6 results
8 - On Zoē and Spider Life: Studio Tomás Saraceno’s Working Objects in the Critical Posthumanities
- Edited by S. E. Wilmer, Trinity College Dublin, Audronė Žukauskaitė, Lithuanian Culture Research Institute
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- Book:
- Life in the Posthuman Condition
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 20 October 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 January 2023, pp 149-172
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Summary
Posthuman working objects
A multitude of expressions of life define the posthuman perspective of what was once called ‘natural’ but is now fully embedded in technocultural knowledge practices. The question of life, not only as bios but as the material non-human life of zoē, has become a key reference point for such critical posthumanities as Rosi Braidotti's (2016, 2019). A variety of perspectives help us to understand the complex, often transspecies and ecological, notions of life. These are mapped both in the humanities, the arts and in a variety of scientific practices, for many different ends but also through a variety of techniques of knowledge: as images, data sets, and many other ways that capture, for example, animal life in and as mediation. In my earlier work such as Insect Media (Parikka 2010), I aimed to articulate this as non-human media theory that proceeds by way of a cultural history of animal sensation; this I have started to call my ‘AI’ book, which was not a reference to artificial intelligence, but animal intelligence much in the spirit of Braidotti's zoē. This relational ecology of intensities, or a set of capacities of sensing, helps us to understand some of the links between cultural representations, artistic methods and important scientific work about non-human animals. This chapter pursues some of these questions and contributes an understanding of how animal intelligence is framed in and through artistic engagement with questions of sensing. In other words, the text addresses contemporary art and science collaborations with special attention paid to how artistic practices, in this case, the renowned contemporary artist-architect Tomas Saraceno and his large studio team, deal with questions of environmental formations and agency. As such many of the projects, including the ON AIR (2018–19) exhibition discussed in this chapter, are already implicitly part of the field of environmental humanities, which over the years has incorporated approaches relating to ‘agency, cultural formations, social change and the entangled relations between human and nonhuman worlds’ (Rose et al. 2012: 2). From multispecies ethnographies to cultural theory of the posthuman, from environmental histories and deep times to conceptually rich work on non-human animals, the field also reaches out to art practices.
9 - Inventing Pasts and Futures: Speculative Design and Media Archaeology
- Edited by Mark Goodall, Ben Roberts
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- Book:
- New Media Archaeologies
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 21 November 2020
- Print publication:
- 07 January 2019, pp 205-232
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Abstract
This chapter aims to put imaginary media research and speculative design in conversation; what does it mean to think of media archaeological and imaginary media projects in the context of speculative design? This earlier missing discussing of the two parallel fields sets out to investigate critical methods in speculative practices across media and design with a special angle to imaginary pasts. Both speculative design and imaginary media research are interested in how alternative worlds might be created and how both temporal, social, and technological tabulations situate coordinates of past-future in alternative ways. The chapter addresses different art and design projects, cross-fertilising the two traditions of media and design theory and practice, and aims to elaborate ways how media archaeology could contribute to speculative design and hence contemporary issues in critical design.
Keywords: Imaginary media, speculative design, design fiction, art practice, practice-based research
Introduction: Imaginary Media as Impossible Yet Necessary Techniques
To be able to start with the non-existent, sometimes even the absurd, is a skill in itself. It can be a methodological way of approaching reality not as ready-made and finished, but as produced and open to further variations, potential, and a temporality that includes the possibility of something else. Like with all methods, the skill of thinking the non-existent needs practicing. It also needs institutional contexts that are able to support such an odd task that seems devoid of actual truth-value and easily dismissed as not incorporating the epistemological seriousness required of the academic subjects.
Despite the difficulty of giving a good one-liner definition that could cover all aspects of different traditions of media archaeology, it is safe to say that it has been able to create an identity as a field interested in the speculative. This has meant many things from mobilisation of media history executed by way of surprising connections across art, design, technology, and architecture to acknowledging the unacknowledged, a sort of a search and rescue-operation for devices, stories, narratives, uses, and misuses left out of the earlier registry. Archaeology has been sometimes used as a general term for the way in which we investigate the conditions of existence of media culture, and the media technical conditions of existence of cultural practices – two things that are closely connected, with the two aspects in co-determining relations: media technology and cultural practices. And it also bends our notions of history and time itself.
9 - Architectures of Air: Media Ecologies of Smart Cities and Pollution
- Edited by Maria Voyatzaki, Anglia Ruskin University
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- Book:
- Architectural Materialisms
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 05 May 2021
- Print publication:
- 17 September 2018, pp 207-227
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Summary
Air Conditions
Clean air is a rare occurrence. It is rather a nostalgic memory in the context of the contemporary city – defined by the sprawling megacities that in many cases carry over a legacy of industrialism and infrastructures based on the archaic energy sources of the planetary underground. Materialities of breathing and sustaining life in the specific chemical zones we call cities is one particular approach one can take to urban planning and architecture; what sort of zones for breathing are designed, intentionally or unintentionally? The atmosphere is one particular way of thinking about the built environment by way of the air-conditioning modernity where air is not merely the romantic deep breath in, but a chemically measured reality increasingly also measured as data – and managed as data.
We encounter political dilemmas of inclusion and exclusion, exposure and security already on the level of particles such as dust. Dust and air pollution are silent aggressors that demonstrate the political urgency of the atmospheric condition: the age of modern design can also be understood as one of bubbles and spheres, as Peter Sloterdijk argues, referring to the constitution of subjectivity as an air-conditioning operation. Modernity opens up as air conditioning and as airborne terror: of denying the possibility of breathing the air of streets and public spaces. Terror begins in the air. This claim connects political contexts of cleaning and dusting to issues of chemical warfare. Such warfare is not merely an issue of the usual armed conflicts, but an increasingly naturalised part of security regimes that govern the urban sphere: an air of gas and clouds, of molecular combinations designed to turn the social breathing space into a space of suffocation. This has become evident during the past years of security politics of excessive tear gas use as a quasi-military form of urban sanitisation against social movements. Examples are plentiful, including for example the infamous case of Turkey during and after the Gezi demonstrations in 2013, the events in Ferguson in 2014, and more recently, the use of tear gas against environmental protestors during #COP21 in Paris. The list could go on and include a longer history of the normalisation of such techniques of denial of air.
9 - The Signal-Haunted Cold War: Persistence of the SIGINT Ontology
- from III - UBIQUITOUS SURVEILLANCE
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- By Jussi Parikka, University of Southampton
- Edited by John Beck, University of Westminster, Ryan Bishop, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton
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- Book:
- Cold War Legacies
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 10 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 31 December 2016, pp 167-187
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Summary
The Ephemeral SIGINT
The persistence of the signal marks an ephemeral yet material continuity of the Cold War. The war of signals, signal interception, spy stations, cryptology and signal intelligence had intensified since the start of World War I. Wireless cryptography became one focal point of national security during the war; national territories were guarded in signal space too, localised in concrete sites such as Tuckerton, New Jersey, or Nayville, New York, telegraph stations, owned by the German Telefunken. For obvious reasons, it was taken into American control during the war years when suspicions of German military interests over the traffic that fl owed through the 500-foot aerial towers became stronger (see Wythoff 2014).
Thousands of code-breakers and radio interceptors – primarily Europeans – worked towards analyses of what was being said and to what ends, and how the obvious message could be altered with only an addition of an extra gap in patterns of Morse code. In ciphers, the persistence of the word ‘ṣifr’ in Arabic (and also Turkish), meaning ‘zero’, is a reminder of how marking ‘nothing’ becomes essential for coded messaging. The contemporary-seeming ‘nothingness’ of wireless communications that does not allow much in terms of perception of the signals crossing space between enddevices is encased in a longer history of the mathematical nothingness that stands as a key reference point for a media archaeology of the cryptographic world that we sometimes bluntly call in more popular terms ‘digital culture’.
Cryptography was still limited in the early wireless days, a different situation than with the arrival of World War II some twentyfive years later. Cryptography itself of course has a longer history in written forms spanning centuries. But techniques of data analysis were even more strongly tied to the use of machines as ways to process intelligence gathered, signals intercepted. Some years later, with the advent of the Cold War, the situation had changed to one characteristic of any modern technological data situation: dealing with information that was ‘often trivial in quality and overwhelming in quantity’ (Ferris 2010: 167). The air and transmission waves were full of signals anyway, which made even the identification of code from everyday nonsense a task in itself. From the forefront of the hot wars, agencies specialising in this technological epistemology of signals moved to increasingly secret organisations of media analysis.
3 - Impulsive Synchronisation: A Conversation on Military Technologies and Audiovisual Arts
- from I - PATTERN RECOGNITION
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- By Aura Satz, Jussi Parikka, Culture and Aesthetics at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.
- Edited by John Beck, University of Westminster, Ryan Bishop, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton
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- Book:
- Cold War Legacies
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 10 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 31 December 2016, pp 70-82
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Summary
Aura Satz's technological art engages with mediated realities and historical pasts that are somehow still present. She completed her PhD in 2002 at the Slade School of Fine Art. Satz's work has been featured in various galleries and festivals in the UK and internationally, from FACT (Liverpool) to Tate and Whitechapel Gallery in London, the Victoria and Albert Museum to the Barbican as well as ICA, and internationally for example at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Switzerland. In 2014–15 she was a Leverhulme Artist-in- Residence at the University of Southampton (the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research, the Department of Music and the John Hansard Gallery) and an artist in residence at Chelsea College of Art, and she also teaches at the Royal College of Art.
Her various installation, audiovisual and performance projects have been able to summon a condition or environment in which one experiences the parallel existence of pasts and presents. Often through historical source work and engaging with past technological ideas, Satz creates poetic imaginaries of technologies, bodies and sonic realities. Indeed, sound technologies are one key theme that runs through a lot of her work, but in a way that engages with the wider vibratory aspects of nature that often become exposed through technological ways of making vibrations and waves visible. She was part of London Science Museum's ‘Oramics to Electronica’ project (2011) on the female inventor Daphne Oram's 1950s synthesiser. Sound visualisation comes out in projects such as Vocal Flame(2012) and the In and Out of Synchfilmic performance (2012). Cultural techniques of synchronisation are exposed in that specific piece and in others, including Joan the Woman – with Voicethat was exhibited in 2013. Her interest in the history of automata is most visible in Automamusic(2008) and Automatic Ensemble(2009), a mixture of old and new automata that engage with surrealist and spiritualist ideas and explorations of automatic writing. Besides the agency of machines, the ‘auto-’ in the automata, Satz however is always meticulously aware of the human body as a vibratory ‘medium’ in itself. This body as medium is always, also, recognised as a gendered one, resulting in her historical excavations into specific moments of media history that result in a poetic and empowering relation to women that is often excluded from many projects and historical narratives.
7 - Ethologies of Software Art: What Can a Digital Body of Code Do?
- from THE AESTHETIC PARADIGM
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- By Jussi Parikka, Anglia Ruskin University
- Edited by Stephen Zepke, Independent, Simon O'Sullivan, Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University of London
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- Book:
- Deleuze and Contemporary Art
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 September 2012
- Print publication:
- 27 May 2010, pp 116-132
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Summary
Art of the Imperceptible
In a Deleuzo-Guattarian sense, we can appreciate the idea of software art as the art of the imperceptible. Instead of representational visual identities, a politics of the art of the imperceptible can be elaborated in terms of affects, sensations, relations and forces (see Grosz 2008). Such notions are primarily nonhuman and exceed the modes of organisation and recognition of the human being, whilst addressing themselves to the element of becoming within the latter. Such notions, which involve both the incorporeal (the ephemeral nature of the event as a temporal unfolding instead of a stable spatial identity) and the material (as an intensive differentiation that stems from the virtual principle of the creativity of matter), incorporate ‘the imperceptible’ as a futurity that escapes recognition. In terms of software, this reference to nonhuman forces and to imperceptibility is relevant on at least two levels. Software is not (solely) visual and representational, but works through a logic of translation. But what is translated (or transposed) is not content, but intensities, information that individuates and in-forms agency; software is a translation between the (potentially) visual interface, the source code and the machinic processes at the core of any computer. Secondly, software art is often not even recognised as ‘art’ but is defined more by the difficulty of pinning it down as a social and cultural practice.