Attention, Habit, Becoming in India’s Platform Ecologies

Attention, Habit, Becoming in India’s Platform Ecologies

This presentation of on-going research considers participatory action research on the political economy of India’s media ecologies, or what I will also refer to as a decolonising political ecology of media. My interest here is in practically diagramming an antogonistic domain of platform monopoly, information control, value extraction, dispossession, and exploitation, and also digital piracy, technological tinkering and repurposing, and collective lines of autonomous flight and social reproduction that techniques of control attempt to capture and revalue: this is  the simultaneously global and singular domain of the reterritorialisation and deterritorialisation of attention and habit today. In recent studies, the political economy of media has expanded beyond ‘Western’ capitalist intellectual property regulatory regimes and complexified beyond the (post)human; in these researches ecological thought has become more materialist and processual. These new materialist methods shift our focus from the social construction of fetishized, reified media platforms (film, TV, radio) toward the actually existing infrastructures of communication and information, their complex processes of value and sense, their vector-tendencies of resistance and violence within which all forms of media are co-evolving today. This presentation considers the practices and discourses surrounding 'jugaad' (everyday workarounds) and social media platforms in India in relation to recent articulations of political theory: Invisible Committee's Now (2017) and Mario Tronti's Workers and Capital (1965). 

Dr. Amit S. Rai is Reader in Creative Industries and Arts Organising at Queen Mary, University of London, where he has also taught critical marketing studies and business ethics. He is author of Rule of Sympathy: Race, Sentiment, Power 1760-1860 (Palgrave, 2002) and Untimely Bollywood: Globalization and India’s New Media Assemblage (Duke UP, 2009). He has taught at the New School for Social Research, Florida State University, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, and Lorton Maximum Security Prison. His current research touches on critical management and organizational studies of the creative and cultural industries in the UK and India, the gendering of affective labor in social reproduction in India, media practices of commoning, and hacking and piracy ecologies in the UK and South Asia. His monograph on work-around practices in Indian urban digital ecologies, Jugaad Time: Ecologies of Everyday Hacking in India, was published in 2019 by Duke University Press. 

Bernard Stiegler's Nanjing Lectures: new book from Open Humanities Press

We are delighted to announce the release of Bernard Stiegler's Nanjing Lectures (2016-2019), translated by Daniel Ross.

Nanjing Lectures 2016-2019 address the relationship of Platonic metaphysics to the age of ‘post-truth’, the shift from biopower to neuropower in platform capitalism, and the need for a new epistemology, one that would be neither materialist nor idealist but hyper-materialist. 

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/nanjing-lectures/ 

Sigi, David, Gary

In this series of lectures, delivered at Nanjing University from 2016 to 2019, Bernard Stiegler rethinks the so-called Anthropocene in relation to philosophy’s failure to reckon with the manifold and indeed “cosmic” consequences of the entropic and thermodynamic revolution. Beginning with the Oxford Dictionaries’ decision to make “post-truth” the 2016 word of the year, and taking this as an opportunity to understand the implications for Heidegger’s “history of being”, “history of truth” and Gestell, the first series of lectures enter into an original consideration of the relationship between Socrates and Plato (and of tragic Greece in general) and its meaning for the history of Western philosophy. The following year’s lecture series traverse a path from Foucault’s biopower to psychopower to neuropower, and then to a critique of neuroeconomics. Revising Husserl’s account of retention to focus on the irreducible connection between human memory and technological memory, the lectures culminate in reflections on the significance of neurotechnology in platform capitalism. The concept of hyper-matter is introduced in the lectures of 2019 as requisite for an epistemology that escapes the trap of opposing the material and the ideal in order to respond to the need for a new critique of the notion of information and technological performativity (of which Moore’s law both is and is not an example) in an age when the biosphere has become a technosphere.

 

Remixing Persona: An Imaginary Digital MediaObject from the Onto-Tales of the Digital Afterlife by MALK (Mark Amerika / Laura Kim)

Open Humanities Press is delighted to announce the first publication in our new MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW series, edited by Joanna Zylinska.

Remixing Persona: An Imaginary Digital MediaObject from the Onto-Tales of the Digital Afterlife by MALK (Mark Amerika / Laura Kim)

Remixing Persona is comprised of two components: a visual manifesto that doubles as a theoretical e-reader and a work of music video art. In building this project, the artists collaboratively investigate persona-making, performance-thinking, and applied remixology. Playfully presenting their research as an intergenerational and intercultural ‘research band’ named MALK (Mark Amerika / Laura Kim), both artists, individually and as a performance duo, bring their own unique experiences and ontologically filtered ‘ways of remixing’ to their intermedia art, writing and performance practice.

The research questions the artists initially presented to themselves were unconventional: ‘Who am I this time?’ ‘What does it mean to share a sense of humor?’ ‘What is an otherworldly aesthetic sensibility?’ The artists were not interested in coming up with answers per se, but in using their artist skills to deploy both intuitive and improvisational performances that would generate a set of primary source material to remix into their creative project. This was when they decided to form MALK and began creating the Digital Afterlife music video artwork as a conceptual tool to investigate persona-making as a meta-practice. The culminating field of recombinatory expression that informs the production of this imaginary digital media object is an inversion of their practice-based research conducted in the TECHNE Lab at the University of Colorado.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Remixing Persona is freely available at:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/remixing-persona/ 

Paper Struggles & Public Library and the Property Form: Exhibition and Seminar

Paper Struggles & Public Library and the Property Form

The exhibition and the seminar will take place at:

Raven Row, 56 Artillery Ln, London

Exhibition opening: Monday, December 9th, 18.30-21.00

Remains open: Tuesday and Wednesday, 11.00-21.00

Seminar: Tuesday, December 10th, 10.30-13.30, guest speakers: Balász Bodó & Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, seminar registration: http://tiny.cc/public_library

Post Office Research Group, Centre for Postdigital Cultures

Coventry University

https://postoffice.media

Exhibition “Paper Struggles”

The exhibition documents how the struggles over access to knowledge in the digital realm are reflected in the world of print and paper. The digital access has expanded the volume of available text by orders of magnitude compared to the days of print. Yet, paper remains the preferred format of reading for many students, scholars and researchers across the globe. Copying on paper is also often the most affordable way of obtaining texts. Struggles over access can thus be seen as struggles over (abundance of) paper. This status of paper in a digital age serves as a starting point for the exhibition, which tells the story of the uneven and messy world of knowledge today.

The exhibition includes five documentary and artistic works:

1. Rameshwari Photocopy Services legal case
2. Kenneth Goldsmith: “Printing out the Internet”
3. Monoskop: “Architecture” & “Anthropocene”
4. “Piracy Project”, a collaboration between Andrea Francke and Eva Weinmayr
5. "Memory of the World, Catalog by Slowrotation"

Conceived by Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak, on the invitation of Kaja Marczewska.

We wish to thank: Alex Sainsbury, the technical staff at Raven Row, Rosemary Grennan, MayDay Rooms, Lawrence Liang, Rabindra Patra, Shubigi Rao, Mohammad Salemy, Dušan Barok, Kenneth Goldsmith, Andrea Francke & Eva Weinmayr.

Seminar "Public Library and the Property Form"

The seminar will explore how intellectual property in the digital realm has impacted the institution of the public library and its mission to provide access to knowledge to all members of society. While the Internet has enabled a massive expansion of access to all kinds of publications, libraries were initially and remain severely limited in extending to digital “objects” the de-commodified access they provide in the world of print. One of the consequences is that the centrality of libraries in facilitating, organising and disseminating literature and science has faded. Thus, while a transition to digital has provided opportunities to reconsider how societies produce, sustain and make available literature and science, incumbent interests in combination with a property-form that treats intellectual creation as if it were a piece of land, have resisted the transformation of our systems of cultural production. Given this context, readers who have been denied access to information due to territorial, institutional and economic divides have created their own systems of access through the sharing of PDFs and shadow libraries, doing what public libraries are not allowed to do.

In this seminar we want to take stock of the present and future role of libraries in publishing texts, supporting universal access to information, and advocating the radical social and economic imaginaries needed to change the above-described status quo.

Schedule

10:30 Marcell Mars & Tomislav Medak: "Public Library and the Property Form"
11:00 Balász Bodó: “Is the Open Knowledge Commons Idea a Curse in Disguise? Towards Sovereign Institutions of Knowledge.”, respondent: Janneke Adema
12:00 coffee break
12:15 Nanna Bonde Thylstrup: “Gleaning Knowledge: The Infrapolitics of Shadow Libraries”, respondent: Gary Hall
13:15 Discussion, introduction: Kaja Marczewska

The seminar is moderated by Valeria Graziano.

Speakers

Balász Bodó is an Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam, Institute of Information Law. He is interested in conflicts around freedom, which take place at the intersection of digital technologies and the law. He is currently leading an ERC project on the regulation of decentralised technologies.

Nanna Bonde Thylstrup is Associate Professor of Communication and Digital Media at Copenhagen Business School. She is interested in how media theory, cultural theory and critical theory can unpack and unfold issues related to datafication and digitisation. She is the author of The Politics of Mass Digitisation published by MIT Press (2019) and has co-edited Uncertain Archives (forthcoming).

Post Office Research Group (CPC@CU)

Paper Struggles and Public Library and the Property Form are organised by the Post Office Research Group, a research collective affiliated to the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University. Post Office follows a methodology of affirmative critique. Our projects are both critical and performative: actively changing the situations in which they intervene while helping devise protagonist-centred approaches to organisation, methodology, and technology. It is involved in changing scholarly and creative writing, publishing, libraries, open access, universities, cultural production, the humanities, technologies, and labour relations, and wants to explore alternatives for a more just, diverse, and equitable future.

How To Be A Pirate In The 21st Century

This is the abstract for my keynote lecture at 20 Years of File Sharing - What is Next?: Third Futures of Media Conference, Xi'an Jiaotong Liverpool University, Suzhou, China, 8-10 November 2019.

Over the last 20 years I have helped to develop over 15 grassroots, bottom-up projects for the production of free resources, technical infrastructure and the commons. They include: Culture Machine, a journal of critical and cultural theory that was launched in 1999 – the same year Napster started; Open Humanities Press, an international publishing collective; and the Radical Open Access Collective, a community of non-profit presses, journals and other entities formed in 2015 and now consisting of over 60 members. 

In this lecture I will discuss the politics underpinning these initiatives together with some of the associated concepts and practices, including pirate philosophy, radical open access and anti-bourgeois theory. In the process I will explain why, as academics and researchers, we should be interested in peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing: as an object of study; but also as activity we should become involved with ourselves more and more in the future. The likes of Napster, Gnutella, MegaUpload, the Pirate Bay and BitTorrent will all be featured. Particular emphasis, however, will be placed on pirate file-sharing libraries such as Aaaaarg.org, UbuWeb, Monoskop, Public Library: Memory of the World, Libgen and Sci-Hub.