Blog for Dr. Tony D Sampson (academic, author)
Category: conference
Very pleased to announce that Tero Karppi joins Carolyn Pedwell as our second keynote at Affect and Social Media#5: More Than (East London, June 25-26th 2020). Check out his excellent book: Disconnect: Facebook’s Affective Bonds
We are expecting to announce soon the release of this year’s Sensorium Song. Attendees at A&SM#4 will remember Mikey Georgeson’s Kindness is a Virus was centre stage at the after conference Sensorium performances.
My keynote at Digital Ecologies II: Fiction Machines in Bath next month will draw on material from a forthcoming book (working title) A Sleepwalker’s Guide to Social Media (due with Polity Press, 2020). For those attending it needs to be read in conjunction with the other keynote Simon O’Sullivan’s work on fictioning. e.g. Mythopoesis or Fiction as Mode of Existence: Three Case Studies from Contemporary Art – https://www.simonosullivan.net/articles/Mythopoesis_or_Fiction_as_Mode_of_Existence.pdf
The below abstract should soon appear on the Digital Ecologies II: Fiction Machines symposium website alongside full details on the event. https://www.bathspa.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/digital-ecologies-ii/
I’ll also be taking a similar approach to the SSASS summer schools in Lancaster PA in late July with artist Mikey Georgeson whose Kemi Peckpo and the Deadends offer a comparable mixture of aesthetic, fiction machinics. The SSASS early bird registration has just been extended to mid June, so do take a look at the full line up.
Feeling Facts and Fakes in the Speculative Contagion of Shock Events
Abstract
Politics is caught in a moment when strategic Big Lies bring big rewards, experts are marked as untrustworthy and factuality acquiesces to so-called post-truthiness. So where is theory in all this? Indeed, at a time when political impasses are all the rage, we find theory has itself gone down a comparable conceptual cul-de-sac. Despite much conjecturing about post-truth, we find a forced distinction between facts that are either brutally rational or decoupled from reality. This talk will draw attention to different ways of grasping the experience of fact. It aims to rethink political fabrication through Whiteheadian aesthetics, micro-shocks, SEO strategies, information voids and speculative contagion. The aim is to bring together feelings and thinking, aesthetics and politics, and consider the perhaps awkward facts about a people yet-to-come, but already on their way.
Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Professor Simon O’Sullivan, Professor of art, theory and practice, Goldsmiths College, London
Dr Tony David-Sampson, Reader in Digital Media Culture and Communication, University of East London
Other Confirmed Participants include:
In the introduction to his book Fiction as Method (2017) Jon K Shaw identifies a fictional place called ‘Null Island’, a fiction that is located at a point in the centre of the earth, amongst the lava that no one can travel to.
‘From this unreal centre the machines can tag our photos to map our memories and images onto the material world, can align our satellites to coordinate and connect us across the planet. Whenever we perform one of these actions, we pass through this fiction. We are transported home via the fictional island.’ (Shaw, 2017: 7)
Our vision of the earth and of each other is increasingly filtered through the operations of a complex assemblage of networked computational writing machines and as Shaw implies, these exist at the centre of our world and our daily experience. As a result the planet itself is increasingly becoming computational, Nigel Thrift describes how the ‘real’ as we know it is the result of multiple simultaneous ‘writing machines’ using a continuous looping process of algorithms. (2005, loc.2879)
As a result, humans now exist within complex informational spaces that produce affects, simulate, analyse and respond to user and environmental data. Within these conditions, fiction and reality become increasingly blurred, machine and human voice, difficult to distinguish.
These machines allow for the generation of complex webs of fabulation which exist in a plethora of contexts from corporate identities to labyrinthine brand stories, to political propaganda and the operations of the derivatives market.
Furthermore our understanding of the ecological is itself increasingly filtered through multiple layers of networked technologies, sensors, algorithms and data visualisations. Jennifer Gabrys discusses the notion of ‘planetary scale computerisation’ and how this leads to the generation of ‘new living conditions, subjectivities, and imaginaries’. (Gabrys, 2016)
Within this context new fictional strategies within creative practice emerge as important weapons for critique, intervention, speculation and change. As Simon O’Sullivan notes: fiction can be used not as a matter of ‘make believe but rather in a Ranciere sense of forging the real to better approximate historical and contemporary experience’. (O’Sullivan, 2016: 6)
In the symposium we ask how fictional methods are being employed to rethink and renegotiate our relationship with current and future technologies; how such methods can be used from activist and political perspectives; how they can address and critique post-truth conditions; how they can reveal forgotten histories and non-human perspectives; and how they can be used to speculate on, and design, new futures.
As Benjamin Bratton notes: ‘Our shared design project will require both different relationships to machines (carbon based machines and otherwise) and a more promiscuous figurative imagination.’ (Bratton, 2016, loc.283)
Symposium Strands:
• Activist fictions
• Speculative design fictions
• Non-human fictions
• Post-truth fictions
• Machinic fictions
The event will include a series of performances by artists including: Ami Clarke, Harry Meadows & Andy Weir, and Annabelle Craven-Jones.
TICKETS:
Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Professor Simon O’Sullivan, Professor of art, theory and practice,
Goldsmiths College, London
Dr Tony David-Sampson, Reader in Digital Media Culture and Communication, University of East London
Other Confirmed Participants include:
Ami Clarke, Jennet Thomas, Rod Dickinson, Charlie Tweed, Andy Weir, Harry Meadows, Ada Hao, Ramon Bloomberg, Bjørn erik Haugen, Hugh Frost, Annabelle Craven-Jones, Monika Oechsler, Garfield Benjamin, John Wild, Alberto Micali, Maud Craigie, Michelle Atherton, Rebecca Smith, Stephanie Moran and Alex Hogan and Teodora Fartan.
The Centre for Media Research at Bath Spa University is proud to host the second Digital Ecologies symposium: Fiction Machines and it will take place on Tuesday July 16th 2019.
In the introduction to his book Fiction as Method (2017) Jon K Shaw identifies a fictional place called ‘Null Island’, a fiction that is located at a point in the centre of the earth, amongst the lava that no one can travel to.
‘From this unreal centre the machines can tag our photos to map our memories and images onto the material world, can align our satellites to coordinate and connect us across the planet. Whenever we perform one of these actions, we pass through this fiction. We are transported home via the fictional island.’ (Shaw, 2017: 7)
Our vision of the earth and of each other is increasingly filtered through the operations of a complex assemblage of networked computational writing machines and as Shaw implies, these exist at the centre of our world and our daily experience. As a result the planet itself is increasingly becoming computational, Nigel Thrift describes how the ‘real’ as we know it is the result of multiple simultaneous ‘writing machines’ using a continuous looping process of algorithms. (2005, loc.2879)
As a result, humans now exist within complex informational spaces that produce affects, simulate, analyse and respond to user and environmental data. Within these conditions, fiction and reality become increasingly blurred, machine and human voice, difficult to distinguish.
These machines allow for the generation of complex webs of fabulation which exist in a plethora of contexts from corporate identities to labyrinthine brand stories, to political propaganda and the operations of the derivatives market.
Furthermore our understanding of the ecological is itself increasingly filtered through multiple layers of networked technologies, sensors, algorithms and data visualisations. Jennifer Gabrys discusses the notion of ‘planetary scale computerisation’ and how this leads to the generation of ‘new living conditions, subjectivities, and imaginaries’. (Gabrys, 2016)
Within this context new fictional strategies within creative practice emerge as important weapons for critique, intervention, speculation and change. As Simon O’Sullivan notes: fiction can be used not as a matter of ‘make believe but rather in a Ranciere sense of forging the real to better approximate historical and contemporary experience’. (O’Sullivan, 2016: 6)
In the symposium we ask how fictional methods are being employed to rethink and renegotiate our relationship with current and future technologies; how such methods can be used from activist and political perspectives; how they can address and critique post-truth conditions; how they can reveal forgotten histories and non-human perspectives; and how they can be used to speculate on, and design, new futures.
As Benjamin Bratton notes: ‘Our shared design project will require both different relationships to machines (carbon based machines and otherwise) and a more promiscuous figurative imagination.’ (Bratton, 2016, loc.283)
Symposium Strands:
• Activist fictions
• Speculative design fictions
• Non-human fictions
• Post-truth fictions
• Machinic fictions
The event will culminate with a series of performances by artists including: Ami Clarke, Harry Meadows & Andy Weir, and Annabelle Craven-Jones.
Throughout the event artist Rod Dickinson’s project Fear Filter will feed images to our Media Wall.
TICKETS:
Tickets are now available from the link below and include lunch, coffee and wine reception, with a special discount for students.
Just booke
d flights for the SSA Summer School in Lancaster PA this summer. I’ll be doing a double act with artist, performer, musician, Mikey Georgeson.
If anyone has PhD, Prof Docs, MAs etc looking for affective toning this summer, then please pass on the details. Looks like a wonder experience.
Link: http://affectsociety.com/
Lancaster is fun in the sun!
There’s a video of the Reworking the Brain session at Transmediale 2019.
Two weeks left to submit your proposals for the Fiction Machines symposium, please see the CFP below:
CALL FOR PROPOSALS
Digital Ecologies II: Fiction Machines
One-Day Symposium: Tuesday July 16th 2019
The Centre for Media Research, Bath Spa University
Newton Park, Newton St Loe, Bath, BA2 9BN
Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Professor Simon O’Sullivan, Professor of art, theory and practice, Goldsmiths College, London
Dr Tony David-Sampson, Reader in Digital Media Culture and Communication, University of East London
The Centre for Media Research at Bath Spa University is proud to host the second Digital Ecologies symposium: Fiction Machines and it will take place on Tuesday July 16th 2019. We are interested in submissions from interdisciplinary researchers including artists, filmmakers, writers, geographers, scientists and theorists whose work connects with the themes of the symposium.
In the introduction to his book Fiction as Method (2017) Jon K Shaw identifies a fictional place called ‘Null Island’, a fiction that is located at a point in the centre of the earth, amongst the lava that no one can travel to.
‘From this unreal centre the machines can tag our photos to map our memories and images onto the material world, can align our satellites to coordinate and connect us across the planet. Whenever we perform one of these actions, we pass through this fiction. We are transported home via the fictional island.’ (Shaw, 2017: 7)
Our vision of the earth and of each other is increasingly filtered through the operations of a complex assemblage of networked computational writing machines and as Shaw implies, these exist at the centre of our world and our daily experience. As a result the planet itself is increasingly becoming computational, Nigel Thrift describes how the ‘real’ as we know it is the result of multiple simultaneous ‘writing machines’ using a continuous looping process of algorithms. (2005, loc.2879)
As a result, humans now exist within complex informational spaces that produce affects, simulate, analyse and respond to user and environmental data. Within these conditions, fiction and reality become increasingly blurred, machine and human voice, difficult to distinguish.
These machines allow for the generation of complex webs of fabulation which exist in a plethora of contexts from corporate identities to labyrinthine brand stories, to political propaganda and the operations of the derivatives market.
Furthermore our understanding of the ecological is itself increasingly filtered through multiple layers of networked technologies, sensors, algorithms and data visualisations. Jennifer Gabrys discusses the notion of ‘planetary scale computerisation’ and how this leads to the generation of ‘new living conditions, subjectivities, and imaginaries’. (Gabrys, 2016)
Within this context new fictional strategies within creative practice emerge as important weapons for critique, intervention, speculation and change. As Simon O’Sullivan notes: fiction can be used not as a matter of ‘make believe but rather in a Ranciere sense of forging the real to better approximate historical and contemporary experience’. (O’Sullivan, 2016: 6)
In the symposium we ask how fictional methods are being employed to rethink and renegotiate our relationship with current and future technologies; how such methods can be used from activist and political perspectives; how they can address and critique post-truth conditions; how they can reveal forgotten histories and non-human perspectives; and how they can be used to speculate on, and design, new futures.
As Benjamin Bratton notes: ‘Our shared design project will require both different relationships to machines (carbon based machines and otherwise) and a more promiscuous figurative imagination.’ (Bratton, 2016, loc.283)
Symposium Strands:
(i) Activist fictions: responses that employ fiction as a political or social method for recuperation/change/intervention.
(ii) Speculative design fictions: responses that utilise fiction to reimagine social, environmental and technological futures.
(iii) Non-human fictions: responses that employ fiction to bring non-human perspectives and voices into view.
(iv) Post-truth: responses that critique and subvert the mechanisms and mediation of post-truth.
Proposal Submission
We encourage proposals for practice based presentations and traditional papers as well as performance lectures. The duration for each presentation should be 20 minutes. Please send proposals (300 words approx.) for all papers – outlining their aim and form – along with a short biography to the symposium coordinator: Charlie Tweed (c.tweed@bathspa.ac.uk) by no later than Friday March 1st, 2019.
Tuesday 16 July, 2019
9:00 AM – 5:00 PM
The Centre for Media Research
Bath Spa University
Newton Park, Newton St Loe, Bath, BA2 9BN
In the introduction to his book Fiction as Method (2017) Jon K Shaw identifies a fictional place called ‘Null Island’, a fiction that is located at a point in the centre of the earth where no one can travel to, set amongst the lava.
“From this unreal centre the machines can tag our photos to map our memories and images onto the material world, can align our satellites to coordinate and connect us across the planet. Whenever we perform one of these actions, we pass through this fiction. We are transported home via the fictional island.”
Our vision of the earth and of each other is increasingly filtered through the operations of a complex assemblage of networked computational writing machines and, as Shaw implies, these exist at the centre of our world and our daily experience. As a result the planet itself is increasingly becoming computational, Nigel Thrift describes how the ‘real’ as we know it is the result of multiple simultaneous ‘writing machines’ using a continuous looping process of algorithms.
Humans now exist within complex informational spaces that produce affects, simulate, analyse and respond to user and environmental data. Within these conditions fiction and reality become increasingly blurred, machine and human voices difficult to distinguish.
These machines allow for the generation of complex webs of fabulation which exist in a plethora of contexts from corporate identities to labyrinthine brand stories, to political propaganda and the operations of the derivatives market.
Furthermore our understanding of the ecological is itself increasingly filtered through multiple layers of networked technologies, sensors, algorithms and data visualisations. Jennifer Gabrys discusses the notion of ‘planetary scale computerisation’ and how this leads to the generation of ‘new living conditions, subjectivities, and imaginaries’. (Gabrys, 2016)
Within this context new fictional strategies within creative practice emerge as important weapons for critique, intervention, speculation and change. As Simon O’Sullivan notes: fiction can be used not as a matter of ‘make believe’ but rather in a Ranciere sense of forging the real to better approximate historical and contemporary experience.
In the symposium we ask how fictional methods are being employed to rethink and renegotiate our relationship with current and future technologies; how such methods can be used from activist and political perspectives; how they can address and critique post-truth conditions; how they can reveal forgotten histories and non-human perspectives; and how they can be used to speculate on, and design, new futures.
As Benjamin Bratton notes: ‘Our shared design project will require both different relationships to machines (carbon based machines and otherwise) and a more promiscuous figurative imagination.’
We are interested in submissions from interdisciplinary researchers including artists, filmmakers, writers, geographers, scientists and theorists whose work connects with the themes of the symposium or the below listed research strands.
Symposium strands
Here’s the link to Transmediale Events Schedule: https://2019.transmediale.de/events/schedule
transmediale
31 Jan – 03 Feb
2019
HKW, Berlin
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.
Expect much fabulating, speculating and recuperating…
CALL FOR PROPOSALS
Digital Ecologies II: Fiction Machines
One-Day International Symposium: Tuesday July 16th 2019
The Centre for Media Research, Bath Spa University, Newton Park, Newton St Loe, Bath, BA2 9BN
Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Professor Simon O’Sullivan, Professor of art, theory and practice,
Goldsmiths College, London
Dr Tony David-Sampson, Reader in Digital Media Culture and Communication, University of East London
The Centre for Media Research at Bath Spa University is proud to host the second Digital Ecologies symposium: Fiction Machines and it will take place on Tuesday July 16th 2019. We are interested in submissions from interdisciplinary researchers including artists, filmmakers, writers, geographers, scientists and theorists whose work connects with the themes of the symposium.
In the introduction to his book Fiction as Method (2017) Jon K Shaw identifies a fictional place called ‘Null Island’, a fiction that is located at a point in the centre of the earth, amongst the lava that no one can travel to.
‘From this unreal centre the machines can tag our photos to map our memories and images onto the material world, can align our satellites to coordinate and connect us across the planet. Whenever we perform one of these actions, we pass through this fiction. We are transported home via the fictional island.’ (Shaw, 2017: 7)
Our vision of the earth and of each other is increasingly filtered through the operations of a complex assemblage of networked computational writing machines and as Shaw implies, these exist at the centre of our world and our daily experience. As a result the planet itself is increasingly becoming computational, Nigel Thrift describes how the ‘real’ as we know it is the result of multiple simultaneous ‘writing machines’ using a continuous looping process of algorithms. (2005, loc.2879)
Humans now exist within complex informational spaces that produce affects, simulate, analyse and respond to user and environmental data. Within these conditions fiction and reality become increasingly blurred, machine and human voices difficult to distinguish.
These machines allow for the generation of complex webs of fabulation which exist in a plethora of contexts from corporate identities to labyrinthine brand stories, to political propaganda and the operations of the derivatives market.
Furthermore our understanding of the ecological is itself increasingly filtered through multiple layers of networked technologies, sensors, algorithms and data visualisations. Jennifer Gabrys discusses the notion of ‘planetary scale computerisation’ and how this leads to the generation of ‘new living conditions, subjectivities, and imaginaries’. (Gabrys, 2016)
Within this context new fictional strategies within creative practice emerge as important weapons for critique, intervention, speculation and change. As Simon O’Sullivan notes: fiction can be used not as a matter of ‘make believe’ but rather in a Ranciere sense of forging the real to better approximate historical and contemporary experience. (O’Sullivan, 2016: 6)
In the symposium we ask how these fictional methods are being employed to rethink and renegotiate our relationship with current and future technologies; how fiction can be used to reveal forgotten histories, non-human perspectives and to speculate on, and design, new futures.
As Bratton notes: ‘Our shared design project will require both different relationships to machines (carbon based machines and otherwise) and a more promiscuous figurative imagination.’ (Bratton, 2016, loc.283)
Symposium Strands:
(i) Activist fictions: responses that employ fiction as a political or social method for recuperation/change/intervention.
(ii) Speculative design fictions: responses that utilise fiction to reimagine social, environmental and technological futures.
(iii) Non-human fictions – responses that employ fiction to bring non-human perspectives and voices into view.
(iv) Post-truth: responses that critique and subvert the mechanisms and mediation of post-truth.
Proposal Submission
We encourage proposals for practice based presentations and traditional papers as well as performance lectures. The duration for each paper should be 20 minutes. Please send proposals (300 words approx.) for all papers – outlining their aim and form – along with a short biography to the symposium coordinator: Dr Charlie Tweed (c.tweed@bathspa.ac.uk) by no later than Friday March 1st, 2019.
VIRALITY 