This page contains all of the available abstracts for the speakers, you can also view full programme. Speakers are sorted alphabetically, by surname.
Nadia Arancio
Webcamming Identities: Adolescents’ Performance in the Digital Theatre
Michael Bauwens
Exodus, transvaluation, phase transition: the role of peer to peer values and open infrastructures in current social change
In our presentation, we will present a hypothesis that deep system changes occur when a dominant system attains fundamental limits, an exodus occurs, both of bodies and attention, and new proto-social structures are created prefiguring a deep change in the political economy and mode of civilization. Our working hypothesis is that peer to peer is the core of this transvaluation occuring now, and that the co-creation of open and distributed infrastructures are the means whereby new prefigurative social practices are taking place. Our second hypothesis is that the cooptation of these new social practices by netarchical capital, and a shift towards post-capitalist structures, are not anti-thetical, but condition each other; and that the second could not occur without the first.
Taina Bucher
Technicity of Attention: On Immediacy and the Update Sphere
Attention has become a scarce resource in digital culture today is something of a common sense claim. In times of information overload, exponentially growing user-generated media content, and the always-on instantaneous nature of everyday life, attention indeed seems to be at stake. However it remains to be discussed what the faculty of attention actually amounts to when talking about digital culture. Social networking sites are key players in this so-called attention economy of the social web, particularly among the younger generation. How then can we make sense of attention as an analytical category to better understand what is at stake in times of immediacy and the real-time social web? Specifically, how do social networking sites organise and structure attention.
Every medium constructs attention in a specific way. Paper for instance makes us linger on a particular plane, a concise space of white that according to Richard Lanham hinges on an economy of sensory denial. Taking Twitter as a case in point of what Katherine Hayles claims to be a shift from “deep attention” to “hyperattention”, the question then becomes upon what kind of economy do social networking sites hinge? In following Hayles’ ideas on hyperattention, technicity and temporality, expanding in turn on philosophers like Simondon and Stiegler, combined with Lanham’s ideas on the rhetorical construction of attention, this talk will examine how attention is allocated in Twitter by a close reading of its software features and functionalities.
On the one hand there is a need to examine the notion of the attention economy itself, as it has become a common sense term. The question is to what extent the attention economy is an incontestable term or whether we can find signs of counter evidence as for instance in the “slow” and “ecological” movements, or art projects like the Suicide Machine. On the other hand we must ask what the perpetual status updates, the freshness fetish and discursive formation of immediacy as exemplified through the real-time web can tell us about the concept of attention more explicitly? Do functionalities like the 140 character limit in Twitter confirm or contradict the attention economy? How then, do software functionalities and features structure attention?
Ruth Catlow
Online Artmaking and Community Building
This presentation will look at the context that gave rise to the activities of its international online community of artists, programmers, writers and hackers looking for ways to live and work on their own terms. Since 1997 Furtherfield has developed platforms for creating, viewing, discussing and learning about experimental and critical practices at the intersections of art and technology.
With lots of examples of artistic activity from the Furtherfield neighbourhood it will focus on how artistically-driven, open and collaborative models of organisation, creation and production have been informed by network thinking; first inspired by the shift in network topologies from the centralised (broadcast) model to the distributed and decentralised networks of the Internet, through a growing awareness of more social engagement with the interdependent network of people, stuff, actions, ideas and matter. It will look at the evolution from the Do-It-Yourself approach of early net art pioneers to a focus on dialogue, participation and collaboration within and across scale free networks, or a practice that we now shorthand as DIWO (Do It With Others).
Since 2009 Furtherfield has been developing a media art ecologies programme that looks at the dependencies of digital culture and the environment and questions of individual and collective agency. The presentation explores how through creative and critical engagement with practices in art and technology people are inspired and enabled to become active co-creators of their cultures and societies. It will demonstrate how art can create a different kind of space for ethical, aesthetic and philosophical exploration in projects that are overtly about providing technical learning.
Dan Dixon
The Art of Surveillance in Pervasive Gaming
Constance Fleuriot
Developing ethical design questions for pervasive media
Designers of pervasive media experiences, whether deliberately and unwittingly, develop applications which generate and store data about users. There is a need to improve critical awareness of ethical issues around pervasive media design in the developer communities as well as in the users of those applications.
The Arts and Humanities Research Council Knowledge Transfer Fellowship scheme at the Digital Cultures Research Centre and Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol, UK has funded a strand of research to identify the economic and social values of pervasive media and develop the language used to describe and define this emerging field. One purpose of the research is to generate a coherent and comprehensive set of questions for designers of pervasive media applications to ask themselves as part of their production process. A key element of the questions will be the ethical considerations associated with pervasive media, such as whether anyone using the application will be generating a data trail of personal data that can be stored, cross-referenced and commodified.
Designers may, on reflection, choose to create applications that either do not collect or store data irrelevant to their design, or in some way expose the algorithms embedded in their software. Making hidden algorithms explicit may not change the fact that those algorithms are there, or what they are doing, but gives users the knowledge that they need in order to make informed decisions about what they are and are not consenting to.
Marco Fioretti
The crucial role of file formats in building and preserving Digital Media Cultures and in the practical impact of such cultures on society
Today all information and communication is digital, that is encoded in sequences of bits. Bits can be stored or transported on generic, commodity devices and networks regardless of what they actually represent. On one side, this is a huge advantage, because it means that only one infrastructure is needed to produce, preserve and exchange knowledge and data, instead of the many incompatible networks and media of the past (tapes, vynil, paper, telegraph, photographic films, analog TV etc…).
On the other hand, this infrastructure is terribly fragile, because (even when the physical media on which they’re stored remains completely accessible) bits sequences are useless, at least in practice, when you can’t know or have forgotten their format. A digital file format is the set of rules that specify the meaning of each acceptable bit sequence in a specific type of documents, e.g. photographs, presentations, audio…
Digital documents, from Tweets or Facebook status updates to law texts and streaming TV, can make a lot to improve building and preservation of cultures, make social life and education richer, increase citizen civic participation and government transparency.
However, this potential can be achieved only if all these digital documents are always preserved and shared in the smallest possible number of truly open formats. When this doesn’t happen, both individuals and society lose crucial information and have much less possibilities to exchange or correlate digital data in the ways that would have the most positive effects on culture, education and civic participation. Therefore, schools and Universities should make their best to inform students about the consequences of not using open digital formats and lead the way in their adoption.
This talk explains the huge cultural, civic and economic damage already happening just because lack of awareness of these issues and suggests a few practical ways to fix it.
Georg Franck
The Knowledge Industry – On Science as a Developed Economy of Attention
In the so-called knowledge society, science has grown into a basic sector of the means of production industry. Science, to be specific, has itself turned into an industry where specialised lines of production produce inputs for other specialised lines of production. Since the industrial organisation of production is known to be a capable means for unleashing productivity one should expect it to be in the centre of interest where the phenomenal success of science is at issue. In fact, however, the theory of science grossly ignores the question of how productivity relies on the organisation of cognitive work. In remarkable analogy, there is no economic theory of scientific production worth its name. At first glance, the reasons of this matter of fact may seem obvious. Scientific production is supposed to be ruled by epistemic, not by economic, motives. Scientific output is published and thus delivered for free instead of sold for money. Finally, the output of scientific production consists of information that is semantic and pragmatic in nature. Semantic and pragmatic information resist measurement in technical, i.e. information-theoretic terms.
On closer inspection, these reasons are far from sufficient to prevent an economic account of the industrial production of knowledge. Economic theorizing is definitely not restricted to money driven economies. Science, in particular, shows to be a highly developed economy of production and distribution as soon as it is conceived as a closed economy of attention. In this view, scientists invest their own economizing attention as the most important and most immediate means of scientific production. Scientific communication, on the other hand, shows to work as an exchange of information not only, but as a market where exchange and valuation are interconnected. By being published, the information is made accessible to the general public as well as turned into intellectual property. Reception of the information is free of cost, but not its use as a means of production in ensuing stages of knowledge production. In order to make productive use of a piece of information made accessible through publication, a licence has to be acquired and a fee to be transferred. The licence is acquired by marking the information as a citation, the fee is paid by transferring a part of the attention that the citing author earns to the cited author. The account of citations that an author earns documents his or her income of congenial attention, the number of citations that a piece of information earns document how often it is used as a means of production, thus measuring its productivity or pragmatic value. In contrast to the widespread opinion that scientific information resists measurement, the pragmatic value of scientific output is subject to measurement in the process of citation. Scientists publish for being paid attention in the scientific community.
In scientific production, attention plays a two-fold role. Its first role is that of a scarce resource. It is the capacity of dealing with mental representations in a conscious and controlled way, it is the energy whose economisation is called thought economy. The other role that attention plays in scientific production is that of a gratifying income. You cannot help to vie for this income if you want to make a scientific career. Reputation, prominence and fame are forms of wealth of received attention. As a means of gratification, attention has a remarkable power of motivation. It is nothing less than the self-consciousness we can afford that depends or our income of (recognising) attention. The paper portrays science as an industry characterised by an inbuilt tendency efficiently using the scarce means invested in the production of knowledge. It provides an idea of how the power of science is to be explained to gain cultural leadership in the cultures entertaining an industry dedicated to knowledge production.
Rolien Hoyng
The Net and Emerging Figures of Culture: Informational Politics by Migrants in Istanbul
In this paper I trace alternations to the concept of “culture” in information technological (IT) industries as well as practices of negotiating cultural identity and values in situated informational milieus. In the case I discuss here, of poor, socially-marginalized migrant populations in the city of Istanbul, I argue that these practices can only be understood in the light of cultural imaginaries and social struggles around technology as well as histories of “networking” by means other than IT. Further, I suggest reconsidering identity politics and politics of memory by attending to formative modes of technological use (Bernard Stiegler).
Global informational industries claim to have overcome the global-local opposition, which older media- and cultural industries have been tackling, through software applications and services that, with only minimum localization at the interface, allow for the emergence of interactive networks beyond borders. According to concomitant marketing perspectives, companies do not need to “understand” the user anymore, as desires, interests, values and taste can be identified and registered through the interactive behavior of users. This registration of fluctuating patterns of desire also replaces categorization in segments based on cultural sensitivities still inhabiting the marketing knowledges of, for example, the “glocal” and “hybrid.” Meanwhile, in popular and academic writings, the Net is considered to introduce a new and better form of sociality. Networking seems to dialectically overcome a whole set of binaries between Gemeinshaft and Gesellshaft, or, the autonomized mass society of the West, “lacking culture,” and the “excessively cultured” traditional societies of the East.
The above perspectives are however the constructs of information industries and their ideological supporters; they do not prevent alternative experiences and practices both of “culture” and “networking.” Network culture might indeed challenge conventional notions of culture by abandoning the domains of representational and symbolic meaning and by inducing fractal processes of community forming and a metastable ontology (Tiziana Terranova). Yet we still need to understand the sociocultural processes through which technologies are negotiated and the particular roles of different technologies within media-ecological milieus.
By studying techno-technological practices of migrant populations in Istanbul, I make a situated analysis of power and resistance in media-ecological milieus revolving around issues of connectivity and its breakdown or exclusion, speed/ slowness or immobility, loudness/ stillness or noise. I show how migrants negotiate the values of technocapitalism, residing in speed, mobility and networking potential. Instead of looking at technological renewal, I analyze processes of intermediation: the adaptation of older technologies to newer ones and vice versa (Katherine N. Hayles).
Fatemeh Javaheri
Socioeconomic Efforts of Internet Usage on Iranian Young People
This paper based on meta-analysis method and by connecting the findings of fifteen different researches, makes an attempt to explore some of the socio-cultural effects of using the internet on the youth. The main purpose of this article is to answer the following questions:
- Does using the internet cause any changes in cultural values?
- Does using the internet have any effects on the amount of social relationship of individuals as well as the type of the relationship?
- Does using the internet have any effects on the identity structure of its users?
Findings show that through using the internet, the youth has become familiar with some of the worldwide widespread cultural values such as modernity, feminism, scientific methods as well as consumption of new cultural commodities, and has absorbed them. As a result of this, a difference in viewpoints between the youth and their parents has come to existence.
The internet has had a dual effect on social relationships of individuals. In the short run, using the internet seems to decrease the amount of face to face communication and appears to increase the amount of social isolation; but in the long run, using the internet has not resulted in a decrease in social relationships, and people have been using complementary cyber relationships alongside their concrete relationships. Using the internet has not had any negative effects on remaining faithful to the national identity or family identity; but due to its particular characteristics, the internet has provided itself with a new sphere of advent, a modern identity to form.
Overall, using the internet has brought us a particular type of the socialization process; therefore it has provided the youth with good conditions of development of sub-cultures and accordingly the internet can be considered a source of major socio-cultural changes in Iranian young generations. Keywords: Youth, socio-cultural consequences of internet, Iran.
Aphra Kerr
Reassembling Trust for the Future Internet
This presentation will give a critical introduction to the technologisation and commodification of trust in online environments and asks what are the implications for the design of the ‘future internet’? The Future Internet research agenda is driven by the belief that there is a mismatch between the original design of the internet and the current and future uses of it. Drawing upon an ongoing interdisciplinary research project on the design of future internet services and applications, indepth case studies on user behaviour in online worlds and analysis of European research and policy documents, this presentation asks how are we currently conceptualizing and building trust in online environments and how can we improve design of online environments in the current geo-political context where security is the dominant paradigm.
Tim Kindberg
Facebook Data Provocations
We are a collection of pervasive media developers, researchers, programmers and activists with a common interest in the ethical issues around pervasive applications and data mining. We believe that we all have the right to know what is being done with our data, by whom, and where, and to this end we are developing thought-provoking experiences. This poster will present a conceptual example of our work in progress: a piece designed to make people think about the way that their facebook activity is commodified and used in market research; where participants are involved concretely in the commodification, market analysis and exploitation of their own personal data.
Huey Li Li
Toward Understanding In/attentive Silence in the Virtual Learning Community
Silence is a complex and complicated urban phenomenon. While it is common to view silence as the opposite of speech, silence also compliments speech. After all, silence and speech form a continuum of human communication. Furthermore, silence can be intentional and unintentional. Intentional silence may be a deliberate cultural practice that aims at facilitating introspection and self-discipline. At the same time, the practice presumably unintentional silence may originate from long-term acculturation and embodies semiotic experiences. Both intentional and unintentional silences have multiple meanings that are open to varied interpretations. In effect, D. Kurzon points out that silence is both the signifier and signified. Thus any effort to formulate the final definition of silence can be easily entrapped in an infinite series of regressions.
In educational settings, embodied silence plays an important yet ambiguous role in the formation of school culture. On the other hand, it is a still widely accepted belief that silencing is an indispensible disciplinary act that aims at establishing an ordered milieu for effective teaching and learning. Embodied silence as an educational state during a designated period of time thus reveals and sustains hierarchical power relationships. In online settings, teachers’ concert efforts to engage learners often lead to intolerance of silence because ‘silence’, along with ‘ineffable’ ideas/thoughts have been rendered meaningless in the online classroom. It is not surprising that effective online teachers inadvertently felt compelled to silence online learners’ silence. As a result it is not clear how we (as teachers) could transfer our recognition of pedagogical value of ‘embodied silence’ to online settings. I point out that the formation of most virtual learning communities is not independent of off-line communities. In fact, most virtual learning communities simultaneously sustain and destabilize their corresponding/overlapping offline communities and vice versa. Instead of focusing on reclaiming the primacy of embodied communication or returning to the real-life community, I argue that concerned educators must undertake a more in-depth inquiry into the entanglement of disembodied and embodied communicative processes in the online setting. Above all, it is essential for educators to question the polarization of silence and speech and to challenge the primacy of speech in current discourse on multicultural education.
Gunnar Liestøl
Topos, Topics and Time: Exploring a Potential Genre for Location-Based Media
The paper/demonstration explores the narrative and expressive potential of a prototyped genre tentatively named ‘situated simulations’.
A situated simulation requires a broadband (3G) smartphone with substantial graphics capabilities, GPS-positioning features, accelerometer and electronic compass. In a situated simulation there is approximate identity between the users visual perception of the real physical environment and the users visual perspective into a 3D graphics environment as it is represented on the screen. The relative congruity between the real and the virtual is obtained by letting the camera position and movement in the 3D environment be determined by the positioning and orientation hardware. As the user moves in real space the perspective inside the virtual space changes accordingly.
A situated simulation is closely related to mixed and augmented reality. While mixed reality, including mobile augmented reality (MAR) is characterized by different combinations of virtual and real representations along the reality-virtuality continuum, a situated simulation is a ‘clean screen’ solution where there is a distinct (although minor) difference between the virtual perspective via the device and the real perspective of the user. Current versions of the system runs on Apple’s iPhone 3GS (other platforms are under consideration).
The paper/demonstration will discuss how this potential/prototyped genre reframes the interconnected relationships betwen topics & places, time & spaces in representations of historical material in future digital learning environments, and in particular the epistemological increments caused by such ‘double descriptions’ (Bateson).
Narcisse Mbunzama Lokowa
The role of Social Media tools to Peace and Human rights promotion in Conflict affected countries, case of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Recent innovations in science and technology, especially social Media, have provided human rights advocates, people, journalists, and scientists with new tools to expose war crimes and other serious violations of human rights and disseminate this information in real time throughout the world. People living in rural and conflict affected area in the Democratic Republic of Congo often lack simple but essential tool to expose/ document human rights violations and to receive information about human rights situations in their regions, that could improve their knowledge and toward peace, justice in conflict affected area in Congo.
Francesca Odella
Adolescents’ social communication practices and infringement of norms on the Web: a private or public issue?
Descriptive studies of the social and relational changes induced by the adoption of pervasive technologies in public settings and in the social sphere report relevant transformations of social behaviour (such as grouping and communication in social network sites among the young, profiling or targeting of specific individuals and groups on the Internet). These forms of interaction, however, are not simply a reproduction of traditional forms of socialization but have an impact in personal spheres such as intimate relations and privacy perception, social cohesion and conflict among peers groups, values formation and public participation to the democratic process. Descriptive studies of the social and relational changes induced by the adoption of pervasive technologies in public settings and in the social sphere report relevant transformations of social behaviour (such as grouping and communication in social network sites among the young, profiling or targeting of specific individuals and groups on the Internet). These forms of interaction, however, are not simply a reproduction of traditional forms of socialization but have an impact in personal spheres such as intimate relations and privacy perception, social cohesion and conflict among peers groups, values formation and public participation to the democratic process. Specifically, the young generations are increasingly becoming the target of new forms of interactive communication and interaction which may induce opportunities of individual self-expression in realms such as political and social participation, but also pave the way for the acquisition of new value orientations. By means of an empirical study of adolescents’ networks of communication the paper discuss the privacy implications of contemporary new media and technological driven forms of social participation. In particular, the study will focus on the adolescents’ moral judgment concerning personal communications on the internet and social concerns about the psycho-social impact of new socializing practices.
Simon Poulter
Google will make us free
‘Google Will Make Us Free’ is the premiere of artist Simon Poulter’s new performance lecture. Revealing the obvious, he endeavours to show by means of a threaded narrative that the semantic web and the propagandist web are inextricably linked. Poulter examines the role of Google as a new dominant world power, over-ruling all but a few nation states. Employing comparator analysis, he will examine Google’s algorithms and open source model, alongside the economic liberalization of the world’s oldest civilization China. The performance will employ marxist propaganda and Goggle applications as a form of exposition.
Ben Roberts
Attention-seeking: Technics, Individuation and Distributed Networks
In this paper I will examine the contribution that Bernard Stiegler’s work might make to thinking around attention economies. Stiegler is well known for his recent work on philosophy and technology, in particular the multi-volume work, Technics and Time. Stiegler’s project pursues both the history of technics—from early tools, through writing to tele-technologies—and the philosophy of technics, from Plato to Rousseau, Heidegger and Derrida. What he calls in the first volume, the ‘prosthesis of the human’ is developed through the idea of tertiary memory. Another idea of particular importance to the economy of attention is the process of psychic and collective individuation, a concept which Stiegler derives, like Deleuze, from the work of Gilbert Simondon. In recent work Stiegler has emphasised the link between the process of individuation and the psycho-technologies working for the ‘capture of attention’. In this paper I will critically examine Stiegler’s work around individuation and consider what this way of thinking might offer to contemporary debates about attention economies. I will argue in that his approach can be seen as an important counter to the liberal orientation of many writers about digital culture, where the network is perceived simply as the achievement of, as Yochai Benkler puts it, ‘decentralised individual action’.
Jörgen Skågeby
Gifting Technologies
Gifting technologies are social sharing technologies that acknowledge gifting concerns and intentions. They enable people to find, socialise with, give and profile the content they most care about to designated others. They combine content-oriented and relationship-oriented features.
A technology can be used in a multiplicity of ways, including ways it was not ‘intended’ and there are also many technologies that can be used to accomplish one specific task (Ihde, 1993). This perhaps especially true in sociotechnical settings where social structure, functionality, and end-user activities co-emerge, as is often the case in rapidly evolving social media sharing services. As such, I do not define gifting technologies as tools but more like cultures.
So far many designs for mediated social intentions have been quite self-centred. We believe that there is a great opportunity to describe the world from the perspective of ‘Gifters’. These users are presenting motivations and desires that are not clearly self-oriented. Rather, these are users who, in the trade-off between what is good for me and what is goof for the larger group(s), opt for concerns for others, social relationship maintenance and ambiguous reciprocity as well as more long-term values as self-fulfilment, fun and well-being.
Fredrick Stahlénius
In Debt for Paying Attention? Cellphone Art in the Attention Economy
Whether media ”determine our situation” (Kittler) or are the ”extension” of man (McLuhan), they change the conditions for how we understand ourselves as human beings – and their effects spread to and affect all levels of human life. Photography and film, Walter Benjamin claimed, ”extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives”. Something similar could be said about today’s cell phones, whose sensors for capturing sound, images, position and movement let us discover aspects in everyday life that would otherwise be left unnoticed. The cell phone, Martin Sønderlev Christensen suggests, is ”a window or microscope to life around us”. But what do we see through this window, so strongly governed by the imperatives of the market? More, if we have a look through cell biologist Daniel Fletcher’s ”CellScope”, a high-magnification microscope attachment for cell phones. No more than the cell phone industry allows us to see, if we ask Tomek Kitlinski, Joe Lockard and Stéphane Symons, because ”cellphones silence us”.
In the post-industrial era, analyzed by Félix Guattari, Franco Berardi and Bernard Stiegler, the ”technologies of spirit” direct our attention, as desires and memories are embedded in technology, quickly recalled but easily forgotten. To free ourselves, an ”industrial politics of spirit” is required. ”We need new social and aesthetic practices, new practices of the Self in relation to the foreign, the strange”, Guattari says.
The presence of cell phones in contomporary art not only centers on the use of mobile phones for the production, distribution and consumption of art, but also on the opportunities the mobile phone offers the artwork’s and the artisitc practice’s immediate connection and attention to everyday life: the mobile phone is an ”ideal art machine” curator Dean Terry suggest. Ideal, but characterized by temporal and spatial exclusions, I contest: ”The art of the mobile phone is the art of the hurried, the time starved, the always on /…/, of waiting in lines, sitting in traffic, and mind numbing meetings /…/, the art of the exhausted, overworked American. Rather than the result of long hours of extended reflection it is the art of the pressured moment”.
This talk brings hurried, loud, promising and intimate cell phone art (by artists Unsworn, Misplay, Luc Tuymans, Golan Levin and Dean Terry) in dialogue with modernist visions of mobility, wirelessness and velocity; art’s freedom from or attachment to specific artists, art forms and media, national identities, geographic location, biological norms and cultural conventions. How does cell phones and cell phone art produce signs, affect and ”image acts” (Horst Bredekemp) – vibrations, light, sound – and how can these be understood in an art historical context? What is ”wireless art” and how does it differ from more ”wired” cultural expressions?
Stanza
Surveillance and Co-creativity
Making visual artworks informed by critical analysis of city spaces
Stanza researches data within cities and how this can be represented, visualized and interpreted as artworks. Data from security tracking, traffic, and environmental monitoring can has been used to make artworks. These investigations have created new ways of comparing, conceptualizing and then visualizing complex concepts related to the relationship of emergent data and real space in the built environment.
Stanza has made a series of modular artworks that express the possibilities for our data-mediated future. There are three strands to his working process; this involves collecting the data, visualizing the data, and then displaying the data. The outputs from the online interfaces and online visualizations have been realized as real time dynamic artworks as diverse as installations, and real objects, made out of new display materials re-located back in physical space. In all his artwork he tries to exploit the changing dynamics of city life as a source for creativity to create meaningful artistic metaphors. Stanza utilizes new technologies and integrates new media artworks into the public domain as part of this ongoing research into the visualization of city space. In essence he is researching data as a medium for creativity and how new experiences of our cities may result. His work has focused on new technologies and their relationship to urban space. In recent years he has spent time researching sensors, motes, CCTV, display technologies and interactive architectures. The body of work, ‘The Emergent City’ incorporates investigations into movements of people, the pollution in the air, the vibrations and sounds of city spaces. The archives of this data are controlled via bespoke online interfaces which have been re-formed and recounted into real time experiences, making emergent artworks.
By investigating these data structures Stanza creates new metaphors relevant to the experience of the city and the environment. The patterns we make, the visual and imaginative interpretations we give to real world events, are already being networked into retrievable data structures that can be re-imagined and source for information. These patterns disclose new ways of seeing the world. The value of gathering and re-presenting this data in artistic form, and then analyzing its impact and influence, lies in making meaning accessible to a wider audience.
‘The Emergent City’ has become a series of works that are affecting and effecting incorporating unique patterns that move around as you move around that are based on your data.
Bernard Stiegler
The Pharmacology of Attention and Relational Ecology
As Jeremy Rifkin claims in The Age of Access, attention has become the rarest of things. In fact, all the efforts of the media, from the analogue mass media of the 20th century to the digital social media of the 21st century, are consecrated to the capture and exploitation of attention.
The exploitation of attention can destroy it. There is, however, an alternative: attention can be exploited (and destroyed), or it can be cultivated (and developed). In the former, the attentional techniques or technologies are toxic and, in the latter, empowering. Thus is posed the question of a pharmacology of attention—a question Plato already posed when he examined writing as a pharmakon, that is, as a poison as much as a cure.
In this presentation I will try to show that this question is inscribed within a much vaster question concerning a relational ecology. In this the epoch of relational technologies, which are technologies of transindividuation, what becomes key is establishing a fruitful rapport between the processes of the production of ‘bottom up’ and ‘top down’ metadata.
Tiziana Terranova
The Bios of Attention
The notion of attention has been at a centre of a number of attempts to conceptualize the nature of the information economy, with particular reference to the Internet and new media, but also within a larger genealogy of the capitalist mode of production. The linking of a bio-psychical force such as attention to a rethinking of the economy allows us to map more clearly the tensions which have accumulated over the past forty years on the one hand on the meaning of the ‘economy’ as such, and on the other hand around the bios of subjectivity, as exemplified in the increasing attention paid to the brain within such literature. How is the bios of attention reconfigured for example by starting with the liberal definition of the economy as the allocation of scarce resources rather than with the Marxist definition of the economy as mode of production? What are the possibilities opened by a theory of attention that reconfigures the notion of economic behavior on the basis of non-economic motivations as in theories of social or p2p production? Can a rethinking of the bios of attention as the conatus or desire of the brain, as suggested by the neo-monadological economic psychology of Gabriel Tarde, open up new ways of thinking about economic processes?
Martin Thayne
The Economy of Personal Information
Emerging from a critique of recent celebratory studies of new media (what have been classified as Media Studies 2.0: Tapscott, 2006; Rosen, 2006; Jenkins, 2006; Gauntlett, 2007; Merrin, 2008; Bruns, 2008), I incorporate a Deleuzian conceptual framework to demonstrate the economic motivations associated with the encouragement of user generated material. In particular, I shall examine the Deleuzian concept of ‘control societies’ within the context of how multimedia communication networks may be associated with the ‘re-territorialisation’ of global capitalism. As computer algorithms increasingly collate personal information, ubiquitous interactive technologies not only suggest, influence and promote, they may also begin to produce and ‘sort’ all aspects of networked culture (Lash, 2006; Beer, 2009). This is not to deny the significance of potential forms of empowerment which are played out in participatory cultures, but it does draw attention to the complex nature of user agency. As Terranova has argued, changes to the relationship between production and consumption are played out within a field that is “always and already capitalism” (2004: 79). Consequently, the social and radically novel aspect of these transformations may be persistently undermined or appropriated by economic systems. I suggest, with reference to a range of concrete examples, that digital interactivity is being increasingly implemented into the monetization strategies of user-generated platforms. It is highly lucrative for commercial interests to integrate themselves within online communities in order to extract the financial benefits from the practice of social participation, in addition to stimulating the individual user to interact closely with relevant goods and services. I demonstrate a number of ways that the personal information transferred within these networks may be utilised in an economic context, as well as exploring the technological infrastructure used to do so.
Elizabeth Van Couvering
The Trade in Traffic: Search Engines and Social Media
For many years, search engines have dominated the public internet; they have been the most widely-visited websites on the Internet and they have provided an essential source of visitors to retailers and publishers alike, becoming some of the largest and most profitable online companies. Recently, however, visits to social media websites have increased to the point where they are beginning to overtake search engines as the most popular online properties, and relations between search engines and social media websites. The rise of social media networks has implications for search engines but it is not clear whether search engines will end up competing with, co-ooperating with, or co-opting social networks.
This talk offers a political economic analysis of the relations between search and social media, taking as its foundation the concept that traffic is the key commodity for online media (see Van Couvering, 2008). It contrasts the navigational media model of search with the model of social media websites, specifically Facebook and Twitter, and analyses the parallels and differences between them, showing how the social media networks capitalize on and trade in traffic with the search engines, and how social media are incorporating search-like functionality and vice versa. While most social media websites remain in private hands, only limited information is available about the economic value of the trade in traffic between social media and search, but it is undoubtedly increasing and the relations between these two sets of actors will be hugely important for the overall content structure of digital media going forward.
