Joasia Krysa (ed.): Curating Immateriality: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems (2006)

“The site of curatorial production has been expanded to include the space of the Internet and the focus of curatorial attention has been extended from the object to processes to dynamic network systems. As a result, curatorial work has become more widely distributed between multiple agents, including technological networks and software. This upgraded ‘operating system’ of art presents new possibilities of online curating that is collective and distributed — even to the extreme of a self-organising system that curates itself. The curator is part of this entire system but not central to it.

The subtitle of the book makes reference to the essay ‘The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems’ (1988), in which Bill Nichols considered how cybernetics transformed cultural production. He emphasised the shift from mechanical reproduction (symbolised by the camera) to that of cybernetic systems (symbolised by the computer) in relation to the political economy, and pointed to contradictory tendencies inherent in these systems: ‘the negative, currently dominant, tendency toward control, and the positive, more latent potential toward collectivity’. The book continues this general line of inquiry in relation to curating, and extends it by considering how power relations and control are expressed in the context of network systems and immateriality.

In relation to network systems, the emphasis remains on the democratic potential of technological change but also the emergence of what appears as more intensive forms of control. Can the same be said of curating in the context of distributed forms? If so, what does this imply for software curating beyond the rhetoric of free software and open systems?”

Contributors: 0100101110101101.ORG & [epidemiC] | Josephine Berry Slater | Geoff Cox | Alexander R. Galloway & Eugene Thacker | Olga Goriunova & Alexei Shulgin | Beryl Graham | Eva Grubinger | Piotr Krajewski | Jacob Lillemose | low-fi | Franziska Nori | Matteo Pasquinelli | Christiane Paul | Trebor Scholz | Grzesiek Sedek | Tiziana Terranova | Marina Vishmidt

Publisher Autonomedia/I-DAT, 2006
Creative Commons License
DATA browser series, 3
ISBN 1570271739
288 pages

Authors, (2)
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Bruno Latour, Peter Weibel (eds.): Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (2005)

“In this editorial and curatorial project, more than 100 writers, artists, and philosophers rethink what politics is about. In a time of political turmoil and anticlimax, this book redefines politics as operating in the realm of things. Politics is not just an arena, a profession, or a system, but a concern for things brought to the attention of the fluid and expansive constituency of the public. But how are things made public? What, we might ask, is a republic, a res publica, a public thing, if we do not know how to make things public? There are many other kinds of assemblies, which are not political in the usual sense, that gather a public around things—scientific laboratories, supermarkets, churches, and disputes involving natural resources like rivers, landscapes, and air. The authors of Making Things Public—and the ZKM show that the book accompanies—ask what would happen if politics revolved around disputed things. Instead of looking for democracy only in the official sphere of professional politics, they examine the new atmospheric conditions—technologies, interfaces, platforms, networks, and mediations that allow things to be made public. They show us that the old definition of politics is too narrow; there are many techniques of representation—in politics, science, and art—of which Parliaments and Congresses are only a part.”

The authors include Richard Rorty, Simon Schaffer, Peter Galison, Richard Powers, Lorraine Daston, Richard Aczel, and Donna Haraway; their writings are accompanied by excerpts from John Dewey, Shakespeare, Swift, La Fontaine, and Melville. More than 500 color images document the new idea of what Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel call an “object-oriented democracy.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2005
ISBN 0262122790, 9780262122795
1072 pages

Review: Anthony Iles (Mute).

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Fibreculture Journal 17: Unnatural Ecologies (2011)

Media ecology has always resonated with discussions of digital and networked media. Perhaps this is because the discipline of media ecology has always been so open to transdisciplinary work. The pioneers of media ecology set off very early on the road to transdiscplinary critique that is a key focus for the Fibreculture Journal. Indeed, media ecological critique is often critique in the best sense: the exploration of the limits, not just the errors of thinking, the immersion of thought in real events and practices, and the creation of new ideas appropriate to the present and future of media. All in all, from Innis and McLuhan on, media ecology has provided a generative engine within media thinking and practice. Indeed it has been exemplary thinking as practice.

Yet the leading scholars writing for the Unnatural Ecologies issue do not perform media ecology as we have known it. At times the articles argue with more “traditional” media ecology. Sometimes, they arrive at a new media ecology, having travelled other trajectories that those of traditional media ecology. They are rewriting media ecology, exploring its limits from inside and outside. In the process the Fibreculture Journal believes this issue makes a crucial contribution to thinking about all media from the perspective of digital and networked media. In thinking through the unnatural ecologies that contemporary media make increasingly obvious, the issue challenges us to rethink not only what media are, or what they do, but what they might have been, and what they have done.

Articles:
Michael Goddard: Towards an Archaeology of Media Ecologies: ‘Media Ecology’, Political Subjectivation and Free Radios
Olga Goriunova: Autocreativity and Organisational Aesthetics in Art Platforms
Jussi Parikka: Media Ecologies and Imaginary Media: Transversal Expansions, Contractions, and Foldings
Matteo Pasquinelli: Four Regimes of Entropy: For an Ecology of Genetics and Biomorphic Media Theory
Matthew Fuller: Faulty Theory
Phoebe Moore: Subjectivity in the Ecologies of P2P Production

Issue edited by Michael Goddard and Jussi Parikka
Publisher: Fibreculture Publications/The Open Humanities Press, Sydney, Australia, April 2011
ISSN: 1449 – 1443

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