Blog for Dr. Tony D Sampson (academic, author)
Tag: cfp
If you’re into the blurs between media theory and media arts practice, then you may be interested in submitting to our Blurring Digital Media Culture special issue for MAST. We’re keen to attract people already working in the blurs, cracks, in-betweens, not-in-betweens, entangled, indistinctness, and messiness of digital media cultures. Contact me to discuss.
https://www.mast-journal.org/cfp-special-issue-blurring-digital-media-culture
A&SM#5 presents:
Cfp and artworks 21st Feb 2020
Please email 200 word abstract to t.d.sampson[at]uel.ac.uk. Be sure to include your name, any affiliations and contact email in the same text.
Details
The call for the 5th international, interdisciplinary Affect and Social Media conference and Sensorium Art Show asks established academics, postgraduate writers, artists and media practitioners to broadly conceive of a more-than social media.
The corporate rhetoric of digital enterprise has often couched connectivity in celebratory terms. There can never be too much connectivity! Expanding on the ambitions and tools of Web 1.0, the social technology paradigm promised to (as Tim Berners Lee put it) connect users to everything and everybody. A social media business model swiftly followed that monetized too much connectivity by way of platform architectures designed to persuade users to spend increasingly more time connecting to each other. Users would now produce more and more relational data through linking to friends (more friends than they had offline!), building groups and communities, posting, sharing, and liking, liking, liking!
Social media is a corporate Empire of Like. It extracts value made from these abundances of connectivity and data. This is an empire that knows no bounds. An empire of excess wherein the endless accumulation and surveillance of all this data seems to be infinite. There can never be too much data. There is so much of the stuff that marketers and consumer researchers often ponder over what exactly to do with it all. What do Facebook really know? Do they know more than we think they know or do they know too much to compute?
Counterintuitively perhaps, these information excesses do not equate to user empowerment. The surpluses of connectivity and data have not produced the assumed information fuelled age of enlightenment. This is a dark age of social media in which James Bridle contends, we may well ‘know more and more about the world,’ but at the same time we are ‘less and less able to do anything about it.’
Platform architectures are designed to do more than make more information available. The behavioural data science teams behind the scenes claim to produce predictable user performances. But more than this, social media developers, researchers and marketers want to stir up a profusion of emotion, feelings and mechanical habits. They want impersonal affects to overflow their threshold points and spread contagiously through transmedia communities. These are viral flows and contaminations that produce affective bonds (Karppi, 2018), keeping users engaged in the process of making more and more sharable data. It is indeed these affective bonds of social media which become entangled with a more-than-human user experience (Clough, 2018).
Much attention has been paid to the negative effects social media can have on a user’s emotions and mental health. Social media addictions and potential overdoses are endemic to a discourse of care. Are We All Addicts Now? Systems of withdrawal, detox, and disengagement have been proposed as an antidote. Yet, as personalities and technologies collapse into Clough’s impersonal user experience (and Chun’s YOU), what kinds of care system can ease the pain of identity loss? What happens when the “I” of the user collapses into these impersonal experiences to become a Facebook lookalike audience?
The failure to produce mass disconnection shows the extent to which digital dependencies are produced by a kind of Skinner’s Box. It is the seemingly endless circulation of impersonal affects in these boxes that bring users together in involuntary acts of collective mimicry, and keeps them pecking for more.
Should we be surprised? Social media appears to have been predesigned for More-Than. As Vaidhyanathan (2019) argues, Zuckerberg’s original design intentions have been dramatically supervened by unanticipated uses of the original Facebook architecture. The overproduction of online harms, hate speech, rumours, conspiracy and fakery are surplus platform productions that algorithms churn and digital immune systems struggle to frustrate. This is a design that has proven to be the perfect environment for a divisive populist politics with further excesses of hate and online harm.
Zuckerberg thinks the solution to these immunological breaches will be AI. And yes, AI is of course a More-Than production of experience. It produces digital emotions which portray, detect, and manipulate predictable patterns. In the social media behaviourist labs, the psych-corps are able to clandestinely experiment on users as if they were Skinner’s pigeons. Users become caught up in a teleological suspension of ethical research. This is a More Than production of pecking subjectivities.
But at least this overproduction is kept to online phenomena only. It all seems so clean. The user experiences of social media is a world away from the smog filled streets and bush fires of climate disaster. Up here in the fluffy whiteness of the digital clouds, it would appear that the only waste users have to manage is the limitless waste of time these platforms offer for thumb exercises.
But of course, digital clouds are not fluffy white areas for excess data storage. The cloud is itself a more-than atmosphere. It is an ideological avatar. More precisely, these clouds are not virtual, but are toxic clouds that obscure the actual dirty heat of the corporate social media server centres. What we find, then, in the cloud, is a user experience of time wasting readily aligned to the excesses of digital junk and the toxic sludge of the Anthropocene.
But after all this dystopian media theory dirge is expended, could there not be a more promising More Than, yet to come? Can the user experience be wrestled back from the clutches of the dark refrains of corporate social media and poisonous populisms? Or will the finite overproductions; the endless acceleration of more thans, reach a point where perhaps endless accumulation turns in on itself. A point where more thans become other thans or more than more thans, perhaps? Like Deleuze and Guattari’s final affirmative more than in What is Philosphy? is there a new people yet to come. We might already be seeing the start of a new ‘intuitive digital subjects’ (Serres, Pedwell) whose habits and addictions are not steered by way of behavioural marketers any longer, but instead delegated and synthesised to digital technologies, opening up cognitive capacities and affective atmospheres in which users might experience ‘intuitive’ modes of being-in-the-world.
Evidently, the list is endless, but here are some other More-Than topics to ponder…
Guest Editors: Charlie Tweed (Bath Spa University), Tony David Sampson (UEL) and Andy Weir (Arts University Bournemouth)
In this special issue of the IJCMR we will 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 and new sorts of machine.
This special issue of invites practice-based researchers with an interest in Fiction Machines to submit works that locate themselves around one of the following thematic strands:
Activist fictions
Speculative design fictions
Non-human fictions
Post-truth fictions
The deadline for submissions is 30 October 2019 for publication in July 2020. Please email 300-word abstracts to
The deadline for submissions is 30 October 2019 for publication in July 2020. Please email 300-word abstracts to c.tweed@bathspa.ac.uk
We will accept work in three submission categories:
‘Single-Piece Explorations’ (i.e. a single video or audio piece accompanied by a 1,500-word research statement)
‘Multi-Piece Portfolios’ (i.e. a number of mixed media artefacts like video, image and audio, accompanied by up to a 3,000-word commentary)
‘Practice Discoveries’ (i.e. a 6,000-word article about an area of creative practice)
After an inspiring day in Bath earlier this month (see above) at this event on fiction machines with Simon O’Sullivan, Charlie Tweed, Mikey Georgeson, and many others, I’m very pleased to announce a related cfp for a special issue of the International Journal of Creative Media Research.
Guest Editors: Charlie Tweed (Bath Spa University), Tony David Sampson (UEL) and Andy Weir (Arts University Bournemouth)
In this special issue of the IJCMR we will 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 and new sorts of machine.
This special issue of invites practice-based researchers with an interest in Fiction Machines to submit works that locate themselves around one of the following thematic strands:
Activist fictions
Speculative design fictions
Non-human fictions
Post-truth fictions
The deadline for submissions is 30 October 2019 for publication in July 2020. Please email 300-word abstracts to .
We will accept work in three submission categories:
‘Single-Piece Explorations’ (i.e. a single video or audio piece accompanied by a 1,500-word research statement)
‘Multi-Piece Portfolios’ (i.e. a number of mixed media artefacts like video, image and audio, accompanied by up to a 3,000-word commentary)
‘Practice Discoveries’ (i.e. a 6,000-word article about an area of creative practice)
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.
Happy to say that we’ve already received a few very good looking submissions for the A&SM#4: Notifications from Technological Nonconscious conference.
There’s a full cfp (deadline 15th Sept) plus updated information on the conference on this page of the Virality blog: https://viralcontagion.blog/affect-social-media4/
A&SM#4 will be held at East London’s USS building in Stratford on Nov 7th 2018.
Our confirmed keynote speaker is Patricia Ticineto Clough followed by a keynote panel including Jessica Ringrose (UCL), Amit Rai (Queen Mary), Rebecca Coleman (Goldsmiths), Darren Ellis and Ian Tucker (East London).
I’m really looking forward to putting together the programme for this one!
Tony
Image by Francesco Tacchini
AFFECTIVE CAPITALISM SYMPOSIUM
5–6 June 2014
University of Turku, Finland
Keynote speakers: Melissa Gregg (Intel Labs/ISTC for Social Computing), Tony D. Sampson (University of East London)
This symposium aims at describing and understanding a regime we call affective capitalism. In cultural theory, affect is considered to be a fruitful concept in analysing how something evokes our body and mind. Affect makes us act. Affect exceeds or precedes rationality. In our daily lives we are constantly affected by a plethora of things; our work, our friends, our surroundings, our technologies (Gregg & Seigworth 2010).
Unsurprisingly perhaps, we are seeing attempts to capture affect in different fields of contemporary culture from labour to social networks and politics. In these contexts, affect and affection are in an extensive manner organised, produced, and maintained for the needs of capitalism. Affective capitalism is lucrative, tempting and even sneaky. It merges with established therapeutic discourses and blurs the limits of intimacy at work (Ross 2003; Illouz 2007; Gregg 2011). It is both cognitive and non-cognitive (Sampson 2012); we are being evoked to act in order for companies to make profits in a market economy. Affective capitalism transforms us into assets, goods and services by appealing to our desires, needs and social relationships, or by making us act on a mere gut-feeling.
The idea of this two-day symposium is to bring together researchers and thinkers to discuss different areas of affective capitalism. We want to challenge affective capitalism on its own ground. To do this we will analyse specific examples of affective capitalism at work and map its defining factors. We are seeking new ways to understand affective capitalism through its ambivalences and complexities. At the same time, we ask how we could resist it and develop alternatives for it.
Thus, we invite papers that discuss the theme of ‘affective capitalism’ from various perspectives. The potential topics for discussion include (but are not limited to):
Labour
Art & Media
Finance & Economy
Gender & Sexuality
Class
Politics
Technology
We invite proposals for individual papers including abstracts (250 words) and a short bio (100 words). Proposals should be sent to affcap[a]utu.fi by 17 March 2014.
Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by 1 April 2014. We are planning to publish a peer-reviewed journal issue based on the presented papers. The symposium is free of charge.
The symposium is organised by two interconnected research groups (Capitalism and Affective labour) at the School of History, Culture and Arts Studies at the University of Turku.
Organising committee:
Tero Karppi
Anu Laukkanen
Mona Mannevuo
Mari Pajala
Tanja Sihvonen
Subject: [CULTSTUD-L] cfp CCSR Conference – Radical Space – EXTENDED DEADLINE
DEADLINE NOW EXTENDED TO APRIL 26th
The Centre for Cultural Studies Research at the University of East London
invites proposals for Radical Space, a conference to take place at the UEL
Docklands Campus on Friday and Saturday, 18th and 19th October, 2013. We are
pleased to announce that Deborah Dixon and Carl Lavery of Aberystwyth
University have now been confirmed as keynote speakers. They will be joined
by Dimitris Papodopoulos (University of Leicester) and the independent artist
Joanna Rajkowska.
We are interested in presentations which address the problematics of space
both as concept and as lived social reality, with a particular emphasis on
the tension between spaces of control in the context of contemporary
neoliberalism, spaces of resistance and the apocalyptic spaces which emerge
from war, forced migration and the failures of consumer capitalism.
What are the politics of space in contemporary contexts? How can we re-think
space beyond the public/private divide? How do spatial arts re-configure
space and the way in which it is experienced? What new configurations of
space may emerge from burgeoning forms of community? How do the theatres of
contemporary war force a re-assessment of spatial concepts? Is it still
possible for the notion of virtual space to function in opposition to the
striated space of contemporary cities?
We would welcome proposals which take a novel approach to presentation,
particularly those which include elements of performance or which make
creative use of the spaces made available for the conference. Topics may
include (but are not limited to):
Occupations and other resistant practices
Squatter communities and displacement camps
New theatres of war
Art in/of the street
Imagining extra-terrestrial space
Utopias and heterotopias
New imaginative architectures
Psychogeography in the 21st century
The space of the body and the body in space
Digital architectures and virtual space
Social networking as a new public sphere
Hacking, hacktivism and other digital spatial incursions
Cinema and post-urbanism
Cartography and performance
Class and social space
Music scenes and spaces of community/expression
The apocalyptic city
For further details, please refer to our website
Abstracts of no more than
300 words should be submitted to either Debra Benita Shaw (d.shaw@uel.ac.uk)
or Tony Sampson (sampson2@uel.ac.uk) on or before 26th April, 2013.
VIRALITY 