Abstracts
Note: A copy of conference abstracts can also be downloaded here.
Jody Berland, York University
Understanding the
animal as medium of communication: Symbolic work in communicative
regimes
This paper is concerned with the increasing visibility of animals within human informational regimes. In her influential book, The Death of Nature, Carolyn Merchant notes that in early modern Europe, “The goat and cat were associated with women and witchcraft because of their presumed sexual lust and slyness.” The widespread popular representation of such animals in visual and oral culture was inseparable from their importance as sacrificial bodies within an emergent biopower apparatus. This is a useful starting place for examining current intersection between symbolic structures, cultural taxonomies, communication networks, and social practices within which the animal animates textual and social practices.
Why is the advertising for cell phones and other mobile digital devices now organized in terms of a range of animal icons? The presentational importance of animals as medium of communication seems to grow commensurate with the de-naturalization of communicative space. Drawing on discussions of the communication “medium,” including those outlined by Claude Levi-Strauss, Marshall McLuhan, Ian Angus and Robert Babe, and Foucault’s writing on biopower, I link the concept of medium to contemporary literature on animal representation. We need to explore how animal figures operate at the interface of cultural and biological within these informational networks, and to better understand how such symbols/bodies are mobilized to perform and legitimate practices of human hierarchy, violence, and connection.
Wendy Chun, Brown University
"Programmable Visions: On the Emergence of Computer and Biological Code-Scripts"
Why are images proliferating at a time when their power to index reality is waning? How and why have non-transparent technologies, such as computers, become conflated with transparency? This talk argues that the answer to these questions lies in the unforeseen emergence of programming languages. Drawing connections between early genetics and computer engineering, this talk argues that digital computing's "programmability"-its return to a "clock-work" universe-encapsulated mid-twentieth century dreams of biological heredity. Rather than foreshadowing DNA, as many have argued, early ruminations on the existence of a genetic code-script that conflated execution and legislation, such as Schrodinger's What is Life?, foreshadowed the emergence of a code-based causality, which software-not DNA-would, and could only, instantiate.
Marc Downie, The Openended Group
“Other Bodies : Between Code and Language”
This paper will discuss the ongoing development of a new class of digital art-making environment. Such tools have been critical to the creation of a wide-ranging series of large collaborative artworks over the last 5 years, including live imagery for dance theater, music compositions and public installations. These open-source, hybrid environments have fused code-writing with visualization within novel, improvisatory interfaces closer to that of a sketch-pad than a traditional computer screen. This paper will focus on my most recent works --- including a full length book project entitled Other Bodies --- that extend the environment, adding techniques for the manipulation of language, the navigation of linguistic information, and ultimately the generation of new poetic forms.
Margaret Flinn, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
“The Aesthetics and Politics of Convergence in the “Digitexts” of Jean-Louis Boissier and Chris Marker”
This paper explores the aesthetic and political possibilities of two concepts recently suggested by communications scholars: convergence and digitextuality. Convergence is widely used to refer to the crossovers (particularly marketing possibilities) between various communications technologies and media: television, cinema, internet, etc. Digitextuality, a term coined in the early twenty-first century, begins to account for the absorption of various signifying systems (for instance, both text of print media or literature and film clips) within a single digital medium—a metasystem of “new media.” While scholars such as Anna Everett have opened the doors towards theories of convergence which have some aesthetic import, the tendency has been to focus on the economics of media industries, using aesthetic distinctions only insofar as they may be applied to define various audience groups and experiences. The focus here is on works by new media artists Jean-Louis Boissier [the CD-ROM Moments de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (2000)] and Chris Marker [217 entries on counterinformation graphic arts blog unregardmoderne.com (2004)] in order to realign the question of convergence on a more developed understanding of aesthetics, asking whether the formal possibilities of the “newest” new media art of the CD-ROM and web necessarily reconfigure and equate image and text within the virtual world. While both CD-ROM and web art have branching forms, Boissier questions the paradoxes embedded in the “naturalized” self-presentation of the CD-ROM’s digital structure: paradoxes rendered explicit through Boissier’s adaptation of Rousseau’s Confessions and Rêveries. In contrast, Marker’s web art can be termed baroque in that its conceptual structure folds continually not only between digital sites, but to external media and events. Both works demand differentiation between medium and representation, offering a glimpse at the proliferation of possibilities for the conferring of authority through the interactions of signifying systems—yet they also demonstrate the multiplication of liminal spaces of creative resistance.
Bertrand Gervais, Université de Québec à Montréal
“The Edenic Illusion: Cyberspace and the Myth of Transparent Media”
We generally measure the effectiveness of a representation by its ability to render present that which is absent, to ensure the illusion of a presence. A representation is effective if it subtly draws the reader or spectator into believing that the figures represented, seemingly autonomous and with a density whose primary effects are the impression of an assured permanence, are not illusions.
Obviously, the effectiveness of a representation relies on the interplay of numerous factors. However, effectiveness is less related to the complexity, strength, and novelty of the devices used and more ordered by the conventions deployed as the devices are used. Far too often we confuse complexity or novelty of the devices with their effectiveness. This confusion regularly appears in discourses on new media, especially on electronic media.
Digitalization’s ability to render different signs, whether they be linguistic, visual, or musical, using only a single binary language, gives it a power heretofore unimagined. And we envisage such powerful representations that erase all space between the subject and the object represented, guaranteeing an illusion of presence independent of context. We imagine representations capable of expressing the perfect equation of presence, immediacy, singularity and interactivity. In fact, the ideal, perfect representation is one where each of these four components are aligned, working with and feeding off each other, ensuring an almost transcendental experience. This is the myth of presence.
It is this myth of presence, given new life with digitalization, that I tackle in this presentation. Initially, I will examine how digitalization makes good on a number of promises specific to this myth, thereby providing it with credibility. Then, I deconstruct it, exposing its share of illusions. Using “Adam’s Cam,” a hypermedia work of art by Sébastien Loghman (http://www.adamscam.net), I will show how a subtle effect of presence is achieved, thereby nourishing the myth of presence, while never completely actualizing it.
Andrea Goulet, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
“Zéropa-Land: Balkanization’s Shadow-Space in French Cyber-Polars of the 1990s”
In the past quarter-century, technological acceleration and global networking possibilities have combined with geo-political instability in the minds of spatial theorists to result in a less-than-sunny “supermodern space”: themes of dystopia and dissolution dominate concepts from Marc Augé’s “non-lieux” to Bruce Bégout’s “Zeropolis” and even Michel Serres’s “blank/white space.” It is not surprising that this “dark side” of the shrinking world has left its mark on the French noir, a genre in which location means everything and whose classic form relies on the simultaneous manipulation by criminals and crime-solvers of communication/transportation networks. If trains and telegraphs created contact nodes and escape routes in early 20th-century crime fiction, modern-day informatics have extended the genre’s narrative reach – into the realms, for example, of international data trafficking and trans-national violence. But new virtual spaces have not, I would argue, merely extended crimes and detection into ever-larger settings; globalization has created its own “warp” in the spatial imagination, for it simultaneously destroys and recuperates illusions of national and ethnic identities. A crucial moment for France’s understanding of its own territorial identity came in the 1990’s, as many of its citizens watched the Yugoslavian nations break up and cartographic confusion ensue.
My paper studies two crime novels set in a trans-national Western Europe (called “Zéropa-land” by one author) whose “civilized” nations (France, Holland, England) are haunted by the fragmentation and violence of the Balkans. In Maurice Dantec’s 1993 La sirène rouge, the ideological mercenary Toorop crisscrosses Europe’s highways to resolve a crime that is both domestic (a young girl flees her murderous mother) and global (the mother runs an international snuff film industry); his temporary focus on an apparently apolitical matter is underwritten in its very violence by Toorop’s alternate role as undercover “freedom fighter” for the Bosnian cause. In Vladan Radoman’s 2000 Ballade d’un Yougo, a Serbian hit-man named Vic Toar (i.e. “victoire”) restarts his life as a poet-doctor in Nice but soon devolves into murderous schizophrenia in the streets of the post-apocalyptic Southern city. Though coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum (Dantec’s hot-headed commitment to the Bosnian cause remained virtual, as he loudly exiled himself from the European continent and his native France; while the Belgrade-born Serb Radoman moved to France and founded “Médecins sans frontières”), Dantec and Radoman both displace the violent fragmentation of the Balkans onto new cartographies of Western European social space. Dantec’s highway nodes and “virus” metaphors, Radoman’s subterranean streetlife and schizophrenic ocean-space: both imaginaries inscribe the noir with the topographical psychopathology of the “supermodern” world-map.
Ryan Griffis, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
“For An Art Against the Cartography of Everyday Life”
The research firm Strategy Analytics estimates that over 18 million Global Position System (GPS) devices, including those built into cell phones, cars and handheld computers, were sold worldwide in 2005. They predict that number to grow to 88 million by 2010. Such devices, along with popular web services linking photographic representations of the earth with the mathematical grid of latitudes and longitudes, like Google Earth and Yahoo! maps, have helped enable a growing form of amateur cartography. As spatial annotation techniques - linking information to geospatial coordinates - develop parallel to the growing trend in amateur media production and distribution tools, naturalistic forms of representation find new value in their ability to be objectively located.
What role does the expansion of cartography into the "everyday" of the wired classes in the Global North mean? If the history of maps, delineating colonial conquests, bombing targets and redlined real estate, can be all too easily identified as one of Walter Benjamin's "documents of barbarism," what can we make of the present cartography of the everyday? What is being archived in the vast databases of the documented movements and minutiae of the GPS-enabled masses?
The artist and writer Alan Sekula, discussing the politics of photographic archives, once wrote that archives need to be read "from below, from a position of solidarity with those displaced, deformed, silenced, or made invisible by the machineries of profit and progress." This paper seeks to read the technologies and methods found in contemporary, popular cartography through the critical discourse surrounding archives and documentary modes of representation, as well as explore the work of artists and activists creating mapping "from below" to produce "counter-cartographies."
Kevin Hamilton, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
“The Instrumental Image: Interface as Representation”
Interfaces are typically designed to go unnoticed, to serve as smooth entry points into powerful and dynamic collections of data. Successful interfaces are described as "intuitive," implying that an interface should serve as an effortless graft between the user and stored data. They grant power through naturalization. Yet interfaces promise power through a more reflexive presence, calling attention to themselves as windows into the life of active, autonomous agents. Designer Maya Lin's addition of non-functional LED's to her design for the CM-5 Supercomputer, for example, demonstrates the symbolic function of interface. She designed a symbol equal to the machine in power, earning the computer a role in the movie Jurassic Park.
How might we understand the interface as an intersection of a technology's symbolic and instrumental potential? Like a photograph or a film, interfaces structure time and space and construct points-of-view. They manifest dreams of new human agency through the creation of new presences to be absorbed and assimilated. This paper will examine actual and fictional interfaces, as depicted in cinema and staged for consumers, to construct a platform for critique of the interface as a powerful image.
James Hay, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
“Helping Themselves: Men and the Kitchen”
This paper considers how communication technologies, in relation to other household appliances, have been integral to fashioning the kitchen a laboratory of self-actualization by a particular class and “taste culture” of men in the U.S. in the latter part of the twentieth century. The paper engages with the writing of contemporary theorists Bruno Latour, Michel Foucault, and Henri Lefebvre to consider a variety of intersecting and interdependent developments–the “smart home” as model home, the reinvention of the household as a sphere of labor and leisure and of production and consumption, the architectonics of domestic space as gendered space, the “moral economy” and civic virtues of home-making, the emergence of the professional chef as celebrity and as a model of entrepreneurialism, the globalization of culinary ingredients/techniques/devices, and the “technologization of the self” in a current reasoning about liberal government and citizenship.
Tim Lenoir, Duke University
“Biointerface: on Desiring Machines and Postbiological Selves”
The specter of a postbiological and posthuman future has haunted cultural studies of technoscience and other disciplines for more than a decade. Concern (and in some quarters enthusiasm) that contemporary technoscience is on a path leading beyond simple human biological improvements and prosthetic enhancements to a complete human makeover has been sustained by the exponential growth in power and capability of computer technology since the early 1990s. Also driving interest in such futuristic scenarios has been the increasing centrality of computational media to nearly every aspect of science, technology, medicine, and the arts, combined with the digital communications revolution of the mid-1990s spawning both the internet and the rapid proliferation of mobile computer-based communications that have already produced significant changes in the organization and production of knowledge as well as in the functioning of the global economy. The deeper fear is that somehow digital code and computer-mediated communications are getting under our skin, and in the process we are being transformed.
While limitations to silicon-based computing might have temporarily deflated some of the more exotic predictions of futurists such as Ray Kurzweil or Hans Moravec, current developments connected with nanotechnology, quantum computing, biotechnology and the cognitive neurosciences provide ample resources for sustaining and even encouraging their posthuman imaginary. More than $4Billion in government investments worldwide in nanotechnology research and development by 2006 has produced some promising results: carbon nanotube wires have been developed for ultraminiaturized electronics components; the first building blocks of a controllable computation in biological substrates at nanoscale have been achieved. In the next phase of the nanotech initiative, Mihail Roco, the senior advisor to the US National Science Foundation and chief architect of the National Nanotechnology Initiative, predicts the development of active nanostructures that change their size, shape, conductivity and other properties during use, enabling the production of electronic components such as transistors and amplifiers with adaptive functions reduced to single, complex molecules. By 2010 Roco predicts that researchers will cultivate expertise with systems of nanostructures, directing large numbers of intricate components to specified ends, including the guided self-assembly of nanoelectronic components into three-dimensional circuits and whole devices. Medicine could employ such systems to improve the tissue compatibility of implants, or to create scaffolds for tissue regeneration, or perhaps even to build artificial organs. In the fourth stage of the current nanotechnology initiative, after 2015–2020, the field will expand to include molecular nanosystems: heterogeneous networks in which molecules and supramolecular structures serve as distinct devices. Among the products of this phase of development Roco predicts new types of interfaces linking people directly to electronics. When considered in light of current research successes in the development of brain-machine interfaces, the sorts of scenarios envisaged by Kurzweil in recent texts such as The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, in which he charts the conditions for the merger of computer-based intelligence and human biology to occur around 2045, begin to sound eminently plausible. While he does not endorse Kurzweil’s notions of a futuristic singularity, Rodney Brooks sees a similar merger of (nanoscale) robotic technology with biotechnology on our horizon:
We are on a path to changing our genome in profound ways. Not simple improvements toward ideal humans as is often feared. In reality, we will have the power to manipulate our own bodies in the way we currently manipulate the design of machines. We will have the keys to our own existence. There is no need to worry about mere robots taking over from us. We will be taking over from ourselves with manipulatable body plans and capabilities easily able to match that of any robot.
Brooks’ admonition that we are machines on a continuous path of co-evolution with other machines prompts reflection on what we mean by “posthuman.” If we are crossing to a new era of the posthuman, how have we gotten here? And how should we understand the process? What sorts of “selves” are imagined by Brooks and others as emerging out of this postbiological “human”?
In Biointerface, I propose to address the impact of digitality on the self, subjectivity, and the body embedded in soon-to-be ubiquitous computing environments—indeed, possibly even postbiological environments of the sort discussed above. The question of embodiment and the future of the human in networked digital environments has been the subject of numerous recent investigations. But these studies, particularly the important recent works of Katherine Hayles, have focused almost exclusively on the role of metaphor, narrative, and ideology in shaping our views and attitudes toward an hypothesized posthuman “singularity” rather than considering the constitutive role of technology in shaping the human. My discussion will focus on how contemporary scientific and engineering efforts to develop nanomachines interfaced with biological materials as well as other efforts to replace silicon-based computers with new, biologically-inspired computational media reshape the playing field of debates about posthumanity and demand that we adopt alternative critical strategies.
Alan Liu, University of California at Santa Barbara (keynote)
“Imagining the New Media Encounter”
A wide-ranging exploration of how cultures historically and in the present first "encounter" new media, and tell themselves about such encounter moments. What makes a good narrative of new media encounter? How do such narratives relate to other first-contact narratives that arise in the tricky boundary zones where different cultures or ages face each other? And how do such narratives open out into whole "environments" or "ecologies" of encounter that can be capably "imagined" in an interface or visualization?
Robert Markley, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
“New Media and the Problem of Disciplinarity”
The development of new media during the past decade paradoxically has both called into question and reinforced traditional disciplinary boundaries. While the digitalization of existing archives and the creation of sophisticated data bases continues to transform almost all academic fields, the speculation in the early and mid-1990s that the internet would transform the values, assumptions, and methodologies of academic scholarship proved wildly optimistic. This paper describes and analyzes the theoretical and practical problems of using digital scholarship as a means to challenge disciplinary configurations of knowledge. Using the titles published in the Mariner10: Educational Multimedia series—the only works of original scholarship on DVD and web platforms published by a major university press—and South Seas: Voyaging and Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Pacific, hosted on the Australia National Library website, this paper explores the ways in which expectations about disciplinary knowledge, educational software, scholarly publishing, funding sources for digital scholarship, and academic credit for tenure and promotion affect the potential of new media to transform traditional practices of knowledge.
Lisa Nakamura, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
“Digital Racial Profiling: Passing Culture, the Internet, and Facial Recognition on Television and the Web”
This presentation will perform textual readings of diverse texts such as political thriller television serials 24 and Sleeper Cell, which are aired by both cable and non-cable networks like Fox and Showtime, as well as television commercials and websites produced by both fans and institutions. Readings of the use of digital profiling technologies in the televisual narratives will be compared and contrasted to the ways that current advertising and websites depict race in the context of the U.S. as both a social burden and a selling point. The use of digital technologies to reveal hidden racial and ethnic identities as well as to facilitate passing appear in all of these examples. The age-old phenomenon of racial passing or cross-racial masquerade is treated in a mode that is primarily informational rather than psychological or even bureaucratic. The promiscuous use of profiling machines such as computers, CCTV (closed circuit television), and digital video and still cameras in both fiction and fact ties race to terror in ways that are familiar and disturbing, hearkening back to an age of eugenics.
This presentation will also analyze the employment of facial recognition technologies in the context of criminal and political surveillance, as well as the way that both the operators and subjects of this technology are racialized. Popular media texts such as the television shows 24 and Sleeper Cell depicts facial recognition technologies as privileged sites of knowledge regarding personal identity, as well as religious, ethnic, and political identities. In addition, commercials for vocational training by institutions like the ITT Technical Institute advertise their degrees in criminal justice by airing commercials that depict the students, many of them people of color, employing computer software to run facial recognition programs. Thus, users of color are depicted at both ends of digital surveillance technologies, as both its users and its subjects. While terror-oriented television serials imply that all people of color can be secret terrorists, they also depict facial recognition technologies as both unfailingly accurate and indisputably race-neutral.
Christian Sandvig, University of Ilinois, Urbana-Champaign
“The Folk Cartography of Electromagnetic Spectrum”
The proliferation of wireless electronics has recently made an invisible landscape newly relevant: the electromagnetic spectrum. In common experience and the popular imagination, the spectrum is suddenly manifest through routine interactions with telephones, radios, and computers. While wireless dreams were predictably spun from stories of seamless, universal communication, wireless experience is instead filled with the cracking noises of interference, bars marking signal strength, and “can you hear me now?” The propagation of these waves has produced a thriving imaginary where any room or road can be perceived to be freshly variegated by invisible information. This paper considers amateur efforts to map and understand these electromagnetic waves in daily experience through a review of visualizations produced by “folk cartographers” of the spectrum. In articulating these personal geographies of electromagnetism, wireless users are not just practicing pop science, they are practicing pop spectrum management, in opposition to and with implications for the public policies controlling communication.
Joseph Squier and Maria Lovett, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
“Writing with Video”
This course engages students in a comprehensive exploration of video as a rhetorical narrative medium, with emphasis on the actual production of video work. Directed writing is integrated into all aspects of the production process — brainstorming and conceptualization, drafting and storyboarding, revision, and critique. Writing is positioned as an integral part of the process of thinking, problem solving, and creating.
Electronic media play an increasingly important role in today’s communication landscape. Consider, for example, the role that time- based visualization now plays in many areas of scientific research, or how video is used in popular culture to inform and persuade.
Students who understand visual, time-based communication and have robust writing skills will have a competitive advantage in the coming decades. The leaders of the next generation will possess sophisticated, multi-dimensional communication skills — the type of skills taught in this course.
Lucy Suchman, Lancaster University
“Human-Machine Reconfigurations”
What new agential possibilities are opened up by computationally based media and artifacts? What does it mean to have texts that have efficacy in ways that they haven’t in the past? How might we take as our subject matter specific configurings of humans and things, trace out their effects, and imagine their possible reconfiguration? This paper considers how cultural imaginaries of agency – the capacity for action taken as distinctive of humans – have first constituted, and then migrated across, a line of demarcation between humans and machines. That boundary, or ‘interface’, delineates two separate bodies, one organic, the other artifactual. This paper brings together two related critiques of the way that humans, and their relations to machines, are currently figured in the development of information and communications technologies. The first of these is based in an examination of efforts to develop interactive machines – interactive not just in the sense that that term references the particular dynamics of new computational media, but in the sense of machines that can engage in conversation with us. The second line of critique starts from the observation that discourses of digital media have tended to erase the human labor that continues to be involved in technological production, implementation, maintenance and the like. This erasure is tied to the more general ways in which information has been rhetorically de-materialized – has ‘lost its body’ in Katherine Hayles’ apt phrase (1999). Drawing on experiments in interactive interface design read through Karen Barad’s (1998) conceptualization of ‘intra-action’, I close with some reflections on the possibilities for a non-reductionist reconfiguring of embodied agencies at the interface. This requires expanding our unit of analysis, while recognizing the inevitable cuts or boundaries through which technological systems are made.
Dmitri Williams, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
“Code and Community: The Future of Online Games”
Online games have become a touchstone for academic and industry discussions about the nature of social relationships in digital space. Practitioners and researchers agree that something is taking place, but precisely what and how have remained elusive. In addition, the interdisciplinarity and the “cool factor” of studying online games have allowed investigations to proceed without much in the way of theoretical guidance.
This chapter will lay out a set of theories for investigating the social practices of online game players and will ultimately provide a research agenda for the next decade of research. En route, it will address and synthesize the existing body of research. The major two points of focus will be what social practices are currently taking place, and what roles code and interface play.
The question at hand is whether online gaming represents an opportunity to revitalize the public sphere by once again mixing people from different backgrounds. Can games be the place where the “strength of weak ties,” to use Granovetter’s expression, can flourish again? Can they be sites for supportive bonding social capital? To what extent do new media like games allow for the reinvention of community, or is that the wrong question? Do games cause altogether new forms and practices relating to social capital? Perhaps a raiding guild or an online bridge club is the new third place. If so, we need scholarship that addresses it on its own terms, but also understands the needs and context of the larger offline civic world.