Through interaction across and between disciplinary boundaries, the Centre will act as a relay station between interests in art, theory and new technologies. A key feature will be promoting an understanding of new and emerging media technologies in a critically informed context that draws from innovative cultural theories. Hence, while promoting innovative practices and creative industry related research, the Centre functions as a 'conceptual laboratory' as well.
In this sense, the Centre relies on the synergies between inter- and transdisciplinary issues that are crucial in contemporary network society. The aim of the Centre is not only to reactively respond to changing media technological conditions, but to proactively map agendas and crucial questions that need addressing. Hence, it suggests the importance of arts and humanities informed practices and research in the technologically shifting cultural geographies where modes of agency, embodiment and knowledge are in a constant state of in-transit in transnational zones of articulation.
Current research projects being undertaken within ARCDigital include the following clusters:
1) Critical Theory of Digital Network Culture
2) The Sonic and Performing Arts
3) Practice as Research
4) Digital Culture and Textuality
Within this framework are a range of ongoing projects.
Current Projects
Spam Cultures
This research project focuses on the 'dark side of digital culture' - spam, viruses, porn, etc. The project aims to develop tools and concepts for a critical understanding of the accidents of digital culture, and address the media anomalies of current digital culture. The wider aim is to address the biopolitics of network culture where the exchange between biology and technology has branded the modernity of technical media.
Contact: Dr Jussi Parikka
Activism and Digital Culture
The project looks to understand and document the re-conceptualisation and re-configuring of the politics of activism that has taken place with the increasing significance of digital network technologies. The question of whether such changes expose democracy to a frightening new kind of threat by shutting down spaces of dissent and action, or open up a process leading towards a fully participatory democracy have been widely debated, and the project aims to capture these debates and map the ongoing development of this thinking and practice as we move away from such binary approaches. The project thus pays close attention to both theory and practice, in the first instance to a range of approaches that contribute to understanding this condition, from theories of the network society, Autonomist and Post-Fordist frameworks as well as theories of radical democracy, communicative action and discourse ethics. In the second instance the aim is to engage with and explore developments in practices such as virtual sit-ins, smart mobs, the exchange of free-labour, open-source software and participatory media production.
Contact: Dr Joss Hands
Neomaterialist Cultural Analysis
The project is a conceptual laboratory that addresses recent transformations in cultural studies. In addition to the agenda of meanings, signifiers and cultural representations, such notions relating to embodiment as affect, intensity and relationality have emerged in cultural analysis and contemporary philosophy. The work in this area addresses multiple media formations and arts, from digital media to sonic arts and performance. In this stream, through publications, events and seminars, the researchers engage with emerging trends in media and cultural theory.
Contacts: Dr Jussi Parikka and Milla Tiainen
Ebooks and Ebook Readers
The inexorable advances of technology are making the eBook and the eBook reader available to a larger audience with every passing month. Around since the 1990s, the eBook has had an uneven progress to this point. But 2008 may well prove to be the year that the eBook reader finally makes it into the mainstream consciousness: the high profile launch of Amazon's US Kindle in November 2007 and its consequent sell out over Christmas that year, and the recent launch of Sony's Reader (Sept 2008) with large advertising campaigns, together with Irex's Iliad, which has been steadily undergoing improvements since its launch in July 2006, mean that in past months the devices have rarely been away from the headlines. The project looks at questions such as: What functions are readers demanding from their ebook Readers? How are companies researching these needs, and what kind of trials have been and are taking place? How is the reading experience changed by ebook Readers? Do different types of texts (eg fiction, reports, articles) elicit different reading experiences? How can those experiences be measured and recorded? How does our notion of a text change (does it change?) when we read through the lens of technology rather than through the physical page?
Contacts: Dr Samantha Rayner or Ian Bennett
Digital Music Composition
The project addresses the peculiarities of capturing streams of audio and methods of combining audio with other media to accompany live performance art. The project looks into incorporating graphic text manipulation as part of the process as well as capturing audio as part of the creation of rhythmic material. The project on sonic arts and digital composition extends furthermore towards media archaeological contexts of sound. Project results are disseminated in the form of practical art projects in various international festivals as well as academic papers.
Contact: Dr Julio D'Éscrivan
Transitions
Transitions is an exploration of teenage image construction and self-projection through electronic social interface networks in UK, USA and China. This work addresses the crucial relationship between the psychoanalytical and the digital interface, seeking to unveil a culture of desire: music, television, film as sites of desire, fantasy. Using language and video, teenage 'snaps' and recorded online 'chat,' the material will juxtapose these visual and aural materials using different modes of presentation, allowing the viewer to engage with all or any one part of the project. Using the global superpower of USA as the pivotal westernising culture, the work investigates its influence in both UK and China, where it combines with tradition and history to produce a range of similarities and dissimilarities, denoting a certain democratic and non-interventionist approach.
Contact: Christine Webster
In this sense, the Centre relies on the synergies between inter- and transdisciplinary issues that are crucial in contemporary network society. The aim of the Centre is not only to reactively respond to changing media technological conditions, but to proactively map agendas and crucial questions that need addressing. Hence, it suggests the importance of arts and humanities informed practices and research in the technologically shifting cultural geographies where modes of agency, embodiment and knowledge are in a constant state of in-transit in transnational zones of articulation.
Current research projects being undertaken within ARCDigital include the following clusters:
1) Critical Theory of Digital Network Culture
2) The Sonic and Performing Arts
3) Practice as Research
4) Digital Culture and Textuality
Within this framework are a range of ongoing projects.
Current Projects
Spam CulturesThis research project focuses on the 'dark side of digital culture' - spam, viruses, porn, etc. The project aims to develop tools and concepts for a critical understanding of the accidents of digital culture, and address the media anomalies of current digital culture. The wider aim is to address the biopolitics of network culture where the exchange between biology and technology has branded the modernity of technical media.
Contact: Dr Jussi Parikka
Activism and Digital Culture
The project looks to understand and document the re-conceptualisation and re-configuring of the politics of activism that has taken place with the increasing significance of digital network technologies. The question of whether such changes expose democracy to a frightening new kind of threat by shutting down spaces of dissent and action, or open up a process leading towards a fully participatory democracy have been widely debated, and the project aims to capture these debates and map the ongoing development of this thinking and practice as we move away from such binary approaches. The project thus pays close attention to both theory and practice, in the first instance to a range of approaches that contribute to understanding this condition, from theories of the network society, Autonomist and Post-Fordist frameworks as well as theories of radical democracy, communicative action and discourse ethics. In the second instance the aim is to engage with and explore developments in practices such as virtual sit-ins, smart mobs, the exchange of free-labour, open-source software and participatory media production.
Contact: Dr Joss Hands
Neomaterialist Cultural Analysis
The project is a conceptual laboratory that addresses recent transformations in cultural studies. In addition to the agenda of meanings, signifiers and cultural representations, such notions relating to embodiment as affect, intensity and relationality have emerged in cultural analysis and contemporary philosophy. The work in this area addresses multiple media formations and arts, from digital media to sonic arts and performance. In this stream, through publications, events and seminars, the researchers engage with emerging trends in media and cultural theory.
Contacts: Dr Jussi Parikka and Milla Tiainen
Ebooks and Ebook Readers
The inexorable advances of technology are making the eBook and the eBook reader available to a larger audience with every passing month. Around since the 1990s, the eBook has had an uneven progress to this point. But 2008 may well prove to be the year that the eBook reader finally makes it into the mainstream consciousness: the high profile launch of Amazon's US Kindle in November 2007 and its consequent sell out over Christmas that year, and the recent launch of Sony's Reader (Sept 2008) with large advertising campaigns, together with Irex's Iliad, which has been steadily undergoing improvements since its launch in July 2006, mean that in past months the devices have rarely been away from the headlines. The project looks at questions such as: What functions are readers demanding from their ebook Readers? How are companies researching these needs, and what kind of trials have been and are taking place? How is the reading experience changed by ebook Readers? Do different types of texts (eg fiction, reports, articles) elicit different reading experiences? How can those experiences be measured and recorded? How does our notion of a text change (does it change?) when we read through the lens of technology rather than through the physical page?
Contacts: Dr Samantha Rayner or Ian Bennett
Digital Music Composition
The project addresses the peculiarities of capturing streams of audio and methods of combining audio with other media to accompany live performance art. The project looks into incorporating graphic text manipulation as part of the process as well as capturing audio as part of the creation of rhythmic material. The project on sonic arts and digital composition extends furthermore towards media archaeological contexts of sound. Project results are disseminated in the form of practical art projects in various international festivals as well as academic papers.
Contact: Dr Julio D'Éscrivan
Transitions
Transitions is an exploration of teenage image construction and self-projection through electronic social interface networks in UK, USA and China. This work addresses the crucial relationship between the psychoanalytical and the digital interface, seeking to unveil a culture of desire: music, television, film as sites of desire, fantasy. Using language and video, teenage 'snaps' and recorded online 'chat,' the material will juxtapose these visual and aural materials using different modes of presentation, allowing the viewer to engage with all or any one part of the project. Using the global superpower of USA as the pivotal westernising culture, the work investigates its influence in both UK and China, where it combines with tradition and history to produce a range of similarities and dissimilarities, denoting a certain democratic and non-interventionist approach.
Contact: Christine Webster
Exploring New Configurations in Network Politics
This project, funded by the AHRC, is led by Dr Hands and Dr Parikka and explores the intersection of politics, networks and cultural practices. The network will work on an analysis of how the emergence of a 'network society' is reshaping the ground upon which we think about politics and culture. The primary objective is therefore to open up a dialogue between researchers, practitioners and activists that begins to map this important new domain of social, political and cultural production. Given that the notion of the network is contested, and entails many variations, the network will also have to address its own form, thus the project will entail a reflexive element which will encourage exploratory and innovative practices. To put it bluntly, it takes a network to understand the network. This will necessitate exploring emerging and ground-breaking media, communications and multi-disciplinary approaches to both scholarship and the dissemination of scholarship. The development of the latter will thus add to the value of the network.
Contact: Dr Joss Hands and Dr Jussi Parikka
Website: www.networkpolitics.org
This project, funded by the AHRC, is led by Dr Hands and Dr Parikka and explores the intersection of politics, networks and cultural practices. The network will work on an analysis of how the emergence of a 'network society' is reshaping the ground upon which we think about politics and culture. The primary objective is therefore to open up a dialogue between researchers, practitioners and activists that begins to map this important new domain of social, political and cultural production. Given that the notion of the network is contested, and entails many variations, the network will also have to address its own form, thus the project will entail a reflexive element which will encourage exploratory and innovative practices. To put it bluntly, it takes a network to understand the network. This will necessitate exploring emerging and ground-breaking media, communications and multi-disciplinary approaches to both scholarship and the dissemination of scholarship. The development of the latter will thus add to the value of the network.
Contact: Dr Joss Hands and Dr Jussi Parikka
Website: www.networkpolitics.org
User / Digitize Me
This is a practice-based research project in the area of creative writing and new media and is concerned primarily with the critical issue of identity production in participatory digital network culture. The work consists in two separate but interdependently evolving practices: User is concerned with developing a body of creative writing that engages with the nature of real and virtual identity production through traditional fictional narrative making. The other, Digitize Me, investigates the interplay of participatory digital media exchange in online network culture via the production of a new online platform. Digitize Me exists as an online community art project that engages fully in every day practices of current social network practices, organizing its intermedial spaces in such as way to inform and respond to specific activity [assignments]. This exploration of digital remediation will be compared to traditional forms of writing in order to investigate a number of key research questions. How has participatory network culture [Web 2.0] affected the way we negotiate ourselves online? Has the proliferation of user content driven interaction made us all critical media content creators? Is there still a place for traditionally authored artefacts? If so, how should the makers of such artefacts respond to an increasingly intermedial world?
Supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England
Contact: Sarah Gibson-Yates
This is a practice-based research project in the area of creative writing and new media and is concerned primarily with the critical issue of identity production in participatory digital network culture. The work consists in two separate but interdependently evolving practices: User is concerned with developing a body of creative writing that engages with the nature of real and virtual identity production through traditional fictional narrative making. The other, Digitize Me, investigates the interplay of participatory digital media exchange in online network culture via the production of a new online platform. Digitize Me exists as an online community art project that engages fully in every day practices of current social network practices, organizing its intermedial spaces in such as way to inform and respond to specific activity [assignments]. This exploration of digital remediation will be compared to traditional forms of writing in order to investigate a number of key research questions. How has participatory network culture [Web 2.0] affected the way we negotiate ourselves online? Has the proliferation of user content driven interaction made us all critical media content creators? Is there still a place for traditionally authored artefacts? If so, how should the makers of such artefacts respond to an increasingly intermedial world?
Supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England
Contact: Sarah Gibson-Yates