Re: [-empyre-] Mediated matters and design abjections
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi all, I just wanted to jump in here and encourage you all to continue discussing. I got the green light from Renate since the new month at -empyre- won't begin until Sunday. There are a couple things that strike me here about the discussion over Datapolitik. Davide writes that Datapolitik refers to the transformation of humans from identity-bearing subjects to data-emitting subjects. There is datapolitik because we acknowledge ourselves as informational subjects whether we like to admit to it or not. Indeed, most of our daily activities are data-generative I can’t help but think of Deleuze’s “Postscript on Control Societies” here. In this short text he notes that we no longer live (and this is in 1990) in a society in which there are individuals, but one in which there are _dividuals_. If I may say so, I think Davide nicely fills out what Deleuze may have been getting at, though he never really analyzes in his brief essay. I do wonder, though, why biopolitics and biopower don’t concern you, Davide. You seem to bring together biopolitics and human subjectivity – you write: “Hence my lack of pursuing (also) of questions about biopolitics and subjectivity”— but I’m not sure that this captures how biopolitics operates in the 21st century. How are you thinking about biopolitics in this instance? And aren’t the practices of bioinformatics and biotechnology (that we talked about last week) clear instances of (neoliberal) biopolitics at work? They also seem to exemplify the Datapolitik you describe. How does this work out for you? And might this help sort out Johannes’ question re: the politics in Data-politik? I know this is spilling over into October, but I invite Davide, as well as the –empyre- community, to jump into this discussion! Thanks, Adam On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 9:01 AM, Johannes Birringer johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- thanks for your very interesting reply, Davide, to some of the comments. And your reply, if we had time here, would raise further questions, naturally, but I am hesitant to ask them as I feel that somehow the monthly debate has not involved very many discussants on our list. and it worries me not knowing whether anyone is reading the conversations or wanting to participate or wanting us to stop? I don’t think (at least for me) that the transmissional model of cause and effect of influence (which is also the model of coercion) is sufficient for our day and age (maybe it was never enough). Hence my lack of pursuing (also) of questions about biopolitics and subjectivity - which aren’t uninteresting questions to raise and follow through; they’re issues that I don’t feel equipped to deal with well enough - or rather, I should say, that the issue of control always already has a moral answer built into it; namely, the one who controls is the one (or it) that simultaneously exploits But once we’ve established this moral/ethical trajectory – let’s call it critical thought’s a priori - what can we say about the structures of association in our contemporary condition? .. The disregarding of interest seems like a unique dynamic of datapolitik that distinguishes it . [Davide] Your (aesthetic?) belief in the healthy disinterest of datapolitik (how can disinterested algorithms have or form a politics or have strategies if we associate the latter with Politik?) is peculiar as you did, earlier, speak of a transmission model, and you called it contagion. But surely contagious spreads and swarming affects are opportunistic, no? they are Machiavellian? at least as far as i understand the biomedical metaphor or epidemiological process and your zombie allegory -- viral algorithms spread, contaminate, and affect influence through contagion -- how then do the immune systems respond and how to political tactics and strategies become re-thinkable and rethought in such an algorithmic culture of associationn? You argue that data have/imply no politics, but call that a data-politik? Are you being ironic? regards Johannes Birringer ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Mediated Matters and design abjections
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi all, Thanks for forcing me to clarify, Johannes. I mentioned last week's discussion for two reasons, I suppose. On the one hand, I wanted to call attention to the fact that eco-technologies (which include the products of biotech, synthetic biology, biodesign, etc.) are often marshaled to support the neoliberalized ideal of an eco-city with its healthy metabolism, and so on. This was mentioned last week, I believe. In other words, the neoliberalization of urban design and biodesign are deeply entangled. The other reason for mentioning last week's discussion is more abstract. That is, I'm very intrigued by the notion of the urban that Ross proposed: namely, that it is a spatial-political order predicated on limitless expansion. I imagine that Ross is drawing on Brenner and Lefebvre here (although please correct me if I'm wrong, Ross). What strikes me, though, is that just as the urban is a spatial-political order that constitutes the world under neoliberal power, life is also becoming-- and in very particular ways--something that is predicated on the limitless expansion of its territory. And the point is: garage biology does not easily escape this expansion. Genetic tinkering (Oron, please correct me if I'm wrong here) never happens in isolation -- either in the wet lab or in the garage. Biomaterials and information are sent through the mail (think of Steve Kutz), exchanged online, found on data bases, etc. In short, bio information, materials, and parts circulate in a global exchange that is profitable -- from next-generation biofuels and organ regeneration to 3D printing organic chairs, etc., etc. One of the implications of this is that there is an unprecedented spatial-political expansion to life, to its materials, and to its limitless applications--and there are also gross inequalities that this expansion produces. In any case, what my previous post was trying to suggest, I suppose, is that urban design and biodesign may share this dream of territorial expansion. And my call for deep time… well, that was merely a plea to think about life as somehow existing simultaneously within the register of neoliberal expansion and within the register of the geologic time of the planet… to the extent that this is at all possible… Hope this clarifies. Thoughts?? Best, Adam On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 11:58 AM, Johannes Birringer johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- dear all realizing the discussion is invited to move on (by Adam's post today), I still hope Oron will follow up his initial postings and perhaps expand on the notions of regenerative biology and designing life that he brought here. Am not sure how they relate to deep time, as Adam suggests, and I am also not convinced that we can draw easy parallels between the first and second weeks' subject matters. What's intriguing to me is how much the conversation is an elaboration of last week's developing discussion on urbanization [Adam] Could you refine how you see 'urban data politics' related to the modes and modalizations of life, as Manchev may imply that side of biology/biotechnology -- introduced by Oron or projected by the quasi-critical designs of bioartists who investigate growing cultures or tinkering with cells, at the genetic level -- when critiquing the politics of plasticity. For those who were interested in my reference to Boyan Manchev's writings but could not track the german text, i found an english translation from a Slovene translation (Odpor plesa, Maska 25 [2010], pp. 9-19), and cite a paragraph from the opening pages of that text on modes of life: Forms of Life as commodities The society of the spectacle undoubtedly complies with technology-based, post-industrial capitalism, its logic of production as well as the modern logic of representation: it is the outcome of hyper-technologization and functionalization, codifying life and prescribing processes of subjectivation, which are nothing less than forms of subjugation. The new model up for debate, as it surpasses the model of developed modernity, introduces a completely new commodity to the game: the forms of life itself. In reference to Debord’s definition of the society of the spectacle, one could define this new model as “capital accumulated to the point that it becomes a form of life”. But first, in what sense can the term ‘life forms’ be used? The term has the fundamental task of introducing a different notion of life, which implies that there is no essentially determined life, only life forms, or rather modes of life: Life is the modalization of life... Traditional capitalism was based on the notion of growth: Working more efficiently and producing more meant an increase and expansion of leisure time for autonomous life beyond commerce, thus creating more space for forms of life that do
[-empyre-] Urban Data Politics
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hello all, Thanks so much Oron and Johannes for your compelling comments. What's intriguing to me is how much the conversation is an elaboration of last week's developing discussion on urbanization. That is, we seem to be running into the same frustrations but at a different scale of design (though I wouldn't want to separate bio and urban design too much, which I think we were beginning to touch on last week-- especially with Adrian's comments). In my last post, I mentioned affect precisely because it is a concept that has so often been marshaled to situate the human in pre-individual capacities for change. But it seems that this is what has been put into crisis (if you'll permit me using this term). Oron, this makes me think of your work on deep time. I wonder if you could discuss some of this work, and perhaps put some of our what is to be done tone (to reference Ross from last week) into perspective. I also want to use this as a segue into this week's topic, urban data politics, with Etienne Turpin and Davide Panagia. To draw our new guests into the conversation, I wonder how the Anthropocene thesis (Etienne) or Datapolitiks (Davide/Etienne) might help us negotiate some of these difficult questions? Thanks so much! Here the bios: Etienne Turpin (ID) is a philosopher researching, curating, and writing about complex urban systems, community resilience, and colonial-scientific history. He completed his Ph.D. (Philosophy) in the Department of Theory and Policy Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) of the University of Toronto. He is supported by a Vice-Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the SMART Infrastructure Facility, Faculty of Engineering and Information Science, and an Associate Research Fellowship with the Australian Center for Cultural Environmental Research, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Wollongong, Australia. With the support of these appointments, Etienne lives and works in Jakarta, where his research is coordinated through anexact office and supported by SMART's _GeoSocial Intelligence for Urban Livability Resilience_ Research Group. Prior to his work in Jakarta, Etienne was a Research Fellow at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan, where he also taught advanced design research and architecture history and theory, and coordinated research-based travel studios for the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. He has also taught in the architecture and landscape architecture graduate programs for the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto, and in the art history and visual culture undergraduate programs for the Department of Visual Studies, University of Toronto-Mississauga. Davide Panagia (US) is an Associate Professor of Political Science at UCLA and co-editor of the quarterly journal Theory Event (Johns Hopkins University Press). He received his Ph.D. in 2002 from Johns Hopkins and was previously Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Cultural Studies Department at Canada’s Trent University. Panagia’s teaching and research interests include contemporary political theory, the history of political thought, aesthetics of cultural theory, visual culture, and citizenship studies. His recent books include _The Poetics of Political Thinking _(2006),_The Political Life of Sensation_(2009), and _Impressions of Hume: Cinematic Thinking and the Politics of Discontinuity_ (2013). ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Mediated Matters
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Oron wrote: What is interesting in our context, which is something that I would like to explore and unpack in the next few days, is that as unsuccessful as this field is in delivering its medical promises, it holds a great symbolic and seductive power as to our fantasies of controlling and designing life forms and forms of life. Oron, I wonder if you could say more about this seductive power. This also speaks to Johannes' question, I believe, about the promises of bioart. One of the daring things that Rob Mitchell (see last September's discussion) proposes in his wonderful book _Bioart and the Vitality of Media_ is that bioart can function as a medium for transformation that produces new affective spaces. My worry is that affect itself is not outside of the pervasive capitalism Johannes mentions. While I can already hear critics accuse me of not understanding Deleuze and Guattari's affect, I do think that there is a reason why Deleuze is worried, even cynical, in the Postscript on the Societies of Control. His concern is that the mutation in capital no longer gives him a way to think the outside. This may sound cynical, but I wonder what promise(s) bioart still holds. And how do we frame-- or reframe-- those promises? Any thoughts? On Tue, Sep 16, 2014 at 7:49 AM, Oron Catts oron.ca...@uwa.edu.au wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear all - it is good to be here again and thanks Adam for inviting me back. Unfortunately I didn't follow all of the conversation last week, as I was in China, experiencing first hand some of the extremes of urban spatial organisation... seeing the out of control urbanisation (read: forests of high rising apartment blocks) in what was until very recently rural farming areas. One story I have heard about this (true or not) that might link what I want to talk about (designing life) and the problem of forcing urban design solutions (which I'm less interested in) is that of the lone Chinese framer forced out of his land and traditional way of living into one of these apartments. To the dismay of his neighbours he moved in with his water buffalo; been both his only companion and property that was only logical for framer to bring the buffalo along. The story ends with the authorities called in to remove the nuisance. Hint- it was not the apartment block... Anyway, one of the main reasons from my trip to China was to continue my research towards an exhibition I'm staging next year, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the first public appearance of (what is for me, at least) one of the most striking example of designed life- the mouse with the human ear on its back. This example of the plasticity of bodies and human abilities to sculpt with living material was what lad me on the path I'm still following. The Ear mouse was also the framing poster boy of the field now known as regenerative medicine. What is interesting in our context, which is something that I would like to explore and unpack in the next few days, is that as unsuccessful as this field is in delivering its medical promises, it holds a great symbolic and seductive power as to our fantasies of controlling and designing life forms and forms of life. In the last couple of years we have seen how this mode of thinking and the actual technology of regenerative biology are entering the mainstream discourse of consumer products. In the next posts I will give some concrete examples, but in the meantime it will be interesting as to what imaginaries will be conjured... Soon Oron -Original Message- From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [mailto: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Adam Nocek Sent: Tuesday, 16 September 2014 12:12 PM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: [-empyre-] Mediated Matters --empyre- soft-skinned space-- ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
[-empyre-] Mediated Matters
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi all, I'd like to thank our invited guests, Ross and Adrian, for participating this past week, as well as all those who joined in the discussion! I'm really encouraged by what has been developing over the past week, especially in relation designing for/with uncertainty and wearable technologies. I do want to draw attention to the notion of the urban that Ross highlighted, which will be picked up again, I believe, in the last week. In any case, what you suggest re: urbanization seems to resonate with Neil Brenner’s work in important ways (e.g., his insightful introduction to the edited volume, Implosions/Explosions: Towards A Study of Planetary Urbanization), especially his central provocation that the urban has no outside (extending Lefebvre’s work). Though what I'm particularly intrigued by is your final question: How can we imagine a spatial organization truly beyond the urban? I think this responds in a really insightful way to how urban design in particular needs to become unrecognizable to itself. Though I wonder whether and how urbanization functions in other design practices, that is, continues and extends urbanization in different and often unrecognizable forms? In any case, I'd like to invite you all to continue the conversations from last week, as well as welcome Oron Catts who contributed to the month on bioart I hosted last September. I don't want to derail any important themes that are emerging here, but I'm sure that Oron will be able to offer some insight into the use of biodesign/tech that is geared toward more aesthetic and ethical forms of experimentation. Perhaps this will open up some interesting questions for Johannes and Susan as well. Welcome Oron! (Unfortunately, Luciana Parisi will not be able to join us due to a family emergency. Our thoughts are with you, Luciana.) Here is a bio for Oron: Oron Catts (AU) is an artist, researcher and curator whose pioneering work with the Tissue Culture and Art Project which he established in 1996 is considered a leading biological art project. In 2000 he co-founded SymbioticA, an artistic research centre housed within the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology, The University of Western Australia. Under Catts’ leadership SymbioticA has gone on to win the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica in Hybrid Art (2007) the WA Premier Science Award (2008) and became a Centre for Excellence in 2008. In 2009 Catts was recognised by Thames Hudson’s “60 Innovators Shaping our Creative Future” book in the category “Beyond Design”, and by Icon Magazine (UK) as one of the top 20 Designers, “making the future and transforming the way we work”. Catts interest is Life; more specifically the shifting relations and perceptions of life in the light of new knowledge and it applications. Often working in collaboration with other artists (mainly Dr. Ionat Zurr) and scientists, Catts have developed a body of work that speak volumes about the need for new cultural articulation of evolving concepts of life. Catts was a Research Fellow in Harvard Medical School, a visiting Scholar at the Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University, and a Visiting Professor of Design Interaction, Royal College of Arts, London. Catts’ ideas and projects reach beyond the confines of art; his work is often cited as inspiration to diverse areas such as new materials, textiles, design, architecture, ethics, fiction, and food. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 118, Issue 1
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi all, Thanks, Ross, Adrian, and others for your great comments. I'm particularly encouraged and intrigued by Adrian's hope that we may be able to subvert neoliberalism via design in the public interest, and so on. I also want to draw attention to John's comments: ...but for the practices to be actualized we should suspend remote conversations that are mediated by a massive global telecommunications infrastructure that is fully dependent on hydrocarbons. (We are the neo-liberals here communicating via this technology) As I sit here writing and utterly dependent on hydrocarbons, I'm reminded of how interdependent practices and materials are in our neoliberalization of all last vestiges of a design future, and how their configuration will have to change, drastically, if we are indeed going to design _for_ a Future (which is what John's point is, I think). In this regard, I can't help but think of Jeanne van Heeswijk's work I saw this summer in Rotterdam ( http://www.jeanneworks.net/projects/freehouse_-_radicalizing_the_local/#/jeanneworks/); her project Freehouse reconceptualizes the very terms of design, altering its methods and materials, by designing social spaces for civil disobedience, which empower communities to become their own antidote. In any case, I'm curious about the extent to which design practices/materials need to become uncertain, or even unrecognizable, to themselves in order to generate the design space that Adrian has in mind. In the context of scientific practice, which has seen its share of commodification in the last decades, Isabelle Stengers draws on A. N. Whitehead's call for uncertainty in the face of scientific minds in a groove. In today's era of fast science that has locked in our future for us, slow science is a way to reclaim uncertain futures, by not reducing the world's messiness to what can be fixed. We cannot ignore messiness, she claims, by dreaming up or fantasizing about how to correct it; we have to learn to live with messiness, and learn from it. We have to become apprentices to mess even. This is what slow science asks of scientists. I guess I'm wondering whether we can make a similar appeal to slow design, and what that would look like. How would learning to design _with_ mess-- instead of trying to fix it-- reconfigure the practices/materials that have stolen uncertain futures from us? Just some thoughts... Thanks! On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 3:04 PM, John Hopkins jhopk...@neoscenes.net wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- But is not lost. I am intrigued and inspired by design practices that attempt to subvert the logic of neoliberalism. Design in the public interest, structures for inclusion, practices of commoning, and so forth are all exciting experiments with a more expanded understanding of the social basis of design as a constitutive power (to borrow from Hardt and Negri). Problem is, 99.999% of 'design practices' (as a cultural-social-academic-economic 'manifestation') are enclosed by a complete dependence on the wider hydrocarbon energy system -- precisely because those practices grew out of and exist because of the excess that contemporary (technological) energy sources have (temporarily and unsustainably!) produced... And, actually, we *will* eventually consume our way out of the environmental 'problem' -- when the energy source is all consumed, then there will be a massive re-set of the system. When the sustainable pre/post hydrocarbon population settles down to somewhere between, say, 0.5 and 1.0 billion of the human species, the environment will slowly re-evolve into something entirely different. (This scenario seems to be the most likely, as there is *no* slowing of consumption apparent on the wide scale...!) In some ways, it is a standard that it an anathema to Life (as a phenomena) to *not* consume when there is an available energy source. Humans try to think themselves out of this need for Life to consume energy to project itself into the future. But it would appear that the conscious thoughts aren't enough to change the actions that are a core part of evolved life. So, bravo for thinking about the practices, but for the practices to be actualized we should suspend remote conversations that are mediated by a massive global telecommunications infrastructure that is fully dependent on hydrocarbons. (We are the neo-liberals here communicating via this technology). Didn't Graham Harwood, or someone else of that ilk make a calculation as to how much energy is expended in sending an email? A few cents of afternoon meditation after having to walk home with a flat tire on my bike through sonic clouds of screeching cicadas. They will be around longer than we shall, neoloberalism or not! Cheers, JH -- ++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD grounded on a granite
[-empyre-] Neo-eco-liberalism
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi all, I'd like to welcome Ross Exo Adams and Adrian Parr to the first week at -empyre! This week's topic addresses what I'm calling, Neo-eco-liberalism. The title references the complicated way that ecological catastrophe dominates so many design discourses today. In an era when the Anthropocene (hypo)thesis is hotly debated in nearly all academic fields, it is designers in particular who often feel a responsibility to correct for the footprint left by modern, industrial-scale design, and design with an eye to the deep time of the planet. No doubt the myriad discourses on “sustainable,” “ecological,” or “smart” technologies come to mind as possible ways of addressing the deep time of design. For example, great progress has been made in the application of biotechnology, synthetic biology, and nanotechnology to design fields, so that “programmable” or “mediated matter” now provides a viable means for designing complex (even semi-living) systems that adapt and evolve in response to wider, non-human environments— surely a post-humanist framework for design. But as our guests know, the many discourses and technologies surrounding “sustainable” and “eco design do not easily avoid neoliberal capture, and in fact, have too often become a resource for private investors to strengthen the firm grip of capital. Urban developers in particular, as Ross has noted elsewhere, have been quick to embrace the discourse of “ecological catastrophe” as a way to ensure that the private development of urban space proceeds without reproach, and destroys the last vestiges of public space. As a way into this week's topic, I'm wondering if our guests would begin the conversation by meditating or complicating this tension. Here are our guests bios one more time: Ross Exo Adams (US) is an architect, urbanist and educator whose work looks at the political and historical intersection between circulation and urbanization. He is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Iowa State University. His writing has been published in Log, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Radical Philosophy, Thresholds, Architectural Review among others. Previously he has taught at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, The Architectural Association, the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, NL and at Brighton University in the UK. His work has been exhibited in the Venice Biennale, the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City, the Centre of Contemporary Architecture in Moscow and the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam. As an architect and urban designer he has worked in offices such as MVRDV, Foster Partners, Arup Urban Design and Productora-DF. He holds a Master of Architecture from the Berlage Institute and a Ph.D. from the London Consortium for which he was awarded the 2011 LKE Ozolins Studentship by the RIBA. Adrian Parr (US/AU) specialist on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and has published widely on the sustainability movement, climate change politics, activist culture, and creative practice. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and School of Architecture and Interior Design at the University of Cincinnati. Some of her recent books include the _Deleuze Dictionary_ (ed.) (2005), _Hijacking Sustainability_ (2009), _New Directions in Sustainable Design_ (ed. with Michael Zaretsky) (2010), and _The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics_ (2013). Thanks again! ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Welcome Adam AJ Nocek, September 2014: Design That Matters
and analysed the bionic transformation of the perceptive sensorium triggered by digital media, the advancement of new techno-ecologies of control, and the nanoengineering of matter. She has published articles on the cybernetic re-wiring of memory and perception in the context of a non-phenomenological critique of computational media vis a vis strategies of branding and marketing. Her interest in interactive media has also led her research to engage more closely with computation, cognition, and algorithmic aesthetic in the context of digital design and architecture. In 2013, she published _Contagious Architecture. Computation, Aesthetics and Space_ (MIT Press). Oron Catts (AU) is an artist, researcher and curator whose pioneering work with the Tissue Culture and Art Project which he established in 1996 is considered a leading biological art project. In 2000 he co-founded SymbioticA, an artistic research centre housed within the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology, The University of Western Australia. Under Catts’ leadership SymbioticA has gone on to win the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica in Hybrid Art (2007) the WA Premier Science Award (2008) and became a Centre for Excellence in 2008. In 2009 Catts was recognised by Thames Hudson’s “60 Innovators Shaping our Creative Future” book in the category “Beyond Design”, and by Icon Magazine (UK) as one of the top 20 Designers, “making the future and transforming the way we work”. Catts interest is Life; more specifically the shifting relations and perceptions of life in the light of new knowledge and it applications. Often working in collaboration with other artists (mainly Dr. Ionat Zurr) and scientists, Catts have developed a body of work that speak volumes about the need for new cultural articulation of evolving concepts of life. Catts was a Research Fellow in Harvard Medical School, a visiting Scholar at the Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University, and a Visiting Professor of Design Interaction, Royal College of Arts, London. Catts’ ideas and projects reach beyond the confines of art; his work is often cited as inspiration to diverse areas such as new materials, textiles, design, architecture, ethics, fiction, and food. Etienne Turpin (ID) is a philosopher researching, curating, and writing about complex urban systems, community resilience, and colonial-scientific history. He completed his Ph.D. (Philosophy) in the Department of Theory and Policy Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) of the University of Toronto. He is supported by a Vice-Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the SMART Infrastructure Facility, Faculty of Engineering and Information Science, and an Associate Research Fellowship with the Australian Center for Cultural Environmental Research, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Wollongong, Australia. With the support of these appointments, Etienne lives and works in Jakarta, where his research is coordinated through anexact office and supported by SMART's _GeoSocial Intelligence for Urban Livability Resilience_ Research Group. Prior to his work in Jakarta, Etienne was a Research Fellow at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan, where he also taught advanced design research and architecture history and theory, and coordinated research-based travel studios for the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. He has also taught in the architecture and landscape architecture graduate programs for the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto, and in the art history and visual culture undergraduate programs for the Department of Visual Studies, University of Toronto-Mississauga. Davide Panagia (US) is an Associate Professor of Political Science at UCLA and co-editor of the quarterly journal Theory Event (Johns Hopkins University Press). He received his Ph.D. in 2002 from Johns Hopkins and was previously Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Cultural Studies Department at Canada’s Trent University. Panagia’s teaching and research interests include contemporary political theory, the history of political thought, aesthetics of cultural theory, visual culture, and citizenship studies. His recent books include _The Poetics of Political Thinking _(2006),_The Political Life of Sensation_(2009), and _Impressions of Hume: Cinematic Thinking and the Politics of Discontinuity_ (2013). Thanks so much. Looking forward to the conversation! On Mon, Sep 8, 2014 at 4:34 PM, Renate Ferro r...@cornell.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- We welcome Adam A.J. Nocek once again as our guest moderator for September. A.J. Nocek is a PhD candidate in the Comparative Literature Department and instructor in the Comparative History of Ideas Program at the University of Washington. His research lies at the intersections of media and aesthetics, design and biotechnology
[-empyre-] Thanks
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi all, Alas, September at -empyre- has come to a close. I'd like to thank both Renate and Tim for inviting me to moderate this month at -empyre-! I'd also especially like to thank this month's guests and subscribers for taking the time to participate in the discussion on bioart and its related themes. I think we covered a truly exceptional amount of ground... so thanks. It was a lot of fun. I look forward to the discussion next month! My best, Adam ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] New Scales of Living
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi all, Thanks, Phillip, for the wonderful question. I think you're right to point out the ambiguity in my use of design here. On the one hand, design functions in synthetic biology, as Adrian MacKenzie addresses so well in his 2009 article, Design in Synthetic Biology (here: http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/mackenza/papers/mackenzie_synbio_design-nov09_web.pdf), as an engineering concept (so that synbio becomes a subset of engineering). And it is this concept of design that has found its way, rather forcefully, into bio-architectural discourse (esp. in Michael Hensel and David Benjamin). In this way, I think that instead of design deterritorializing scientific and design practices it may actually reinforce extremely dangerous hierarchies. This does not mean that design cannot offer useful conceptual tools, however. This summer I actually taught a study abroad course in the Netherlands on Dutch Design and Aesthetics. One of the most compelling themes that my students and I kept on returning to is how design, for many Dutch designers, is always *re-*design. There is no original or copy; design is always taking place in the middle of things -- in the midst, if you like. While Dutch design certainly has its fair share of micro-fascisms, tedious Modernisms, and so on, I think the notion of redesign is instructive here: it seems to capture -- in much more compelling way than design-as-engineering -- the noisy practice of building or designing biological parts in the lab (as Maureen O' Malley and Bernadette Bensaude Vincent have argued), and what it means for these parts to be redesigned as media for the built environment. Redesign privileges process over product. Perhaps it is in redesign and not design that we find our aesthetics. Thanks, Adam On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 2:58 PM, Phillip S Thurtle thur...@uw.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Interesting points, Adam. I see some interesting synergies with earlier posts as well. We've been using the analytic of aesthetics on the list and I'm wondering how that might relate to your use of design? Your suggestion at the end of the post regarding synbio suggests that design might be related more to engineering, although I don't think it a perfect overlap. Could you help me triangulate these three terms: design, engineering, and aesthetics? I realize that this is a lot to ask. Phillip On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 10:32 PM, Adam Nocek ano...@uw.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi all, I'd like to offer a few thoughts regarding New Scales of Living by picking up on something that Phillip wrote last week: the inside and outside the laboratory distinction is useful, but constantly needs to be tempered by identifying how labs are both privileged places as well as highly interlinked places. This strikes me as a critical insight, though I'd like to add -- and I think this is already implicit in Phillip's remarks-- that the concepts we construct are essential for producing modes of thought that do not privilege spaces like the biologist's laboratory. A.N. Whitehead's wrote something similar in his _Science and the Modern World_ when he calls for the re-engineering of our abstractions so that we resist the modern temptation to bifurcate nature into essential and non-essential qualities (e.g. the laboratory and then those other spaces). For Whitehead, these concepts need to be constructed and re-constructed. What's essential is not the concepts themselves, but rather their effects. Can they produce non-bifurcating modes of thought? With this in mind, I wonder in what ways design has become, or rather could become, a concept that challenges the privilege of the laboratory space? While design has certainly been important to biotechnology since the 70s and 80s, with the rise of synthetic biology in the last decade or so, it is now used to articulate the terms of a full-scale method: the application of design principles to biological systems. And yet professional design disciplines -- architectural and industrial design, specifically -- have become increasingly concerned with how the design of living systems in synbio make available new media for design (check out: http://www.syntheticaesthetics.org/) -- some architects even advocate that architecture is a form of artificial life at a non-standard scale. In this perspective, life has become designed and design has become living. I'm interested in what ways design challenges the laboratory space... or reinforces it at another level. Thanks, Adam On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 9:07 PM, Adam Nocek ano...@uw.edu wrote: Hi all, Once again, a terrific discussion this week. I'd like to extend a big thanks to Adam Z, Phillip, Nik and Maja for their contributions. I know there are still a lot of loose ends -- especially
Re: [-empyre-] New Scales of Living
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi all, I'd like to offer a few thoughts regarding New Scales of Living by picking up on something that Phillip wrote last week: the inside and outside the laboratory distinction is useful, but constantly needs to be tempered by identifying how labs are both privileged places as well as highly interlinked places. This strikes me as a critical insight, though I'd like to add -- and I think this is already implicit in Phillip's remarks-- that the concepts we construct are essential for producing modes of thought that do not privilege spaces like the biologist's laboratory. A.N. Whitehead's wrote something similar in his _Science and the Modern World_ when he calls for the re-engineering of our abstractions so that we resist the modern temptation to bifurcate nature into essential and non-essential qualities (e.g. the laboratory and then those other spaces). For Whitehead, these concepts need to be constructed and re-constructed. What's essential is not the concepts themselves, but rather their effects. Can they produce non-bifurcating modes of thought? With this in mind, I wonder in what ways design has become, or rather could become, a concept that challenges the privilege of the laboratory space? While design has certainly been important to biotechnology since the 70s and 80s, with the rise of synthetic biology in the last decade or so, it is now used to articulate the terms of a full-scale method: the application of design principles to biological systems. And yet professional design disciplines -- architectural and industrial design, specifically -- have become increasingly concerned with how the design of living systems in synbio make available new media for design (check out: http://www.syntheticaesthetics.org/) -- some architects even advocate that architecture is a form of artificial life at a non-standard scale. In this perspective, life has become designed and design has become living. I'm interested in what ways design challenges the laboratory space... or reinforces it at another level. Thanks, Adam On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 9:07 PM, Adam Nocek ano...@uw.edu wrote: Hi all, Once again, a terrific discussion this week. I'd like to extend a big thanks to Adam Z, Phillip, Nik and Maja for their contributions. I know there are still a lot of loose ends -- especially, on the nature of experiment, process, and pragmatics in relation to the Biochymickal Arts workshop (which I encourage you to look at!)-- so please continue discussing! This week I'd like to welcome Luciana Parisi to -empyre- Luciana and I will be considering how bioart might be extended to new and exciting scales. Here is short bio for Luciana: Luciana Parisi is Senior Lecturer/Convenor of the PhD in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Parisi’s research looks at the asymmetric relationship between science and philosophy, aesthetics and culture, technology and politics to investigate potential conditions for ontological and epistemological change. Her work on cybernetics and information theories, evolutionary theories, genetic coding and viral transmission has informed her analysis of culture and politics, the critique of capitalism, power and control. During the late 90s she worked with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick and has since been writing with Steve Goodman (aka kode 9). In 2004, she published Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (Continuum Press), where she departed from the critical impasse between notions of the body, sexuality, gender on the one hand, and studies of science and technologies on the other. Her work engaged with ontological and epistemological transformations entangled to the technocapitalist development of biotechnologies, which un-intentionally re-articulated models of evolutions, questioning dominant conceptions of sex, femininity and desire. Since the publication of Abstract Sex, she has also written on the bionic transformation of the perceptive sensorium triggered by new media, on the advancement of new techno-ecologies of control, and on the nanoengineering of matter. She has published articles about the relation between cybernetic machines, memory and perception in the context of a non-phenomenological critique of computational media and in relation to emerging strategies of branding and marketing. Her interest in interactive media has also led her research to engage more closely with computation, cognition, and algorithmic aesthetics. Parisi’s latest monograph, Contagious Architecture. Computation, Aesthetics and Space (MIT Press,2013), reflect these concerns. Thanks, Adam ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] AnthropoDecentering and the Hack of the Human Germline
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Last of Four on Designer Baby ethics and aesthetics Looking forward to hearing the wrap up week. The two biopolitical animal studies letters I posted above are meant to contrast the very anthropocentric issues of the FDA GM babies post above them. I don¹t know if elite, DIY or corporate mass produced transhumans count as human, super human, subhuman, post human, nextwave golemic or a-humanist mugwump jismatics but we are all always animal already. I wonder if the ethics of wetlab involvement in gore ethics of the Letter to Alba and the livestock aesthetics of well bred Cloned Animal meat might help mete out the home on the wide range that the diversity collage shuffle\d into this millenium? In any case, you can read into the issues of Human IGM between the blinds¹ of the animal model concepts in the two letters. Adam ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] New Scales of Living
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi all, Once again, a terrific discussion this week. I'd like to extend a big thanks to Adam Z, Phillip, Nik and Maja for their contributions. I know there are still a lot of loose ends -- especially, on the nature of experiment, process, and pragmatics in relation to the Biochymickal Arts workshop (which I encourage you to look at!)-- so please continue discussing! This week I'd like to welcome Luciana Parisi to -empyre- Luciana and I will be considering how bioart might be extended to new and exciting scales. Here is short bio for Luciana: Luciana Parisi is Senior Lecturer/Convenor of the PhD in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Parisi’s research looks at the asymmetric relationship between science and philosophy, aesthetics and culture, technology and politics to investigate potential conditions for ontological and epistemological change. Her work on cybernetics and information theories, evolutionary theories, genetic coding and viral transmission has informed her analysis of culture and politics, the critique of capitalism, power and control. During the late 90s she worked with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick and has since been writing with Steve Goodman (aka kode 9). In 2004, she published Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (Continuum Press), where she departed from the critical impasse between notions of the body, sexuality, gender on the one hand, and studies of science and technologies on the other. Her work engaged with ontological and epistemological transformations entangled to the technocapitalist development of biotechnologies, which un-intentionally re-articulated models of evolutions, questioning dominant conceptions of sex, femininity and desire. Since the publication of Abstract Sex, she has also written on the bionic transformation of the perceptive sensorium triggered by new media, on the advancement of new techno-ecologies of control, and on the nanoengineering of matter. She has published articles about the relation between cybernetic machines, memory and perception in the context of a non-phenomenological critique of computational media and in relation to emerging strategies of branding and marketing. Her interest in interactive media has also led her research to engage more closely with computation, cognition, and algorithmic aesthetics. Parisi’s latest monograph, Contagious Architecture. Computation, Aesthetics and Space (MIT Press,2013), reflect these concerns. Thanks, Adam ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Does Cloned Animal Safety take into account the effect of Aesthetics on the long-term Ecological effects of Food Chain Design?, Eye of the Storm, Arts Catalyst, Tate Museum, London UK, 2009
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Adam Zaretsky Submitted a Response to the United States Food and Drug Administration call for comments on the Use of Edible Products from Animal Clones or their Progeny for Human Food or Animal Feed as follows: http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/dockets/03n0573/03N-0573-EC370-Attach-1.pdf SubbDocket Number Title: 2003N-0573 - Draft Animal Cloning Risk Assessment; Proposed Risk Management Plan; Draft Guidance for Industry; Availability Summary: Availability of, and request for comment on, Animal Cloning: A Draft Risk Assessment (to evaluate the health risks to animals involved in the process of cloning and to evaluate the food consumption risks that may result from edible products derived from animal clones or their progeny); draft Animal Cloning: Risk Management Plan for Clones and their Progeny; and draft GFI #179: Use of Edible Products from Animal Clones or their Progeny for Human Food or Animal Feed Does Cloned Animal Safety take into account the effect of Aesthetics on the long-term Ecological effects of Food Chain Design? We should not be overly worried about somatic cell nuclear transfer as a Food Science edible technique. The abnormalities that can be expected might be delicious. Our worries stem from the fact that a large percentage of breeders may not have had the Art Historical schooling that most Academic students of Aesthetics might have had. Right now, the only type of taste¹ we can see embedded in cloned livestock is based on ramping up meat production and maybe designing and cloning industrial beings born with zero percent transfat. If we are spending millions of taxpayer dollars on making copies of sires whose profitability is based on 4-H tropes of beauty alone, then we are missing much of what contemporary art can lend to contemporary breeding of gastronomic novelty. How do we decide what is worth engineering for? In particular, Livestock can be designed along a wide variety of Aesthetic gene expressions. Considering the range of gene expressions possible in a collage of multiple genomic palletes, economic efficiency is neither a simple concept nor our only deciding force. Beyond public acceptance of the technology, there is also public trend diversity, novelty markets and niche power to be brokered in this global competition for more unusual food. We need to explore the entire range of clonables and widen the variety pool to include gourmet, abject and non-utilitarian breeding projects. Practitioners or Historians of Futurism, Surrealism, Abstraction, Minimalism and other Contemporary art movements may all have their own special cow, pig or chicken clone advisory role to play. Consider what a gifted cubist could bring to the table. What are the cultural aesthetics of our ecological future? The decision to design livestock along a plurality of aesthetic lineages may have an impact on the future of ecology and diversity of our planet. As competitively designed meat factories take up more and more of the terrestrial grazing land, we have come to understand that we live on a planet dominated by humans and their domestic familiars. Designed and cloned livestock are limited editions but they can reproduce independently. The industry animals may be foreign species brought forth from technological sites but are they beautiful enough for us to want to live with them for generations to come. Sometimes real-time back fat is not enough. There is an economy of aesthetics, which will drive the ecological affect of our engineered future. What can an understanding of the arts bring to livestock design? The history of art may finally come to some use for humanity through agricultural and other replicant applications. The aesthetic hazards of breeding without a proper understanding of Western Culture and our shared artistic heritage must be taken into account.. The arts represent a great asset for livestock design and a great way to insure that the future isn¹t born looking dull, retrograde and a bit too sketchy. Without a firm grasp of Art History, our cloned food may not represent our national and international goals as U.S. food producers and consumers. The admixture of global variety through genetic engineering and the cloning of spectacular hereditary cascades should only be approved through an aesthetic advisory commission made up of artists, art historians and aesthetics specialists. The future of style and the avoidance of our populous eating any aesthetic hazards depends on collaboration between new reproductive biotechnology and the Arts. I hope these issues will be taken into account as we sculpt new life from the media of biotechnology. Adam Zaretsky Link: http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/dockets/03n0573/03N-0573-EC370-Attach-1.pdf ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Animal Interlude, Letter to Alba Guestbook, 2001
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi Eduardo As you know... I support you and Alba. May you find togetherness!(Pending FDA/EPA approval.) I have no problem with the techniques of transgenes being used for art production purposes. I do have an objection to the concept of this being a Harmless Art. Why pretend that? The inserted gene is claimed to be harmless to Alba as an organism. This is an industry claim that I seriously doubt. But, if the art of GFP Bunny is not Alba in Herself but instead 'comprises her creation' including the techniques of Insertational Mutagenesis and you still want to claim that 'no harm was done' then lets take a closer look at the Protocols for a Transgenic Rabbit· They call for hormone treatments both for hyper-ovulation of the egg supplying (donor) rabbit -- mom(1) and hormone treatments for the psuedo-pregnant state of the surrogate 'uterus' donor -- mom(2) and surgery on both sides to collect the fertilized embryos from the fallopian tubes of mom(1) rabbit and to implant the GFP positive embryos into the surrogate uterus of the mom(2) rabbit. This says nothing of the throwing away of the biohazardous leftover¹ embryos that didn't take the transgene properly. As a part of the process, We also have to take into account the unnamed or numbered Brothers and Sisters of Alba who were possibly still born or born with abnormalities due to the viral infection vectors, cytoplasmic bacterial infection, bad laparascopic technique, or other natural causes. How many embryos were implanted? From which rabbit? Into which rabbit? How many lived? How many were tossed? Where are Alba's moms? Could you have done this procedure, proudly, with your own hands? Let me be clear. I remind you that I support your actions, morally and artistically. I believe that Transgenic Art, both the products and the processes, are valid as an art forms a nd as much needed commentaries on an industry of post/species-boundarybreeding technology. Unnecessary surgery, Aesthetic breeding, Even embryonic gene-play should and has be done by curious artists wielding their own scalpels. But it does us all an injustice to white wash (or green glowwash) a bloody and meaty process. No art that uses the knife (even a knife for hire) should claim that it is harmless. That is a grotesque affront. Could you to be a little more transparent or forthcoming When you review the modern breeding procedures That went into the formation of Alba? They surely did cause some harm. Signing out until next time, A difficult fan, Adam Zaretsky Research Affiliate, MFA Arnold Demain Fermentation and Industrial Microbiology Laboratory Department of Biology Massachusetts Institute of Technology 68-223 Cambridge MA 02139 PS: I hope the next trangenic mammalian art piece is better documented. I mean the glowing birth of a GFP Mammal will be a gorgeous event to capture on Digital Video! Woodstock, NY USA - Tuesday, July 17, 2001 at 11:02:46 (PDT) http://www.ekac.org/bunnybook.2001.html ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Redistributing the material world¹s diverse accents
--empyre- soft-skinned space--This is a response to Chris Robbins:
I am answering a request for more definitive notion of art goals.¹ Beyond
what I had said about bioart offering a reading of science and art in the
difficult land of luxurious, useless, process based, conceptual, secular
catechism. This former listing of art goals¹ is naïve modernism
described. I think we are still there in the arts and the sciences,
perpetuating the myth of the Avant Garde or as Laibach and NSK calls it: the
Retro Garde.
http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/archive/258-synthesis-retro-avant-garde-
or-mapping-post-socialism-in-ex-yugoslavia-
http://www.reanimator.8m.com/NSK/zizek.html
Is the goal Tactical bioMedia?
The showcasing or making public of techniques for scientific control over
organismic development has a tactical design. This is a more popular way of
explaining why we do public labs. To bring a hands-on experience to the
untrained crowd-sources demystification and takes relational knowledge to
the sites of contention. It sounds benevolent.
Accused of lowering the bar on a slippery slope.
The other half of Chris¹ question asks for delineation of what I mean by
cruel and unusual arts. Examples:
Tissue Culture
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfOVEf7tVm0
Synthetic Biology
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_2uNKGxlzw
Embryology
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mve5b8RW6_8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBKgimtgWuM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgZ6o8FIeiE
Mutant Environmental testing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8g1XIpbI_rk
Human Germline Alteration
http://itp.nyu.edu/classes/germline-spring2013/
http://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article.php?id=7002
Firstly, do these Bioart exposures merely normalize our novel ways of toying
with life? Wet-lab bioart has recently been read as a form of DIY Fukushima.
(Loose quote from a rescent public debate about a GMO permit filed with the
Ministry in the Hague to exhibit modified organisms (Solar Zeebrafish and
Bipolar Flower) in the Errorarium at the Ja Natuurlijk exhibition with
representatives: Rob Zwijnenberg, Per Staugaard, Lucas Evers De Waag,,
Herman Bekken Greenpeace, Dirk de Jong Ministery of Economic Affairs and
Miep Bos Gentechvrij {GMO Free EU}).
http://www.biosolarcells.nl/onderzoek/maatschappelijke-aspecten/artist-in-la
b-making-a-field-of-interpretation-for-biosolar-cells.html
It is keen to ask, is citizen science merely a practice of assuaging the
public¹s reactive disgust to new life science? This would be advertising,
the use of fine¹ art as propaganda for the biotechnical bubble we fund.
Actually, many DIY-BIO centres have no problem with the idea that these
hands-on labs would be staged to promote acceptance of the inherent safety
and casual usury that research entails. In fact, often being science led,
they fear the good name of science being help in dissonant hands.
http://genspace.org/event/20131007/1800/Biohacker%20Boot%20Camp
Lust for life
So art can pose prettily for public relations propping up science in a
redundant campaign and art can also chide the public for not being more
active in contestational debate:
http://www.critical-art.net/MolecularInvasion.html
If we uncover the root desire to inflict change, to breed or grow
imagination in lineage form, this is the culturing of lust, the incubating
of desire. Want is inbred and an excess of greed is more than likely a
genetic aberration (potentially curable with gene therapy), but lust for
life just is. What kind of transcendence leaves it¹s chthonic mark in the
brains and germcells of the ones it has come to know? What is life without
lust? Biotech is muddy parasitism.
³The urge to scope and poke, force evolution and morphologically sculpt is a
bridge that joins the Arts and the Sciences. But, I will say this once
because it is quite clear and concise, I think this process is cruel.
Physical Manipulation DevBio Arts as a way towards knowing or sculpting
Development is non-intuitive, intriguing, curious and lovely but there is no
doubt that the process is meddlesome, violent, surgical and often
gratuitously so.²
AZ from THE MUTAGENIC ARTS
magazine.ciac.ca/archives/no_23/en/dossier.htm
More on lust in Bioart:
Viva Vivo! Living Art Is Dead
http://www.emutagen.com/downloads/leonardoZaretsky.pdf
___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Living Experiments
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi all, A wonderful discussion this week. I thank you all for participating! I thoroughly enjoyed -- and I am continuing to enjoy -- all your posts on bioart and related fields. I'm especially intrigued by the discussion on aesthetics. I think that bringing together Neal White, Jennifer Fisher, among others, into conversation with Brian Massumi and A.N. Whitehead et al. is challenging and important work. More thoughts later. I'd like to extend a special thanks to Oron Catts and Rich Doyle for their wonderful contributions this week! This week I'd like to welcome four new guests into the fold: Adam Zaretsky (who is no stranger!), Phillip Thurtle, Maja Kuzmanovic, and Nik Gaffney. Here is a bit of bio for each of our guests: Phillip Thurtle is director of the Comparative History of Ideas program and associate professor in History at the University of Washington. Thurtle is the author of The Emergence of Genetic Rationality: Space, Time, and Information in American Biology 1870-1920 (University of Washington Press, 2008), the co-author with Robert Mitchell and Helen Burgess of the interactive DVD-ROM BioFutures: Owning Information an Body Parts (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), and the co-editor with Robert Mitchell of the volumes Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information (Routledge, 2003) and Semiotic Flesh: Information and the Human Body (University of Washington Press, 2002). His research focuses on the material culture of information processing, the affective-phenomenological domains of media, the role of information processing technologies in biomedical research, and theories of novelty in the life sciences. His most recent work is on the cellular spaces of transformation in evolutionary and developmental biology research and the cultural spaces of transformation in superhero comics. Adam Zaretsky, Ph.D. is a Wet-Lab Art Practitioner mixing Ecology, Biotechnology, Non-human Relations, Body Performance and Gastronomy. Zaretsky stages lively, hands-on bioart production labs based on topics such as: foreign species invasion (pure/impure), radical food science (edible/inedible), jazz bioinformatics (code/flesh), tissue culture (undead/semi-alive), transgenic design issues (traits/desires), interactive ethology (person/machine/non-human) and physiology (performance/stress). A former researcher at the MIT department of biology, for the past decade Zaretsky has been teaching an experimental bioart class called VivoArts at: San Francisco State University (SFSU), SymbioticA (UWA), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), University of Leiden’s The Arts and Genomic Centre (TAGC), and with the Waag Society. In the past two years he has taught DIY-IGM at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and New York University (NYU). He also runs a public life arts school: VASTAL (The Vivoarts School for Transgenic Aesthetics Ltd.) His art practice focuses on an array of legal, ethical, social and libidinal implications of biotechnological materials and methods with a focus on transgenic humans. http://www.youtube.com/VASTALschool http://www.youtube.com/VASTALschool Maja Kuzmanovic holds a Master of Arts in Interactive Multimedia and her specialization is interactive film and storytelling. She is currently director of the Brussels-based laboratory, FoAM, where she works with various art and technology collectives and explores novel modes and resources of cultural expression. She was involved in the development of the Design Technology course at the Utrecht School of the Arts. She previously worked as Artist in Residence at the Center for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam, and the National Center for Information Technology in Sankt Augustin, Germany. In 1999, Kuzmanovic was named by MIT’s Technology Review Magazine as one of the top 100 young innovators of the year. Her current interests span alternate reality storytelling, patabotany, resilience, speculative culture and techno-social aspects of food food systems. Nik Gaffney is a founding member of the Brussels-based laboratory, FoAM, as well as a media-systems researcher. Gaffney has previously worked as a graphic designer and programmer for Razorfish AG in Hamburg and Moniteurs in Berlin. His studies covered the fields of computer science, cognitive science and organic chemistry at Adelaide University. As one of the founders of the artists' collective, mindfluX, he worked on installation pieces, performances and the editing and distribution of the electronic magazine mindvirus. Gaffney has been an active collaborator in the performance group Heliograph, helping shape their vision for hybrid arts performance. He is a member of and prominent contributor to farmersmanual, a pan-european, net-based, multisensory disturbance conglomerate, whose 'ship of fools' filled the canals of Venice with sound during the 2001 Biennale. ___ empyre forum empyre
[-empyre-] Ethics of the Semi-Living
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Dear all, First, I'd like to thank our two guests, Rob Mitchell and Cary Wolfe, for an excellent conversation this past week! I think that their insightful comments were able bring bioart and biopolitcs into new proximity. While there were certainly more questions raised than answered -- for example, the relation between populations and bioart, the meaning of an affirmative biopolitics, the affirmation of death, the exhibition contexts, and so on -- I think this attests to the importance of (re)framing the political stakes of bioart in biopolitical terms. I'm sure that we will have many opportunities to revisit and redevelop threads from this conversation in the next few weeks. Thanks! This week I'm delighted to welcome Oron Catts and Richard Doyle to the discussion at -empyre- and invite them to consider specific uses of biomedia and how they might challenge us to reframe some of our guiding assumptions about ethics and life. Here is a short bio for both Oron and Richard: Oron Catts is an artist, researcher and curator whose pioneering work with the Tissue Culture and Art Project, which he established in 1996, is considered a leading biological art project. In 2000 he co-founded SymbioticA, an artistic research center housed within the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology, The University of Western Australia. Under Catts’ leadership SymbioticA has gone on to win the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica in Hybrid Art (2007) the WA Premier Science Award (2008) and became a Centre for Excellence in 2008. In 2009 Catts was recognized by Thames Hudson’s “60 Innovators Shaping our Creative Future” book in the category “Beyond Design”, and by Icon Magazine (UK) as one of the top 20 Designers, “making the future and transforming the way we work”. Catts interests lie in shifting relations and perceptions of life in the light of new knowledge and it applications. Often working in collaboration with other artists (mainly Dr. Ionat Zurr) and scientists, Catts have developed a body of work that speak volumes about the need for new cultural articulation of evolving concepts of life. Catts was a Research Fellow in Harvard Medical School, a visiting Scholar at the Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University, and a Visiting Professor of Design Interaction, Royal College of Arts, London. Catts’ ideas and projects reach beyond the confines of art; his work is often cited as inspiration to diverse areas such as new materials, textiles, design, architecture, ethics, fiction, and food. Richard Doyle is Professor of English, Affiliate Faculty of Information Science and Technology, Convenor of the Penn State Center for Nano Futures at Penn State University, and was Visiting Associate Professor at UC Berkeley, Department of Rhetoric in 2003. Doyle has published three monographs, On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences (Stanford, 1997), Wetwares: Experiments in PostVital Living (Minnesota, 2003), and Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants and the Evolution of The Noösphere (University of Washington Press, 2011), that form a trilogy about emerging transhuman knowledges. These knowledges and practices, linked to molecular biology, artificial life, nanotechnology, psychedelic and information technologies, render the experiential distinctions between living systems and machines frequently dubious and often indiscernible. This excited and confused rhetorical membrane between humans and an informational universe nonetheless broadcasts a clear message: humans, in co-evolution with the technical matrices transforming the planet, find themselves in an evolutionary ecology that is as urgent as it is experimental. Doyle’s is also at work on book, Admixtures: Dialogues After Genomics, with Anthropologist, Mark Shriver. With Shriver Doyle founded the The Penn State Center for Altered Consciousness, which investigates the genetics and phenomenology of legally altered consciousness with the help of a flotation tank. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] First Postings
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks, Adam, for these helpful reflections. I'd like to try to tie together some threads in order to encourage some discussion. It seems to me that Rob's concern over death and affirmation-- or at least as he's expressed it so far-- can be related to Adam Z's experiences with biomedia and their politics .Life is uncontained, oozing revelry and consuming lewdness… this is a question of affirmation. Can we be all accepting? This question strikes me as absolutely critical since using biomedia is, as both Adam and Rob suggest, messy and uncontained -- it is slimy, oozing, rotting. What are the intersections among death, affirmation, messy bioart and politics? Incidentally, I couldn't help but think of Nick Land's critique of philosophies of life (for those of you familiar), and whether there are certain bioart practices that invoke thanatropic/accelerationist principles instead of vitalist ones. And what new intersections between dark media and life would be generated? In an earlier post, I invoked Whitehead's remark that life is robbery in order to suggest, as Whitehead himself does, that there is not a straightforward opposition between life and organismic death. My sense is that bioart is, or at any rate, could be an absolutely critical site for complicating the life/death relation in the (affirmative) biopolitical landscape. Thoughts? Thanks, Adam On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 5:37 AM, Adam Zaretsky e...@emutagen.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks Adam N. for having a mind meld on these topics. Good crew! Off the top, Bioart is living-materials-first in my addled brain. No offense to the object oriented animism of listmania but tinkers and tailors of life feel the experience differently than illustrators. The use of biomedia for aesthetic projection is the ethico-political stake we wield. The blood on the hands is part of the sacrificial rite, neh? That being sort of put out there bare, I am more interested in the debate being started in terms of the potentials for positive declension in the moulding of populations. I have to say that optimism in biopolitics, even in terms of techno-breeding for novel feelings, is not a total ruse. A trajectory from Charles Fourier, to Willhelm Reich, to Buckmister Fuller, not to mention the Bronx cheer of Charles Fort, trace the potential for a river of amorous flows. But can we really limit the emphasis on the work of the negative in Foulcault to that of a gore hound, netcasting for yet another Gilles de Rais? We have to remember that philosophy is caught up in the industrial confessionary. We may be parrahesiac cheerleaders, spreading liturgy for liturgy¹s sake, but the toying with fascism is just an armchair away from the radiation's leak. Mayr's migrating populations shower us with difference, but population genetics is being marketed as a post race identity politics for those in need of a new origin story from which to promulgate neo-superiorities (see http://www.ancestry.com/). In terms of affirming affirmation, to distort et echo Cary, I can only find it through that deep ecospheric indiscriminacy that Rob mentioned. Is the work of the positive to posit a function of the organism, orgasmically in optimismÉ in every direction? I hope so. Life is uncontained, oozing revelry and consuming lewdness. A snail-like acting is wet and slap-happy and on itÕs way. This is the question of affirmation. Can we be all accepting. This is a more systemic question, which should be looked at a variety of magnifications: The Panspermic Cosmos, The 'Gaia at Werk' Planetary Organism, Populations/Variations/Migrations/Meshing, The Crust Operas of Vitality (Spartan/Hedonism of Being inCorporate), The Organs without a Body (BatailleÕs Big Toe), The Selfish life of Cells, Subcellular Congeniality (hanging out on the sofas of the Endoplasmic Reticulum, alternative conformating). ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] First Postings
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks Adam N. for having a mind meld on these topics. Good crew! Off the top, Bioart is living-materials-first in my addled brain. No offense to the object oriented animism of listmania but tinkers and tailors of life feel the experience differently than illustrators. The use of biomedia for aesthetic projection is the ethico-political stake we wield. The blood on the hands is part of the sacrificial rite, neh? That being sort of put out there bare, I am more interested in the debate being started in terms of the potentials for positive declension in the moulding of populations. I have to say that optimism in biopolitics, even in terms of techno-breeding for novel feelings, is not a total ruse. A trajectory from Charles Fourier, to Willhelm Reich, to Buckmister Fuller, not to mention the Bronx cheer of Charles Fort, trace the potential for a river of amorous flows. But can we really limit the emphasis on the work of the negative in Foulcault to that of a gore hound, netcasting for yet another Gilles de Rais? We have to remember that philosophy is caught up in the industrial confessionary. We may be parrahesiac cheerleaders, spreading liturgy for liturgy¹s sake, but the toying with fascism is just an armchair away from the radiation's leak. Mayr's migrating populations shower us with difference, but population genetics is being marketed as a post race identity politics for those in need of a new origin story from which to promulgate neo-superiorities (see http://www.ancestry.com/). In terms of affirming affirmation, to distort et echo Cary, I can only find it through that deep ecospheric indiscriminacy that Rob mentioned. Is the work of the positive to posit a function of the organism, orgasmically in optimismÉ in every direction? I hope so. Life is uncontained, oozing revelry and consuming lewdness. A snail-like acting is wet and slap-happy and on itÕs way. This is the question of affirmation. Can we be all accepting. This is a more systemic question, which should be looked at a variety of magnifications: The Panspermic Cosmos, The 'Gaia at Werk' Planetary Organism, Populations/Variations/Migrations/Meshing, The Crust Operas of Vitality (Spartan/Hedonism of Being inCorporate), The Organs without a Body (BatailleÕs Big Toe), The Selfish life of Cells, Subcellular Congeniality (hanging out on the sofas of the Endoplasmic Reticulum, alternative conformating). ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Bioart and the Vital Politics of Populations
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks for a truly excellent post, Rob. I'm intrigued by the way in which bioart creeps back into the end of your wonderful post by extending biopolitics (understood through population thinking) to non-human populations. This is compelling to me for a variety of reasons, not least of which is how it counters the accusation that Foucauldian biopolitics is anthropocentric in scope. As you know, Roberto Esposito, who you invoke at the end of your piece, albeit negatively, has done much to dispel the myth that biopolitics is reducible to its _negative declensions_; he does so, of course, through immunity, a category he criticizes Foucault for neglecting, which must be inverted in order to protect what it is it formerly had to deny in order to exist as _thanatopolitical_. There are many problems with Esposito's immunity thesis of course, as Cary Wolfe among others has pointed out, but I wonder whether your link between populations and bioart is similarly invested in cashing out the terms of an affirmative biopolitics. Let me try to be more specific: a more robust sense of population -- in its Mayrian and not Malthusian sense -- would seem to create the conditions for, as you say developing new approaches to population from within existing models of populations, as _Rythm 0_ seems to; and bioart would [expand] upon this approach to populations and biopolitics, and in large part by emphasizing, as you claim, linkages between human and non-human populations. My sense here is that you're attempting to develop the conditions for an affirmative biopolitics that is inclusive of the non-human (perhaps in concert with Esposito) by means of what it is implicit in Foucault's _own_ understanding of population (something that Esposito misses); and in this perspective, bioart becomes an essential site for this biopolitical work. I'm wondering if you could comment on this, perhaps by spelling out how you see bioart functioning in this biopolitical landscape. Thanks, Rob! Best, Adam On Sun, Sep 1, 2013 at 1:12 PM, Rob Mitchell rmi...@duke.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear all, My thanks to Adam for having invited me to contribute to this discussion about BioArt: Materials, Practices, Politics. And my sincere apologies in advance to the list for the length of my post: Adam and I were laboring until this morning under a misinterpretation about the desired length for these initial posts, but since I had already composed my post, I'm sending it as is than cutting massively and in haste. Though I have written a bit about the politics of bioart in _Bioart and the Vitality of Media_--arguing there, for example, against a simplistic understanding of bioartworks as primarily good or bad communications cast into a public sphere of debate--I would like to take a slightly different approach here by focusing on the connection between bioart and biopolitics. Such an approach may not initially strike all readers of -empyre- as encouraging--isn't that connection rather obvious, and in any case, is there really need for yet more on the seemingly well-worn topic of biopolitics? But I nevertheless hope that what follows can provide us with a new way of thinking about both the politics and the vitality of bioart. More specifically, I'd like to think about what we might call the aesthetics of biopolitics, by which I mean the ways in which biopolitical assumptions and projects--and especially assumptions about the importance of difference and variation for populations--have come to establish a more general frame for the experiences that now count as beautiful, picturesque, sublime, disgusting, thrilling, etc. Since much of what follows is oriented toward a theory of population, a brief initial sketch of a bioart example will establish, I hope, the plausibility and utility of thinking bioart in terms of biopolitics, biopolitics in terms of populations, and populations in terms of difference and variation. My example--Eduardo Kac's _Genesis_--is admittedly well-worn, but it is also (and by that token) well-known, and so I can avoid a long description of the project here. (If you don't know the project, a description is available here: http://www.ekac.org/geninfo.html.) As many commentators have demonstrated, one can analyze _Genesis_ in terms of various themes: questions of translation; the shift from a theological to a post-theological world; questions of human dominion and power; and so on. However, at a formal level, _Genesis_ is above all else an attempt to link three different populations, and in such a way that the differences in each of these populations communicate with one another. Thus, _Genesis_ uses the art gallery to link a genetically-engineered population of _E. coli_ to both a relatively small population of humans who visit the art gallery and to a much larger population of humans
Re: [-empyre-] about Brooke's post
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- hi Your post is very interesting Gaby. I work as a facilitator of collaborative knowledge production and was really amazed when talking to a dance choreographer how much the two had in common. It struck me very deeply. If you had a moment it would be very interesting to hear a little more about what you think the students dont understand about the process and any strategies to get them to appreciate more what they are gaining from it... adam On 05/23/2013 10:22 AM, Gabriela VargasCetina wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear all, I am enjoying this discussion very much. What I know of Brooke's work is very inspiring, and it is difficult to see how the scale or her projects would make them manageable by a single person, so the question group / individual becomes very relevant. I am an anthropologist and we have pretty much the same problems you have all been describing: the humanities and social sciences train students to work individually, and not together with other people. Furthermore, it is very difficult to get an anthropologist to work with others from mixed training, including mathematicians and artists. I have been allowed by our Faculty of Anthropology to put together courses where students have to dance or perform their theoretical concepts, or design anthropologically-meaningful websites using theories derived from fiction, always in teams. However, many of my colleagues (especially at other universities) think this is all bizarre and nonsensical, and even the students think that they do not develop 'useful skills' in my courses. And yes, like art students, as per Ana's comment, anthropology students today are being told they should find ways to 'market' themselves to corporations, individually, and follow instructions instead of questioning the world. There is the job market problem, though: where will graduates from anthropology find employment, other than at the local branches of multi-national corporations? I don't have any answers, but the fact that the questions are so difficult is sad and troubling. Gaby Vargas-Cetina Facultad de Ciencias Antropologicas Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan On 5/22/13 4:43 PM, Ana Valdés wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Brooke I loved your rethoric question: I teach collaboration too and just a few days ago during final presentations saw the power of bringing people together who do not know each other well -- or at all-- for a common cause or, as Paul notes, shared agendas. I pair groups of students to make media work for non-profit organizations in Westchester, a pro-bono approach with a participatory design bent. But I guess I am left wondering why collaboration is to this day is still seen as unusual or something special in art practice and art education and not the modus operandi? Now we are going to study individuality ... the methods of and reasons for working alone!! I agree totally with you and wonder why all artist educations are headed to educate artists as entrepreneurs, as they were heads of an unipersonal enterprise with only them as contracted. I think that's the problem when you try to create the idea artists and writers are professions as doctors, podologists, architects, dentists or other. The writing educations grow as swamps, the creative writing is now an accepted part of the curriculum in many of the world's universities but do we have seen the growing of a talented writing group of people equivalent to all who are being educated as writers or do we see the same amount of people writing without any academical education? My point is: we are evolving from the concept the artist or the writer as gifted by God and part of an elite to another myth: the artist or writer as part of a corporation, skilling them in selling of their own works, marketing it and publishing it. I think collaboration is nearly mandatory today if you want to make changes and leave a trace in the world we live into. Ana -- http//congresomujeresdenegromontevideo.wordpress.com http://congresomujeresdenegromontevideo.wordpress.com http://www.twitter.com/caravia158606060606060 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0 cell Sweden +4670-3213370 cell Uruguay +598-99470758 When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. — Leonardo da Vinci ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Gabriela Vargas-Cetina Facultad de Ciencias Antropológicas Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán Carretera a Tizimín km 1 Mérida, Yucatán 97305. México Tel. +52 999 930 0090 ___ empyre forum empyre
Re: [-empyre-] The New Aesthetic - questions and conclusions
Has the discussion also addressed the reaction of theorists and curators to the phenomenon surrounding the NA artefact? Why is it largely defensive, land grabbing, and sometimes aggressive against James Bridle? It might even be considered to *be the phenomenon* and of interest on its own terms. I state that as someone now removed from the arts scene and watching from the outside and these issues seem to be the most interesting as an 'outside observer'. Sorry if I missed that part of the conversation if it is been had already. I just pip in out of Empyre to check in and haven't read the archives for this conversation in detail. adam On 09/28/2012 03:25 PM, Lichty, Patrick wrote: Since my last received post was on the 13th (and I apologize for not driving the conversation harder), I am a little dismayed at the dead air. Therefore i would like to aks a few questions to hopefully drive a closing discussion about NA this month, and get ready for October. The first is whether the New Aesthetic is empty to the point where it does not drive a substantial discussion. In image board terms, is it a movement that consists mainly of a Oh, this looks cool, so I'll just leave it here mentality, or does it represent an ephemerality of culture where movements are as ephemeral as the medium? Also, I want to ask where people see NA going, if anywhere. Will that be dependednt on the development of technologies, or human reflections upon them? I am off to SLSA; I will eb monitoring from there. Best, Patrick. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- -- Adam Hyde Founder, FLOSS Manuals Project Manager, Booki Book Sprint Facilitator mobile :+ 49 177 4935122 identi.ca : @eset booki.flossmanuals.net : @adam http://www.flossmanuals.net http://www.booki.cc http://www.booksprints.net ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] screens
Frame buffer invented by Richard Shoup, working on Alan Kay's Xerox PARC Alto project, in 1972. First recorded bitmap picture = Shoup, excited, holding a small placard reading it works. ES commercialized the device. ~Adam Sent from my iPhone On 07/07/2012, at 3:18, Rob Myers r...@robmyers.org wrote: On 07/06/2012 02:16 PM, Simon Biggs wrote: With the death of Flash it's not just the vector based screen on its way out (that's been on the way out ever since Evans and Sutherland invented the framestore at the start of the 1970's) but also vector based graphics (or at least one commercial application). Flash isn't needed for vector graphics on the web, though. Even if we don't use SVG, the html5 canvas tag supports all the usual vector graphics operations, and there are JavaScript libraries to support this: http://raphaeljs.com/ http://d3js.org/ http://calebevans.me/projects/jcanvas/index.php - Rob. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] benefits of practice to conventional research / could gamification save academia?
Online gamification is usually a way of getting people to do work without monetary reward. And gamification has conceptual problems: Agreed. From my perspective based inside the games discipline, gamification is more interesting as a social phenomenon, as yet again a body of knowledge is being viewed by management consultants as a silver bullet, rather than as as an opportunity in motion. Much of what it supposedly covers, games were already doing. Games in the enterprise go back into the 1960s, in the military much further. Furthermore, the interesting interdisciplinary linkages that could provide real opportunities for renewal (e.g. challenging the rhetoric of efficiency in interaction design) are things that gamification does not presently explore. Cheers, Adam -- Adam Parker Campus Academic Coordinator Qantm Melbourne Qantm College Melbourne Campus 235 Normanby Rd South Melbourne VIC 3205 Australia +61 (0) 3 8632 3400 | Phone +61 (0) 3 8632 3401 | Fax 2011 MCV Pacific Awards: **Tertiary Games Educational Institution of the Year *** * www.sae.edu | Web www.qantm.com.au | Web www.saeshortcourses.com | Web SAE National Provider Code: 0273. SAE CRICOS Provider Codes: NSW 00312F. SAE Institute Pty Ltd, ABN: 21 093 057 973 This email (including all attachments) is confidential and may be subject to legal privilege and/or copyright. The information contained within this email (including all attachments) should only be viewed if you are the intended recipient. If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete this email from your system along with any copies that have been made. Any unauthorised use, which includes saving, printing, copying, disseminating or forwarding is prohibited and may result in breach of confidentiality, privilege or copyright. If you wish to unsubscribe or choose not to receive further commercial electronic messages from SAE Institute or any grouped/associated entities please send an email this address with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] license
I agree with most of what you say except one crucial point. I think we should stop calling file sharing of all-rights reserved works piracy. There is some point where it ceases to be useful to use the term piracy and we must call it stealing. Piracy is a great marketing strategy for software companies. Many students cannot afford the licenses of the softwares their courses require them to purchase so they steal the software. So the students 'pirate' it which in the end works well for the producers of the software. Calling this piracy softens the blow on the proprietary software companies - they are not turning students into pirates (this term is too soft and has too many +ve connotations in many parts of society). The software companies are criminalising the students - turning them into criminals of necessity. That is how stupid copyright is and how stupid and blind educational institutions are. We need to do the same with books - stop calling it piracy. Call it stealing and start a movement not to 'pirate' but to not steal ie. produce free content. Don't tell a student to pirate a book or software tell them to get involved in a movement requiring and producing free software and free content. adam On 01/29/2012 06:51 PM, h w wrote: Adam wrote: = We need to get rid of these fears, stop hiding behind licenses, upholding old values and processes of closed culture within free culture and embrace the values and consequences of free culture no matter how uncomfortable they might be. = Normally I am a total lurker on this list. I was very active some years ago. I've been following this discussion, and what I quoted from Adam above is, IMHO, a really crucial and important point. Simon (Hi Simon!) asked about the legalistics, and that is also a good question. I think it is also a question that comes out of the fear that Adam describes above, and it is a real one. What this discussion is dancing around is Power. The media companies have it, and the rest of us don't. The media companies get to call file sharing, Piracy. I never understood how some 12 year old boy in the comfort of his mother's basement downloading Katie Perry's latest offence against 40,000 years of music making is some how morally equivalent to the forcible seizure of watercraft by a gang of armed bloodthirsty thugs hellbent on the slaughter and/or enslavement, rape, and pillaging of the crew, the theft of the boat's contents, and then the final gleeful burning and murderous sinking of the vessel and all left on board. So, firstly - it's not PIRACY. It is file sharing or file trading. Stop calling it Piracy, and if someone calls it Piracy, correct them. If they insist on calling it Piracy, tell them you will not discuss the matter until they use your language. That's my beef with the Pirate Party. By adopting the epithet as an appropriation of a term to be worn as some badge of honour is a dated tactic and suboptimal at best. It doesn't help the argument and it obfuscates what is really going on: file sharing. So, please: It's Not Piracy. Period. Secondly - we need to get over the notion that the Internet is rhizomatic and flexible. Egypt proved otherwise. Sure, some people quickly routed around it, but for the vast majority who are not tech saavy, the internet went dark for them. SOPA and PIPA and C11 and ACTA are all just more nails in the coffin. The Internet is now arboretic - it is stiff and lacks flexibility - it is being cut into planks and nailed together into walled gardens as we speak. That's the whole point of replacing laptops with mobile devices. Thirdly - people want files. They are easy to copy. My research has found that most of the pdf files of full length books I've DL'd tend to be around 5 megs in size. ePubs are smaller - averaging around 750k to 1 meg. The library at the school where I teach has about 550,000 books. At 1 meg each, that's 550 GB of ePubs, a few terabytes of pdfs. As epubs, the entire library would fit on a drive I can buy this afternoon for $69. I could dupe that drive very quickly via USB3. Why my university doesn't simply distribute such drives to each student when they pay their student fees would elude me if it wasn't for Adam's point about fear... Fourthly - A license that says use this I don't care is not a license. A license has to be enforceable as it is a contract, and a contract has to be enforceable otherwise it's not a contract. It's just a proposal or a statement. If it is not enforceable, it is not a license. This means that without state sanctioned violence that is necesary for the enforcement of contracts and the disposition of property you cannot have a use license. You can make a statement Use this I don't care and that's fine. But anything that has any restriction must have enforceability and consequences for infraction. The consequences
Re: [-empyre-] comments welcome
On 01/27/2012 08:34 PM, Rob Myers wrote: It's certainly more convenient to have ebooks, but it was possible to make books that people were free to copy, revise, comment on and so on prior to the existence of ebooks. It's a matter of principle (and law) rather than technology, although technology can obviously be a major enabler. i agree. the problem with ebooks though is that they are often proprietary formats that evade unpacking the source or break licenses if unpacked In the digital era, even if we only have physical copies of books we can scan and OCR them. This is the basis of gutenberg.org and of Google's book digitization project. good for unpacking texts that were published in print before digital media, we have no choice actually in the case - archive.org are also doing amazing work in this area and have rooms of people scanning books almost 24/7 it seems. its also cool to see many more diy scanners appearing over the last 2 years or so, not only are there more but they are getting more mature eg http://www.diybookscanner.org/ Rob - you would know this better than I - what free licenses are there suitable for books that require the source to be available? I only really know the ones that FLOSS Manuals have evaluated. :-) The GNU GPL can be used for books and this would require that source be made available. The GNU FDL, written specifically for books (software instruction manuals) requires that a transparent copy of the work be made available: https://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html A Transparent copy of the Document means a machine-readable copy, represented in a format whose specification is available to the general public, that is suitable for revising the document straightforwardly with generic text editors or (for images composed of pixels) generic paint programs or (for drawings) some widely available drawing editor, and that is suitable for input to text formatters or for automatic translation to a variety of formats suitable for input to text formatters. But the FDL is generally frowned on as it allows un-removable cover texts and un-editable invariant sections to be added, and it doesn't handle attribution particularly well for massively collaborative projects. Wikipedia have switched to BY-SA from the FDL for example. But as long as you don't use or hit its problematic features it's a good copyleft licence that requires source IMO. the thing i have learned about the FDL is that it is not a free license but a strategy by the FSF to protect their own business model. it seems the FSF saw oreilly stealing its business model (making documentation) and so the FDL was invented to stop publishers from taking free content and republishing it. that is why there are so many bizarre clauses like: If you publish printed copies (or copies in media that commonly have printed covers) of the Document, numbering more than 100, and the Document's license notice requires Cover Texts, you must enclose the copies in covers that carry, clearly and legibly, all these Cover Texts: since when does a free license have clauses like this? its more or less placing an arbitrary threshold on freedom (ie. 99 copies or less). it makes no sense from a freedom point of view. We can only understand this clause and others like it if we understand what the FSF was trying to achieve - stopping commercial competitors. the FDL should not be seen as a license but a defense commercial strategy which is more or less the same in practice as all rights reserved. The historical background about the FSF and oreilly is not conjecture as far as I can tell (not naming sources). Source provision for BY-SA is being discussed on the Creative Commons mailing lists at the moment as part of the 4.0 revision discussions. I don't think source provision will be included, but I do recommend that anyone who is interested get involved. maybe we need to create a free book manifesto, something similar to the four freedoms of the free software movement. a manifesto that requires access to the source in an easily editable and transferable form amongst other requirements. adam - Rob. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- -- Adam Hyde Founder, FLOSS Manuals Project Manager, Booki Book Sprint Facilitator mobile :+ 49 177 4935122 identi.ca : @eset booki.flossmanuals.net : @adam http://www.flossmanuals.net http://www.booki.cc http://www.booksprints.net ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] comments welcome
the thing about most of these licenses though is that you do not have to provide the source. a free book without available sources is not free. its a type of mechanical copyright protection. we need easily accessible editable sources. not pdf, not epub, not mobi, not paper books but easily editable sources. Rob - you would know this better than I - what free licenses are there suitable for books that require the source to be available? adam On 26/01/12 17:17, Simon Biggs wrote: I'm all for free culture - of course. But I am also pragmatic, seeking to understand the legal side of things. This week's discussion is being led by a copyright lawyer and I am hopeful she can offer insights. I know it doesn't have to be about licenses. The question, however, is whether an assertion, no matter how seemingly right, is legally right? In some jurisdictions there isn't a public domain to dedicate your work to, in others there is but you can't dedicate work to it, in others you can't waive your rights, etc. CC0 is an internationally legally sound public domain dedication that works around this. So I would recommend using that instead as a practical statement of principle. https://creativecommons.org/choose/zero/ http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC0_FAQ Actually I'd *really* recommend using a copyleft licence instead (CC-BY-SA), but that's another matter entirely. ;-) (I am not a lawyer, etc.) - Rob. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] comments welcome
On 01/26/2012 02:22 PM, Simon Biggs wrote: Adam cited the Sharism statement: The person who associated a work with this deed has dedicated the work to the public domain by waiving all of his or her rights to the work worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law. You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission. but I'd be interested to know what legal status such a statement would actually have. Smita, what legal status does such a statement have and how might it be interpreted in different jurisdictions and legal systems? any thoughts on the values of free culture vs the value of licenses? adam best Simon Simon Biggs si...@littlepig.org.uk http://www.littlepig.org.uk/ @SimonBiggsUK skype: simonbiggsuk s.bi...@ed.ac.uk Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ http://www.elmcip.net/ http://www.movingtargets.co.uk/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- -- Adam Hyde Founder, FLOSS Manuals Project Manager, Booki Book Sprint Facilitator mobile :+ 49 177 4935122 identi.ca : @eset booki.flossmanuals.net : @adam http://www.flossmanuals.net http://www.booki.cc http://www.booksprints.net ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] OSW: open source writing in the network
hi, very interesting conversation and points made in the last days :) one quick thought...if the net is making things fuzzy between public and private then does this also erode the role of 'publishing' to carry things over from private to public? if that is the case then the question might be what happens when publishing ceases to exist...can we imagine that? could we imagine culture and knowledge production not as a private 'in progress work' of a sole author which is then revealed but rather the development of shared public artefacts made by many contributors... publishing for me in this scenario doesn't hold much of what it was (so much so that I think it would need another name) but is tremendously exciting. adam On 01/24/2012 02:42 PM, marc garrett wrote: I agree with Snelting's comment. For if we are to get some kind of grip on what publishing is, we need appreciate what the reasons behind publishing are in the first place. If we mainly consider publishing in terms of facilitation and function alone, we lose the stories that can inspire others to engage themselves in creating their own methods of publishing And gate-keeping is a historical and contemporary situation which we can all relate to, perhaps universally. It is the situations themselves that people experience which define and instruct their motives for publishing. One of my own fascinations around this is how others find ways around systems to get their message out there and heard to a larger audience or potential collaborators. Sometimes to make this happen, it involves activities of illegality or instances of grass root manoeuvrings. This also means that boundaries will be blurred due to the nature of redefining one's or a groups place by finding an alternate space to have a publication made concrete, seen by others. Your comment What can it mean to express political agency, to ‘act’ or to make oneself present in the sense that Hannah Arendt uses it, in this context? Feels poignant, especially now. Hannah Arendt wrote an interesting book 'On Revolution', which it seems you've read. Where she proposes the French Revolution was not successful and the American Revolution was. Not only contentious because of her criticism on Marxist thought, but also seen as re-introducing the much earlier politics by the conservative Edmund Burke. This also links directly to another writer Mary Shelley author of 'Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus'. Where she lived through the wrath of Burke and the post French Revolution backlash. Shelley's rebellion against her own parent's ideas as well as other radicals, seems to take on echoes of Burke's own fears. Rousseau's dream of humanity- the noble savages, claiming power at grass roots and breaking away from the chains of a corrupted civilization, ended in himself anguishing about the death of many across Europe. The combination of Shelley's own personal doubts on Revolution and war, and considerations of Burke's very public discourse against her own father were key influences in the writing of Frankenstein's content. In regard to contemporary and independent publications as agency, a group I'm been interested in, called 'University For Strategic Optomism' (http://universityforstrategicoptimism.wordpress.com/). As an active argument against their education being 'privatised, corporatised and commodified'. Have taken it upon themselves to create their own (peer 2 peer) PhD'S. based on the principal of free and open education, a return of politics to the public, and the politicisation of public space. As our university buildings are being boarded up we inhabit the bank as public space. Not just a public space but the proper and poignant place for the introductory lecture to our course entitled ‘Higher Education, Neo-Liberalism and the State’. They took their research readings of various peer on the subject of neo-liberalism out of the 'official' realms of traditional universities, into physical environments and read them publicly inside Banks to mid-large audiences. Of course, creditation in this respect is not an option in normal, academic terms. But then, I have never believed the notion that an academic is immediately an intellectual or a critical thinker by default. But, we all know this don't we ;-) I see this form of publication as part of the tradition of leafleting and as the natural exponential growth of networked culture and its influence in creating alternative hi-tech frameworks for distribution. Exploiting the idea and very practical solution of bypassing gatekeeping situations in creating one's own context as an alternative to the limits of official representation/distribution. While e-commerce will always depend upon legal regulation, 'interactive creativity' among Net users has little need for courts and police. Barbrook http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/conference/code/texts/barbrook.html Wishing you well. marc * Dear Smita, Marc, Simon and everyone. Many
[-empyre-] a comment on reuse
a work. They feel they lack the mandate to change. Many people still ask if they can improve a Book Sprinted work even though the mandate to change a work is loudly passed on and articulated by ‘the creators’ to anyone. Infact it is difficult to pass on the mandate to change. It doesn't help that large projects like wikipedia are working against this mandate. Wikis and Wikipedia have managed to introduce ideas of participative knowledge creation but as Lawerence Liang (4) has argued Wikipedia is possibly trying to establish itself as an authoritative knowledge base which also has the effect of revoking the mandate to change as has been experienced by many new contributors that find their edits reversed. I think we will leave this all behind in time but its going to be a long time. All books can be improved – even the most sacrosanct literary works. However we live with the notion of the authority of the creator. The only thing that can change that is to take the rights afforded to us by free licenses and experience and value the possibilities open to us if we act differently. We need living books and under copyright we have to fight very hard to keep them alive. 1. Daniel James^ 2. http://www.futureofthebook.org/commentpress/ ^ 3. http://benfry.com/traces/^ 4. http://vimeo.com/10750350^ -- -- Adam Hyde Founder, FLOSS Manuals Project Manager, Booki Book Sprint Facilitator mobile :+ 49 177 4935122 identi.ca : @eset booki.flossmanuals.net : @adam http://www.flossmanuals.net http://www.booki.cc http://www.booksprints.net ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] OSW: open source writing in the network
I think you are making some huge assumptions about the economics of book production. First - the vast majority of authors under the current dominant model of publishing *dont* make any money. Authors do it for the chance to make money, and they do it for the profile. So there is no monster financial industry that is pouring money into culture workers, they are pouring money into book production and distribution. Secondly, it is reported that ebook sales are going through the roof. Amazon has reported that ebooks are the most popular book format (http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060p=irol-newsArticleID=1565581highlight). Ebooks have lower costs for production, infact you can more or less say that producing an EPUB (a very popular and open 'almost standard' for ebooks) costs nothing. Find the right software and its done in minutes. This puts *very* profitable publishing in the path of open publishing. Lastly models for becoming profitable are changing. The biggest shift I see is to put the money at the front of the production cycle instead of at the end. There are platforms like Unbound (http://www.unbound.co.uk/) that are giving this a go, and many successful examples in Kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/robinsloan/robin-writes-a-book-and-you-get-a-copy The above example is a fiction being funded at $14,000 before it was produced. In a blog post on Creative Commons the author states: I think the most important thing about a book is not actually the book. Instead, it’s the people who have assembled around it. It’s everyone who’s ever read it, and everyone who’s ever re- or misappropriated it. It’s everyone who’s ever pressed it into someone else’s hands [...] it’s that group of people that makes a book viable, both commercially and culturally. And without them — all alone, with only its author behind it — a book is D.O.A. http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/23876 Thats a pretty good argument from the inside of fringe cultural production that it *doesnt need* the publishing industry. He also goes on to explain secondary economies he is trying to generate from the book. Also you may wish to look here at more funded projects: http://www.kickstarter.com/discover/categories/publishing/most-funded?ref=more The above is a list of very well funded books (85,000 USD being the top earner) that demonstrate a model we can all participate in as cultural workers. Kickstarter approaches have their issues, but I think there are many people, orgs, and companies that want books produced and have the $ and motivation to pay for them to be produced. adam On 01/12/2012 06:40 PM, Dmytri Kleiner wrote: Definitely Simon. But as mentioned, this is only a tiny fringe. A small percentage of the total number of cultural workers, who are are currently working for the capitalist cultural industry. Thus, within Capitalism, our social capacity for the production of open works will always be tiny in comparison to our social capacity for closed works. Is this what we mean by There is no disconnect?... that out of the entire body of our cultural productive forces, a small minority is able to exist as open producers on the fringes of capitalism? If this is the limit of our ambition, than Free Cultural is nothing more than a sort of lumpen proletariat in the cultural field. And end even within this meagre ambition of maintaing an open subcultural fringe, there is still a disconnect with capitalism since not only will capital not fund open works, but the logic of capital conflicts with open practice in the space of what they perceive as their rightful consumer market, as we have seen in the persecution of artists such as John Oswald, Negitvland, DJ Dangermouse, and many others, not to mention the war on file sharing, etc. Is Free Culture content to be a beleaguered, insular, fringe? Or is Free Culture meant to be a critique of our curent cultural industries? Does it aim only for it's own meagre existence? Or does it aim for the transformation of cultural production? If the answer is the later, than this ambition can not be reconciled with capitalism. Or is Free Culture simply proposing the elimination of the popular cultural industries and a massive descaling of cultural production and employment? Even this is jousting a windmills. Capitalism will not accept the argument that they should just chill out and abandoned copyright because the culture they make sucks anyway, and that we can make better works with the free time of dilettantes, studends and hobyists. If this our position? Scrap big culture? Personally, like I suspect many on list, I generally prefer more experimental and independent cultural works and wouldn't really mis Hollywood and friends. But make no mistake, understand that in taking such a position we are operating without the solidarity of the vast majority of cultural consumers and against the interests of the vast majority of people
Re: [-empyre-] OSW: open source writing in the network
Hi all I don't post here at all (I mostly lurk), so I apologise for my silence and hope that the community finds this valuable. In one of the specialisations offered at the campus I coordinate, namely games, there is a serious set of questions beginning to develop around precisely the co-creation issues that Simon notes. For academics like myself, this has required an abandonment of support for auteur models that have tend to permeate the professional practice. These questions turn on how game designers might account for the creative input of committed player communities in games that involve constructive player activity. I'd include a range of practices, from community-based real time storytelling, as in the complex social narratives generated within EVE Online, to pragmatic level design contributions in Little Big Planet's editing community, to collaborative development practices such as Legend of Robot, where developers worked with a player forum in a participatory design process. Considering these issues, I am finding that game design should be looking through interaction design lenses now, as a means for cracking the problem apart - we need to become more ethnographic, more anthropological, more collaborative, more iterative in our design practices. This has run headlong into the structural issues that Simon notes - traditional developers and publishers have serious problems integrating these approaches into a business model predicated on secrecy, distrust of players and the absolute control of intellectual property rights. I can also offer what I suspect might be a lead towards finding solutions. A student of mine investigated von Hippel's open source innovation frameworks last year as an undergrad lit review project. There may be some benefit in von Hippel's work; while for me it's too early to say, for those readers who have looked at his work (and similar) as well as game design practices there may be strong and informative connections between game community development practices and those social structures found in open source software development. Cheers, Adam -- Adam Parker Campus Academic Coordinator Qantm Melbourne Qantm College Melbourne Campus 235 Normanby Rd South Melbourne VIC 3205 Australia +61 (0) 3 8632 3400 | Phone +61 (0) 3 8632 3401 | Fax www.sae.edu | Web www.qantm.com.au | Web www.saeshortcourses.com | Web SAE National Provider Code: 0273. SAE CRICOS Provider Codes: NSW 00312F. SAE Institute Pty Ltd, ABN: 21 093 057 973 This email (including all attachments) is confidential and may be subject to legal privilege and/or copyright. The information contained within this email (including all attachments) should only be viewed if you are the intended recipient. If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete this email from your system along with any copies that have been made. Any unauthorised use, which includes saving, printing, copying, disseminating or forwarding is prohibited and may result in breach of confidentiality, privilege or copyright. If you wish to unsubscribe or choose not to receive further commercial electronic messages from SAE Institute or any grouped/associated entities please send an email this address with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] OSW: open source writing in the network
hi, A happy new year to all :) On 01/11/2012 10:44 AM, tterranova wrote: I'm not saying that I agree with all these different perspectives, but my questions to the list would be: in which ways do open practices of publishing, writing and reading interact with the general attention economy of networked media, where attention is defined as a 'scarce commodity'? How can they be used to counteract some of the compulsive/destructive dynamics of Internet readership? What do your experiences tell us of the difference between social interaction on corporate media platforms and social interaction on alternative, open platforms? What is it that in your opinion ultimately defines the quality and affective texture of communication on succesful open platforms? What defines the quality and affective texture of books on open and closed platforms? - is there anyone that can comment on the differences between books produced by open and closed platforms? It seems to me that there are some wonderful opportunities to transform the texture of books even within a linear container because of open production models enabled by the web. Yet there are many, academics being near the top of the list, that shoot down the idea of open book production. adam looking forward to the rest of the discussion tiziana terranova Il 09/01/12 12.07, Simon Biggs ha scritto: Welcome to all empyre subscribers and, especially, this months moderators and discussants, Penny Travlou, Smita Kheria, Tiziana Terranova, Dmytri Kleiner, Adam Hyde, Salvatore Iaconesi, Joss Hands and Marc Garrett. We have the collective responsibility of welcoming in 2012, during the year's first monthly theme. For much of the world 2011 was, at best, a challenging year, and 2012 looks like more of the same. This appears to be a period of socio-economic change as the shifting tectonic plates of geo-political power grind against one another. I've never been keen on futurology or fortune-telling but am confident 2012 will be another year of turbulent events that will have us end up in a different place to where we started. In this globalised and highly mediated context, during the month of January, we wish to focus empyre discussion on how writing and publishing are currently evolving in the context of global networks. We wish to engage a debate about open models of writing and publishing. We hope to gain some insight into how changes in notions and practices of authorship, media, form, dissemination, intellectual property and economics affect writing and publishing as well as the formation of the reader/writerships, communities and social engagement that must flow from that activity. Specifically, we wish to look at examples of open publishing, whether they be FLOSS manuals, copyLeft or CopyFarLeft or other publication models, in order to look at new methods for knowledge making and distribution. We also wish to consider how communities of shared-value emerge through such initiatives and how their members are able to identify themselves to one another and others. As usual, the month (the next three weeks) will be structured into weekly bite sized chunks, each led by a moderator and involving two discussants. Participants can choose to post to the list at any time but the discussants for each week will have the opportunity to focus the debate for that period. We hope that as many empyre subscribers as possible will feel engaged and contribute to the discussion. Our guests are, in the order of the weeks they will participate: Tiziana Terranova lectures and researches cultural studies and new media at the Università degli Studi di Napoli 'L'Orientale'. She is the author of Network Culture (Pluto Press, 2004) and has recently co-edited, with Couze Venn, a special issue of Theory, Culture and Society on Michel Foucault's recently published courses. She is currently working on a book about neoliberalism and digital social media. Dmytri Kleiner describes himself as a Venture Communist. He creates miscommunication technologies, including deadSwap, Thimbl and R15N and is the author of the Telekommunist Manifesto. He lives in Berlin and his url is http://dmytri.info Simon Biggs is an artist, writer and curator. His work focuses on interactive systems, new media and digital poetics (http://www.littlepig.org.uk). He is involved in a number of research projects, including the EU funded project Developing a Network-Based Creative Community: Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (http://www.elmcip.net). He is Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts, directing the MSc by Research in Interdisciplinary Creative Practices, at the University of Edinburgh. Adam Hyde lives in Berlin. In 2007 Adam started FLOSS Manuals, a community for producing free manuals for free software. Through this work he also started Booki (a book production platform) and has been pioneering Book Sprints - a methodology for collaboratively producing books
Re: [-empyre-] question about online writing
On Wed, 2009-10-28 at 21:56 -0400, Marco Deseriis wrote: Hi Adam, :-) Hey Marco :) So I want to ask you a question. In your experience with the Floss Manuals Foundation, how many times have you noticed that the workshops you run are actually driven by a shared project? In other words, do you think that the HowTos can create communities *beyond* the hackers and the technologists (who, by definition, are interested in rules and practices of manipulation) or do you think that in the case of art, activism, design, architecture, and even the hard sciences the sparking motivation has to be external to an interest in pragmatics-for-its-own-sake? Many thanks for the points and the question. I think you are asking me a question that is beyond my experience to answer. I actually dont know much about the demographic of the project beyond those individuals that make themselves known to me or to the community. There are many contributors, and some quite regular, that I have never met and I don't know what their background is. I obviously can't speak then about the motivations of the majority of contributors because of this. From the small subset I do know, there are many artists involved, designers, educators, radio enthusiasts, free content evangelists etc. The motivations vary, as they would for any open free content project. The most interesting motivations to me are those that sign in under a pseudonym - there is no hope in identifying them although they might make large contributions. What motivates them? I would love to know. To bring the focus back to the networkedbook - I find it very interesting that projects in FLOSS Manuals that are born by a community have a broader contribution base. There are a number of books in FLOSS Manuals that are 'born' by an individual. They are excellent books, but we have more that are of the same quality whose genesis lies in 'the community' or a small niche orientated group (we have more community written books largely because it takes a single author 5 months - 2 years to produce a book that the FM community can produce in 2-5 days). Those books that are instigated by an individual, and who could be identified as having 'an author', have _far_ less contributions than those that are created by community (this is my observation by anecdote, no metrics I'm afraid). It seems very true to me that if content wants to flourish in the bazaar it must be native to the bazaar. I believe this has a lot to do with mandate. Those that wish to contribute will feel more likely to have the mandate to do so if the book was created by community. Those coming from the Cathedral will be largely ignored because no one knows how to interact with them (this is an over simplification of course). This is why I find the NetworkedBook project problematic. It seems to be attempting to enter into bazaar space, but with Cathedral attitudes. Hence the form will be 'commented on' but not collaborated on. I personally think there is _much_ more to be gained by exploring collaborative content production than by exploring 'author - commentary' dynamics. However, I understand there are many shades and each to their own, of course. adam Best, Marco adam hyde wrote: i have a very basic question to the turbulence crew. I must first say, I'm not an academic so I would really appreciate a plain text answer and not have to use the postmodern dictionary to parse ...what part of the Networked Book project is not replicating the politics and top-down processes of the established publishing industry? I see the mechanics as (slightly) different from what most 'publishers' use these days. But the fact that you 'use a wiki' or a blog to create a collection of long from texts does not seem to me to be tackling anything interesting. Comment Press I like, but this is interesting an out-of-the box plugin for wordpress. What are you adding to this? When it comes down to it, I think that the process inherent in your model is more conservative than most wikis since you have very clearly named authorial hierarchy such as Lichty › Art in the Age of DataFlow. There still seems to be a very standard authorship model in place and you have not investigated how the networked environment can really break established modes of textual production. From the long view, it seems you have a mistake of not knowing if you are in the Cathedral or the Bazaar. Which is it? adam On Wed, 2009-10-28 at 12:49 +1100, Anna Munster wrote: I don't want to sound like a fascist here...but as moderator I am supposed to keep people on topic on the empyre list as it is a list devoted to particular topics by the month. The question has been raised about whether networks involve a sustainable form of future energy. This is tangentially related to the topic at hand insofar as reading/writing/making online does involve consuming energy
[-empyre-] question about online writing
i have a very basic question to the turbulence crew. I must first say, I'm not an academic so I would really appreciate a plain text answer and not have to use the postmodern dictionary to parse ...what part of the Networked Book project is not replicating the politics and top-down processes of the established publishing industry? I see the mechanics as (slightly) different from what most 'publishers' use these days. But the fact that you 'use a wiki' or a blog to create a collection of long from texts does not seem to me to be tackling anything interesting. Comment Press I like, but this is interesting an out-of-the box plugin for wordpress. What are you adding to this? When it comes down to it, I think that the process inherent in your model is more conservative than most wikis since you have very clearly named authorial hierarchy such as Lichty › Art in the Age of DataFlow. There still seems to be a very standard authorship model in place and you have not investigated how the networked environment can really break established modes of textual production. From the long view, it seems you have a mistake of not knowing if you are in the Cathedral or the Bazaar. Which is it? adam On Wed, 2009-10-28 at 12:49 +1100, Anna Munster wrote: I don't want to sound like a fascist here...but as moderator I am supposed to keep people on topic on the empyre list as it is a list devoted to particular topics by the month. The question has been raised about whether networks involve a sustainable form of future energy. This is tangentially related to the topic at hand insofar as reading/writing/making online does involve consuming energy. However, I'd rather not have an explosion of comments about networks and energy use etc in a topic where we are looking primarily at networked writing/reading UNLESS there are salient points to be made about the relation of each to the other. Just a general note about the fact that I will moderate an onslaught of off-topic posts IF they come! cheers Anna A/Prof. Anna Munster Director of Postgraduate Research (Acting) Deputy Director Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics School of Art History and Art Education College of Fine Arts UNSW P.O. Box 259 Paddington NSW 2021 612 9385 0741 (tel) 612 9385 0615(fax) a.muns...@unsw.edu.au From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Julian Oliver [jul...@julianoliver.com] Sent: Wednesday, 28 October 2009 10:37 AM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] a Question ..on Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 10:20:19PM +, s...@krokodile.co.uk wrote: I may have missed this during the past month but has anyone here actually talked about the cost of networks and whether the network forms are sustainable ? If there's something I don't grokk here it's the strangely time-less, willy-nilly projection of the term 'sustainable'. From when to when and what to what is sustainable? 'Sustainability' is a concept that refers to a temporary control over energetic decay that favours one or more (inter)dependent organisms. We live on a sphere in a void and we're breeding like rabbits. Let's talk about minimising inevitable harm (a 'sensible harm'?) rather than invoking the myth of 'sustainability' no? My 2 watts, Julian P.S For all the hair-dryers, needles, routers, castles, deep-sea probes, Zaha Hadids, Ikea bookshelves and false teeth made, it's my suspicion that the Earth has not grown any heavier and nor has it grown any lighter. -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Berlin, Germany about: http://julianoliver.com Anna Munster wrote: I'd now like to bring Anna Gibbs and Maria Angel into the discussion, perhaps as 'other voices' and I've intro'd them below. They aren't authorial contributors to Networked but hopefully they might become contributors anyway! I'm wondering if either of you might comment upon the question of reading new media/networked writing. We've had a lot of discussion the difficulty of reading dense theoretical writing in online environments and hence of people participating in the Networked project. Do either of you have any comments about the screen (broadly speaking) as a reading interface and/or the role and place of the reader in collaborative and participatory writing? best Anna BIOGRAHIES Anna Gibbs is Associate Professor in the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney. A specialist in affect theory, she works across the fields of cultural, textual and media studies and her most recent publications are in Cultural Studies Review, Interrogating the War on Terror (ed Deborah Staines) and forthcoming in The Affect Reader (eds Greg Seigworth and Melissa Gregg). A writer of experimental
