issue09
FCJ-059 Domestic ICTs, Desire and Fetish
Michael Arnold, Martin Gibbs, Chris Shepherd Unviversity of Melbourne, Australia We make our objects from what we make of our world, and in return they teach us: this is fetishism’s object lesson. Ellen Lee McCallum (1999: xxii) Introduction Matthew lives alone in a run-down, one-bedroom apartment in Melbourne suburbia. Visitors to Matthew’s home are extremely rare. However, if visitors should enter the apartment and attempt to navigate through it, as we researchers did, one does so at a risk; the sides of the walls are piled ceiling-high with old technological items—keyboards, computers boxes, typewriters, monitors, amplifiers, radios, televisions, cables, circuit boards and other artefacts. Once in the living room, visitors may proceed along a narrow path between haphazard stacks to find a desk with a computer, a telephone and a stereo. Matthew sits here up to 12 hours a day, downloading from the Internet, chatting to one or two of…
FCJ-058 Contact Aesthetics and Digital Arts: At the Threshold of the Earth
Warwick Mules Central Queensland University, Australia ‘Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and immovable’. (Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, 1863) Aesthesis Modern aesthetics has always been concerned with the human senses in apprehension of art objects.[1] In modern aesthetic experience something is discovered, perhaps an inner sense of harmony or proportion, or some essential function of the human mind in relation to the sensory experience itself. But, in a paradoxical way, modern aesthetics denies sensory experience as foundational for human creativity, setting up a distance between inner reflection and outward sensory perception whereby an art object might be judged.[2] The senses are treated as suspect, misleading humans away from truth and into error. As Hans Robert Jauss has argued with respect to the emergence of aesthetics in early European modernity, aesthetic experience is: a new kind…
FCJ-057 The Case of ‘Mafiaboy’ and the Rhetorical Limits of Hacktivism
Gary Genosko Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Canada Canada proved to be the home of the most notorious Web hacker to date, “Mafiaboy,” a Montreal teen who intermittently crippled the Web sites of Amazon, CNN, Dell, eBay, and Yahoo! from 7-15 February 2000 by means of a distributed denial of service attack in which Web servers were flooded with so many requests for data that they were effectively clogged. He was charged under subsections 342.1(1) (unauthorized use of computer) and 430(1.1) (mischief in relation to data) of the Criminal Code (R.S.C. 1985, c. C-46) and sentenced on 12 September 2001 to eight months detention plus one year probation (R. c. M.C., [2001] J.Q. no. 4318 (C.Q. jeun.) (QL)). Craig McTaggert (2003, at para. 81, note 112) Introductory Remarks On September 12, 2001, Cour du Québec, Chambre de la jeunesse, District de Montréal Judge Gilles L. Ouellet sentenced a 17-year old male…
FCJ-056 Cultural planning and Chaos Theory in Cyberspace: some notes on a Digital Cultural Atlas Project for Western Sydney
Bob Hodge and Elaine Lally University of Western Sydney A perennial issue for digital politics has been the debate between those who claim a liberatory role for digital technologies and those who see them as instruments for a more effective oppression. We prefer to avoid such abstract oppositions and ask more specific questions: what kind of digital technology, used in what way by whom, for what purposes in what contexts, may support the efforts of those who work for a better, more open society? To focus our enquiry we look at the intersection of digital systems and “planning”. “Planning” in a general sense is a fundamental human activity in all societies exercising the “rationality” that has come to define humanity since the ancient Greeks. Yet the dominant form of planning in western societies today employs a specific form of ‘rationality’ which has emerged only recently, labelled ‘Occidental rationalism’ by Weber…
FCJ-055 Prosthetics Making Sense: Dancing the Technogenetic Body
Erin Manning Concordia University, Montréal Explorations of new technologies and dance, led by Mark Coniglio, Scott de Lahunta, Antonio Camurri and others, focus on the difficulty of locating gesture-as-such. One key to developing sensitive software is understanding — and embedding into the software program — what a gesture is. In a recent paper, Scott de Lahunta suggests that the best way of coming to an understanding of gesturality is to work collaboratively with dancers such that ‘the choreographic and computational processes are both informed by having arrived at this shared understanding of the constitution of movement.’[1] A similar tendency is expressed by Mark Coniglio when he suggests that live performance work must ‘delve beyond direct mapping and the metaphor of a musical instrument; to building systems that could better sense qualities of movement; to represent something of the “gestalt” of movement’[2] An engagement with the technogenetic body demands an encounter…
FCJ-054 Digital Bodies and Disembodied Voices: Virtual Idols and the Virtualised Body
Daniel Black Monash University, Australia Introduction The virtual idol, a computer-generated media celebrity, is a figure representative of a cultural milieu in which arrangements of data seem interchangeable with physical materiality. We are currently in an historical moment when form, information and data are widely understood to be rendering matter, physicality and flesh increasingly redundant. Popular and academic accounts of the body as discourse, behaviour as genetically programmed and digital information systems as rendering spatial relationships and physical interaction irrelevant, for example, are all dominant discourses of the ‘information age’. This mode of understanding is perhaps a prerequisite for the appearance of the virtual idol, a figure animated by digital data, an immaterial substance into which seemingly anything – even the body itself – can be translated. The virtual idol seeks to simulate a particular kind of human body: the celebrity who is already heavily mediated and virtualised through her…
Issue 09 – General Issue
Let us for a moment call the field we work in “new media studies”. Immediately, questions arise. For a start, one of the wonderful things about the field we work in – as thinkers, as practitioners – is that its name is constantly contested. New media, digital media, multimedia, internet studies, computer media, inter-media, simply media, cyberculture, network culture – the renaming of the field is ongoing and never finally resolved. The problem of the name is not as trivial as is sometimes assumed. That none of these names seems adequate suggests that the field itself, perhaps by nature, is constantly shifting, encouraging a series of precise engagements perhaps but eluding homogeneity. At the same time, the problem of the name does suggest a defining feature of the “field” – this is transversality that becomes unavoidable when working with new media technologies. Simply put a transversal is a line that…
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
