Category: Assemblage Brain

A&SM#5/Sensorium registration open, full programme published

The organisers of the 5th Affect and Social Media/Sensorium Conference and Art Show (25-26th June 2020) are very pleased to announce that registration is now open.

The confirmed full programme for A&SM#5 MORE-THAN is published here: https://viralcontagion.blog/asm5-summer-2020/

There is also a link to registration on this official UEL event page: https://www.uel.ac.uk/events/2020/06/affect-and-social-media-conference

As with previous events, we have tried to keep costs down so that the conference is affordable to colleagues from other institutions on hourly paid or fixed term contracts, students and artists. The event is free for all UEL staff and students.

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Very best wishes,

Tony

Visit to BrainCulture Lab in April

The BrainCultures Lab at Duke looks like a fascinating project. Website still a wip. All going to plan, I’ll be visiting to talk and debate the assemblage brain with them in mid April. https://sites.duke.edu/braincultures/
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Here’s the blurb…

The BrainCultures Lab develops undergraduate and doctoral students’ humanistic and interdisciplinary toolkits by fostering the study of the brain as a socially and culturally constituted object, one that exceeds the strictly biological basis assumed by the neurosciences. While the focus of the lab is specifically on the plural lives of the brain (whether as a globalized icon for “intelligence,” sci-fi film feature, signifier of mindfulness, t-shirt logo, etc.), the lab additionally opens questions about the intersection of humanities and sciences more broadly. Through embedded courses, reading groups, workshops, film series, a multimedia website, and selected speakers and events, the lab exposes Duke students across specializations to strategies for critically conceptualizing the brain from a humanistic perspective.

BrainCultures begins with the contention that the brain is a heterogeneous assemblage with a social life of its own that doubles or is independent of the organ. Rather than unquestioningly ratifying the neurosciences’ view of the brain as a natural substratum, we draw on resources from critical theory, critical race theory, philosophy, and aesthetic works in order to position the brain as a plural and cultural object of humanistic investigation. BrainCultures challenges the superabundance of scholastic perspectives that have effectively revived localization debates of the nineteenth century, which equated mental illness with brain disorders. German psychiatrist Wilhelm Griesinger’s assertion that “mental illness is brain disease” in the 1840s effectively inaugurated a century and a half of medical and cultural investment in the brain as the physical site of mind and self.  Psychoanalysis is part of this early history. Sigmund Freud’s initial work as a neuropathologist is a testament to the centrality of brain-based debates during the formative years of psychiatry’s medical professionalization, even if psychoanalysis would dramatically depart from psychiatric practice thereafter. Contemporary psychiatry’s focus on psychopharmaceutical treatment preserves the core of Griesinger’s maxim: modification to the physical operation of the brain should, in theory, be the royal road to self and subject. Recent scholarship in the field of the neuro- and medical humanities has largely followed suit, working from the presumption that humanistic inquiry should merely reproduce or transpose the findings of neuroscience into its own idiom.

A&SM#5 CfP deadline fast approaching

Senior researchers, ECRs and PGRs all welcome.

Call for Papers and Artworks Deadline 21st Feb 2020

Affect & Social Media#5 & Sensorium Art Show

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>MORE-THAN>

Stratford, East London: 25-26/06/20

Confirmed Keynotes

Carolyn Pedwell (Kent)

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Tero Karppi (Toronto)

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Keynote Panel: Amit S Rai (Queen Mary), Rebecca Coleman (Goldsmiths), Ian Tucker and Darren Ellis (UEL). Chaired by Tony Sampson.

Full details of CfP on the theme of More-Than: https://viralcontagion.blog/asm5-summer-2020/

Call for papers and artwork deadline to A&SM#5/Sensorium Fri 21st Feb

The deadline for submission to Affect and Social Media#5 and the Sensorium Art Show is fast approaching.

Call for Papers and Artworks Deadline 21st Feb 2020

Affect & Social Media#5/Sensorium

>MORE-THAN>

Stratford, East London: 25-26/06/20

Confirmed Keynotes

Carolyn Pedwell (Kent)

s200_carolyn.pedwell

Tero Karppi (Toronto)

disconnect01

Keynote Panel: Amit S Rai (Queen Mary), Rebecca Coleman (Goldsmiths), Ian Tucker and Darren Ellis (UEL). Chaired by Tony Sampson.

Full details of CfP on the theme of More-Than: https://viralcontagion.blog/asm5-summer-2020/

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A new, modified blurb for A Sleepwalker’s Guide to Social Media

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Social media has taken a dark turn, encompassing both economic and political expropriation of the user experience. Users not only give away ownership of their community relations to big platforms, but the potential for positive change through revolutionary contagion is under threat. What was once the domain of pro-democratic movements has been annexed by the far right.

Tony Sampson focuses on the role social media play in this somewhat abrupt capitulation to the dark refrain of post-truth, fake news and hate speech. Positing online users as “sleepwalkers”, he argues that by understanding their collective behaviour we can identify the different lures that are used to capture them and which, in turn, produce their subjectivities.

Drawing on a wide range of theories, this book offers compelling ways to understand social media at a time when it is more important than ever. It is an important reference for students and scholars of media theory, digital media and social media.

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A New Syntax of the User Experience. Diagram by Mikey B Georgeson

Two Assemblage Brain related articles published in AI and Society

There are two Assemblage Brain related articles published in the current issue of AI & Society journal.

I am more than a little excited about these publications since my school history teacher at an Essex comp in the late 1970s, Richard Ennals, set up AI & Society in 1986.

Firstly, Tero Karppi’s review of the book. See Karppi, T. ‘Tony D. Sampson: The Assemblage Brain. Sense Making in Neuroculture.’ AI & Society (2019) 34: 945. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-018-0826-8

And next, the first article I wrote after the book was published in Dec 2016.

See Sampson, T.D. ‘Transitions in human–computer interaction: from data embodiment to experience capitalism.’ AI & Society (2019) 34: 835. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-018-0822-z

This one develops on themes from the book, including Experience HCI and Capitalism, as well as many of the subsequent Whiteheadian ventures started in AB and picked up again in my next effort.

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TS 20/10/19

Reworking the Brain at Transmediale, 2019 Berlin

Managed to get through (and survive) my talk at the Transmediale Festival here in Berlin yesterday. This one was with the wonderful Hyphen_Labs talking about their Neurospeculative Afrofuturism project in a session called Reworking the Brain.  We were in the auditorium in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, which is this absolutely huge venue with one of the largest engaged audiences I’ve ever seen at an event like this.

Highlights from the first day were Jackie Wang’s keynote on Carceral Capitalism including some very affecting poetry. Only realized afterwards that it was Jackie who asked me two really interesting/challenging questions during the Reworking the Brain session.

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Link to Transmediale Events Schedule

Here’s the link to Transmediale Events Schedule: https://2019.transmediale.de/events/schedule

transmediale
31 Jan – 03 Feb
2019
HKW, Berlin

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transmediale 2019 focuses on how feelings are made into objects of technological design and asks what role emotions and empathy play within digital culture. One of the key questions of the upcoming festival is “What moves you?”, referring not only to an emotional response but also to the infrastructures and aesthetics that govern how affect becomes mobilized as a political force today.

With digital technologies being integrated into the liveness of experience, a new situation for social change and cultural practice has arisen, which currently seems to lead to either political extremes or extreme complacency. How to resist the manipulative and polarizing aspects of affect in the digital public sphere as it is expressed through a deadlock of the politics of feeling on the one side and disengagement on the other? What motivates social engagement and how can new forms of care and solidarity be developed and embodied?

For the first time in many years, the festival does not have a title in order to emphasize the possibility of emergence: In response to a critical time, transmediale wants to focus on live practices and the creation of learning environments rather than close down meaning.

Taking up the challenge of how to understand and work with new technologies of feeling, transmediale recognizes that digital culture has become instrumental for capturing and managing what Raymond Williams once called “structures of feeling”—lived experiences and cultural expressions, distinct from supposedly fixed social products and institutions. Such experiences and expressions now create the affective spaces of social media, form the design imperatives of artificial intelligence applications, and seem to be capable of evoking empathy through virtual reality. In these contexts, social and political issues tend to become emotionalized and get turned into binary choices of for and against. One of the contemporary challenges is how to be critical and affirmative at the same time while avoiding such oversimplifications. For this purpose, transmediale 2019 strives to feature living, and not yet fully formed digital cultures of artistic vision, speculative thinking, activist intervention, and counter-cultural dreaming.

Following its focus on cultural emergence, the 2019 festival aims for a high level of participant and audience engagement through discussion-based and educational formats: Preceding the public festival days, transmediale offers the new Student Forum to create an environment for concentrated, in-depth work and studying. The workshop program is extended and starts on 29 January, too, continuing throughout the festival. Furthermore, the transmediale Study Circles are integrated across the program, zooming in on specific aspects of the festival theme. The Study Circles Affective Infrastructures and Uneasy Alliances consist of working groups in which participants come together before, during, and after the festival and generate various outputs such as workshops, events, and publications.

Find all events in our 2019 schedule.