CRITICAL THEMES IN MEDIA STUDIES GRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCE DIGITAL | AFFECT
APRIL 5TH & 6TH, 2013 THE NEW SCHOOL | SCHOOL OF MEDIA STUDIES
WELCOME TO THE 13TH ANNUAL CRITICAL THEMES IN MEDIA STUDIES GRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCE! The annual Critical Themes in Media Studies Conference, hosted by the School of Media Studies at The New School, provides a forum for graduate students from around the world to present original scholarship in media studies and related fields. This year’s conference theme “Digital | Affect” seeks to open relations between these two terms to invite many possible renderings of the ways in which each notion informs and enacts the other. We asked for graduate student theorists and practitioners to share projects focusing on relationships between affect and digital communication technology and their socio-political, ontological, institutional and creative implications. The caliber of work we have received this year is high, and we look forward to dialogues based on this outstanding academic work. Since the start of our organizing efforts over nine months ago, we have been lucky to have the monumental support of a core group of students without whom this conference would not be possible. Stephanie Andares, Hillary Bliss, Bria Cole, Wolfgang Daniel, Albert Rodriguez, Aliaksandra Sakhar, Oz Skinner, and Lauren Treihaft— thank you for your hard work during the planning process. Thank you to the many others who offered support in reviewing abstracts, giving advice and a whole host of other details required to run an event like this. In this realm, we extend a special thanks to Sepand Ansari and Eric Peterson for helping us implement our website. The committee would like to thank all of our faculty respondents who have been so generous with their time in reading papers and
crafting insightful replies. Thank you to Christiane Paul and Eugene Thacker, for your input and guidance this year. Many thanks to Dylan Fisher, Charles Whitcroft, Matthew Kotowski, Gregory Griffith and Janelle McKenzie for your help in making the bureaucracy more navigable. We are also grateful to Professors Mark B.N. Hansen and Patricia Clough for visiting and sharing their work with us and of course—thanks to all our student presenters! Your labors are what this conference is all about! Finally, Critical Themes would not be possible without the generous support of many institutions within The New School: the University Student Senate; the Executive Office of the Dean of the New School for Public Engagement; and of course, the School of Media Studies. We wish everyone an enjoyable and inspiring conference experience! Brittany Paris and Laura Trager Conference Chairs Critical Themes in Media Studies 2013 School of Media Studies
April 5th, 2013 WOLLMAN HALL 65 W. 11TH STREET 7:00 PM OPENING KEYNOTE
April 6th, 2013 GRADUATE STUDENT PANELS
MARK B.N. HANSEN
ROOM 510 66 W. 12TH STREET
BEYOND AFFECT?: TECHNICAL SENSIBILITY AND THE PHARMACOLOGY OF MEDIA
10:30 AM—12:00 PM DECODING IDENTITIES IN FLUX
Mark B.N. Hansen is a Professor of Literature at Duke University and (co-) author of Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory (2009), Bodies in Code: Interfaces with New Media (2006), New Philosophy for New Media (2004) and Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing (2000), among others. In his research, writing and teaching Hansen theorizes the role played by technology in human agency and social life with a focus on the experiential significance of the revolution in computation. 8:30PM OPENING RECEPTION
FACULTY RESPONDENT: AMIN HUSAIN DISRUPTING PRIVILEGE THROUGH AUGMENTED REALITY Angela Daniels MA Emergent Digital Practices University of Denver Privilege is afforded to us based on varying factors such as skin color, sexual orientation, gender, and religion. Whether or not we acknowledge this privilege, it exists and affects many aspects of daily life. My presentation will be a summary of my MA thesis project which aims to bridge the gap between technology and social work by creating a tool that can be used for furthering the discussion on privilege. My research project seeks to disrupt privilege by utilizing the augmented reality capabilities of smartphones. Through the Layar platform, I have created a walking tour of the University of Denver campus highlighting examples of various types of privilege, information for adopting ally behavior, and additional resources for creating a community to critically think about these issues. It is my hope that by using technology to enhance our understanding of human interaction, we can build a more socially conscious community. My presentation will explore the ways in which we all embody privilege and oppression and how
these intersectionalities can be visually represented through mobile technologies. I will also raise questions about the effect digital representation has on thought processes around privilege and oppression as well as emotional connection and response. LIFELOGGING, A TECHNOLOGY OF THE SELF Mateusz Halawa PhD Sociology/University of Warsaw PhD Anthropology/The New School As the emergence of new media, including personal digital devices with unlimited capacity for production and storage of traces, blurs the boundary between the archive and the everyday, the old desire for an exhaustive “archive of existence” suddenly seems viable. Based on a collection of both deliberate and inadvertent lifelogging projects, this paper proposes a sociological reading of this phenomenon focused on questions of subjectivity in the individualised society as well as questions of social time, including timelessness and nostalgia for the present. While many contemporary debates about the new media focus on new forms of visibility they afford to individuals, a relatively less explored problem is that of becoming visible not to others but to oneself. I argue that the concept of “technologies of the self” (Foucault) may be productive in understanding the pervasive “archive fever” of new media users.
AS WE MAY LIKE – LIKING THINGS IN THE DIGITAL AGE Daniel Fehr and Hannes Mandel PhD German Literature Princeton University One of the most fundamental human affects, it seems, lies in the disposition to ‘like’ things. However, it would be wrong to assume that what we like or dislike is merely – or even mainly – determined by our so-called character, our personality, nature, or ‘soul’. While some of our likings certainly originate from bare somatic, i.e. biological needs, most of our more sophisticated likes and dislikes can not at all be sufficiently explained by science. Who or what is it then, that decides what we like? Is it really simply ‘us’? In our presentation we argue that the cultural liking of things is not a perfectly self-determined, presuppositionless act of choice, but a cultural technique that is always already informed (and affected!) by the likes and dislikes of others, contingent upon the medium of expression, and viscerally aware of the circumstance of being observed by others. No other example shows this more evidently than the ‘Like’ function on Facebook. Taking insightful glances back to the 18th and 19th century, when professional applauders were hired to ‘like’ plays in Paris, and Karl Marx filled in a ‘favorite things’ questionnaire in London, our talk will focus on ‘Liking’ per click on the Internet, and explore the effects that this rather inconspicuous but highly influential ‘affect machine’ might have on art, economy and culture.
ACT UP NY: UNLEASHING LATINO POWER Julian de Mayo Rodriguez MA Media Studies The New School ACT-UP-NY: Unleashing Latino Power is a digital mapping project that captures and revives the stories and memories of Latino AIDS activism in New York City, between 1987-1996. It is rooted in the belief that digital media provides new spaces for remembrance, reconciliation and feeling. In looking back at the HIV/AIDS crisis in NYC. academics, artists and activists are researching the contributions of the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP) to medical research, its exceptional legacy in public health and LGBT movement, its influence in guerilla activism and performance art, and more recently, its imprint on contemporary grassroots movements. ACT UP: Unleashing Latino Power uncovers ACT UP’s legacy in Latino AIDS and LGBT activism. This project can be understood as expanding popular representations and perceptions of ACT UP NY, as well as providing an opportunity to revisit and commemorate the contributions of ACT UP NY’s Latino Caucus. I am interested in the local and transnational geography of their actions, the production and translation of media they undertook, as well as the networks they accessed in New York City and abroad. The project lives on Parsons’ Urban Research Tool. It is comprised of archival documents from the New York Public Library, oral history recordings with ex-members of the Latino Caucus, and a narrative ‘voice’ which threads the different elements of the map.
1:00 PM—2:30 PM FRAMING THE VIRTUAL IN SPATIAL ENCOUNTERS
FACULTY RESPONDENT: ELIZABETH ELLSWORTH THE OSMOTIC BUBBLE. DESIGN SYNCHRONICITY: COGNITIVE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE BILATERAL BRAIN— HOW EMOTION AND INTUITION EMPOWER US TO IMAGINE Gigi Polo MA in Design Studies The New School In the midst of the 21st Century, a lot of conversations are revolving around design education and the challenges that designers face in this new Technological Era. Knowing design theory and having a refined aesthetic is not enough anymore. Design students need to be taught how to exercise critical and analytical thinking, in combination with the traditional educational models of theory and practice, in order to embrace their potentiality of becoming—more than designers—creators, innovators, and pioneers of possible futures. A womblike structure, The Osmotic Bubble (Polo 2012) is a large-scale space where both conscious and unconscious mind will be simultaneously exposed to sensory stimuli—tactile, visual, and auditory in order to regress to a place of selfdiscovery. It is a space of free-floating stimuli that transforms creative thinking hence behavior, and where creative ideas and design solutions are explored, shared, and nurtured. By connecting the bubbles through synapses—and sharing abstract ideas and concepts through projections—a collaborative group come up with unexpected and innovative ways of solving complex problems within a
system—the Bilateral Unconscious brain at work. The Osmotic Bubble is also a provocation piece that seeks to imbue our world with new ideas— with possibilities of better futures; and strives to take us back to our true nature of being human, and accept ourselves as new humans—whose essence is one with both the natural and technological realms. In a more universal perspective, to achieve the non-lateralization of knowledge and, ultimately, become self-sustained selves who are capable of creating more optimistic futures for themselves and others. THE REVOLUTIONARY AFFECT: ICONOGRAPHY AND (E)MOTION IN STREET RIOTS Tom Ullrich MA Kulturwissenschaftliche Medienforschung Bauhaus-University Weimar A revolutionary situation such as a street riot is a political, social or mass psychological phenomenon. As a historical event it must have been witnessed and experienced. Moreover, street riots are particularly visual events, especially since the media provide recording and coverage. In doing so they constitute and affect what one usually calls a certain historical moment, a revolutionary action or a movement. Hence, there is no movement without moving pictures, there is no emotion without motion, there is no effect without affect. What constitutes the visual representation of street riots and how do the media transmit and create an effective image of insurgency? To answer these questions, the presentation doesn’t focus on the facts and effects but rather on the emerging “affectiveness” of the media and the milieus themselves, in relation to the action they had made possible at first.
It’s the agency of things, stupid – breaking up the street, assembling cobblestones, building barricades, facing the police by throwing stones or waving flags. A disposition of given materials and their (ab)use will be analyzed in order to discuss how movement, displacement and appropriation of human and nonhuman actors contribute to a historical iconography of violent protest. In particular, the presentation deals with the city of Paris as an important scene of revolution ever since and has a closer look on French insurgencies from the 19th century to the protests of May 1968. My experimental approach introduces a visual pre-history of street riots and therefore might offer a different understanding of more recent protest like Paris (2005), Athens (2010), London (2011), the West Bank (2011) and Cairo (2012). Tracing a concept of revolutionary affects, the presentation seeks to demonstrate 1) urban sites as mediated milieus of street riots as well as 2) the representation and creation of revolutionary icons via “affective images”. MUSEUMS, COLONIAL ARCHIVES AND AFFECTIVE RESIDUES May Chew PhD Cultural Studies Queen’s University, Ontario The museum can be conceptualized as a site that facilitates the “passing” of colonial history into a brick-andmortar, flesh-and-bone archive. More than just the elegiac residues of a bloodless imperial mission, these material archives have become the means through which neocolonial discourses are (re)invigorated as well as naturalized. With curatorial additions of interactive technologies and immersive exhibits in recent years, the archive has become even more of a haptic interface
which visitors are encouraged to extend their limbs into and to press their bodies up against. In this way, objects in the museum—in both their material and virtual manifestations—“flesh” out the colonial apparatus by reviving its affective capacity and providing a sensuous entry point into the nation’s imaginary. This paper will examine the ways in which bodies come into contact with the colonial archive displayed in Canadian state museums, and how this material “afterlife” continues to produce, inscribe and move bodies in ‘post’coloniality. It takes as its point of departure Benedict Anderson’s elucidation of nation as an “imagined political community” composed by members who collapse great spatial and temporal expanses by narrating a collective belonging. What Anderson refers to as the “profound emotional legitimacy” (4), which members of the nation invest in their imagined community is produced through the affective labour involved in not just dreaming the nation, but also, dreaming up one’s place within this narrative geography. This paper will draw on examples of interactive and immersive technologies that have been introduced in Canadian museum exhibits since the 1960s, namely: audio guides, projections, tactile exhibits, and lastly, immersive environments/ narratives. Through this, it will probe the ways in which nation functions as a structure of desire, imagined into being through the confluence of technology and affect; it will furthermore explore the ways in which citizens are beckoned through these affective “collisions” between bodies and technologies.
2:45 PM—4:15 PM CRISS-CROSSING LANGUAGE
FACULTY RESPONDENT: PAOLO CARPIGNANO TRANSMEDIALITY AND AESTHETICS OF THE TECHNOLOGICAL SUBLIME Ksenia Federova PhD Cultural Studies/University of California, Davis PhD Philosophy/Ural Federal University In the proposed paper I intend to consider practices of media art taken within the context of the discourses of transmediality and the sublime. Digital technology creates phenomena that provoke new modes of perception and new sensory experiences, including those evoking a sense of something that is beyond representation, a feeling traditionally belonging to the aesthetic framework of the sublime. I am particularly interested in the analysis of affective qualities of the experience of transition across media borders and of the potential realm beyond the closed loops of these borders. I would like to explore possible connections between the concept of the beyond and the idea of the “in between” space of electronic transmission, challenging the presupposition about computation being the most objective and neutral means of translation between different media languages. What kind of meaning does this translation produce on the level of phenomenological and aesthetic inquiry, but also in terms of increasingly complicated cultural relations? What is in this transfer or transposition from one medium to another, in this interstice created by transmedial operations that courts the modern consumerized sensibility? What is the correlation between “technological
contamination”, sensorium and the unutterable? How can “hypermediacy” (J.D.Bolter) as a strategy of disruption of the seamlessness of technological use contribute to the discussion of liminality effect? Finally, what are the strategies via which new media art enacts the sensorial tensions of transmediality? The examples will include practices representing diverse types of rendering relations: visual and acoustic interpretations of physical data (“psychogeophysics” projects by micro_research group), mutually affected recombinations of movement, speech and written text (“BodyText” by Simon Biggs and Sue Hawksley), as well as interactive projects, involving smell and gesture by Russian group “Where the Dogs Run”. THE SANKOFA PROJECT Olubusola (Shola) Ajayi and Javale Jean-Pierre MA Media Studies The New School The Sankofa Project is an oral history experiment that works to take stories from the past and make them present. The project sets out to build partnerships with libraries that have their oral histories boxed away and create a web presence for these narratives so that the public will be able to access them not only on the web but also in public spaces. There are two major components to The Sankofa Project. The first component is its functioning website where people can preview oral histories they are interested in — allowing them to hear and read short excerpts from the oral history narrative which will hopefully entice them just enough to come to the oral history libraries to access the full oral histories. The second component is the public performance walk where
groups of people can sign up to publicly perform the narratives of selected narrators from the website. AUTISM AS EVOLUTION: TALKING IN PICTURES Julie Casper Roth MFA Combined Media University at Albany In her autobiographical book, Thinking in Pictures, Temple Grandin claims that people with autism think visually; words are secondary to visual representations in their thought processes. Current research supports this notion for at least a portion of the population on the autism spectrum. Some people on the autism spectrum communicate via computer programs, flash cards, and iPad applications that exploit the subject’s visual thinking – translating images into verbally-expressed ideas. These practices coupled with the unbiased proliferation of autism throughout the world may signal a gradual shift from verbal to visual communication in the population. Photo-sharing, cell phone videos, emoticons, and internet memes simultaneously reduce and expand verbal and text-based language. As society shifts to technology-mediated communication, information exchange increasingly employs pictorial prompts and interactions. The growing presence of autism in the worldwide population coupled with technological innovation suggests a future world that expresses itself visually and speaks in pictures. As a video artist and filmmaker, my current video work explores the notion of autism as the next stage in human evolution. My work is based on research in the hard and soft sciences that examines autism’s origins, genetic expression, and societal implications. My current focus on visually-based communication plays out as a short
fictional narrative that imagines how a non-text based world might operate. While expressing ideas about nonverbal communication, the film – itself – becomes a form of non-verbal communication. Ultimately, I aim to create a video that expresses and embodies the advantages of visual thinking/communicating while also highlighting the possible advantages of autism to human progress. ASCII AND ARTISTIC PRACTICES Mitch Patrick MFA Brooklyn College In 2011 I began a body of digital works that investigate both digital images through the use of text based in ASCII script and the common viewing gestures insinuated by technological seeing. One project consists of a series of seamlessly looping videos which demonstrate the peculiar circumstances of digital observation. These videos feature animated characters, objects, and previously made artworks all placed within sterile tableaux. The contents within each scene seamlessly move, their actions are determined by the scenarios taking place. These video tableaux are calculated and sardonic; they serve as imagined demonstrations that catalog the effect that digital has over perception and attempt to unveil the control certain technologies have on our relationship to art and culture. The other body of work rigorously engages current events exclusively perceived through the transmission of digital images. By redesigning every character contained within the ASCII script, I create illegible symbols/ marks that ultimately remove the legibility of the original set of ASCII characters, these encoded images are then transferred on a surface via digital printing or they are written-out by
hand. This body of ASCII based art is a reference to the idea contained within the German term bildpunkte, meaning picture-point. In this practice I make an absurd commitment to create my own sets of pixels to better understand our experience of visual history through digital propagation. The language inherent behind all digital images is also of concern within this body of work, to which importance is placed upon detailing the image through a text-based practice. The next step in this process is to utilize open source 3D printers I’m building to implement computer generated tactility to my images. Theoretically I have been particularly inspired by Vilem Flusser’s idea that technical images will eventually supersede textual communication and credence will be given toward the language of images in its place. As both of these bodies of work develop I find it important to note specific gestures of viewership which are in constant flux by digital space.
4:30 PM—6:00 PM TRANSHUMAN BECOMINGS FACULTY RESPONDENT: PETER ASARO
CRITICAL VLOGS ON YOUTUBE: THE AFFECTIVE AND AESTHETIC DIMENSION IN STRANGE AND YET FAMILIAR FERTILITY PROJECTS Nathalie Soelmark PhD Cultural Studies University of Southern Denmark This presentation examines how reproductively challenged American couples’ engagement with in vitro fertilization (IVF) is expressed in user-generated videoblogs (vlogs) on YouTube forge a sensibility concerning biomedical optimization by way of a dialectics in terms of involvement
and detachment as suggested by sociologist Norbert Elias. Placing vlogs featuring physical pain, and (ugly) feelings within the frameworks of experience orientation, I explore how the aesthetic-affective orchestration function as an individual fertility project re-encoded, a term media theorist André Jansson has argued captures intersections of everyday life, consume, and (digital) media. I suggest that the affective orchestration as re-encodings provide a powerful lens through which the formation and development of individuals as actively involved in how they swayed by passion at the same time detach themselves from the body – objectifying it in order to become fertile – and involve them in the consequences of this objectification. Affectivity in vlogs in this regard is followed as central to enable viewers and the producers of the vlogs to involve themselves in the strange but yet familiar fertility projects. THE DYING PATIENT, THE INVINCIBLE MOUSE AND TUMOR MEDIA: TECHNOLOGIES AND CULTURES OF TUMOR MEDIATION
codes across clinical communities. This sustenance requires multiple technologies and cultures of tumor mediation – that is, ways of extending the lifespan of tumors by transferring human tumors to laboratory animals, modes of representing these tumors and their carriers in bioinformatic databases, and creating species which are themselves engineered specifically for these tasks. In this paper I describe these processes of tumor mediation as a way to describe new technologies of visualization and digitalization and their broader implication of how we understand disease, scientific progress and visuality. Based on field work conducted at the leading scientific institution Jackson Laboratory, the paper describes the new techniques of seeing and understanding cancer by describing the process of multispecies genetic research conducted at this institution. The paper also inquires how the creation of these scientific objects – namely, mobile tumors, their representation and their extended lives as lab objects – relate back to the subjectivity of the diseased. THE BODY AS TECHNO-BASE
Ekin Yasin PhD Media, Culture and Communication New York University
Rochelle Goldberg MFA/Bard College Piper Marshall MA Art History/Hunter College
Popular discussions about cancer typically describe the disease as something to kill, eradicate and cure. Do these military metaphors, which mobilize cancer funding, accurately describe the cultures of experimentality and the technological deployments of research facilities? Scientists require techniques and instruments both organic and inorganic that visualize, nurture, archive, and even generate cancer tumors which are globally circulatable in an array of informational
The fingerprint, the organ, the phantom limb, and figuration as affect, have never been more present in contemporary art praxis. Vital to the sequencing of both digital and analog technologies are object-oriented procedures. Contemporary art criticism increasingly erects a divide between new media and object-based practice–what the hand can touch vs. what technology places out of reach. This false problematizing is both curious and troubling, as object-
based operations, digital and other, are in extension of the bodily sphere. Seemingly at odds are the scientific and psychoanalytic understandings of sense perception with the conflation of object oriented practice as analogue archive. Proprioception, one’s sense of being in space suggests that contemporary art practice is not a reaction to digital trauma, fatigue, or disavowal, but rather, an extension of complex negotiations between the body and the virtual landscape. Whether digital or analog, our experience of vision and visibility is always virtual. The crystalline lens of the human eye sees all objects—art and other—merely as “images.” The complexity of this data translation, is given broad expression through a spectrum of media, from trompe l’oeil to second life. The continued presence of object oriented art practice is evidence of operative modalities between vision with touch. The body will always be the base for this sensorial contingency which adapts to technology. The interaction between human and the technological, in excess of our survival needs, can be perceived from a longer view as conditioned by the social, in which the formation of these senses as we now know them is a historical labor. RE-EMBODYING THE POST HUMAN EXPERIENCE Rachel Morrissey MA Media Studies The New School As the world has become more technologically driven, the spaces where we interact have become more two dimensional, lacking the true intimacy that only touch and familiarity with bodies can provide. In order to answer our own desires to make these spaces more three dimensional, or more
embodied, computer programmers and inventors are exploring many ways to make these spaces more tactile. Particularly as we enter a time when mobile phones are beginning to take on a prosthetic quality, human beings are desiring more tactile interaction both with and through our computers and the internet. To really understand this desire, we must discuss the skin, i.e. the body, and the philosophies that have led both to glorifying the “shedding” of our skins and the desires to embody the modern experience with technology. By examining the psychological, spiritual, theoretical, and political ideas about the nature of skin and how it defines us, confines us and frees us, then we can better discuss how technology has developed in relation to the body, including adaptations to smartphones, computer screens, design development screens, and technological ‘skins’. After examining those developments, we can prognosticate what future technologies may develop to continue incorporating technology in the body and the body in technology.
ROOM 509 66 W. 12TH STREET
2:00 PM—3:30 PM PUBLIC/PRIVATE ASSEMBLAGES FACULTY MODERATOR: EDWARD BYFIELD
RECURSIVE IDENTITIES IN SOCIOPOLITICAL MOVEMENTS: A CASE STUDY OF HACKATHONS Nathanael Bassett MA Media Studies The New School In today’s “network society,” individuals are highly connected, thanks to increased public access to information technologies. The Internet, mobile communications and digital networks provide communication channels that people with access can use to exercise some control over the flow of information to which they are exposed. Hacktivists are part of a broader range of media activists who take advantage of the connectivity between individuated identities to explore the possibilities of collectivizing personalist concerns into communal action or movements, by exposing others to media they would not otherwise experience. This work on hackathons examines in what ways a hackathon can be a unique mode of civic engagement and/or sociopolitical activism, for researchers, activists, and hackathon organizers. Secondly, can hacktivist-oriented hackathons be designed to emphasize the conscious organization of participants into collectives? If so, they could provide support and advocacy for their corresponding socio-political movements. Finally, this work also examines the recursive nature of the connection between individual and communal identities of collective socio-political movements and their participants, framed in cyclical relationships around power and knowledge.
The findings of this preliminary, limited study indicate that hackathons are not inherently concerned with solving social problems, even when they are the theme of the event, but are about solving technology problems. Collaboration is the key to understanding hackathons, but it may be possible to encourage collectivity if the organizers make the effort. DIGITAL UNCANNINESS: ART FROM GOOGLE STREET VIEW Chaeeun Lee MA Modern Art Columbia University Recently, Google’s ambition to digitize and provide a panoramic view of every corner of the world has instigated a rise of a new genre of digital photography – Google Street View photography. Taking a virtual tour of the world through the massive archive of mechanically photographed images, artists have created works of art through selecting, cropping, and adjusting the images. If conventional photography is about taking from the real world “a thin slice of space as well as time,” to quote Sontag, Street View photographs are fragments taken out of the virtual world itself constructed by photographs of the real world. This double nature of the photography as well as the particular operations involved in its two-fold transformation – marginalization of human figures, automatic blurring and disfiguring of faces and bodies, pixelation of the surface, and fragmentation of a space-time, all the while maintaining the indexicality of photography – not only result in a curious tension between reality and fiction, but also provoke a sense of the uncanny, the punctum in Barthes’ term. Works of two artists, Doug Rickard and Edgar Leciejewski, are discussed to explicate the affective effects of Street View photography. Rickard’s series of
photographs called A New American Picture (2009-2011) show fragmented views of the bleak and abandoned streets of overlooked parts of the nation in broken, low-quality images, which heighten the eeriness and fragility of the deserted neighborhoods. Leciejewski’s series of photographs titled NYC – Ghosts and Flowers (2012) are cropped images of ghost-like pedestrians who are unwittingly caught by the Street View cameras. Not only are their faces automatically blurred but their bodies and faces are at times mutilated in the digitization process. While their pixelated and distorted qualities indicate shortcomings of the technology, they are ironically the very characteristic which renders the images “digital,” and also which invites various artistic interventions. FLASH MOBS: SEIZING SPACE “IN A FLASH” WITH DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY Kristie Byrum PhD Rhetoric, Communication and Information Design Clemson University Flash! Citizen “mobsters” seize the space of a virtual urban stage performing an engaging “act” to captivate bystanders. Flash mobs strategically operate at the intersection of collective human action and technology, revealing the outcome of a transient community bound together for a temporary act. They blur public and private spheres creating spectacles on city streets, retail stores, hotels, hospitals and many other venues. Social media technology fuels these temporal “communities” promoting a new instantaneous collective action, whether for political discourse or a cultural performative act. With the ubiquity of smart phones, Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere, flash mob organizers exert immediate communication with key constituencies further fortifying
their power to organize with a few alphanumeric characters. Contemporary flash mobs indicate a new, expressive medium forcing corporations, city planners and police to respond as they attempt to mediate this spontaneity and return “order.” This paper / presentation reveals the intersection of technology and the formulation of limited purpose communities. THE SOCIO-POLITICS OF VIRTUAL PRIVATE NETWORKS Scott Silsbe MA Draper Interdisciplinary Program Humanities and Social Thought New York University A global arms race for control of and access to networked communication technology and virtual spaces (e.g. websites and social networking platforms) is ongoing. Entrenched elite power-holders (political and commercial)—favoring status quo censorship and restricted access—oppose media consumers, as well as reformist and/or revolutionary agents—favoring relatively free and open access to content and networking platforms. At stake are lucrative commercial monopoly privileges and socio-political franchise. Both sides of this contest are bold and technically sophisticated. I will examine one technical innovation— virtual private networks (VPNs)— currently being deployed by non-elites to overcome censorship and access restrictions imposed by elite powerholders. Networked devices—ubiquitous, even in relatively repressed regions—allow individuals to seamlessly represent themselves and interface with others in vivid digital environments. Arguably, intensive network users now have what amount to full fledged virtual personae, not necessarily in alignment with their physical selves. VPNs further complicate the interaction of the physical with
the virtual, particularly in regards to geography and identity. Briefly, VPNs allow someone to be in two places at once. Her physical person is at (GPS coordinate) 35.807676,51.483084, a Starbucks in Tehran. Her virtual persona is at (IP address) 95.211.35.225, somewhere in Amsterdam. VPNs internalize the individual’s local IP address, bypassing automatic geographic restrictions and obscuring the user’s location and identity from enforcement agents. VPNs are being used all over—by media consumers in the United States, subversives in China, and proto-revolutionaries in Iran. I will comparatively examine some of the myriad uses of VPNs, especially in ongoing socio-political struggles, demonstrating how VPNs allow virtual traverse of geography even after elite power-holders have raised the ‘digital defenses’. Here the affect of the virtual on the physical (and vice versa) is nuanced and dynamic. The story is ongoing.
3:45 PM—5:15 PM MEDIASCAPES AND CINEMATIC CARTOGRAPHY FACULTY RESPONDENT: BRIAN MCCORMACK
TRANSNATIONAL MIGRANTS, MEDIASCAPES AND THE CONCEPTUAL CARTOGRAPHY OF URBAN SPACES Jessa Lingel PhD Library and Information Science Rutgers University It has become all but cliché to lament Hollywood’s hegemony in global media, to decry the extent to which mainstream media in the U.S. dominate the worldwide production of movies and television shows, reaching diverse audiences all over the globe. Within these claims, however,
are interesting questions about media and migration: Does the prevalence of U.S. media abroad impact processes of migration? In what ways do media depicting particular urban environments affect immigrant experiences of arriving in those same cities? Using qualitative interviews with immigrants in New York, this paper investigates questions of media and movement. The focus of this analysis relates to reactions of surprise, disappointment and amusement related to expectations of New York informed by exposure to media portrayals of the city prior to arrival. Theoretical constructs from media studies, sociology and urban studies are brought to bear on these questions, framing this examination of media influences on transnational movement in terms of audience studies and immigration theory. In particular, I draw on Appadurai’s concept of mediascapes, Lynch’s construct of imageability and Baudrillard’s work on simulacra. With these interpretive tools, I work through interview material from recent immigrants, exploring the role of media in urban acculturation. DWELL, INHABIT, AND DIGITAL URBAN SCREENS Bria Cole MA Media Studies The New School Urban Screens are “various kinds of dynamic digital displays and visual interfaces in urban space.” With the digital turn, numerous experimentations in digital screens escape the commercial cohort. Scaling architecture, sensorial expressions are enlarged, augmented, and experienced. These projects serve the spaces as a form of art and culture driven aestheticism. What is essential to this paper is examining the current and possible roles of digital urban screens to contribute to tacit knowledge through affect. With examples of non-commercial
digital screens, it is possible to imagine the public space as an affective space, and linking the city dweller or city wanderer to the ecology one inhabits or journeys through. Beginning with an expository introduction to these works, the paper will probe into the intention and context of the creations. Then an inquiry will outline the various media tools used to achieve the individual projects. These factual and technological details are resources for extrapolating on affective occurrences and possibilities within urban spaces. As a mesh of experiences and sensations, the cityscape is a sensorial landscape with opportunities to shape, modulate, flux and exfoliate lived realities. Billboards are principally used and associated with advertising, and mirror a consumerdriven ecology. If designed and erected with other intentions, what ways can digital screens interface with human bodies? With different information available, how can urban ecology morph? With the current proliferation of urban screens projects, how do behaviors of inhabiting or visiting a city transform? By understanding structures as efficacious, the presence of urban screens merits a greater share of a city’s personality by creating zones of affect and relations. CINEMA, SELF, AND SOCIETY Ysenia Lima MFA Digital Cinema University of Central Florida The presentation is centered on the affect a portrayal of a city via the cinema has on a city’s inhabitants and its global image. This will be explored through the making of a film that follows the lives of 4 Miami, FL natives living in different parts of the city. Tony, 18, Laura, 24, Juan, 28, and Marvin, 25, struggle with the question of staying or leaving. They deal with hopes and aspirations for their futures while tussling with a personal identity that has
been informed by their experiences with the city itself. In The Spirit of Cities Why the Identity of a City Matters in a Global Age, Daniel A. Bell and Avner de-Shalit apply the definition of ethos to a set of values and outlooks that are generally acknowledged by people living in a particular city. Cinema informs this ethos by utilizing the cathartic benefits of all of the arts. It creates and strengthens communities, lends to selfimage thus building social image. What has been seen of Miami, FL via the cinema has inevitably put the city on the mind-map of people of the world. It’s served to tell everyone including the city’s inhabitants of their own culture or ethos. However, its current portrait consists of vapid images: drugs, beaches, “beautiful” people, money, etc. The film aims at acknowledging the rightful place of these images in the city’s culture while providing a more genuine depiction of its occupants. The characters, though fictional, will be your neighbor, co-worker, cousin, sister, etc. The process of making the film will be a personal testament to the self-identity of a native created by the communal ethos of the city. It will showcase the power of the cinema’s affect in this regard while adding to the global image of the city.
WALKING THE SONIC: ACOUSTIC EXPERIENCES AND EXPERIMENTS IN CORONA Yeong Ran-Kim MA Media Studies The New School Walking the Sonic is my multimodal thesis project, which encompasses sonic explorations of urban space and the methodological implications of thinking and practicing with the sonic. It includes a set of field recordings that I captured in the course of an ethnographic research in Corona, Queens, which eventually became substantial materials for a live remix and composition in a multimedia performance Ecstatic Corona. I began going on walks with a (re) search collective, directed by Dr. Patricia Clough, professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY. In attempts to immerse ourselves in the psycho-geography of Corona, we listened to each other’s stories about growing up in the neighborhood, in which memories of violence and hatred, love and joy were haunted each corner of the streets. Examining the boundaries historically drawn by the state, the church, and the family, we revisited places of memory and shared emotions and feelings, all while taking in the sights and sounds of Corona today. These various, interlocked experiences found their way into Ecstatic Corona, a multimedia performance. As a producer and a sound designer of a multimedia performance Ecstatic Corona, I chose sound to be glue for creativities that each participant brought in with dance, song, and spoken words. My research inquiry has been centered around: (1) how the engagement with the sonic offers a new way of encountering urban space and its history and (2) in what ways sonic
media practice contribute to generating a critical method for reconfiguring socio-political forces that are not always visible. Drawn upon my experience as an ethnographer and a media artist in this collaborative research project, I would like to discuss the ways in which the new practice of sonic media has become politically exciting, enabling sites in which academics, artists, and activists all merge and collaborate to envision a future politics of affect.
5:30 PM—7:00 PM VIRTUAL MATERIALISMS
FACULTY RESPONDENT: EUGENE THACKER ON THE ONTOLOGY AND THE MATERIALITY OF DATA: GOING BEYOND DATA AS THE REPRESENTATION OF AN OBJECT Sepand Ansari MA Media Studies The New School Materiality of the objects give us the security that there is something within those objects that is essential to their being, apart from our gaze. As we move toward things that are immaterial, or things in which their material manifestation is arbitrary to what constitutes them as beings, more theoretical effort is needed to make them stand coherent independently. An ever expanding class of such things are the digital technological entities which are becoming more complex in their capabilities and interactions with humans, but also sophisticated and incomprehensible as objects themselves. Within this ecology, ‘Data’ plays the role of mediator to facilitate the interactions between the algorithms, but more
importantly, between the material (and cultural) world(s) and the digital domain. The process of formation of data varies depending on the external objects, the algorithmic models and also the technology of interface among many others. In this presentation different modes of ontogenesis of data is explored to get beyond the notion of data as the discrete and quantified representation of the objects that we already know within the world. The most familiar manifestation of data is the tabular representation of entities where each row represents one instance of an entity (i.e. a person) and each column the quantification of one property of the same object (e.g. height). This model is closely related to the depiction of an object in traditional philosophy as the ‘selfsufficient totality of properties’ where those properties define the identity of the object. This notion of data has been culminated in computer softwares and relational databases. Moving away from the already well established objects and deal with more complex objects which in many cases are formed during the process of data, the values that we know as data does not correspond to attributes and properties of certain objects. This is chiefly because there is no prior human perspective to be imposed to the world to conceptualize and then parametrize reality. In this mode data, or signal, flows through the computational model and its intensity changes through the path to absorb the affects from the environment and transform it to find patterns within data and create a universalized conception that we know as an object.
EMERGENCE OF PHYSICALITY IN THE DIGITAL AGE | MAPPING THE NODES Bryan Waddell MA Emergent Digital Practices University of Denver My current work focuses on how and why the physical and physical interactions have resurged in recent year and have become a prominent feature in the Digital Age. During the late 1970’s and into the 1980’s when the adaptation of digital technologies and new media first came about, a fear of a society fully immersed digitally and technologically (commonly referred to as technophobia) existed amongst some. An idea so powerful that within such a society, our reliance on physical activity and goods would no longer matter and technology would dictate and run all our actions and interactions alike. What we see happening today through the relationship between humans and technology, is proving to be quite the opposite than what was feared. We can see this illustrated through the interactions with new digital technologies and devices; a recent boom in DIY (Do It Yourself) communities creating not only new technologies, but also objects and interfaces to interact with them; and through the growing movement and interest in 3D printing. Each brings digital creations, ideas and objects to life in our physical world directly through human ingenuity. My project and research will aim to elucidate how and why the physical and the physicality of things have reaffirmed themselves in our current Digital Age through the aforementioned nodes. I will highlight how human interactions with digital technologies are making us more aware than ever of our own physicality through an interactive installation. Here, the interactions one has within
the navigable digital environment will present the participant with a visual display of how the nodes chosen affirm the physical. Through defining and visualizing the interactions and connections of the nodes, it will help illuminate my inquiry and interests to the participant in showing that the physical is more prominent in our lives than it has ever been before. LIVING WITH COMMODITIES: EMERGENCE AND MATERIALITY IN SUBJECT-OBJECT RELATIONS Sun-ha Hong PhD Communication University of Pennsylvania The consumer’s self-experience of subjectivity and intentionality occurs through a certain liveness and agency of commodities – an object agency grounded in their materiality. I argue we are always already infiltrated by object agency, and exist as subjects only by managing and coping with that relationality. The subject’s phenomenological experience of reality, wherein affect belongs, is thus positioned in an interobjective network of lived space. The presentation will illustrate this argument through an overview of research-in-progress on the cultural imaginary of toys. The research compares aspects of contemporary toy-discourse, including the Toy Story films, to late 19th and early 20th century cases such as Sears & Roebuck mail-order catalogues and prescriptive discourse on toys and parenthood. Western society retains in many ways a pseudo-Kantian mythology of control; its axiological foundation is the autonomous subject, its weapon instrumentality. Metapragmatic discourses on commodity objects, from advertisements to consumer rationale, tend to invoke (1) the subject’s essentialized desire; (2) a functionalist
definition of the commodity; (3) the subservience of function to desire. This imaginary consequently emphasizes purchase over maintenance and disposal, normative schemas of use, and objects as discrete functions over their emergent ecology in space. In contrast, I suggest that (1) commodityobjects are ‘live’ and agentic, recalling Husserl’s operative intentionality; (2) consumer-subjects are decentered, only knowable and existing in conjunction with objects they form experiential relations with; (3) practices of ‘use’ and ‘consumption’ are thus already infiltrated by object agency, and constitute our efforts to manage and cope with the flux of objects within lived space. Toy discourse is saturated with familiar instantiations of the control-myth. Interpretive schemas like binary gender stereotypes or imitative pedagogy constrain our perception of toys’ social lives into normative definitions of ‘childhood’. Discourses of boundless imagination or anthromorphized toys appear less restrictive, but in fact conform to a fantasy of instrumental control wherein toys are compliant artifacts for humans’ (mainly adults’) collective imagination of childhood as socially constructed. The ‘liveness’ and ‘agency’ of toys is thus admitted in deferred form: no harm done that ignorant children believe such things, for it allows sensibly minded adults to indulge too in such flights of fancy! Thus “these childish toys are more to us than they can ever be to children.” (G.K. Chesterton)
WOLLMAN HALL 65 W. 11TH STREET 7:30 PM CLOSING KEYNOTE
PATRICIA CLOUGH
PERFORMANCE—MY MOTHER’S SCREAM Patricia Clough, Professor of Sociology, Women’s Studies, and Intercultural Studies at Queens College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York, is going to conclude the conference with her address on Saturday, April 6th. Clough’s work draws on theoretical traditions concerned with technology, new media, affect, the unconscious, timespace and political economy. She is author of Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (2000); Feminist Thought: Desire, Power and Academic Discourse (1994) and The End(s) of Ethnography: From Realism to Social Criticism (1998). She is editor of The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (2007), a collection of essays by Sociology graduate students drawn from their dissertations.