Andrew Murphie
Andrew Murphie is the editor of the open access, online journal, the Fibreculture Journal (http://fibreculturejournal.org/). He is also Editor for the Fibreculture Book Series with Open Humanities Press (http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/fibreculture-books/) and an Editor for the Immediations Book Series with Open Humanities Press (http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/immediations/). He (very occasionally) blogs at http://www.andrewmurphie.org/blog/.
His research examines the productive nature of differential intensity. He works on transformation, crisis and possibility—as these are filtered through generative process in media, arts and philosophy, dynamic modeling of all types, and new forms of cooperation in politics/social organization. He is currently writing a book—Differential Media, Differential Life: the past and future of social organization that rethinks the ‘world as medium’. This diagrams the relations between: media; thinking, feeling and perceiving; Bateson/Guattari’s ‘three ecologies’ of the social, self and environment. Another book project is On not performing: technology and intensity. This considers alternatives to measure/the push to performance in the development of approaches to social organisation.
Andrew’s work draws on the history of media and communications, and the mutual relation between this and shifting models of human thinking. He also draws on electronic arts and design (eg cross signal processing), performance in all its senses, poststructuralism (Deleuze, Guattari), process philosophy (Whitehead), ‘speculative pragmatics’ (Massumi/Manning), performance studies, and extended and dynamicist theories of mind. He has an interest in the contemporary transformation of publishing (academic publishing to books, music, journalism), both new practices and theory, and the way that these come into related events in education and knowledge mobilization and exchange (technics, methods, and new network, information and attentional literacies).
He is the co-author of Culture and Technology, with John Potts. Recent publications include: 'Performance as the Distribution of Life: from Aeschylus to Chekhov to VJing via Deleuze and Guattari', ‘Deleuze, Guattari and Neuroscience’, 'On Not Performing: the Third Enclosure and Neofeudal Fantasies' and, with Lone Bertelsen, 'An Ethics of Everyday Infinities and Powers: Félix Guattari on Affect and the Refrain'.
He also works with the ‘technologies of lived abstraction’ project at Senselab in Montréal (http://senselab.ca/), is affiliated with the National Institute for Experimental Arts at COFA in Sydney (http://www.niea.unsw.edu.au/), and was recently a visiting researcher at the Centre for Digital Urban Living at Aarhus University in Denmark (http://www.digitalurbanliving.dk/). From 2007-2011 he was a Chief Investigator (with Dr Anna Munster) on an Australian Research Council Discovery Project: Dynamic Media: innovative social and artistic developments in new media in Australia, Britain, Canada and Scandinavia since 1990 (http://dynamicmedianetwork.org/). He was co-organizer of the e-Performance and Plug-Ins: A Mediatised Performance Conference in 2005, 'dATA dYNAMICS': an invited workshop on dynamic media and database projects in 2010, both in Sydney. In December, 2011, with Anna Munster, he organized the Into the Diagram workshop (http://diagramworkshop.wordpress.com/), an international workshop held simultaneously in Aarhus, Sydney, Montreal and elsewhere.
He is on the Editorial Board of Open Humanities Press (http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/), Performance Paradigm (http://www.performanceparadigm.net/), and Dancecult (http://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/journal/about/displayMembership/3).
In the distant past, he’s worked as a marketing manager and production manager for arts companies, and as a freelance theatre director (which has included work on productions of Samuel Beckett's shorter plays and Heiner Muller's Hamlet-Machine).
His research examines the productive nature of differential intensity. He works on transformation, crisis and possibility—as these are filtered through generative process in media, arts and philosophy, dynamic modeling of all types, and new forms of cooperation in politics/social organization. He is currently writing a book—Differential Media, Differential Life: the past and future of social organization that rethinks the ‘world as medium’. This diagrams the relations between: media; thinking, feeling and perceiving; Bateson/Guattari’s ‘three ecologies’ of the social, self and environment. Another book project is On not performing: technology and intensity. This considers alternatives to measure/the push to performance in the development of approaches to social organisation.
Andrew’s work draws on the history of media and communications, and the mutual relation between this and shifting models of human thinking. He also draws on electronic arts and design (eg cross signal processing), performance in all its senses, poststructuralism (Deleuze, Guattari), process philosophy (Whitehead), ‘speculative pragmatics’ (Massumi/Manning), performance studies, and extended and dynamicist theories of mind. He has an interest in the contemporary transformation of publishing (academic publishing to books, music, journalism), both new practices and theory, and the way that these come into related events in education and knowledge mobilization and exchange (technics, methods, and new network, information and attentional literacies).
He is the co-author of Culture and Technology, with John Potts. Recent publications include: 'Performance as the Distribution of Life: from Aeschylus to Chekhov to VJing via Deleuze and Guattari', ‘Deleuze, Guattari and Neuroscience’, 'On Not Performing: the Third Enclosure and Neofeudal Fantasies' and, with Lone Bertelsen, 'An Ethics of Everyday Infinities and Powers: Félix Guattari on Affect and the Refrain'.
He also works with the ‘technologies of lived abstraction’ project at Senselab in Montréal (http://senselab.ca/), is affiliated with the National Institute for Experimental Arts at COFA in Sydney (http://www.niea.unsw.edu.au/), and was recently a visiting researcher at the Centre for Digital Urban Living at Aarhus University in Denmark (http://www.digitalurbanliving.dk/). From 2007-2011 he was a Chief Investigator (with Dr Anna Munster) on an Australian Research Council Discovery Project: Dynamic Media: innovative social and artistic developments in new media in Australia, Britain, Canada and Scandinavia since 1990 (http://dynamicmedianetwork.org/). He was co-organizer of the e-Performance and Plug-Ins: A Mediatised Performance Conference in 2005, 'dATA dYNAMICS': an invited workshop on dynamic media and database projects in 2010, both in Sydney. In December, 2011, with Anna Munster, he organized the Into the Diagram workshop (http://diagramworkshop.wordpress.com/), an international workshop held simultaneously in Aarhus, Sydney, Montreal and elsewhere.
He is on the Editorial Board of Open Humanities Press (http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/), Performance Paradigm (http://www.performanceparadigm.net/), and Dancecult (http://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/journal/about/displayMembership/3).
In the distant past, he’s worked as a marketing manager and production manager for arts companies, and as a freelance theatre director (which has included work on productions of Samuel Beckett's shorter plays and Heiner Muller's Hamlet-Machine).
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Long ago, Alfred North Whitehead wrote of this ‘world as medium’—for him, a medium for the ‘vector transmission’ of feeling. For Whitehead, “worlds” are worlds of feeling (feeling as worlding). Signal, the basis of media and communication, is feeling in movement, which is to say the world in movement, which is to say the world communicating itself in feeling as it creates itself. Things or events—both of which we can consider as what Whitehead terms “actual occasions”—do something special within the world as medium. They maintain their intensity. This paper will outline a theory of affect, signal, intensity and world, drawing largely from Whitehead and Deleuze. It will also provide a quick series of propositions concerning affect and politics that arise from thinking the world as medium. It draws attention not only to Whitehead's usefulness for thinking media and world but to Whitehead's own media philosophy (and in a couple of footnotes yet to be developed, to Whitehead's importance to media and communications theory and practice in the 20th century).
--
How did so much of contemporary technics become so disappointing, so deadening? How is technics being thought, and worked with, to enliven? What different assemblages and principles are involved? This chapter begins in sympathy with Michel Serres’ “aggrieved shame” and then moves to Wendy Hui Kyong Chun's discussion of an "undeadness" at the heart of technical culture. After summarising more positive pathways in interaction design and thinking, I argue that a series of Pavlovist variations on powerlessness still inhabits contemporary technics. This combines with a series of calculative assemblages to form a calculative-behavioural assemblage, both in technics generally, and in what have become "cognition" and computing in recent culture. These assemblages in fact have three aspects: actual, directly material assemblages of technologies and processes; abstract "agencements", for example, a generalised Pavlovism that infuses subsequent events; and diagrams, meant to intervene in both. I then suggest principles of escape towards other kinds of relations between technics and worlds. These relations affirm mutual care as well as mutual powers. They would be immanently attentive to the complexity and variability of the world as event.
Where power comes from—in anyone’s theory—remains a mystery (Stephen Muecke)
The strange has become commonplace. Unprecedented climate, technical and social changes form a generative array of potential catastrophes. They challenge many aspects of simply living a life. At the same time, it feels like we have the potential answers to so many things and we know how good life could be. Yet whatever happens, a lot of modes of living and formations of power are going to have to give way. It is perhaps no wonder then that so much of culture is now an intensifying struggle over the fabrication of new sovereignties and allegiances, commons and anarchies.
Much of this fabrication is apportioned via interfaces and more obvious interaction. Yet it is also backgrounded by a ‘programmability’ (Wendy Hui Kyong Chun) to which tangible interfaces only provide, for most, an increasingly limited and illusory access. Indeed, complex data formations and algorithmic processes and signaletic materials (Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen) interact increasingly with each other, not with “us”. The situation, it often seems almost tangentially, creates new regimes of ‘affectability’—of who or what is deemed to be affectable and who or what is not (Denise Ferreira Da Silva). These often enhance older as much as they create new inequities.
Throughout this, pseudo-theological vestiges of older gods persist in concepts of com- munication and interaction, and deep within technical diagrams and infrastructures. Yet everywhere there are new ways of speculative pragmatically moving towards a world without these exhausted gods. There are now very different possibilities for interaction de- sign’s participation in what Whitehead called the ‘world as medium for the vector transmission of influences’. Ironically, Whitehead’s own concept of god might prove useful here, alt- hough diagrammed in an entirely worldly way. It allows us to rethink ‘interaction’ as ’mutual immanence’ and media as ‘media alive’. The talk will briefly map some of the current fractures and fault lines of interaction design. It then outlines a recent constellation of ideas, practices and examples that take on mutual immanence and media alive in order to reconsider what participation in the world might be.
The question "what is a book?" arises (yet again) of course, if we are to think- feel our way through to what books can become. It's an important question because books are such a prominent aspect of the archival (in many ways they are archives par excellence). Yet books also provide ways out of archives. They are paradoxically (an)archival. Within and on the way out of the book, the archive turns against itself. It turns toward the anarchival. A short history of this paradox ...
3 1995:17). The attempt here will be neither to valorise this age, nor to condemn it. Rather, the article seeks out its characteristics and the modulation of the notion of modulation it performs; the way in which, as a concept, VR allows us to modulate our transformation of objects into objectiles, to shift the gears on the thresholds of perception, operation and expression more powerfully than ever before. An understanding of the role of differential forces within media and cultural events is developed.
In sum, if performance is not evaluated here in terms of the success or failure of its representation of life, this is because it is more important to evaluate performance’s role in directly adding to, or diminishing, life as lived.
Long ago, Alfred North Whitehead wrote of this ‘world as medium’—for him, a medium for the ‘vector transmission’ of feeling. For Whitehead, “worlds” are worlds of feeling (feeling as worlding). Signal, the basis of media and communication, is feeling in movement, which is to say the world in movement, which is to say the world communicating itself in feeling as it creates itself. Things or events—both of which we can consider as what Whitehead terms “actual occasions”—do something special within the world as medium. They maintain their intensity. This paper will outline a theory of affect, signal, intensity and world, drawing largely from Whitehead and Deleuze. It will also provide a quick series of propositions concerning affect and politics that arise from thinking the world as medium. It draws attention not only to Whitehead's usefulness for thinking media and world but to Whitehead's own media philosophy (and in a couple of footnotes yet to be developed, to Whitehead's importance to media and communications theory and practice in the 20th century).
--
How did so much of contemporary technics become so disappointing, so deadening? How is technics being thought, and worked with, to enliven? What different assemblages and principles are involved? This chapter begins in sympathy with Michel Serres’ “aggrieved shame” and then moves to Wendy Hui Kyong Chun's discussion of an "undeadness" at the heart of technical culture. After summarising more positive pathways in interaction design and thinking, I argue that a series of Pavlovist variations on powerlessness still inhabits contemporary technics. This combines with a series of calculative assemblages to form a calculative-behavioural assemblage, both in technics generally, and in what have become "cognition" and computing in recent culture. These assemblages in fact have three aspects: actual, directly material assemblages of technologies and processes; abstract "agencements", for example, a generalised Pavlovism that infuses subsequent events; and diagrams, meant to intervene in both. I then suggest principles of escape towards other kinds of relations between technics and worlds. These relations affirm mutual care as well as mutual powers. They would be immanently attentive to the complexity and variability of the world as event.
Where power comes from—in anyone’s theory—remains a mystery (Stephen Muecke)
The strange has become commonplace. Unprecedented climate, technical and social changes form a generative array of potential catastrophes. They challenge many aspects of simply living a life. At the same time, it feels like we have the potential answers to so many things and we know how good life could be. Yet whatever happens, a lot of modes of living and formations of power are going to have to give way. It is perhaps no wonder then that so much of culture is now an intensifying struggle over the fabrication of new sovereignties and allegiances, commons and anarchies.
Much of this fabrication is apportioned via interfaces and more obvious interaction. Yet it is also backgrounded by a ‘programmability’ (Wendy Hui Kyong Chun) to which tangible interfaces only provide, for most, an increasingly limited and illusory access. Indeed, complex data formations and algorithmic processes and signaletic materials (Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen) interact increasingly with each other, not with “us”. The situation, it often seems almost tangentially, creates new regimes of ‘affectability’—of who or what is deemed to be affectable and who or what is not (Denise Ferreira Da Silva). These often enhance older as much as they create new inequities.
Throughout this, pseudo-theological vestiges of older gods persist in concepts of com- munication and interaction, and deep within technical diagrams and infrastructures. Yet everywhere there are new ways of speculative pragmatically moving towards a world without these exhausted gods. There are now very different possibilities for interaction de- sign’s participation in what Whitehead called the ‘world as medium for the vector transmission of influences’. Ironically, Whitehead’s own concept of god might prove useful here, alt- hough diagrammed in an entirely worldly way. It allows us to rethink ‘interaction’ as ’mutual immanence’ and media as ‘media alive’. The talk will briefly map some of the current fractures and fault lines of interaction design. It then outlines a recent constellation of ideas, practices and examples that take on mutual immanence and media alive in order to reconsider what participation in the world might be.
The question "what is a book?" arises (yet again) of course, if we are to think- feel our way through to what books can become. It's an important question because books are such a prominent aspect of the archival (in many ways they are archives par excellence). Yet books also provide ways out of archives. They are paradoxically (an)archival. Within and on the way out of the book, the archive turns against itself. It turns toward the anarchival. A short history of this paradox ...
3 1995:17). The attempt here will be neither to valorise this age, nor to condemn it. Rather, the article seeks out its characteristics and the modulation of the notion of modulation it performs; the way in which, as a concept, VR allows us to modulate our transformation of objects into objectiles, to shift the gears on the thresholds of perception, operation and expression more powerfully than ever before. An understanding of the role of differential forces within media and cultural events is developed.
In sum, if performance is not evaluated here in terms of the success or failure of its representation of life, this is because it is more important to evaluate performance’s role in directly adding to, or diminishing, life as lived.
Deleuze and Guattari’s engagement with Jarry makes three things very clear. First, in the ongoing constitution of existential territory, we are always rebuilding as we demolish metaphysics and technics. Second, in the process we can neither submit ourselves to metaphysics and technics absolutely, nor impossibly step outside of them. Third, everything is constantly transformed in the process, including machinism itself. Machinism is never completed.
The principles of machinism shall first be described generally through the work of Guattari, beginning with his subtraction of the capital ‘B’ in Heidegger’s Being (Pelbart 1994: 178). The article then discusses Jarry’s relation to Deleuze’s machinic thinking, especially in Deleuze's little discussed essay on Jarry as a "little known precursor" to Heidegger. Returning briefly to Guattari, I conclude that machinism offers us a way of engaging fully – and more ethically – with the ecologies of a post-phenomenal world. An acceptance of the onto-logico-generative intensity of the machinic allows a more specific and dynamic engagement with the social, environmental and subjective consequences of the now more obviously machinic life that we lead.
Little remains stable. Even when elements of the old manage to persist they do not cease to be transformed. Disciplines, concepts and practices become transient. The basic terms of engagement change constantly from within engagement itself. This constant transformation—the very register of the machinic—is the main concern of this article. The article only secondarily concerns itself with what Deleuze and Guattari mean by metaphysics (and we shall see, pataphysics, and even that which exceeds
Theoretical Frameworks 11 Technological Determinism 11 Technologies of Media 13 Baudrillard and the Technologies of Simulacra 15 Cultural Materialism 17 Is Technology Neutral? 22 Knowing the World Differently: Poststructuralist Thought 28 Going with the Flow: ‘Machinic’ Thought 30 Virilio and the Technologies of Speed
Art and Technology Digital Aesthetics: Cultural Effects of New Media
Technologies 66 Authorship, Intellectual Property and Technology 67 Net Culture, Net Art 73 The Digital Image 75 Digital Aesthetics: New Labels for the New Aesthetic 84 New Media and Digital Aesthetics 87 The Digital, the Future and the Past Science Fictions 95 The Beginnings of Science Fiction: Frankenstein 98 Frankenstein’s Legacy 99 Robots 102 Utopias and Dystopias 104 Flesh and Machine 109 Hyperreal Science Fiction Cyborgs: the Body, Information and Technology 115 Donna Haraway’s Cyborg 116 Cyborg Basics 118 Information as the New ‘Spirit’? 120 From Postmodern to Posthuman 121 Presence and Patterns 126 The Body as Collective 129 Stelarc 131 Material Immortality and ‘Genethics’ 133 Radical Futures and ‘Gray Goo’ Technology, Thought and Consciousness 142 Consciousness 143 Computers as Universal Machines 147 How Artificial is Intelligence? 151 Technology Affects Thought 156 The Sense of Self 158 Heidegger and the ‘Question Concerning Technology’ 163 Outside Thought Getting Wired: War, Commerce and the Nation-State 169 Sovereignty 169 Sovereignty and Technical Control 170 War, Technology and the Question of Control 172 Riding Turbulence 174 Logistics and Networking 176 Control, Complexity and Computing 177 Pure War? 179 The Network and the Fate of the Nation-state 181 The New Economies 183 Old Rules, New Rules 186 Network Society Living with the Virtual 196 Machines and the Three Ecologies 196 Third Nature and the Natural Contract 200 Shifting Communities and ‘Cyberdemocracy’ 202 Computers, Knowledge and the Petit Récit 205
We decided the central question concerning media literacies was variability, but what does this mean? For me, several things perhaps—
Configurations—Petra Gemeinboeck
FCJ-204 Degrees of Freedom—Elena Knox
FCJ-205 Life and Labour of Rovers on Mars: Toward Post-Terrestrial Futures of Creative Robotics—Katarina Damjanov
FCJ-206 From Braitenberg’s Vehicles to Jansen’s Beach Animals: Towards an Ecological Approach to the Design of Non-Organic Intelligence—Maaike Bleeker
FCJ-207 Game On: A Creative Enquiry into Agency and the Nature of Cognition in Distributed Systems—Michaela Davies
FCJ-208 This Machine Could Bite: On the Role of Non-Benign Art Robots—Paul Granjon
FCJ-209 Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Pattern Thinking: An Expanded Analysis of the First Indigenous Robotics Prototype Workshop—Angie Abdilla and Robert Fitch
FCJ-210 Falling Robots—Lian Loke
FCJ-211 Embodying a Future for the Future: Creative Robotics and Ecosophical Praxis—Keith Armstrong
FCJ-199 Modelling Systemic Racism: Mobilising the Dynamics of Race and Games in Everyday Racism—Robbie Fordyce , Timothy Neale & Tom Apperley
FCJ-200 When Memes Go to War: Viral Propaganda in the 2014 Gaza-Israel Conflict—Chris Rodley
FCJ-201 Visual Evidence from Above: Assessing the Value of Earth Observation Satellites for Supporting Human Rights—Tanya Notley and Camellia Webb-Gannon
FCJ-202 Simulated Wars, Virtual Engagements—Seimeng Lai and Scott Sharpe
Issue 26 2015 Entanglements - Activism and Technology
Editors: Pip Shea, Tanya Notley, Jean Burgess, Su Ballard
Articles:
FCJ-188 Disability’s Digital Frictions:
Activism, Technology, and Politics—Katie Ellis, Gerard Goggin, Mike Kent
FCJ-189 Reimagining Work: Entanglements and Frictions around Future of Work Narratives—Laura Forlano, Megan Halpern
FCJ-190 Building a Better Twitter: A Study of the Twitter Alternatives GNU social, Quitter, rstat.us, and Twister—Robert W. Gehl
FCJ-191 Mirroring the Videos of Anonymous: Cloud Activism, Living Networks, and Political Mimesis—Adam Fish
FCJ-192 Sand in the Information Society Machine: How Digital Technologies Change and Challenge the Paradigms of Civil Disobedience—Theresa Züger, Stefania Milan & Leonie Maria Tanczer
FCJ-193 Harbouring Dissent: Greek Independent and Social Media and the Antifascist Movement—Sky Croeser & Tim Highfield
FCJ-194 From #RaceFail to #Ferguson: The Digital Intimacies of Race-Activist Hashtag Publics—Nathan Rambukanna
FCJ-195 Privacy, Responsibility, and Human Rights Activism—Becky Kazansky
FCJ-196 Let’s First Get Things Done! On Division of Labour and
Techno-political Practices of Delegation in Times of Crisis—Miriyam Aouragh, Seda Gürses, Jara Rocha & Femke Snelting
FCJ-197 Entanglements with Media and Technologies in the
Occupy Movement—Megan Boler & Jennie Phillips
Practitioner Reports:
FCJMESH-005 Technology and Citizen Witnessing:
Navigating the Friction Between Dual Desires for Visibility and Obscurity—Sam Gregory
FCJMESH-006 From Information Activism to the Politics of Data—
Maya Indira Ganesh and Stephanie Hankey
FCJMESH-007 Our Enduring Confusion About the
Power of Digital Tools in Protest—Ivan Sigal and Ellery Biddle
FCJMESH-008 Solutions for Online Harassment Don’t Come Easily—Jillian C. York
FCJMESH-009 Ranking Digital Rights: Keeping the Internet Safe for Advocacy—Nathalie Maréchal
FCJMESH-010 Getting Open Development Right—Zara Rahman
FCJMESH-011 : ‘We don’t work with video, we work with People’:
Reflections on Participatory Video Activism in Indonesia—M. Zamzam Fauzanafi & Kampung Halaman
Articles:
FCJ-179 On Governance, Blackboxing, Measure, Body, Affect and Apps:
A conversation with Patricia Ticineto Clough and Alexander R. Galloway— Svitlana Matviyenko, Patricia Ticineto Clough, Alexander R. Galloway
FCJ-180 ‘Spotify Has Added an Event to Your Past’: (Re)writing the Self through Facebook’s Autoposting Apps—Tanya Kant
FCJ-181 There’s a History for That: Apps and Mundane Software as Commodity—Jeremy Wade Morris and Evan Elkins
FCJ-182 Middlebroware—Frédérik Lesage
FCJ-183 iHootenanny: A Folk Archeology of Social Media—Henry Adam Svec
FCJ-184 Interpassive User: Complicity and the Returns of Cybernetics—Svitlana Matviyenko
FCJ-185 An Algorithmic Agartha: Post-App Approaches to Synarchic Regulation—Dan Mellamphy and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy
FCJ-186 Hack for good: Speculative labour, app development and the burden of austerity—Melissa Gregg
FCJ-187 The Droning of Experience—Mark Andrejevic
FCJ-174 Constructing the contemporary via digital cultural heritage—Torsten Andreasen
FCJ-175 Humans at play in the Anthropocene—Troy Innocent
FCJ-176 A Skeuomorphic Cinema: Film Form, Content and Criticism in the ‘Post-Analogue’ Era—David H. Fleming and William Brown
FCJ-177 Television Assemblages—Teresa Rizzo
FCJ-178 Network Affordances: The unpredictable parameters of a Hong Kong SPEED SHOW—Audrey Samson and Winnie Soon
We hope that as they meet, the ideas and practices discussed here become joyfully invested in something like a wave of ‘speculative pragmatism’ (Massumi, 2011a; see also 2011b). This issue diffracts something of this wave, embracing and thinking through what must be embraced and thought through, establishing new forms of critique, or new forms/concepts of design, in order to infra-act with the emergent worlds of contemporary media. It rethinks the forces and ephemeral forms of digital and networked media via a “radical empiricism”. Relations and dynamic ecologies come first, before fixed forms and established disciplines or business models.