Abstracts
Daniel Black - Digital Bodies and Disembodied Voices: Virtual Idols and the Virtualised Body
The Japanese virtual idol, a computer-generated media celebrity, is a
product of an historical moment in which structures of data have seemingly
supplanted physical materiality. The attempt to create a media personality
entirely from digital code highlights both a long-standing obsession with
simulating the life of the human body by technological means, and some of
the ways in which the human body is coming to be seen as gathered into
structures of information ownership and exchange. These themes are discussed
in relation to the career of Yuki Terai, the world's most successful virtual
idol.
Erin Manning - Prosthetics Making Sense: Dancing the Technogenetic Body
Explorations of new technologies and dance often focus on the difficulty of
locating gesture-as-such. For the practitioners of dance and technology the
exploration of movement is intrinsically related to how to locate where a
movement begins and ends in order to map its coordinates within a sensitive
system. Yet, the question "What is a gesture? (and how can the computer
recognize one?)" may direct the techno-dance process toward establishing a
kind of grammar of movement that would — paradoxically — be more likely to
tie the body to some pre-established understanding of how it actualizes.
"Mapping" gesture risks breaking movement into bits of assimilable data, of
replicating the very conformity the computer software is seeking to get
beyond. Instead of mapping gesture-as-such, this paper therefore begins
somewhere else. It seeks to explore the technogenetic potential of the
wholeness of movement, including its "unmappable" virtuality. The unmappable
— within a computer software program — is the aspect of movement I call
pre-acceleration, a virtual becoming — a tendency toward movement — through
which a displacement takes form. If a vocabulary of gesture is to be
reclaimed as part of what can be stimulated in the encounter between dance
and new technology, it must be done through the continuum of movement,
through the body's technogenetic emergence in the realm of the virtual
becoming of pre-acceleration.
Bob Hodge and Elaine Lally - Cultural planning and Chaos Theory in Cyberspace: some notes on a Digital Cultural Atlas Project for Western Sydney
This article explores the intersection between digital technologies and
cultural planning. New information technologies ought to enable more
powerful planning strategies. Yet a common seductive vision of planning is
mirrored by utopian claims for cyberculture, which often fall short of the
hoped-for reality. We suggest that one problem is the linear thinking common
to mainstream planning and digital thinking, which leads to a cumulative
lack of fit with the non-linear (chaotic) world of social action. We draw on
chaos and complexity theory to reframe planning problems and develop more
creative digital strategies in a specific location, Western Sydney, using
and adapting Geographic Information Systems.
Gary Genosko - The Case of 'Mafiaboy' and the Rhetorical Limits of
Hacktivism
This article analyses the "Mafiaboy" case of 2000, in which a teenage hacker
from Montréal brought down several blue chip American Web sites. What makes
the subsequent court case compelling is that the categories and distinctions
developed in the academic literature on hacker culture were shown to fit the
Mafiaboy case too perfectly. They circulated with ease across defense and
prosecution lines, yet upon closer inspection reveal themselves to be empty
containers and rhetorically hollow. Via content analysis of an extensive
media dossier, it is demonstrated that the mundane reality behind the media
hype surrounding the case challenges the popular and political perception of
the "hacker". Mafiaboy himself may have also discovered the
incommensurability of his imagined future as a hacker legend and corporate
security expert employee, and his everyday reality as a computer loving teen
whose curiosity passed over into mischief with data, and beyond.
Warwick Mules - Contact Aesthetics: At the Threshold of the Earth
This article develops the idea of contact aesthetics as an expansion of
Anna Munster's call for an approximate aesthetics which explores the
disjunctive affectivities of computer mediated experiences as they are
played out on the human body. It argues that the experience of disjunctive
proximity is not specific to digital art but is better understood as part of
the experience of modernity itself. Drawing on the work of Jean-Francois
Lyotard and Jean-Luc Nancy, it proposes contact aesthetics in terms of the
gesture as the touching of the body to the world.
Michael Arnold, Martin Gibbs & Chris Shepherd - Domestic ICTs, Desire and Fetish
This paper argues that Information and Communication Technologies
(ICTs) lend themselves to fetishism and the intense affective states that
fetishism involves. This understanding enables an exploration of ICTs and
their place in everyday life that attends to subject-object relations. To
explicate the argument, the authors present a case-study of "Matthew"; a hoarder and
collector of ICTs. Through this case they develop a perspective on ICTs that
goes beyond instrumental understandings of ICTs as inter-personal mediators
and perspectives that focus on acquisition-consumption semiotics, to enable
an analysis of the intrapersonal dynamic that circulates between subject,
object, and desire in late modernity.
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