[Tokyo Hacker Space's meeting place. Photo Credit: David Powell] 4S/EASST Panel: Hacking Science and Technology Studies (STS) - bio-hacking, open hardware development, and hackerspaces :: October 17-20, 2012 :: Copenhagen, Denmark :: Call for Papers - Deadline: March 18.

During the past two decades, hacking has chiefly been associated with software and computers. This is now changing as the figure of the hacker, together with the ideas and practices associated with this figure, are spreading to new walks of life. Thus we are reminded of the origin of hacking in hardware development. Continue reading

David Weinberger on Too Big To Know:

We used to know how to know. Get some experts, maybe a methodology, add some criteria and credentials, publish the results, and you get knowledge we can all rely on. But as knowledge is absorbed by our new digital medium, it’s becoming clear that the fundamentals of knowledge are not properties of knowledge but of its old paper medium. Skulls don’t scale. But the Net does. Now networked knowledge is taking on the properties of its new medium: never being settled, including disagreement within itself, and becoming not a set of stopping points but a web of temptations. Networked knowledge, for all its strengths, has its own set of problems. But, in knowledge’s new nature there is perhaps a hint about why the Net has such surprising transformative power. Continue reading

Seismopolite Journal of Art and Politics - Reimagining The Political Geography Of Place And Space :: Call for Papers - Deadline: March 5, 2012.

In the coming issue we wish to focus on political geographies, as well as artistic interventions in, and reimaginations of, such geographies. The distinction between “place” and “space” is of particular interest, as it is fundamental not only to much art, but also to our global situation within neoliberal political geography. If time has come for us to reimagine this geography, as well as the interrelationships between, and definitions of “space” and “place”, is it thinkable that art could be an ideal site for such reimagination?

The construction and exploitation of a particularism of the local also seems indigenous to the logic of neoliberalism, in the sense that it relies on the opposition between place and space to be able to expand in the first place. Continue reading

Theory in Action, the journal of the Transformative Studies Institute (quarterly publication print ISSN: 1937-0229 electronic ISSN: 1937-0237), is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal, whose scope ranges from the local to the global. Its aim is to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and the discussion of current research (qualitative and quantitative) on the interconnections between theory and action aimed at promoting social justice broadly defined.

The journal editorial board does not privilege any particular theoretical tradition or approach and there are no word or page limits for its articles. TIA publishes papers that connect academic scholarship with activism, what R.K. Merton calls ‘theories of the middle range.’ TIA values radical and unconventional ideas, expressed in different styles, whether academic or journalistic. Continue reading

Review of Josephine Bosma’s Nettitudes, Let’s Talk Net Art (2011) by Eric Kluitenberg (via spectre):

Nettitudes, the new book by Josephine Bosma, is an important contribution to the often confusing and unbalanced discussion about the Internet and contemporary art. This contribution becomes especially clear from what the book does not do. First of all, Bosma does not try to offer a historical overview of the phenomenon that she calls ‘net art’. She also indicates clearly why it is difficult to mark out this area unequivocally, for there are widely differing views as to how the interaction between the Internet and contemporary art should be interpreted. Indeed, net art must in the first place be seen in a broader context than that of contemporary art, because the development of this ‘genre’ cannot be seen separately from the various forms of network culture with which it sometimes partly converges or by which it is influenced. Continue reading

Programmed Visions: Software and Memory by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, MIT Press:

New media thrives on cycles of obsolescence and renewal: from celebrations of cyber-everything to Y2K, from the dot-com bust to the next big things - mobile mobs, Web 3.0, cloud computing. In Programmed Visions, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that these cycles result in part from the ways in which new media encapsulates a logic of programmability. New media proliferates “programmed visions,” which seek to shape and predict - even embody - a future based on past data. These programmed visions have also made computers, based on metaphor, metaphors for metaphor itself, for a general logic of substitutability.

Chun approaches the concept of programmability through the surprising materialization of software as a “thing” in its own right, tracing the hardening of programming into software and of memory into storage. Continue reading

Theory Beyond Codes: Haptics, Mobile Handhelds, and other “Novel” Devices: The Tactile Unconscious of Reading across Old and New Media by Rachel Lee :: CTHEORY: Theory, Thechnology, Culure VOL 35, NOS 1-2 :: Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker.

I. Don’t Press. Just Touch

In a 2007 news article in the ~Korea Times~ covering the then innovative technology of the capacitance v. resistive (i.e., pressure sensitive) touch screens, Cho Jin-Seo uses the lead-in “Don’t Press. Just Touch” to capture the habituated finger knowledge one would have to incorporate in order to switch from the more familiar interface of ATM’s and cashier check-out stands to the newer interfaces of mobile devices. [1] Continue reading

The Second International Conference on Transdisciplinary Imaging at the Intersections between Art, Science and Culture :: June 22-23, 2012 :: Victorian College of the Arts, Federation Hall, Grant Street, Southbank, Melbourne 3006 :: Call for Papers: Interference Strategies for Art - Deadline for Abstracts: March 30, 2012.

The Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference seeks papers that explore the theme of ‘Interference’ within practices of contemporary image making. Continue reading

The Social Media Reader, edited by Michael Mandiberg:

With the rise of web 2.0 and social media platforms taking over vast tracts of territory on the internet, the media landscape has shifted drastically in the past 20 years, transforming previously stable relationships between media creators and consumers. The Social Media Reader is the first collection to address the collective transformation with pieces on social media, peer production, copyright politics, and other aspects of contemporary internet culture from all the major thinkers in the field.

Culling a broad range and incorporating different styles of scholarship from foundational pieces and published articles to unpublished pieces, journalistic accounts, personal narratives from blogs, and whitepapers, The Social Media Reader promises to be an essential text, Continue reading

Negative Dialectics in the Google Era: A Conversation with Trevor Paglen by Julian Stallabrass :: OCTOBER 138, Fall 2011, pp. 3–14.

In the last seven years, in a series of performances, publications, exhibitions, and installations, Trevor Paglen has explored the world of hidden military projects and infrastructure. One of his best-known series is Limit Telephotography, for which he trained lenses designed for astronomical photography on secret military bases in the U.S., using their very-long-range photographic capabilities to capture images that would otherwise be hidden to civilian eyes. These are the “limits” that lie at the heart of Paglen’s project: the limits of democracy, secrecy, visibility, and the knowable. Continue reading