issue18
Issue 18 – Trans
It is now perhaps a commonplace that digital, networked and informational media are extremely transient. They diversify in form and function at a dizzying rate. At the same time, they transit and fuse “social” and “natural” differences in a manner which reconfigures all the worlds involved. It is also perhaps a commonplace to suggest that some established powers have found it difficult to come to grips with this (although this is perhaps beginning to change). For many, from seriously challenged newspaper proprietors to established media disciplines, it might be time to pause for breath, if only for a moment—to regroup and adapt established practices and ideas, to count the survivors from among the old media worlds of just a few years ago. While occasionally sympathetic, this issue of the Fibreculture Journal questions this approach. If we pause for breath, it is to take in the new air. This issue draws…
FCJ-128 A Programmable Platform? Drupal, Modularity, and the Future of the Web
Fenwick McKelvey. York / Ryerson Universities, Toronto I found Drupal in the summer heat of the riverside town of Rosario, Argentina during an internship with a women’s rights organisation in the city. The Canadian government funded me to help the organisation with their information technology, part of a program to promote Canada’s reputation as a leader in technology sector. Cynical of my government’s motives, but committed to the politics of free or open source software (FOSS), I helped the administrator migrate from proprietary software to free software alternatives. Their website relied on an aging copy of Macromedia Dreamweaver, a foreign application for most of the staff. I wanted in Rosario to create the ideal website for the NGO, but I did not have the ability to program such customised software. After some extensive searching, I happened upon the Drupal content management system (CMS) as a replacement. Drupal describes itself as…
FCJ-127 Concrete Software: Simondon’s mechanology and the techno-social
Simon Mills. De Montfort University, Leicester. [Abstract] In this article I will discuss the philosophy of technology developed by Gilbert Simondon, predominantly in his 1958 book The Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, with a particular concentration on his concepts of associated milieu and concretization. The article provides an introduction to Simondon’s theory of technological genesis and indicates the problematic nature of the cultural for Simondon’s account. This is made apparent by contemporary developments in techno-social networks. However, I will also argue that this insufficiency is not insurmountable given Simondon’s overall ontology. Instead, it is a result of his own bias regarding technological development at the time when he was writing. In the latter part of the paper I will attempt to demonstrate how this insufficiency can be overcome and Simondon’s theory can be fruitfully applied to the theorization of contemporary social media and software. Additionally, I hope this paper…
FCJ-126 The Becoming Environmental of Power: Tactical Media After Control
Michael Dieter Media Studies, The University of Amsterdam. [Abstract] There is a last enterprise that might be undertaken. It would be to seek experience at its source, or rather, above that decisive turn where, taking a bias in the direction of our utility, it becomes properly human experience. (Bergson, 1991: 184) Tactical media (TM) was originally conceived during a period of widespread media diversification, enabled most dramatically through digital and networked technologies (Garcia and Lovink, 1997). In the original account, ‘tactics’ was used with reference to Michel de Certeau as an explanation for the material diversification and experimentation with media that could challenge and compete with forms of centralised mass concentration. In this respect, while TM was informed by the rise of the Web and a nascent participatory culture, in many ways the concept was still expressed in opposition to older hierarchical formations of congealed hierarchical power (The State, Mass…
FCJ-125 From Representation to Sensation: The Transduction of Images in John F. Simon Jr.’s ‘Every Icon’
Troy Rhoades. Concordia University, Montreal. [Abstract] Perhaps the peculiarity of art is to pass through the finite in order to rediscover, to restore the infinite.—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 197) Science and Art When encountering John F. Simon Jr.’s software artwork Every Icon (1997) on his website, it can be difficult for viewers to know whether they are seeing the visual execution of a mathematical theorem or experiencing a work of artistic expression. [1] This is because they are presented with a stark white and black thirty-two by thirty-two square grid on the right side of the website and three statements that read like a mathematical theorem on the left side. They state: Given: An icon described by a 32 X 32 grid. Allowed: Any element of the grid to be coloured black or white. Shown: Every icon (Simon, 1997b). [2] But…
FCJ-124 Interactive Environments as Fields of Transduction
Christoph Brunner. Zurich University of the Arts & Concordia University, Montreal. Jonas Fritsch. Department of Information and Media Studies, Aarhus Universitet. [Abstract] Introduction Digital and interactive technologies have evolved dramatically as the traditional desktop computer has given way to ubiquitous computation. Computation is now an integrated part of many people’s everyday lives, a question of experience more than simple use, as John McCarthy and Peter Wright have argued in their seminal book on the subject Technology as Experience. Yet while all this might be a simple given, accounting for and working with the reality of newer interactive technologies is less straightforward. Ubiquitous computation provides a digital layer that can be added to almost anything, offering radically new contexts of use and technological possibilities (McCullough, 2004). This changes the way one can—and must—imagine the design of digital and interactive technologies. Design is often now for what Terry Winograd has termed ‘interspaces’,…
FCJ-123 The Transversal Generic: Media-Archaeology and Network Culture
Kristoffer Gansing. transmediale – festival for art and digital culture School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University [Abstract] The generic no doubt cuts across the contemporary operators of thought, like the transversality of Deleuze-Guattari, or Foucault’s diagonality.—Francois Laruelle (2011: 252) ‘Take, for instance, an overhead projector’ as Bruno Latour wrote in a 1994 article (36). And why not? Introduced as a non-human actant by John Law in 1992 (3), Latour further employs this standardised piece of presentation equipment as an example of a generic black-box technology whose operation is hidden from the user. Most likely drawing on his own immediate experience as a lecturer, Latour described a situation where the technological complexity of the overhead projector only reveals itself in breaking down, when technicians come to the rescue and open up the machine, revealing components in a seemingly never-ending network. Today, one may assume that Law and Latour have long…
FCJ-122 Anxious Atmospheres, and the Transdisciplinary Practice of United Visual Artists
Vince Dziekan Faculty of Art & Design, Monash University, Melbourne [Abstract] In the electric age all former environments whatever become anti-environments. As such the old environments are transformed into areas of self-awareness and self-assertion, guaranteeing a very lively interplay of forces. – Marshall McLuhan This article initiates a course of research that takes as its focus the transdisciplinary practice of United Visual Artists (UVA). At the heart of UVA’s distinctive art and design practice is a prevailing interest in testing the spatio-temporal relations that exist between site, the performed work and audience perception. Concentrating primarily on the example of their kinetic light and sound sculpture, Chorus, the following text will investigate the aesthetic conditions that underwrite the work’s exhibition. By doing so, this enquiry will speculate on how the integration of digital processes and spatial practice embodied by this particular artwork operates transductively as part of its framing as…
FCJ-121 Transversalising the Ecological Turn: Four Components of Felix Guattari’s Ecosophical Perspective
John Tinnell. Department of English, University of Florida. [Abstract] Over the past decade, the humanities disciplines have played host to an explosion of ecologically themed transformations, which continue to open up new (sub)fields of research and teaching. The development of the ecological turn in English studies (conceived broadly to house the study of literature, composition, film, and new media) resonates with the general evolution of the eco-humanities; indeed, English departments have led this movement in many respects. A survey of English’s recent appropriations of ecological ideas (and their failings) establishes a point of departure for rethinking the eco-humanities. Ecocriticism, with its reputable journals and popular conferences, has no doubt become the most institutionalised of English’s eco-fields, while more pointed approaches continue to gather loosely around terms such as green cultural studies, ecofeminism, ecocomposition, and ecomedia studies.[1] At the turn of this century, much of the early work in ecocriticism was…
FCJ-120 Other Ways Of Knowing: Embodied Investigations of the Unstable, Slippery and Incomplete
Petra Gemeinboeck College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney Rob Saunders Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney ‘… unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. … However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes that do fall apart.’ —Philip K. Dick (1995: 262) One of the most curious characteristics of computing processes and the medium of the digital is that they evoke, reinforce, produce and nourish two disparate positions of understanding us and the world: the reductionist, generalised and objective; and, the situated, partial and multiple. The first looks at…
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