affect
FCJ-187 The Droning of Experience
Mark Andrejevic Pomona College [Abstract] Recent debates over the fate of automated weaponry raise the question of pre-empting pre-emption: might it be possible to thwart the seeming ineluctable development of so-called ‘killer robots,’ that can respond to perceived threats more efficiently and rapidly than humans? The processes of disarmament and pre-emption collided in the ‘bold action’ of a top United Nations official who issued a call to ban the ominously-acronymed Lethal Autonomous Weapons (LAWs). ‘You have the opportunity to take pre-emptive action and ensure that the ultimate decision to end life remains firmly under human control,’ UN Director-General Michael Moller told the participants in a 2014 conferenced on killer robots (Agence France Presse, 2014). The difference between LAWs and other lethal weapons lies in the command decision – that is, the final determination regarding whether to fire (bomb, destroy, etc.). If the command decision always incorporates a human at some…
Issue 25: Apps and Affect
Introduction [1] In William Gibson’s recent futurist novel The Peripheral, the planet has been devastated by a massive eco-techno-political catastrophe (‘the jackpot’) but remaining inhabitants are still able to enjoy the luxury of activating digital devices simply by tapping their tongues on the roof of their mouths. This touch is sufficient to set into play systems that communicate across space and time – enabling the establishment of connections back in time, for example, to people closer to our own present-day, for whom mobiles are still (somewhat) separate from the body. Thirty years ago, in his first novel Neuromancer, Gibson immortalised cyberspace with the account of what now sounds like an amazingly clunky process whereby the hero ‘jacks-in’ to virtual reality. But in The Peripheral the process of translation and transition into networks is streamlined – occluded, internal, intimate and implanted – right at the tip of the tongue. This issue…
FCJ-166 ‘Change name to No One. Like people’s status’ Facebook Trolling and Managing Online Personas
Tero Karppi University of Turku, Finland [Abstract] Whitney Phillips (2012: 3) has recently argued that in order to understand trolls and trolling we should focus on ‘what trolls do’ and how the behaviour of trolls ‘fit[s] in and emerge[s] alongside dominant ideologies.’ [1] For Phillips dominant ideologies are connected to the ‘corporate media logic.’ Her point is that social media platforms are not objective or ‘neutral’, but function according to certain cultural and economic logic and reproduce that logic through the platforms at various levels. [2] The premise, which I will build on in this article, is that the logic of a social media platform can be explored through the troll. In the following I will discuss how trolls and trolling operate alongside Facebook’s politics and practices of user participation and user agency. I provide a material “close reading” of two particular types of trolls and trolling within Facebook –…
FCJ-150 AffeXity: Performing Affect with Augmented Reality
Susan Kozel. MEDEA and the School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University, Sweden. AffeXity AffeXity is an enquiry into affect in cities, and a-fixity as an urban condition. It is an artistic research project, but really it is a set of overlapping practices: artistic practices of dance improvisation, video shooting, digital image editing and sound composition, combined with the daily practices of moving through a city and using mobile devices. Add to this bundle the applied technical research of developing applications for mobile devices and the practices of writing and reflecting on all of the processes, and you have an unwieldy assemblage. The entire project is animated by explorations of affect. It is in constant motion, exceeding both the artistic direction or conceptual coherence that attempt to structure it. [1] This project opens implications for interaction design: designing affectively and designing for affect are two different things. It is possible…
FCJ-151 The modulation and ordering of affect: from emotion recognition technology to the critique of class composition
Mark Gawne. Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Sydney. Introduction: ordering affect and the question of labour Recent developments in the workplace have seen the intensification of methods to elicit and capture value within and across the affective encounter, notably through the introduction of technologies to measure the production of emotion by service workers. One of the most compelling examples of such methods is the ‘smile-scan’ – a technology developed by Japanese company OMRON to read and measure the intensity of facial expression in the workplace. Through an analysis of the use of OMRON’s OKAO Vision smile scans in workplaces, this paper seeks to understand the insertion of particular affective technologies into the technical composition of capital and their role in the ordering of affect. In the post-Fordist condition, the role of affect has emerged as a central point of contestation, since the capacity to produce relationships and…
FCJ-149 Affect and Care in Intimate Transactions
Lone Bertelsen. This article considers the ‘co-affective’ power (Ettinger, 2011: 13) of the new media artwork Intimate Transactions. Keith Armstrong (2005), artistic director of the Transmute Collective—the creators of Intimate Transactions—describes Intimate Transactions as collaborative, ecological, and concerned with relation. [1] In its most recent incarnation Intimate Transactions takes the form of a ‘dual site networked installation’—‘two people’ participate in the artwork from ‘two different locations’ (Armstrong, n.d.). In Sydney, where I encountered the work, these locations were the Performance Space in Redfern and Artspace in Woolloomooloo. [2] Participants engage with Intimate Transactions through active ‘full body’ movement. Through this, they engage with the animated ‘creatures’ in the ‘virtual environment[s]’ on a large screen (Armstrong, 2005; Hamilton and Lavery, 2006: 2). At times it is also possible to collaborate in a networked, ‘moving together’ with the other person (Massumi in Massumi and Zournazi, 2002: 223). This ‘moving together’ affects what…
FCJ-148 Affect and the Medium of Digital Data.
Adam Nash. RMIT University, Melbourne. Figure 1: Screenshot from *Autoscopia* by Justin Clemens, Christopher Dodds, Adam Nash, 2009-present: generated portrait of Adam Nash. Image and permissions provided by Adam Nash. Introduction This paper attempts a technical analysis of the medium of digital data to establish how affect may emerge in that medium. Two central questions here are, first, whether it is possible for two immanently digital entities to establish an affect cycle with each other, and, second, how this relates to affect cycles established between digital data and non-digital entities? It should be possible to build artworks that can test certain of their own intrinsic properties in both these respects. The author had a hand in creating some such artworks, and these are examined later in this paper. [1] The constant movement of data in a process of modulation, demodulation and remodulation is one of the defining characteristics of the digital…
Issue 21: Exploring affect in interaction design, interaction-based art and digital art
The notion of affect does take many forms, and you’re right to begin by emphasizing that. To get anywhere with the concept, you have to retain the manyness of its forms. It’s not something that can be reduced to one thing. Mainly, because it’s not a thing. It’s an event, or a dimension of every event. What interests me in the concept is that if you approach it respecting its variety, you are presented with a field of questioning, a problematic field, where the customary divisions that questions about subjectivity, becoming, or the political are usually couched in do not apply. (Massumi, Of Microperception and Micropolitics, 2009, p. 1) The aim of this special issue of the Fibreculture Journal is to address some of the contemporary challenges involved in working with affect across disciplines and practices that centre on the use of interactive- or digital technologies. The issue has a…
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