Abstracts
Eugene Thacker -
Living Dead Networks
This essay explores, through a series of condensed modules, the
ways in which contagion operates in both biological and informational
networks.Through an examination of the fields of information security
and medical surveillance, computer viruses and mathematical epidemiology,
and pathogenic information and informed pathogens, this essay asks
how the political relation between 'control' and 'emergence' is
formed in networks in which the distinction between information
and biology breaks down.
Jussi Parikka -
Digital Monsters, Binary Aliens – Computer Viruses, Capitalism
and the Flow of Information
This article deals with articulations of digital accidents, focusing
especially on how the computer virus has been signified as a problem
for national security, international commerce and the individual
user. However, at the same time as viruses have since the 1980s
been constructed as malicious software threatening the very basics
of the network society, they have been captured as part of the consumer
capitalist system, exemplified e.g. in the rise of anti-virus industry.
Thus, the article argues that capitalism itself is viral, functioning
through a constant reshifting of its limits. Capitalism proceeds
per se via these accidents and disruptions that it at the same time
constructs as its enemies. In this sense, computer viruses and worms
can be understood as the general accidents of digital capitalist
culture.
Roberta Buiani -
Marginal Networks: The Virus between Complexity and Suppression
'Virus talk' has become very fashionable lately. Our culture of
fear suggests to us that we constantly and exclusively refer to
viruses as negatively connoted, harmful or potentially dangerous.
I argue that despite the prevalent publicising of harmful features,
viruses contain a somewhat hidden complexity that has been often
overlooked or neglected. In this essay, viruses are examined in
a number of artistic interventions that exploit them for political
and/or purely aesthetic purposes. The examples elucidate the significance
of viruses as cultural notions as well as the existence of a contradictory
and conflicting relation between their so-called potentialities
and their negative reputation.
Stamatia Portanova
- Rhythmic Parasites: A Virological Analysis of Sound and Dance
This article analyses the contagious spread of rhythm across the
physical,cultural and technical levels of the dancing body. The
first analytical level maps the bio-physical diffusion of rhythm
in the cellular population of the human body. The second level follows
the diffusion of rhythm, sound and dance rituals across social and
geographic limits. The third level shows how the development of
new digital technologies of rhythmic engineering (such as digital
sound systems) allows the microscopic control of physical potential
and social mobility (for example in dance clubs), but also the simultaneous
emergence of autonomous, self-organised physical and social events
(for example at rave parties).
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