If you’re in London in October you may be interested in this event at Goldsmiths to mark the release of Evil Media, Virality and the next issue of Computational Culture. It’s the first of a number of events related to Virality I’ll be posting about.

Computational Culture, Issue Two

Virality, Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks, by Tony D. Sampson

Evil Media, by Matthew Fuller & Andrew Goffey

22nd October

6pm

Room RHB 342

New Cross

Free, all welcome

To celebrate these publications, informal presentations will be made by the authors of Virality and Evil Media and contributors to Computational Culture.

‘Computational Culture’  is an online open-access peer-reviewed journal of inter-disciplinary enquiry into the nature of cultural computational objects, practices, processes and structures.  The new issue presents articles by Carlos Barreneche, Jennifer Gabrys, Robert W. Gehl & Sarah Bell, Shintaro Miyazaki, Bernhard Rieder, Bernard Stiegler, Annette Vee and reviews by Chiara Bernardi, KevinHamilton, Boris Ružiæ, Felix Stalder and an anonymous contributor.

In ‘Virality’ Tony D. Sampson presents a contagion theory fit for the age of networks. Unlike memes and microbial contagions, Virality does not restrict itself to biological analogies and medical metaphors. It instead points toward a theory of contagious assemblages, events, and affects. For Sampson, contagion is not necessarily a positive or negative force of encounter; it is how society comes together and relates.

[University of Minnesota Press]

‘Evil Media’ invites the reader to explore and understand the abstract infrastructure of the present day. From search engines to flirting strategies, from the value of institutional stupidity to the malicious minutiae of databases, this book shows how the devil is in the details.  The title takes the imperative “Don’t be evil” and asks, what would be done any differently in contemporary computational and networked media were that maxim reversed.

[The MIT Press]

In ‘Sensing an Experimental Forest’, her article for ‘Computational Culture’ 2, Jennifer Gabrys discusses fieldwork conducted at an environmental sensor test site, the James Reserve in California.  The use of wireless sensor networks to study environmental phenomena is an increasingly prevalent practice, and ecological applications of sensors have been central to the development of wireless sensor networks that now extend to numerous ‘participatory’ applications.

Virality

http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/virality

Evil Media

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12995

Computational Culture

http://www.computationalculture.net/