“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:

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.

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“Nobody has a job. Everybody has a set of contracts. Some keep you in the same place for eight hours with the same coworkers five days a week, but it isn’t a job. A job requires benefits. A job requires taxes be paid by an employer. As a subcontracting entity you’re paid to pay your own taxes, to waive your own minimum wage requirements, your own working time directives. You are management. You don’t rent, you pay fractional reserve interest on a 99-year heritable lease entity that sublets your front room as storage space to a distributed shop. Every Saturday you pack boxes in your hall to tell other people how they can make a fortune out of the new economic climate by packing boxes in their hall. There are more guns in the world than there are people who can read properly. You ride a bus to the building that is your ‘office’. It used to be a hotel, when people could afford to go to other countries that weren’t over the road. You need a passport stamp to visit your mother. You don’t need a passport stamp to visit your father. You have six identity cards. You broke your leg in school and as a result can’t join a library. If there was still a library open near you you couldn’t even go in it. Instead you just can’t login.

Every morning when you get onto the number 27 you sit in the window and watch the UAVs circle over the shanty town in the park. You have extensive scarring on your left shoulder where the man next to you was extrajudicially assassinated when you used to get the number 26. Your ex-boyfriend left a camera in your shower, and you only found out when his ex sued for a share of the earnings, naming you as a witness. Your best friend Jane and you have a tradition. Every new year you buy another lock for her front door, fit it beside the others, then drink vodka until you vomit blood. You fight, and don’t talk again until christmas …”

- erithromycin, ‘Re: Cyberpunk in 2008‘, RPG.net, 28/06/2008

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

“Paying attention to the last ten years means we need to realize that nonproprietary, distributed production is not the poor relation of traditional proprietary, hierarchically organized production. This is no hippy lovefest. It is the business method on which IBM has staked billions of dollars; the method of cultural production that generates much of the information each of us uses every day. It is just as deserving of respect and the solicitude of policy makers as the more familiar methods pursued by the film studios and proprietary software companies. Losses due to sharing that failed because of artificially erected legal barriers are every bit as real as losses that come about because of illicit copying. Yet our attention goes entirely to the latter.”

- Prof. James Boyle, The Public Domain

(via @mathpunk)

Gobbledegook or genius? There are some minor spelling and referencing issues, sure, and – in her comments – my course tutor suggested that the writings of biologist/cyborg feminist Donna Haraway might have filled the gaps in my argument. Since submitting, I’ve devoured a book-length interview with the woman, and got my hands of a copy of When Species Meet (2008) as part of the Christmas loot, which is high on my dead-tree reading list for 2010.

In the meantime, any comments or questions?

“The 1946 Macy Conference is kind an aleph moment. In attendance were people intrinsically involved in computers and prosthesis (the collaboration of man and machine), modern anthropology and modern neuroscience (what it means to be human), game theory (the Cold War and the conversion of people into cogs). We can trace direct paths through counterculture and social organisation, decentralisation and the Web, and to a socialist Chilean internet. There are connections to cults, advertising, social software and games, rocketry, suburbia, complexity theory and ecology. Historical roots lie in golems and pneumatic tubes, science fiction and weaving, pataphysics and the telegraph. The language of our information society was created, often knowingly, by these people. Cybernetics is the beautiful and ugly and ambiguous heart of our information society.”

- Matt Webb, ‘Cybernetics: Researcher Wanted‘ (BERG)

“… I walked off stage and immediately went to Brady and asked what on earth was happening. And he gave me a brief rundown. The Twitter stream was initially upset that I was talking too fast. My first response to this was: OMG, seriously? That was it? Cuz that’s not how I read the situation on stage. So rather than getting through to me that I should slow down, I was hearing the audience as saying that I sucked. And responding the exact opposite way the audience wanted me to. This pushed the audience to actually start critiquing me in the way that I was imagining it was …”

An interesting discussion of the way an audience can rapidly become a mob, in all it’s pitchfork-waving, windmill-burning glory – full kudos to danah for being so open and honest about the whole thing. There’s also something interesting (and faintly disturbing) about the journalistic/political side of this.

See: Trafigura & Carter-Ruck, Stephen Fry.

And then there’s this from Chairman Bruce, in conversation with Dunne & Raby (and courtesy of of Icon 078) :

“If you were a science fiction writer and you were reading, say, Scientific American you would have at least an 18-month lead over the general population in which you could write a story about something in a laboratory and it would appear in a pulp magazine and people would read it and they’d be surprised by it because they’d never heard of it. That is not possible [any more], the sluggishness that allowed that particular set of reactions is just not there. I mean now if I blog something that’s going on in somebody’s lab I’m going to get an email from the guy: “Ah, Mr Sterling, thank you for putting my photon experiment on wired.com, would you like to meet my photon friends? I see you’re in London today, how about dropping by the pub.” This is a small foretaste of the kind of trouble we’re getting into.”

At this point, some appropriate footage from the BBC Digital Revolution rushes, from (the newly en-PhDed) Aleks Krotoski‘s ‘virtual communities’ interview with Howard Rheingold:

I’m (always) on Twitter, and – as a medium – it’s made my experience of the world a lot ‘thinner’, for want of a better word. It’s given me partial access to lots of people and areas of interest that would have otherwise remained strictly off-limits. This might be because I got in early, at the point where a relatively small, tech-literate user base were more willing to engage with strangers, and the ‘thinness’ phenomena is something I’ve also experienced (though to a far lesser extent) with other media and social networks – bulletin boards, newsgroups, email, Facebook.

But is Twitter a Rheingoldian (?) ‘virtual community‘ in the same way as something like the WELL or a World of Warcraft guild? I’m not really sure – the affordances of the technology seem to favour the individual at the expense of any kind of inchoate collective. It’s lots of relationships happening simultaneously in the same space, but there’s no real distinct group identity. Here, a logic of radical individualism combines with a sense of transience to encourage behaviours that – as with the boyd case – simply wouldn’t wash elsewhere. There’s an acceleration of discourse; a qualitative, structural change which Sterling sees as a major challenge to science fiction authors attempting to evoke a sense of wonder from an audience of readers who will have read the same things, and may even be able to reverse-engineer the initial ingredients from the final published work. And that’s after the writing (authoring?) process is complete!

See: Node Magazine, a hypertext annotation of William Gibson’s 2007 novel Spook Country.

As a Twitter user, it’s easy to feel abstracted from your words: words which either fade to dust or take on a life of their own, re-tweeted by others. A slip of the tongue, an impulsive comment, and – like Fry – you find yourself as the prisoner of your own (digitised) tongue.

“My focus is on habits, practices and opportunities, not a limited set of concerns or visceral reactions to our changing world. ‘I dwell in possibility’, not a mere assessment of digital spaces’ less perfect or less savoury aspects. I will leave that to others more concerned than I. Change is not disconcerting to me. People do some messed up things when cloaked in anonymity. We will live.”

- Lisa Galarneau, ‘I dwell in possibility’

A spirited defense of techno-optimism, from digital anthropologist (?) Lisa Galarneau.