Tag Conference + Lecture Recap

Entries 12 Total

Sorting Network Artifacts, Part 2

Apr 27, ’12 7:20 PM

Ancient Plumbing, via Ken and Nyetta on Flickr: http://bit.ly/Ixvwul

In my previous post I recapped the first day and a half’s presentations at last weekend’s Network Archaeology conference. Now I’ll try to move a bit more quickly through the latter day-and-a-half. That last post took me a ridiculously long time; this one’s going to have to be more condensed.

Abandoned Theater near Culver City via http://bit.ly/IJKrDk

Friday afternoon started off with a nice talk by Brian Jacobson on electrical networks at Gaumont studios in Paris, and the links between cinema’s industrialization and parallel developments in science and engineering. Then James Purdon talked about the representation of pylons in the poetry of Stanley Snaith and Stephen Spender. After that, Veronica Paredes shared her dissertation research on the repurposing and mapping of old movie theaters in LA; I’ve heard Veronica speak about this work on a few occasions, and I’m always excited to hear about her progression.

It was about this time that I started to get a bit nervous about my own upcoming talk, so my note-taking was suspended until after my panel.

via http://bit.ly/Khrsi0

Later that evening we had Jussi Parikka’s provocative keynote. I’m afraid if I were to try to crystallize his argument, I wouldn’t do it justice. But Jussi offered several important take-away concepts and messages that resonated throughout the rest of the weekend’s conversations, so I’ll list some of those instead:

  • The concept of micro-temporality — recognizing that seemingly instantaneous processes are actually comprised of a series of micro-temporal steps, e.g., switching, batch-processing, real-time systems
    • Acknowledging a non-human temporality, a “machine time”
      • Likewise, spatiality/addressing can be machine-driven. Systems can be self-learning; a system can “teach itself where to go, how to be routed.” There needn’t be any central control, “just local routing knowledge to go where it needs to go.”
  • Networks are “not about flow, but about managing bursts.”
  • “Publicness has a special relation to time, to machine time,” and is “understood through the switch”; packet-switching involves a form of shared time, determining who speaks, and when.
  • The concept of critical engineering (which some attendees, like Darren Wershler, suggested that we subject to its own critique)

The day closed with some great performances and screenings, including my former thesis student Ben Mendelsohn’s screening of his wonderful and widely circulated short documentary, Bundled, Buried and Behind Closed Doors, and Chris Cuellar’s totally awesome live video performance examining computer vision and first-person films.

The next morning I was really out of sorts, so the only thing I remember — perhaps fittingly, given my spaciness — was John Shiga’s super-fascinating, and devastating, presentation on John Lilly’s dolphin communication experiments. Oh, the terrible things we do to to animals.

via SuperStock: http://bit.ly/JytFq0

The highlight of the conference for me was Lisa Gitelman’s “Network Returns” keynote. Lisa’s work has been inspirational to me for years, and I’m always tremendously excited by the creativity of her scholarship. She demonstrates how the tiniest media artifacts — slips of paper, staples, microscopic inscriptions — offer hugely important clues into the way we create, organize, and store information, and how we construct knowledge. Her talk was divided into two parts: one about self-addressing in telegraphy, and the second about the utility pole as neighborhood information hub.

She discussed the 19th-century practice of “having [one's] name sent” via telegraph as a novelty; people would pay a few cents to have their names sent and returned — a practice that, Lisa says, helped to “make sense of the [new] process” of telegraphy by means of “interpellation.” Interestingly, first and last names had only recently become stable identifiers; before taxation, the draft, credit-reporting bureaus and other bureaucratic institutions required that people have reliable identifiers, there was a great deal of variability in the spelling of their names (she pointed out that, until the late 19th century (?), passport applications made a point of specifying that applicants were to spell their names the same way all throughout the application!). It’s important to consider that proper names held a particular place in telegraphy; because operators had learned to receive messages sonically, and because codes had been developed for routinizing (and abbreviating) messages sent in Morse code, proper names were the only words that had to be spelled out. Self-addressing finds recent-historical and modern-day parallels in the self-addressed, stamped envelope and in DNS debates.

Stapled by pinkcigarette on Flickr: http://bit.ly/JywBTk

The second part of Lisa’s talk, which made me giddily happy, was about staple-ridden telephone poles. The pole, Lisa said, is “like a tree undone”; she draws parallels between it and the railroad tie, both creosote-treated wooden supports for 19th-century infrastructure. When I see one of these pierced poles, I have to stop and pay my respects. Despite the pockmarks and weathering, they have an air of nobility and worldliness. They’ve sacrificed themselves to perform a public service: it’s here where people post their most intimate public notices, complete with personal contact info — announcements about lost dogs, yard sales, piano lessons (there’s also of course a bunch of crap about escort services and “work from home” marketing shams). They ride the line of legality; posting leaflets is technically illegal, so each staple represents a violation, another blemish in the wood. Bare staples, meanwhile, “trouble the relationship between storage and transmission”; they remind us that the notices posted here are ephemera; they aren’t meant to last. The poles also serve as a conceptual hinge between multiple scales: at the top, where the phone lines and electric wires are draped, the pole represents our connection to global grids of power and communication; but on the ground, at staple-height, they root us in the local. What a gorgeous metaphor — and what a fantastic research subject.

After Lisa’s talk was a great panel with Alex Ingersoll, who drew connections between contemporary locative media and the divining rod; Brooke Beslisle, who spoke about 19th-century photo sets that represented new global networks of commerce and mobility; and Kris Paulsen on the distribution and preservation of guerilla video in the 70s (including work by some of my New School colleagues).

After that, Darren Wershler gave an awesome, and awesomely entertaining, talk on comic book scans, which raised questions regarding the changing materiality of comics themselves; the politics of digital formats (cbr, cbz); and “specific modes of social organization, attribution, and authorship, etc. I was also happy to hear Wershler (who wrote a great book about typewriting) take to task the Manovich model of studying such huge scanned repositories; the focus on mathematical analysis of visual qualities both contributes to “data mystification” and ignores the highly significant material properties of these objects (even in digital form!). Wershler’s presentation reminded me of the work of another of my past thesis advisees; in 2011 Andrew Nealon finished a great thesis on comic subcultures’ agreements on conventions and values in digital reproduction.

Dennis Ashbaugh, William Gibson, Kevin Begos, Jr., The Agrippa Files

Alan Liu had the last word. He spoke first about the Agrippa Files; I won’t recount his comments here, fascinating though they were, since he’s obviously given some version of this talk before. I will, however, outline his recommendations for developing new methods — for analysis, for preservation, etc. — that treat networks as something other than an abstraction; and new techniques for preserving networks as networks:

X

  1. Treat individual works of media as proto- or micro-networks: “it’s not the case that first there are individual works which are then networked.”
    • Preserve not a work, but a “swarm architecture”
    • Preserve the relationships among works
    • Create metadata standards to accommodate structural maps of media
  2. Treat micro-networks of individual works as part of a macro-network.
    • Our familiar concepts of the library and archive “collection” are obsolete, as are “finding aids,” shelving, etc.
    • We rarely attend to relationships among works, or with users, or between holdings past and present
    • We need to shift the paradigm of the library to data provenance and data lineage
    • Let’s see what we can learn from open archival information systems, data lineage, actor-network theory, bioinformatics, network archaeology
  3. Treat the past as a network: we must take up the challenge to produce a network archaeology method that can recode our understanding of what a library can be as a network — which might mean RFID tagging loose items, reconceiving of the library as an Internet of Things.
  4. Treat past and present networks differently: practice network-specific analysis (drawing from Katherine Hayles’ medium-specific analysis) that attends to culturally- and historically-specific network typologies.

I’ll leave it at that. I need a Gatorade.

 

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Sorting Network Artifacts, Part 1

Apr 27, ’12 3:31 AM

from The Lost City

Earlier this week I posted the text and images from my talk at last weekend’s Network Archaeology conference at Miami University. There were so many fantastic talks, and I met so many wonderful people, that I thought I should take some time to transcribe some of my notes — if for no other reason than that I probably won’t be able to make sense of these scribbles a few months down the road.

I should say up front that my notes are far from perfect, primarily because I was a far-from-ideal attendee. I arrived in Oxford, OH, without having slept much the previous two nights, and I was pretty much sleepwalking through the first day. I recovered on Friday, but hit another wall on Saturday. I was so exhausted — through no fault of the presenters! — that I had to find a remote classroom where I could take a nice, long nap on the floor (so embarrassing)! Consequently, I missed some good talks.

Even with the impartiality of my notes, I unfortunately don’t have time here to recount everything, so I need to be selective. My lack of commentary on some presentations shouldn’t be interpreted as a tacit statement about their value. I’m simply focusing on those presentation that have most relevance to my own interests.

The first talk for which I have somewhat comprehensible notes is Adrian Johns’s “The Information Defense Industry and the History of Networks,” whose abstract accurately described the content of his presentation. I couldn’t possibly do justice to his overarching argument or attempt to relay his celebrated research on the topic of piracy, some of which he summarized here, so I’ll simply present a few disjointed points that struck me as particularly interesting:

  • The development of the information defense industry is “not simply a product of a growing network culture”; it has “traced the history of the network” itself — e.g., a “fraternity through guild systems.”
  • The proprieties of linking creativity and commerce parallel the rise of the concept of piracy, a term that had moral, economic, and political meanings.
  • Piracy-preventive measures can be either overt (e.g., encryption, photocopy-proof paper), covert (anti-copying codes, regional codes, genetic triggers), or… [I couldn't transcribe the slide quickly enough]
  • It’s important to have a “deep” perspective on piracy and “information defense”; the enterprises charged with upholding networks do so “by destabilizing other cultural values” — i.e., you might uphold rights here by compromising privacy there.
    • Sometimes you “may have to conceded on the social contract in order to uphold rights” — but “where to draw the line?”
  • Who guards the guards?
  • Johns declared: “I think radio is the most revolutionary medium.” [Paraphrase] You sit in a studio and speak into a microphone, and you have no idea if anybody’s listening…. You have to develop a new social science to ‘get’ your audience, which in a private system means providing quantitative data for advertisers, and in a public system means demonstrating that you’re serving the public good. (I really need to read Johns’s Death of a Pirate.)

The next morning Liam Young presented a fabulous paper on “the list” (a topic I’m quite fond of). He cited a fantastic quotation from Latour’s “Visualization and Cognition: Drawing Things Together”: “In politics as in science, when someone is said to “master’ a question or to ‘dominate’ a subject, you should normally look for the flat surface that enables mastery (a map, a list, a file, a census, the wall of a gallery, a card-index, a repertory); and you will find it.” Young ranged from the ability of lists to prescribe action (we can cite the work of Cornelia Vismann, who describes how lists “prescribe the algorithmic processes of file”) to lists in programming, like LISP’s dynamic data structures which don’t require that data types be prescribed in advance (as opposed to a language like C:, for which “everything is set up in advance by a human agent”; “everything is included”).

Microfilming, 1950s - via http://bit.ly/Iu8t3q

Sandra Gabrielle, whom I was delighted to get to know, shared a wonderful paper on newspaper archives, in which she focused on the materiality and politics of preservation. Most digital newspaper databases are scans of microfilm, which itself was often made from bound newspapers and subject to the “vagaries of binding.” Our digital access “remains limited to choices made decades ago,” including choices regarding which papers to microfilm; local papers were often left out. What’s more, the limitations of microfilm were “transferred to digital”: we don’t get color, images are often smeary, etc. In short, the digital record “doesn’t reveal much about the newspaper as a form.” We also have to wonder what type of experience of newspaper-reading is embodied in these various preservation formats. What about the “logics that structure the reading of the newspaper?” The newspaper microfilm reinforces linear reading through scrolling, while we’re free to flip through – to randomly access — a print paper. To sum up, both today’s digital scans and yesterdays’ microfilm were/are “bound by earlier preservation decisions.” Is it appropriate to think of digital scans as surrogates, and the databases themselves as instances of either “remediation” or “transfiguration”?

Mnemosyne Atlas - via http://bit.ly/AuBKv6

Pepper Stetler gave a great talk on Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, which we talk about in my Archives/Libraries class. Warburg approaches history as a “network of recurring visual motifs,” and he “felt most comfortable” practicing art history in the form of panels of images (which Stetler compared to Latour’s “immutable mobiles”). He affixed images to these panels using pins and clips; he wanted to keep the relations between images mobile. Stetler suggested that Warburg’s work raises such questions as: how did visual and pictorial expressions originate; what are the conditions under which they’re stored in archives of memory; and what are the laws that govern their formation or reemergence? She regards Warburg’s project as an effort “to prove photography’s mnemonic and archival potential” — and “to think of [Warburg's] network,” of the Atlas, “as ‘incomplete’ is to assume that Warburg thought the project could be finished.” Such an assumption “ignores the asymptotic nature of networks.” Ultimately Warburg’s project makes us wonder “how much explanatory burden…the visual [can] carry” — and just how much content matters in network analysis (Stelter questions Galloway and Thacker’s suggestion that analyzing content has given way to analyzing network structure).

via http://bit.ly/JLcsLV

After Stetler, Rory Solomon gave a brilliant talk on the “media archaeology of ‘the stack’” (full disclosure: he’s my RA and thesis advisee :-) If Wolfgang Ernst advocates for examining the “non-discursive” in our media, “How do we locate non-discursive objects for analysis — especially in software?” Rory talked us through the history of various logical structures in the history of computing; conditional branching and if/then structures, the function call stack and its push/pop operations, the principle of “last in, first out,” etc. He looked at “the stack” — the application stack, the network stack — as a structural and intellectual model that can help us understand computing operations, and the interdependency of different “levels” of technical systems. We see that higher level systems in the stack are always constrained, always dependent on lower-level systems; “you can do only what the lower-level system allows you to do.” So where, then, do we locate the non-discursive or sub-semantic in these technical systems? Given the interdependency of various levels of the stack, Rory argues that finding any purely non-discursive site is tricky: “each level is simultaneously discursive (to levels below) and non-discursive (to levels above).”

via Puck magazine

Richard John then presented a whirlwind of a keynote on “network effects” in telecom history. I had the pleasure of riding from the airport with John and was immensely impressed, both then and during his talk, by his encyclopedic knowledge of telecommunication history and his embodiment of the historian’s historian. As in his book, Network Nation, John emphasized here that understanding network history requires that we also understand the roles of business and government. The telegraph and the telephone followed different evolutionary paths; our “presumption that the network has a [single] logic of its own” only serves to “mystify the actual development of historical narrative.” Network building in the formative era of telecom history “followed no singular logic”; decisions were often based on business strategy, and, contrary to popular narratives, only rarely did they rely on electricity.

My head hurts just from remembering all this material. I need a break.

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Vocal Stylings

Mar 2, ’12 3:53 AM

via NYTimes: http://nyti.ms/ztZmxe

Last summer, in a post about all my seasonal listening — which included an awful lot of podcasts — I commented on a weird sonic trend I had discerned among well educated, culturally savvy young ladies on the radio. Here’s what I wrote:

[This American Life's] rebroadcast earlier this summer of their episode on Infidelity was, in a way, a sonic revelation for me. Click on the link and listen to the Prologue [0:54 -> 3:42]. I listened to this section at least ten times — not because I was particularly taken by the story, but because I was taken with the [female] guest’s voice. By “taken with” I mean: positively nettled. Over the past couple years I’ve noticed a mini-trend among well-educated, seemingly self-confident young women on the radio: their voices emerge initially from the front of their mouths, then, over the course of a sentence, move back into their throats. Their sentences trail off into whispery, raspy monotones — kind of East-Coast-Ivy-League-Valley-Girl-All-Grown-Up-And-Working-At-The-New-Yorker. It sounds knowing and lazy and jaded all at the same time. I heard it again near the end of the inaugural n+1 podcast — and again, in a differently “timbred” variation, in [a] Triple Canopy podcast [and regularly in Third Coast's amazing Re:sound podcast]. As podcasts make possible the increasing niche-ification of audio micro/broad-casting, I wonder about the cultivation of particular stylized “vocal types.” The “throatily jaded” sound seems to be one of them.

Lo and behold — there’s a name for that odd affectation. And of course it’s not specific to podcasts; it’s a global epidemic! It’s vocal fry. The New York Times ran a story about it in the Science section this week (it’s news for them, but not for vocal scientists — nor for my husband, an actor, who learned lots of vocal tricks in acting school, and who told me about vocal fry a while ago). Young women, it seems, are trend-setters when it comes to vocal stylings:

The latest linguistic curiosity to emerge from the petri dish of girl culture gained a burst of public recognition in December, when researchers from Long Island University published a paper about it in The Journal of Voice. Working with what they acknowledged was a very small sample — recorded speech from 34 women ages 18 to 25 — the professors said they had found evidence of a new trend among female college students: a guttural fluttering of the vocal cords they called “vocal fry.”

A classic example of vocal fry, best described as a raspy or croaking sound injected (usually) at the end of a sentence, can be heard when Mae West says, “Why don’t you come up sometime and see me,” or, more recently on television, when Maya Rudolph mimics Maya Angelou on “Saturday Night Live.”

Some researchers propose that use of the fry is a “natural result of women’s lowering their voices to sound more authoritative.” Or it can be “used to communicate disinterest, something teenage girls are notoriously fond of doing.” Apparently, the trend has spread to the late-20/early-30-something female literati.

Another trend I’ve noticed among the intelligentsia — and I’m certainly not alone in this — is a tendency among speakers at academic conferences (keynoters in particular!) to end their sentences with “right?,” then move quickly along to the next sentence. I’ve heard so many people do this at the last few conferences I’ve attended. Maybe “right” is the new conjunction. Or maybe it’s just filler — a self-assuredly affirmative “um.” Regardless, it irks me in its repeated, arrogant presumption of my agreement. It’s inflected as a question — you with me? — but functions as an imperative: stay with me, dammit! i’m right!

Another rhetorical strategy that I’ve become more conscious of, and which seems to be commonly used during Q&A sessions at academic presentations, is the “That’s interesting, but what I’m interested in is…” evasion. Somebody in the audience will raise a valid question or critique, and rather than engaging with that critique, the presenter frames it as outside his or her area of interest, and thus outside his or her realm of responsibility.

Questioner: “I appreciated your talk, but I wonder how you arrived at the conclusion that video games are a vastly more efficient teaching technology — and that all public schools should trash their books and fill the libraries with X-boxes — when your study ran for only one week, and your sample consisted solely of your son.”

Evader: “That’s super-interestaaaaannng, but what I’m really interested in is [some B.S. that probably includes the phrase "complex interplay"].”

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Imminent Incidents

Feb 8, ’12 3:31 AM

via Cartographies of Time

On my calendar for the spring semester:

Saturday, February 11, 10:30am-12pm: Being the Media: Designing a Rrradical New Media (Paper Tiger Television’s 30th anniversary): I’ll be speaking about materiality and radical media during the Media Intensive on Saturday morning.

Tuesday, February 14, 12-2pm: City Workshop Series: I’ll be presenting “Radio City: Space, Sound and the City” at The New School — 80 5th Ave, Room 802.

Wednesday, March 21, 12-1:45pm: Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in Boston: I’ll be participating in the “Teaching the City: Pedagogical Issues in Urban Cinema and Media Studies” workshop with Amy Corbin from Muhlenberg College, Sabine Haenni from Cornell, Brendan Kredell from University of Calgary, Paula Massood from Brooklyn College, and Mary Woods from Cornell.

Thursday, March 22, 11am-12:45pm: Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in Boston: I’ll be presenting “Deep Time of Media Infrastructure” on the “Signal Traffic” panel with Lisa Parks from UCSB, Nicole Starosielski from Miami University, and Jonathan Sterne from McGill — all amazing!

Friday, April 20 – Saturday, April 21: Network Archaeology Conference at Miami University: I’ll be presenting “Digging Through Archives and Dirt: Entangling Media Archaeology, Archaeology Proper, and Architectural History.” Jussi Parikka, Lisa Gitelman, Alan Liu, and Richard John will be there — as will two of my thesis students: Ben Mendelsohn and Rory Solomon. Yay!

All of June: Fellowship in Canada

All of July: Fellowship in South Korea

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Urban Research & Mobile Media Session Tapes

Dec 2, ’11 12:27 AM

Trebor Scholz has also posted the audio for the Mobility Shifts “Urban Research and Mobile Media” panel on which I participated with Jess Irish, Jane Pirone, Victoria Marshall, and Vyjayanthi Rao. I posted my slides before, but I might as well add them here, too.

Urban Research & Mobile Media by THE NEW SCHOOL NYC

Mattern_MobilityShifts_URT

 

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Library Jam

Dec 2, ’11 12:13 AM

via 3liz4 on Flickr: http://bit.ly/rASj3P

Trebor Scholz has posted the audio recording of the libraries panel (what one might call, figuratively speaking, a “jam”) I organized and moderated at the Mobility Shifts conference in October. You’ll hear me being all inarticulate at the beginning, then I make way for the brilliance of Kim Dulin from the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, then Linda Johnson from the Brooklyn Public Library, and finally, Deanna Lee from the NYPL.

The Library in Your Pocket: Library Tech Development and DIY Learning by THE NEW SCHOOL NYC

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Some Stuff I’m Doing This Fall

Sep 2, ’11 3:55 PM

via oschene on flickr: http://bit.ly/pUYGDF

 

Here are a few fall events at which I’ll probably be either sitting or standing at either a table or podium at the front of a room. There are other events for which we haven’t yet worked out the details, but which I’ll post eventually.

Friday, September 9, 7pm: 9/11: A Forum on Memory, Trauma, and the Media @ Wollman Hall, 65 East 11th Street; flyer posted below; open to all Media Studies students (I’ll be talking about paper and dust)

Wednesday, September 14, 10:15am-6pm: Object Oriented Ontology III Symposium @ various rooms at The New School; I’m presenting in the afternoon panel, from 4:15 to 6pm; program posted below

Thursday, September 15, 3:30-5pm: Installation of the President Ceremony @ Tishman Auditorium, 66 W 12th Street; here’s where I receive my Distinguished University Teaching Award!

Thursday, October 13, 7:30-9:30pm: “Urban Research & Mobile Media” Panel, with Jess Irish, Jane Pirone, Victoria Marshall & Vyjayanthi Rao @ Mobility Shifts Conference, The New School

Friday, October 14, 4-6pm: “Library in Your Pocket: Library Tech Development and DIY Learning,” with Kim Dulin, Director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab; Linda E. Johnson, Interim Executive Director of the Brooklyn Public Library, Deanna Lee, Vice President of Communications and Marketing at the New York Public Library @ Mobility Shifts Conference, The New School

Tuesday, October 18, 6:30-8pm: “Beyond the Seminar Paper: Setting New Standards for New Forms of Student Work” as part of a “DH in the Classroom” Panel, with Mark Sample @ CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative, CUNY Grad Center, location TBD

Thursday, October 20, 7pm: “No Thing Unto Itself: Object-Oriented Politics” Panel, with David Turnbull & Noortje Marres, and moderated by Katherine Behar  @ James Gallery, CUNY Grad Center, details TBA

Thursday, October 27, 2pm: “Course Planning” Workshop @ New School Provost’s Office’s Pedagogy Seminar

Thursday, November 3, 2pm: “Course Planning” Workshop @ New School Provost’s Office’s Pedagogy Seminar

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

OOOIII
(TRANSLATED AS: WHEEEE!)

10:15–12.00: Morning Session: 65 W 12th St., room A404

  • (Ken Wark, moderator)
  • Graham Harman, “The Four Most Typical Objections to OOO”
  • Aaron Pedinotti, “Occasions, Decisions and the Given: Some Remarks on the Technical Underpinnings of the Harman-Shaviro Debate”
  • Steven Shaviro, “Panpsychism And/Or Eliminativism”
  • McKenzie Wark, “P(OO): Praxis (object-oriented)”
  • Q&A

12:30–2:30: Luncheon with Jane Bennett, 66 W 12th St., Klein Room A510, The Vera List Center for Art and Politics

  • NB this is an RSVP event with limited seating. We are working on simulcast possibilities.

2:30–4:00: Afternoon Session: 66 5th Ave., Kellen Auditorium

  • (Eugene Thacker, moderator)
  • Tim Morton, “Objects, Aesthetics, Causality”
  • Shannon Mattern, “Everything is Infrastructure”
  • Levi Bryant, “Strange Substances: On the Nature of Objects”
  • Mabel Wilson, “Object Lesson – A Pedagogy for Teaching Architects”
  • Q&A

4:15–6:00: Roundtable discussion, Bark Room: The panelists (Harman, Pedinotti, Shaviro, Wark, Morton, Mattern, Bryant, Wilson)
Featuring a special video appearance by Ian Bogost

6:00–8:00: Opening, “And Another Thing” exhibition; co-curated by Katherine Behar and Emmy Mikelson; The James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center; 365 5th Ave.

  • The event will be videoed, recorded and livestreamed.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Um, excuse me. There seems to be a human at the center of your object-oriented ontology.

Sep 2, ’11 2:46 AM

via http://thingsorganizedneatly.tumblr.com/

I’ll be participating in The Third Object-Oriented Ontology Symposium at The New School on September 15. When I received the invitation a few weeks ago, my immediate response was: “I’m honored to have been invited — but you know I’m not a philosopher, right? Are you sure you want me?” Fast forward a few days, and I find myself on the schedule. I’m working under the assumption that my role is to represent object-focused work from outside the fold — work that might have both something to contribute to, and something to learn from, OOO. Sure, I’m up for that. It’s encouraging to recall these words from Graham Harman in a Mute interview from this past summer:

…OOP will want to say more about numerous concrete topics. Here I’m not as worried, because other people are doing much of the work for us already. It’s not my job to tell anthropologists and video artists how OOP should affect their work. That’s their job. They’re supposed to tell me what they learned, and maybe it will have a retroactive effect on my philosophy.

Perhaps I’m one of those “other people.” Yet my acceptance of these terms doesn’t mean that I’m not shaking in my boots, positively daunted by the prospect of temporarily infiltrating such a tightly-knit and intimidatingly intellectual group.

I’d been observing the evolution of the OOO “movement,” if you will, from the periphery for the past year-and-a-half or so. I became aware of it, or them, when I started developing my Media & Materiality grad seminar early last year, and I’ve been sporadically following some of the key figures’ blogs since then. I’m of course sympathetic to their overall mission — or at least what I understand of it. Ian Bogost offered a “simple, short, comprehensible explanation” on his blog in December 2009:

Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology (“OOO” for short) puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, DVD players, cotton, bonobos, and sandstone, for example. In contemporary thought, things are usually taken either as the aggregation of ever smaller bits (scientific naturalism) or as constructions of human behavior and society (social relativism). OOO steers a path between the two, drawing attention to things at all scales (from atoms to alpacas, bits to blinis), and pondering their nature and relations with one another as much with ourselves. [Here are some other attempts to articulate what OOO is all about.]

Sure, sign me up! This works for me primarily, I think, because I’ve been working under most of the same assumptions — although I might’ve articulated them differently (or not thought to articulate them at all) — for the past decade or more. I say this not in a “Pshaw! I’ve been doing this stuff for years!“-sort-of-way, but in a “Hey, cool, we’re of like minds!”-sort-of-way.

I’m going to be talking about infrastructures — micro and macro, animate and inanimate, concrete and conceptual — in my talk on the 15th. And I’m not going to attempt to ape the philosophy talk; I’d make an utter fool of myself. Instead, I’m going to talk the way I normally talk, and hope that we find some fruitful intersections. Still, for the past week or so I’ve been doing a little cramming with the OOO “primers” in an attempt to find answers to some fundamental questions: How do they define “objects”? And why is the object the “unit” we should use to “package” (for lack of a better term) things as disparate as plumbers, bonobos, and sandstone into a “flat ontology”? (See Bogost’s Latour Litanizer. Harman explains his litanizing strategy in Mute: “In many cases I try to have the lists include one object from the sciences, one living creature, one machine, one compound entity, one human political unit and perhaps one fictional entity, just to enforce the notion of a ‘flat ontology’ in which all objects are equally objects.”)

Because I have infrastructure on the brain, I’m also having a really hard time getting past what seems to me an inherent contradiction in the infrastructure of the OOO enterprise itself — all the blogs; the university-based conferences, and the airplanes and faculty travel budgets that take the geographically dispersed “core” OOO group to those conferences; the doctoral students who lobby their departments to make those conferences happen; the open-access publishers that have helped to popularize the field; the glaring gender imbalance in the community; the linguistic infrastructure, so dependent as it seems to be on neologizing and developing new OOO “versions.” I just can’t get over the contradiction between, on one hand, the desire to remove the human, and human experience, from the center of philosophy; and, on the other hand, the blatant anthropocentrism — I might go so far as to say egocentrism (I’m referring to a systemic characteristic, not to the egocentrism of any particular individual(s)) — of the work involved in developing and promoting this post-/anti-/other-/whatever- humanist framework.

I’m sure I’m putting my philosophical naïveté (or stupidity?) on full display here. Maybe this is simply the way things work in this field: even within a collective enterprise, as OOO seemingly is, one still has to cultivate recognition for one’s unique contributions to the field (which presumes that we’re still looking for “individual genius”). And that responsibility involves coining new phrases; branding new theories; promoting (through either good or bad press!) one’s colleagues’ terminology and ontological flavors; convening the group for international symposia; and writing lots of lengthy treatises debating the merits of different colleagues’ unique OOO variants, while barely mentioning any actual objects at all. Harman, again in the Mute interview, offers a SWOT-based marketing analysis of some of the available brands:

It’s hard to say which brand of speculative realism is the most popular among philosophers (perhaps Quentin Meillassoux’s), but in humanities fields outside philosophy there’s no question that object-oriented philosophy is the dominant version. This is not surprising, given OOP’s highly democratic approach to objects. Those forms of SR which claim that sociology is worthless compared with neuroscience are obviously not going to be useful to sociologists. By contrast, OOP is far less judgemental about the other disciplines and welcomes interaction with them. OOP makes room to an equal degree for electrons, medieval history, literary criticism, and musicianship, so it’s little wonder that we’ve become a quick favourite across the widest variety of disciplines.

This self-reflexivity is endemic to “emerging” fields. I’ve noted before how much writing in the Digital Humanities still seems to be about what the Digital Humanities even are. Yet the emergence of a new field of study, a new method, a new ontology offers up the possibility to create a new discursive space — to design the “infrastructures” through which these developments can take shape. In their introduction to The Speculative Turn, Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Harman acknowledge the roles that a vibrant blogging community, adventurous new journals, and open-access publishing have played in shaping the discursive politics surrounding Speculative Realism. But why don’t we expand the OOO “litany” to call our attention also to other “objects” in the movement itself: disciplinary values (individual genius?), the Carbon footprint for those symposia, gender, the academic market for branded theories, and the politics of its rhetoric — which, from my vantage point, seems to have an anthropocentric bias out of character with the movement’s professed mission.

I offer this observation as a non-expert, as an external observer who’s quite sympathetic to what OOO stands for but not entirely sure that its discursive practices fit me well. And here I have to acknowledge my own biases: I’m not one for neologizing. I’m reluctant to refer to myself as a “theorist” because I’d never presume that I could generate an “original” theory. I’m way too self-effacing to think that the world could possibly need me to invent new language or intellectual frameworks.

The work that I do is simply a product of contact lenses (one object from the sciences), border collies (one living creature), a series of usually trusty Mac computers (one machine), the Dewey Decimal system (one compound entity), Happy Valley (one human political unit), Ferris Bueller (one fictional entity) — and, if you’ll permit me to add my own category to the litany, extreme sleep deprivation (one psychosomatic condition).

What if OOO, as an “institution” or practice, were to think of itself as a “flat ontology”?

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Objects: Taped, Tracked, Theorized

May 29, ’11 7:05 PM

Before catching the bus to Boston on Thursday afternoon, I decided to do a quick loop around Chelsea to catch some shows before they closed. Chris Marker’s Passengers was eh, but Ellen Kooi’s photographs were quite enchanting. I knew nothing about her, but surmised, based on her work, that she’s either Scandinavian or Dutch; I was right: she’s Dutch.

I had high hopes for Carter Mull’s The Day’s Specific Dreams, but I found the execution less compelling than the conceptualization. According to the press release, “The exhibition’s title takes its cue from Stéphane Mallarmé’s essay, Un Spectacle Interrompu (An Interrupted Spectacle), in which the author proposes that major cosmopolitan cities’ newspapers should chronicle the dreams of their population. This is a fitting proposal for Mull, who breaks apart the newspaper into temporal poetic fragments, erases differences between found images and ones of his own making, and buries the indexical potential of the photograph in favor of its ability to capture the abstract and elusive ruminations of our cultural imaginary.” The show was just as much about image-making as it was about newspapers. I appreciated the juxtaposition of this Photoshopped image of a printer, drawn from Diderot’s Encyclopedie, and 1,800 metallic prints, scattered across the floor, each featuring a frame from an iPhone 4 commercial. The images feature lots of splotches and bleeds — a skeuomorph of the analogue “glitch”?

I’m not sure if it was considered an “official” part of the show, but Sara and Gerald, a broadsheet that Mull co-edits, was free for the taking in the gallery. I always like a show with tangible take-aways; I have a few boxes in the basement that are full of postcards, posters, trinkets, and other ephemera I’ve picked up at various galleries over the past 15 or so years.

I was surprised to discover inside, just today, this fitting hauntological (are we using this word anymore?) reference:

Then at bitforms I saw Tim Knowles’ Recorded Delivery, in which he tracked, via photography and audio recording, a package along its 902-mile journey from London to the Isle of Barra. This piece reminded me a lot of sensor-driven projects, like SensibleCity Lab’s Trash Track, but Knowles’ work, from the point of view of the package itself, is more a manifestation of object-oriented ontology (creating an interesting ontological resonance with Mull’s broadsheet).

I wish I knew how to make sense of this:

Finally, my favorite of the afternoon was Simon Evans’ Shitty Heaven, in which he “assembles prosaic materials, such as scraps of paper, scotch tape, pencil shavings and correction fluid into diagrams, maps, flowcharts and diary entries that obsessively catalogue the fragments of a life.” I’m a complete sucker for this kind of work. It’s an obsessive — almost outsider-art-ish — mapping of the comical or the absurd:

These supposedly function as “yantras,” or visual energy diagrams. And of course the material object itself makes one conscious of the physical energy expended in copying the text and assembling the work:

And this reminds me of a more tactile, egocentric version of a Mark Lombardi chart:

Then we were off to Boston, where I caught The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, which I was so excited about last year that I pre-ordered the catalogue. I knew I’d never made it to NC to catch the show at Duke’s Nasher Museum, and it was a lucky coincidence that it was in Boston while we were in town. Lots of great stuff (and some of my favorite artists) were here, playing with the record as both a sonic and physical resource.

And then to wrap it up, I was very grateful to have had the opportunity to meet two fantastic object-oriented comm/media colleagues on our “Design and Communication: The Philosophy of Objects, Systems, and Spaces” panel at the ICA conference. I’m glad to know more about Liz Moor’s fantastic work on branded materials and Christine Harold’s exciting work on the “makers movement.”

In short, an object-filled week!

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The History of Universality, Technological Determinism, and Other Deep Thoughts

Mar 27, ’11 7:49 PM

This weekend I attended the “Media Histories: Epistemology, Materiality, Temporality” conference at Columbia. Now, when I say “attended,” I mean to say that I was physically present, in room 501 Schermerhorn Hall, for most of the sessions. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend Jonathan Crary’s keynote on Thursday evening. I also missed Joseph Vogl’s keynote on Friday, because I went downtown for Diana Taylor’s keynote at the Memory conference at The New School. And I just couldn’t make Saturday morning happen, so, sadly, I missed Erhard Schüttpelz, Weihong Bao, and Marilyn Ivy. Even though I was bodily present for all the other panels, I can’t say that I was mentally all there. As I explained a few weeks ago, in regard to my experience at SCMS, there’s a limit to my concentration — particularly when the object of concentration is a 45-minute scholarly presentation…or two or three in succession. I found myself much more engaged with the first presenter on each panel, and a little less attentive to the second and third presenters. Regardless of the order of presentation, however, several of the presentations seemed to me much better suited for the page than the ear (a valid observation at a conference on epistemology and materiality, I’d say!); I would’ve much preferred to read these papers, and I hope I’ll have the opportunity to do so at some point.

Those presentations that most stuck with me were Adrian Johns’ “Unpacking the Universal Library: The Morals of Massive Research Collections, 1810-2010″ and John Durham Peters’s “Two Cheers for Technological Determinism.” I was also inspired by Jimena Canales’s “A Tenth of a Second”; her book has been on my “wish list” for a while, and I’ve finally decided to order it. And Mary Ann Doane’s “Lost Time: Technologies of the Gap” reinforced my admiration for her earlier writings on time, indexicality, and cinema.

Job Koelewijn's Mobius bookshelf via BoingBoing: http://bit.ly/hv9ipz

Johns’s presentation was particularly satisfying because he essentially covered, in 30 minutes, much of the same terrain we’re covering in my “Libraries, Archives & Databases” graduate seminar this semester; it served as a welcome reassurance that I did a pretty good job of constructing that syllabus! He called for a historicization of the concept of universality. The dream of the universal library of course has a long history — but various epochs’ notions of universality are tied to their distinctive understanding of how books work; of the economics of book production, distribution, and consumption; of how reading takes place (i.e., what does it mean that, today, books are scanned not to be read by people, but to be read by machines?); of how aspirations toward “placeless” information are perhaps paradoxically tied to the construction of library places.

The Q&A after the presentations, led by Ben Kafka, raised interesting questions regarding the significance of ordering and classifying library materials; these are not only epistemological concerns, but also moral ones. And what of the new librarian for the digital library? Is she a human or an inanimate aggregator? According to Johns, librarians advocate for themselves as professionals who perform important skills-based, critical educational roles. We’d all agree that this should be the case — that librarians should serve as “information mediators,” and patrons should rely on them as such — but will this be the case? Or will patrons simply turn to aggregators whose algorithms for selection we don’t understand? These questions of “library morality” have long been woven into library history; just look at the Progressive Era library and its aspiration to serve as an instrument of uplift. How the library aspired to function, and how patrons used it, are two separate issues.

As a closeted McLuhan sympathizer, I was especially psyched by Peters’s “Two Cheers” polemic. Peters traced the history of “technological determinism” — particularly its use as an insult (calling someone a technological determinist, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young says, is akin to saying he likes to strangle puppies!) or its invocation as a preemptive disclaimer (“Of course I do not mean to lapse here into technological determinism!”). He traces the concept through Thorstein Veblen’s use of the German technik (see also this), to 20s and 30s debates about economic history, to Lucian Febvre, to Mumford’s technic, to McLuhan, to SCOT and actor-network theory. Peters argues that fear of technological determinism rests in part on a “suspicious subject/object distinction,” a failure to recognize that human are “always-already technical beings.” We often fail to realize that “to say that technology creates possibilities is not to say that it causes them.” Fear of technological determinism “hinders big thoughts.” Media studies is necessarily interested in media shape, form, delivery, etc., and to resist exploring and arguing for these factors’ potential roles in influencing social change or shaping history, is to “giv[e] up critique.”

An immensely inspiring talk.

Redeeming McLuhan?

 

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