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 –…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Sarah Barns Institute 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…
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…
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…
Orit Halpern Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University Gökçe Günel School 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…