Dra. Alejandra Navarro Smith
Instituto de Investigaciones Culturales-Museo
Universidad Autónoma de Baja California
Mexicali, BC
www.cicmuseo.com

(more…)

Mediaccions and Urban Transformation in the Society of Knowledge joint seminar

Mónica Degen, School of Social Sciences, Brunel University

‘Architectural atmospheres, branding and the social: the role of digital visualizing technologies in contemporary architectural practice’
As public life has become increasingly commercialised, new developments have been promoted by developers through ‘place marketing’, with an emphasis on the sensory, experiential qualities and atmosphere of places (Ashworth and Voogd 1990, Julier 2008, Degen 2010).  The idea of ‘place experience’ has also been embraced by planners as key to promoting community involvement in and engagement with urban planning initiatives at local level.

Drawing on a case study of a redevelopment in Doha, Quatar, this paper will consider the role of architects in these processes – specifically the way that digital visualisation tools, technologies, and special effects, are used in architects’ offices, not simply to produce workable designs and obtain planning consents, but also to produce and sell contemporary architecture as ‘affectively resonant atmospheres’. In other words, the ways in which digital technologies are used in building design to evoke the pre-personal force of ‘a multiplicity of non-representational forces and practices and processes’ (Latham and McCormack 2004: 705).The paper will conclude by outlining the direction for a larger research project, based on ethnographic research methods in two architectural offices.

Where: MEDIATIC Building, 7th. floor, William J. Mitchell Room, Roc Boronat street, 117, 08018

When: Tuesday, 24 April 2012 (10:30 - 13:00)

(Photo: Edgar Flickr)

This workshop explores ways in which digital photography, especially cameras in their various forms, ‘act’ as a nexus in everyday life across time and space.  The goal of our paper is twofold. On the one hand it discusses the main digital photographic practices of a heavy user group, and second, it describes the way the group is constituted and formed as a collective identity performing those practices. Two critical conclusions are proposed: the traditional role of snapshot and amateur photography is changing, from a memory device to a connectivity practice and from having a primary social cohesion role to be a key element in group formation. And second, that the formation of a “social network” goes beyond the specific technological platforms of mediation (flickr, Facebook, twitter, etc.). Although the studied group was born in flickr, their consolidation requires several instances online and offline where digital imagery plays a key role on their practices.

Key(words)interview with Wieber Bijker: technology, digital culture and networks.

Iniciamos una serie de mini-entrevistas mediaccions basadas en  el método de dar al o la entrevistada unas 3 o 4  palabras clave para que mediante la asociación libre de ideas nos diga lo que le parezca. Empezamos la serie con Wieber Bijker y tres palabras clave: tecnología, cultura digital y redes.  La entrevista dura unos 10 minutos. Falta subtitular, pero todo llegará.

keywords from mediaccions on Vimeo.

Procesos simbólicos y artefacto cultural:
consonancias entre separar/unir y desconectar/conectar.
Andrés Gómez Seguel
Investigador Juan de la Cierva, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona
agseguel.blogspot.com

En términos sociológicos se puede plantear que nuestras sociedades están experimentando el paso de una separación y abstracción de la información a un repoblamiento analógico del cálculo digital. El desafío en tales circunstancias son las derivas sociales de la tecnología. Presento algunas experiencias de investigación en movimientos sociales y comunidades étnicas que apuntan a una específica estructuración simbólica con arreglo al uso de tecnologías de la información. Valiéndome de la idea de artefacto cultural intentaré teorizar los ejes de esta racionalidad tecno-social: el uso, la experimentación y codificación de la información.

Palabras clave: procesos simbólicos, artefacto cultural, reflexividad,
información, codificación.

Desde el diseño de Software a la acción política: un
acercamiento etnográfico al movimiento de la Cultura Libre.
Débora Lanzeni
UOC/IN3
mediacciones.es

En el seminario se presentará la primer etapa de un trabajo de investigación en curso donde se examina  el Movimiento de la Cultura Libre en el horizonte de la relaciones entre conocimiento digital y política. A través de un enfoque etnográfico, nos detendremos en la vida cotidiana de los desarrolladores de Software libre, privilegiando las nociones y las prácticas que configuran su modo de vida y su particular concepción del mundo y de la tecnología. Concretamente, nos centraremos en una expertise específica que moviliza tanto formas de entender el espacio, como la sociabilidad entre personas, lenguajes y conocimientos de un estar en el mundo digital, así como los modos de vincularse con la tecnología y la materialidad.

Palabras clave: Cultura libre, Software libre, prácticas, vida cotidiana, acción política

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Entrada libre y gratuita
Confirma tu asistencia a: eardevol@uoc.edu
mediacciones.es

Special Issue on Revisiting Digital Media Technologies? Understanding
Technosociality

http://www.communicationsonline.eu/

Content:

Kate O’Riordan
Revisiting digital technologies: envisioning biodigital bodies

In this paper the contemporary practices of human genomics in the 21st
century are placed alongside the digital bodies of the 1990s. The
primary aim is to provide a trajectory of the biodigital as follows:
First, digital bodies and biodigital bodies were both part of the
spectacular imaginaries of early cybercultures. Second, these
spectacular digital bodies were supplemented in the mid-1990s by digital
bodywork practices that have become an important dimension of everyday
communication. Third, the spectacle of biodigital bodies is in the
process of being supplemented by biodigital bodywork practices, through
personal or direct-to-consumer genomics. This shift moves a form of
biodigital communication into the everyday. Finally, what can be learned
from putting the trajectories of digital and biodigital bodies together
is that the degree of this communicative shift may be obscured through
the doubled attachment of personal genomics to everyday digital culture
and high-tech spectacle.

Gemma San Cornelio and Elisenda Ardévol
Practices of place-making through locative media artworks

In recent years, the vast increase in information flows have made it
possible to instantly connect location dependent information with
physical spaces. These technologies have provided new forms of the
representation of space as much as new forms of perception through tools
and techniques used in land surveying, remote sensing, etc. From a
critical point of view, pervasive computing, location-based
applications, or in other words, “locative media”, provide an
interesting framework to understand how these technologies relate to our
understanding of space and place. Concretely, we want to examine how the
uses of locative media in social-oriented artworks interact with
people’s sense of place. This article therefore discusses contemporary
theories on space related to media and technology with a specific focus
on the conceptualization of the notion of place. It also relates these
theories to the study of different locative media artworks: Canal
Accessible (2006), Bio Mapping (2004), Disappearing Places (2007), and
Coffee Deposits (2010). We contend that locative media artworks act upon
distinctive ways to understand the mediation of technology in current
place-making practices.

Susanna Paasonen
Revisiting cyberfeminism

In the early 1990s, cyberfeminism surfaced as an arena for critical
analyses of the inter-connections of gender and new technology –
especially so in the context of the internet, which was then emerging as
something of a “mass-medium”. Scholars, activists and artists interested
in media technology and its gendered underpinnings formed networks and
groups. Consequently, they attached altering sets of meaning to the term
cyberfeminism that ranged in their take on, and identifications with
feminism. Cyberfeminist activities began to fade in the early 2000s and
the term has since been used by some as synonymous with feminist studies
of new media – yet much is also lost in such a conflation. This article
investigates the histories of cyberfeminism from two interconnecting
perspectives. First, it addresses the meanings of the prefix “cyber” in
cyberfeminism. Second, it asks what kinds of critical and analytical
positions cyberfeminist networks, events, projects and publications have
entailed. Through these two perspectives, the articles addresses the
appeal and attraction of cyberfeminism and poses some tentative
explanations for its appeal fading and for cyberfeminist activities
being channelled into other networks and practiced under different names.

CarrieLynn D. Reinhard
Studying the interpretive and physical aspects of interactivity:
Revisiting interactivity as a situated interplay of structure and agencies

The concept of “interactivity” has routinely been used to differentiate
older analogue media and newer digital media. In this usage,
interactivity has come to be defined as primarily a physical behavior
from the person, as dictated by the media product, which has
technological and/or content features that enable, promote, and require
specific types and amounts of such activity. However, physical
behaviours are only part of the processes involved in engaging with a
media product. These also involve cognitive, affective and interpretive
behaviours. Additionally, what are considered the most important
behaviors may vary in any given media reception situation. This paper
reports on a study that considered interactivity as involving
interpretive and physical behaviours together. In interviews about
people’s engaging with new and old media products, the processes of
interactivity were mapped for their interconnected components. The
results help illustrate the complexity of the concept.

Phil Ellis
reenacttv.net <http://reenacttv.net>: re-working the site(s) of new
television: participants, contemporary and historical television, and
the archive

This article investigates the potential for new television as arts
practice. It explores this potential by revisiting acts and sites of
television’s history through processes of enactment, specifically the
reenactment of The Man with the Flower in his Mouth, the first drama
broadcast by John Logie Baird (with the BBC) in 1930. This took place in
Baird’s studio at 133 Long Acre, London. The article outlines key
features of various possibilities for a “new” television and a new
television arts practice and considers how reenactment as an arts
process might address the “trace” of historical television’s archive,
and in doing so also give it a particular contemporary relevance.
Theorists of memory and storage (Ricoeur and Derrida) are drawn upon to
develop forms of thinking about television and performance as archive
which are then drawn on to consider the prospects for reenacttv.net
<http://reenacttv.net>. Reenacttv.net <http://Reenacttv.net> is an art
and television history project which will reenact The Man with the
Flower in His Mouth in the summer of 2011.

Abstract keynote speaker Rosalind Gill, King’s college, London

This talk has three aims. Firstly, it will review “what we know” about the features of cultural and creative work, discussing issues such as precariousness, bulimic patterns of working, and the intensification and extensification of work over time and space . It will consider how these now ‘well-established’ ‘facts’ about creative work may be being challenged by co-creation. Is this the ‘ultimate’ in exploitation of ‘free labour’ or a harbinger of a different set of participatory ethical practices in the cultural sphere, a democratization of who gets to ‘make culture’?
Secondly, it will explore the notion of “self exploitation” that has emerged as a key term for theorizing the labouring conditions and subjectivities of workers involved in the cultural and creative industries. Whilst this originated as a critical term from a Foucaultian tradition concerned with theorizing new modalities of power and discipline, its usefulness both as an analytical and political tool will be interrogated. Has it become another neoliberal term of abuse–blaming workers for their own exploitation and rendering invisible the structural conditions in which work is carried out? Why has the word exploitation only become speakable when it prefixed by the notion that we are somehow doing it to ourselves? What would it take for us to start talking about exploitation again? Do we need a new vocabulary to think about labour – especially in the context of co-creation? And what kind of resistance is possible without recourse to this vocabulary?
Finally, the talk will raise questions about what still remains a largely silenced issue in debates about the conditions of cultural workers–inequalities between workers. I will develop from the notion of “unmanageable inequalities” to explore how gender, race and class inequalities have become not simply unmanageable but unspeakable in cultural work–even by those most adversely affected by them. How do we begin to challenge the toxic myths of egalitarianism and meritocracy that circulate in the cultural and creative industries–and in much writing about them? And how can we make sure that questions about inequality are on the agenda of a politics that seeks to challenge and resist contemporary labouring conditions – whether this is the labour of freelancers of employees or of hobbyists who give their time ‘freely’.
The aim of this talk is to stimulate discussion and raise questions in the early part of the workshop.

Este artículo pretende reflexionar sobre las posibilidades que abre Internet para el estudio de la cultura visual contemporánea a la vez que plantea una serie de cuestiones teóricas, éticas y metodológicas sobre la fotografía digital y su uso para la investigación antropológica. Internet puede considerarse actualmente como uno de los mayores archivos de fotografía o como un banco de imágenes inmenso al cual podemos acceder instantáneamente desde cualquier buscador. Sin embargo, esta perspectiva supone la descontextualización de las imágenes, que aparecen así de un modo revuelto; alteradas.

Palabras clave: Fotografía digital, ética, etnografía, antropología visual.