UEL have suggested we can make these two in-person events open to the public. The 2nd is our leaving seminar, so yes, please do please do come along if you’re near the Docklands campus in east London on 15th Dec.

Link to regsiter as a guest for 15th Dec below.

Both seminars are in the East Building: EB.1.07 (Docklands Campus, toward Beckton at DLR Cyprus Station)

1. Thinking Decolonialisation/Decolonialising Thinking

Thurs December 1st at 4pm.

“… aims to provide a safe space for academics and postgraduate researchers to think through decolonialisation and consider possible ways to decolonise our research and teaching.” Co-organised by Charmaine Dambuza and Tony Sampson.

2. Emotion, Feeling, Affect

Thurs 15th Dec at 4pm

A one-off seminar including Darren Ellis and Tony Sampson with special guests (tbc), The event will be followed by drinks at a yet to be confirmed venue.

Join here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/emotion-feeling-affect-tickets-456912907807

OPEN ACCESS

BREAKING! OUT NOW! NEW Rizosfera RELEASE ! Click here to read the book published on the independent platform Monoskop https://bit.ly/3O7Bmdi ::

TONY D SAMPSON :: EXPERIENCE CAPITALISM. SELECTED TEXTS. TRANSLATED IN SPANISH BY ANA FABBRI :: RIZOSFERA SERIES OF BOOKS RHIZONOMICS 006 :: FREE DOWNLOAD // OPEN ACCESS ::

We are proud to announce the publication of Tony D Sampson’s Experience Capitalism e.book / pdf translated in Spanish by Ana Teresa Fabbri. Tony D Sampson is a British academic author who writes about philosophies of media technology, design thinking, social and immersive user experiences and neurocultures. He has published extensively on digital media cultures, social contagion theory, neurocultures, affect philosophy, assemblage theory and social media. He is best known for his widely cited and debated academic publications on virality, network contagion and neuroculture. Ana Teresa Fabbri is an Argentinian researcher in Sociobiology, Sociocybernetics and Social Theory at University of Buenos Aires :: Ana T. Fabbri Socióloga (Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de Buenos Aires). Lacaniana -no sin Guy Le Gaufey- “per via di levare”. Trabaja en el Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos (Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires). Vive en Vicente López, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

New eBook “Experience Capitalism” due soon in Spanish and English

Very pleased to announce imminent publication of new Rizosfera eBook in both Spanish and English. I hope these texts will provide a glimpse into a continuing project I have tried to encapsulate under the heading of Experience Capitalism. This term stresses the importance of a political inclination toward the management and intensification of the so-called user experience. The outcome of this tendency is twofold: (a) it draws attention to a neurological-somatic shift from the management of efficient cognition (perception, attention, memory etc.), toward previously marginalized affects, feelings and emotions, and (b), necessitates a critical theory and philosophy of experience, alert to such trends in digital labour.

The first text is taken from The Assemblage Brain: Sense Making in Neuroculture (Minnesota UP, 2016). It sets out a theoretical frame intended to trace the trajectory of Experience Capitalism from ergonomics and cognitive science toward the intensification of the collective dynamic of user experience. The second text, taken from A Sleepwalker’s Guide to Social Media (Polity, 2020), extends this critical frame by sketching out a Whiteheadian philosophy of experience. In addition to these two chapters, there is an interview with Jernej Markelj, currently based at the University of Amsterdam. This text was first published in The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory (2020) and provides a rangy discussion on contagion theory, interestingly captured in the context of the first COVID-19 lockdown. There is also a dialogue with N Katherine Hayles, initially published in Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry (2018). This conversation locates the Assemblage Brain thesis in a converging and diverging spiral of relation to Hayles’s Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Unconscious (University of Chicago, 2017). We have also included some somnambulist illustrative diagrams by the artist Mikey Georgeson, extracted from A Sleepwalker’s Guide. More to follow: https://viralcontagion.blog/books/

Review of Robert J. Shiller’s Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events

I have a review of Shiller’s book published in American Literary History. Read it here.

Shiller_Review Download

Activist Neuroaesthetics in Cognitive Capitalism SFSIA 2021 online. Free public lectures

Here is the list of public lectures for SFSIA 2021. Free registration link: https://activistneuroaesthetics.art/conference/

A central feature of SFSIA is a Public Lecture Series, which is free and open to the public to invite conversation, debate, and inquiry across communities. This year, an ACTIVIST NEUROAESTHETICS Conference will be held online over four days as part of Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art.

All times Central European Time (CET/Berlin).
via Zoom, free with registration at: https://activistneuroaesthetics.art/conference/

THURSDAY, JULY 8
5pm Introduction
5:30pm Panel discussion with Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Cécile Malaspina, Warren Neidich, and Charles T. Wolfe
7:30pm Warren Neidich

FRIDAY, JULY 9
1pm Yann Moulier Boutang
2:30pm Yves Citton
5pm Tony David Sampson
6:30pm Reza Negarestani

SATURDAY, JULY 1010am Anna Munster
11:30am Jacquelene Drinkall
1pm Kundalini Yoga with Nathalie Anglès

5pm Florencia Portocarrero and Karen Lofgren
6:30pm Anuradha Vikram

SUNDAY, JULY 11
1pm Elena Agudio
2:30pm Agnieszka Kurant
5pm Juli Carson
6:30pm Arne De Boever

Fiction Machines: Part III (online)

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:

BOOK TICKETS HERE

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

Fiction Probes in Art, Philosophy and Science – Tony D Sampson

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.

Contributors include

Ami Clarke who 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. Tony D. Sampson will present a talk on his recent research into neuroaesthetics. 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.

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. Richard Carter will showcase two new projects Orbital Reveries and Landform, which centre on the processing of satellite and drone imagery into multi-dimensional ‘textscapes’. Anna Engelhardt 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. 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.

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. Andy Weir 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. Charlie Tweed presents an excerpt from a new sound project which uses fictional writing to respond to images generated by AI applications.

Link to Event