Fabricating Publics and Hacking the Anthropocene: two new open access books from Open Humanities Press

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

Fabricating Publics: The Dissemination of Culture in the Post-truth Era, edited by Bill Balaskas and Carolina Rito:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/fabricating-publics/

Feminist, Queer, Anticolonial Propositions for Hacking the Anthropocene: Archive, edited by Jennifer Mae Hamilton, Susan Reid, Pia van Gelder and Astrida Neimanis:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/feminist-queer-anticolonial-propositions-for-hacking-the-anthropocene/

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Fabricating Publics: The Dissemination of Culture in the Post-truth Era, edited by Bill Balaskas and Carolina Rito

Fabricating Publics explores how cultural practitioners and institutions perceive their role in the post-truth era, by repositioning their work in relation to the notion of the “public”. The book addresses the multiple challenges posed for artists, curators and cultural activists by the conditions of post-factuality: Do cultural institutions have the practical means and the ethical authority to fight against the proliferation of “alternative facts” in politics, as well as within all aspects of our lives? What narratives of dissent are cultural practitioners developing, and how do they choose to communicate them? Could new media technologies still be considered as instruments of democratizing culture, or have they been irrevocably associated with ‘empty’ populism? Do “counter-publics” exist and, if yes, how are they formed? In the end, is “truth” a notion that could be reclaimed through contemporary culture? With contributions by Charlie Gere, Christine Ross, David M. Berry, Emily Rosamond, Forensic Architecture, Gregory Sholette, Mieke Bal, Nat Muller, Ferry Biedermann, Natalie Bookchin, Alexandra Juhasz, Ramon Bloomberg, Santiago Zabala, Steven Henry Madoff, Terry Smith, and UBERMORGEN.

Fabricating Publics 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

Bill Balaskas is an artist, theorist, and educator, whose research is located at the intersection of politics, digital media, and contemporary visual culture. He is an Associate Professor and Director of Research, Business and Innovation at the School of Art and Architecture of Kingston University, London. His work has been widely exhibited in the UK and internationally. He has received awards and grants from the European Investment Bank Institute; Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA); Open Society Foundations; European Cultural Foundation; the Australian National University; and the Association for Art History (UK), amongst others. He is Editor of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (MIT Press), co-editor of Institution as Praxis – New Curatorial Directions for Collaborative Research (Sternberg Press, 2020), and of Architectures of Education (e-flux Architecture, 2020). Originally trained as an economist, he holds a PhD in Critical Writing in Art and Design from the Royal College of Art, London.

Carolina Rito is Professor of Creative Practice Research, at the Research Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities (CAMC), Coventry University, UK, and lead of the Critical Practices research strand. She is a researcher and curator whose work explores ‘the curatorial’ as an investigative practice, expanding practice-based research in the fields of curating, visual cultures, and cultural studies. Rito is Executive Board Member of the Midlands Higher Education & Culture Forum (MHECF); Research Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History, Universidade NOVA Lisboa; Founding Editor of The Contemporary Journal; and Chair of the Collaborative Research Working Group for the MHECF. Rito is the co-editor of Institution as Praxis – New Curatorial Directions for Collaborative Research (Sternberg Press, 2020); Architectures of Education (e-flux Architecture, 2020); and editor of the “On Translations” and “Critical Pedagogies” issues (The Contemporary Journal, 2018–2020). From 2017 to 2019, she was Head of Public Programmes and Research at Nottingham Contemporary. She holds a PhD in Curatorial/Knowledge from Goldsmiths, University of London.

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Feminist, Queer, Anticolonial Propositions for Hacking the Anthropocene, edited by Jennifer Mae Hamilton, Susan Reid, Pia van Gelder and Astrida Neimanis

If the Anthropocene heralds both a new age of human supremacy and an out-of-control Nature ushering in a premature apocalypse, this living book insists such assumptions must be hacked. Reperforming selections from three live events staged in 2016, 2017 and 2018 in Sydney, Australia, Hacking the Anthropocene offers a series of propositions – argument, augury, poetry, elegy, essay, image, video – that suggest alternative entry points for understanding shifting relationships between humans and nature. Scholars and artists from environmental humanities and related areas of social, political and cultural studies interrogate the assumption of the human “we” as a uniform actor, and offer a timely reminder of the entanglements of race, sexuality, gender, coloniality, class, and species in all of our earthly terraformings. Here, Anthropocene politics are both urgent and playful, and the personal is also planetary.

Feminist, Queer, Anticolonial Propositions for Hacking the Anthropocene is an OHP Labs Seedbook:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/labs/seedbooks/

Editor Bios

Jennifer Mae Hamilton lives on unceded Anaiwan Country, and is a researcher, teacher and community organiser. Her interdisciplinary research explores weather, affect and housework, and, with Astrida Neimanis, co-founded COMPOSTING Feminisms and Environmental Humanities. She is a lecturer in English at the University of New England.

Astrida Neimanis is Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities at UBC Okanagan campus on unceded Syilx territory in Kelowna, Canada. She is co-coordindator of COMPOSTING Feminisms (with Jennifer Hamilton), a member of the Weathering Collective, and director of The Feel-ed Lab. She also writes about bodies, water, and weather.

Sue Reid is a creative researcher, artist, writer and lawyer, working and living on Gadigal and Yugambeh lands. She is a member of the Sydney Environment Institute; a researcher with The Seed Box; and a PhD candidate in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at The University of Sydney—her thesis is titled, ‘Imagining Justice with the Ocean.’

Pia van Gelder is a researcher, historian and artist at the School of Art & Design at the Australian National University. Her work investigates historical and contemporary conceptions of energies and how these shape our relationship with technology, bodies and our environment.

The Interfact by Gabriel Yoran - new open access book from Open Humanities Press

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of The Interfact: On Structure and Compatibility in Object-Oriented Ontology by Gabriel Yoran

Like all Open Humanities Press books, The Interfact is available to download for free:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/the-interfact/

Objects in object-oriented ontology (OOO) are mysterious and inexhaustible entities. But since OOO grants ontological priority to objects, it should have an easy time referring to objects. But this is not the case.

In The Interfact, Yoran researches the question of how OOO refers to an object’s haecceity, its ‘thisness.’ He starts with an investigation into OOO’s eponymous practice, object-oriented programming (OOP) and identifies not just a plethora of parallels, but finds OOP’s concept of interfaces (as structured ways of object confrontation in time) a promising tool to describe both the rift between all objects and their relative stability.

Yoran then extends Harman’s fourfold diagrams to reflect the linkages between fourfolds, revealing that objects necessarily are parts of other objects. This phenomenon, which he calls out-of-phase objects, reveals links to Simondon’s notion of compatibilisation.

Yoran argues that objects are necessarily integrated into a fabric of interconnected fourfolds as well as component-compound relations. This structure solves the problem of object identification, by recognizing the object-fourfolds as overlaps, a mutually stabilizing structure which allows for reproducible object confrontation in time, or facts.

'The complexity of the ideas in this book are challenging to the intellect, just as the argument itself represents a worthy challenge to some well-regarded philosophical positions. One of the most exciting things about this argument is that it takes seriously the ways in which object-oriented programming can inform object-oriented philosophy, and vice-versa, demonstrating significant, practical connections between the two.'

 - Noah Roderick, author of The Being of Analogy

The Interfact is published in our New Metaphysics series, which is edited by Graham, Harman and Bruno Latour:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/new-metaphysics/

Author Bio

Gabriel Yoran received his PhD on Speculative Realism at the European Graduate School. Previously, he studied Social and Economic Communications at the Berlin University of the Arts. He is co-founder of several digital companies (Steady, Steganos, aka-aki) and works at the intersection of computer science and philosophy. He contributed “Applied Metaphysics – Objects in Object-Oriented Ontology and Object-Oriented Programming” to the Interface Critique Journal and “Interface kaputt – Cyborgism and Object-Oriented Philosophy” to the volume Interface Critique, published at Kadmos. For more information on his work see yoran.com

'Pluriversal Socialism - The Very Idea' published in Media Theory

My article 'Pluriversal Socialism - The Very Idea', has been published in the open access journal Media Theory:

http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/126

‘Pluriversal Socialism – The Very Idea’ starts from the position that politics in the West today is typically conducted in liberal humanist terms. This is the case regardless of whether those involved identify as radical democrats, socialists, communists, feminists, Greens, Marxists or anarchists.

Contemporary antihumanist and posthumanist theory is meant to offer something very different to liberal humanism. Media ecology, media archaeology, new materialism and object-oriented philosophy are all positioned as representing a shift away from anthropocentrism and a modernist epistemology based on the separation of human from nonhuman, subject from object, masculine from feminine, culture from nature, living from non-living. Instead, they champion a radically relational approach to the world that is designed to destablise such ontological dualisms. Yet while antihumanist and posthumanist theorists may write about transgressing the boundary that divides the human from the nonhuman, when it comes to their owns ways of being and doing they too often end up operating as bourgeois liberal humanists.

‘Pluriversal Socialism’ continues with my exploration (in texts such as Pirate Philosophy and ‘Anti-Bourgeois Theory’) of how we can not only write non-liberal humanist theory but actually work, act and live as non-liberal humanists too. It does so by drawing on the emphasis that is currently placed by a number of Latin Americanist theorists on pluriversal, ontological, radically relational politics (as distinct from the universal, modernist, counterhegemonic politics of most left thinkers in the Global North). In the process it addresses two important questions that have been raised recently by Arturo Escobar and Boaventura de Sousa Santos respectively: ‘Can we unlearn the liberal individual … in a similar way that we endeavour to unlearn patriarchy, racism and heterosexism?’ And is what we need to do so ‘another theory of revolution’ or a revolution of theory?

‘Pluriversal Socialism’ is the latest addition to the political discussion about how to transition toward a noncapitalist, nonracist, nonheteropatriarchal future between Jeremy Gilbert, Gabriela Méndez Cota and myself. See also:

Gabriela Méndez Cota, 'Pirate Traces': http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/114

Jeremy Gilbert, 'Anti-Bourgeois For What?': http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/115

Gary Hall, 'Anti-Bourgeois Theory': http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/91

Machine Intelligences, new edition of Culture Machine – available open access

Culture Machine 20 (2021): Machine Intelligences, guest-edited by Peter Jakobsson, Anne Kaun and Fredrik Stiernstedt

https://culturemachine.net/vol-20-machine-intelligences/

Culture Machine is part of Open Humanities Press and the Radical Open Access Collective

Vol 20: Machine Intelligences, guest-edited by Peter Jakobsson, Anne Kaun and Fredrik Stiernstedt

From the editors’ introduction

The aim of this special issue is to advance new critical perspectives on machine intelligence. Although the current hype surrounding artificial intelligence has been countered by several critical interventions, there is still a long way to go in order to produce a shift in the mainstream discourse concerning these technologies. The AI-hype has support from resourceful and well-connected actors within industry and politics. Within the art world and popular culture, AI appears to be a more ambiguous phenomena, associated with both blessings and grave dangers. Nevertheless, its development is all too often portrayed as though it is inevitable and that the path it will take is already set. The impulse behind this special issue is to deepen and diversify the interrogation of this seemingly inevitable development and to get a look behind the shiny surfaces of these supposedly new technologies. This special issue thus offers historical perspectives, conceptual re-thinking and situated analyses of the technical realities and the social and cultural implications of machine intelligence, in its many different forms and manifestations, with the hope that this will provide opportunities to intervene in and change the course of our technological futures….

Contents 

Machine Intelligences – An Introduction – The Editors

The Mountain in the Machine: Optimization and the Landscapes of Machine Learning – Sam P. Kellogg

Generative Adversarial Copy Machines –Martin Zeilinger

Optimal Brain Damage: Theorizing the Nervous Present – Johannes Bruder & Orit Halpern

In Other Words: Smart Compose and the Consequences of Writing in the Age of AI – Crystal Chokshi

What Personalisation Can Do for You! or, How to Do Racial Discrimination Without ‘Race’ – Thao Phan & Scott Wark

Intelligent Borders? Securitizing Smartphones in the European Border Regime – Michelle Pfeifer

‘A Game That is Not a Game’: The Sublime Limit of Human Intelligence and AI Through Go – Kwasu Tembo

Whose Singularity? Artificial Intelligence as a Mechanism of Corporate Sovereignty
– Andrew Davis

Theseus in the Epistemic Labyrinth: Critical Histories of Data and the Apparent Weight of Color
– Evan Donahue

Artificially Shared Kinesthetic Intelligence – Lisa Müller-Trede

We Have Always Been Artificially Intelligent: An Interview with Joanna Zylinska
– Claudio Celis and Pablo Ortuzar Kunstmann

 Playful Machine Learning: An Interaction Designer’s Journey into Neural Networks – Andreas Refsgaard

Filosofía pirata y trabajo editorial / Pirate Philosophy and Editorial Work

An e-book of essays on pirate philosophy, edited by Gabriela Méndez Cota in Mexico, has just come out:

Filosofía pirata y trabajo editorial (Pirate Phiosophy and Editorial Work)

It's partly influenced by, and engaging with, my work on Pirate Philosophy, and a lecture I gave for Gabriela at her institution in Mexico city, Universidad Iberoamericana, in September 2019: 'Liberalism Must Be Defeated: On the Obsolescence of Bourgeois Theory in the Anthropocene'. (A Spanish translation of my lecture is available here.)

But - as is indicated by the 'related posts' section at the bottom of the page - Filosofía pirata y trabajo editorial/ Pirate Philosophy and Editorial Work is also influenced by the work of my Centre for Postdigital Cultures colleagues Janneke Adema and Rebekka Kiesewetter on radical open access, feminism and piracy.