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cybernetics

This tag is associated with 3 posts

FCJ-184 Interpassive User: Complicity and the Returns of Cybernetics

By ⋅ October 8, 2015 ⋅ Post a comment

Svitlana Matviyenko University of Western Ontario …cybernetics gets more and more complicated, makes a chain, then a network. Yet it is founded on the theft of information, quite a simple thing. Michel Serres, The Parasite (2007: 37). No boundaries This essay explores the properties of mobile apps – and ‘smart’ technologies in general – that return us to the allegedly ‘old’ questions of governance and control raised by cybernetic theory. I argue that mobile apps are different from other software due to the role they play in transforming the configuration of actors in the human-machine assemblage. The significance of such radical reconfiguration is veiled by the discourses of ‘innovation,’ ‘creativity,’ ‘sustainability,’ ‘productivity,’ and ‘transparency’, which advocate the extensive use of cloud based technology for the sake of generating more data. This results in an environment where ‘the body-across-platforms as the body with the data’ becomes ‘the body as the data […]

FCJ-179 On Governance, Blackboxing, Measure, Body, Affect and Apps: A conversation with Patricia Ticineto Clough and Alexander R. Galloway

By ⋅ September 30, 2015 ⋅ Post a comment

Svitlana Matviyenko University of Western Ontario Patricia Ticineto Clough Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY Alexander R. Galloway New York University Introduction The work of these two authors is well known to anyone whose research concerns matters of affect and biopolitics, software, networks and gaming, interface culture and communication, political economy of media and information, the systems of measure and control addressed in the contexts of French theory, feminist and speculative thought, Marxism or psychoanalysis. We were lucky to have them among the keynotes for our Apps and Affect conference, where their talks sparked an interesting exchange that impacted a number of the conference conversations. Afterwards, I suggested to Patricia and Alex that they elaborate on aspects of their discussion; this invitation resulted in the following conversation, which took place via email between April and December 2014. Patricia Ticineto Clough is a Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Queens College and the […]

Issue 25: Apps and Affect

By ⋅ September 29, 2015 ⋅ Post a comment

Introduction [1] In William Gibson’s recent futurist novel The Peripheral, the planet has been devastated by a massive eco-techno-political catastrophe (‘the jackpot’) but remaining inhabitants are still able to enjoy the luxury of activating digital devices simply by tapping their tongues on the roof of their mouths. This touch is sufficient to set into play systems that communicate across space and time – enabling the establishment of connections back in time, for example, to people closer to our own present-day, for whom mobiles are still (somewhat) separate from the body. Thirty years ago, in his first novel Neuromancer, Gibson immortalised cyberspace with the account of what now sounds like an amazingly clunky process whereby the hero ‘jacks-in’ to virtual reality. But in The Peripheral the process of translation and transition into networks is streamlined – occluded, internal, intimate and implanted – right at the tip of the tongue. This issue […]

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