FCJ-181 There’s a History for That: Apps and Mundane Software as Commodity

Jeremy Wade Morris and Evan Elkins University of Wisconsin-Madison [Abstract] Introduction I Am Rich was first released in August 2008 in Apple’s iOS App store for $999 (Milian, 2008). The program’s only function, other than displaying an image of a jewel, was a self-congratulatory message that read ‘I am rich, I deserv it, I am good, healthy & successful [sic].’ It was reportedly purchased 8 times before Apple removed it from the store. I Am Rich could be read as clever commentary on conspicuous consumption (Veblen, 1965) in an era of digital and ephemeral goods or dismissed as a trivial piece of software – a novelty joke like an electric shock pen or a whoopee cushion (both of which, incidentally, you can also find as apps). However, these readings of the app’s limited functionality and ostentatious pricing miss a much larger story about the way apps have radically reconfigured the…

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FCJ-180 ‘Spotify Has Added an Event to Your Past’: (Re)writing the Self through Facebook’s Autoposting Apps

Tanya Kant University of Sussex, Brighton, UK [Abstract] ‘The film you quote. The songs you have on repeat. The activities you love. Now there’s a new class of social apps that let you express who you are through all the things you do’ (Facebook, 2014). Introduction: Performing the Self in the ‘Like’ Economy Facebook’s apps network – an ‘ecosystem’ designed to ‘deeply integrate’ (Zuckerberg, 2011) commercial lifestyle, gaming, entertainment and shopping applications into Facebook – is a key component of Facebook Inc.’s current operational and economic infrastructure. As Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly emphasised during the 2014 F8 conference keynote, Facebook apps play an essential role in Facebook Inc.’s newest expansion strategy – that is, to become a ‘cross-platform platform’ (Zuckerberg et al., 2014) that connects not just friends, family and acquaintances but the millions of platforms, websites, ‘stacks’ and services that currently constitute the web. To date, the external products and…

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FCJ-179 On Governance, Blackboxing, Measure, Body, Affect and Apps: A conversation with Patricia Ticineto Clough and Alexander R. Galloway

Svitlana Matviyenko University of Western Ontario Patricia Ticineto Clough Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY Alexander R. Galloway New York University [Abstract] Introduction The work of these two authors is well known to anyone whose research concerns matters of affect and biopolitics, software, networks and gaming, interface culture and communication, political economy of media and information, the systems of measure and control addressed in the contexts of French theory, feminist and speculative thought, Marxism or psychoanalysis. We were lucky to have them among the keynotes for our Apps and Affect conference, where their talks sparked an interesting exchange that impacted a number of the conference conversations. Afterwards, I suggested to Patricia and Alex that they elaborate on aspects of their discussion; this invitation resulted in the following conversation, which took place via email between April and December 2014. Patricia Ticineto Clough is a Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Queens College and…

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Issue 25: Apps and Affect

Introduction [1] In William Gibson’s recent futurist novel The Peripheral, the planet has been devastated by a massive eco-techno-political catastrophe (‘the jackpot’) but remaining inhabitants are still able to enjoy the luxury of activating digital devices simply by tapping their tongues on the roof of their mouths. This touch is sufficient to set into play systems that communicate across space and time – enabling the establishment of connections back in time, for example, to people closer to our own present-day, for whom mobiles are still (somewhat) separate from the body. Thirty years ago, in his first novel Neuromancer, Gibson immortalised cyberspace with the account of what now sounds like an amazingly clunky process whereby the hero ‘jacks-in’ to virtual reality. But in The Peripheral the process of translation and transition into networks is streamlined – occluded, internal, intimate and implanted – right at the tip of the tongue. This issue…

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Announcing FCJ24: 2015 Images and Assemblages

We at the Fibreculture Journal are very happy to announce the second of three in a series of issues that developed out of a general call at the end of last year. FCJ24 Images and Assemblages edited by Su Ballard (University of Wollongong) is now live. Issue 24 features contributions from Torsten Andreasen, William Brown, Justin Clemens,  David H. Fleming, Troy Innocent, Adam Nash, Teresa Rizzo, Audrey Samson and Winnie Soon.

FCJ-178 Network Affordances: The unpredictable parameters of a Hong Kong SPEED SHOW

Audrey Samson City University of Hong Kong Winnie Soon Aarhus University [Abstract] Introduction Internet-based activities like social communications, money transactions, education, and entertainment are increasingly inseparable from everyday life. Artists work with and within this banal network and explore its affordances to address network technologies, politics, aesthetics, and culture. This paper examines the notion of network affordance, a term used in the field of Human Computer Interaction and Software Studies, within the context of network art. Building on James Gibson’s theory of affordance in the context of psychology, we understand affordance as the directly perceived parameters and properties of things in an environment (Gibson, 1977: 127). The study of parameters and properties is useful in comprehending the affordances of network technologies. In the context of design, William Gaver discusses the interactivity between things and users with what he calls the affordance of predictability (Gaver, 1996). Both Gibson and Gaver call…

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FCJ-177 Television Assemblages

Teresa Rizzo University of Sydney [Abstract] Introduction It is an understatement to say that television and television culture have undergone a dramatic transformation over the last decade. As little as ten years ago typical Australian viewers would sit in front of the television set at a particular time to watch their favourite show. If they wanted to record a programme they would have to go through an elaborate process which included: searching the scheduled programme time and then entering the start and end dates and times on a video recorder; rummaging for a free tape and making sure the video recorder was left on. Today, by contrast, viewers can access their favourite shows in a number of different ways, on a variety of platforms and devices, at a time of their choosing. New forms of digital television have emerged, including Internet television and IPTV, that offer new ways of accessing…

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FCJ-176 A Skeuomorphic Cinema: Film Form, Content and Criticism in the ‘Post-Analogue’ Era

David H. Fleming University of Nottingham Ningbo, China William Brown University of Roehampton, London [Abstract] In like manner a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can freely express himself in it only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use of the new. (Karl Marx, 2000: 327) In this essay we utilise a ‘digitally detoured’ notion of the ‘skeuomorph’ to better understand the ‘gaseous’ form and content of contemporary cinema, arguing in particular that this concept entails various nuances that make it a more fecund framework through which to consider the aesthetics of digital cinema. Looking in particular at digital cinematography and performance, we argue that because of its emphasis on concealed and/or misunderstood novelty, the skeuomorphic framework yields…

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FCJ-175 Humans at play in the Anthropocene

Troy Innocent Swinburne University of Technology [Abstract] culture arises in the form of play, that it is played from the very beginning. Even in those activities which aim at the immediate satisfaction of vital needs , €“hunting, for instance, €“tend, in archaic society, to take on the play-form. Social life is endued with supra-biological forms, the shape of play, which enhance its value. It is through this play that society expresses its interpretation of life and the world (Huizinga, 1949 : 46). Introduction The Anthropocene marks ‘a new phase in the history of both humankind and of the Earth, where natural forces and human forces become intertwined.’ (Zalasiewicz 2010: 2231). It is the current time in which human processes such as culture and language, the use of tools and technology, are acknowledged as part of the earth’s ecology, €“and as integral to the operations and behaviours of the earth’s ecology…

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FCJ-174 Constructing the contemporary via digital cultural heritage

Torsten Andreasen University of Copenhagen [Abstract] The digital cultural heritage archive appeared in the discourse of cultural heritage around the beginning of the new millennium and did so with certain specific goals, €”the digital preservation of and accessibility to cultural heritage should serve global tolerance, strengthen regional and national identity and, finally, inspire entrepreneurial creativity and innovation. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the predominant global agent of cultural heritage since the Second World War, has tended to express the potential use-value of cultural heritage by appropriating a quote from Arjun Appadurai: ‘Culture is the resource that society needs to move from today to tomorrow’ (UNESCO, 2010: 7). According to this discursive formation, operated internationally by UNESCO in parallel with its supranational and national counterparts, digital cultural heritage has a specific strategic temporality, €”the digital construction of the past as a force driving the present into the…

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