Peter Lunenfeld: The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine (2011)

“The computer, writes Peter Lunenfeld, is the twenty-first century’s culture machine. It is a dream device, serving as the mode of production, the means of distribution, and the site of reception. We haven’t quite achieved the flying cars and robot butlers of futurist fantasies, but we do have a machine that can function as a typewriter and a printing press, a paintbrush and a gallery, a piano and a radio, the mail as well as the mail carrier. But, warns Lunenfeld, we should temper our celebration with caution; we are engaged in a secret war between downloading and uploading–between passive consumption and active creation–and the outcome will shape our collective futures.

In The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading, Lunenfeld makes his case for using digital technologies to shift us from a consumption to a production model. He describes television as “the high fructose corn syrup of the imagination” and worries that it can cause “cultural diabetes”; prescribes mindful downloading, meaningful uploading, and “info-triage” as cures; and offers tips for crafting “bespoke futures” in what he terms the era of “Web n.0″ (interconnectivity to the nth power). He also offers a stand-alone genealogy of digital visionaries, distilling a history of the culture machine that runs from the Patriarchs (Vannevar Bush’s WWII generation) to the Hustlers (Bill Gates and Steve Jobs) to the Searchers (Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google fame). After half a century of television-conditioned consumption/downloading, Lunenfeld tells us, we now find ourselves with a vast new infrastructure for uploading. We simply need to find the will to make the best of it.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2011
ISBN 0262015471, 9780262015479
219 pages

Review: Jan Baetens (Leonardo Reviews, 2011).

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Αθήνα ανοχύρωτη πόλη: Χωρική ανάλυση της εξέγερσης του Δεκέμβρη 2008 (2010) [Greek]

Το κείμενο επιχειρεί μια περιπλάνηση στην αθηναϊκή μητρόπολη πριν και κατά τη διάρκεια της εξέγερσης του 2008, επιδιώκοντας να φωτίσει εκείνες τις πλευρές που πυροδότησαν τις δεκεμβριανές συγκρούσεις. Αντιμετωπίζει τον χώρο ως παράγωγο ανθρώπινων σχέσεων και τις πόλεις ως χώρους συνύπαρξης που μπορούν να λειτουργήσουν ως πεδία αντίστασης και διεκδίκησης της καθημερινής ζωής. Μέσα από μια περιήγηση στα ιδιαίτερα πολεοδομικά χαρακτηριστικά της Αθήνας παρουσιάζει τη χωρική εξάπλωση των συγκρούσεων ερευνώντας τη σχέση του αστικού χώρου με τα συμβάντα των ημερών και τις μετέπειτα παρακαταθήκες τους στον ιστό της πόλης. Στην πραγματικότητα, αυτό που ανέδειξε ο Δεκέμβρης του 2008 είναι πως όπου υπάρχει καταπίεση θα υπάρχει και αντίσταση, όπου υπάρχει βία θα υπάρχει και αντιβία, όπου υπάρχουν άνθρωποι θα υπάρχει αγώνας για ζωή και τότε ο θάνατος δεν θα έχει πια εξουσία.

Publisher Urban Anarchy, December 2010
116 pages

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Georges Didi-Huberman: Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpetriere (1982/2003)

In this classic of French cultural studies, Georges Didi-Huberman traces the intimate and reciprocal relationship between the disciplines of psychiatry and photography in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the immense photographic output of the Salpetriere hospital, the notorious Parisian asylum for insane and incurable women, Didi-Huberman shows the crucial role played by photography in the invention of the category of hysteria. Under the direction of the medical teacher and clinician Jean-Martin Charcot, the inmates of Salpetriere identified as hysterics were methodically photographed, providing skeptical colleagues with visual proof of hysteria’s specific form. These images, many of which appear in this book, provided the materials for the multivolume album Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere.

As Didi-Huberman shows, these photographs were far from simply objective documentation. The subjects were required to portray their hysterical “type”—they performed their own hysteria. Bribed by the special status they enjoyed in the purgatory of experimentation and threatened with transfer back to the inferno of the incurables, the women patiently posed for the photographs and submitted to presentations of hysterical attacks before the crowds that gathered for Charcot’s “Tuesday Lectures.”

Charcot did not stop at voyeuristic observation. Through techniques such as hypnosis, electroshock therapy, and genital manipulation, he instigated the hysterical symptoms in his patients, eventually giving rise to hatred and resistance on their part. Didi-Huberman follows this path from complicity to antipathy in one of Charcot’s favorite “cases,” that of Augustine, whose image crops up again and again in the Iconographie. Augustine’s virtuosic performance of hysteria ultimately became one of self-sacrifice, seen in pictures of ecstasy, crucifixion, and silent cries.

Originally published by Editions Macula, Paris, 1982
Translated by Alisa Hartz
Publisher MIT Press, 2003
ISBN 0262042150, 9780262042154
373 pages

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PDF (updated on 2012-9-24)