Articulating Media: Genealogy, Interface, Situation, edited by James Gabrillo and Nathaniel Zetter

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of Articulating Media: Genealogy, Interface, Situation, edited by James Gabrillo and Nathaniel Zetter.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Articulating Media is available open access (it can be downloaded for free):

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/articulating-media/

Book description:

To ‘articulate’ media means to understand them by locating their connections in space and time. Articulating Media offers new approaches to the writing of technology and the technologies of writing by twinning an investigation of language with an attention to location. Where does media theory take place? How should media theory understand its own occupation of the spaces of media? What materialities might survive media’s many articulations and associations?

Diverse in topic and method, the collection’s nine chapters analyse those questions of value, representation, and categorisation that are held within the languages of media. Contributors consider media technologies – following previous volumes in the Technographies series – not as mute objects addressed through language, but as processes and devices situated in the very grammars and vocabularies of their address. Scholars of literature, film, musicology, art, design theory, and media history evaluate new linguistic possibilities for thinking across disciplines and for considering the significance of location to media-critical writing. Collectively, the book traces the ways in which media vernaculars have shaped the vernaculars of media theory, and proposes a few ways in which we might reshape them.

Editor Bios

James Gabrillo is an assistant professor of musicology and ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin. He was previously a lecturer at The New School and a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University.

Nathaniel Zetter is a College Teaching Associate in English at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge.

Series

Articulating Media is published as part of the Technographies series, edited by Steven Connor, David Trotter and James Purdon:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/technographies/

Data Farms, edited by Tsvetelina Hristova, Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of Data Farms, edited by Tsvetelina Hristova, Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Data Farms is available open access (it can be downloaded for free):

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/data-farms/

Book description:

What is at stake in naming data centres as data farms? These installations are essentially hangars packed with computers. They congregate servers, switches and wires that facilitate the storage, processing and transmission of data in high volumes and at fast speeds. Data centres present a scale of operations, potentially planetary in scope, that intensifies and multiplies the productive and extractive capacities of digital technologies. The economic advantages that accrue to parties with servers in these installations derive not only from opportunities for peering and networking but also from inputs to client machines that may be situated at vast distance. Yet data centres have precise locations, often clustering where there is access to energy, skills, land concessions, tax exemptions or undersea cables. There are no data centres without land and water. Like the ‘dark satanic mills’ associated with the factories of the industrial revolution, data centres burn fossil fuels. Yet, despite these continuities with agrarian and industrial activity, the data economy generates stark figurations of territory, power and circulation.

Contents

LAND AND WATER, Brett Neilson & Ned Rossiter

HABITS, DATA, LABOUR: FROM WAREHOUSES TO DATA CENTRES, Liam Magee & Ned Rossiter

TOWARDS A FEMINIST SERVER STACK, Nancy Mauro-Flude

CLOUD COSMOGRAM, Maya Indira Ganesh & Johannes Bruder

THE INTERNET BEYOND BORDERLESS VERSUS FRAGMENTED, Luke Munn

ISLAND IN THE NET, Stefan Yong

HOW DATA CENTRES PRODUCE TOPOLOGIES OF TERRITORY AND LABOUR, Brett Neilson & Tanya Notley

DATA FARMS SONIFCATION: AN EXPERIMENT IN DATA MODELLING AND SPATIAL AUDIO, Sarah Cashman, Michela Ledwidge & Brett Neilson

DATA CENTRES: IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE AND EVERYWHERE, Rolien Hoyng

CAPITAL OPERATIONS: DATA AND WASTE, Brett Neilson

THE DISPOSITIF OF DISTRIBUTION AND THE GEOPOLITICS OF DATA, Florian Sprenge

Editor Bios

Tsvetelina Hristova is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University.

Brett Neilson is Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. He is author, with Sandro Mezzadra, of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor and The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism.

Ned Rossiter is Director of Research at the Institute for Culture and Society, and Professor of Communication, School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University. His current book projects include Media of Decision and (with Soenke Zehle) The Experience of Digital Objects: Automation, Aesthetics, Algorithms.

Series

Data Farms is published as part of the Low Latencies series, edited by Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/low-latencies/

Geological Filmmaking and Volumetric Regimes: two new open access books from Open Humanities Press

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of two new open access books:

Geological Filmmaking by Sasha Litvintseva: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/geological-filmmaking/

Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence, edited by Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/volumetric-regimes/

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Geological Filmmaking by Sasha Litvintseva: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/geological-filmmaking/

Every film image is geological. As a technical medium derived from the metals and minerals extracted from the earth, every moving image is materially embedded in the world it records. It is also temporally linked to the almost inconceivably vast deep time of the planet’s formation. What would it mean to make films in response to this situation? Geological Filmmaking argues that the challenge lies in situating oneself in the space between the concrete object of a film and the broader planetary conditions of its existence. The nuances of this position are at once formal, ethical and political. Sasha Litvintseva discusses her process of developing such a film practice as a way of tackling the perceptual and aesthetic difficulties presented by ongoing ecological crises. These concerns are explored through the prism of the author’s own films about asbestos and sinkholes in their respective economic and colonial contexts.

Geological Filmmaking develops a new genre of writing rooted in a reciprocity between the practice of making films and the theoretical study of the relations they participate in. Litvintseva expands current conversations in the environmental humanities through building on the rich legacy of experimental film as a tool for producing alternative modes of experiencing the world. The book is intended for readers from a broad range of backgrounds, looking for new ways of dealing with questions about the life and death of our planet.

Geological Filmmaking  is published in our MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW serues, edited by Joanna Zylinska: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/media-art-write-now/

Author Bio

Sasha Litvintseva is an artist, filmmaker, writer and senior lecturer in Film at Queen Mary University of London. Her work is situated at the intersection of media, ecology and the history of science. Her films have been exhibited worldwide, including at the Berlinale and Rotterdam film festivals, Baltic Triennial and Venice Architecture Biennale. She is the author, with Beny Wagner, of All Thoughts Fly: Monster, Taxonomy, Film (Sonic Acts Press, 2021). For more information on her work consult her webpage http://sashalitvintseva.com

 

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Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence, edited by Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/volumetric-regimes/

3D computation has historically co-evolved with Modern technosciences, and aligned with the regimes of optimisation, normalisation and hegemonic world order. The legacies and projections of industrial development leave traces of that imaginary and tell the stories of a lively tension between “the probable” and “the possible”. Defined as the techniques for measuring volumes, volumetrics all too easily (re)produce and accentuate the probable, and this process is intensified within the technocratic realm of contemporary hyper-computation. The ubiquity of efficient operations is deeply damaging in the way it gradually depletes the world of all possibility for engagement, interporousness and lively potential. Volumetric Regimes: material cultures of quantified presence proposes an urgent intersectional inquiry into volumetrics to foreground procedural, theoretical and infrastructural practices that provide with a widening of the possible.

Volumetric Regimes emerges from Possible Bodies, a collaborative research activated by Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting on the very concrete and at the same time complex and fictional entities that “bodies” are, asking what matter-cultural conditions of possibility render them present. This becomes especially urgent in relation to technologies, infrastructures and techniques of 3D tracking, modelling and scanning. How does cyborg-ness participate in the presentation and representation of so-called bodies? Intersecting issues of race, gender, class, species, age and ability resurface through these performative as well as representational practices.

Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence is published in our DATA Browser series, which is edited by Geoff Cox and Joasia Krysa: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/data-browser/

Editor Bios

Jara Rocha is an interdependent researcher-artist. They are currently involved in several disobedient action research projects, such as Volumetric Regimes (with Femke Snelting), The Underground Division (with Helen Pritchard and Femke Snelting), The Relearning Series (with Martino Morandi), and Vibes & Leaks (with Kym Ward and Xavier Gorgol). They are part of the curatorial teams of DONE at Foto Colectania, of ISEA at Arts Santa Mònica and of La Capella, all in Barcelona; Jara also teaches screen studies at the Escola Superior de Cinema i Audiovisuals de Catalunya, as well as at the Körper, Theorie und Poetik des Performativen Department at Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Stuttgart. With Karl Moubarak and Cristina Cochior, they conform the Cell for Digital Discomfort at the 21/22 Fellowship for Situated Research of BAK, Utrecht. Jara works through the situated, mundane, and complex forms of distribution of the technological with an antifascist and trans*feminist sensibility, and their show “Naturoculturas son disturbios” emits erratically from dublab.es radio.

Femke Snelting develops projects at the intersection of design, feminisms, and free software in various constellations. With Seda Gürses, Miriyam Aouragh, and Helen Pritchard, she runs the Institute for Technology in the Public Interest. With the Underground Division (Helen Pritchard and Jara Rocha) she studies the computational imaginations of rock formations, and with Jara Rocha, Femke activates Possible Bodies. She is team member of Programmable Infrastructures (TUDelft), i-DAT (University of Plymouth) and supports artistic research at PhdArts (Leiden), MERIAN (Maastricht) and a.pass (Brussels). Femke teaches at XPUB (MA Experimental Publishing, Rotterdam).

Well, I Guess I Rather Asked For That, Didn't I: Review of A Stubborn Fury

The journal Postdigital Science and Education has published an appropriately disrespectful review of A Stubborn Fury by Sandra Abegglen, Tom Burns & Sandra Sinfield: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42438-022-00357-6.

Here are two excerpts from the review, one from the beginning and one from the end:

'A Stubborn Fury offers a lot of food for thought, both in terms of its content and
presentation of arguments. Thus, this review engages with Hall’s arguments, chapter
by chapter. In keeping with Hall’s writing approach and style, we embrace the ellipti-
cal and the poetical, the pulse, and the repeat. We hope that our remnants and refrain
capture Hall’s project in spirit to pique the reader’s curiosity. We draw a tentative
conclusion of how this book, in its unique style, may mobilise "the medium of writing
as a mode of critical enquiry and aesthetic expression". Reach out and read this—it is
the most readable piece of theory on theory through writing that you will meet.'

'Reading this was emotionally uncomfortable—and perhaps that was the point...
Reading A Stubborn Fury, while at times unsettling, is exciting and pacey—especially
to those who have struggled to read French theory. Yet, we are left feeling unclean—as if
we have engaged in a public stoning. Is this useful? What can we now do? "[T]here is no
water" (Eliot 2020), just the bitty bits of scar tissue.'

Yesterday, in a brief post-review exchange with Abegglen, Burns & Sinfield, I mentioned I had recently come across the following passage in B.S. Johnson's introduction to Aren’t You Rather Young To Be Writing Your Memoirs?: ‘I am always sceptical about writers who claim to be writing for an identifiable public. How many letters and phone calls do they receive from this public that they know it so well as to write for it. Precious few in my experience, when I have questioned them about it.’ It struck me because, as A Stubborn Fury indicates, I find it ironic that in Britain we have a largely private school and Oxbridge-educated section of society (journalists, media commentators etc.) who regularly scold contemporary theorists for using supposedly difficult language, on the grounds that it is this elite-educated section of society themselves who know best what the public can and cannot understand.

Johnson's lines came back to me when reading Abegglen, Burns & Sinfield's review. I'm not sure who it is books such as A Stubborn Fury are written for. This is a different spin on their line: 'We are not really sure who is "saying" this.' In this respect, a still further provocation would be: 'We are not really sure who is "reading" this.' Nevertheless, I'm grateful to them for joining me in the imagined collective of those who are impolite enough to want to perform writing and reading differently.

Anthropofictions, new edition of Culture Machine – available open access (Spanish & Portuguese language only)

We are excited to announce the publication of the latest edition of the open access journal Culture Machine.

Culture Machine 21 (2022): Anthropofictions/Antropoficciones, guest-edited by Edited by Claudio Celis Bueno & raúl rodríguez freire 

https://culturemachine.net/archives/vol-21-antropoficciones/

Culture Machine is part of Open Humanities Press:

http://openhumanitiespress.org

and the Radical Open Access Collective:

http://radicaloa.disruptivemedia.org.uk

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Culture Machine 21 (2022): Anthropofictions/Antropoficciones, guest-edited by Edited by Claudio Celis Bueno & raúl rodríguez freire

For the first time in its 22 year history, an issue of Culture Machine appears in languages other than English, reflecting not only the appreciation that the journal has received in recent years beyond the so-called Global North, but also ongoing discussions, across the Radical Open Access community, about linguistic hierarchies and other epistemic injustices in academic publishing. Anthropofictions, guest-edited by our colleagues Claudio Celis Bueno and raúl rodríguez freire, a philosopher of technology and a literary theorist working in Chile, is not, however, about specific regions of the planet where the majority of people speak Spanish or Portuguese. Nor even about how such languages translate the question concerning technology/extraction. Instead, it concerns the construction and deconstruction of anthropological fiction in a time of technological domination, and thus re-enacts Culture Machine’s foundational commitment to the task of thinking. That said, the journal is open to proposals and gifts of translation. 

Contents 

Editorial - Culture Machine

Antropoficcciones: ética, técnica y política no-humana para otros mundos posibles
Claudio Celis Bueno and raúl rodríguez freire

Narrativa
Alexandre Nodari

Volver a signos y formas: de ficción, antropología y literatura
Andrea Torres Perdigón

Imágenes materialistas para el Antropoceno
Iván Pinto Veas

Para acabar con la imagen extractivista del pensamiento: una ficción filosófica
Sara Baranzoni & Paolo Vignola

Relacionalidades humano-artefactuales. Lecturas de otra filosofía de la técnica
Natalia Fischetti

Imaginação radical no/para o fim do mundo: estudo, fuga, ou alguns sussurros sobre viver outramente
Kevin Hacling Alves Gomes

The Case of Thinking Machines: Posthumanism and Techno-Human Hybridity in Children’s Literature
Shubhneet Kaur Kharbanda

Cuerpos permeables: microbioma, imaginación y existencia compartida
Marilyn Payrol Morán

A civilização do plástico / o plástico da civilização: maleabilidades
Evando Nascimento

List of Contributors