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The Amazon Machine
Joana Moll’s new project The Hidden Life of an Amazon User launches online, investigating the relations of code, users, logistics, space and transport. It also deals with the double energies of energy infrastructures of online platforms/logistics companies such as Amazon, and the energies of usage of customers. I was also invited to write for the project; in my short text I outline how “Moll’s critical interface project can also be considered an experimental set up of the Standard Amazon User (SAU): a semi-automated algorithmic pattern of interface actions that are measured and guided by a mass of code and synchronised in relation to the planetary scale logistical operation that is the backbone of Amazon’s infrastructural and data-intensive operations – the warehouse driven architecture of digital economy. “
The full text here.
Data Asymmetry – a Burak Arikan exhibition in Winchester
I am happy to announce that the Turkish artist, technologist Burak Arikan’s exhibition Data Asymmetry opens in November at the Winchester Gallery (at the Winchester School of Art).
The exhibition addresses critical mapping as a way to understand data culture. The pieces raise questions about the predictability of ordinary human behavior with MyPocket (2008); revealing insights into the infrastructure of megacities like Istanbul as a network of mosques, republican monuments and shopping malls (Islam, Republic, Neoliberalism, 2012) ; remapping and organising recurring patterns in the official tourism commercials of governments with Monovacation (2012); exploring the growth of networks via visual and kinetic abstraction with Tense Series (2007-2012); and showcasing collective production of network maps from the Graph Commons platform. As the works emphasise, the aim of the Graph Commons is to empower people and projects through using network mapping, and collectively experiment with mapping as an ongoing practice.
Previously Arikan has had his work shown at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art New York, Venice Architecture Biennale, São Paulo Biennial, Istanbul Biennial, Berlin Biennial, Ars Electronica and many others.
The exhibition opens November 10.
In addition to the exhibition in the Winchester gallery, Arikan is organising a workshop on critical mapping and network graphs at the Winchester School of Art.
Arikan’s visit also includes another workshop in London at the British Library and as part of the Internet of Cultural Things-project. The visit to Winchester is also supported by the AMT research group at WSA.
For more context on Arikan’s art practice, please find here an audio interview I did with Arikan on stage at transmediale 2016 in Berlin.
For information and queries, please contact me: Contact details.
Denials of Service
I wrote a short text on “Denials of Service” for the just released new book There is no software, there are just services. (Meson Press and downloadable as an open access PDF).
The book, edited by Irina Kaldrack and Martina Leeker, asks if software is dead. This is not merely a rehashed Nietzschean proclamation so much as an observation about the current digital industry landscape where “the (re)emergence of the service paradigm […] challenges traditional business and license models as well as modes of media creation and use.” Indeed, perhaps software is replaced by services. “The short essays in this edited collection discuss how services shift the notion of software, the cultural technique of programming, conditions of labor as well as the ecology and politics of data and how they influence dispositifs of knowledge.”
Meson Press is a recent publishing initiative at Leuphana University, Luneburg. Here’s a short interview with Mercedes Bunz explaining the idea of the Press.
A Mini-Interview: Mercedes Bunz explains meson press
meson press’ first book, Rethinking Gamification (PDF), was just released in Lüneburg. Part of the Hybrid Publishing Lab at the Leuphana University, the press focuses on digital culture and network media with the aim to “challenge contemporary theories and advance key debates in the humanities today.” I was interested in inviting one of the representatives of the press, Mercedes Bunz, to share in the style of some earlier mini-interviews I have conducted what she sees as the stakes in coming up with a multiple-format publishing house that focuses on theory.
Most of scholars are increasingly frustrated with the dinosauric habits of big academic publishers, but how to establish alternatives in the academic world that is challenged both by the necessity of new formats and by the only slowly changing recognition systems of the academic world?
The burning questions in publishing seem to be about the changing media ecology of academia of which publishing is one part – and inherently connected to institutional settings and subject-positions.
In other words, the question posed to Bunz: 
“What and why is meson press as a theory publishing project and does it connect with the wider question of the “post-digital scholar?”
Mercedes Bunz: “You are right: publishing itself gets profoundly questioned by digital media, it isn’t just that digital media is an exciting field for theory because it never stands still.
The interesting thing: while we all know that within publishing there is “disruption”, oddly enough this doesn’t necessarily mean that there will be change. It might be true that technology offers alternative ways of publishing. However, reputation management and academic recognition systems stand in the way and ensure that nothing changes. Thus, the situation we find ourselves in is slightly mad: technically there are many ways to publish and share intelligent thoughts by now. However, young academics can’t use those alternatives because then their book a) can’t find its way into academic libraries which means b) they don’t get cited, or c) the book isn’t recognized for their CV. For all of that it still needs an approved publisher. Our technical super-connected, post-digital world is left helpless.
Of course, one can’t accept this.
meson press works its way through this situation. Naturally as academics who are also media scholars, we are quite interested in exploring the question: What chances are there in digital book production for theory debates? Our answer so far is the following: We publish open access, and this makes books easily findable and pushes citation. Also we foster the findability of our books regarding search engines and catalogues, and take marketing quite serious. However, the most important difference in my opinion is the conceptual understanding of what this is: a book.
Similar to Mattering Press, or Christopher Kelty’s scholarly magazine Limn http://limn.it/ our publishing project is an academic cooperative: from academics for academics. This means in our view, a book becomes a place to meet and debate, similar to a lecture, a workshop, or a seminar. Editing a book was always a starting point for a discussion, copy-editing was always a way to connect or disagree. It is this tendency which now needs to be further amplified. In other words, we take quality assessment very serious and try to turn it into a concept: A book isn’t just a product that starts a dialogue between author and reader. It is accompanied by lots of other academic conversations – peer review, co-authors, copy editors – and these conversations deserve to be taken more serious. In a post-digital world one needs to understand that a book is a process that gives good reason to meet in person. Formats like book sprints have lead the way. Wendy Chun has also inspired us to create a writing group in which we constructively discuss a non-completed essay or chapter.
So I suppose this is how meson press connects to our situation as post-digital scholars. As a publishing house which is also a publishing project, we focus on the book as a form of communication, and this communication is an important part of its production. This is a way to optimize its task: to intervene, and challenge (which is not an easy task in our neoliberal societies). But we like the humanities, and we like them alive and kicking.
If I may give you a little overview of our upcoming publishing projects: After”Rethinking Gamification” we will publish two forgotten classics: The first will be by the Greek-French philosopher Kostas Axelos “On Marx and Heidegger”, which is edited with great care and expertise by Stuart Elden. We are very interested in Axelos’ take on technology and alienation. The second will be by Antonia Caronia “The Cyborg”.
Also we are very proud that Yuk Hui and Erich Hörl have started editing the series “After Simondon” with us, and we are preparing two edited collections “Diffracting Kittler: German Media Theory and Beyond” and “Critical Keywords for the Digital Humanities”.
Sorry, but may I end this little interview with an appeal? If anyone has an idea for a thrilling book proposal in the context of digital culture and media studies, please send us a short trenchant abstract and chapter overview to: mesonpress@hybridpublishing.org.”
Deleuze and the New Humanities in Hong Kong
I will be speaking in Hong Kong in June and addressing Deleuze and digital culture. However, my argument is that instead of the usual suspect of starting with the Control Societies-text, Deleuze affords an understanding of the materialities of technological and scientific culture in many other ways too. As part of the geophysical materiality, we can talk about desire’s investment as an infrastructural issue of power – not ideology, just desire but that is infrastructurally effective.
Code and Labour
The new issue of Cultural Studies Review follows up from the 2012 Code-conference that was held in Melbourne, at Swinburne University. The event was marvelous, thanks to the organizers. And now, Esther Milne and Anthony McCosker have edited a lovely special issues Coding Labour. With a line-up including Anna Munster, Ned Rossiter, Mark Cote,Rowan Wilken and many more – as well as for instance Meaghan Morris in the same issue – one can expect much.
My own article is about the slightly heretic crossbreeding of German media theory and cognitive capitalism. It briefly discusses the notion of cultural techniques as a way to elaborate cognitive capitalism in the context of practices and techniques of software, code and labour. Hence it ends up in a curious short example from the 1970s, the management and organisational arrangement of metaprogramming, as a way to discuss how we might approach techniques of “creative” work in software culture.
You can find the text here and below a short abstract.
This article addresses cultural techniques of cognitive capitalism. The author argues that to understand the full implications of the notion of cognitive capitalism we need to address the media and cultural techniques which conditions its range and applications. The article offers an expanded understanding of the labour of code and programming through a case study of ‘metaprogramming’, a software related organisation practice that offered a way to think of software creativity and programming in organisations. The ideas from the 1970s that are discussed offer a different way to approach creativity and collaborative and post-Fordist capitalism. The author brings together different theoretical perspectives, including German media theory and Yann Moulier Boutang’s thesis about cognitive capitalism. The wider argument is that we should pay more attention to the media archaeological conditions of practices of labour and value appropriation of contemporary technological capitalism as well as the cultural techniques which include ‘ontological and aesthetic operations’ that produce cultural, material situations.
Plant on Tulipmania
Sadie Plant is such an iconic figure in the study of digital culture and media theory. Here’s her short text on tulips, viruses, spam and modern economy. She wrote this as the Foreword to our Spam Book and here you can access it as a teaser-trailer to the book itself! It speaks of digital anomalies but through the colourful words of tulips and the tulipmania:
“Tulipmania was certainly a great irregularity, a malfunctioning of seventeenth century financial markets causing the first such large-scale economic crash. It was a kind of fever: the craze was as infectious as the virus itself, a runaway sequence of events triggered by the smallest of anomalies – which was, as it happens, effectively repressed as soon as its nature was known: once it was discovered, after nearly three centuries, that a disease was the agent of tulip variegation, the virus was eliminated by the tulip industry. Modern striped, multicoloured, and frilled tulips are the flowers of healthy bulbs, bred to emulate those of their virally infected predecessors: the effects remain, but the virus has gone. Order has been restored. ”
(As an addition, here’s our Introduction to the same volume, written together with Tony D. Sampson: “On Anomalous Objects of Digital Culture“).
Google DNS Freedom Fight: 8.8.8.8
In the midst of the past (less than) 24 hours of Turkey’s Twitter-blockade, we have seen a flood of tweets, comments, analysis and information – a lot of them, paradoxically, from Turkey. Some operators might not have yet been quick enough to shut down access, and at the same time people have found access via alternative means. The situation has again meant an increase in people’s understanding of the internet and looking into how DNS works as well as VPN’s. Indeed, tips were spread online to assist Turkish people – such as the three simple methods. And information was passed offline too – demonstration of a yet another connection of the streets and the online.
That people are able to bypass the DNS-based censorship is one thing to ponder about – especially because the new internet law in Turkey would allow other measures too. But what Geraldine Juárez pointed out on Twitter was of course this: 8.8.8.8. points to Google Public DNS. Corporate freedom services, the rhetorics of net freedom, etc. play as part of this wider scenario where alternatives to authoritarian nationalist politics seem to be the Corporate system. And that it’s pretty odd/scary/eerie that this gets rather automatically picked up as the political alternative, even to the extent of Google becoming infrastructurally used as the politically “open alternative” – or just more bluntly, as “Freedom”:
In such situations, one does need quick and dirty solutions – infrastructural affordances, whether corporate or not, need to be taken into use for short-term goals; but in terms of the wider political situation of networks – networkpolitics on the level where infrastructure meets the political imaginary – this leads into rather an odd choice between “closed” and “open” that does not imply as clear of a choice as one would assume based on the older political vocabularies. This is indeed not to downplay the significance of this sort of activism – distributing DNS information on streets, as in the image below. It is just to ask the fundamental questions regarding political choice, alternatives and how much the lack of alternatives is increasingly attempted to be hardwired into a material actualisation of the lack of political imaginary: “no choice but”.
Update [March 22, 2014]: Turkish government has now blocked access to Google Public DNS too.
– related reading includes (of course)
Evgeni Morozov’s analysis of network politics and its relation to Silicon Valley but also Benjamin Bratton’s work on “the stack” and the changing political nomos in the age of planetary computation.
tm14 Afterglow: trash and to trash
Transmediale has released its theme for 2014: afterglow. It refers to the feeling of “after”, “post” the digital enthusiasm that branded the past decades, and now somebody needs to pick up the trash. The theme summons connotations of trash, waste and other aftereffects of the digital, both material and immaterial.
Winchester School of Art is happy again to be official partner of the transmediale-festival and participate in curation of some of the academic content. Below more info on transmediale-theme – and a link to the call for works.
afterglow
The digital revolution is over again and this time “YOU” lost.
In the wastelands of its aftermath, what is still burning?
With the theme afterglow, transmediale 2014 suggests that in a world where resources (human, bodily, material, environmental, economic …) are more and more used up, the digital does not any longer stand up to its promise of antiseptic high-tech worlds and opportunities for all. On the contrary, digital culture is more and more becoming a post-apocalyptic wasteland ruled by a few powerful clan leaders. Still, digital culture is full of things that shine and glow, both promising and uncanny: from social media to big data. On the one hand, this afterglow can be seen as an extreme expression of the wasteful state of digital culture (excess, overload, endless repetition, pre-emption of meaning, exploitation), but on the other hand, as “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”, this afterglow is also providing the transition to new forms of being. If we are living in a post-digital culture, then afterglow is what characterises its aesthetics and politics during the transition to new cultural forms that are still unknown to us.
In the 2014 edition of the transmediale festival, the idea of an afterglow of digital culture is taken as an opportunity to speculate on positions that lead beyond the digital: not beyond the digital in a literal sense as in doing away with digital technology, but beyond the digital as a metaphysical character that overcodes all forms of existence. Even a supposedly critical term like “post-digital” is in this sense only promoting an idea of the contemporary and of the future as predetermined by the digital. Instead of revelling in the hypes of the post-digital, we invite the contributors of transmediale 2014 to reflect on this afterglow: to exploit our nostalgia for the pre-digital through the use of trashed technologies, ideas and narratives and/or to imagine new modes of existence and new modalities of critical intervention, by junking the afterglow of digital culture.
A Hefty Companion
A Companion to New Media Dynamics is out now. And admittedly, it is quite expensive. But try to get your library to order a copy, as it does contain some really handy chapters on media culture, networks, politics of platforms, mobility, and more! I just finished reading a nice Sean Cubitt-piece (on media studies and new media studies), and will continue with some of the other great looking texts.
I co-wrote with Tony Sampson a piece on spam, network virality and contemporary capitalism and marketing: “Learning from Network Dysfunctionality: Accidents, Enterprise and Small Worlds of Infection”. It continues our joint interests into networks as well as viral capitalism, but with a specific Tardean twist.
Machinology 