Sean Cubitt: Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies (2016)

“While digital media give us the ability to communicate with and know the world, their use comes at the expense of an immense ecological footprint and environmental degradation. In Finite Media Sean Cubitt offers a large-scale rethinking of theories of mediation by examining the environmental and human toll exacted by mining and the manufacture, use, and disposal of millions of phones, computers, and other devices. The way out is through an eco-political media aesthetics, in which people use media to shift their relationship to the environment and where public goods and spaces are available to all. Cubitt demonstrates this through case studies ranging from the 1906 film The Story of the Kelly Gang to an image of Saturn taken during NASA’s Cassini-Huygens mission, suggesting that affective responses to images may generate a populist environmental politics that demands better ways of living and being. Only by reorienting our use of media, Cubitt contends, can we overcome the failures of political elites and the ravages of capital.”

Publisher Duke University Press, 2016
Cultural Politics Books series
ISBN 9780822362920. 0822362929
256 pages
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Ricardo Rosas, Giseli Vasconcelos (eds.): net_cultura 1.0: Digitofagia (2006) [BR-PT]

A collection of essays contextualizing actions and initiatives in Brazil’s net culture and hacktivism, edited by the late Ricardo Rosas and Giseli Vasconcelos and coming out of their experience creating Festival Digitofagia in 2004.

“Digitofagia é resultado de um processo coletivo de pensamento gerado durante a concepção, planejamento e realização de um festival de mídia tática, no Rio de Janeiro e em São Paulo, no ano de 2004, que discutiu, entre outras coisas, a necessidade urgente de “abrasileirar” práticas de mídia-ativismo que até então eram teorizadas, praticadas e planejadas sob a influência de teorias e práticas aparentemente alheias ao contexto brasileiro.

A concepção de Digitofagia foi pensar uma pratica antropofágica que se reatualiza no contexto da cultura digital, reabastecendo seu viés libertário. Para tanto, abraçar práticas espontâneas na cultura contemporânea brasileira, como a pirataria, os camelôs e a gambiarra, seria, quem sabe, formas de trazer a mídia tática para um campo mais familiar e mais cotidiano aos praticantes, teóricos e activistas brasileiros. Afinal, a própria cultura brasileira é um codigo (em) aberto.”

“Composto por 35 textos de escritores, ativistas, pesquisadores, acadêmicos e artistas preocupados com os caminhos do ativismo político-artístico nos tempos da globalização digital, Digitofagia é fruto da inesgotável energia e alegria de Ricardo Rosas (1969-2007), que primeiro pensou e organizou, ao lado de Giseli Vasconcelos, os textos selecionados para este volume.”

Publisher Radical Livros, São Paulo, with Sarai/CSDS, Delhi, and Waag Society, Amsterdam, 2006
Creative Commons BY-SA-NC 2.5 Brazil
ISBN 8598600048, 9788598600048
347 pages

Commentary: Paul Keller (2009), Geert Lovink (2009).

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L’Internationale, Rado Ištok (eds.): Decolonising Archives (2016)

This publication “aims to show how archives bear testimony to what was, even more so than collections. Archives present documents that allow one to understand what happened and in which order. Today Internet technology, combined with rapid moves made on the geopolitical chessboard, make archives a contested site of affirmation, recognition and denial. As such, it is of great importance to be aware of processes of colonialisation and decolonisation taking place as new technology can both be used to affirm existing hegemonic colonial relationships or break them open.”

Publisher L’Internationale Online, 2016
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License
111 pages

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