Viva Culture Machine!: Latin American Mediations

We are pleased to announce the latest issue of the open access journal Culture Machine <http://www.culturemachine.net> titled VIVA CULTURE MACHINE!: LATIN AMERICAN MEDIATIONS, edited by Gabriela Méndez Cota. For more details about the issue and the journal please see below.

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CULTURE MACHINE 15 (2014)
http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/current

VIVA CULTURE MACHINE!: LATIN AMERICAN MEDIATIONS
edited by Gabriela Méndez Cota

In her 2013 book The Posthuman, Rosi Braidotti complains about critical thought ‘after the great explosion of theoretical creativity of the 1970s and 1980s’: it was as if ‘we had entered a zombified landscape of repetition without difference’, she writes. And no doubt poststructuralist theory did in certain hands become another orthodoxy. Yet given the degree of emphasis currently being placed on monistic, realist, object-oriented and materialist ontologies in what is perceived as the ‘cutting-edge’ critical thought of today, it is hard not to wonder: are we in danger of embarking on another journey into theoretical orthodoxy?

Sharing the frustration of Braidotti and others with the decline of so much post-Marxism, deconstruction and psychoanalysis into mere repetition without difference, Culture Machine has over the years published essays and issues on various aspects of monism, realism and materialism. Nevertheless, in an effort to ensure the journal avoids succumbing to a zombified future by doing just more of the same, we have decided to celebrate Culture Machine’s 15th anniversary by transferring much of its editorial oversight to scholars located in Mexico. By placing this bet on Mexico, we are endeavouring to force the Culture Machine journal into inventing a different, unorthodox future for itself that is at once both singular and unpredictable.

As a way of beginning the process of reinvention, for this 15th anniversary issue of the journal we have invited a number of scholars, writers, activists and artists from Latin America to provide us with a series of contaminating mediations of Culture Machine and its history. The issue is therefore designed to constitute something of a critical retrospective, both offering new contributions and inviting the readers to revisit some of the earlier work that was published in Culture Machine. This is only a first step, however. The intention for future issues is to invite increasing numbers of non-Anglo collaborators to participate in Culture Machine, in English and in Spanish (and hopefully in other languages too later on), and in this way join those in the English-speaking world in helping to generate a more distributed, decentred, multi-polar academic gift economy for the production, publication and dissemination of contemporary theory.

Contents

* Culture Machine Editorial Collective / Viva Culture Machine!

* Gabriela Méndez Cota / Fifteen Years: a Textual Celebration

* Benjamín Mayer Foulkes interviewed by Gabriela Méndez Cota / Towards the Post-University: Experimenting with Psychoanalysis and Institutions

* Stefania Haritou / Creativity in Practice

* Emilia Ismael Simental / Re: Recordings

* Nestor García Canclini and Maritza Urteaga interviewed by Emilia Ismael Simental / The Hyper-affective Turn: Thinking the Social in the Digital Age

* Euridice Cabañes and María Rubio / Arsgames: A Political Take on Videogames and Social Networking Platforms

* Benjamín Moreno interviewed by Juan Pablo Anaya / The Electronic Literature of Benjamín Moreno: Affect and Sense Outside the Conventions of the Literary

* Alberto López Cuenca / Writing Errancy: Outcasts, Capitalism and Mobility

* Beatriz Miranda / Traveling through Remembrance as Praxis with Disability Baggage

* Vivian Abenshushan interviewed by Gabriela Méndez Cota / The No-Work Paradox

* Etelvina Bernal Méndez / The Flood Is Elsewhere

* Néstor Braunstein / Economics (and) the Politics of Attention

* Francisco Vergara Silva / Universal Bio-cosmopolitics, Or the Perspectivism of Canine Life

* Gabriela Méndez Cota / Digital Humanities: Whose Changes Do You Want to Save?

Technographies: new book series from Open Humanities Press

In celebration of Open Access Week, we are pleased to announce a new open access book series, Technographies, edited by Steven Connor, David Trotter and James Purdon.

According to Aristotle, the modes taken by the ‘art of representation’ (mimesis) differ in ‘means’, ‘object’, and ‘manner’. Some translations offer ‘medium’ instead of ‘means’, as though Aristotle had seen McLuhan coming from a very long way off. Others have argued that the term poses the question ‘in what?’: in what (language, genre, form, etc.) has expression taken place? ‘Through what?’ might instead be the question for a series which aims to explore the cultural (written) history of material technologies.

Technographies aims to answer the question ‘through what?’ in a variety of ways, with varying degrees of literalness. The term itself seeks to recuperate some of the strangeness that has been lost in the course of the long naturalization of ‘technology’. Originally a genre of writing — a treatise on a practical art or craft — a ‘technology’ soon came to denote the end product of such arts and crafts, and eventually became associated with the machinery or equipment used in production. Today, we tend to assume that a ‘technology’ is a machine, a system, a piece of kit: a term for a discourse or a way of thinking has over the centuries been transformed into a term for an object, or a set of objects.

By contrast, the term ‘technography’ came into use during (and possibly in reaction to) the late-nineteenth-century turn from words to things. A technography is a description of technologies and their application with primary regard to social context. Technography, itself technologically mediated like all forms of writing, is a reflection upon the varying degrees to which all technologies have in some fashion been written into being. It examines the crucial role writing has played, not just in the description of technological objects and their functions, but in the inscription of technologies within social and cultural life.

Technographies aims to encourage investigation of a wide variety of writing ‘about’ technology. It is not committed to the furtherance of any single methodology, nor is it period-specific; instead contributions are sought that will develop new, ambitious and scholarly approaches to technological mediation using the tools of literary criticism, theoretical elaboration, rhetoric, poetics, gender studies and queer theory, material culture, media archaeology, the history of science, and similar disciplines.

How was it that technology and writing came to inform each other so extensively that today there is only information? Technographies seeks to answer that question by putting the emphasis on writing as an answer to the large question of ‘through what?’. Writing about technographies in history, our contributors will themselves write technographically.

To contribute to the series, please contact Steven Connor, David Trotter or James Purdon

Advisory Board

• Emmanuelle André (Paris Diderot)
• Edward Dimendberg (University of California, Irvine)
• Sebastian Gießmann (University of Siegen)
• John Guillory (NYU)
• Jondi Keane (Deakin University, Melbourne)
• Tanya Krzywinska (Falmouth University)
• Charlotte Sleigh (University of Kent)
• Susan Merrill Squier (Penn State University)
• Sherry Turkle (MIT)
• Gregory L. Ulmer (University of Florida)

Open Education: Condition Critical

The Centre for Disruptive Media presents: 

Open Education: Condition Critical

A panel exploring opportunities to experiment critically and creatively with different ideas of what the university and education can be.

http://disruptivemedia.org.uk/

Thursday November 20^th 4:30-6:30pm

Coventry University, Disruptive Media Learning Lab, 3^rd floor Frederick Lanchester Library

Panellists:

Sean Dockray (The Public School), Richard Hall (University of Leicester), Shaun Hides (Coventry University/Disruptive Media Learning Lab), Sharon Irish (University of Illinois/FemTechNet), Pauline van Mourik Broekman (Mute)

Entrance is free

Please register at: http://criticalopeneducation.eventbrite.co.uk

What for decades could only be dreamt of is now almost within reach: the widespread provision of free online education, regardless of a student’s geographic location, financial status or ability to access conventional institutions of learning. Yet for all the hype-cycle that has been entered into over MOOCs, many experiments with Open Education (OE) do not appear to be designed to challenge the becoming business of the university or alter Higher Education in any fundamental way. If anything, they seem more likely to lead to a two-tier system, in which those who can’t afford to pay (so much) to attend a traditional university, or belong to those groups who prefer not to move away from home (e.g. lower-income families), have to make do with a poor, online, second-rate alternative education produced by a global corporation.

Open Education: Condition Critical will thus examine some of the opportunities that exist for experimenting with very different ideas of what the university and education can be in the 21st century. In doing so, rather than focusing on the 2012 batch of extremely publicity-savvy xMOOCs (Edx, Udacity, FutureLearn etc.), it will draw attention to a range of more radical developments in the Open Education arena. They include The Public School, FemTechNet’s DOCCs (Distributed Open Collaborative Courses), the self-organised ‘free universities’ associated with the Occupy, anti-austerity and student protests, and even so-called ‘pirate’ libraries such as libgen.org and aaaaarg.org.

Open Education: Condition Critical has been organised to mark the publication of Open Education: A Study in Disruption (London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2014), co-authored by Coventry University’s Open Media Group and Mute Publishing as a critical experiment with both collaborative, processual writing and concise, medium-length forms of shared attention.

Disruptive Media Learning Lab

The Disruptive Media Learning Lab (DMLL) at Coventry University, a new innovative teaching, learning and study space, is a cross-university experimental unit comprising of academics, learning technologists, subject librarians, educational developers and researchers. The Lab is based in the heart of the Uiversity’s campus in a newly refurbished space on the top floor of the Frederick Lanchester Library, uniquely designed to promote open dialogues, collaborative work and exploratory play for all interested in defining the 21st century university.

Responding to the disruption of connected media technologies the Lab will develop radically new approaches to teaching and learning. It will provide the support, expertise and resources needed to enable projects to experiment with new pedagogies, new business models and technologies.

Contact: dmll@coventry.ac.uk

For more on disruptive learning, see here.

Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene: new book from OHP

Joanna Zylinska's new book, Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene, has just been published by Open Humanities Press. Adopting a philosophy-meets-art-meets-cultural studies approach, it contains a modest ethical proposal for the (whole) universe which is faced with the prospect of climate change, total destruction and the extinction of life as we know it. It also contains an image-based project as an alternative visual track to the argument presented. The official blurb is below.

The online and pdf versions of the book are of course available for free:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/minimal-ethics.html

 

MINIMAL ETHICS FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE

by Joanna Zylinska

Open Humanities Press, 2014

An imprint of Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library: Ann Arbor

Series: Critical Climate Change edited by Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook

 E-version freely available on an open access basis:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/minimal-ethics.html

Also available in paperback

Life typically becomes an object of reflection when it is seen to be under threat. In particular, humans have a tendency to engage in thinking about life (instead of just continuing to live it) when being confronted with the prospect of death: be it the death of individuals due to illness, accident or old age; the death of whole ethnic or national groups in wars and other forms of armed conflict; but also of whole populations, be they human or nonhuman. Even though Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene is first and foremost concerned with life—understood as both a biological and social phenomenon—it is the narrative about the impending death of the human population (i.e., about the extinction of the human species), that provides a context for its argument. 'Anthropocene' names a geo-historical period in which humans are said to have become the biggest threat to life on earth. However, rather than as a scientific descriptor, the term serves here primarily as an ethical injunction to think critically about human and nonhuman agency in the universe.

Restrained in tone yet ambitious in scope, the book takes some steps towards outlining a minimal ethics thought on a universal scale. The task of such minimal ethics is to consider how humans can assume responsibility for various occurrences in the universe, across different scales, and how they can respond to the tangled mesh of connections and relations unfolding in it. Its goal is not so much to tell us how to live but rather to allow us to rethink 'life' and what we can do with it, in whatever time we have left. The book embraces a speculative mode of thinking that is more akin to the artist’s method; it also includes a photographic project by the author.

A spirited, eloquent, original, and interdisciplinary manifesto for ethics, which takes seriously, on the one hand, a non-anthropocentric perspective and the challenge to human exceptionalism; and, on the other hand, the possibility of the extinction of life in the Anthropocene epoch. The book presents a serious meditation on the meaning of the old ethical preoccupation – “how to live a good life?” – in an age when life itself is threatened with extinction. (Ewa Ziarek - Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joanna Zylinska is Professor of New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. The author of several books—most recently, Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process (with Sarah Kember; MIT Press, 2012) and Bioethics in the Age of New Media (MIT Press, 2009)—she is also a translator of Stanislaw Lem's major philosophical treatise, Summa Technologiae (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Together with Clare Birchall, Gary Hall and Open Humanities Press, she runs the JISC-funded project Living Books about Life, which publishes open access books at the crossroads of the humanities and the sciences. Zylinska is one of the Editors of Culture Machine, an international open-access journal of culture and theory, and a curator of its sister project, Photomediations Machine. She combines her philosophical writings and curatorial work with photographic art practice.