In his arms he has a pile of galleys; he sets them down gently, as if the slightest jolt could upset the order of the printed letters. “A publishing house is a fragile organism, dear sir,” he says, “If at any point something goes askew, then the disorder spread, chaos opens beneath our feet. Forgive me, won’t you? When I think about it I have an attack of vertigo.” And he covers his eyes, as if pursued by the sight of billions of pages, lines, words, whirling in a dust storm.’

- Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler, 1981 [1979], pp. 97-98

photo credit: anyjazz65

In the context of the dissertation, I’ve been thinking a fair bit about textual cyborgs, the speculative field of reader-book interaction, and how this could relate to Tim’s excellent post on cyborg infrastructure. Here, the above quote from Calvino definitely resonates, but I’m still not sure what it all means …

“Listening to deathly voices in the dark, from Quixote’s moment on the hillside onwards, technologics has suggested, to those who want to listen to its broadcasts, a new, dynamic way of understanding literature – that is, of understanding what it is to write, who (or what) writes, and how to read it. Where the liberal-humanist sensibility has always held the literary work to be a form of self-expression, a meticulous sculpting of the thoughts and feelings of an isolated individual who has mastered his or her poetic craft, a technologically savvy sensibility might see it completely differently: as a set of transmissions, filtered through subjects whom technology and the live word have ruptured, broken open, made receptive. I know which side I’m on: the more books I write, the more convinced I become that what we encounter in a novel is not selves, but networks; that what we hear in poems is (to use the language of communications technology) not signal but noise. The German poet Rilke had a word for it: Geräusch, the crackle of the universe, angels dancing in the static.”

- Tom McCarthy, ‘Technology and the Novel, From Blake to Ballard’, The Guardian

1. Clip from Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence – a brilliant film, directed by Mamoru Oshii:

The female forensic specialist is named for Donna Haraway, which segues nicely into the second clip.

2. Video montage (mash-up) inspired by Haraway’s landmark feminist essay, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto‘. Created by YouTube user artlessartist, this includes some really nice footage, particularly that of the different examples of cyborg and robot:

3. Music video for Björk’s ‘All Is Full of Love’ – directed by Chris Cunningham:

Supposedly, Cunningham was the inspiration for an minor character in Pattern Recognition (2003) – the (absent) owner of the flat Gibson’s protagonist is house-sitting:

‘Partially disassembled robots are propped against one wall, two of them, torsos and heads, like elfin, decidedly female crash-test dummies. These are effects units from one of Damien’s videos, and she wonders, given her mood, why she finds them so comforting. Probably because they are genuinely beautiful, she decides. Optimistic expressions of the feminine. No sci-fi kitsch for Damien. Dreamlike things in the dawn halflight, their small breasts gleaming, white plastic shining faint as old marble. Personally fetishistic, though; she knows he’d had them molded from a body cast of his last girlfriend, minus two.’

- William Gibson, 2003: p. 5

4. Clip from No Maps for These Territories (2000), with Gibson talking about technology:

CABINETS OF CURIOSITY. Taxidermy. The weird, the grotesque, the freakish. Marginalia. Taxonomies of the unorganisable. Sensawunda. Organised properly, maybe even some kind of mathematical sublime, through the sheer volume of heterogeneous artefacts? The entire world in a single collection.

Museum Wormianum; seu, Historia rerum rariorum, tam naturalium, quam artificialium, tam domesticarum, quam exoticarum . . . (1655)

Some of my own photos, from a trip to the Horniman Museum, South London:

There are some wonderful examples of Wunderkammern in London and southeast England. The Booth Museum of Natural History (mostly stuffed birds; Brighton), the Wellcome Collection (rational technoscience meets Victorian fetishism), and the Sir John Soane’s Museum (which I’ve yet to visit, and has half of Charles Babbage’s brain). Even my hometown has got in on the act, with its own explicit, self-described ‘Corridor of Curiosities’.

Oh, and the BBC has a radio show - ‘The Museum of Curiosity’, which develops the concept in a more … abstract manner, as various celebrity and polymathic guests donate their own curiosities and entities to the fictional museum of the title. Highly recommended.

If Pescovitz is right on the whole Maker Faire, DIY, edupunk, citizen science thing – and I really hope he is, there could be lessons here for education and the public understanding of science. Certainly, at the Horniman earlier today, I ended up talking to my friends about the domestication of dogs, geological time, and hybridity in religion (and, admittedly, how it would have been impossible to domesticate the auroch simply by shipping multiple specimens to Madrid). As long as you are with people, the artefacts are reframed as social objects – as much, if not more, than items from history (all in italics).

Hmm. Here, I’m reminded of:

• Captain Hammersley’s article on biohacking, from August 2009.
• Design fiction infiltrating the Science Museum.
• A friend of mine who’s planning to attend a 3D printing workshop in Tel Aviv at the end of next month, under the auspices of the Architectural Association.
• My promise to Catt that we’d compare notes while attempting to engineer (assemble) our own theremins, as a project for the autumn.
• TV Commons – a speculative art/design installation I worked on with a couple of other Goldsmiths students, and that we exhibited at a warehouse in Hoxton earlier this month (more on this to come later … probably).
• Super-Empowered Individuals, Hopeful and otherwise.

So, if the future of the Wunderkammer is a world of kite photography and DIYbio – and it certainly looks as if my future might be, it could be pretty great.

Important questions: How can we create Wunder-communities? Wunder-collaboration? How can we stop other people from touching your walrus (heh), and do we even want/need to?

(hat-tip to Klint Finley, over at Technoccult)

Jacob Vaark being the (absent?) protagonist of Toni Morrison’s 2007 novel, A Mercy.

For your enlightment and deliction: a decidedly odd essay on something I decided to ‘the haunted domestic’ in American fiction post-2000. Mostly concentrating on the Morrison , but also drawing on the excellent Lunar Park (soon to be a film) and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man. Probably the best course that I’ve taken during my time at Goldsmiths – helped, no doubt, by a tiny class size and excellent teaching from Dr Rick Crownshaw. Bears almost literally no relevance to the rest of my Masters degree, but does mesh rather nicely with my undergrad dissertation.

Also recommended is this NPR interview with Toni Morrison, which sheds a great deal of light on some of the novel’s subtleties:

Dating back to November 2009, this talk by Stuart Candy resonates at an incredibly similar frequency to where my head is right now. Highly recommended.

So, not only am I attempting an essay that links Stuart’s examples of experiential futuring, the wunderkammer, and public sociology, but I’m also in the early stages of some kind of design fiction slash media futures thing with two other MA students from Goldsmiths – and it’s probably the most fired up I’ve been since the end of Superstruct. For more on both project and essay, watch this space.

photo credit: irina slutsky

photo credit: jfpickard

Notes, as ever, under the cut.

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Digital Media – Critical Perspectives, Part 1

The Uses and Meanings of ‘Technological Objects’, a guest lecture by Prof. David Morley. If the two ‘pure’ approaches to digital media are (1) technological determinism and (2) cultural constructivism, Morley was all about the constructivism.

Unfortunately, this equating to a two-hour session of him tilting at illusory windmills, for – however determinist we may appear – ‘pure’ technological determinism died with McLuhan. Equally, ‘pure’ constructivism can no longer be held as a tenable position, as it tends to radically underemphasise the novelty of new media’s technical affordances.

Technological objects as symbolic, as well as functional (Silverstone). Barthes’ notion of ‘the superlative object of [its] time” – car, washing machine, mobile phone, USB memory stick. A specific artefact which becomes metonymic of technology as a whole (see: Anth & Representation, Wk 3: marked vs. unmarked terms). The technocultural transubstantiation of consumer appliances, fuelled by ubiquity. It’s why this works:

Audience studies? Morley’s accusation is that much of new technology studies operates with old models of media effects. It’s important to recognise that people use media in different ways; audiences bring their own cultural baggage to the … home entertainment centre.

No television? “So what does your furniture point at?” (Friends)

Take the mobile phone. The single most frequently lost item on the London Underground. And that’s a place with no mobile connectivity. What are people doing, without connectivity, that means they can leave their phone on the tube? Seriously. Mobile as security blanket, as social barrier, as portable private space, as identity vector, as St. Christopher Medallion …

So, the important question: how much determinacy do you want to give the object? How much agency can you cede? Think of our discussion of virtuality and cybernetics in the Cold War, and the abstraction of human responsibility (see Digital Media #5). What is technology, even? Language, sanitation, cartography? I’m thinking Civilization II (1996), and the tech-tree:

Technology – neither good nor bad, but intensely political in its affordances and capabilities. Important discourse-clusters (memeplexes?) relating to novelty, upgrade, innovation, and hacking.

“I’m a PC, I’m a Mac” as symbolic warfare (see Anth & Rep #8). A semiotic tennis of campaigns and counter-campaigns:

Morley >> “It’s about the non-material meanings we attach to technology, as much as its capabilities and affordances.”

Us >> “Well, yes. We thought that was the point.”

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21st Century American Fiction

Two weeks worth of seminars, amalgamated into a four-hour LitFest. The novels: Edward P. Jones’ The Known World, and Philipp Meyer’s American Rust. Finding the former a work of baffling scale, and far too diffuse to absorb properly, my surrender followed with relative speed. On the Meyer, however, I was doing my presentation …

Presentation notes, as a .pdf:

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Anthropology & Representation

A time-shifted seminar, with footage of a lecture from the reading week shown in the room where it was initially filmed – a phenomenon both recursive and faintly unsettling.

Economic anthropology. Gifts. Colonialism as an economic exercise. Debt as a moral excuse. The infinite desire of the conquistador. Economics as justice, as “common sense”. Communism – not as totality, but economic mode within capitalism (open source software vs. Apple / Microsoft). The breakdown of market economics in times of natural disaster, or when the cost is sufficiently low (asking for a light, for directions, for the time). Societies in which you cannot eat your own pigs, but must eat the pigs of your neighbour – permanent artificial dependencies. Contrast with: commercial exchange as a relationship that cancels itself.

The man in action. Well, not “the man”, but this man. We are all already communists (reconsidered). Yes:

The reciprocal act of taking-out-for-dinner only works when the two parties are assumed to be equal. Questions of hierarchical debt, or precedent. A continuum between theft and charity, with neither extreme implying an ongoing relationship.

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Digital Media – Critical Perspectives, Part 2

Technoscience, and how to do it!

Watch as new media slides peculiarly into science & technology studies, with a convergence/remediation of information, communication, and … biotechnology. Wait, what?

Evolutionary psychology, artificial life, genomics >> hegemonic discourses, based on information, and much more conservative than they initially appear.

Media about science, questions of content & form. We’re talking embodiment, affective computing, intelligent media. It’s all made of the same stuff – the same technobabble, the same framings. The so-called ‘science wars‘ have broken down, giving way to wetware, synthetic biology (see: ‘At home with the DNA hackers‘), and the rapid proliferation of biologic metaphors pretty much everywhere.

Hmm.

photo credit: shareski

We’re left with McLuhan as revenant. Scrapping the determinism in his work, Kember reckons we may yet need his physicalism and notions of embodiment. In 2010, let us talk of media not as agent, but prosthesis.

END OF {AUTUMN TERM}

PLEASE REBOOT

“What new species of books, then, have proved themselves fit to survive in the attentional ecosystem of the aughts? What kind of novel, if any, can appeal to readers who read with 34 nested browser tabs open simultaneously on their frontal lobes? And, for that matter, what kind of novel gets written by novelists who spend increasing chunks of their own time reading words off screens?”

- Sam Anderson, ‘When Lit Blew into Bits’, New York Magazine

In the Ninth Week (23/11 – 27/11), I ventured out into London, with events at the RSA and Hackney’s SPACE. As the week drew to a close, attempts to pull myself back into some kind of life structure & emotion balance were destabilised by a (as it turned out, relatively minor) health issue … which I dramatically overanalysed, sending my mind spiralling inwards … leading to my abandonment of Friday’s classes in favour of a flight back to rural Sussex & the solace of family.

From before then, though, a photo of the most enjoyable part of the week – the epic quest to Hackney for Usman Haque & Adam Greenfield (on which, more below), and the surreal return via Canary Wharf. It’s always good to get out of New Cross, and check out different bits of London – keeps me sane!

photo credit: jfpickard

This week’s notes follow, under the cut.

Digital Media – Critical Perspectives

Lev Manovich argues that the cinema has profoundly influenced the development of the computer (the notion of the frame, the narrative as loop, editing and montage).

- Goldsmiths Course Syllabus

But, according to pretty much everyone else in the field, he’s wrong. Poor chap.

photo credit: Anne Helmond

Steering away from the relatively clear and concise definitions of new media in Lister et. al., Manovich argues that there are five characteristics that constitute new media –> [numerical representation / automation / transcoding / variability / modularity].

As a heuristic, we might be able to retrieve something of value … but as a definition, Manovich somehow manages to be obtuse, vague and unnecessarily technicist. This is echoed in his piece on ‘The New Language of Cinema’, in which he reduces the new digital cinema (?) to six areas, which distinguish it from its analogue predecessors –> [simulation / the loop / montage / information space / cinema as a code / narrative].

But this move of ‘rendering innocent’ (Haraway) the analogue is more a rhetorical tactic than anything substantive. It overemphasises the purely indexical, representative qualities of old media – diverting attention from historical manifestations of the experimental and avant-garde. Take Man With a Movie Camera (1929), which pursues indexicality within the form of the montage (database?):

Seduced by the logic of the computer, Manovich heralds novelty wherever he sees it – reducing media to its technical properties, he suggests that technological convergence (c.f. Week 4) is not only real, but a fait accompli.

For us, the reality is a question of hybridity, remediation and exchange. Convergence is never a finished product, and its not enough to say that because computer and cinema now exist in a relationship of remediation, they are now necessarily the same thing. Rooted in apophenia, Manovich’s arguments are seductive but (for our purposes) far too simplistic.

Slavoj Žižek @ the RSA

In a time of ever-increasing economic inequality, Žižek pointed to Venture Philanthropy and the Guaranteed Minimum Income as two reletavely novel approaches to the issue of charity, which – pitted against each other in some kind of … dialogue? contest? – he uses to illustrate many of the assumptions and biases which underlie our current moral/political/economic landscape.

21st Century American Fiction

Two novels, both supposed to shed light on the ways in which fiction of 2000s has dealt (is dealing?) with the darker moments of American history. The books: Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, and Sherman Alexie’s Flight. The former is a sober, relatively grim look at the earliest days of American colonialism, telling the story of a Dutch man (Jason Vaark) who accidentally drifts into the slave trade, primarily from the perspective of the women of his household (wife, slaves, etc.). The latter is the Native American equivalent of something somewhere between Audrey Niffinger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife and Quantum Leap.

Both were well written and had their (powerful, affective) moments. That said, the Alexie did – at times – slide toward the facile and the  emotionally manipulative, while much of the Morrison relied on the reader’s willingness to immerse themselves in the world and cosmology of a specific place and time far removed from contemporary experience.

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((There’s a separate piece to come on the Usman Haque & Adam Greenfield event, as my notes were sufficiently sprawling & meandering to deserve some serious post-Christmas analysis. Plus, I’ve just laid my hands on an Arduino starter kit & an RFID reader. Watch this space))