Tag: Bath Spa

Fiction Machines: Part III Programme

A reminder that you can now book tickets for Fiction Machines: Part III (online) an evening of screenings, talks and performances from artists, filmmakers and theorists, and a belated launch event for the Fiction Machines special issue of the International Journal of Creative Media Research. The event is free but booking is essential:

Fiction Machines – Part III –

Book here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/fiction-machines-part-iii-live-online-event-tickets-157254878575

Programme

6pm – Welcome and Introduction Charlie Tweed

6.10 – Andy Weir: Unearth – shows a short video extract as part of new (theory and practice) work in progress on grounding and ungrounding, navigating planetary sites of nuclear toxicity through a mythic/materialist ontology (geo-fiction) of dust.

6.20 – Distributed Cognition Cooperative (Anna Engelhardt, Sasha Shestakova) will present the project Intra-structures which treats infrastructures as intra-active processes, placing the user within Russian propaganda infrastructures via the fictioning machine of the telegram bot

6.30 – Richard Carter: In the Wake of Waveform – showcasing two new projects Orbital Reveries and Landform, which centre on the processing of satellite and drone imagery into multi-dimensional ‘textscapes’.

6.40 – Maud Craigie will show an excerpt from her film Indications of Guilt, pt.1, along with some photographs from her current exhibition at Mirror, Plymouth.

6.50 Harry Meadows discusses Sasha Engelmann’s book Sensing Art in the Atmosphere: Elemental Lures and Aerosolar Practices, exploring the atmosphere as a metaphor for thinking, free from earthly constraints.

7.05 – Ada Hao presents Making touch visible with the suture of fantasy with virtual aesthetician in “The Best Facial Clinic” – The glitchy-score of tele-synaesthesia performance in the age of global pandemic

7.20 – Tony D. Sampson – The Centre for Critical Neuroaesthetic Interferences, presenting a talk on his recent research into neuroaesthetics.

7.35 – John Cussans will present his new work PKD-AI: A proposal which outlines a plan to apply a GPT3-like AI to Philip K. Dick’s entire corpus of writing in order to produce a posthumous AI generated PKD novel.

7.45 – Mikey Georgeson will present Professor Kimey Peckpo who will attempt a live stream of an auto fictional account of a real life walk emerging from the past beyond the perimeter of the CCNI.

8.00 – Ami Clarke will present new work Pandemonium (working title), commissioned by Radar for Risk Related, and subject to further development through Clarke’s residency at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in May 2021. It forms part of an ongoing body of work by Clarke exploring probability and risk within surveillance/disaster capitalism from a trans-feminist post-human position

Q and A

Fiction Machines – Part III

Ami Clarke, Tony D. Sampson, Maud Craigie, John Cussans, Andy Weir, Anna Engelhardt, Richard Carter, Mikey Georgeson, Harry Meadows, Ada Hao and Charlie Tweed

The Centre for Media Research at Bath Spa University presents Fiction Machines – Part III, an evening of new screenings, talks and performances from artists, filmmakers and theorists. The work presented will highlight a diverse range of critical approaches that make use of particular fictional strategies in their conception and deployment.

This event will be the third part of the Fiction Machines project, which began as a symposium at Bath Spa University in July 2019, featuring keynotes from Professor Simon O’Sullivan (Goldsmiths and Plastique Fantastique) and Dr. Tony D. Sampson (UEL). The project evolved into a special issue of the International Journal of Creative Media Research, edited by Andy Weir (AUB), Tony D. Sampson (UEL) and Charlie Tweed (BSU) which launched in late 2020.The event will bring together all of the contributors to the IJCMR: Fiction Machines special issue, acting as both a launch event and a showcase of new works and research projects that build on its themes.

Feeling Facts and Fakes: Digital Ecologies II: Fiction Machines keynote

Feeling Facts and Fakes: Digital Ecologies II: Fiction Machines keynote

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.

Digital Ecologies II: Fiction Machines (one day symposium)

Digital Ecologies II: Fiction Machines

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

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.

About the conference

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.’

Symposium strands

  1. Activist fictions – responses that employ fiction as a political or social method for recuperation/change/intervention
  2. Speculative design fictions – responses that utilise fiction to reimagine social, environmental and technological futures
  3. Non-human fictions – responses that employ fiction to bring non-human perspectives and voices into view
  4. Post-truth – responses that critique and subvert the mechanisms and mediation of post-truth.

https://www.bathspa.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/digital-ecologies-ii/

Digital Ecologies II: Fiction Machines – final call

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.

 

Digital Ecologies II: Fiction Machines

Digital Ecologies II: Fiction Machines has a website with cfp and submission details. See here: https://www.bathspa.ac.uk//news-and-events/events/digital-ecologies-ii/

Digital Ecologies II: Fiction Machines

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

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

Call for papers

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

  1. Activist fictions – responses that employ fiction as a political or social method for recuperation/change/intervention
  2. Speculative design fictions – responses that utilise fiction to reimagine social, environmental and technological futures
  3. Non-human fictions – responses that employ fiction to bring non-human perspectives and voices into view
  4. Post-truth – responses that critique and subvert the mechanisms and mediation of post-truth.

 

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: Digital Ecologies II: Fiction Machines

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.