Fibreculture Journal 21: Exploring Affective Interactions (2012)

“The aim of this special issue of the Fibreculture Journal is to address some of the contemporary challenges involved in working with affect across disciplines and practices that centre on the use of interactive- or digital technologies. The issue has a special focus on interaction design, interaction-based art and digital art.” (from Editorial)

With contributions by Adam Nash, Lone Bertelsen, Susan Kozel, Mark Gawne, Andrew Goodman and Erin Manning, and Sher Doruff and Andrew Murphie.

Issue Edited by Jonas Fritsch and Thomas Markussen
Publisher: Fibreculture Publications/The Open Humanities Press, Sydney, Australia, July 2012
ISSN: 1449 – 1443

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Sianne Ngai: Ugly Feelings (2005)

“Envy, irritation, paranoia—in contrast to powerful and dynamic negative emotions like anger, these non-cathartic states of feeling are associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended. In her examination of the cultural forms to which these affects give rise, Sianne Ngai suggests that these minor and more politically ambiguous feelings become all the more suited for diagnosing the character of late modernity.

Along with her inquiry into the aesthetics of unprestigious negative affects such as irritation, envy, and disgust, Ngai examines a racialized affect called “animatedness,” and a paradoxical synthesis of shock and boredom called “stuplimity.” She explores the politically equivocal work of these affective concepts in the cultural contexts where they seem most at stake, from academic feminist debates to the Harlem Renaissance, from late-twentieth-century American poetry to Hollywood film and network television. Through readings of Herman Melville, Nella Larsen, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, John Yau, and Bruce Andrews, among others, Ngai shows how art turns to ugly feelings as a site for interrogating its own suspended agency in the affirmative culture of a market society, where art is tolerated as essentially unthreatening.

Ngai mobilizes the aesthetics of ugly feelings to investigate not only ideological and representational dilemmas in literature—with a particular focus on those inflected by gender and race—but also blind spots in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Her work maps a major intersection of literary studies, media and cultural studies, feminist studies, and aesthetic theory.”

Publisher Harvard University Press, 2005
ISBN 0674015363, 9780674015364
viii+422 pages

Reviews: Jennifer L. Fleissner (Modernism/modernity, 2006), Jennifer Greiman (Leviathan, 2012), Eu Jin Chua (Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature, 2007), Dina Mendonça (Metapsychology, 2005).

Interview with author (Adam Jasper, Cabinet)
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Richard Grusin: Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (2010)

The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 have been called the world’s first live global media event. Responding to the immediacy and collective shock produced by live coverage of the collapse of the Twin Towers, print, televisual, and networked media have become obsessed with the pre-mediation of potential futures.

In an era of heightened securitization, US and global media have attempted to prevent a recurrence of such media trauma by ensuring that no future will be able to emerge into the present that has not already been premeditated in the past. Socially networked US and global media work to premediate collective affects of anticipation and connectivity, while also perpetuating low levels of apprehension or fear.

Following up on the groundbreaking work of media theory Remediation: Understanding New Media, Grusin develops the logic of premediation in terms of such concepts as mediality, the affective life of media, and the anticipation of security.

Publisher Palgrave Macmillan, 2010
ISBN 0230242529, 9780230242524
240 pages

review (Jussi Parikka, Leonardo)

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