News/Research

Announcing the 2017-2018 Season of the History and Theory of New Media Lecture Series

01 Aug, 2017

Announcing the 2017-2018 Season of the History and Theory of New Media Lecture Series

From software arts to self-tracking technologies, cybernetics to techno-ecologies, we are thrilled to introduce the speakers in this year's History and Theory of New Media program!

12 Oct, 2017 | 4:00–6:00 PM | ​470 Stephens Hall

Keeping Track

with Natasha Schull
In partnership with CSTMS

Natasha Dow Schüll is a cultural anthropologist and associate professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her recent book, ADDICTION BY DESIGN: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton University Press 2012), draws on extended research among compulsive gamblers and the designers of the slot machines they play to explore the relationship between technology design and the experience of addiction. Her next book, KEEPING TRACK (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, expected late 2018), concerns the rise of digital self-tracking technologies and the new modes of introspection and self-governance they engender. Her documentary film, BUFFET: All You Can Eat Las Vegas, has screened multiple times on PBS and appeared in numerous film festivals.

Schüll graduated Summa Cum Laude from UC Berkeley’s Department of Anthropology in 1993 and returned to receive her PhD in 2003. She held postdoctoral positions as a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at Columbia University’s Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy and as a fellow at NYU’s International Center for Advanced Studies. She was a professor at MIT from 2007–2015, before joining the faculty at New York University. Schüll’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, among other sources.

Schüll’s research and op-eds have been featured in such national media venues as 60 minutes, The New York Times, The Economist, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Capital Gazette, Financial Times, Forbes, Boston Globe, Salon, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Daily Herald, Las Vegas Sun, 99% Invisible, NPR, WGBH, and WNYC.

17 Oct, 2017 | 1:00–5:00 PM | 310 Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall

Between the Digital and the Political: New Ecologies of Mind

with Erich Hoerl, Yuk Hui, Luciana Parisi
Panel Discussion
with David Bates & Warren Sack
With support from the Townsend Center and the Dean of Arts and Humanities

Since 2014 Erich Hörl is full professor of Media Culture at the Leuphana University Lüneburg. He is also a senior researcher at Leuphana’s Digital Cultures Research Lab (DCRL). Prior to this, he was professor of Media Technology and Media Philosophy at the Ruhr-University Bochum, where he was the head of the ‘Bochumer Kolloquium Medienwissenschaft’ (bkm). Currently, he is working on a general ecology of media and technology as well as on a critique of the processes of cybernetisation of every form of life and every mode of existence, focussing on a historical-systematic outlining of a technoecology of participation. He publishes internationally on the history as well as the problems and challenges of the contemporary technological condition.

Yuk Hui studied Computer Engineering, Cultural Theory and Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong and Goldsmiths College in London, with a focus on philosophy of technology. He is currently a research associate of the project "techno-ecologies of participation" at the Leuphana University Lüneburg, where he also teaches at the institute of philosophy; previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Research and Innovation of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and a visiting scientist at the T-Labs Berlin. He has published on philosophy of media and technology in periodicals such as Metaphilosophy, Research in Phenomenology, Parrhesia, Angelaki, Cahiers Simondon, Intellectica, Implications Philosophiques, Jahrbuch Technikphilosophie, Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, New Formations,Parallax, etc. He is an editor (with Andreas Broeckmann) of 30 Years after Les Immatériaux: Art, Science and Theory (2015), and author of On the Existence of Digital Objects (prefaced by Bernard Stiegler, University of Minnesota Press, March 2016), The Question Concerning Technology in China. An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Urbanomic, December 2016).

Luciana Parisi is Reader in Cultural Theory, Chair of the PhD programme at the Centre for Cultural Studies, and co-director of the Digital Culture Unit, Goldsmiths University of London. Her research draws on continental philosophy to investigate ontological and epistemological transformations driven by the function of technology in culture, aesthetics and politics. Her writing aims to develop a naturalistic approach to thinking and technology. She is interested in cybernetics, information theory and computation, complexity and evolutionary theories. Her writing addresses the technocapitalist investment in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, nanotechnology. She has written extensively within the field of Media Philosophy and Computational Design. In 2004, she published Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (Continuum Press). In 2013, she published Contagious Architecture. Computation, Aesthetics and Space (MIT Press). She is currently researching the history of automation and the philosophical consequences of logical thinking in machines.

16 Nov, 2017 | 5:00–6:30 PM | BCNM Commons, 340 Moffitt Undergraduate Library

Porn Sequence

with Hoang Nguyen

Hoang Tan Nguyen received a B.A. (with highest honors) in Art and Art History from the University of California, Santa Cruz, an M.F.A. in Studio Art from the University of California, Irvine, and a Ph.D. in Rhetoric, with an emphasis in Film Studies, from the University of California, Berkeley. He has received grants and fellowships from the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts, and the University of Pennsylvania Humanities Forum. His research interests include Asian American visual culture, Southeast Asian cinema, queer cinema, experimental film, race and pornography, film programming, and video production. His experimental videos have been screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, and the Pompidou Center in Paris. He has programmed film, video, and performance for MIX NYC: New York Queer Experimental Film Festival and the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival.

29 Jan, 2018 | 6:30–8:00 PM | Osher Auditorium, BAMPFA

Indexical Ambivalence

with Kris Paulsen
In partnership with the Arts, Technology, and Culture Colloquium

Kris Paulsen is Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art and the Film Studies Program at The Ohio State University. She is a specialist in Contemporary Art with a focus on time-based and computational media. Her work traces the history of technology in the arts and the rhetoric of “new media” from photography to digital art, with a particular emphasis on telepresence and interface studies. In 2017, The MIT Press published Dr. Paulsen’s first book, Here/There: Telepresence, Touch, and Art at the Interface, as part of the Leonardo Book Series. Her current research project, “Against Algorithms (or The Arts of Resistance in the Age of Quantification)” addresses the logics of quantification and algorithmic structures in contemporary art, culture, and activism. Her work has appeared in Representations, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, Mousse, BOMB, Design and Culture, Media-N, Art Practical, Amodern, and numerous exhibition catalogs and collections of essays. From 2012 to 2016 she was co-director of The Center for Ongoing Research & Projects (www.the-corp.org), an experimental art space in Columbus, OH.

More information can be found at: [links no longer available]

1 March, 2018 | 5:00–6:30 PM | BCNM Commons, 340 Moffitt Undergraduate Library

The Software Arts

with Warren Sack
In partnership with CSTMS

Warren Sack is a media theorist, software designer, and artist whose work explores theories and designs for online public space and public discussion. He is Chair and Professor of Film + Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz where he teaches digital arts and digital studies. He has been a visiting professor in France at Sciences Po, the Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme, and Télécom ParisTech. His artwork has been exhibited by SFMOMA (San Francisco), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and the ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany). His scholarship and research has been supported by the Paris Institute for Advanced Study, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Sunlight Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. Warren received his PhD from the MIT Media Lab and was an undergraduate at Yale College. The subject of his talk will be The Software Arts, a book manuscript for the MIT Press "Software Studies" series.