Rasa Smite: Creative Networks: In the Rearview Mirror of Eastern European History (2011/2012)

Creative Networks explores the dawn of the Internet culture in the age of network society from the perspective of Eastern Europe. From a theoretical angle the networks are introduced and interpreted as complex socio-technical systems. The author analyzes the development of these networked self-organized formations starting off with ‘virtual communities’ of ‘creative networks’, which emerged during the early phase of the Internet, up to the phenomena of today’s online ‘social networks’. Along with the translocal case studies of Nettime, Syndicate, Faces and Xchange networks (as well as with the other important facets of the 1990s network culture in Europe), the author studies also local community networking case of alternative and digital culture that evolved around E-Lab in the 1990s in Latvia. By focusing primarily on the network culture of 1990s, this study reflects those changes in the social structure of today’s society that are occurring under the process of socio-technical transformation.

The book is based on a dissertation by Rasa Smite, with the title “Creative Network Communities” and was defended in Riga Stradins University, February 2011.

First published in Latvian in Riga: RIXC and Liepaja: LiepU MPLab, 2011.
Translated by Linda Vebere
Publisher Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2012
Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works 3.0 Netherlands License
ISBN 9789081857505
160 pages

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Adrian Mackenzie: Wirelessness: Radical Empiricism in Network Cultures (2010)

How has wirelessness—being connected to objects and infrastructures without knowing exactly how or where—become a key form of contemporary experience? Stretching across routers, smart phones, netbooks, cities, towers, Guangzhou workshops, service agreements, toys, and states, wireless technologies have brought with them sensations of change, proximity, movement, and divergence. In Wirelessness, Adrian Mackenzie draws on philosophical techniques from a century ago to make sense of this most contemporary postnetwork condition. The radical empiricism associated with the pragmatist philosopher William James, Mackenzie argues, offers fresh ways for matching the disordered flow of wireless networks, meshes, patches, and connections with felt sensations.

For Mackenzie, entanglements with things, gadgets, infrastructures, and services—tendencies, fleeting nuances, and peripheral shades of often barely registered feeling that cannot be easily codified, symbolized, or quantified—mark the experience of wirelessness, and this links directly to James’s expanded conception of experience. “Wirelessness” designates a tendency to make network connections in different times and places using these devices and services. Equally, it embodies a sensibility attuned to the proliferation of devices and services that carry information through radio signals. Above all, it means heightened awareness of ongoing change and movement associated with networks, infrastructures, location, and information.

The experience of wirelessness spans several strands of media-technological change, and Mackenzie moves from wireless cities through signals, devices, networks, maps, and products, to the global belief in the expansion of wireless worlds.

Publisher MIT Press, 2010
ISBN 0262014645, 9780262014649
255 pages

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Fibreculture journal 18: trans (2011)

It is now perhaps a commonplace that digital, networked and informational media are extremely transient. They diversify in form and function at a dizzying rate. At the same time, they transit and fuse “social” and “natural” differences in a manner which reconfigures all the worlds involved. It is also perhaps a commonplace to suggest that some established powers have found it difficult to come to grips with this (although this is perhaps beginning to change). For many, from seriously challenged newspaper proprietors to established media disciplines, it might be time to pause for breath, if only for a moment—to regroup and adapt established practices and ideas, to count the survivors from among the old media worlds of just a few years ago.

While occasionally sympathetic, issue 18 of the Fibreculture Journal questions this approach. If we pause for breath, it is to take in the new air. This issue draws on the accelerated evolutions of media forms and processes, the microrevolutions in the social (and even the natural sciences) that dynamic media foster, even the way in which “new” media lead us to reconsider the diversity of “old” media species. Summed up simply here under the sign/event of the “trans,” this issue catalyzes new concepts, accounts of and suggestions for new practices for working with all these processes.

Articles:
Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders: Other Ways Of Knowing: Embodied Investigations of the Unstable, Slippery and Incomplete
John Tinnell: Transversalising the Ecological Turn: Four Components of Felix Guattari’s Ecosophical Perspective
Vince Dziekan: Anxious Atmospheres, and the Transdisciplinary Practice of United Visual Artists
Kristoffer Gansing: The Transversal Generic: Media-Archaeology and Network Culture
Christoph Brunner and Jonas Fritsch: Interactive Environments as Fields of Transduction
Troy Rhoades: From Representation to Sensation: The Transduction of Images in John F. Simon Jr.’s ‘Every Icon’
Michael Dieter: The Becoming Environmental of Power: Tactical Media After Control
Simon Mills: Concrete Software: Simondon’s mechanology and the techno-social
Fenwick McKelvey: A Programmable Platform? Drupal, Modularity, and the Future of the Web

Issue edited by Andrew Murphie, Adrian Mackenzie and Mitchell Whitelaw
Publisher: Fibreculture Publications/The Open Humanities Press, Sydney, Australia, October 2011
ISSN: 1449 – 1443

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New Network Theory: Collected Abstracts and Papers (2007)

On 28 – 30 June 2007, the Institute of Network Cultures and Media Studies, University of Amsterdam and the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, organized the international conference New Network Theory. The object of study has shifted from the virtual community and the space of flows to the smart mob. When the object of study changes, so may the distinctions that dominate, particularly the schism between place-based space and place-less space, both organized and given life by networks. New Network Theory explored contemporary network theory that suits and reflects the changes to the objects of study that come to define our understandings of network culture – a post-Castellsian network theory, if you will, that takes technical media seriously.

themes: network theory, the link, locative media, networks and subjectivities, networking and social life, art and info-aesthetics, actor-network theory and assemblage, networks and social movements, mobility and organisation, anomalous objects and processes, and the global and the local.

speakers: Katy Börner, Wendy Chun, Noshir Contractor, Florian Cramer, Rob Stuart, Jean-Paul Fourmentraux, Matthew Fuller, Valdis Krebs, Olia Lialina, Noortje Marres, Anna Munster, Warren Sack, Alan Liu, Ramesh Srini-vasan, Tiziana Terranova, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and many others.

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Three additional papers (Verheij, Cramer, Goriunova)

Yochai Benkler: A Free Irresponsible Press: Wikileaks and the Battle Over the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate (draft, 2011)

A study of the events surrounding the Wikileaks document releases in 2010 provides a rich set of insights about the weaknesses and sources of resilience of the emerging networked fourth estate. It marks the emergence of a new model of watchdog function, one that is neither purely networked nor purely traditional, but is rather a mutualistic interaction between the two. It identifies the peculiar risks to, and sources of resilience of, the networked fourth estate in a multidimensional system of expression and restraint, and suggests the need to resolve a major potential vulnerability—the extralegal cooperation between the government and private infrastructure companies to restrict speech without being bound by the constraints of legality. Finally, it offers a richly detailed event study of the complexity of the emerging networked fourth estate, and the interaction, both constructive and destructive, between the surviving elements of the traditional model and the emerging elements of the new. It teaches us that the traditional, managerial-professional sources of responsibility in a free press function imperfectly under present market conditions, while the distributed models of mutual criticism and universal skeptical reading, so typical of the Net, are far from powerless to deliver effective criticism and self-correction where necessary. The future likely is, as the Guardian described its own experience with Wikileaks, “a new model of co-operation,” between surviving elements of the traditional, mass-mediated fourth estate, and its emerging networked models. The transition to this new model will likely be anything but smooth.

Working Paper of article forthcoming in the Harvard Civil Rights – Civil Liberties Law Review.
8 February 2011 version.
66 pages

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Geert Lovink, Rachel Somers Miles (eds.): Video Vortex Reader II: Moving Images Beyond YouTube (2011)

Video Vortex Reader II is the Institute of Network Cultures’ second collection of texts that critically explore the rapidly changing landscape of online video and its use. With the success of YouTube (’2 billion views per day’) and the rise of other online video sharing platforms, the moving image has become expansively more popular on the Web, significantly contributing to the culture and ecology of the internet and our everyday lives. In response, the Video Vortex project continues to examine critical issues that are emerging around the production and distribution of online video content.

Following the success of the mailing list, the website and first Video Vortex Reader in 2008, recent Video Vortex conferences in Ankara (October 2008), Split (May 2009) and Brussels (November 2009) have sparked a number of new insights, debates and conversations regarding the politics, aesthetics, and artistic possibilities of online video. Through contributions from scholars, artists, activists and many more, Video Vortex Reader II asks what is occurring within and beyond the bounds of Google’s YouTube? How are the possibilities of online video, from the accessibility of reusable content to the internet as a distribution channel, being distinctly shaped by the increasing diversity of users taking part in creating and sharing moving images over the web?

Contributors: Perry Bard, Natalie Bookchin, Vito Campanelli, Andrew Clay, Alexandra Crosby, Alejandro Duque, Sandra Fauconnier, Albert Figurt, Sam Gregory, Cecilia Guida, Stefan Heidenreich, Larissa Hjorth, Mél Hogan, Nuraini Juliastuti, Sarah Késenne, Elizabeth Losh, Geert Lovink, Andrew Lowenthal, Rosa Menkman, Gabriel Menotti, Rachel Somers Miles, Andrew Gryf Paterson, Teague Schneiter, Jan Simons, Evelin Stermitz, Blake Stimson, David Teh, Ferdiansyah Thajib, Andreas Treske, Robrecht Vanderbeeken, Linda Wallace, Brian Willems, Matthew Williamson, Tara Zepel.

Copy Editor: Nicole Heber
Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam.
Supported by: the School for Communication and Design at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (Hogeschool van Amsterdam DMCI).
ISBN: 978-90-78146-12-4
378 pages
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works 3.0 Netherlands License.

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Trebor Scholz, Laura Y. Liu: Situated Technologies Pamphlet 7: From Mobile Playgrounds to Sweatshop City (2010)

The authors reflect on the relationship between labor and technology in urban space where communication, attention, and physical movement generate financial value for a small number of private stakeholders. Online and off, Internet users are increasingly wielded as a resource for economic amelioration, for private capture, and the channels of communication are becoming increasingly inscrutable. Liu and Scholz ask: How does the intertwining of labor and play complicate our understanding of exploitation?

Publisher: The Architectural League of New York, Fall 2010
Series Editors: Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz, Mark Shepard
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

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