Contingency and Plasticity in Everyday Technologies

Natasha Lushetich is professor of contemporary art & theory at the University of Dundee and Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellow. Her research is interdisciplinary and focuses on intermedia and critical mediality; global art; the status of sensory experience in cultural knowledge; biopolitics and performativity. Her books include Fluxus: The Practice of Non-Duality (2014), Interdisciplinary Performance (2016), The Aesthetics of Necropolitics (Rowman & Littlefield 2018), Beyond Mind, Symbolism, an International Annual of Critical Aesthetics (2019), Big Data – A New Medium? (2020) and Distributed Perception: Resonances and Axiologies (co-edited with I. Campbell, 2021). Iain Campbell is a teaching fellow in aesthetics at Edinburgh College of Art and a research associate at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee, where he is working on the project The Future of Indeterminacy: Datafication, Memory, Bio-Politics. He has written on topics across philosophy, music, sound studies, and art theory for publications including parallax, Contemporary Music Review, Sound Studies, and Continental Philosophy Review. His current research focuses on experimentation and on the differences and continuities between conceptualisations of this notion in philosophy, art, music, and science. He is co-editor, with Natasha Lushetich, of Distributed Perception: Resonances and Axiologies (2021).Dominic Smith is senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Dundee, where he researches philosophy of technology/media. Dominic is interested in bringing the continental tradition in philosophy (e.g. phenomenology, critical theory, poststructuralism, new forms of realism and materialism) to bear on philosophy of technology and media. He is a member of the Scottish Centre for Continental Philosophy: http://scot-cont-phil.org/. Dominic’s latest book is Exceptional Technologies: A Continental Philosophy of Technology. His current project involves thinking about how philosophy of technology can be broadened to speak to issues in philosophy of education, design, and creativity, with a focus on the work of Walter Benjamin.

Is the process of technological innovation an opening up of possibilities or a predetermined production of commodities? Through the analysis of concrete examples of smart technologies and artificial intelligent systems, the authors collectively brilliantly thematize a new modality of the future, that lies between contingency and necessity. Its name is plasticity. A fascinating endeavor.

• List of FiguresPrologue: Normalising Catastrophe or Revealing Mysterious Sur-Chaotic Micro-Worlds?Natasha Lushetich, Iain Campbell and Dominic SmithAcknowledgmentsPart I: Social-Digital TechnologiesChapter 1: Information and Alterity: From Probability to PlasticityAshley WoodwardChapter 2: Transcendental Instrumentality and Incomputable ThinkingLuciana ParisiChapter 3: Digital Ontology and ContingencyAden EvensChapter 4: Blockchain Owns You: From Cypherpunk to Self-Sovereign IdentityAlesha SeradaChapter 5: The Double Spiral of Chaos and AutomationFranco ‘Bifo’ BerardiPart II: Spatial, Temporal, Aural and Visual TechnologiesChapter 6: Allagmatics of Architecture: From Generic Structures to Genetic Operations (and Back)Andrej RadmanChapter 7: Computation and Material Transformations: Dematerialisation, Rematerialisation and Immaterialisation in Time-Based MediaOswaldo Emiddio Vasquez HadjilyraChapter 8: How the Performer Came to be Prepared: Three Moments in Music’s Encou