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Technology and Cultural Form: A Liquid Reader

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Saved by Joanna Zylinska
on November 3, 2010 at 2:55:50 pm
 

 

ADM-HEAOHP

 

On Liquid Reading

Joanna Zylinska, On Liquid Reading I, 2010

 

About this reader

 

This is a ‘liquid reader’ which presents a series of texts that interrogate the notion of ‘technology’ as a specific cultural form. Originally devised as a reader for a course on the MA Digital Media at Goldsmiths, University of London, titled 'Technology and Cultural Form: Debates, Models, Dialogues', by the course tutor Dr Joanna Zylinska in collaboration with her students, this reader is now being made available to the international academic community on the open access, open content and open editing basis. To find out more about how this reader has been put together, read the project description. Key readings for Goldsmiths students are HIGHLIGHTED IN GREEN - just click on the title to read the appropriate text.

 

The reader as such does not host any texts: instead, it makes use of open Internet data by providing links to the already available external resources. (Many texts are available under the Creative Commons and fair use licenses. However, the open, liquid nature of the reader - and of the Internet itself - does not allow us to constantly control all the links. Please notify us should you wish for any of the links to be removed.)

 

The reader is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on questions of power, politics and networks. In the context of the relation between technology and power, it looks at issues of surveillance, control and globalisation. The second part explores questions of human and non-human becoming with, or by means of, technology. It looks at Foucault’s notion of technologies of the self and at the more recent work on posthumanism and bioethics. The third part of the reader highlights a more creative engagement with technology. They key opposition that is being tested and contested there is that between ‘media theory’ and ‘media practice’.

 

About ‘technology’

 

Both experiential and theoretical developments in the areas of new technologies and new media are calling on us to radically rethink the mainstream understanding of technology as just a tool that can be applied to discrete entities. It seems more productive to envisage instead a mutual co-constitution between the entity that gets designated as ‘the human’ and its technology. In other words, if we think technology beyond its Aristotelian concept of a mere tool, and see it instead as an environment, or a field of dynamic forces, we will arguably have a more interesting and more critical framework for understanding both ourselves and the world of which we are part. This repositioning will also allow us to analyse the political vector of many of these forces, their cultural signification and their material consequences.

 

Contents

 

INTRODUCTION: FUTURE BOOKS: A WIKIPEDIA MODEL?

 

PART I: THE BEING OF TECHNOLOGY: NETWORK, POWER, POLITICS

 

1 Surveillance, Power and Control: Technological Modulations

1. Foucault, M. (1975) ‘The Body of the Condemned', ‘The Means of Correct Training’ and ‘Panopticism’ in Discipline and Punish, Allen Lane (KEY READING; WEEK 1)

2. Cascio, J. (2005) 'The Rise of the Participatory Panopticon', Open the Future

3. The Surveillance Camera Players

4. Adam Curtis Documentary-BBC   The Trap: What Happened to Our Dreams of Freedom?

5. Lyon, D. (1994) The Electronic Eye. The Rise of Surveillance Society, Polity Press

6. Staples, William G. (2000) Everyday Surveillance: Vigilance and Visibility in postmodern life, Rowman & Littlefield

 

2 The Being of Technology: Tool or Environment?

1. Poster, M. (2001) ‘The Being of Technologies’ (pp. 21-28 only) in What’s the Matter with the Internet, University of Minnesota Press

2. Poster M. (1995) 'Cyberdemocracy: Internet as a Public Sphere'. Also available in M. Poster (2001) What's the Matter with the Internet, University of Minnesota Press.

3. Stiegler, B. (1998) ‘Prometheus’s Liver’ in his Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, Stanford University Press (KEY READING; WEEK 2)

4. Stiegler, B. (2003) 'Our Ailing Educational Institutions', Culture Machine vol. 5.

5. (2009) Bernard Stiegler and the Question of Technics, special issue of the journal Transformations

6. Morello, J. (2007) 'e-(re)volution: Zapatistas and the Emancipatory Internet' A Contracorriente Journal of Social History and Literature in Latin America, vol. 4, no. 2, 54-76, available in http://www.ncsu.edu/project/acontracorriente/winter_07/Morello.pdf

7. Kelly, K. (ongoing) The Technium

8. Video clip from No Maps for These Territories (2002): 'William Gibson on technology'

 

3 Globalisation and Empire

1. Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2000) Empire, Harvard University Press (KEY READING; WEEK 3; PREFACE & CH. 1.2, 'BIOPOLITICAL PRODUCTION')

2. Terranova, T. (2004) Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, Ann Arbor: Pluto Press

3. Galloway, A. R., (2004) Protocol, MIT Press

4. Appadurai, A., ed. (2001) Globalization, Duke University Press

5.  Zizek, S. (2001) 'Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist Manifesto for the 21st Century?', Rethinking Marxism 13, 3/4

 

4 Spaces of Flows in the Network Society

1. Castells, M. (2000) ‘The Space of Flows’, in The Rise of the Network Society, Blackwell (KEY READING; WEEK 4)

2. Castells, M. ‘Identity and Change in the Network Society: an Interview with Manuel Castells’

3. Castells, M. 'Information Technology, Globalization and Social Development'

4. Easterling, K. (2005) Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades,MIT Press

5. Sterling, B. (2007) 'Dispatches from the Hyperlocal Future', Wired 15.07

 

 

PART II: BEING-WITH-TECHNOLOGY: HUMAN, ANIMAL, MACHINE

 

5 The Cyborg and/as the Posthuman

1. Haraway, D. (1991) ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, Simians, Cyborgs and Women, Free Association Books (KEY READING; WEEK 5)

2. Video clip from Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004): 'Haraway on anthropomorphisation'

3. Video from Frank Theys: 'The Transhumanist's Wet Dreams - Posthuman'

 

6 Technologies of the Self

1. Foucault, M. (1990) ‘Technologies of the Self’ (excerpt), in L. Martin et al. (eds) Technologies of the Self, Tavistock Books, pp. 16-31 (KEY READING; WEEK 6)

2. Clark, J. ‘Deconstructing "You've Got Blog"’

3. Horning, R. (2009) 'Confessio Fraternitatis: Twitter as Spiritual Exercise', Generation Bubble, 30/11/2009

 

7 Nature/Culture and the Question of Bioethics

1. Franklin, S. (2000) ‘Life Itself. Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary’, in Franklin, S. Lury, C. and Stacey, J. Global Nature, Global Culture, Sage

2. Zylinska, J. (2005) ‘Bioethics and cyberfeminism’, in The Ethics of Cultural Studies, Continuum

3. Critical Art Ensemble, 'The Coming of Age of the Flesh Machine'

4. Kember, S. (2003) Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life, Routledge

 

 

PART III: TECHNOLOGY IN THE MAKING: ART, CRAFT, POIESIS

 

8 Information Systems and the Body (Case study: new media art)

1. Hall, G. and Zylinska, J. (2002) 'Probings: An Interview with Stelarc', in Zylinska, J. (ed) (2002) The Cyborg Experiments: the Extensions of the Body in the Media Age, Continuum (KEY READING: WEEK 8)

2. Hayles, N. Katherine (1999) ‘Toward Embodied Virtuality’, in How We Became Posthuman, The University of Chicago Press

4. Stelarc. 'The Body is Obsolete'. Contemporary Arts Media.

5. Mackenzie, A. (2002) 'Infrastructure and individuation: speed and delay on Stelarc's Ping Body', in Mackenzie, A. (2002) Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed, Continuum

6. Critical Art Ensemble, 'The Coming of Age of the Flesh Machine'

7.  0100101110101101.org aka Eva and Franco Mattes (2007- ongoing), 'Reenactments' and 'Synthetic Performances'

 

9 Beyond Theory and Practice: The Digital ‘Revolution’ in Publishing

1. Hall, G. (2008) ‘Introduction: Another University is Possible’ (pp. 1-5 only) and ‘Metadata I: Notes on Creating Critical Computer Media’ in his Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) (KEY READING; WEEK 9)

2. Hall. G. (2010) 'Fluid Notes on Liquid Books' in T. W. Luke and J. W. Hunsinger eds, Putting Knowledge to Work and Letting Information Play: The Center for Digital Discourse and Culture, Center for Digital Discourse and Culture (CDDC) @ Virginia Tech.

3. Hall. G. (2005) 'Cultural Studies E-Archive Project (Original Pirate Copy)', Culture Machine vol. 5.

4. Hall, G. 'Pirate Philosophy': a video lecture (2008) and a special issue of Culture Machine (2009)

5. Hayles, Katherine N. (2003) 'Deeper into the Machine: The Future of Electronic Literature', Culture Machine vol. 5.

6. Hammersley, B. (2010) 'E-Books - The Bigger Problem', Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent, 05/01/2010

7. Adema, J. (2009) 'Scanners, collectors and aggregators. On the ‘underground movement’ of (pirated) theory text sharing', Open Reflections, 20/09/2009

8. Kelty, C. (2008) Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. Duke University Press.

9. Lessig, L. (2004) Free culture : how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity. New York : Penguin Press.

 

10 Digital Futures, or Who Is Afraid of the Amateur Photographer?

1. Jack, I. (2009) ‘The Unstoppable Rise of the Citizen Cameraman’, The Guardian, 11.04 (KEY READING; WEEK 10).

2. Manovich, L. (1995) ‘The Paradoxes of Digital Photography’, Photography after Photography exhibition catalogue (KEY READING; WEEK 10).

3. Coleman, R. (2007) 'Picturing civic journalism: How photographers and graphic designers visually communicate The Principles of Civic Journalism'Journalism 8; 25

4. Gilmor, D. (2006) 'The Decline (and Maybe Demise) of the Professional Photojournalist', Center for Citizen Media Blog

 

11 A BONUS: A GALLERY-WITHIN-A-BOOK (click on this link to see some pictures!)

1. 'Everyone is an artist', or, are we all media producers now?

 

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