Abstracts

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun: “The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future is a Memory” (PDF)

New media, like the computer technology on which it relies, races simultaneously towards the future and the past, towards the bleeding edge of obsolescence. Indeed, rather than “what is new media?”, the more important questions seem to be: “what was new media?” and “what will it be?” To some extent this phenomenon is due to the modifier “new”: to call something new is to ensure that it will one day be old. This inevitable aging, however, does not explain how or why the digital became the new, or why the yesterday and tomorrow of new media are often the same thing: concepts such as social networking (MUDS to Second Life), hot Youtube videos that are already old, and old email messages forever circulated and re-discovered as new.

Key to the digital as the new is an ideological conflation of memory and storage that undermines and underlines digital media’s archival promise. Memory, with its constant degeneration, does not equal storage; although artificial memory has historically combined the transitory with the permanent, the passing with the stable, digital media complicates this relationship by making the permanent into an enduring ephemeral. As I explain in this talk, it does so not simply through some inherent technological feature, but rather through everyday usage and parlance that seeks to arrest memory and its degenerative possibilities in order to support dreams of digital programmability—that is, of the future unfolding predictably from memory. Unpacking the theoretical implications of constantly disseminating and regenerating digital content, this paper argues these dreams create, rather than solve, archival nightmares by proliferating non-simultaneous enduring ephemerals.

Sande Cohen: “Digital Critical?” (Word)

My paper is a discussion of some widely circulating notions, including digital, network, virtuality, and performance. These notions span the arts and humanities, and draw in related ideas and practices, e.g. speed, production (e.g. of the future), intensity, re-symbolization, and obsolescence. If one wants to make a critique of how these terms/processes are used to, say, rationalize university or museum or publisher or software designer, or help such institutions compete and hence function more “smoothly,” where do we create concepts and-dimly-functions of criticism? If contemporary society is collectively shifting from discipline to control in the smallest spheres of biopower (Foucault), is discourse based criticism obsolete in the face of imaging concepts, e.g. pictures of emotions from machines that are then used to tell us what is normal and not about the quietest processes, like sleep? Through a discussion of some practices and instances, I want to find out something about new powers of the system and its critique.

Alexander R. Galloway: “Alternative Algorithms (On Method)” (Word)

It happens from time to time that a certain amount of reflection becomes necessary, not simply concerning the objects of the mind, but as to the actual manner in which intellectual work is done. This typically comes under the heading of methodology, which today has a distinctly liberal profile. With method, it is often more a question of suitability than existential correctness, often more a question of personal style than universal context. Hence methodological discussions these days often devolve into a sort of popularity contest. Who advocates what method and for what purpose? Which general equivalent trumps all others—is it race, or is it class, or is it the logos, or the archive, or the gaze, or desire, play, excess, singularity, resistance, or perhaps life itself—elevating one methodological formation above all others in a triumphant critique (to end all future critique)? In this paper I examine what sorts of methodological approaches make sense today, making the case that the proper methodological position for those working critically within techno-culture is the creation of alternative algorithms.

Ken Goldberg: “The Emperor’s New Media”

Three propositions:

1. new media is the new medium.
2. new media should not be limited to the digital.
3. history is helpful.

The Berkeley Center for New Media

New media can transform how we perceive, learn, communicate, and experience the world. What is “new” is accelerating rapidly with emerging technologies, yet remains deeply rooted in powerful aesthetic, cultural, and political forces.

The Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM), located at the center of design and information technology, is based in a public research university known for alternative thinking. Our mission is to understand what is new about each new medium from cross-disciplinary and global perspectives that emphasize humanities and the public interest.

A medium, from the Latin for “middle element,” acts as a lens between observer and object, or between subjects. New Media refers to media that are discovered, invented, or adopted during a particular point or period in history. The alphabet was a new medium in 1800 BCE; subsequent new media include the printing press, telescope, camera, X-ray, and the electric light. Contemporary new media range from Wifi to Wii to Wikipedia.

The Berkeley Center for New Media defines new media broadly to include ideas that facilitate perception and communication: Theories are media. For example psychoanalytic theory and the theory of relativity are intellectual frameworks for interpreting phenomena; they act as lenses for viewing texts, data, and events.

Lenses both transmit and distort. As Sophocles observed, “nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.” One goal of the BCNM is to highlight and critically examine the opportunities, illusions, and risks associated with new media, and to consider how new media can constructively benefit education, political engagement, privacy, and aesthetic experience.

The BCNM is itself a medium between people and ideas. It serves as a focal point for unconventional historical and contemporary thinking from a diverse community of over 100 affiliated faculty, advisors, and scholars from over 30 UC Berkeley departments, including Architecture, Philosophy, Film Studies, Art History, Performance Studies, the Schools of Engineering, Information, Journalism, Law, and the Berkeley Art Museum.

As a Center, the BCNM catalyzes research and educates future leaders. The BCNM presents courses, symposia and special events for students, researchers, industry, and the public to seek out, consider, and develop insights into contemporary new media. It offers a special program for UC Berkeley PhD students and has established new cross-disciplinary faculty positions. The BCNM analyzes and helps shape future developments by facilitating traditional modes of scholarship, hosting critical dialogues, and encouraging unorthodox artworks, designs, and experiments.

Mark B. N. Hansen: “Is the ‘Digital’ in Digital Cinema the Same as the ‘Digital’ in Digital Technics?” (Word)

In the spirit of the conference topic, I shall return to early debates concerning the role of cinema in thinking digital media. Lev Manovich famously pronounced that digital culture circa 1999 was (and would remain) cinematic culture, and his analysis has guided much of the work that has developed around the topic of new media in the almost decade since. At the same time, film scholars have begun to explore the significance of digital technologies of production, post- production and distribution for film studies and for the institution of film itself. Despite their undeniable convergence of interest, these two lines of exploration develop remarkably different accounts of what exactly the digital is and why its technical specificity should matter. In my paper, I will unpack this difference by focusing on the question of how digital technologies capture and/or represent time and duration. Specifically, I will take up the recent argument, advanced by filmmaker Babette Mangolte and seconded by film theorist D.N. Rodowick, that digital film cannot represent duration. Taking this claim as indicative of how cinema is figured in discourses on film studies and production, I shall both explore its governing assumptions and present counterexamples from digital filmmakers and artists that fundamentally reconfigure the mode in which time is captured by digital technology and the resulting expressive possibilities.

Thomas Keenan: “The death of politics? Human rights, new public spheres, and the jihad”

Human rights and the jihad: the two discourses could not be more different. Except that they share a few gestures, particularly in the complexity of their relation to politics and of their investment in the global new-media public sphere. The paper will explore some of these complexities, with the help of a number of examples from recent Internet-based jihadist video production.

Friedrich Kittler: “Ontology of the media”

I start from the assumption that philosophy (or, in Heidegger’s term, European metaphysics) has been necessarily unable to conceive media as media. This neglect begins already in Aristotle: First, because his ontology deals only with things, their matter and form, but not with relations between things in time and space, the very concept of a (physical) medium (tò metaxú) is relegated to his theory of sensorial perception (aisthesis). Second, because the Greeks did not distinguish between articulated speech elements and articulated alphabetic letters, the very concept of writing as philosophy’s own (technical) medium is missing from Aristotle on.

I shall proceed with a short history of this philosophical neglect, passing from Thomas Aquinas and Descartes to Fichte and Hegel, in order to show that only in Heidegger, when he turned philosophy into thought", a growing consciousness for technical media arose. First, because already Being and Time thematized the inconspiciousness of every day media such as glasses and telephones, second, because in the thirties Heidegger described mass media such as radio no more in existential, but rather in historical terms, third, because after World War II he conceptualized the beginning of computers as the factical end of philosophy itself. This end, however, following Heidegger, makes it all the more necessary to pose (in terms of “Seinsgeschichte”, history of being) the question why philosophic logic as invented by Aristotle finally led to its machinization by Turing, Shannon, and others.

Fifty years after Heidegger, I think his question has to be taken up in more precise terms. The leading role of mathematics in media history cannot be misread any longer as some Platonic error. On the contrary, Greek arithmetic has played the same fundamental role as the concepts of being and ontology in founding an epoch where, for the second time in history, a universal medium of binary numbers is able to encode, to transmit, and to store whatever will happen, from writing or counting to imaging or sounding.

Tim Lenoir: “Recycling the Military/Entertainment Complex: Turning Swords to Ploughshares” (PDF)

Addressing recent scholarship on the relationship between the contemporary gaming industries and the very large domain of military simulation, I will discuss my own current collaboration with Virtual Heroes, the company that built the online game/training environment and recruitment tool, America’s Army. We are “recoding” some of their technology to create multiplayer environments for training personnel in the area of peace and conflict resolution in several key areas of global conflict. The discussion of the project will serve as a platform for discussing promising new developments in the area of “serious games”, the use of gaming technology for purposes of teaching and learning, and their potential as a new form of interactive narrative.

Tom Levin: “Five Tapes, Four Halls, Two Dreams: Vicissitudes of Surveillant Narration in Haneke’s Caché.”

I propose a reading of Hanecke's Caché. which looks at the narrative function of its surveillant aspects, in particular what I argue is the moralism of its surveillant narration. For it is in the subtle vicissitudes of what I demonstrate is a panoptic formalism over the course of the film that a huge amount of work takes place—a shift that is best indicated by considering the formal similarity of the first and last scenes (of the house and of the entrance to the school, respectively) which, despite the seeming similarity of their surveillant stasis in fact have utterly different emotional/narrational connotation. Why is this? How does this occur? What is at stake in what I call the moralist formalism of the film’s metaleptic indexicality? This is what I explore in a very close reading of Caché, as I indicate in the paper’s title: “Five Tapes, Four Halls, Two Dreams: Vicissitudes of Surveillant Narration in Haneke’s Caché.”

Laura U. Marks: “Latency and the Will to Figuration in Islamic Art and New Media Art” (Word)

A general distinction between Sunni and Shi’a thought is that for the former, meanings should be clear and agreeable to all, while for the latter, meaning is latent, and interpretation is necessary in order to draw it out. The Sevener Shi’ism of the Fatimid caliphate in Cairo (909-1171) developed this belief, with its Neoplatonist and Gnostic undertones, and on Fatimid mosques, letters of the script called foliated Kufic seem to grow leaves and tendrils, as though to demonstrate the meaning latent in the text (as Yasser Tabbaa has argued). Meanwhile, despite the constraint of the clear and unambiguous Sunni scripts, I observe a fascinating will to figuration in Sunni Islamic art whereby letters and words start to look like bodies. This occurs especially in secular contexts and in formerly Christian or polytheist cultures that adopt Islam: in artworks in twelfth-century Anatolia and Afghanistan and thirteenth-century Delhi, and later in fifteenth-century Ottoman art, all kinds of inventive variations make figures arise from text-based, nonfigurative art. (Incidentally, alchemy derives from similar beliefs in the relationship between manifest and latent materiality of substances.)

These artworks in which text unfolds into figure, and the syncretic, Shi’a and Islamic Neoplatonist thought that inform it, have a parallel in the figurality (Lyotard, Rodowick) of digital media and in code-based works that oscillate between textuality and figuration. Thus I seek to use Islamic thought to unfold the significance of contemporary digital figuration.

Colin Milburn: “My Little Avatar, or Nanomorphosis” (Word)

Today, the avatar is suddenly a familiar figure and a household word, thanks especially to the phenomenal success of massively-multiplayer synthetic worlds like World of Warcraft and Second Life. But the avatar as a specific new media form precedes the history of cyberspace, and in many ways it might be considered a foundational technology for computational culture at large. Tracing a genealogy of avatar across its multiple incarnations, its serial emergence at the crossroads of mythology, programming, role playing, science fiction, video games, and telepresence technologies, I argue that the avatar is a medium of becoming-molecular, or “nanomorphosis.” For the avatar is a prosthetic agent enabling virtual access and self-projection into a small other world; it is a vehicle through which the self becomes articulated with an otherwise radically discontinuous microcosm. Moreover, I will show that the avatar as an instrumental technology has been at the core of accelerating technoscientific convergence at the molecular scale: the ongoing process now called “nanoconvergence” in which we see formerly distinct fields such as biotechnology, informatics and cognitive science all now becoming molecular sciences, reconfigured as forms of nanotechnology. By analyzing the various remediations and premediations of avatar since the 1950s, I claim that the avatar has always been the medium of nanomorphosis, the medium that facilitates a becoming-molecular of the subject of science and the consumer of technoculture.

Trevor Paglen: “Blank Spots on a Map: State Secrecy and the Limits of the Visible”

A virtual road trip through the world of hidden budgets, state secrets, covert military bases, and disappeared people: a landscape that military and intelligence insiders call the “black world.” Over the course of his talk, Paglen leads us from “non-existent” Air Force and CIA installations in the Nevada desert to secret prisons in Afghanistan and to a collection of even more obscure “black sites” startlingly close to home. Using hundreds of images he has produced and collected over the course of his work, Paglen shows how the black world’s internal contradictions give rise to a peculiar visual, aesthetic, and epistemological grammar with which to think about the contemporary moment.

Kriss Ravetto: “Shadowed by Images: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Art of Surveillance” (Word)

Through an analysis of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s recent work, I explore the disjuncture between recognizing and reacting to the fact that we are being followed (by images, interfaces, and tracking devices) and recognizing and reacting to the fact that these devices already anticipate our movements, desires, and trajectories. Lozano-Hemmer’s work does not offer us a way of subverting these mechanisms of control, but it allows us to examine the uncanny relationship between the fear (or in some cases Eros) of being watched and the realization that there is no disembodied position (of the voyeur) that is not subject to being anticipated and therefore, controlled by tracking systems that trace our responses. Our awareness of such anticipation produces an uncanny effect, allowing us to temporarily feel that we have moved outside or beyond the boundedness of our bodies. I would like to address how surveillance systems, global capital, and digital technologies have reconfigured notions of embodiment and public space, and of the public itself.

Brian Rotman: “Virtual X and Ghost Effects” (Word)

Within the landscapes of the new media the virtual is everywhere. Virtual memory, virtual presence, virtual worlds, virtual life, virtual war, virtual money, virtual sex, virtual art, virtual X. Why? Is virtualization a result or epiphenomenon of electronic technology? Should one speak of an ontology of the virtual? How is the virtual related to de-embodiment? To the unreal? To the being and non being of ghosts? My paper offers a response to these questions in which virtuality is central not only to contemporary media technologies but also to those of speech and its inscription.

Julia Scher: “Locate”

As part of the study of “Surveillant Architectures”, location (or maybe for the conference you would use the word landscape) can be all about controlled technology, medium and ingenuity. It can also be a “zoo for natural phenomena” where real time mixing algorithms slide along public and private transmission systems of observation and data collection for the purposes of art.

Eugene Thacker: “After Life” (PDF)

A central feature of new media technologies is their properties of dispersion—they are increasingly distributed, wireless, ubiquitous, and pervasive. However such properties are not limited to media technologies, but are claimed of biological and political phenomena as well. This paper will consider three such examples of dispersion: networks (a technical model), swarms (a biological model), and multitudes (the political model). Each of these can be regarded as involving a rethinking of the theological concept of immanence in terms of “life,” often to the extent that one cannot be thought of as separate from the other.

Sha Xin Wei: “Petitot, Whitehead, the Problem of Novelty, and Computer Vision”

I discuss two applications of a topological approach to embodied experience that starts from continua rather than atomic egos or bodies: the question of novelty in a continuous processual experience, and phenomenologically informed approaches to computer vision. Both of these applications concern how people or machines may construe, construct, or constitute things.

I consider Jean Petitot’s work on morphogenesis and in particular, his provocative attempt to “naturalize” phenomenology. Petitot’s poetic use of fibre-bundles and concepts from differential geometry, following on René Thom’s earlier inventions upon continuous topology, stand in sharp contrast with A.N. Whitehead’s bare-handed approach to an unbifurcated world.

These francophone and anglophone approaches to continuous experience yield challenging responses to the question of novelty. How do things emerge from and dissolve back into continuous fields, whether they be discursive fields or fields of hybrid computational matter? Of course, nearly every term in this question is a nexus of divergent interpretations, therefore in a brief discussion, I can only try to examine a few of them, informed by emergent practices in new media arts and sciences.

One interesting question from the perspective of science studies is the entanglement between Petitot’s and other continuum approaches to materiality and embodiment, and studies of computer vision and machine perception at engineering research centers in Paris, namely the Sony Computer Science Laboratory, and the Laboratoire de Psychologie Experimentale, CNRS, Université René Descartes. Computer vision, perhaps the most developed area of machine perception, has permeated some recent new media work with responsive environments, and to the extent that such art comments on or tilts our embodied experience, the conceptual commitments implied in the use of computer vision techniques merit critical attention.

Siegfried Zielinski: “Depth of Subject and Diversity of Method: An Introduction to Variantology” (Word)

My endeavour is not to explain the history of the media as a consecutive retrospective, but to move from reflections about the deep time history of arts and sciences to speculative projections that occasionally might reach into the present and into the future. Our work on deep time relations between arts, sciences, and technologies does not seek to re-invent the concepts of the media or the arts. The aim is to open up both media and the arts via their interactions with scientific and technological processes.