ‘mood music’ to capture some sensibilities of a possible future, by representing it and hooking ideas into our general  imagination of technology and society. It certainly plays on the trope of the normalisation of heavy surveillance… what else can such a system be?

The Amazon Go video is an interesting confluence of lots of contemporary trends in attempts to refigure how we imagine digital technology. Implicit in the video is a normalisation of yet-more automation (of payment, of trust). Explicit here, as already mentioned, is that these kinds of places are not ‘private’ in any way – the system “knows” you, will know your habits, manages your money and that’s ok, in fact – it’s apparently preferable (trust, again).

Amazon seem to be fairly aggressively pushing this, taking the smooth apparently effortless aesthetics of many tech design fiction videos and using this as a means to capture the idea that such technology = Amazon. Apparently there is a “beta” shop in Seattle (where else?). No doubt someone will already be writing a journal article about this as code/space and, of course it is (and just as Kitchin & Dodge suggest about airports – I wouldn’t want to be in this shop when the servers go down), but I think the thing I find more interesting is that it seems to me that this is perhaps an overtly political manoeuvre to capture the public story about what ‘currency’ is and how payment works when we take for granted higher levels of automation, through what kinds of institution and who we can trust. This is quite a different story to the blockchain, Amazon seem to be saying “let us handle the trust issue” – a pitch usually made by a bank, or PayPal…  That might be interesting to think about (I’m sure people, like Rachel O’Dwyer, already are), not least in relation to other ways ‘trust’ is being addressed (and attempts are being made to refigure it) by other companies, institutions and groups.

All this means I’ll definitely be re-writing my lecture about money for the next iteration of my “Geographies of Technology” module next term…