Tag: Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey

Friction Conference call for papers

This looks like a wonderful call… See below

In the meantime here’s a nice primer on friction from MIT. A beautiful example of evil media perhaps…

A World Without Friction

Friction: An interdisciplinary conference on technology & resistance

University of Nottingham
Thursday 8th May & Friday 9th May, 2014

Keynote talk by Pollyanna Ruiz (LSE)

With workshops led by: Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey; University of Leicester Technology Group; Jen Birks and John Downey; and Rachel Jacobs (Active Ingredient).

Current workshop themes include: evil media; data, digital leaks and political activism; hacklabs and artistic uses of data.

More TBC

Workshop and talk abstracts, and information about speakers will be appearing on our blog in the forthcoming weeks: http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/criticalmoment/

Friction:
noun
[mass noun]
The resistance that one surface or object encounters when moving over another:
· the action of one surface or object rubbing against another
· conflict or animosity caused by a clash of wills, temperaments, or opinions

Oxford English Dictionary, 2013

We are now living in a frictionless economy in which money, jobs and products can move around the world in the blink of an eye. And yet we have not moved to a frictionless society. Rather, many of the technologies that support the frictionless economy create various forms of friction in society. Taking a lead from the University of Nottingham’s Centre for Critical Theory’s Technology and Resistance research strand, we are interested in proposals for papers and workshops that explore the concept/metaphor of ‘friction’ as a starting point for exploring the relationship between everyday technologies and resistance; with resistance understood in both a politically empowering and an inhibitory sense. On the one hand, we’re interested in modes of organised resistance: of activist movements making use of, or reacting against, technological developments. However we’re concerned with resistance in a second sense: of technologies resisting their intended function, breaking down, being exploited by hackers or triggering unexpected socio-economic complications.

We invite people to use the concept of ‘friction’ as a route into exploring these themes, with potential topics for discussion including (but not limited to):

· Data and ethics
· Cultural shifts relating to the capture of data
· The vulnerability of software to hacking and surveillance
· Resistance to surveillance and data harvesting
· Activist uses of data, particularly the circulation of leaked material
· The politics of hacking
· The exploitation of ambiguity in software design by hackers
· Activist and everyday contestations of technological developments
· The sociological and cultural factors required for technologies to ‘work’
· Everyday and/or activist reappropriations of technology
· Tensions between new technologies and existing infrastructures

We are an interdisciplinary group of researchers, including academics from Geography, Business, Critical Theory, Cultural Studies and Media & Communications: so we welcome a diverse range of perspectives and approaches to this theme.

We encourage interactive presentation formats, and will allocate longer time-slots to workshops to accommodate these, but also have space for shorter 20 minute position papers.

Extended deadline for proposals: 1st March 2014

If you are interested in participating please submit a 250 word proposal for a workshop or paper, along with your name and current email address, to centreforcriticaltheory@gmail.com

Please also feel free to contact us with more general enquiries, follow the Centre for Critical Theory’s Twitter account @criticaltheory

Evil Media

Developing on their excellent 2009 chapter in The Spam Book, Fuller and Goffey’s new book on evil media is published by MIT.

Recommended! Blurb below.

In the meantime, details of an event at Goldsmiths on the 22nd Oct to mark the release of both Evil Media and Virality coming soon.

Evil Media

Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey

Evil Media develops a philosophy of media power that extends the concept of media beyond its tried and trusted use in the games of meaning, symbolism, and truth. It addresses the gray zones in which media exist as corporate work systems, algorithms and data structures, twenty-first century self-improvement manuals, and pharmaceutical techniques. 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.

Media here are about much more and much less than symbols, stories, information, or communication: media do things. They incite and provoke, twist and bend, leak and manage. In a series of provocative stratagems designed to be used, Evil Media sets its reader an ethical challenge: either remain a transparent intermediary in the networks and chains of communicative power or become oneself an active, transformative medium.

See MIT page:

About the Authors

Matthew Fuller is David Gee Reader in Digital Media at the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software and Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (MIT Press, 2005) and editor of Software Studies: A Lexicon (MIT Press, 2008).

Andrew Goffey is a Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture, and Communication at Middlesex University, London. He is the coeditor, with Éric Alliez, of The Guattari Effect and the translator of Isabelle Stengers and Philippe Pignarre’s Capitalist Sorcery, of Félix Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies, and of work by Maurizio Lazzarato, Barbara Cassin, and Etienne Balibar. He is also coeditor of the journal Computational Culture.