Seminars
Virality and Memeification: Affective Networks in the Dataverse (Penelope Papailias & Mitsos Bilalis)
This seminar will examine the affective forces and critical events emergent in network culture and their relation to subjectivity, publics, popular culture, and conceptions of the ‘user’.
Our entry point into examining the data/power nexus embodied in contemporary modes of governmentality of network, database and platform is through ‘following’ the viral circulation and memeification of shocking and controversial images in social media, the attendant affective intensities and acts of performative embodiments and contagious replication. We will be particularly interested in the galvanizing role of the image and the place of the dead (or the semi-alive) in these assemblages. This seminar will critique phobic, pathological and classist reactions to the ‘viral’ and the ‘meme’ -- which often characterize not only public discourse but also humanities/ social science readings – as we seek to critically analyze these processes and understand their significant cultural, political and economic impact, as well as examine proposals for strategic acts of antipathy and disconnection.
Some of the topics to be covered include: the shift from archive to database, mesmerized subjectivity and somnabulatory capitalism, spectropolitics and image-events.
This seminar will examine the affective forces and critical events emergent in network culture and their relation to subjectivity, publics, popular culture, and conceptions of the ‘user’.
Our entry point into examining the data/power nexus embodied in contemporary modes of governmentality of network, database and platform is through ‘following’ the viral circulation and memeification of shocking and controversial images in social media, the attendant affective intensities and acts of performative embodiments and contagious replication. We will be particularly interested in the galvanizing role of the image and the place of the dead (or the semi-alive) in these assemblages. This seminar will critique phobic, pathological and classist reactions to the ‘viral’ and the ‘meme’ -- which often characterize not only public discourse but also humanities/ social science readings – as we seek to critically analyze these processes and understand their significant cultural, political and economic impact, as well as examine proposals for strategic acts of antipathy and disconnection.
Some of the topics to be covered include: the shift from archive to database, mesmerized subjectivity and somnabulatory capitalism, spectropolitics and image-events.
Platform Capitalism (Athina Karatzogianni & Petros Petridis)
This seminar will explore new economic and political regimes, practices and subjectivities that emerge in the context of platform capitalism. We will discuss topics and concepts such as the sharing economy, platform, digital activism, digital surveillance, virtual currencies, gamification, quantification, allegorithm, soft biopolitics, fan labor, and creationist capitalism. Our analysis will be based on a combination of critical media theory and ethnographic research.
This seminar will explore new economic and political regimes, practices and subjectivities that emerge in the context of platform capitalism. We will discuss topics and concepts such as the sharing economy, platform, digital activism, digital surveillance, virtual currencies, gamification, quantification, allegorithm, soft biopolitics, fan labor, and creationist capitalism. Our analysis will be based on a combination of critical media theory and ethnographic research.
Algorithmic Sociality (Sandra Robinson & Robert Seyfert)
This seminar will analyze how digital technologies have transformed our life and social relationships. How have algorithms changed the way we encounter others or our presentation of self--whether through our interactions on social media platforms or through devices to measure the performance of the self? Powerful algorithmic mechanisms shape our everyday communicative practice, our relations to others, the body, and the self, and in turn our everyday practices can shape algorithmic technologies. How might vernacular (everyday) practices (even inadvertently) undermine the intentions of algorithmic technologies? What are the responses to such deviations? These questions are approached through critical engagement with algorithms as part of our increasingly datafied world. How might we explore the power structures that emerge in and through algorithmic technologies in relation to gender, race, class, and other categorizations? Which critical (and perhaps subversive) practices are possible and feasible in order to evade and resist constant algorithmic evaluation, judgment and nudging?
This seminar will analyze how digital technologies have transformed our life and social relationships. How have algorithms changed the way we encounter others or our presentation of self--whether through our interactions on social media platforms or through devices to measure the performance of the self? Powerful algorithmic mechanisms shape our everyday communicative practice, our relations to others, the body, and the self, and in turn our everyday practices can shape algorithmic technologies. How might vernacular (everyday) practices (even inadvertently) undermine the intentions of algorithmic technologies? What are the responses to such deviations? These questions are approached through critical engagement with algorithms as part of our increasingly datafied world. How might we explore the power structures that emerge in and through algorithmic technologies in relation to gender, race, class, and other categorizations? Which critical (and perhaps subversive) practices are possible and feasible in order to evade and resist constant algorithmic evaluation, judgment and nudging?
Methodological workshop/experiment
Production and staging of a Serious Game (Petros Petridis, George Mantzios, Penelope Papailias, Manolis Patiniotis)
Over the course of the lab, participants will participate in a methodologically-focused, experimental workshop dedicated to the making and multi-sited staging of a serious game related to this year's theme. This workshop will culminate in the staging of the experiment in a public event on the final day of the lab (August 30, 2019). Drawing inspiration from the open source movement, user listservs, music and video file sharing, social networking, and especially gaming subcultures, the workshop aims to be user-driven and in part user-designed. Considered as an experiment in problem-based research, the workshop aspires to involve participants as gamers whose embodied interactions within a gamespace generate real-time feedback that actively shapes the parameters of that space as a domain of collaborative knowledge production. Thus conceived through the idioms, interfaces, and pedagogical genres of online and offline gaming, this workshop will explore the implications of moving from content orientation to problem orientation in research design and knowledge production. Along these lines the working hypothesis of this prospective workshop is that collaborative laboratory-oriented research, centered around an open-ended, unpredictable and re-enactable public experiment, can interface theory and practice in and as the elaboration of an interactive gamespace.
Production and staging of a Serious Game (Petros Petridis, George Mantzios, Penelope Papailias, Manolis Patiniotis)
Over the course of the lab, participants will participate in a methodologically-focused, experimental workshop dedicated to the making and multi-sited staging of a serious game related to this year's theme. This workshop will culminate in the staging of the experiment in a public event on the final day of the lab (August 30, 2019). Drawing inspiration from the open source movement, user listservs, music and video file sharing, social networking, and especially gaming subcultures, the workshop aims to be user-driven and in part user-designed. Considered as an experiment in problem-based research, the workshop aspires to involve participants as gamers whose embodied interactions within a gamespace generate real-time feedback that actively shapes the parameters of that space as a domain of collaborative knowledge production. Thus conceived through the idioms, interfaces, and pedagogical genres of online and offline gaming, this workshop will explore the implications of moving from content orientation to problem orientation in research design and knowledge production. Along these lines the working hypothesis of this prospective workshop is that collaborative laboratory-oriented research, centered around an open-ended, unpredictable and re-enactable public experiment, can interface theory and practice in and as the elaboration of an interactive gamespace.