Thermal Objects and The Nature of Data Centers: new double issue of Culture Machine

We are excited to announce the publication of the latest edition of the open access journal Culture Machine (http://culturemachine.net). This is a special double-issue, consisting of:

 

Culture Machine Vol. 17 (2019):  Thermal Objects, edited by Elena Beregow

Culture Machine Vol. 18 (2019): The Nature of Data Centers, edited by Mél Hogan and Asta Vonderau

The contents of each issue are provided below.

 

Established in 1999, Culture Machine is now edited principally by Gabriela Méndez Cota and Rafico Ruiz. Its aim is to seek out and promote scholarly work that engages provocatively with contemporary technical objects, processes and imaginaries from the North and South. Building on its open ended, non-instrumental, and exploratory approach to critical theory, Culture Machine is actively calling for creative proposals that contest and come up against globalizing technical narratives and the environmental logics of extraction.

Culture Machine is part of Open Humanities Press. 

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Vol. 17: Thermal Objects, edited by Elena Beregow

http://culturemachine.net/vol-17-thermal-objects/

 

Editorial: Theorizing Temperatures and the Social − Elena Beregow

Time, Temperature and its Informational Turn – Wolfgang Ernst

Hot and Cold Techniques in the Longue Durée of Media − Erhard Schüttpelz

Cooked or Fermented? The Thermal Logic of Social Transformation − Elena Beregow

Thermocultures of Memory – Samir Bhowmik

Natural Ice and the Emerging Cryopolis: A Historical Perspective on Urban Cold Infrastructure – Paula Schönach

Infernal Machinery: Thermopolitics of the Explosion − Nigel Clark

Thermal Violence: Heat Rays, Sweatboxes and the Politics of Exposure − Nicole Starosielski

As ‘index and metaphor’: Migration and the Thermal Imaginary in Richards Mosse’s Incoming − Niall Martin

Distance Runners as Thermal Objects: Temperature Work, Somatic Learning and Thermal Attunement – John Hockey and Jacquelyn Allen-Collinson

Posthuman Dance: Body Heart and Haptic Intimacy in ORA – Hilary Bergen

Thermal Envelopes: Heat and Warmth in Installation Art − Gunnar Schmidt

Performative Raw Clay Practices and Ceramic Firing Techniques − Agustina Andreoletti

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Vol. 18: The Nature of Data Centers, edited by Mél Hogan and Asta Vonderau

http://culturemachine.net/vol-18-the-nature-of-data-centers/

Editorial − Mél Hogan and Asta Vonderau

Resurrection from Bunkers and Data Centers − Adam Fish and Bradley L. Garrett

Emplacing Data Within Imperial Histories: Imagining Iceland as Data Centers’ ‘Natural’ Home − Alix Johnson

Silicon Forest and Server Farms: The (Urban) Nature of Digital Capitalism in the Pacific Northwest − Anthony M Levenda and Dillon Mahmoudi

The Second Coming: Google and Internet Infrastructure – Vicki Mayer

An Apple a Day: Listening to Data Centre Site Selection through a Sonospheric Investigation − Matt Parker

Managing Carbon and Data Flows: Fungible Forms of Mediation in the Cloud − Anne Pasek

The Data Center as Technological Wilderness − A.R.E Taylor

Data Centres as Impermanent Infrastructures − Julia Velkova

Storing Data, Infrastructuring the Air: Thermocultures of the Cloud − Asta Vonderau

When Infrastructure Becomes Failure: A material analysis of the limitations of cloud gaming services − Sean RM Willett

(Please note that a temporary issue with the site's SSL certificate requires you to view the issues on a secure network)

On Gesture: Approaches and Questions event

On Gesture: Approaches and Questions 

17th May, 2019

The DigiLab, William Morris Building, Coventry University  

The study-day draws upon the rich literature on gesture recently emerged across media and film studies, design, dance, psychoanalysis, linguistics, art, philosophy and performance studies. The aim of this event is less centred around defining gesture and its particular ontology, in these various fields but rather opening up the concept for further investigation. The main focus is then on the methodological stances and attitudes better apt to examine gesture as a medium across disciplines and between theory and practice, in the attempt to understand why these movements of the body have become so important to us in a postdigital world. 

The event will comprise contributions by Darren Berkland (CPC, Coventry University), Bonnie Evans (Queen Mary, University of London), Tina Kendall (Anglia Ruskin University), Catherine MacTaggart (artist), Caroline Molloy (MPA, Coventry University), Tom Gorman (MPA, Coventry University), Sara Reed (C-DaRE, Coventry University), and an artist talk by Agata Mergler (York University, Toronto).     

Register here: https://coventry.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/ongesture 

We Started Building a Progressive Ecosystem for the Arts and Humanities – You Won’t Believe What Happened Next!

This is the abstract of my talk for Critical Issues in Open Access and Scholarly Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London, May 24, 2019, organized by Goldsmiths in collaboration with Research England and Jisc. More details about this even are provided below.

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Over the last 20 years I’ve been involved in developing more than 15 grassroots, scholar-led open access projects. This talk discusses the politics underpinning these initiatives along with some of their unforeseen consequences. Among the projects featured are:

- Culture Machine (http://culturemachine.net), a journal of critical and cultural theory that started in the UK in 1999 and is shortly due to relaunch out of Mexico

- Open Humanities Press (www.openhumanitiespress.org), an international collective that currently publishes 21 OA journals, over 40 OA books distributed across 8 book series, as well as libre OA experiments such as Liquid Books and Living Books About Life

- Radical Open Access Collective (http://radicaloa.disruptivemedia.org.uk), a community of non-profit presses, journals and other entities that was formed in 2015 and now consists of over 60 members.

Posthumanities Publishing

This is an 'authors-cut' version of the abstract Janneke Adema and I have put together for our forthcoming presentation at the Institute of Network Cultures' 'Urgent Publishing: New Strategies for Publishing in Post-Truth Times', Making Public conference Arnhem, 15-16 May. Janneke and I are speaking with Lídia Pereira and Axel Andersson on the 'The Carrier Bag Theory of Non-Fiction' session. 

This plural-voiced presentation will focus on what publishing does rather than what publishing is. It will intervene in the debate over publishing in the post-truth era by shifting the focus away from a hegemonic, modular, object-centered understanding of modularity, toward a more relational model of posthumanities publishing. Here research, reading, writing and the published text (not to mention software, the market and the commons) are understood as emerging from the intra-actions of a heterogeneous constellation of both human and nonhuman actors, many of which are ignored by existing theories of media. Drawing boundaries – whether it involves conceptualising information containers via the figure of the net, leaf or carrier bag – is still recognised as unavoidable from such a posthumanistic perspective. For us, then, it is a matter of drawing the boundaries differently, in a manner that does not impose on such relational intra-actions a version of capitalism’s old, closed, pre-digital logic. The latter emphasizes the finished object that is made rather than the process of making, as under existing IP law only the discrete finished object, be it a book, zine or platform, can be turned into a marketable commodity (not the idea or creative process itself).

This collaborative presentation will proceed to discuss processual posthumanities publishing experiments that have emphasised different forms of relationality – forms that do not revolve primarily around the published text-as-object, or indeed the individual human author-as-subject. In discussing these experiments it will show strategising publishing in terms of urgent and non-urgent, fast and slow can be unhelpful: the art of critique requires its own pace. It is not even certain publishing in our post-truth, postdigital era still means ‘making public’.

Anti-Bourgeois Theory

This is the abstract for my forthcoming keynote lecture at Technology, Science, and Culture: A Global Vision Universidad de las Américas (UDLAP), Puebla, Mexico, 6 September 2019.

In his celebrated 2009 memoir Returning to Reims, the Parisian intellectual and theorist Didier Eribon travels home for the first time in thirty years following the death of his father. There he tries to account for the change in politics of his working class family over the period he has been away: from supporting the Communist Party to voting for the National Front. (With the notable exception of the 2018 election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico, it’s a shift toward the populist nationalism of the far right that’s visible in many countries today: UK, Germany, Poland, Italy, Greece, Hungary, US, Brazil.) But Eribon also discusses the transition he himself has undergone as a result of having escaped his working class culture and environment through education, and how this has left him unsure whom it is he is actually writing for. He may be addressing the question of what it means to grow up poor and gay, however he is aware few working class people are ever likely to read his book.

At the same time, Eribon emphasizes that his non-conforming identity has left him with a sense of just how important it is to display a ‘lack of respect for the rules’ of bourgeois liberal humanist ‘decorum that reign in university circles’, and that insist ‘people follow established norms regarding “intellectual debate” when what is at stake clearly has to do with political struggle’. Together with his friend Édouard Louis and partner Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, Eribon wants to ‘rethink’ the antihumanist theoretical tradition of Foucault, Deleuze, Cixous et al. to produce a theory ‘in which something is at stake’: a theory that speaks about ‘class, exploitation, violence, repression, domination, intersectionality’, and yet has the potential to generate the same kind of power and excitement as ‘a Kendrick Lamar concert’.

In this keynote talk I likewise want to reinvent what it means to theorise by showing a certain lack of respect for the rules of bourgeois decorum the university hardly ever questions. I want do so, however, by also breaking with those bourgeois liberal humanist conventions of intellectual debate that – for all his emphasis on rebelling ‘in and through’ the technologies of knowledge production – continue to govern the antihumanist theoretical tradition Eribon and his collaborators are associated with. Included in these conventions are normative ideas of the human subject, the proprietorial author, the codex print book, critical reflection, linear thought, the long-form argument, self-expression, originality, creativity, fixity and copyright. I will argue that even the current landfill of theoretical literature on matter and the material, the posthuman and the Anthropocene, is merely a form of bourgeois liberal humanism that is padded with nonhuman stuffing – technologies, objects, animals, insects, plants, fungi, compost, microbes, stones, geological formations – to make it appear different. Can we not do better than this?