Roughly simultaneously, I’ve also been working with post-disciplinary design company Superflux; levering my newfound knowledge of cyborg anthropology to help with a project about (dis)ability and the post/transhuman sensorium. Here’s their enigma-drenched summary:

‘Between that, we are prototyping a series of ideas for our new Lab project titled ‘Song of the Machine‘, a mind-boggling optogenetics/neuroscience project in partnership Dr. Patrick Degenaar, Newcastle University and Dr. Anders Sandberg. This is a long-term project with different design aspects. But for now, our first short piece (to be done in less then 4 weeks!) is commissioned by the Science Gallery, Dublin, for their upcoming exhibition HUMAN+ The Future of our Species. Super exciting!’

It is, at that; and includes a trip to Ireland in mid-April – the perfect opportunity to collect some more material for a personal project on collapsonomics and European electoral politics.

In the meantime, some reading …

By me; hosted elsewhere:

• How should I design a trans-continental leisurely road-trip to maximize “literary potential”? [Quora; the seeds of what I'm tentatively naming 'Operation Cascadia']

• What was it like to take part in Superstruct? [Quora]

• Counterfactual Confessional [Storify]

• Life Map, version 0.1 [Flickr]

• ‘A critical analysis of Southland Tales (2007) in terms of its cognitive mapping of contemporary capitalist society’ [Scribd]

By other people:

• “It’s not a war, it’s a rescue mission” [m1k3y, grinding.be]

• Nuclear Counterinsurgency [Nick Mirzoeff, For the Right to Look]

• How Social Movements Happen (and part two) [Seb Paquet, Emergent Cities]

• Revolution from the Edge [John Hagel, Edge Perspectives]

• On Public Objects: Connected Things And Civic Responsibilities In The Networked City [Adam Greenfield, Cognitive Cities]

• Closing Keynote, IXDA 11 [Bruce Sterling]

• The Future is Here Today, and it’s Superdense [Scott Smith, Changeist]

• New Europe: The life of a German family [Stuart Jefferies, The Guardian]

• On the Very Idea of a Super-Swarm [Dr David Roden, enemyindustry]

‘I wish you a hopeful Christmas
I wish you a brave New Year
All anguish pain and sadness
Leave your heart and let your road be clear’

– Greg Lake / Peter Sinfield / Prokofief, ‘I Believe in Father Christmas‘

So, that was 2010? Already? Hmm.

Right, so let’s see what we’ve got here … *dunks head in pensieve*

~ The feverish activity of the blue hours of deadline day. Adrenaline and nausea. Pillow-over-head; attempting to sleep through the hour of strained mechanical whirring as my ageing printer struggled with 50-odd pages of Masters thesis.

~ Listening through the warm haze of Sunday night pintage, as my Italian then-flatmate and her brother span exotic tales of the hot winds and intra-family surveillance of small-town Sicily.

~ The increasingly windswept ‘city’ of Akureyri, Iceland. Three Germans, a French national, and myself. Instant cross-European, generational communitas. One of the single most joyful evenings of my year.

~ Lost in a maze made of maize in the fields of Surrey, flanked by an endlessly tolerant Karen Hancock; our small flag held proudly aloft.

~ Feeling sheepish about my (considerable) height in an acupuncture consultation with a diminutive Vietnamese doctor in Golders Green. Left for a full half hour, legs hanging over the end of the table, desperately struggling to suppress the urge to flex my en-needled right foot.

~ Walking from the British Museum to Deptford in the early hours of a weekday morning, as the aftermath of a friend’s birthday. No maps, navigating solely by Canary Wharf and the first third of the Shard. Despite everything, wasn’t stabbed.

photo credit: jfpickard

~ The single greatest burger / jacket potato combination, cooked to perfection. Eaten from a moulded plastic container while sitting on a wall, on hipster safari with six Romanians in London’s Brick Lane.

~ Standing in the apocalyptic, ash-strewn foothills of Eyjafjallajökull; the volcano that — five months earlier — had stranded my father in West Africa.

photo credit: jfpickard

~ A 45 minute walk through the Ballardian periphery of Heathrow, having totally failed at navigating airport buses to the Radisson Edwardian for 2010′s Eastercon.

~ That one, ill-advised game of football on Goldsmiths’ college green. Trainers and brown cords for the first act of voluntary team sport in over five years. Under half an hour from first kick to the inevitable groin impact.

~ At the end of a pub gathering, spontaneously serenading a departing Sarah Dobbs with a synchronised chorus of impromptu, awesome, and totally unreplicable table-drumming. Hell, there may have been counter-rhythms.

~ Hitting Chat Roulette with Josh Fry in the blue hour aftermath of a moustache-themed party, armed with alcohol and an acoustic guitar. Advising Californian teens on their romantic issues, then showing a Chilean dentistry student our teeth. Surprisingly low penis-to-human ratio. Again with the communitas.

photo credit: jfpickard

~ Crashing Goldsmiths’ Cultural Studies end-of-term party, where US taqwacore band The Kominas played to an audience of maybe twenty-five; mostly drunk academics.

~ The patio of a gîte in France’s Vendée region, a cool July evening. Sitting in the eerily calm eye of a massive storm, alongside my father, gigantic banks of angry blue-black clouds bearing down from all directions. Twilight sky the colour of a bruise; lightning crackling on the horizon, as we scratched the head of an increasingly deranged local cat.

photo credit: jfpickard

~ Cait McFarland‘s ‘shark museum’ anecdote, delivered deadpan from the luggage-strewn bed of a Reykjavik youth hostel.

~ Finally finding that excuse to write an academic essay on Richard Kelly’s cult classic Southland Tales (2007).

~ Two awesome TV dramas; both American, both cancelled after one season: Terriers (FX) and Rubicon (AMC). Highly recommended.

~ Four books, read in quick succession as part of my return to reading-for-pleasure in the immediate aftermath of my MA. Unexpectedly complementary, providing four different cardinal directions for the compass of twenty-first century speculative fiction, they were:

• The Dervish House, Ian MacDonald. A tale of nanotechnology against the backdrop of a Europeanised/ing Turkey. For me, intricate plotting and his deployment of an ensemble cast elevated this far above his previous offering, Brasyl, while invoking memories of my own trip to Istanbul in the summer of 2007. Great eye for detail, even if it occasionally skirted the dubious territories of hokum-meister Dan Brown.

• Zero History, William Gibson. A work of linguistic precision and unparalleled poise. Having reread the two preceding books for my MA thesis, this was one of my most pleasurable reads of the year. Almost uncanny levels of personal pay-off for the inclusion of familiar London locations, and his decision to conclude the narrative in Iceland, where I myself chewed through the final chapters; tucked under a duvet in that Reykjavik youth hostel, as part of my campaign of guerilla warfare waged against unexpected (and probably unwarranted) jet-lag.

• Finch, Jeff VanderMeer. Alternate world fantasy as prog rock concept album, with mushrooms. At times baroque, sublime, and bitingly political, it struck me as an excellent companion to China Mieville’s The City & the City (2009), with that same sense of the almost-plausibly surreal. A really strange hybrid which shouldn’t have worked, it somehow pulled together into a cohesive whole. On reflection, I think I preferred the black humour and epistolary textures of its predecessor, Shriek: An Afterword (2006), but there was a whole lot to like here.

• Super Sad True Love Story, Gary Shyteyngart. This book made me physically nauseous, in a way that I struggle to explain. Though messy and uneven, it transcended the details and specifics of its (many) flaws. Like the best science fiction, it wasn’t intended as prediction, but rather a commentary of the present state of the writer’s world; in this case, an America in post-imperial decline. By turn darkly comic and deeply sad, it had this unsettling quality — whether in its detailing of a post-literate society, or the specifics of social networking or US politics — that while the world he was detailing was obviously a satire; a piss-take or parody, it nevertheless rhymed with my own world. Tragic and discomfiting, it felt all-too-familiar. For me, this book induced some deep, gut-level future shock.  If the Gibson was comfort food, this was some kind of violent ambush or mugging. High praise? I’m still not sure.

~ Didn’t see many films this year, but there were three that really stuck with me: Monsters (Gareth Edwards, UK), Skeletons (Nick Whitfield, UK), and The Social Network (David Fincher, US).

An eventful year, then, if not the most evenly spread. And what of 2011? I start the year in the shadow(s) of fifty cyborgs; musing on the future of education, of statecraft, of the firm; and with 20,000 words of the first draft of a full-length bookthing. Very much work-in-progress, but already a hell of a lot better than the sum of my extant writing. Occasional flashes of something readable. Just. got. to. keep. chipping. away. Which is, of course, far harder than it looks.

Meanwhile, interesting noises emanate from the Superflux shed, as Anab and Jon prepare to kick their activities up to eleven. There are pints owed to people whom I intended to catch before the spreading fungus of Yuletide burnout, and a graduation ceremony sketched in for mid-January (cue absurd snowfall). There may well be travel and adventure.

That’s the plan, anyway. Watch this space.

photo credit: jfpickard

Took this shot while walking a chunk of the Downs Link. Welcome to Southwater’s Lintot Square, part of my old stomping ground, and a definite non-place. Behold, the spooky semiotics of the ‘New Ruins of Great Britain‘; a final, desperate bulwark against the total evacuation of local history:

‘Some 153 years ago the world was awestruck as images of a concrete Iguanodon, designed by Hawkins, appeared in the Illustrated London News. Remarkably both events are linked, for the celebrated Crystal Palace Iguanodon was based on fossils found in Horsham in 1840, whilst the new bronze Iguanodon is based on fossils found in Southwater, a village 2 miles from Horsham, in the 1920s. (…)

The Crystal Palace Iguanodon became the icon of the Victorian era, inspiring New York to create its own prehistoric theme park. The solid concrete monster attracted visitors across the globe as it stood proudly on its man made island. Following on from its discovery in the 1920’s the Sussex and Dorking Brick Company used the Southwater Iguanodon as its logo. With the demise of that company the image disappeared from public consciousness, just as Crystal Palace did after the fire in the 1930’s. Now, thanks to Miller Construction (UK) Ltd. and Horsham District Council, the Iguanodon can become the icon for the new Southwater of the 21st century, an icon not made of concrete but bronze.’

– Horsham District Council, ‘A Tale of Two Iguanodons‘, October 2006.

*

The Iceland Notes, or What I Did On My Holidays

(Part One of Several)

*

So, you say you want to understand the emerging contours of the twenty-first century? Look to Iceland.

Fingers on keyboard. It’s 11.20 on a Saturday in mid-September, and there’s a small beer on the table – sitting unobtrusively to the right of my Chinese-made, grease-caked Lenovo ThinkPad. I don’t remember buying it. The beer that is; not the laptop.

Tomorrow afternoon, I take a bus to Keflavik and, from there, fly back to the United Kingdom in a half-empty plane, held together by insulation tape and Icelandic bloody-mindedness. The United Kingdom: a polity which, in a strange echo of the Holy Roman Empire, is anything but. The United Kingdom: a body politic with its collective breath held in anticipation of a socio-economic buggering – delivered enthusiastically by a coalition government of an entirely novel and interesting shade of malevolence.

Muted by my body’s desperate attempts to metabolise last night’s tidal swell of Viking beer, this nevertheless stands as a partial, halting answer to the eternal question; usually delivered with a near-imperceptible tilt of the head – ‘So, what are you doing in Iceland?‘

I take a quick swig of the beer. Though not overtly horrible, drinking-before-lunch and drinking-to-stave-off-a-hangover align in a way that floods my spine and stomach with a powerful sense of foreboding.

So, what am I doing in Iceland?

Ultimately, it all comes down to TINA – that lynch-pin of the Thatcher-Reaganite consensus and, later, of neoliberal globalisation: ‘There is no alternative.‘ My hypothesis: Iceland offers an alternative: albeit muted, partial, and – for the most part – virtual. But however much it is limited by the shrink-wrap legalese of Iceland’s IMF loans, there’s definitely something going on. Others have tasted it on the air; finding themselves lured as if by a siren to this volcanic outpost populated by knitwear hipsters, trolls, and abnormally small horses (not ponies). Though they would surely deny it, these exiles are the collapsitarians, and, for now, this is their Big Rock Candy Mountain.

However hungover I am currently, there’s a woman to my left who is surely an order of magnitude more so. She stirs beneath her jacket, shuddering slightly. I take a second mouthful of beer as a gesture toward focus.

Failure.

Bear with me; I’ll return to you later.

*

photo credit: jfpickard

*

Time passes and the hangover fades. I’m now at Keflavik – Europe’s most beautiful airport – a full 30 minutes before my flight departs. I’ve stocked up on natural bath products, Nordic t-shirts, and dried fish. Starting to sense that this trip might be what games researcher Jane McGonigal refers to as an ‘experience grenade‘: the fuse is lit, and I’m working through ideas, keeping them circulating until the explosion.

*

Since that last asterisk, two weeks have passed. I’ve been back in the UK for roughly the same length of time as I spent in Iceland. 1% of Iceland is forested, as a result of the early settlers’ total ignorance of then-far-future institutional economist Elinor Ostrom. Upon my return, I’m suddenly conscious of the UK’s arboral plenitude.

*

Observation: the Mayor of Reykjavik is a self-described ‘anarcho-surrealist’. Give that a moment to sink in. Now, read it out loud: ‘The Mayor of Reykjavik is an anarcho-surrealist.’ Mayor. Anarchist. Surrealist.

This is he:

photo credit: jfpickard

However you look at it, the 2010 Reykjavik City Council election was strange. Protest vote in the wake of scandal and widespread political apathy? Or part of something more significant? The jury is still out.

*

Iceland may be broke, but it has bucketloads of symbolic capital. At the level of public discourse, we have a strange convergence of #collapsonomics, futurity, and the natural sublime. Everyone speaks English. The outpouring of art/music/film is totally disproportionate to the size of its population. Check out the country’s social media campaign. Simple, straightforward, but extremely effective – inspiring near-fanatical outpourings from Iceland enthusiasts near and far. Collating holiday photos and diaries as social objects, it gives the contributors an affective link to the place.

On the futurity front, Iceland feels like the 2010s. Somewhere along the line, the country became a byword for creative destruction. After the storm, let a thousand flowers bloom. Is your crazy scheme incapable of gaining traction elsewhere? Try Iceland!

See also – debates on energy independence and the ownership of natural resources, biodiesel pumps at the petrol station, international newspapers printed on-demand:

photo credit: jfpickard

Charging stations for electric cars:

photo credit: jfpickard

Having read a genuinely remarkable magazine feature on UK electric car start-up Riversimple on the flight out – written by Chris Finnamore (one of the people I dogsbodied for as part of my Jan 2009 internship with Wired UK), and with a slightly dodgy reproduction available through the company’s website – it was strange to see that Iceland is already there. Again, where Riversimple will, to begin with, be limited in its operations by the accessibility of charging infrastructure, Iceland’s comparatively small size (with one ‘proper’ national road) plays to its advantage. Low cultural inertia; (comparatively) low capital outlay; low barriers to entry.

*

More to follow – including: Icelandic property law, citizens conventions, hackerspaces, anarchists, WikiLeaks, angry protests, life expectancy, paranoia, alcohol, global warming, and geothermal energy. Watch this space.

]]> http://justinpickard.net/2010/10/the-iceland-notes/feed/ 2 http://justinpickard.net/2010/01/goldsmiths-autumns-final-fortnight/ http://justinpickard.net/2010/01/goldsmiths-autumns-final-fortnight/#comments Sun, 10 Jan 2010 03:08:38 +0000 Justin http://justinpickard.net/?p=2187 Really need to get this post finished before heading back up to London for the ice-encrusted start of Spring Term. So, here’s a compressed summary of Weeks Eleven (30/11 – 4/12) and Twelve (7/12 – 11/12).

photo credit: jfpickard

Notes, as ever, under the cut.

*

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.”

*

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:

*

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.

*

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

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.

*

((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))

This week, one of my friends from undergrad was down in London. She’s studying for a PhD on the mating behaviour of massive scary ants, and was learning how to radio-tag insects as a guest of ZSL. Having been woken by the fire alarm test an hour after the start of my Wednesday morning American Lit seminar, I needed exciting animals and zoological facts to cheer me up – so legged it across town to meet her at London Zoo. Hence the photo, which is sufficiently odd to stand as an illustration of Week 8:

photo credit: jfpickard

Course notes follow, below the cut.

Digital Media – Critical Perspectives

Photography, digital and otherwise. Working from the introductory essay in Lister’s The Photographic Image in Digital Culture (1995), we zoomed in on the celebratory discourses of digital photography … in which the change from analogue to digital is posited as ‘startling’, ‘powerful’ and ‘epochal’ … a paradigm shift.

Here, it’s all too easy to read the digital image as an unprecedented fusion of the imagined and the real, but really there’s nothing particularly new about all this. Yes, we’ve shifted our attention from the camera-as-prosthetic eye to ‘the small grey, plastic box of the personal computer’ (p. 3) and we might be living under Sontag’s image-based economy. But this is all linguistic/discursive!

Digital photography is still photography; part of an 150-year old photographic culture. Lister comments on the way in which digital photography has become entangled with ‘a heady mixture of millenarian futurology, the visionary excesses of postmodern thought, and of utopian premise and cultural pessimism.’ (p. 5) Supposedly ‘traditional’ (analogue) photographic images are cast as indexical; slavish (subordinate) mirrors/copies of the Real. With analogue edits, there’ll always be a trace or stain – some evidence of tampering with the indexicality of the image.

Semiotics: links between signifier and signified are arbitrary … culturally constructed! Notions of indexicality serve to naturalise the cultural connotations (meaning) of the photo; the illusion of immediacy can be used to conceal the tacit assumptions and ideology of the image. Historically, photography has held a powerful position as an evidential practice. Think of photographs in the legal, medical, and photojournalistic realms. John Tagg’s Burden of Representation (1993).

Barthes’ Camera Lucida (1980) talks about photography as an affective (emotional-physiological) medium. What does my body know of photography? Punctum (detail) – the emotive immediacy of a photographical detail. The power of something that resonates, or ‘leaps out at you’. Think of the girl in the red coat in Schindler’s List (1993).

Digital photography parcelled with postmodernism – a collapsed sense of temporality; an emergent schizophrenia. The spatio-temporal manipulations of the digital, of images that no longer function in relation to science … abstracted from light, film, chemistry – are we looking at the death of optics? Remediation! It’s not as if analogue photography has disappeared. Plus, digital photography is still informed by the legacies of the analogue – there continues to be a language, a grammar of (effective/good) photography.

Mechanical/optical media were a historical phase in visual media. Perhaps the analogue photograph was an anomaly; a ‘raw’ indexicality sandwiched between the oil painting and the photo-manipulation? Yet the metadata of digital photography stands as an extended (and more powerful) form of indexicality. From a Flickr photo, you can deduce the camera make, date taken, and (sometimes) even the geographical location: it’s all embedded in the image-as-data.

Peripheral to, but illustrative of, the shift from analogue –> digital, we have Foucauldian interpretations of  Jeremy Bentham’s notion of the panopticon. Photography & the lens, the gaze … as an instrument of power, of science, in criminology, medicine, psychiatry … a way of making truth claims (Gunning). Relationships between the observer and the object of scrutiny?

((ASIDE: In one of the Anth & Representation seminars, Graeber raised an interesting and … surprisingly local line of enquiry – springing from the fact that the earliest manifestation (inspiration?) of the panopticon concept was in the schemes of the philosopher’s brother, Sir Samuel Bentham, who’d commissioned the construction of a prototypical ‘Inspection House’ on Prince Potemkin’s estate in Russia. Later, Sir Samuel was also in charge of improvements made to the docks at Deptford in 1799 – a short walk from the current location of Goldsmiths College. There’s probably some kind of alternate history here, where a better-funded Bentham turns Deptford & Greenwich into a pre-steampunk, pseudo-totalitarian naval/mercantile super-panopticon … Say, that’d be pretty good fun to write about. Hold that thought!

Oh, and for another alternate history of panopticism, check out Tony Jones’ exemplary exercise in world-building; Cliveless World))

Following the shift to digital, Cascio’s notion of the participatory panopticon. When photos can be faked, the best measure of veracity is through plurality – if an Event (with-a-capital-E) occurs, there will be multiple photos, from the camera phones of participants and observers (participant observation?). Think Eyeborg …

… that photo from the London bombings, and – perhaps most strikingly – the human wall of camera screens at Obama’s inaugural Youth Ball …

image provenance hard to find, due to the crazy Sontagian circulation & reproduction of images – but I’m inclined to credit Reuters staff photographer Kevin Lamarque

21st Century American Fiction

Security, by Stephen Amidon. Not great literature, nor particularly original – but interesting, likeable and skillfuly written. From the Washington Post review -

“What a freak show,” a character in Stephen Amidon’s Security remarks of another’s unstable father after a humiliating scene. Although the speaker herself is detestable, an irredeemable villain, her comment lays bare the deepest fears of Amidon’s people: that their messy private lives will burst into public view. But because the author is a nimble satirist, we can count on such disruptions, as readers of his fine Human Capital already know.

On the surface, these characters aren’t remarkable or odd, and neither is the setting, the quiet Berkshire town of Stoneleigh, but the major players are in crisis: Edward Inman, proprietor of a home security firm, hasn’t slept in weeks and roams the night rather than share a bed with his wife, Meg. Kathryn, his old flame, is trying to reconnect with her college dropout son, Conor. And Walt Steckl, formerly a master electrician, takes painkillers and drinks to quiet his nerves, which were fried in a workplace accident.

(…)

Despite the improbable endgame and an over-reliance on types among his supporting cast — the preoccupied wife, the creepy snob, the sullen teen — the novel succeeds as an entertainment. It’s well-paced and always engaging, if occasionally broad. Thematically, like any good satire, it presents a cautionary tale and dares us to find ourselves in it, and because Amidon is such a fine writer, we do. As in Human Capital, he once again displays his unerring facility for sniffing out the shaky foundations of our lives, showing us what we will selfishly renounce — trust, intimacy, integrity, reality — to achieve what we believe is an impregnable security.

Taken alongside Ellis’ Lunar Park (see previous week), Amidon’s novel sheds light on a very specific current within 21st century American fiction – something related to the spatialities of suburbia, focusing in on the unstable and arbitrary foundations of our domesticity, and containing some (limited?) form of social critique. It’s probably too early to see quite how this’ll develop, but I think we can also see something similar in American TV dramas like Desperate Housewives, Weeds, and architectural competitions such as Reburbia. There’s an anxiety here; a precariousness which seems worthy of further investigation.

Anthropology & Representation

As far as I can make out, something to do with the phenomenology of giant puppets? Violence, myth, and narrative in the (alter-)globalisation movement. We’re talking Battle of Seattle, protests against the Iraq War, and – slightly more jovially – the Burning Man Festival and the Paperhand Puppet Intervention. The puppets really annoy the police, but why?

We need to think about the relationship between puppets and monuments. Questions of memory, identity and permanence/transience. Perhaps they stand as a pastiche or parody of the monumental; something to do with totems, fetishes and the carnivalesque; boundaries between the sacred and the profane; or the uncanny valley? How about conspiracy theories – puppets mirror the relations of power; it’s an appropriate deployment because we (they?) are the puppets? The processes of puppet-construction as an act of community-formation. A literal embodiment of the man-made-of-many-men of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan … the body politic.

Urban protests as a manifestation of symbolic (asymmetric) warfare. The media as a platform for a conflict of symbolic systems. Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967). The violence of representation? Denigration of enemies (of the state?) as ‘trust fund kids’. A Black Bloc ethics, rooted in concepts of value – where it’s verboten to attack family-owned stores, but the symbols of transnational capitalism (McDonalds, Starbucks) are fair game. Rules of engagement, different for the cops (do anything necessary to contain the chaos, but don’t kill people) and the protesters (violence against capital, against property … harm everything but people). Carl Schmitt & post-Westphalian, urban warfare.

Narrative frames lifted from Hollywood, mass media, fiction – protest as an orgy of destruction. Replicated in music festivals, public holidays, Guy Fawkes’ Night … as a sublimation of the carnivalesque into popular culture(s) of destruction.

photo credit: BellaBim

“… 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.

Week Six (2/11 – 6/11) was a reading week, so no timetabled classes. Instead, a bit of frolicking in London, a trip back to the Sussex countryside to see the parents, the peculiar voyeurism of watching novels being penned (keyboarded?) in real-time on Google Wave, and a concerted effort to finish the bulk of a diagnostic essay for my Digital Media course.

M&M at the Tate Modern, with Joseph Beuys‘ installation, (The Pack):

photo credit: jfpickard

Two thirds of an extremely left-field essay on Katherine Hayles‘ theories of virtuality, giving far too much detail in my case studies of (1) Nintendo’s Virtual Boy console and (2) Princeton’s experiments with mice and the Quake III engine:

The Seventh Week (9/11 – 13/11) sees me handing in said essay, and giving a presentation on the utility of Barthes and Foucault when considering hypertext, which is the subject of our workshop in …

Digital Media – Critical Perspectives

Memex; a 1940s thought-experiment in surrogate (prosthetic?) memory. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman as a meta-text (hypermediacy!) … a precursor to hypertext?

Structuralist theories of text:

author –> language –> meaning = coherent –> book

Poststructuralist theories of text, following Death of the Author? The author (god) is supplanted by the reader, with semiotics highlighting the rupture between language and its (deferred) meaning.

Language is not nomenclature, but a system of signifiers. Writing as technology (Derrida) … as performative of the text (Barthes) … as code.

21st Century American Fiction

Lunar Park, by Bret Easton Ellis – a brilliant book, which somehow combines Gothic horror and the self-indulgence of postmodernism. Here’s the blurb:

“Imagine becoming a bestselling novelist while still in college, and then seeing your insufferable father reduced to a bag of ashes in a safety-deposit box. Imagine drowning in a sea of booze, drugs and vilification before being given a second chance, as the Bret Easton Ellis of this remarkable novel, married to the mother of his previously unacknowledged son and living in the suburban hinterlands, is given. Imagine the unravelling of that new life. And remember as you hold this book in your hands: all of it really happened, every word is true.”

Suburbia as a refuge of the affluent. Insecurity, the uncanny, and the grotesque. Redemption through fatherhood? Self-medication, masks, the docile (domestic) subject. McMansions and the spatialities of late capitalism. Loss (historical, subjective) and absence.

The author/writer persona as a means to mount a claim on authorial knowledge (verisimilitude) and narrative control. A search for causal origins; anything to explain the current condition (regime?) of insecurity. Imminent threats, incursions of History and ‘the real’. A mise en abyme, in which the fiction gives way … but the ‘external’ world (external to suburbia) is not ‘reality’, but another, distorted (counter-factual) history:

“Miles of major cities had been cordoned off behind barbed wire, and morning newspapers ran aerial photographs of bombed-out buildings on the front page, showing piles of tangled bodies in the shadow of the crane lifting slabs of scorched concrete.”

(Easton Ellis, 2005: p.40)

Questions of form. Hybridities of genre; pastiche & parody. An uncanny return of the authors’ creations, given substance. The ghost of Stephen King.

Seventeen questions released; titles for the final assessed essay, due sometime in February. Nowhere near as bad as I was expecting, with a couple standing out as particularly feasible. Bodes well.

Anthropology & Representation

Skip class for a delayed bonfire night celebration with schoolmates back in Sussex, deftly avoiding the guilt of failing to submit an essay (unfinished, unassessed) on politics & narrative.

I’ve fallen a bit behind with these, but this week is reading week (half-term), which gives me a bit of a window to catch up. In retrospect, I seemed to spend a significant chunk of week five in pubs and flat kitchens, hanging out with other MA students. Great fun, but – outside of timetabled workshops & seminars – not particularly conducive to productivity. Also managed to fit in a couple of trips to London town, and an aborted attempt at research training.

Ooh, look – it’s Canary Wharf:

photo credit: jfpickard

Digital Media – Critical Perspectives
In the mid-90s, our understanding of ‘the virtual’ could be boiled down to one object: the Nintendo Virtual Boy. According to Katherine Hayles, our current understanding of virtuality rests on ‘the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns’. In the wings, there lurk plans for something that we’ve begun to call augmented reality. How does this all fit together? How did we get from a world of branded gaming headsets to virtuality as an outright condition of being?

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

- William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

Yup – that’s cyberspace as a consensual hallucination. Illusions, delusions of transcending the limitations of the flesh. Here, the (military) origins of virtual technologies are obscured by the more celebratory, techno-utopian discourse.

It starts with flight simulators, and spreads through the military-industrial complex like a fungus. Right up to the point where, by the early 90s, Jean Baudrillard could claim that America’s reliance on technologies of mediation & simulation meant The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Claims that human agency was ceded to machines; self-guilded missiles and targeted ‘smart bombs’ – positing the virtual geographies of cyberspace as a distinct, autonomous sphere.

At which point, we must call bullshit. There’s nothing preordained about the forms of technology, which emerge embedded and mutually constituted with and within the wider social and political world. We need to break down the binary oppositions & Cartesian splits:

Virtual / Real

Disembodied / Embodied

Immaterial / Material

Machine / Human

Technology / Biology

Instead, how about the following:

CYB / ORG

Cyborg

Cyborg theory! Humans and machines in mutually constituted, non-linear systems. In this reading, it’d be impossible to cede agency to a machine, because you’re part of the machine … and the machine is part of you. We’re talking interpenetration. To return to the writings of Hayles, it’s all relational. And here we return to the core preoccupation of this MA degree – the remediation of life with (digital) information technologies. The condition of virtuality (if such a thing can be said to exist) is based on coexistance, a hybridity of information and materiality – in which neither can be seperated from, or reduced to, the other.

As it stand, I’d argue that the best examples of a Haylesian (?) understanding of virtuality can be found in the work of Usman Haque – particularly the data management platform Pachube – and some of the stranger, Heath Robinson devices people have rigged up with Arduino:

21st Century American Fiction

Continuing last week’s seminar on No Country for Old Men and representations of the borderlands, our novel for this week was Ana Castillo’s The Guardians. Told in a shifting first-person narrative, covering a cast of characters entangled in the politics and history of the US-Mexico border. Strong characterisation of sympathetic, if passive, characters. Questions as to the utility of including words from the Spanish, and the notion of vocality, oral language, and the representation of lived (embodied) experience. Hybrid vocalities as the most interesting part of a novel which – at times – reads less like a story, more as a collection of random, loosely-linked incidents.

“So, it’s either an arbitary narrative, or … just arbitrary?”

- RC

As an aside, the last couple of weeks have thrown additional light on a couple of interesting examples of design fiction and SF film – Richie Gelles’ ¡SUPER NAFTA LAND! (as covered on BLDGBLOG) and Alex Rivera’s 2008 film, Sleep Dealer.

Anthropology & Representation

Desire, Consumption, Fetishism and the Object. With the death (radical reconfiguration?) of kinship, Daniel Miller has argued that consumption should be taken up as anthropology’s new schtick. But what exactly is consumption?

Consumption – to lay waste to; to eat; to destroy? It is with destruction that we create meaning. The only way you can prove that you have total mastery over / ownership of an object is to destroy or utterly negate it; to stop anyone else from being able to use it. But destruction for it’s own sake doesn’t help you, the possessor. Unless the act of destruction can somehow be said to absorb the ‘substance’ of the object into yourself, as with the eating of food. Using it up.

With consumer capitalism, we can see the birth of, and I quote, ‘modern self-illusory hedonism’:

“Traditional hedonism…was based on the direct experience of pleasure: wine, women and song; sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll; or whatever the local variant. The problem, from a capitalist perspective, is that there are inherent limits to all this. People become sated, bored … Modern self-illusory hedonism solves this dilemma because here, what one is really consuming are fantasies and day-dreams about what having a certain product would be like.”

- D. Graeber, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire (2007)

Fetishism? Something to which we attach too much importance (measured how?) – a confusion of means with ends, the peripheral with the heart of a matter. A surfeit of value? Or something about the arbitrary nature of our understandings of value? Irrationality?

Gold as a fetish of early modern Europe? African religious fetishes as a physical embodiment of agreements, oaths and social relations – direct opposites of the dissimulation of market economics – which uses the abstraction of money (gold?) to create a veil of ignorance, erasing the history and meanings of the processes behind production & consumption.

photo credit: Julius!

Fetishism as an essentially creative act … in art, culture? Etymologically, ‘fetish’ = from the Portugese verb, ‘to make’. But it’s also a destructive act, as in neoliberal capitalism’s fetishisation of the market (which, as we’ve already seen, stands as an abstracted version of Augustinian conceptions of providence and desire … and doesn’t even really work).

There’s definitely something here about the interstitial status of contemporary ‘participatory’ culture (c.f. Henry Jenkins), as a form of radical social creativity under neoliberal, market conditions. Video mash-ups and fan fiction = the fetishism(s) of the new media bricoleur?

More next week!