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FCJ-173 Being and Media: digital ontology after the event of the end of media
Justin Clemens University of Melbourne Adam Nash RMIT University [Abstract] Everything is Digital Today, everything is digital and the digital is everything. Surely such a totalising, yet reductive, assertion can’t be right, even if we accepted that it had any sense? What about rocks and stones and trees? The great eighteenth-century literary critic Dr Johnson famously responded to Bishop Berkeley’s idealist, ‘immaterialist’ philosophy broached in A Treatise Concerning Human Understanding by kicking a boulder and declaring “I refute it thus!” (Boswell, 238). Such a naturalist rejoinder has found its contemporary avatars in the field of media studies under a variety of names, ranging from Bruno Latour and Actor-Network-Theory [1] to Luciano Floridi’s philosophy of information (Latour, 2007; Floridi, 2014). Despite their manifest, manifold differences, what unites such projects is their commitment to fundamentally naturalistic redescriptions of the complex interactions of trans-human agents. They are directed at displacing ‘the human’ from…
FCJ-173 Being and Media: digital ontology after the event of the end of media
Justin Clemens University of Melbourne Adam Nash RMIT University [Abstract] Everything is Digital Today, everything is digital and the digital is everything. Surely such a totalising, yet reductive, assertion can’t be right, even if we accepted that it had any sense? What about rocks and stones and trees? The great eighteenth-century literary critic Dr Johnson famously responded to Bishop Berkeley’s idealist, ‘immaterialist’ philosophy broached in A Treatise Concerning Human Understanding by kicking a boulder and declaring “I refute it thus!” (Boswell, 238). Such a naturalist rejoinder has found its contemporary avatars in the field of media studies under a variety of names, ranging from Bruno Latour and Actor-Network-Theory [1] to Luciano Floridi’s philosophy of information (Latour, 2007; Floridi, 2014). Despite their manifest, manifold differences, what unites such projects is their commitment to fundamentally naturalistic redescriptions of the complex interactions of trans-human agents. They are directed at displacing ‘the human’ from…
Issue 24: Images and Assemblages
Editorial: Possible worlds It is worth paying attention to images. Picture opening the pages of a neglected book and finding an image of some bland nineteenth century industrial dreamscape with a small black smudge in the bottom left corner. Clues to the future of the world can be found in this microcosm; a sooty mark left by over-heated carbon as it drifted down to the surface of the page. Impossible to erase from either the page or the history of its own making the soot is a terrible troublemaker; together with the humans who learnt to manufacture it, it is a locus of anxiety and concern. In looking closely at this small sketch I find documentation of the transformations of the biosphere; mundane media twisted into a networked and sustaining dialogue that points towards something of the possible world to come. Even with their backs turned, images continue to have…
Call For Papers – Special Issue for the Fibreculture Journal – Computing the City
https://fibreculturejournal.org https://fibreculturejournal.org/cfp-computingthecity CFP Computing the City_(PDF) Please note that for this issue, initial submissions should be abstracts only Issue Editors: Armin Beverungen and Florian Sprenger abstract deadline: 20 April, 2015 article deadline: 1 July, 2015 publication aimed for: early 2016 all contributors and editors must read the guidelines at: https://fibreculturejournal.org/policy-and-style/ before working with the Fibreculture Journal Email correspondence for this issue: armin.beverungen@leuphana.de, florian.sprenger@leuphana.de CFP- Special Issue for the Fibreculture Journal: Computing the City Edited By Armin Beverungen and Florian Sprenger Ubiquitous computing is often referred to as a prime example not only of a new mode of computing, but of a new paradigm of mediation itself. The ‘smart city’ is promoted as its primary site of materialisation: the integration of computational systems with architectural design turns inefficient urban settings into smart cities that manifest as the penultimate value-extraction machines. This themed issue focuses specifically on the pre-history of ubiquitous computing, its…
New Issue – FCJ-23
I’m pleased to announce the launch of Issue 23 of The Fibreculture Journal edited by Andrew Murphie and including papers from: Ted Mitew: FCJ-168 Do objects dream of an internet of things? Stephen Monteiro: FCJ-169 Mapping Moving-Image Culture: Topographical Interface and YouTube Benjamin Abraham: FCJ-170 Challenging Hate Speech With Facebook Flarf: The Role of User Practices in Regulating Hate Speech on Facebook Craig Norris: FCJ-171 Expectations denied: Fan and industry conflict around the localisation of the Japanese video game Yakuza 3 and a converastion with N. Katherine Hayles by Holger Pötzsch : FCJ-172 Posthumanism, Technogenesis, and Digital Technologies: A Conversation with N. Katherine Hayes In other news we have been very busy behind the scenes this year. Issue 23 is one of three General Issues that were put together in response to our Contemporary Issues and Events CFP from earlier this year. The second two issues in this series will be…
FCJ-172 Posthumanism, Technogenesis, and Digital Technologies: A Conversation with N. Katherine Hayles
Holger Pötzsch UiT Tromsø N. Katherine Hayles Duke University [Abstract] Holger Pötzsch: Katherine Hayles, your idea of posthumanism is inspired by cybernetics and by a new attentiveness to the body and materiality? N. Katherine Hayles: Posthumanism as I define it in my book How We Became Posthuman (1999) was in part about the deconstruction of the liberal humanist subject and the attributes normally associated with it such as autonomy, free will, self determination and so forth. What I saw happening in the 1980s and 1990s was the rise of a new way of thinking about human beings that was in flat contradiction to all these attributes; that was what I called posthumanism. One of its manifestations was the idea that if you capture the informational patterns of the human brain, you could then upload it to a computer and achieve effective immortality. To me this seemed absolutely wrong, even pernicious,…
FCJ-171 Expectations denied: Fan and industry conflict around the localisation of the Japanese video game Yakuza 3
Craig Norris University of Tasmania [Abstract] Introduction As various scholars (Jenkins, 2006a; Ito, 2007; Gray, 2010) have shown, fans can derive creative and emotional pleasure out of the ‘world building’ occurring in complex media franchises like Pirates of the Caribbean (Jenkins, 2007), and Star Wars (Brooker, 2002). Media industries are also increasingly valuing the contributions fans are making to these large media franchises. As Joshua Green and Henry Jenkins (2009: 213) have pointed out, ‘fans have been redefined as the drivers of wealth production within the new digital economy: their engagement and participation is actively being pursued.’ As this research has shown, although audiences engage deeply and passionately with these large fictional worlds there is a growing expectation among fans that they will have some freedom to use and access this content in a way which best suits them. Within this context, online fan cultures have provided researchers with a…
FCJ-170 Challenging Hate Speech With Facebook Flarf: The Role of User Practices in Regulating Hate Speech on Facebook
Benjamin Abraham University of Western Sydney [Abstract] Introduction A recent spate of high profile cases of online abuse has raised awareness of the amount, volume and regularity of abuse and hate speech that women and minorities routinely attract online. These range from the responses garnered by Anita Sarkeesian’s (2012; 2014) video series ‘Tropes vs. Women in Video Games,’ which included photoshopped images of Sarkeesian made to appear bruised and brutalised, (Lewis, 2012) to the abuse directed at the activist Caroline Criado-Perez following her campaign to have a woman represented on a UK banknote (Guardian Staff, 2014), to the countless instances of more pernicious ‘Everyday Sexism’ documented by the activist group of the same name. As a result of these and a host of similar recent events, it has become increasingly apparent that online abuse and instances of hate speech directed at women, people of colour, transgender individuals and other minorities…
FCJ-169 Mapping Moving-Image Culture: Topographical Interface and YouTube
Stephen Monteiro The American University of Paris [Abstract] Navigation and mobility are defining characteristics of the contemporary media experience. Unlike the rigid, easily learned parameters of earlier media forms, global digital networks offer increasingly complex and constantly changing exchanges, formations, and compilations of information. Through a combination of hardware design and integrated software a range of devices including smartphones, tablets, and netbooks are as much navigational instruments as they are communicative tools (Verhoeff, 2012; Farman, 2011). These devices and their effects are meant to get us places, whether objectively through geo-positioning and locative technologies or subjectively through operations and platforms that retrieve, analyse, and display data in response to our commands and presumed goals. In theorizing interfaces, Alexander Galloway points to effects as their critical component. ‘Interfaces are not simply objects or boundary points. They are autonomous zones of activity. Interfaces are not things, but rather processes that effect a…
FCJ-168 Do objects dream of an internet of things?
Teodor Mitew University of Wollongong [Abstract] Heteroclite I: Hermes, a walking statue In a fragment of a comedy by Plato Comicus, a statue of Hermes stumbles onstage and must answer the skeptic’s question: ‘Who are you? Tell me at once. Why are you silent? Won’t you speak?’ To which the statue replies, ‘I am Hermes, with a voice of Daedalus, made of wood, but I came here by walking on my own’. (Daston, 2004: 39) I may speak with the voice of my maker, but I came here on my own. I may be enunciating the agency of another, but have agency of my own too. In the Greek view of being, possessing a spirit was synonymous with having a voice, and therefore entities that appeared to be superficially inanimate yet had a voice signaled a transgression of the rules of occupancy, a deviation from the parameters of being, a…
Future Issues and Archives
Connections
- ARCDigital
- C-Theory
- Cntr History & New Media
- CoDE
- Computational Culture
- Cosmos and History
- Ctrl-Z
- Culture Machine
- Digital Culture and Ed…
- Digital Humanities Alliance
- Digital Studies
- Eludamos
- Film-Philosophy
- First Monday
- Future of the Book
- Hyperrhiz
- Inflexions
- Institute of Net Cultures
- Jrnal Digital Information
- Junctures
- nmediac
- Noema
- Open Humanities Alliance
- Open Humanities Press
- Parrhesia
- Public Library of Science
- Sarai
- Transformations
- Vague Terrain
