State Machines: Reflections and Actions at the Edge of Digital Citizenship, Finance, and Art (2019)

“Today, we live in a world where every time we turn on our smartphones, we are inextricably tied by data, laws and flowing bytes to different countries. A world in which personal expressions are framed and mediated by digital platforms, and where new kinds of currencies, financial exchange and even labor bypass corporations and governments. Simultaneously, the same technologies increase governmental powers of surveillance, allow corporations to extract ever more complex working arrangements and do little to slow the construction of actual walls along actual borders. On the one hand, the agency of individuals and groups is starting to approach that of nation states; on the other, our mobility and hard-won rights are under threat. What tools do we need to understand this world, and how can art assist in envisioning and enacting other possible futures?”

Contributors: James Bridle, Max Dovey, Marc Garrett, Valeria Graziano, Max Haiven, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Francis Hunger, Helen Kaplinsky, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, Rob Myers, Emily van der Nagel, Rachel O’Dwyer, Lídia Pereira, Rebecca L. Stein, Cassie Thornton, Paul Vanouse, Patricia de Vries, Krystian Woznicki.

Edited by Yiannis Colakides, Marc Garrett, and Inte Gloerich
Publisher Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2019
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 License
ISBN 9789492302335
260 pages

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Jennifer Gabrys: Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (2016)

“Sensors are everywhere. Small, flexible, economical, and computationally powerful, they operate ubiquitously in environments. They compile massive amounts of data, including information about air, water, and climate. Never before has such a volume of environmental data been so broadly collected or so widely available.

Grappling with the consequences of wiring our world, Program Earth examines how sensor technologies are programming our environments. As Jennifer Gabrys points out, sensors do not merely record information about an environment. Rather, they generate new environments and environmental relations. At the same time, they give a voice to the entities they monitor: to animals, plants, people, and inanimate objects. This book looks at the ways in which sensors converge with environments to map ecological processes, to track the migration of animals, to check pollutants, to facilitate citizen participation, and to program infrastructure. Through discussing particular instances where sensors are deployed for environmental study and citizen engagement across three areas of environmental sensing, from wild sensing to pollution sensing and urban sensing, Program Earth asks how sensor technologies specifically contribute to new environmental conditions. What are the implications for wiring up environments? How do sensor applications not only program environments, but also program the sorts of citizens and collectives we might become?

Program Earth suggests that the sensor-based monitoring of Earth offers the prospect of making new environments not simply as an extension of the human but rather as new “technogeographies” that connect technology, nature, and people.”

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2016
Electronic Mediations series, 49
ISBN 9780816693122, 0816693129
x+357 pages
via publisher

Reviews: Etienne S. Benson (Am J Sociology, 2017), Matthew W. Wilson (Cultural Geographies, 2017).
Interviews: Rorotoko (2016), Ulrik Ekman (Computational Culture, 2017).

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transversal, 03/13: Flee Erase Territorialize (2013) [EN, DE, FR, ES, Arabic]

“The refugee protests in many EU countries have succeeded in drawing widespread public attention and produced a strong media echo. There is hope that the activism of the refugees and their supporters will at least produce improvements in regards to the violation of human rights in asylum procedures which even contradict rules established by the Geneva Convention.

However, the protests far surpass the legal realm. They raise the fundamental question if and how today’s governmental procedures are compatible with democracy, if and how democracy can be viewed and realized in a globalized order that is influenced by dramatic social, economical and political injustices.

In whatever this “we” of those with documents may consist, genuine democratic citizenship today can only be realized /with/ those who have no documents, with Sans-Papiers. In this sense fleeing is a movement that erases the traces and mechanisms of identification, but at the same time it also means to take refuge – not as an object or a victim, but as self-determined occupation of territories, be they protest camps, churches or new homes.” (from the Editorial)

With contributions by Etienne Balibar, Stefan Nowotny, Amine Germaine, Simo Kader, Adalat Khan, Numan Muhammad, Brigitta Kuster, Tina Leisch, Gin Müller, Ilker Ataç, Brigitta Kuster / Vassilis S. Tsianos, Helmut Dietrich, Monika Mokre, Peter Waterhouse.

Editors: Andrea Hummer, Birgit Mennel, Raimund Minichbauer, Monika Mokre, Stefan Nowotny, Gerald Raunig
Developed in cooperation with the journals Kulturrisse and Malmoe
Publisher eipcp – European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, Vienna/Linz
Copyleft
ISSN 1811-1696

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