Tag: events

Affects, Interfaces, Events Programme

After all the excitement of the wonderful Capacious Conference in Lancaster PA earlier this month I’m now preparing to head off for AIE in Aarhus next week. Here’s the blurb…

“The proliferation of digital and interactive technologies in most aspects of our daily lives produces an intensified distribution of affect. Existential conditions change through affective interface foldings of bodies, subjectivities and technologies. The conference Affects, Interfaces, Events investigates how affective interface events – on a micro- and macro-level – reinforce or challenge these changes. A major concern of the conference is to consider interface modulations on an affective, social, aesthetic, and political level.”

The preliminary programme looks amazing. Here’s a link to the PDF.

Preliminary Programme version 1

Call for Abstracts: “Neuroaffect” at Capacious: Affect Inquiry/Making Space Conference: August 8 to 11, 2018

Thanks to those of you who have already sent in proposals for this call.

Interim reminder – The final deadline for submissions is Thursday, March 15, 2018.

Call for 250-word paper abstracts for Stream 15: Neuroaffect

phrenology

For Capacious: Affect Inquiry/Making Space Conference: August 8 to 11, 2018 at Millersville University’s Ware Center, Lancaster, Pennsylvania: http://capaciousjournal.com/conference/

S15: “Neuroaffect”

Call for 250-word paper abstracts can now be submitted to

capacious@millersville.edu

The final deadline for submissions is Thursday, March 15, 2018.

STREAM ORGANIZER
Tony D. Sampson

For the most part affect theory has enthusiastically welcomed the neurosciences into its fold. Through the work of Libet (1985), Damasio (1995), and LeDoux (2003), for example, affect theorists have challenged mainstream anthropocentricism in the humanities, upsetting the stability of a model of human cognition previously assumed to hold sway over the perceptible world. As follows, the brain sciences have helped to support an alternative perspective in which humans arrive late to consciousness since their brains take time to build a cognitive reaction. Immediate experience of consciousness is, as such, a backdated illusion and just one of many responses to the dynamics of the exteriority of experience. As Gibbs (2010) argues, there can be no “pure cognition… uncontaminated by the richness of sensate experience, including affective experience” (p. 200). Indeed, according to affect theory, thinking is not at all limited to the thought inside the brain. On one hand, somatic markers act as a kind of corporeal thinking in which emotion becomes a capture of affect in consciousness. On the other, a new materialist affect theory extends the image of thought to a wider remit of incorporeal sense making including nonhumans, self-organizing matter, assemblages and events. The analytical focus has thus shifted away from conventional cognitive processes (perception, memory, representation) to the significance of such things as imperceptibility (Grosz, 2003), precognition and nonrepresentation (Thrift, 2007), premediation (Grusin, 2010), processual incorporeality (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010) and discognition (Shaviro, 2015).

There has, nevertheless, been an inevitable backlash against affect theory’s cosying up to the brain sciences. Wetherall (2012), for example, argues that Thrift and Massumi take the wrong message from neuroscience (p. 61). Her work does not simply reject neuroscience, but instead uses it to (re)personalize affect and renegotiate it alongside discourse, representation and meaning. Similarly, Hayles (2017) has recently drawn on the same neuroscientific resources as affect theory (e.g. Damasio, Libet), but argues against the Spinoza-Deleuzian overtures of new materialism and returns the brain (and its fellow cognizers) to the cognitive theoretical frame.

The neuroaffect stream welcomes provocative, inventive and speculative interventions that engage with the wide-ranging influence of the neurosciences on affect theory and related areas. It asks for submissions that engage with neuro-concepts of affect, such as the nonconscious, somatic markers, lags, mirror neurons, neuro-typicality, assemblage brains, technological nonconscious and discognition, while also addressing the numerous challenges and reinventions of affect stemming from various interventions in the humanities and social sciences.

Possible topics for the stream are not limited to the following neuros:

Neuroaffect, somatic markers, lags, mirror neurons, neuro-typicality, cognition, noncognition, discognition, consciousness, nonconsciousness, technological nonconscious, brains, microbrains, assemblage brains, temporality and space, locationism, neuroevents, neuropolitics, neuropopulism, neuro-dystopia/utopia, neurocapitalism, neuromedia, ontology, nonhumans, Anthropocene, contagion, organic and inorganic matter, assemblages, antilocationism, neurophilosophy, neurophenomenology, neuroprocess philosophy, neurocomputing, neural nets, brain-computer interfaces, neurofiction, brain-art, neuroaesthetics, neurobleedin’ everything…

 

REFERENCES

Damasio, A. (1995). Descartes’ error: emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York: Penguin.

Damasio, A. (2000). The feeling of what happens: body, emotion, and the making of consciousness. London: Vintage.

Gibbs, A. (2010). After affect sympathy, Synchrony, and mimetic communication. In Gregg, M. & Seigworth, G. J. (Eds.), The affective theory reader (pp. 186-205). Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Gregg, M. & Seigworth, G. J. (2010). The affective theory reader. Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Grosz, E. (2002). A politics of imperceptibility: A response to ‘anti-racism, multiculturalism and the ethics of identification’ Philosophy and Social Criticism. 28 (4) pp. 463-472.

Grusin, R. (2010). Premediation: affect and mediality after 9/11. New York, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hayles, K. N. (2006). Traumas in code. Critical Inquiry 33(1), 136-157.

Hayles, K. N. (2017). Unthought: the power of the cognitive nonconscious. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Karppi, T. Kahkonen, L. & Mannevuo, M. (Eds.) (2016). Affective capitalism. Ephemera (16)4 Ephemera.

LeDoux, J. (2003). The synaptic self: how our brains become who we are. New York: Penguin Books.

Libet, B. (1985). Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action. Behavioral Brain Sciences. (8)5, 29–566.

Rolls, E. T. (2012). Neuroculture: on the implications of brain science. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Shaviro, S. (2015). Discognition. New York: Repeater Books.

Sampson, T. D. (2016). The Assemblage brain: sense making in neuroculture. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

Thrift, N. (2004). Remembering the technological unconscious by foregrounding knowledges of position. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 22(1), 175-190.

Thrift, N. (2007). Non-Representational theory: space, politics, affect. New York, London: Routledge.

Wetheral, M. (2012). Affect and emotion: a new social science understanding. London: Sage.

Confirmed Viral Events for 2012/13

  • There are a number of confirmed events related to Virality that might be of interest to readers of this blog.

    Following the academic launch of Virality at Goldsmiths College in October and the launch party with Mute Magazine in Limehouse last Friday (more on that collaboration soon in another post), I will be joining Jussi Parikka at the School of Arts and Humanities (Culture, Media and Creative Industries) Kings College, London on the 20th March (this new date is penciled in replacing the Feb 6th) for our “Anomalies, Archaeology and Contagion” talk and discussion followed by a wine reception for both Virality and Jussi’s What is Media Archaeology?

    There’s an interesting event at the University of East London (School of Arts and Digital Industries) in Feb where I’m planning to do a piece on “Viral Love and the Underground Man.” The “Love Slam” event is on the 14th Feb 6-9pm.

    As part of an ongoing series of collaborations with artists and musicians I’ve been working with the “crowd” artist Dean Todd on a performance piece for Virality which will be exhibited at the “Bookworks” show between April 8-19th, also at the University of East London.

    On April 11th 2013 I will visit the Copenhagen Business School to do a talk called “Putting the Neuron Doctrine to Work.” This is for an invite to a public lecture series called “Public Sphere, Crowd Sentiments and the Brain.”

    I have a provisional working title for a confirmed invite to the Department of Sociology and Communications at Brunel University on May 24th. “Too Much Connectivity” will form part of the “New Media and the Internet: Digital Democracy or Complex Chaos?” series of workshops.

    Between July 1-3rd we (Darren Ellis, John Cromby, Lewis Goodings, Tony Sampson, and Ian Tuckerare) are off to the Fourth International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Emotional Geographies at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands to run a couple of seminars called “Leaking Affects and Mediated Spaces.”

    Finally, there are a few other events in the pipeline including a contribution to an exhibit at the Berlin Transmediale Festival in Jan-Feb 2013, and a series of workshops at the University of Bern in Switzerland on the subject of the Immunologic. More details to follow.