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FCJ-020 Marginal Networks: The Virus between Complexity and Suppression
Roberta Buiani York University, Canada ‘What is a Margin ?’ I asked a friend recently. You know what a margin is” she replied “It’s outside the body of the text. It’s what holds the page together. Also,” she added, “It’s where you write your notes.’ (Berland, 1997) Introduction In a recent article, Sampson suggested that the metaphoric relocation of the contagious properties of biological viruses into viral technologies has produced the assumption that computer viruses are ‘imbued with an alien otherness’ (Sampson, 2004). However, it is arguable that such alterity can be ascribed to all viruses, as long as they are analysed as cultural notions or as discursive forms instead of being forced within clearly defined disciplinary boundaries, and being classified as separate and incompatible entities, organisms, or mere strings of code. Suspended between life and death, myth and reality, abstract and concrete, viruses are perfect candidate for the champions…
FCJ-020 Marginal Networks: The Virus between Complexity and Suppression
Roberta Buiani York University, Canada ‘What is a Margin ?’ I asked a friend recently. You know what a margin is” she replied “It’s outside the body of the text. It’s what holds the page together. Also,” she added, “It’s where you write your notes.’ (Berland, 1997) Introduction In a recent article, Sampson suggested that the metaphoric relocation of the contagious properties of biological viruses into viral technologies has produced the assumption that computer viruses are ‘imbued with an alien otherness’ (Sampson, 2004). However, it is arguable that such alterity can be ascribed to all viruses, as long as they are analysed as cultural notions or as discursive forms instead of being forced within clearly defined disciplinary boundaries, and being classified as separate and incompatible entities, organisms, or mere strings of code. Suspended between life and death, myth and reality, abstract and concrete, viruses are perfect candidate for the champions…
FCJ-019 Digital Monsters, Binary Aliens – Computer Viruses, Capitalism and the Flow of Information
Jussi Parikka Department of Cultural History, University of Turku, Finland As an analogy to a computer virus, consider a biological disease that is 100% infectious, spreads whenever animals communicate, kills all infected animals instantly at a given moment, and has no detectable side effects until that moment. If a delay of even one week were used between the introduction of the disease and its effect, it would be very likely to leave only a few remote villages alive, and would certainly wipe out the vast majority of modern society. If a computer virus of this type could spread throughout the computers of the world, it would likely stop most computer usage for a significant period of time, and wreak havoc on modern government, financial, business, and academic institutions. (Fred Cohen, 1984) We feel that “The Virus” is the “stranger”, the “other”, in our machine, a sort of digital sans papier—uncontrollable…
FCJ-018 Living Dead Networks
Eugene Thacker School of Literature, Communication, and Culture, Georgia Institute of Technology Contagion and Transmission In contemporary popular culture, ideas about contagion are often tied up with ideas about information transmission. The film 28 Days Later, for instance, opens with a harrowing scene in which primates undergo medical experiments by being exposed to large doses of violent media images. Though the link between these images and the ‘rage virus’ that takes over the British Isles is never explained, the film abstractly puts forth the idea that there is some relation between media image and biological virus. The Japanese horror film Ringu takes this a step further, imaging a videotape, which causes its viewer to suffer a mysterious death. Rumors about the videotape begin circulating and the videotape itself becomes a kind of vector for the contagious and ultimately fatal images. But it is not only in film that such connections…
FCJ-017 Material Cultural Evolution: An Interview with Niles Eldredge
Belinda Barnet, Swinburne University of Technology Niles Eldredge, City University of New York Niles Eldredge is good at collecting things, particularly fossils. He is Adjunct Professor of Biology and Geology at the City University of New York, and has been a palaeontologist for nearly forty years. His personal specialty is trilobites – a group of extinct arthropods that lived roughly 540-245 million years ago. Eldredge examines the fossil record of trilobites to determine their evolutionary history, demarcating lineages based on the way their form has changed over time. His ultimate goal is to develop a better understanding of how the biological evolutionary process works to produce the patterns of history he sees in his trilobites. Collecting fossils is a passion. In 1972, Eldredge developed the theory of ‘punctuated equilibria’ with Stephen Jay Gould. This is a revision of Darwinian theory that debunked a reigning assumption in paleontology at the time;…
FCJ-016 The Online Body Breaks Out? Asence, Ghosts, Cyborgs, Gender, Polarity and Politics
Jonathan Marshall University of Technology, Sydney [1] Representations of the online body seem constantly involved with issues of imprecise, crossed or broken boundaries. Online boundaries, both personal and group, appear especially fluid when contrasted with moves towards establishing impermeable boundaries offline. This contributes to perceptions of disembodiment or potential unity with machines. Online bodies are thus described in terms reminiscent of other constructs such as ghosts – partly because experiences of materiality can be described in terms of boundary issues, and partly because it is difficult to bring offline bodies to bear. From another angle, gender, when constructed as a polarity, also serves to “ghost” experience. However, online bodies are also connected to constructions and feelings of offline bodies to reduce ambiguities and to establish authenticity online. For example, mood, as sustained by the offline body, acts as a framing for communication in netsex, mourning and flame. Another popular body…
FCJ-015 Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Google-Bomb
Séamus Byrne School of Media and Communications, UNSW Google. That the noun has rapidly become a verb speaks volumes for the influence of this search engine. Powered by PageRank, the accuracy of its results has done more than make Google the premiere search application – it has moved web search into the realm of ‘killer app’ alongside e-mail. When über.nu columnist Adam Mathes tested his theory of the ‘Google Bomb’, he may have realised the potential of his actions, but he perhaps underestimated the power of the pure idea itself. The fashion in which Google could be manipulated highlighted many questions about the nature of the web and its network of linkages. Deleuze and Guattari would see such activity as not only exemplifying the web as rhizome, but that it also demonstrates their conception of the refrain. Google Bombs demonstrate how web link ecologies, particularly those of blog linkages, influence…
FCJ-014 Online Memorialisation: The Web As A Collective Memorial Landscape For Remembering The Dead
Kylie Veale Curtin University of Technology Introduction “The life of the dead consists in being present in the minds of the living.” Cicero In the last ten thousand years, our deceased antecedents are thought to number over one hundred billion (see Davies, 1994). Not much has been recorded about them, unless they were famous, rich or fortunate enough to have been catapulted into the memory of others. It was therefore up to the general public to ‘individualise’ the deaths of the rest through mortuary ritual, an accomplishment to which archaeologists and our cemeteries can attest today. Individualisation via memorialisation has become a way for past and current societies to commemorate life on the event of a death. To that end, memorialisation provides one of a group of artefacts used by historians, genealogists and the like to document history and family links. [The] memorialisation of departed loved ones seems to be…
FCJ-013 It’s New Media: But is it Art Education?
Trebor Scholz Institute for Distributed Creativity There is a crisis in new media arts education. Yet there has been surprisingly little debate about it until recently, despite the widespread emergence of new media arts programs and massive student interest all throughout the North American university landscape. The current crisis is only now starting to get widespread acknowledgment from new media educators in the United States, Finland, Switzerland, Germany, Australia and beyond. Fields of conflict range from undergraduate students exclusively demanding vocational training, to the lack of advanced debate about new media artwork, and the media-specific orientation of departments. Once beyond the certainty of technical instruction new media arts educators on many campuses experience a crisis due to the unbearable lightness of their topical orientation. In addition, it is an almost impossible challenge for a single human being to keep up with all technological advances. And last but not least, there…
FCJ-012 Composing the Self: Of Diaries and Lifelogs
José van Dijck University of Amsterdam Introduction A recent cartoon from a Dutch newspaper shows a man and a woman lying in bed, trying out the best delta-8 vape carts apparently after having sex. ‘Do you keep a diary?’ asks the man to his partner, and upon her negation, he comments: ‘Good. I don’t like it when a woman immortalises her intimate experiences with me on paper.’ In the last frame, we see the woman sitting behind a computer screen and typing ‘Dear weblog…’, while the man snores away on the bed behind her. In this short cartoon, we can detect a number of assumptions about diaries and weblogs, but the clue to this joke is the paradox that the weblog is considered a digital equivalent of the diary and yet it is not. For centuries, the diary has been characterised as a private, handwritten document that chronicles the experiences,…
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