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FCJ-228 University, Universitas
Erin Manning SenseLab, Concordia University, Canada [Abstract] It cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightment. (Moten and Harney, 2009: 145) Nothing About Us Without Us! (Charlton, 2000) Universities have a long history. The mantra of the universitas – ‘the whole, the universe, the world’ – has moved thinkers across the centuries: the university of al-Qarawiyyin, in Fez, Morocco, was founded in 859 followed by Al-Azhar University, in Cairo, Egypt, in 972. The first in Europe, the University of Bologna (the oldest university still in existence), opened its doors in 1088. In 1636, Harvard University became the first university in the United States. In The History of American Higher Education, Roger Geiger (2014) demonstrates how in the context of the United States, universities have evolved over ten or eleven generations from the religious college…
FCJ-224 Design Thinking, Design Activism, Design Study
Maria Hynes The Australian National University, Australia [Abstract] But we won’t stand corrected. Moreover, incorrect as we are there’s nothing wrong with us. (Harney and Moten, 2013: 20) In their consideration of the contribution of academic labour to what they call the ‘social reproduction of conquest denial’, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten isolate a number of factors. They examine modes of intellectual practice that deny: the ‘incessant and irreversible intellectuality’ that was already there; political practices that, claiming to engage in just redistribution, wish to think away the division of private and public and, with it, the unpayable debts at the heart of the social; and forms of criticality that deny the underlabour that makes the social being of critical academics possible. To these characteristic forms of labour practiced in the university they oppose a somewhat idiosyncratic sense of ‘study’: ‘study is what you do with other people. It’s talking…
FCJ-223 Fugitively, Approximately
Erin Manning SenseLab, Concordia University, Canada [Abstract] Two phrases haunt my thinking. The first comes from Fred Moten: all black life is neurodiverse life. It might also have been black life is always neurodiverse life. The second is approximation of proximity. The feeling is that the ambiguity of memory in the first has a connection to the approximation of the second. Moten’s words, written in a manuscript review before the publication of The Minor Gesture in 2016 felt vitally important when I received them. But The Minor Gesture was already too close to completion to fully carry the force of the proposition, and so, while I did signal it in the book, I decided to make Moten’s words the fugitive force of the thinking to follow. I say fugitive force both to carry forward Moten and Harney’s concept of fugitivity, and to emphasize that this is how work comes into…
FCJ-227 Survey and Project: On the (Im)possibility of Scholarship in an Era of Networked Knowledge
Glen Fuller University of Canberra, Australia [Abstract] Researchers concerned with networks have engaged with a variety of conceptual and technical problems and areas of interest. Fibreculture’s key focus has been any and all manifestations of network culture, with a particular interest in media. Our interest in scholarly publishing – both this journal, books and experimental forms – has long been as advocates for open access. We have critically engaged with shifts in the technologies of editorial production, publishing and then storage and retrieval. The changes to the systems of scholarly and intellectual publishing over the last 30 years mean that academics, scholars and intellectuals of all types now have access to a huge array of material either with open or closed (paid) access. Let’s call it the Google Scholar Effect. (Of course, it is more than the effect of Google Scholar and Google Scholar has its own specificities.) Writing in…
FCJ-226 ‘And they are like wild beasts’:[1] Violent Things in the Anthropocene
Susan Ballard School of the Arts, English and Media, University of Wollongong [Abstract] Disappearance At the opening of the temporary Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2010 there was a room curtained off from all the others. Looking behind the curtain I found two chairs, headphones, a silently meditative voice, a highly-reflective dark blue leaning-yet-standing wooden panel, a rug, and a humming slide projection of an old ballroom. Of all the various objects somehow existing together for this moment, it was the chairs that held my attention. They were just chairs but they seemed important. The work was Circular Facts (2009, figure 2) by New Zealand artist Ruth Buchanan: an installation based on the script of a performance Buchanan staged after researching the strange and highly publicised disappearance of British writer Agatha Christie. [2] In 1926 Christie vanished for eleven days until she ‘was found staying in a hotel under a…
FCJ-225 One Definite Note and the Anarchic Share of Listening
Andrew Goodman La Trobe University, Australia [Abstract] What you listen to or what you’re reading is still moving and still living. It’s still forming. (Harney and Moten, 2013: 107) Music charms us, even though its beauty consists only in the harmonics of numbers and in a calculation that we are not aware of, but which the soul nevertheless carries out, a calculation concerned with the beats or vibrations of sounding bodies, which are encountered at certain intervals. (Leibniz, 1994: 212) Every room has its own melody, hiding there until it is made audible. (Lucier & Simon, 2012: 31) Introduction: A Sonic Can of Worms Alfred North Whitehead’s opus Process and Reality devotes slightly more than one page to the question of the audition of sound (1978: 233-5). [1] Whitehead slyly defines this as a ‘simple’ example that avoids any ‘unnecessary complexity’. In fact he opens a can of (vibratory) worms….
FCJ-214 Visions of Urban Informatics: From Proximate Futures to Data-Driven Urbanism
Sarah BarnsInstitute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University [Abstract] Introduction Urban informatics, the nascent field that took as its subject the urban contexts of increasingly connected, smartphone-enabled citizens, is ten years old. Armed with tools of digital experimentation, data science, and design, equipped to decipher and decode complex urban environments, the field is increasingly positioned as a vital contributor to the contemporary urban sciences. The proliferation of distributed computing throughout our cities presents seemingly unlimited opportunities to explore and interrogate the workings of the city using novel methods of information retrieval, analysis and visualisation. Reflecting this opportunity, investment in urban informatics research capability is growing. In 2012, three significant research institutes focused on establishing city-focused data sciences capabilities were created in New York alone, [1] joining existing groups such as Queensland University of Technology’s Urban Informatics Research Lab and the MIT SENSEable City Lab in promoting the applications of…
FCJ-216 ‘Know Your Place’: headmap manifesto and the Vision of Locative Media
Dale Leorke Melbourne School of Design, The University of Melbourne [Abstract] What is the point of all the extraordinary technical inventions the world now has at its disposal if the conditions are lacking to derive any benefit from them, if they contribute nothing to leisure, if imagination is absent? Constant Nieuwenhuys, ‘Another City for Another Life’ (2006/1960: 71) Introduction When the headmap manifesto first appeared in 1999, Google was barely a year old, the U.S. government had not yet removed the GPS signal degradation that prevented its widespread commercial use, and Apple’s iPhone was still almost a decade away. Predominantly written by computer engineer Ben Russell, headmap (always spelt in lower case, although I capitalise it here when beginning a sentence) envisioned a world not entirely unlike the one we inhabit today, in which location-aware devices have radically transformed everyday life. It foreshadows recent developments from the emergence of location-based…
FCJ-213 Babylonian Dreams: From Info-Cities to Smart Cities to Experimental Collectivism
Clemens Apprich Leuphana University, Lüneburg. [Abstract] Welcome to post-liberal Los Angeles, where the defense of luxury lifestyles is translated into proliferation of new repressions in space and movement, undergirded by the ubiquitous “armed response”. This obsession with physical security systems, and, collaterally, with the architectural policing of social boundaries, has become a zeitgeist of urban restructuring, a master narrative in the emerging built environment of the 1990s. […] Images of carceral inner cities (Escape from New York, Running Man), high-tech police death squads (Blade Runner), sentient buildings (Die Hard), urban bantustans (They live!), Vietnam-like street wars (Colors), and so on, only extrapolate from actually existing trends. (Davis, 1990: 223) In his bestselling book City of Quartz, Mike Davis, urban sociologist and rigorous chronicler of his Southern California home, described the imminent end of the ‘California Dream’ in the early 1990s (cf. Davis, 1990). By ‘excavating the future in Los Angeles’…
FCJ-215 Demoing unto Death: Smart Cities, Environment, and Preemptive Hope
Orit HalpernDepartment of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University Gökçe GünelSchool of Middle Eastern and North African Studies, University of Arizona [Abstract] Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living.(Nicholas Negroponte, 1995: 6) Today, growing concerns with climate change, energy scarcity, security, and economic collapse have turned the focus of urban planners, investors, and governments towards infrastructure as a site of value production and potential salvation from a world consistently defined by catastrophes and crisis. From discussions about ‘disaster capitalism’ to the embrace of a world after humans, the idea that some environmental, economic, or security catastrophe has arrived, or will arrive, is almost unquestioned. In response, there has emerged a new paradigm of high technology infrastructure development obsessed with ‘smart’, ‘ubiquitous’, or ‘resilient’ infrastructures. Such smartness and resilience must be understood as quite specific as it directly refers to computationally and digitally-managed systems – from electrical grids…
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