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In: Theory, culture & society: explorations in critical social science, Volume 23, Issue 2-3, p. 570-571
ISSN: 1460-3616
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In: Theory, culture & society: explorations in critical social science, Volume 23, Issue 2-3, p. 570-571
ISSN: 1460-3616
In: Theory, culture & society: explorations in critical social science, Volume 23, Issue 2-3, p. 346-346
ISSN: 1460-3616
In: Cultural politics: an international journal ; exploring cultural and political power across the globe, Volume 1, Issue 2, p. 243-246
ISSN: 1751-7435
Science, Art, Democracy -- A Laboratory of Form and Movement: Institutionalizing Emancipatory Technicity at MIT -- The Hands-on Approach: Engineering Collaboration at E.A.T. -- Feedback: Expertise, LACMA and the Think-Tank -- How to Make the World Work -- Heritage of Our Times.
In: Technicities
List of figures -- Series editors' preface -- Acknowledgements -- Notes on contributors. Introduction: the long Cold War / John Beck and Ryan Bishop. 1 Pattern recognition : The future : RAND, brand and dangerous to know / John Beck -- Simulate, optimise, partition: algorithmic diagrams of pattern recognition from 1953 onwards / Adrian Mackenzie -- Impulsive synchronisation: a conversation on military technologies and audiovisual arts / Aura Satz and Jussi Parikka. 2 The persistence of the nuclear : The meaning of Monte Bello / James Purdon -- Deep geological disposal and radioactive time: Beckett, Bowen, Nirex and Onkalo / Adam Piette -- Shifting the nuclear imaginary: art and the flight from nuclear modernity / Ele Carpenter -- Alchemical transformations? Fictions of the nuclear state after 1989 / Daniel Grausam. 3 Ubiquitous surveillance : "The very form of perverse artificial societies:" the unstable emergence of the network family from its Cold War nuclear bunker / Ken Hollings -- The signal-haunted Cold War: persistence of the SIGINT ontology / Jussi Parikka -- "Bulk surveillance," or the elegant technicities of metadata / Mark Coté. 4 Pervasive mediations : Notes from the underground: microwaves, backbones, party lines and the Post Office Tower / John W.P. Phillips -- Insect technics: war vision machines / Fabienne Collingnon -- Overt research / Neal White and John Beck -- Smart dust and remote sensing: the political subject in autonomous systems / Ryan Bishop. Index
In: Cultural politics: an international journal ; exploring cultural and political power across the globe, Volume 20, Issue 1, p. 136-154
ISSN: 1751-7435
Abstract
This visual essay explores the Catalan exhibition Following the Fish/Toppi jën wi at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2023). The exhibition concentrates on the various geopolitical, economic, and historical forces that have driven many sub-Saharan migrants to flee their homes for the EU, placing them in complexly perilous sites of socio-legal-economic and cultural conditions, ones fraught with danger but also operating in hope with many lessons for EU cities and their civic, public spheres. The exhibition is a collaboration between the Barcelona architectural collective Leve and the organization Top Manta, a Barcelona collective and fashion design manufacturer that creates communal and legal opportunities for migrants who sell their wares on blankets in public squares.
In: Cultural politics: an international journal ; exploring cultural and political power across the globe, Volume 19, Issue 3, p. 297-317
ISSN: 1751-7435
Abstract
The role of transindividuation is one of many key elements in Stiegler's thought. It concerns how expectations of a future (protentions) are generated and how collective protentions coalesce in a horizon. Transindividuation, as an individual and collective process of becoming, provides the means by which the local begins to enter into the mix of the global rendered as planet and biosphere. Therein resides a number of processes accelerating and perpetuating the various crises bundled together under the rubric of the Anthropocene: a rubric teeming with metonymic shorthands for the various crises facing humanity and its existence on the earth in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. In this article, the authors ask what becomes of the urban in light of the acceleration of extant technologies for visualization and calculation—the very organization of locality, its scales and volumes? In raising this question, we argue that spaciousness becomes not only an ontological concern but also an epistemological and biotechnological one straddling material and noetic localities.
In: Theory, culture & society: explorations in critical social science, Volume 38, Issue 4, p. 111-133
ISSN: 1460-3616
This interview with Bernard Stiegler's long-time translator and collaborator, Daniel Ross, examines the connections between different periods of Stiegler's work, thought, writing and activism. Moving from the three volumes of Technics and Time to the final large-scale collaborative project of The Internation, the discussion concentrates on Stiegler's conceptualization of 'protentionality', hope and care for a world confronted by climate crises, entropy and computational economic reconfigurations of work, economy and imaginations for futural possibilities. The interview foreshadows the special issue on The Internation project planned by Bishop and Stiegler for TCS that will appear in the near future.
Technocrats of the Imagination traces the rise of collaborative art and technology labs in the U.S. from WWII to the present. Ryan Bishop and John Beck reveal the intertwined histories of the avant-garde art movement and the military-industrial complex, showing how radical pedagogical practices traveled from Germany's Bauhaus movement to the U.S. art world and interacted with government-funded military research and development in university laboratories. During the 1960s both media labs and studio labs leaned heavily on methods of interdisciplinary collaboration and the power of American modernity to model new modes of social organization. In light of revived interest in Black Mountain College and other 1960s art and technology labs, this book draws important connections between the contemporary art world and the militarized lab model of research that has dominated the sciences since the 1950s.
BASE
In: Cultural politics: an international journal ; exploring cultural and political power across the globe, Volume 14, Issue 2, p. 225-243
ISSN: 1751-7435
In North America, there are over one hundred programs and labs committed to collaborative experimentation in art and technology. This article examines the current prominence of art and technology labs in the context of the resurgence of collaborative practice in the arts, not only between artists, but also among a wide range of cross-disciplinary groupings of designers, scientists, engineers, scholars, and others. The push for collaboration in the arts is part of a recalibration of the meaning of "research" as it is understood by arts practitioners, and among the legacies of institutional critique has been the expanded engagement of artists in contexts that move beyond galleries and museums and into, among other places, universities, businesses, science and tech labs, and research facilities. At the same time, the massive growth of the tech sector has given rise to a new generation of speculative research enterprise, from Google to SpaceX, which shares, to some degree, the expansive research and development horizons of advanced art. Some of the most prominent current art and tech projects explicitly draw on the legacy of precursor programs from the 1960s to establish a lineage and to confer art historical legitimacy on the new versions. This article examines two art and tech projects, at MIT and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and their strategic deployment of their 1960s antecedents: György Kepes's Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) and Maurice Tuchman's Art & Technology program (A&T), respectively. This examination argues that the loss of a radical vision that preceded the 1960s labs rendered them untenable and explores how the art and technology labs furthered a larger shift from progressive liberalism to neoliberalism. While these earlier projects were short-lived and the targets of considerable criticism, not least because of their connections with military and corporate clients, in the twenty-first century the legacies of CAVS and A&T have been unproblematically reclaimed. Contemporary art and tech projects, we argue, are in danger of succumbing to the same techno-utopianism as their 1960s iterations, and the same military-industrial allegiances that tainted the earlier projects continue to underpin twenty-first-century collaborations.
In: Theory, culture & society: explorations in critical social science, Volume 30, Issue 7-8, p. 199-219
ISSN: 1460-3616
Using a number of his recent site-specific installations, conceptual artist and theorist Victor Burgin discusses the status and future of the camera from photography to moving image to computer-generated virtual works that combine both still and moving images. In the process he modifies Bazin's question 'What is cinema?' to ask 'What is a camera?' These works extend and develop Burgin's long-standing interest in the relationship of aesthetics and politics as rendered through visualization technologies, especially as it pertains to space. Burgin's discussion constructs a genealogy of seeing, visualizing and image-making as technologically-determined and crafted. The ideology of vision and the ideological artefacts produced by and through visual technologies from perspectival painting to analog photography to computer imaging constitute, in Burgin's argument, 'the ideological chora of our spectacular global village'.
In: Theory, culture & society: explorations in critical social science, Volume 26, Issue 7-8, p. 263-277
ISSN: 1460-3616
This article introduces the themes and theoretical concerns of a special section that explores the various ways the specificities of the Mumbai attacks serve as a metonym for issues found in other urban sites within the conditions, concerns and vulnerabilities of globalization-as-urbanization and does so through the rubric of the city-as-target. As urbanization grows exponentially in unforecastable ways, the likelihood of violent urban targeting of many different kinds — state-sponsored, paramilitary, sectarian, economic, racial, tribal, etc., to name but a few — grows as well. Mumbai is a specific event, but it is also the common-place, the cityscape that is our daily lives and quotidian existence rendered unusual in all the expected ways. With Mumbai, the article argues, one does not necessarily see the future of the urban, but rather a reminder of what the urban has always been, even from the great walled cities of antiquity: a target. There is an imperative, then, to rethink urban space at all levels. The pieces in this section consider immaterial and material aspects of the city: its plan, infrastructure (economic and military bases), buildings and dwellings, polity and policy, protection and penetration. The technologies and technicities involved in the attacks, as well as the specific historicity, reveal a great deal about the Mumbai events, as well as revealing potential modes of engagement with cities in the present and future.
In: Cultural politics: an international journal ; exploring cultural and political power across the globe, Volume 4, Issue 3, p. 269-288
ISSN: 1751-7435
In an attempt to rethink the boundaries that conventionally determine the Cold War period and its fiction, we examine theoretical, historical, and aesthetic spheres that both precede and exceed the Cold War years. We focus on works by H.G. Wells and Richard Powers in connection with modes of investigating thought, action, and sensation that were integral to Cold War strategy and technology. We argue that duration and the historical closures of the period inevitably fail to capture intrinsic factors of the Cold War that are consistently manifested in discourses as wide-ranging as those of military technology, aesthetics, philosophy, science, and psychology. These discourses tell the same story from different angles. The horizon has either already disappeared into the absolute distance or a spectral remnant of it remains as the target for an action that would reduce it and bring it back entirely into its range.
In: Culture and organization: the official journal of SCOS, Volume 10, Issue 1, p. 61-75
ISSN: 1477-2760
In: Body & society, Volume 9, Issue 4, p. 69-88
ISSN: 1460-3632
This article considers the capacity of the military body to appropriate various modes of power, personnel and material, in terms of the tache. In particular we examine the (post)colonial military body, especially in Southeast Asia, and its intimate relations to the detachment of the colonial state from the colonial body and attachment to the global regimes of Cold War and neo-liberal post Cold War processes. We do so through a wide range of 'texts'– including a Conrad novella, a Singaporean documentary series, transformers (toys), and international money laundering – in which the defining logic that the (post)colonial military body deploys is its capacity to attach and detach at will. A series of related and homologous attachments and detachments proceed from this capacity: the power of sovereignty, the generation and circulation of capital, and the transformation of the colonial military body into the postcolonial military body. However, it is also the logic of this empowering connectivity that imposes intractable limits on the desire for ultimate control, as the tache always indicates something beyond the corpus, something outside the locus of control.