Digital Media Studies

This book is the product of an extended investigation of the origins of "digitization" and its effects on a culture primarily based on the deep relationship between print (and other forms of technical reproduction) and intellectual property laws. This relationship has long been grounded in the common sense assumption that pure content can have infinite material actualizations without changing the content in any way. That is, a piece of text or music remained a piece of text or music, regardless of its medium. Western culture, a culture of books, has been built upon this belief. This is most apparent during the 20th century in terms of editorial, film and recorded music industries and their approach to publishing (i.e., the technical reproduction of text, image and sound) and the enforcement of "book-based" copyright conventions. This model has been replicated in other cultural industries such as music, film and videogames. Digital technologies in contemporary culture have undermined and, at the same time, strengthened such practices, provoking an unprecedented quarrel over the possession of, and access to, cultural products. The book confronts this paradoxical situation, that is, the tension between conceiving cultural objects as finite and discrete objects that can be "owned" and the theoretically infinite possibilities of replication and sharing made possible by digitalization--by way of focusing on the culturally fascinating event surrounding the release of Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) in December 1992.  This admittedly peculiar piece of work by writer William Gibson, artist Dennis Ashbaugh, editor Kevin Begos and a number of additional collaborators, was both an art object with erasable images and a diskette. The latter included a software program displaying a digital poem that allowed only one reading. Such a piece -even over twenty years on--poses a challenge to a range of assumptions about literature, art, meaning, preservation, archiving and books, as well as what all this means for future thinking about these objects and practices in the age of digital technologies and new media. In order to show the importance of Agrippa for digital culture studies, the book will include a discussion of the origins of the artistic project itself and how it bespeaks a series of cultural, artistic and technical genealogies. It will also shed light on the frequently understated importance of the materiality of digital culture and the naïve and biased investment in the "technological sublime" currently underway in contemporary society. In response, this proposed book develops a critique of digital technology and its alleged neutrality. The genealogies that converge in Agrippa imply looking into the history of digitalization and its effects on the perception of both cultural heritage and cultural production. But they also imply looking into the history of books and a number of concepts often taken for granted by scholarly approaches, such as the importance of text over the meaningful surface (or storage) in which they are inscribed. The research reported in this book will also help to unveil the technological and artistic developments of the time in which this peculiar piece of work appeared, such as Michael Joyce´s hyper-novel afternoon: a story and text-based computer games. This extended discussion shows how Agrippa anticipated a number of contemporary phenomena associated with digital culture such as piracy, leaks, remixes, memes, zombie editions of classic novels, different forms of digitalization of analog content and more. Furthermore, Agrippa also forces us to rethink the concept of content itself, a concept that rules the way in which culture is produced, received and preserved today.
Endorsements for Agustin Berti´s From Digital to Analog: "From Digital to Analog engagingly reveals the hidden significance of anomalous, unusual digital objects such as the early electronic literary project, Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), and of diverse practices of piracy, hacking, bootlegging, remixing, e-poetry, digital memes, leaks, clones, and zombies to understanding the strange life of digital objects and the current cultural formations they unsettle, redouble, and preserve. Its roundabout, thick description of the backalleys of digital culture and critical pursuit of what may appear to be momentary aberrations to acceptable, standardized digital reproduction effectively mobilizes recent philosophy of technology to unpack a series of persistent, unavoidable questions digital objects pose today. The book sheds crucial light on seemingly contradictory traits, such as digital objects´ notoriously immaterial materiality, and underscores the pressing -at once technical, aesthetic, political, and economic- importance of confronting this unacknowledged, underexplored complexity. Recontextualizing and rejecting predominant ideologies of the digital as "pure content" by reading them through and against the oblique shadows, contours, and diffractions provided by stray digital literary experiments and other unexpected digital forays, From Digital to Analog reasserts and significantly expands the value of reading electronic literature, print and digital hybrids, and other variously experimental digital practices with full awareness of their critical contributions to digital cultures face to face with their technicity."
Laura Shackelford, Associate Professor of English, Rochester Institute of Technology / Author of Tactics of the Human: Experimental Technics in American Fiction
"From Digital to Analog surpasses expectations as a critical reading device. It comes with a spectrum of well-chosen case studies running from the pre-digital to the digital culture, and authoritative discussions on such topics as the materiality -and its degradation from the originals- of literary, artistic, game works, the analog/digital divide, hybrid (re)production and circulation, opacity and transparency of technology in a genealogical perspective, crafting and cracking codes (the "evasive ontology [and ethics] of copies"), copy rights and piracy, and the ever changing modalities of their conflicting preservation. It is a book that will become indispensable for the study of what the author states as the grounding of codes, and will certainly entice its readers to rethink their assumptions when exposed to our mutating activity of encoding/inscribing/recording and transmitting culture in all its institutionalized/professionalized areas, including the tech industry. Highly recommended for students, scholars, and anyone who wants to know more about certain compelling issues within our digital humanities multiverse."
Luis Correa-Diaz, University of Georgia/Academia Chilena de la Lengua

Abstract
The article introduces the NECSUS Spring 2020 Special Section #Intelligence (https://necsus-ejms.org/portfolio/spring-2020_intelligence/#toggle-id-2), that includes seven essays addressing the impact of Artificial Intelligence on cinema and media from a cultural perspective. More particularly, three levels of pertinence are focused. At a first level, selected papers analyse several representations of non-human intelligence confronted with human one, as provided by film, television series, and video games. At a second level, a set of mutual functioning dynamic between A.I. and the media are identified and scrutinised. Finally, the contributing authors consider how A.I. algorithms lead cinema and media theory to deeply rethink its assumptions about creating and viewing moving images.

The media is the most omnipresent and powerful force due to its influences on how we perceive at men and women today. The depiction of Black athletes by the visual media (film, television, talk shows) as well as the printed media (news, sports magazines, internet blogs) is therefore crucial to examine. In the printed media, Black athletes receive more negative coverage in comparison to White athletes. The effect of negative coverage is that, it puts the athletes’ careers under constant surveillance that robs them of living their lives. In film and television, Black athletes are depicted as more violent people who are self-centered, selfish people and have sublime mental capabilities in comparison to their White counterparts. The effect of these characterizations by the visual media is that they reinforce negative stereotypes about the Black race. My concern is that since many Black athletes are role models in society, the caliber of LeBron James, Tiger Woods, and Colin Kaepernick; therefore, it is an urgent necessity not just to examine how the media talks about them but, to also understand how their stories are told in film and acted out in television.

Mary Foltz: "With passion and insight, Tierney re-evaluates the decade as one in which literary and other authors challenge the metaphors used in boosterism for technological advancement... Unable to do justice to this magnificent monograph here, it will have to suffice to say that Tierney's DISMANTLINGS is one of the most important books of the year."

This is a statement at the broadest level of abstraction of my basic concerns and research interests. The particular objects and practices I study are not mentioned except in passing. It is a revised version of the conclusion of the thesis I wrote as a student at Dartmouth College in 2020.

يأتي هذا الدليل استجابة للواقع الإعلامي الحالي مع انتشار الميديا الاجتماعيّة وتعدّد وسائط التواصل، حيث اجتاحت عاصفة من الأخبار الزائفة هذه الوسائل الحديثة، لتنتقل فيما بعد إلى وسائل الإعلام التقليديّة. ففي عصر اندماج وسائل الإعلام، تتجاوز المعلومة اليوم، العالم الافتراضي لتنتشر بسرعة على أرض الواقع.

وقد اكتسحت الأزمة الوبائية العالم بأسره وحبست أنفاسه، وشلّت مختلف مناحي الحياة، ورافقها الانتشار السريع للمعلومة في عصر التكنولوجيا الرقميّة، ممّا جعل مصداقيّة وسائل الإعلام التقليدية محلّ نقاش عامّ. فلقد ساهم الوضع الوبائيّ في انتشار الأخبار الزائفة، إلى درجة أنّ البعض اعتبر فيروس كورونا سلاحًا بيولوجيًا تمّ تطويره بأحد المختبرات البحثيّة الصينيّة أو هو شيء اختلقه بيل غيتس، مؤسس شركة مايكروسوفت، من أجل الاستفادة من تسويق اللقاح المحتمل. وليست هذه الأخبار إلاّ جزءا من وباء المعلومات الذي نعيش على وقعه منذ ظهور هذا الفيروس. وعادة ما يساهم المؤثّرون في الرأي العامّ على غرار السياسيين ورجال الأعمال والتجّار، في الترويج للأخبار الزائفة من أجل الدفاع عن مصالحهم. وقد يتحوّل الصحفيّ أيضا إلى عنصر فاعل في عمليّة الترويج للأخبار الزائفة، وهو ما من شأنه أن يمسّ من مصداقية الوسيلة الإعلاميّة الـتي يعمل بها، أمام الرأي العامّ. فكثيرا ما تبثّ وسائل الإعلام العديد من الأخبار الزائفة عن قصد أو عن غير قصد. وهو ما يدفعنا من خلال هذا الدليل إلى النظر في مدى مسؤولية الصحفي لمجابهة الأخبار الزائفة سواء من الناحية الأخلاقيّة أو من الناحية القانونيّة.

ومن هذا المنظور، فإنّ هذا الدليل موجّه إلى كلّ الفاعلين في مجال الإعلام والراغبين في التمكّن من الخطوات الأساسيّة والأدوات والتقنيات الضروريّة للتحقّق من المعلومات قبل نشرها، على غرار أساتذة وطلبة الإعلام والصحفيين المهنيّين ونشطاء الميديا الاجتماعية والمواطنين، حتّى يساعدهم على بناء قدراتهم في هذا المجال. 

وينقسم هذا الدليل إلى أربعة فصول تجمع بين النظريّ والتطبيقيّ. ويتخلّل كلّ فصل جملة من التمارين التطبيقية التي يمارس من خلالها القارئ المكتسبات النظريّة. كما يطمح هذا الدليل إلى تنمية قدرات الصحفيين وتعزيز غرف الأخبار من أجل محاربة الأخبار الزائفة، ولم لا تكوين فريق خاصّ بمقاومة الأخبار الزائفة في كلّ مؤسسة إعلامية.

الموقع:    tunisia-fact-checking.com

صفحة الفايسبوك  الخاصة بهذا الدليل:

https://www.facebook.com/tunisiaFactChecking/

This paper introduces the theme of the inaugural issue of the Digital Culture & Society journal: “Digital Material/ism”. It provides a genealogy and an overview of recent (neo)materialist approaches to media research. Such approaches have emphasised the relevance of materiality and the non-human, also with regards to inorganic matter. The introduction shows that new technological developments and imaginaries come along with digital media research which is increasingly concerned with questions of materiality. This trend can be seen as reaction to the myth of immateriality which is promoted in commercial contexts and (critically) addressed in art as well as popular culture.

En esta investigación se desarrolló una aproximación al estudio de los
videojuegos de comunicación de la ciencia, utilizando como marco de análisis la coherencia y cohesión entre los distintos elementos del juego y su propósito: comunicar evolución por
selección natural.

The paper attempts to critically understand the relationship between religion and technology by examining how religion and religious practices negotiate, appropriate and has reworked its relationship with digital technologies. In other words, the paper attempts to unpack how Hindu religion and digital technology intersect and accommodate each other. The study is based on the WhatsApp group formed by the Bengali Hindu community, mostly educated middle-class, living in Delhi, India to celebrate various Bengali Hindu religious festivals. It explores how they actively engage using digital and mobile technologies to create a cohesive community and shared Bengali Hindu identities through the celebration of the religious festivals. On the other, it delves into how these ‘constant’ interactions in WhatsApp lead to immediate and personal experiences that overlap and are enmeshed with their offline everyday experiences and religious practices. Thus, the paper argues for and highlights the inter-connections and blurring of boundaries between the real and the digital, local and translocal, the sacred and the secular.

The aim of this article is to study and explore the cyborg as a metaphoric figure, as well as its semiotic correlation with the contemporary subject, an entity moving through a society developed by digital technologies. The cyborg paradigm is formed by the unification of existing dichotomies between human-machine, nature-culture, and science-magic, disrupting transcendental dualisms and fixed categories. These phenomena can be understood through the concept of intertextuality developed first by Julia Kristeva and then by Roland Barthes, both using the cyborg body as a textual construction, and through Donna Haraway’s theory, which understands cyborgs as an indexical consequence of digital mediation in human society.

Per un prolungato periodo la rivoluzione digitale è risultata agevolmente leggibile secondo l’ormai classico paradigma della “esteriorizzazione”, che interpreta l’evoluzione della nostra specie come estensione mediante la tecnologia delle capacità umane, a partire da quelle corporee. L’avvento delle wearable technologies ha però reso più complesse le dinamiche in atto e soprattutto quelle che si annunciano a venire. Se infatti alcune di esse confermano la tendenza alla esteriorizzazione di quello che viene ormai opportunamente caratterizzato come il “sistema corpo-cervello” (il passaggio degli schermi dallo statuto di “medium” a quello di “tecno-protesi corporea” ne è un esempio), altre segnalano piuttosto la tendenza, inversa ma non opposta, all’incorporamento delle protesi, ancora una volta finalizzato ad aumentare certe capacità umane.
Il presente contributo intende invece soffermarsi sulla tendenza – molto meno evidente e dunque ancora più insidiosa di quella appena descritta – all’uso, via via più invasivo e condizionante, di certi organi del nostro corpo (le retine o la pelle, per esempio) come componenti aggiunte di artefatti tecnologici, più precisamente digitali, virtualmente connessi. Quando sono sottoposti a tali usi, questi organi sembrano potersi qualificare insomma come “quasi-protesi” di quegli artefatti, dove il prefisso “quasi” vuole designare non già una proprietà costante, ma un modo temporaneo d’esistenza degli organi in questione, di cui si tratterà di precisare i caratteri e lo statuto.

Este ensayo sobre los sentidos del silencio se concibe como una reflexión
epistemológica en torno a la pregunta: ¿qué es comunicación? El objetivo
es plantear una base que permita abordar los fenómenos digitales desde
una perspectiva comprensiva, sin el pre-juicio de la crítica común. Se
parte de una tesis central: el silencio constituye el ethos del lenguaje, el
silencio es la condición ontológica de la palabra. La comprensión del silencio
nos remite a la naturaleza lingüística de los seres humanos. Si callar
manifiesta un alto en el diálogo, el soliloquio evoca la perennidad del
pensamiento y la imaginación en los seres humanos; la imposibilidad de
vivir sin palabra. La reflexión que se plantea se circunscribe a la condición
hablante (dialógica e imaginativa) del ser humano en tiempos de lo digital.
Se plantea que la virtualización de la vida cotidiana es una evidencia del
silencio discursivo que habita en todos y ahora se comparte, se irrumpe,
se invade. La virtualidad constituye un espacio donde por primera vez
nuestra imaginación (véase phantasia) se pone en sintonía y se visibiliza
–tan es así que hoy en día las discusiones sobre el derecho a la privacidad,
el anonimato y la censura son parte de las agendas internacionales–.
La virtualidad constituye un espacio de extensión para el imaginario
social. Internet es una “vitrina de lo social”, en la cual podemos observar
lo que somos, sin tapujos. Pensar en los sentidos del silencio en tiempos de lo
digital es pensar en una transfiguración humana sin precedentes que deriva
de la tecnología. Vivimos en una época silenciosa, ensimismados en un
mundo virtual donde la palabra es implosiva, donde el imaginario impera
y su exposición produce múltiples encuentros y desencuentros. Bajo un
enfoque filosófico, se plantea que la causalidad y el uso de las tecnologías
digitales constituyen una clave para comprender lo humano que vislumbra
y justifica la emergencia de los Estudios Digitales. Con esto se abunda en
la relación existencial de lo humano frente a la tecnología, y en los alcances
sociales de lo que llamo el destape imaginario del presente.

Over the past decade, a growing body of scholarship in media studies and other cognate disciplines has focused our attention on the social, material, cultural, and political dimensions of the infrastructures that undergird and sustain media and communication networks and cultures across the world. This infrastructural turn assumes greater significance in relation to digital media and in particular, the influence that digital platforms have come to wield. Having 'disrupted' many sectors of social, political, and economic life, many of the most widely used digital platforms now seem to operate as infrastructures themselves. This special issue explores how an infrastructural perspective reframes the study of digital platforms and allows us to pose questions of scale, labor, industry logics, policy and regulation, state power, cultural practices, and citizenship in relation to the routine, everyday uses of digital platforms. In this opening article, we offer a critical overview of media infrastructure studies and situate the study of digital infrastructures and platforms within broader scholarly and public debates on the history and political economy of media infrastructures. We also draw on the study of media industries and production cultures to make the case for an inter-medial and inter-sectoral approach to understanding the entanglements of digital platforms and infrastructures.

We are now entering an era where the human world assumes recognition of itself as data. Its basis for existence is becoming fully subordinated to the software processes that tabulate, index, and sort the relations entailed in making up what we perceive as reality. The acceleration of data threatens to relinquish ephemeral modes of representation to ceaseless processes of computation. This situation compels the human world to form relations with non-human agencies, to establish exchanges with the algorithms and other software processes that accelerate and intensify the possibility of its obsolescence in order to allow for a profound upgrade to our own ontological understanding to take precedent. Through a partial attunement to what is always already non-human in its form of mediation to a higher intelligence, we are able to rediscover the actual inner logic of the age of intelligent machines, as at once the reason of trauma and the instrument of catastrophe for a humanity still beholden to a linear process of rationality. Humanity now finds itself captive to pervasive institutionalised forms of violence whose force has everything to do with the aggressive pattern of economics in a neoliberal age, bound with an internet that has taken on a fourth dimension to generate consequence in the material world. This has allowed the internet to become thingly insofar as it will soon be understood not as an interface but as an environment. It thus takes on the ability to shape conditions beyond the imaginary and embed itself into materiality in a variety of ways that benefit from the demise of state parameters and the enlivenment of a fluidity of information able to migrate across time and space. All previous forms of media suffered from imprisonment within a screen, which limited their ability to function as the foundation for alternative networks, or as nodes of multilayered connectivity. The promise of a universal connectivity through a perpetual summons of our inclinations brings forth nothing less than a new form of imperialism able to transform space into a sphere of liquidity, and complexity into a condition of movement. As labour precarity and labour migration becomes the normative situation of a disenfranchised humanity, so too does its acquiescence to a universal accessibility where individuals are continuously subject to digital interpolation, and as such their behaviours and movements are made available to generating exploitable forms of interest. The data created is thus credited to others and interpreted to advance interests of others; all in order to finance the states and corporations who control the means for making worlds we alone discover. The End of the Future conceives an understanding of the digital through its dynamic intersection with the advent and development of the nation-state, race, colonisation, navigational warfare, mercantilism and capitalism, and the mathematical sciences over some five centuries. Its task is to animate an understanding of the twenty-first century as an era where the screen has split off from itself and proliferated onto multiple surfaces, and as a consequence has allowed an inverted image of totalitarianism to flash up at this point in history, and be altered to support our present condition of binary apperception. It progresses through a recognition of a now atomised political power whose authority lies in the control not of the means of production, but of information, and thus, digital media now serves to legitimise and promote a customised micropolitics of identity management. On this new apostolate plane, it is possible to conceive a world in which each human soul is captured and reproduced as an autonomous individual bearing affects and identities. The digital infrastructure of the twenty-first century makes it possible for power to operate through an esoteric mathematical

Daniel Howe is an artist and critical technologist whose work explores the relationships between networks, language, and politics. His hybrid practice explores the impact of networked, computational technologies on human values such as diversity, privacy and freedom. He has been an open-source advocate and contributor to dozens of socially-engaged software projects over the past two decades. His outputs include software interventions, art installations, algorithmically-generated text and sound, and tools for artists. He currently resides in Hong Kong where he teaches at the School of Creative Media.

The MoRE Museum (the Museum of Refused and Unrealized Art Projects) is a digital museum that collects, preserves and exhibits refused and unfinished art projects of the 20 and 21st centuries. The MoRE Museum, born in 2012, from the collaboration of two Italian researchers, Elisabetta Modena and Marco Scotti,​ was recently awarded the Italian prize I8 for independent art spaces and was “exhibited” at the MAXXI in Rome. In the wake of the virtualisation process, which has led to the advent of virtual works and exhibitions (The Gallery of Lost Art, Tate Gallery, London, 2012), the MoRE Museum is not the digital platform of a real museum. On the contrary, it is a virtual institution which has appropriated the digital language to make it a heuristic device.
By insisting on the hybridisation of the museum process, generated by the virtual nature of this museum, the paper aims at a critical rereading of some key concepts: archives, projects, artwork, collection, in a contemporary, digital perspective. From the ontological change experienced by the idea of project (which loses its nature of preparatory work to acquire the very status of artwork), we will go on to question the virtual modalities of spectatorship apprehension and experience, until the point of probing the very condition of this museum, exhibited as artwork, inside another museum.

Borders are largely assumed to create lines of division that fragment people and space and at times closing all possible forms of communication and encounters.  But with the emergence of new media, particularly social media the borders have not only become porous but have become increasingly an interface, facilitating communication across the borders which was earlier not possible. The paper closely examine the emergence of this interface and how transnational identities are created and negotiated with, within the context of these blurring borders. Set in the backdrop of India and Pakistan the paper looks into how everyday conversations over social media is creating new trans-national identities, a larger South Asian identity on the basis of a shared cultures and histories. The paper explores the broader landscape of shifting identity markers through an analysis of the specific construction of a South Asian female tennis star, Sania Mirza. (co written with Shekh Moinuddin)

While the making of the bricoleur, who uses what he has close at hand, involves deeply “undoing” the “project” of the engineer, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss, that of the tactician, described by Michel de Certeau, rather encourages a “redo it your way”, that deviates an expected use. Is it a matter of “rethinking the making” or “diverting the use”, or a combination of the two? A combination of these two gestures – (un/re)do – should be promoted, as is already at work in eco-design. Faced with the current ecological challenges, the inscription in the natural environment of a “concrete thought”, in the anthropological sense, and the deconstruction of the technological environment initiated by the critical hackers – like Benjamin Gaulon, mentioned here – should cross-pollinate.

This essay evaluates visualization practices in data science and the digital humanities by drawing on the resources of the environmental humanities. I show how certain conceptions of ecology and natural systems have provided constitutive metaphors in the design and theorization of data visualization practices. This genealogy of the visual culture of data science began with the professionalization of graph theory in the nineteenth century. Ecological analogies were also a prominent feature in twentieth-century computer and network design, and they have continued to inform many of the layout algorithms that generate present-day data visualizations. This history of ideas and practices shows how ecological metaphors have naturalized information systems in ways that obscure the material and social realities of those systems.

El presente artículo de reflexión estudia el caso de los videoconciertos digitales de la música champeta divulgados en plataformas de streaming para entender mejor sus dimensiones archivística y estética, a la luz de los procesos de construcción de la memoria en el marco de una práctica musical tan controvertida como representativa de una identidad afrocaribeña colombiana como lo es la champeta. Se concluye que los archivos digitales informales reflejan narrativas alternas sobre la identidad cultural que contrastan con los discursos oficiales del Patrimonio Cultural Inmaterial (PCI) y se invita a reflexionar acerca de la utilidad de los recursos digitales populares en el marco de las instituciones de gestión cultural desde una perspectiva transdisciplinar.

Recorded as a hoax – already performed on stage – by a well-known professional humorist, the video that makes fun of generational misunderstandings (grandpa/grandson) and sounds-like words (Mein Kampf/Minecraft) quickly spread on the internet and turns out to be viral. Despite some factual elements that undoubtedly show that the book was actually not Mein Kampf – but a bad quality photocopy of the front cover pasted on another book – many people whether shocked or amused start to take the video for granted. Indeed, as the video gradually spread away from its original source and was relayed on the internet through social networks and websites, including some cultural news media and far-right organizations, more and more people were prone to believe it was authentic. Comments published on YouTube under the video also confirm that many people were fooled.

Personal data is highly vulnerable to security exploits, spurring moves to lock it down through encryption, to cryptographically 'cloud' it. But personal data is also highly valuable to corporations and states, triggering moves to unlock its insights by relocating it in the cloud. We characterise this twinned condition as 'clouded data'. Clouded data constructs a political and technological notion of privacy that operates through the intersection of corporate power, computational resources and the ability to obfuscate, gain insights from and valorise a dependency between public and private. First, we survey prominent clouded data approaches (blockchain, multiparty computation, differential privacy, and homomorphic encryption), suggesting their particular affordances produce distinctive versions of privacy. Next, we perform two notional code-based experiments using synthetic datasets. In the field of health, we submit a patient's blood pressure to a notional cloud-based diagnostics service; in education, we construct a student survey that enables aggregate reporting without individual identification. We argue that these technical affordances legitimate new political claims to capture and commodify personal data. The final section broadens the discussion to consider the political force of clouded data and its reconstitution of traditional notions such as the public and the private.

As Natural User Interfaces (NUIs) grow increasingly common, this article investi- gates what they might do with/for writing and say about the teaching of writing. Specifically, I review three NUI writing projects, critically examining the rhetorical features of the projects and investigating the relationship between NUIs and Graphic User Interfaces (GUIs). Ultimately, I argue that NUIs are not “natural” interfaces but are as historically and socially grounded as GUIs; even so, NUIs hold the potential to invigorate a critical and activities-based pedagogy, placing new focus on socially constructed meanings, material interactions, and embodied performances.

Digital media literacy is a critical component of civil society in the 21st Century. Recent political uprisings with citizen protest in Tunisia, Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries reflect a new level of mass mobilization using mobile and social media. These media are shaping domestic and foreign political agendas, affect our privacy and security, and are changing the nature of individual autonomy and freedom. We have entered an information era in which the teaching and learning of these media should be critically embedded in the educational program, with careful consideration given to ethical, privacy, and security concerns. The author addresses important considerations and present strategies for mastering the use of new media using learner centered approaches.

EN
Using the example of Deep Down Tidal (2017) by Tabita Rezaire, the article explores the question of the extent to which post-African futures are articulated in this aesthetic of digital media art, which can be understood as a counter-future in the sense of decoloniality. At the center of this decolonial counter-future are forms of sociality that connect to certain historical African cultures of the digital. The post-African media aesthetic of the future is derived from an understanding of technology that has always included sociality and spirituality coupled with nature. At the same time, it becomes clear that due to this understanding, the decolonial concept of healing is configured differently: Healing is thus asserted as the digital code of post-African futures that allows for reprogramming the present as a counter-future and is not to be confused with holism. Healing is, instead, a rifted algorithm.

GER
Am Beispiel von Deep Down Tidal (2017) von Tabita Rezaire geht der Beitrag der Frage nach, inwiefern sich in dieser Ästhetik der digitalen Medienkunst postafrikanische Zukünfte artikulieren, die als Gegenzukunft im Sinne von Dekolonialität verstanden werden können. Im Zentrum dieser dekolonialen Gegenzukunft stehen Formen der Sozialität, die an bestimmte historische afrikanische Kulturen des Digitalen anschließen. Die gegenzukünftige Medienästhetik Post-Afrikas leitet sich danach aus einem Technologie-Verständnis ab, das mit Natur verkoppelte Sozialität und Spiritualität immer schon inkludiert. Gleichzeitig wird deutlich, dass sich aufgrund dieses Verständnisses der dekoloniale Begriff von Heilung anders konfiguriert: Heilung wird folglich als der digitale Code postafrikanischer Zukünfte behauptet, der als Gegenzukunft Gegenwart umzuprogrammieren erlaubt und dabei nicht mit Holismus zu verwechseln ist. Healing is, instead, a rifted algorithm.

The latest stage of the Anthropocene is its cosmopolitanization: the problems and risks it faces are transnational and require what German sociologist Ulrich Beck termed a "cosmopolitan outlook" (Beck 2006, 18): The national outlook, together with its associated grammar is becoming false. It fails to grasp that political, economic and cultural action and their consequences know no borders; indeed it is completely blind to the fact that, even when nationalism is reignited by the collision with globality, this can only be conceptualized in the form of cosmopolitan perspective. (Ibid.

This article puts forward an argument for the importance of HIV/AIDS to digital studies, focusing, focusing on the North American context. Tracing conjoined histories and presents makes clear that an HIV-informed approach to digital media studies offers methods for attuning to marginalized media practices that should be central to interrogating the politics, relations, and aesthetics of digital media. Artist Kia LaBeija’s #Undetectable (2016) is closely analyzed in order to explicate some of HIV’s potential resonances for digital studies, including viral media and justice-based responses to surveillance. We then propose a methodological framework for centering HIV in understandings of three key concepts for the field: (1) networks; (2) social media and platforms; and, (3) digital history. We argue that HIV-positive users bring expertise to navigating digital infrastructures that can surveil and harm while also facilitating pleasure and connection. Such tension provides models of response that publics need to insist upon more just digital tools and structures for our unfolding present.

Imaginaires présents, numérique à venir : impensés et idéologies. Journée 2 :« Représentations et devenir de la sphère publique dans le “numérique” »
28 mai 2019
Université Jean Monnet, Saint-Étienne


La notion de « numérique » s’est imposée ces trente dernières années dans la sphère publique comme le lieu commun permettant d’évoquer à la fois les techniques de communication, le Web et les outils informatiques. Désormais intégrée au champ du design et des productions esthétiques, cette notion reste cependant ambiguë : l’infrastructure opaque des réseaux, l’incommensurabilité du nombre d’informations échangées, mais aussi la multiplicité des agents économiques et des utilisateurs qui la composent et l’administrent rendent l’exercice de représentation du « numérique » complexe. Tout en désignant un ensemble d’objets, le « numérique » contient une part d’imaginaire connue, exploitée, mais aussi tributaire d’un certain impensé.
Cette part d’imaginaire du « numérique », faite de mythes, de fantasmes, de discours, se matérialise et devient sensible dans des représentations gravitant autour des productions techniques qui transforment nos perceptions et notre conception du réel. Elle fonde donc des récits fabriqués, consciemment ou inconsciemment, qui façonnent des partis pris esthétiques, des habitudes et des interactions sociales. À la lumière de l’économie de marché numérique et de la critique de son idéologie, la notion d’« imaginaire » se révèle aussi comme opérant, sous de multiples formes, un recouvrement de la réalité des rapports réels de production. Pour certains analystes, elle devient un outil d’aveuglement qui participe à l’idéologie qu’elle construit. Considérée comme une notion floue dépourvue de rhétorique, elle ne semble pas moins donner un prétexte à l’économie numérique pour se soustraire à ses « épreuves de justifications politiques et éthiques » (Robert).
De prime abord, l’imaginaire que suscite l’informatique au milieu du XXe siècle semble peu compatible avec l’idée de sphère publique : le dispositif informatique est à l’époque perçu comme un instrument d’oppression des individus, produit dans un cadre technique bureaucratique isolé et insensible (Turner). Un imaginaire « numérique » compatible avec la sphère publique commence néanmoins à se diffuser lors de l’investissement des États occidentaux dans la recherche cybernétique au cours de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, et continue de se développer de la Guerre Froide à nos jours. La sphère publique, simultanément processus et espace (Fuchs), constituée de l’ensemble des interactions d’individus réunis autour d’enjeux d’intérêt commun, est utilisée comme caisse de résonnance de l’imaginaire « numérique ». Connectant la culture, l’économie et le politique, cette sphère publique, à l’instar de la « société civile » hégélienne, émerge de la simple organisation sociale, lorsque des individus agissent politiquement en commun pour favoriser leur existence dans un milieu, ce dernier se présentant de plus en plus comme infusé par le « numérique ».
L’idée de « système informatique » devient ainsi socialement acceptable dès la fin des années 1940 avec l’émergence de la cybernétique, promue par le mathématicien Norbert Wiener. Cette nouvelle discipline se développe en effet dans un contexte institutionnel singulier, où des chercheurs de cultures différentes travaillent en réseaux par le biais d’outils collaboratifs.
La métaphore sociotechnique computationnelle (l’idée que l’humain est en partie une machine, accompagnée d’une vision de l’informatique comme écosystème naturel) et la philosophie technologique qui nourrit la cybernétique préparent le terreau idéologique et autorisent trente ans plus tard l’occupation de la sphère publique par l’économie de la micro-informatique. L’imaginaire glisse ainsi progressivement de l’idée d’une informatique à la solde d’un État militarisé vers celle d’une force sociale à construire par l’informatique en réseau (Turner).
Plus tardivement, dans les années 1970, des pratiques de communication industrielle et artistique hétérogènes modélisent l’informatique comme un outil de libération des individus, simultanément au développement du marché de la micro-informatique. Des utopies nourries par l’idée de sphère publique, concrétisées entre autres par les pratiques du logiciel libre, sont encore revisitées de nos jours, notamment à travers le développement libéral-libertaire du marché des plateformes collaboratives.
Dans les années 2000, le monopole des industriels numérique sur le développement de la sphère publique devient idéologiquement et techniquement stable : le marché de l’innovation informatique se concentre sur le développement d’outils spécifiquement dédiés à l’idée même de sphère publique, les réseaux sociaux. Accessibles « gratuitement » par les utilisateurs, ils se trouvent économiquement de plus en plus rentables grâce à la monétisation des contenus et des données personnelles produits par ces derniers. Pourtant, la financiarisation de la sphère publique à travers les réseaux sociaux et leurs dérivés ne semble possible que du fait de l’intervention de fictions idéologiques dans la classe dominante (Tort).
Les effets de transparence de l’imaginaire « numérique » doivent donc être questionnés. Suite à ces considérations socio-historiques, quelle place laisse réellement ce « numérique à venir », qui prend racine dans les stratégies militaro-industrielles, à la sphère publique ? Quel regard portent sur l’interaction de ces deux mondes le design, la communication graphique, mais aussi les œuvres d’art qui contribuent à construire les imaginaires de cette sphère publique, tout en étant eux-mêmes innervés par les imaginaires industriels ? Nourrie par les regards croisés de théoriciens issus de différentes disciplines, cette journée d’étude se donne pour tâche d’interroger les discours, représentations et productions esthétiques liées à la place de la sphère publique dans le « numérique à venir », en prêtant une attention particulière aux impensés et idéologies qui entourent leur rencontre. L’enjeu réside ainsi dans le fait de penser la sphère publique dans sa matérialité (Fuchs), que les techniques et technologies de communication transforment et travaillent.
Cette journée d’étude fait suite à une première journée de recherche, « Représentations et devenir du sujet dans le “ numérique ” », tenue le 7 mars 2018 à l’École Supérieure d’Art et Design de Saint-Étienne, où le concept de sujet était interrogé à la lumière de la notion de « numérique ».

CALENDRIER
– Soumission des résumés : 21 janvier 2019 ;
– Réponse du comité : 15 février 2019 ;
– Journée d’étude : mardi 28 mai 2019.

SOUMISSION
Les propositions de communication (résumés au format .doc ou .pdf, de 4000 signes), accompagnées d’une brève bio-bibliographie de leur auteur, sont à envoyer par courrier électronique (imag2019@protonmail.com), jusqu’au 21 janvier 2019 inclus.

COMITÉ D’ORGANISATION
Lorène Ceccon & Clément Paradis
COMITÉ SCIENTIFIQUE
Olaf Avenati (ESAD Reims) ;
Damien Baïs (ESADSE, Random(Lab)) ;
Lorène Ceccon (UJM, CIEREC, ESADSE, CyDRe) ;
Pierre-Antoine Chardel (IMT, LASCO IdeaLab, CNRS / EHESS, IIAC, UMR 8177) ;
Vincent Ciciliato (UJM, CIEREC) ;
Dominique Cunin (ESAD Grenoble-Valence) ;
Éric Guichard (ENSSIB, ENS, Réseaux, Savoirs & Territoires) ;
Danièle Méaux (UJM, CIEREC) ;
Marc Monjou (ESADSE, CyDRe) ;
David-Olivier Lartigaud (ESADSE, Random(Lab)) ;
Carole Nosella (UJM, CIEREC) ;
Clément Paradis (UJM, CIEREC) ;
Anolga Rodionoff (UJM, CIEREC).

Journée d'étude organisée par le CIEREC, Université Jean Monnet, en partenariat avec le CyDRe, École Supérieure d’Art et Design de Saint-Étienne et le Random(Lab), Unité de Recherche numérique Art et Design ESAD Saint-Étienne/ENSBA Lyon.
En partenariat avec alt.516, association des doctorants.es stéphanois.es Arts, Lettres, Langues.