FCJManager
FCJ-160 Politics is Serious Business: Jacques Rancière, Griefing, and the Re-Partitioning of the (Non)Sensical
Steve Holmes. Department of English, George Mason University. [Abstract] Lulzpolitik ‘We do not sleep, we do not eat, and we do not feel remorse. We will tear you apart from outside and in, we have all the time in the world.’ (Anonymous) Trolling is a difficult phenomenon to classify in terms of its political orientation. Some researchers such as John Kelley (2011) suggest that groups like Anonymous can be situated within the anarchist political tradition. Anarchists tend to privilege bottom-up, decentralized, and horizontal networks over top-down state or corporate control (Graeber 2004), and a similar attitude and organizational structure are evident in many of Anonymous’ past activities. Others are more skeptical. E. Gabriella Coleman (2011) notes that trolls’ cyberactivism lacks a singular agenda and a sustained commitment to political coordination with other actors and institutions. Along different lines, Lincoln Dahlberg (2001) has questioned whether trolls can be considered as valid…
FCJ-165 Obama Trolling: Memes, Salutes and an Agonistic Politics in the 2012 Presidential Election
Benjamin Burroughs University of Iowa [Abstract] If the 2008 American Presidential election is known for being the first modern Internet campaign, then perhaps the 2012 American election should be known as the first real social media campaign. While social networking was a major part of the 2008 campaign, with users enacting socio-technical linkages primarily between Youtube and Facebook walls (Robertson, 2010); the increasing pervasiveness of mimetic communication melded with social networking has once again impacted the political landscape. From ‘Big Bird’ to ‘binders full of women’ (and the made-for-meme Obama ‘Bayonets’ line) memes riff in real-time on contemporary politics. What is different about 2012 is the intersection between the technology, the architectural affordances of social networking platforms, and the penetration of a larger trolling culture. Trolling is colloquially understood as a negative behaviour, particularly amongst traditional media, that desires to bully and vilify unsuspecting netizens, all in the name of…
FCJ-156 Hacking the Social: Internet Memes, Identity Antagonism, and the Logic of Lulz.
Ryan M. Milner College of Charleston [Abstract] Violentacrez and the Antagonistic Internet ‘A troll exploits social dynamics like computer hackers exploit security loopholes…’ (Adrian Chen, 2012 October 12) In October 2012, reddit – a popular link aggregation service and public discussion forum – was embroiled in a prominent controversy. Adrian Chen, a journalist for the news site Gawker, had just revealed the ‘offline’ identity of Violentacrez, one of reddit’s ‘most reviled characters but also one if its most beloved users’ (Chen, 2012 October 12). Violentacrez, who Chen calls ‘the biggest troll on the web’, was responsible for reddit pages (called ‘subreddits’) like ‘r/Jailbait’ (sexualised photos of young girls) and ‘r/Creepshots’ (sexualised photos of women taken in public without their consent). Chen accuses Violentacrez of releasing ‘an unending fountain of racism, porn, gore, misogyny, incest, and exotic abominations yet unnamed’ to reddit. To Chen, Violentacrez ‘hacked’ social dynamics with his posts,…
FCJ-153 Multimedia Mixing and Real-time Collaboration: Interview with Sher Doruff about the development and use of KeyWorx, the Translocal and Polyrhythmic Diagrams
Sher Doruff Amsterdam School for the Arts. Andrew Murphie University of New South Wales. Video: Interfacing/Radiotopia/KeyWorx (DEAF03) Andrew Murphie: I am interested in your background, in how you see your own movement through the use of media. Something I find really interesting is your work with the translocal and the collaborative. I’m also interested in why you are thinking about moving this towards a more directly material practice. [1] Sher Doruff: Yes! (laughs) Caught in a transitional vacuum! Would you want a little bit of a history? Is that helpful? Andrew: Yes, that would be fantastic. Sher: I went to art school from ’68 to ’72. I was attracted to what was then emerging, which was conceptual art. But I was unhappy with my art department. So I switched to the philosophy department. In my junior year a new faculty was hired in the art department and they…
FCJ-152 Entertaining the environment: a conversation
Andrew Goodman. Monash University, Melbourne. Erin Manning. Concordia University, Montréal. Andrew: Erin, before we discuss the implications of ‘Entertaining the environment’ [1] with an artwork or event, I thought we could perhaps start with a brief outline of how you arrived at the concept? Erin: I think the concept has been lurking in the sidelines of my practice for some time. It began to take form around questions of interactivity, particularly around technologically innovative art projects that themselves question how art tackles notions of participation. Two issues seemed most salient for me in this turn toward the technological: 1. How do we not become too entranced by the technology itself, bending to its needs—how, as artists, do we not fall prey to feeling as though it is technology that provides the experience. Or, put differently, how do we not fall prey to the idea that it is technology that supplies…
FCJ-150 AffeXity: Performing Affect with Augmented Reality
Susan Kozel. MEDEA and the School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University, Sweden. AffeXity AffeXity is an enquiry into affect in cities, and a-fixity as an urban condition. It is an artistic research project, but really it is a set of overlapping practices: artistic practices of dance improvisation, video shooting, digital image editing and sound composition, combined with the daily practices of moving through a city and using mobile devices. Add to this bundle the applied technical research of developing applications for mobile devices and the practices of writing and reflecting on all of the processes, and you have an unwieldy assemblage. The entire project is animated by explorations of affect. It is in constant motion, exceeding both the artistic direction or conceptual coherence that attempt to structure it. [1] This project opens implications for interaction design: designing affectively and designing for affect are two different things. It is possible…
FCJ-151 The modulation and ordering of affect: from emotion recognition technology to the critique of class composition
Mark Gawne. Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Sydney. Introduction: ordering affect and the question of labour Recent developments in the workplace have seen the intensification of methods to elicit and capture value within and across the affective encounter, notably through the introduction of technologies to measure the production of emotion by service workers. One of the most compelling examples of such methods is the ‘smile-scan’ – a technology developed by Japanese company OMRON to read and measure the intensity of facial expression in the workplace. Through an analysis of the use of OMRON’s OKAO Vision smile scans in workplaces, this paper seeks to understand the insertion of particular affective technologies into the technical composition of capital and their role in the ordering of affect. In the post-Fordist condition, the role of affect has emerged as a central point of contestation, since the capacity to produce relationships and…
FCJ-149 Affect and Care in Intimate Transactions
Lone Bertelsen. This article considers the ‘co-affective’ power (Ettinger, 2011: 13) of the new media artwork Intimate Transactions. Keith Armstrong (2005), artistic director of the Transmute Collective—the creators of Intimate Transactions—describes Intimate Transactions as collaborative, ecological, and concerned with relation. [1] In its most recent incarnation Intimate Transactions takes the form of a ‘dual site networked installation’—‘two people’ participate in the artwork from ‘two different locations’ (Armstrong, n.d.). In Sydney, where I encountered the work, these locations were the Performance Space in Redfern and Artspace in Woolloomooloo. [2] Participants engage with Intimate Transactions through active ‘full body’ movement. Through this, they engage with the animated ‘creatures’ in the ‘virtual environment[s]’ on a large screen (Armstrong, 2005; Hamilton and Lavery, 2006: 2). At times it is also possible to collaborate in a networked, ‘moving together’ with the other person (Massumi in Massumi and Zournazi, 2002: 223). This ‘moving together’ affects what…
FCJ-148 Affect and the Medium of Digital Data.
Adam Nash. RMIT University, Melbourne. Figure 1: Screenshot from *Autoscopia* by Justin Clemens, Christopher Dodds, Adam Nash, 2009-present: generated portrait of Adam Nash. Image and permissions provided by Adam Nash. Introduction This paper attempts a technical analysis of the medium of digital data to establish how affect may emerge in that medium. Two central questions here are, first, whether it is possible for two immanently digital entities to establish an affect cycle with each other, and, second, how this relates to affect cycles established between digital data and non-digital entities? It should be possible to build artworks that can test certain of their own intrinsic properties in both these respects. The author had a hand in creating some such artworks, and these are examined later in this paper. [1] The constant movement of data in a process of modulation, demodulation and remodulation is one of the defining characteristics of the digital…
Issue 21: Exploring affect in interaction design, interaction-based art and digital art
The notion of affect does take many forms, and you’re right to begin by emphasizing that. To get anywhere with the concept, you have to retain the manyness of its forms. It’s not something that can be reduced to one thing. Mainly, because it’s not a thing. It’s an event, or a dimension of every event. What interests me in the concept is that if you approach it respecting its variety, you are presented with a field of questioning, a problematic field, where the customary divisions that questions about subjectivity, becoming, or the political are usually couched in do not apply. (Massumi, Of Microperception and Micropolitics, 2009, p. 1) The aim of this special issue of the Fibreculture Journal is to address some of the contemporary challenges involved in working with affect across disciplines and practices that centre on the use of interactive- or digital technologies. The issue has a…
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