Near Futures Online, 1: Europe at a Crossroads (2016)

“Europe at a Crossroads, the pilot issue of Near Futures Online, examines the recent history and potential fate of the two faces of “crisis” in today’s Europe, namely: the resistance and eventual surrender of the Greek government to the dictates of its creditors, and the growing tensions regarding the reception of asylum seekers and the place of immigrants in the EU.”

“Near Futures Online, the online companion of Zone Books’ Near Futures series, is a forum dedicated to the analysis of the challenges borne out of national governments’ and international institutions’ responses to some critical events – the financial crisis of 2008, the “Arab Springs” of 2011 – as well as ongoing developments such as climate change and soaring inequalities. Organized around a specific question, each issue of NFO brings together scholars, journalists, political activists, and artists, and includes contributions belonging to different genres and using a variety of media – essays and reportages, interviews and dialogues, photo essays and videos. Contributors are invited to address questions raised by NFO through an engagement with particular debates, histories, policies, and actors as well as to examine their possible trajectories in the near future.”

Edited by Michel Feher, William Callison, Milad Odabaei, and Aurélie Windels
Publisher Zone Books, Mar 2016
Open access

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Computational Culture, 5: Rhetoric and Computation (2016)

“How can machines be rhetorical? The readers of Computational Culture need not be convinced that computation drives the digital and networked spaces in which we interact, argue and communicate: word processing programs, videogames, banking and commerce systems, social networking sites, and smartphone apps that track our data (both with and without our knowledge) are all evidence that computation in code shapes nearly every space we inhabit. Computation in code affects and effects our lives. Computational machines affect us through their programming and design, as well the discourse they can generate, via text, image, sound, and so on. By writing computer code and software, programmers and designers construct machines that make arguments and judgments and address audiences both machinic and human. In this sense, even the most mundane computational technologies can be seen as rhetorical –from the grocery store check-out scanner to the high school graphing calculator–because any computational machine shapes and constrains behavior. […]

Software studies has paved the way for many disciplines to approach software as an object of study and computer programs as written artifacts, and we may add rhetoric to our toolkit to do so. We can use rhetoric to interpret the ways that computation addresses and responds to various audiences and exigencies, makes assertions about identities, and ultimately participates in a complex ecology of forces that shape behavior and perception. This version of rhetoric is more expansive than the limited, Aristotelian definition rhetoric as the ‘available means of persuasion.’ Just as software studies recognizes that software is more than code, and that code is more than ones and zeros, contemporary rhetoric is interested in more than the content of arguments; it also concerns the relational forces that precede and exceed arguments.” (from the introduction)

With thematic texts by Steve Holmes, John Tinnell, Kevin Brock, Elizabeth Losh, Jennifer Maher, Alexander Monea, Andreas Birkbak & Hjalmar Bang Carlsen, Matthew Bellinger; articles by M. Beatrice Fazi, Erica Robles-Anderson and Patrik Svensson, Michael Lachney, William Babbitt & Ron Eglash, and review section.

Edited by Annette Vee and James J. Brown, Jr.
Published in January 2016
Open Access
ISSN 2047-2390

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Journal of Research Cultures, 1 (2016)

“JRC is a platform for the communication and presentation of strategies of experimental, transdisciplinary and artistic research practices across epistemic cultures. It provides a forum for these epistemic cultures to interconnect and encourages comparative investigations by focusing on strategies rather than outcome of research activities. JRC deliberately emphasises the explorative nature of contemporary research with technology-supported methods and artistic- and practice-based approaches. It extends the philosophy of openness with the intention to be accessible to a broad audience both within the academic framework and outside.”

With contributions from Gerald Nestler, Armin Medosch, Josh Harle, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Margarete Jahrmann, Rosemary Lee, Shintaro Miyazaki, and Tavi Meraud.

Edited by Andrew Newman, Matthias Tarasiewicz, and Sophie-Carolin Wagner
Publisher Research Institute for Arts and Technology, Vienna, 2016
Creative Commons BY 3.0 License
ISSN 2411-3751

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