Drone Culture - call for papers for Culture Machine 2015 issue

As Above, So Below: Drone Culture - call for papers
Culture Machine, Vol.16 (2015)
Edited by Rob Coley and Dean Lockwood (University of Lincoln, UK)
http://www.culturemachine.net

 

The colloquium, ‘As Above, So Below’, held at the University of Lincoln in May 2014, proved the topic of drone culture to be a productive and resonant point of access for discussions of novel forms of life, power, and social and cultural logics in the twenty-first century. The 2015 issue of the peer-reviewed open access journal, Culture Machine, will combine papers commissioned from selected speakers at the colloquium together with new contributions. We are particularly keen to gather international perspectives.

The implications of the drone are still unfolding, however its valence as, in Benjamin Noys’s words, the ‘signature device of the present moment’ is indisputable. Certain discourses, practices and lines of investigation are already established. As Noys notes, above all, a certain theological and metaphysical attitude to the drone – a myth of the drone, foregrounding its ‘God-like’ powers of search and destroy, troubling in its militaristic techno-fetishism – has come to dominate discussion, with interlocutors either wishing to celebrate or critique and demystify such claims for drone power.

What is at stake in our ‘desire for the drone’? How might we engage with such refrains in the interests of resistance? What transformative energies does the phenomenon of the drone exert upon philosophy, media, aesthetics, social and cultural theory, literature and history and how might these disciplines, in and across and between themselves, direct their own energies back upon the drone? We are familiar with some of the more recognizable manifestations of the drone, a list which includes the diffusion of the conventional battlefield, the supposed precision of surgical strikes, and the peculiarities of such a ‘remote’ system of seeing and killing from thousands of miles away. These are the activities of a power that remains largely invisible, for political as much as technical reasons. There is, then, a certain paradox to drone culture: the drone communicates something that must not be communicated. The drone is redacted: hidden in plain sight, present but opaque. Accordingly, though we can describe a culture in which the drone, and the consequences of the drone, are normalized, are integral to an increasingly dominant logic of power, the task of expressing this culture in its material, experiential terms proves to be more difficult. How do we engage with a phenomenon that is simultaneously invisible and utterly visible? How do we map the middleness of this experience?

We invite contributions on such topics as:

– Drone metaphysics
– Drone fiction
– Drone sorcery, magic and glamour
– Occultural theory
– De-Westernizing drone rhetoric and discourse
– Drone temporalities: speed and accelerationism
– Vectoral power: mediation and middleness
– Thanatopolitics

Please submit your contributions including contact details to:

Rob Coley - email: rcoley@lincoln.ac.uk

Dean Lockwood - email: dlockwood@lincoln.ac.uk

The deadline for submission of articles of 5000-7000 words is 19th December 2014. If you wish to discuss potential contributions ahead of submitting completed articles, please feel free to contact the editors.

Culture Machine’s Guidelines for Authors:
http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/about/submissions#authorGuidelines

Performative Publications

Now live: the performative project Janneke Adema has put together to create an alternative take on, and artist’s book out of, ‘The Political Nature of the Book: On Artists’ Books and Radical Open Access’. This is an article Janneke and I wrote together, the original version of which was published in New Formations last year.

The project is part of a larger programme of research on performative publications Janneke is carrying out. It is available at http://disruptivemedia.org.uk/thepoliticalnatureofthebook/index1.html and consists of a website and accompanying posters, which have both been designed by Coventry University 2nd year design students Nabaa Baqir, Mila Spasova and Serhan Curti.

Information about the different multimedial ways of engaging with the text both online and offline, together with some of Janneke's thoughts on the concept of performative publications, and reflections on how this particular project was conceived and developed, are available on her Open Reflections blog as well as that of the Centre for Disruptive Media.

Rethinking Gamification and meson press

Mercedes Bunz, Marcus Burkhardt & Andreas Kirchner, who are colleagues of mine in the Hybrid Publishing Lab at Leuphana,  University of Lüneburg, have announed the first publication of their newly founded open access publishing project, meson press:

Rethinking Gamification, edited by Mathias Fuchs, Sonia Fizek, Paolo Ruffino, and Niklas Schrape

'The main task of rethinking gamification today is to rescue it from the gamifiers.'
- Sebastian Deterding

About the Book
The phenomenon of gamification marks a major change to our lives: today, we find game-elements such as awards, rule structures, and interfaces inspired by video games everywhere around us. After corporations, states have started to use gamification as a tool to govern populations more effectively. It promises to fix what is wrong with reality by making every single one of us fitter, happier, and healthier. But is society up for being transformed into one massive game?

The contributions in this book offer a candid assessment of the gamification hype. They explain its novel design practices and methods as well as they trace back the historical roots of the phenomenon. They present artistic tactics for resistance, and critically discuss its social implications.

It is time to rethink gamification!

The pdf edition can be downloaded freely at www.meson-press.com.

Language: English | Publishing Year:  2014 | Softcover | 346 pp. | 6.14 x 9.21" / 23.4 x 15.6 cm
ISBN (Print): 978-3-95796-000-9 | ISBN (PDF): 978-3-95796-001-6
RRP (Print): EUR 15.00 / GPB 12.00 / USD 19.00

Contents
Mathias Fuchs, Sonia Fizek, Paolo Ruffino, and Niklas Schrape: Introduction

Resetting Behaviour
Niklas Schrape: Gamification and Governmentality
Paolo Ruffino: From Engagement to Life, or: How to Do Things with Gamification?
Maxwell Foxman: How to Win Foursquare: Body and Space in a Gamified World
Joost Raessens: The Ludification of Culture

Replaying History
Mathias Fuchs: Predigital Precursors of Gamification
Felix Raczkowski: Making Points the Point: Towards a History of Ideas of Gamification

Reframing Context
Fabrizio Poltronieri: Communicology, Apparatus, and Post-History: Vilém Flusser’s Concepts Applied to Videogames and Gamification
Thibault Philippette: Gamification: Rethinking ‘Playing the Game’ with Jacques Henriot
Gabriele Ferri: To Play Against: Describing Competition in Gamification

Reclaiming Opposition
Daphne Dragona: Counter-Gamification: Emerging Tactics and Practices Against the Rule of Numbers
Matthew Tiessen: Gamed Agencies: Affectively Modulating our Screen and App-Driven Digital Futures

Remodelling Design
Sonia Fizek: Why Fun Matters: In Search of Emergent Playful Experiences
Scott Nicholson: Exploring the Endgame of Gamification
Sebastian Deterding: Eudaimonic Design, or: Six Invitations to Rethink Gamification

A Very Brief History of Neoliberalism: From the Open Society to the Sharing Economy

As is well known, one of the main influences underpinning the interest of the UK Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government in open access, open data, open education and open government is Karl Popper’s philosophy of scientific method. For Popper, ideas are true only until they can be proved false. He thus emphasises the importance of having an open society to enable its ideas to be constantly tested through scientific experimentation as a means of guarding against authoritarianism.

In keeping with the neoliberal desire to minimise the role played by the state in society, the coalition government have adopted a variation of Popper’s philosophy to justify reforming public services. They have done so on the grounds that it is not just the state that knows how to supply such services – a multiplicity of others do too, including privately owned for-profit businesses. The relevant information and data, including that produced by academic research, therefore needs to be made openly available to the public so that ideas of how such services can be provided and funded can likewise be subject to continual testing and experimentation. And indeed privatisation.

Interestingly, however, a number of texts published just this month - Mike Bulajewski’s 'The Cult of Sharing', Evgeny Morozov’s 'What You Whistle in the Shower: How Much for Your Data?' – have begun to portray this opening up of information, data and services as part of a further shift still. It is a shift in which state regulated service intermediaries like hotels and taxi companies are replaced by information and data management intermediaries such as the sharing economy start-ups Airbnb (a community marketplace for renting out rooms) and Uber (an app that enables passengers to connect with a taxi, private car or rideshare using their mobile phones).

As far as comprehending the latest developments in contemporary neoliberalism is concerned, the important point to note is that, by avoiding pre-emptive state regulation, these profit-driven sharing economy businesses are able to operate according to what can be understood as both a pre- and post-welfare state model: 'social protections for workers are minimal, they have to take on risks previously assumed by their employers, and there are almost no possibilities for collective bargaining'. It is a situation that often leaves those providing services on the platforms of these sharing economy companies labouring for less than the minimum wage and without a host of workers’ rights. The list of lost benefits is certainly a long one. It includes 'the right to have employers pay social security, disability and unemployment insurance taxes, the right to family and medical leave, workers’ compensation protection, sick pay, retirement benefits, profit sharing plans, protection from discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, age or national origin, or wrongful termination for becoming pregnant, or reporting sexual harassment or other types of employer wrongdoing'.

PhD Studentships in Digital Media

Eligibility: UK/EU Students Only
Award Details: Tuition Fees + Maintenance grant:  £13,726 per year
Duration: 3 years Fixed Term (Sept 2014 start)
Application deadline: 25 July 2014
Interview Dates: 3 September 2014

The Project

Coventry School of Art and Design conducts world-leading research and is offering exciting PhD opportunities through a number of bursaries for students, to work with our professors and other researchers:

http://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/research-students/research-studentships/phd-studentships-in-art-design-media-and-performance/

In addition to more mainstream approaches, research projects may be practice-based where appropriate. They will be pursued within or across our broad research areas of industrial/transport/3D design, performing arts, creative arts, and media and we are particularly interested in the following (with potential supervisor shown):

Digital Media (Professor Gary Hall)

Email: gary.hall@coventry.ac.uk

Digital Media - specifically, the development of a critical Digital Humanities that explores how open access, open knowledge, open data, p2p networks, distributed media or ‘internet piracy’ can be used to  creatively disrupt core arts and humanities concepts such as the author, subjectivity, originality, the book, the archive, ownership, copyright and the (post)human.

The topic is part of a larger critical and creative investigation in the school into Disruptive Media and Open Media. As such, the successful candidate will be part of a team of researchers, Research Fellows and PhD students with many contacts in the UK and internationally through their work on projects such as Culture Machine, Open Humanities Press, Living Books About Life and Disrupting the Humanities.

Candidate specification:
A good honours degree, and ideally an MA, in an appropriate digital media-related subject.

Eligibility:
Only UK/EU citizens may apply with the academic requirements as listed on: http://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/research-students/research-entry-criteria/

Application Procedure:

For an application form please click here.

Complete the application form and return with a covering letter to:

Research Recruitment and Admissions team
RAO
Student Centre
Coventry University
Priory Street
COVENTRY
CV1 5FB
United Kingdom

Email: research-apps.pg@coventry.ac.uk

Informal enquiries may be addressed to Prof Martin Woolley.

For more about studying at Coventry, see here.