Technicities – serie

Ashley Woodward demonstrates what a new generation of scholars are just discovering: that Lyotard’s incisive work is essential for current debates in the humanities. Lyotard’s ideas about the arts and the confrontations between humanist traditions and cutting-edge sciences and technologies are today known as ‘posthumanism’. Woodward presents a series of studies to explain Lyotard’s specific interventions in information theory, new media arts and the changing nature of the human. He assesses their relevance and impact in relation to a number of important contemporary thinkers including Bernard Stiegler, Luciano Floridi, Quentin Meillassoux and Paul Virilio.

What happens to the cultural politics of human rights when atrocities are rendered calculable, abuses are transformed into data, and victims become vectors? As human rights organisations have increasingly embraced information technologies this 'datafication' of rights has become both a reality and a pressing concern, one inextricably tangled up with questions regarding the broader political valences of human rights. Combining contemporary social and cultural theory with archival research and original ethnographic work, Josh Bowsher resituates recent critiques of human rights within ongoing theoretical discussions concerning informational capitalism, digital culture and the politics of data. Critically analysing the contemporary human rights movement as an informational politics, Bowsher provides a new conceptual agenda for both exploring and overcoming the limits of human rights in an era shaped by the data flows, network infrastructures and informational logic of late capitalism.

What happens to the cultural politics of human rights when atrocities are rendered calculable, abuses are transformed into data, and victims become vectors? As human rights organizations have increasingly embraced information technologies this 'datafication' of rights has become both a reality and a pressing concern, one inextricably tangled up with questions regarding the broader political valences of human rights. Combining contemporary social and cultural theory with archival research and original ethnographic work, Josh Bowsher resituates recent critiques of human rights within ongoing theoretical discussions concerning informational capitalism, digital culture and the politics of data. Critically analysing the contemporary human rights movement as an informational politics, Bowsher provides a new conceptual agenda for both exploring and overcoming the limits of human rights in an era shaped by the data flows, network infrastructures and informational logic of late capitalism.

Demonstrates Blanchot's ongoing importance for contemporary philosophical debate about technology, the post-human, and ecological thinkingDemonstrates a considerable shift in Blanchot's thinking from 1940s to 1980sHighlights the significance of Blanchot for important figures of twentieth-century French thought such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Bernard StieglerArgues for the continued relevance of Blanchot to twenty first-century debates in literary theory and criticismHolly Langstaff reappraises the influential French thinker Maurice Blanchot's writing from the 1940s to his late work in the 1980s, demonstrating how Blanchot's exploration of the question of technology remains decisive throughout his career.She situates Blanchot's fictional and critical work in the context of his thinking of art as techne - as it develops out of Martin Heidegger's philosophy. While Blanchot follows Heidegger in the view that writing is a form of techne, he never appeals for salvation from the menace of technology in the modern era. Rather, he sees in all forms of technology the opportunity for a new way of thinking beyond value. This, Blanchot calls an entirely different sort of affirmation.

Holly Langstaff reappraises the influential French thinker Maurice Blanchot's writing from the 1940s to his late work in the 1980s, demonstrating how Blanchot's exploration of the question of technology remains decisive throughout his career. She situates Blanchot's fictional and critical work in the context of his thinking of art as techne as it develops out of Martin Heidegger's philosophy. While Blanchot follows Heidegger in the view that writing is a form of techne, he never appeals for salvation from the menace of technology in the modern era. Rather, he sees in all forms of technology the opportunity for a new way of thinking beyond value. This, Blanchot calls an entirely different sort of affirmation. Langstaff demonstrates Blanchot's ongoing importance for contemporary philosophical debate about technology, the post-human, and ecological thinking.

Explores the increasingly intimate relationship between China and wireless technology, taking the wave as a central conceptProvides a new theoretical apparatus that reimagines key issues around technological evolution in a shifting geopolitical landscapeOffers a corrective to certain myopias of Western media theoryPresents a deep, historical engagement with issues and debates surrounding Chinese cybercultureBrings together contemporary media theory with modern Chinese philosophical thoughtIn the 21st century city, wireless waves constitute an imperceptible, immersive, all-encompassing environment. Nowhere is this more so than in China, where a hyperdense network of mobile media has restructured daily life.Anna Greenspan re-imagines the relationship between China and wirelessness by synthesising contemporary media theory with modern Chinese thought. It focuses specifically on the work of three critical figures: Tan Sitong ??? (1865 1898), Xiong Shili ??? (1885 1968) and Mou Zongsan ??? (1909 1995).

In the twenty-first century city, wireless waves constitute an imperceptible, immersive, all-encompassing environment. Nowhere is this more so than in China, where a hyperdense network of mobile media has restructured daily life. Anna Greenspan re-imagines the relationship between China and wirelessness by synthesizing contemporary media theory with modern Chinese thought. It focuses specifically on the work of three critical figures: Tan Sitong ??? (1865 1898), Xiong Shili ??? (1885 1968) and Mou Zongsan ??? (1909 1995).

As the symbiotic relationship between human and machine unfolds, robotic vision facilitates a reshaping and reconstitution of our perception of the world. This edited collection explores ways in which this is taking place and the implictions for these new ways of seeing ethically, politically, culturally and socially from an art and design perspective and through a critical theoretical lens.The contributors converge on the intersection of New Materialism, Media Studies and Cultural Theory and offer speculative approaches combining creative writing and visual interludes from artists and designers, all of which address the question: are we on the cusp of new ways of seeing??

As the symbiotic relationship between human and machine unfolds, robotic vision facilitates a reshaping and reconstitution of our perception of the world. This edited collection explores ways in which this is taking place and the implictions for these new ways of seeing ethically, politically, culturally and socially from an art and design perspective and through a critical theoretical lens.The contributors converge on the intersection of New Materialism, Media Studies and Cultural Theory and offer speculative approaches combining creative writing and visual interludes from artists and designers, all of which address the question: are we on the cusp of new ways of seeing??

Presents a new multidisciplinary perspective on portraiture in the era of post-digital mediaExtends the domain of portraiture to include not just painting, photography, and film but also ethography, literature, music video, social media, digital apps and algorithmic facial recognitionIncludes case studies from France, Italy, Germany, Finland, Russia, Mexico, Argentina, South Korea, Canada, and the United StatesPresents 'the portrait' as a media-theoretical concept and traces its practices within diverse sets of material, technological, and media networksBrings together both internationally renowned and emerging scholars across a range of disciplines, including: media studies, art history, critical theory, science and technology studies, and medical humanities, and animal studiesAs technological practices of the portrait have proliferated across the media ecosystem in recent years, this canonical genre of identity and representation has provoked a new wave of scholarly attention and artistic experimentation.This collection of essays explores the stakes of that seemingly anachronistic comeback. It reframes portraiture as a set of cultural techniques for the dynamic performance of subjects entangled in specific medial configurations. Tracking the portrait across a wide range of media - literature, drawings, paintings, grave stelae, films, gallery installations, contemporary music videos, deep fakes, social media, video games and immersive VR interfaces - the contributors interrogate and transform persistent metaphysical and anthropocentric assumptions inherited from traditional notions of portraiture.

This collection of essays explores the stakes of that seemingly anachronistic comeback. It reframes portraiture as a set of cultural techniques for the dynamic performance of subjects entangled in specific medial configurations. Tracking the portrait across a wide range of media literature, drawings, paintings, grave stelae, films, gallery installations, contemporary music videos, deep fakes, social media, video games and immersive VR interfaces the contributors interrogate and transform persistent metaphysical and anthropocentric assumptions inherited from traditional notions of portraiture.As technological practices of the portrait have proliferated across the media ecosystem in recent years, this canonical genre of identity and representation has provoked a new wave of scholarly attention and artistic experimentation.

What will wireless media be like in the future? How might they change people and societies? Will the future differ significantly from the past? Wireless Futures argues that meaningful answers to these century-old questions depend equally on markets, technical limits, and sociotechnical imaginaries of media change. Before wireless came to mean 'Wi-Fi,' before 'the wireless' meant 'radio,' even before the first trials in radiotelegraphy, it was a central object of financial and theoretical speculation. Wireless Futures unpacks the speculative media question for the case of German modernity. Interrogating the materiality, temporality, and contingency of wireless, this critical project contributes to media philosophy, modernism & modernity studies, and German literary & cultural studies. Wireless Futures models an approach to speculative media based on testing out the limits of media knowledge and questioning the limits of limit-thinking. It shows how the present continuously remakes connections between the past.

What will wireless media be like in the future? How might they change people and societies? Will the future differ significantly from the past? Wireless Futures argues that meaningful answers to these century-old questions depend equally on markets, technical limits, and sociotechnical imaginaries of media change. Before wireless came to mean 'Wi-Fi,' before 'the wireless' meant 'radio,' even before the first trials in radiotelegraphy, it was a central object of financial and theoretical speculation. Wireless Futures unpacks the speculative media question for the case of German modernity. Interrogating the materiality, temporality, and contingency of wireless, this critical project contributes to media philosophy, modernism & modernity studies, and German literary & cultural studies. Wireless Futures models an approach to speculative media based on testing out the limits of media knowledge and questioning the limits of limit-thinking. It shows how the present continuously remakes connections between the past.

What will wireless media be like in the future? How might they change people and societies? Will the future differ significantly from the past? Wireless Futures argues that meaningful answers to these century-old questions depend equally on markets, technical limits, and sociotechnical imaginaries of media change. Before wireless came to mean 'Wi-Fi,' before 'the wireless' meant 'radio,' even before the first trials in radiotelegraphy, it was a central object of financial and theoretical speculation. Wireless Futures unpacks the speculative media question for the case of German modernity. Interrogating the materiality, temporality, and contingency of wireless, this critical project contributes to media philosophy, modernism & modernity studies, and German literary & cultural studies. Wireless Futures models an approach to speculative media based on testing out the limits of media knowledge and questioning the limits of limit-thinking. It shows how the present continuously remakes connections between the past.

The precarious balance of power held in place during the Cold War structured not only global geopolitics but the experience of reality itself for populations across the world. In the increasingly unpredictable multipolar world of the twenty-first century, how have conceptions of time and history forged in the Cold War come to shape and trouble our understanding of the present?Building on the previous collection Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics (EUP, 2016) but extending further beyond the U.S.-Soviet binary and focusing in particular on questions of history, temporality, agency and representation, this new collection gathers scholars and artists who investigate the ways in which the contemporary world continues to be shaped by ideas, values and practices that had been codified, intensified and institutionalised during the decades of the Cold War.

A cultural and historical philosophy of fashion in economic and social life from the 1830s to the present dayUlrich Lehmann brings together methods and ideas from social sciences and material production to offer a new political reading of fashion in today's post-democracy. Accessing rare source material across a wide range of European languages and cultures, he offers insight into new working structures in the manufacture of garments and textiles. Reinvigorates materialism as a critical approach to analysing economics, society and media through the thematic focus on fashion as the economically and culturally dominant sector within post-industrial societiesCase studies include the male suit in Alfred Hitchcock's film 'North by Northwest' (1959), the revolutionary production methods in the work of Carol Christian Poell and the innovative textile manufacture of Bonotto in Molvena, north-east ItalyRedirects fashion theory toward materiality and materialism from previous art-historical and social-anthropological approachesExposes the need critically to engage with fashion production, away from the exclusive reading of fashion through its media representationExtends the discussion of fashion production from aspects of labour conditions and sustainability to the materialist critique of the fashion system

From futures research, pattern recognition algorithms, nuclear waste disposal and surveillance technologies, to smart weapons systems, contemporary fiction and art, this book shows that we are now living in a world imagined and engineered during the Cold War. Drawing on theorists such as Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Friedrich Kittler, Michel Serres, Peter Sloterdijk, Carl Schmitt, Bernard Stiegler and Paul Virilio this collection makes connections between Cold War material and conceptual technologies, as they relate to the arts, society and culture.

The first book to look critically at digital technologies and the role they play within queer lives in contemporary IndiaThis pioneering interdisciplinary collection works across mainstream and alternative spaces such as Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Grindr and gay men's health websites. These digital platforms are then situated within the contemporary socio-political conjuncture in India, offering a way of understanding queerness and Indian-ness in contemporary India.Queering in this book does not simply refer to a sexual category rather queerness is a mode of dispossession through which certain bodies are rendered as bodies marked for discipline and regulation. This book takes on diverse strands of queer theory in order to name the ways neoliberalism, nationalism, digital technologies, and movements for queer rights converge with each other within present day India. This analytical approach to queerness in India is the first of its kind and the result is a pioneering interdisciplinary collection.Key FeaturesTakes on diverse strands of queer theory to show where neoliberalism, nationalism, digital technologies and movements for queer rights converge in present-day IndiaIntegrates academic pieces with activist and practitioner narrativesLooks at sexualised online communities: their aims, compositions and potentialitiesDiscusses hook-up apps and social media, and how institutions use them to control, discipline and repressEngages with new forms of queer politics, feminist politics and online activismContributorsNiharika Banerjea, Ambedkar University, New Delhi, IndiaAniruddha Dutta, University of Iowa, USAAmit S. Rai, Queen Mary, University of London, UKJack Harrison-Quintana, independent researcher and Director of Grindr for Equality, USARadhika Gajjala, Bowling Green State University, Ohio, USARahul Gairola, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, IndiaKareem Khubchandani, Tufts University, USAIla Nagar, Ohio State University, USARohit K Dasgupta, Loughbrough University, UKPawan Singh, University of California San Diego, USASneha Krishnan, St John's College, University of Oxford, UKDebanuj DasGupta, University of Connecticut, USAInshah Malik, recently Yale University, USA

Ashley Woodward demonstrates what a new generation of scholars are just discovering: that Lyotard’s incisive work is essential for current debates in the humanities. Lyotard’s ideas about the arts and the confrontations between humanist traditions and cutting-edge sciences and technologies are today known as ‘posthumanism’. Woodward presents a series of studies to explain Lyotard’s specific interventions in information theory, new media arts and the changing nature of the human. He assesses their relevance and impact in relation to a number of important contemporary thinkers including Bernard Stiegler, Luciano Floridi, Quentin Meillassoux and Paul Virilio.

John Armitage and Joanne Roberts present a groundbreaking examination of the relations between historical and, crucially, contemporary ideas of luxury. This volume gives you a technocultural focus on aesthetic, design-led and media practice with key case studies.

Connects Cold War material and conceptual technologies to 21st century arts, society and cultureFrom futures research, pattern recognition algorithms, nuclear waste disposal and surveillance technologies, to smart weapons systems, contemporary fiction and art, this book shows that we live in a world imagined and engineered during the Cold War. Key FeaturesMakes connections between Cold War material and conceptual technologies, as they relate to the arts, society and cultureDraws on theorists such as Paul Virilio, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, Friedrich Kittler, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Michel Serres, Bernard Stiegler, Peter Sloterdijk and Carl SchmittThe contributors include leading humanities and critical military studies scholars, and practising artists, writers, curators and broadcastersContributorsJohn Beck is Professor of Modern Literature and Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster, London.Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Arts and Politics, Director of Research and Co-Director of the Winchester Centre for Global Futures in Art Design & Media at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. Ele Carpenter is a curator and writer, and senior lecturer in MFA Curating and convenor of the Nuclear Culture Research Group at Goldsmiths, University of London. Fabienne Collignon is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at the University of Sheffield. Mark Cote is Lecturer in Digital Culture and Society at King's College London.Daniel Grausam is Lecturer in the Department of English at Durham University. Ken Hollings is a writer and broadcaster, visiting tutor at the Royal College of Art and Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design. Adrian Mackenzie is Professor of Technological Cultures at Lancaster University. Jussi Parikka is a media theorist and writer, and Professor of Technological Culture and Aesthetics at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. John W. P. Phillips is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the National University of Singapore. Adam Piette is Professor of English at the University of Sheffield. James Purdon is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of St Andrews.Aura Satz is an artist and Moving Image Tutor at the Royal College of Art.Neal White is an artist and Professor of Media Art at the Faculty of Media and Communication, Bournemouth University.

Rhythm and Critique presents twelve new essays from a range of specialists to define, contextualise and challenge the concepts of rhythm and rhythmanalysis, and includes newly translated materials from Rudolf Laban and Henri Meschonnic. The book begins with a genealogy of rhythm as it occurs through critical theory literatures of the twentieth century, enabling the reader to situate philosophical and contemporary readings that further define rhythm as a critical term and mode of analysis.In placing emphasis upon rhythm as cultural technique and locating its significance for the analysis of the everyday, the book offers a clear and engaging overview of a fascinating theoretical field. It helps map a range of histories and approaches and considers how rhythm might now emerge more forcefully and pertinently as a critical framing for contemporary culture.

This pioneering interdisciplinary collection works across mainstream and alternative spaces such as Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Grindr and gay men’s health websites. These digital platforms are then situated within the contemporary socio-political conjuncture in India, offering a way of understanding queerness and Indian-ness in contemporary India. 'Queering' in this book does not simply refer to a sexual category rather queerness is a mode of dispossession through which certain bodies are rendered as bodies marked for discipline and regulation. This book takes on diverse strands of queer theory in order to name the ways neoliberalism, nationalism, digital technologies, and movements for queer rights converge with each other within present day India. This analytical approach to queerness in India is the first of its kind and the result is a pioneering interdisciplinary collection.

Ulrich Lehmann brings together methods and ideas from social sciences and material production to offer a new political reading of fashion in today’s post-democracy. Accessing rare source material across a wide range of European languages and cultures, he offers insight into new working structures in the manufacture of garments and textiles. Case studies include the male suit in Alfred Hitchcock’s film North by Northwest (1959), the revolutionary production methods in the work of Carol Christian Poell and the innovative textile manufacture of Bonotto in Molvena (north-East Italy)

These essays address the epistemological, aesthetic and political implications of scale in both scholarly and artistic work. From the mass image in vernacular culture to transformations of photography in contexts of big data and artificial intelligence, they explore the massification of photography.

Konrad Wojnowski argues that the probabilistic revolution, while recognized and investigated by historians of science, has been largely overlooked in the field of art. He shows that the idea that one can perceive and comprehend reality in terms of shifting probabilities was clearly present in the work of many avant-garde artists working in Europe and North America. Exploring the probabilistic aspects of the avant-garde allows him to establish a dialogue between scientific and artistic forms of knowledge. This is particularly important now, as we become surrounded by probabilistic AIs and while the very nature of cognition is being reinterpreted as inherently probabilistic.

Konrad Wojnowski argues that the probabilistic revolution, while recognized and investigated by historians of science, has been largely overlooked in the field of art. He shows that the idea that one can perceive and comprehend reality in terms of shifting probabilities was clearly present in the work of many avant-garde artists working in Europe and North America. Exploring the probabilistic aspects of the avant-garde allows him to establish a dialogue between scientific and artistic forms of knowledge. This is particularly important now, as we become surrounded by probabilistic AIs and while the very nature of cognition is being reinterpreted as inherently probabilistic.