Author: techsocjal

Mümtaz Murat Kök
(Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw)

Abstract:
In this presentation, I am going to try and answer one of the questions in the call for the conference regarding the affective language of the contemporary global economy. In order to do so, I will focus on what I have termed as ‘discourses of optimism’ which exhibit blind belief and thus commitment to the inevitable human progress through capitalism. I will explore these discourses through a reinterpretation of the concept of “emotional capitalism” in that I will argue that they constitute an emotional commitment to capitalism. After having discussed the downside of the discourses of optimism, I will argue that pessimism (specifically ‘cosmic pessimism’) can and will affect much needed radical change in the face of increasing global inequality (and all that it brings with it) and impending climate disaster.

Mümtaz Murat Kök was born in Ankara in May 6, 1989. He completed his undergraduate studies at Izmir University of Economics (2008-2012). After that, he was admitted to Ege University for master’s study. He graduated from Ege University in 2015. Later, he attended the IFiS PAN/ Lancaster University Joint MA Programme at the Graduate School for Social Research. He is currently continuing his PhD studies at the GSSR.

 

Victor Gabriel García Castañeda
(Autonomous University of Barcelona)

Abstract:
The hyper-mediatic nature of the post-digital era has created new pathological modalities on the way in which Internet users present themselves on social media. It is not uncommon to hear nowadays about narcissism (infatuation with the self-image), attention deficit disorder (derived from the oversaturation of information), sociopathy (fostered in online communities that hold radical ideologies), depression and anxiety (caused by the pressure of seeking social recognition) or other affective and behavioral disorders in relation to the compulsive use of digital technologies. In this space I will argue that these disorders are presented within the framework of cognitive, affective and aesthetic capitalism that demands users –specially the most active and the so-called “influencers”– to maintain a systematic presence on social media, to represent themselves with stylized bodies, over perfectly designed scenarios and maintaining a transmedia projection of their self in episodic forms by means of different textual and audiovisual supports. On the other hand, it is common for content creators to enter “burnout” phases of creative or physical exhaustion, as is the case of streamers who spend hours recording on their computers daily, often without leaving their homes for weeks, in addition to being pressured to always show a positive and entertaining facet of their lives for their followers. Exploring the effects of late capitalism exploitation of the affective dynamics of social media is important to understand the social constructions of online and offline identities and the political dimension of the self.

Victor Gabriel García Castañeda is a Philosophy PhD student at the Autonomous University of Barcelona doing research on the aesthetics of the post-internet subject. He holds a Masters on Sociology from the Iberoamerican University of Mexico City and a bachelor’s in Philosophy and Social Sciences from ITESO (Guadalajara, Mexico). His research interests include: digital cultures, aesthetic and cognitive capitalism, online identity constructions, the attention economy and the informational person and body. He has previously worked as a research assistant, a political communications consultant and an editor for a nation-wide newspaper in Mexico. He also writes for different magazines about the Internet, popular culture and music.

 

Paweł Frelik
(University of Warsaw)

Abstract:
Video games are, to use Raymond Williams’ phrase, structures of feeling as well as systems of affects, both emotional and bodily. Some of the players’ affective responses to game texts have now been well theorized. For instance, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow” has been repeatedly mentioned in both academic works in game studies and more popular approaches to games (e.g. Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken). Elsewhere, Aubrey Anable, in Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect (2018), provides several case studies in which she traces various affective entanglements in games to earlier cultural experiences and phenomena. Following her line of thinking, in my presentation I would like to apply her framework to shed some light on selected titles belonging to the sub-genre known as “walking simulators.” Texts grouped in this category very often lack traditional features connected with challenges or goals, and while some substitute them with strong narrative structures, there are many “walkers” that dispense even with those. As my case studies, I have selected 9.03m (2013) and Glithhikers (2014), two ephemeral texts which, to my mind, provide interesting opportunities for thinking about affect and/in games. In their analysis I would particularly like to focus on how these two texts can engender both indescribable emotions and embodied experiences. Apart from focusing on specific affective operations and qualities in them, I would also like to propose some new ways of understanding walking simulators as texts exceeding the task-and-challenge and narrative modes of the gaming medium.

Paweł Frelik is Associate Professor and the Leader of Speculative Texts and Media Research Group at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw. His teaching and research interests include science fiction, video games, fantastic visualities, digital media, and transmedia storytelling. He has published widely in these fields, serves on the boards of Science Fiction Studies, Extrapolation, and Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, and is the co-editor of the New Dimensions in Science Fiction book series at the University of Wales Press. In 2017, he was the first non-Anglophone recipient of the Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service presented by the Science Fiction Research Association for outstanding service activities. 

Adam Cichoń
(University of Warsaw)

Abstract:
The borderlines between love, technology and community in the post-digital age are really thin, if not completely blurred. The development of virtual reality goes hand in hand with the changing relationships between people. In the last few years cinematography has given us representations of something which can be called “strange love”. In movies such a Her or Blade Runner we find protagonists who fall in love with an “interface”. For a long time authors such as Sherry Turkle tried to rethink how people are affected by non-human objects and why they can establish relationships with them. Thus, it is not surprising that science fiction movies explore these kind of stories. In his works, Dominic Pettman goes one step further and provides us with a concept which is adequate to that of “strange love”. For Pettman love is simply a kind of technology – technology of being together. In the end love is something that we make. From that perspective an inter-face is just another technology which helps us to be together or in other words – to “make” a love. But what exactly have interfaces to do with affects? To answer that question we have to go back to the notion of face which Pettman borrowed from Gilles Deleuze and which he transformed into the inter-face. In my paper I am going to explore that concept by juxtaposing it with another Deleuzian idea – the “affection-image” of which the face seems to be an important correlate. In some sense the digital age enables us to fulfill the Deleuze’s famous postulate – to escape the face, escape that horror story (as he called it). But even if we are living in the age of “strange love” is it a sufficient reason to learn to stop worrying and love the interface?

Adam Cichoń is a PhD student at the Faculty of “Artes Liberales” at the University of Warsaw. He received his MA in Philosophy from the University of Warsaw. He is currently working on his PhD dissertation which is focused on the expression in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema.

Mitchell Atkinson III
(Polish Academy of Sciences)

Abstract:
A central goal of the transhumanist community, that of “migrating” personality from an organic substrate to a non-organic or otherwise artificially constituted substrate, is troubled by myriad philosophical difficulties. Although the range of these difficulties is broad and includes thorny problems of the structure of consciousness requiring phenomenological analysis, here I will begin with Lebniz Law arguments on the structure of identity. Starting with the problems of identity, it can be seen that emulations and ancestors must be different sorts of thing if they are to be clearly defined.  Further, I will address phenomenological issues related to criteria for salience of functions of consciousnesses attempting migration, and the problems associated with construing those salience criteria personalistically, naturalistically, or transcendentally. All of the preceding leaves open the question as to whether something like substrate migration can take place, and more pressingly, whether such “migrations” will yield creatures who believe that they share an identity, however tortured, with their ancestors.

Mitchell Atkinson III is a doctoral candidate at the Graduate School for Social Research in the Polish Academy of Sciences. He works on phenomenology and social theory.

Euripides Altintzoglou
(University of Wolverhampton)

Abstract:
Post-Truth assertions are public acts of persuasion; rhetoric exercises that employ rational processes of dissemination (technology) and volumetric strategies of validated authorship(public endorsement of the ‘source’) in order to corroborate the ethical manipulation of what is right or wrong. This paper will pay particular focus on the allegorical processes that enable the production of these public statements and their operative manipulation of the veracity of fiction as fact: the resolution of familiar images into otherwise abstract aesthetic norms followed by their re-contextualised appropriation into precepts of specific ideological determinacy. Images have been traditionally theorised within binary paradigms: personal/universal, truthful/idealised (fictional), radical/hegemonic. With the rise of social media and their impact on the rate of dissemination of information, along with a populist determination of source credibility, we need to consider how these factors further condition the production of meaning in images that are proposed as ‘truthful’. The resurgent prominence of the theory of the ‘affect’ provides a third pole that not only mediates a balance within the dialectic natureof linguistic and semantic conflictual coexistences but also repositions the production of meaning as an emergent phenomenon. In such triadic networks, the ‘unleashed potentiality of abstraction’ (Massumi, 1995) renders the ‘affect’ as a tabula rasa, where the allegorical methods of confiscation, superimposition, fragmentation, and decentralisation (Owens,1980) are employed for the appropriation of narratives.

Dr Euripides Altintzoglou is a Subject Leader in Photography and a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art & Photography at the FHEA Wolverhampton School of Art, University of Wolverhampton. He is the author of Portraiture and Critical Reflections on Being (Routledge 2018) and co-editor (with Martin Fredriksson) of Revolt and Revolution: The Protester in the 21st Century (Inter-Disciplinary Press 2016). A practicing artist, he exhibited his works in Greece, France and the UK.

Lara Alouan
(Ph.D., Sociology, University of Paris Saclay, France)

Abstract:
To sum up briefly, Hackerspaces are workshops organized with an open community model where people with technological interests can socialize, collaborate, share and expand their knowledge. Hackerspaces advocate more democratic, less formalized and hierarchical way of proceeding, in order to grant more autonomy and responsibility to their members. The interest generated by hackerspaces, as particular places of technological creativity, has spread recently beyond researchers (Lallement, 2015; Davies R., 2017; Berrebi-Hoffman, Bureau, Lallement, 2018). Specifically hacker movement – taken in its general sense of emancipation thought technic and not in its reductive acceptance of informatics piracy (Raymond, 1999 ; Himanen, 2001 ; Mc Kenzie Wark, 2004) – calls for continuous experimentation with alternative forms of working organization. And if these organization forms, based on peer relations, own alternative character, even “capacitable”, do hackerspaces create a new socio-economical paradigm or do they consider/conceal other realities? To answer all these questions, we suggest our research: behind the smooth and enthusiastic facade in which hackerspaces are presented, what are structuring or occurring issues implemented (not only technological, but also social, economic, political terms)? In this contribution, we analyze if and how a focus on sensitization, technological skills and hacking can recreate or overcome reproduction of inequitable power relations at work. The purpose of this communication, based in empirical analysis, is to present four hackerpaces, self-organized, and observed in France from April 2015 to December 2017. Hackerspaces observed are volunteer-run, self-managed, autonomous spaces. Three of them become a hub for hacktivists in an attempt to create and communicate a collective challenge against capitalism and defend their vision based on open access, horizontal collaboration, self-management coordination and the free circulation of information.

Lara Alouan received her doctorate from University Of Paris Saclay, in November 2018, in France. She joined Sociology and Economics of Networks and Services at Orange Labs. Since 2017, she has been involved with French Association of Sociology (AFS) as a member of RT 25 committee (Research Network related to Labour market, Employment and organization).

Randal Auxier
(Professor of Philosophy and Communication Studies Southern Illinois University Carbondale; Visiting Full Professor, Department of the Philosophy of Culture Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw)

Abstract:
Does anything ever really “go away,” completely? This paper is a search for real deletion, and the metaphysics that must accompany real deletion. Bergson argued that the full past is active in the present. The issue is access. Metaphysical annihilation is not possible, even for a divine being. Whitehead took a softer line: the past is “objectively immortal,” but its “subjective immediacy” and “relevance” to the present “perpetually perishes.” No real deletion. These are convictions about past actuality. What about possibilities? Presumably past possibilities once had some active relation to some actual present, but, if their moment passed without their being actualized, are they now really deleted? Are might-have-beens truly gone? And in what sense? I will argue that insofar as anything intelligible to us can be “really deleted,” it must belong to a constellation of possibilities (my term) that never ingresses (Whitehead’s term), due to its incompatibility with a collection of possibilities that does ingress (again my term). Not ingressing is not real deletion until actuality has drained such a constellation of might-have-beens of all potency. It is a process. Real deletion is, therefore, enacted in the present, as actuality is related to possibility in any moment. There must come a moment when a constellation of un-enacted possibilities loses all potency, and the act (sometimes quite dramatically) whereby a constellation loses its last measure of potency is all we can mean by “real deletion”: the end of a process. To “delete” in general, then, is to devalue some clusters (my term) of possibilities in their relation to other clusters possibilities, until a constellation is separated from the clusters possessing some potency, and becomes a “constellation.” It is the only deletion consistent with the continuity of the actual and the possible. This argument therefore crosses the digital/analogue divide and shows one feature of their continuity.

Randall Auxier is a Professor of Philosophy and Communication Studies at Southern Illinois University and a Visiting Professor at the Department of the Philosophy of Culture, Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw. Among his research interests are philosophy of culture (including popular culture), aesthetics, process philosophy and theology, post-Kantian continental philosophy, and pragmatism. His publications include: Time, Will and Purpose: Living Ideas from the Philosophy of Josiah Royce (Chicago, Open Court, 2013), The Quantum of Explanation: Whitehead’s Radical Empiricism (with Gary L. Herstein) (Routledge, 2017), Metaphysical Graffiti: Deep Cuts in the Philosophy of Rock (Open Court 2017), and numerous articles on Vico, Bergson, Dewey, Cassirer, Langer, Whitehead and others. He is also Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture (www.eidos.uw.edu.pl).

El Bedoui Imen
(Dr. in sciences and arts techniques, University of Kairouan)

Abstract:
We will explore the connection between the implications of the postdigital in the bio art practices. When technology with its inventions takes a part in the artistic practice, we witness a new age of art creation. By using living material to create a unique living or semi-living artwork, bio artists explore the power of post-digital as a way to express the vital effect. The limit between real and virtual, between biological and virtual seems to be blurred. The openness and the limitless power of digital and post-digital as a possibility for a new creative visions impact the living and its manifestations in artworks. Roy Ascott consider distinction between digital and ‘’post-digital’’ is part of the economy of reality. In his book The Future of Art In Postdigital Age, Mell Alexemberg addresses the “humanization of digital technologies’’. Rethinking art, through the post-digital is also re-considering human creative mind with a new dimensions that goes beyond it limits. How could we consider the potential possibility that offers post-digital for the process of artwork becoming? In which way we could explore that deep and complex connection between the biological and the post-digital for the feature of bio art visions. Through this paper we will try to apprehend how human imagination can reach new territories by exploring the powerful use of technology and the understanding of its dimensions. By melting living material into digital and post-digital field, bio artists play with life to create a posthuman figure expression.

El Bedoui Imen is a doctor in sciences and arts techniques, specialty art theory in the University of Tunis and assistant professor at the Higher Institute of Arts and Crafts Kasserine at University of Kairouan. Her research focus on the Bio art practice and its issues on ethics and Aesthetics, working on the question of limit.

Joseph Cook
(PhD Researcher in Digital Anthropology, University College London, UK)

Abstract:
To many the contemporary corporate office exhibits many qualities reminiscent of Bentham’s Panopticon. Through both the exposed nature of the open-plan physical space and the assumption of workers being overseen through digital technologies, developments around such environments are understandably a concern of many modern labour unions. This paper tries to look at both sides of this argument by engaging with the thoughts and actions of those that design such spaces. Evidence-based designers claim to be delivering democracy, representing the worker in the design process and using data to create more humane spaces. By using online employee surveys, gathering utilisation data through sensors, swipe cards or video recordings, and interviewing workers, workplace strategy and design professionals aim to create spaces that not only work for business, but also take into account worker preferences in creating spaces that promote wellbeing and employee satisfaction. To labour unions though the cons of such engagement are often seen as outweighing the pros – with the ‘evidence’ gathered simply a continuation of scientific management into white collar professions, cleverly disguising the power of such data as concern. This paper draws on information gained through extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the workplace design team of one of the world’s largest architecture firms, along with interviews with trade union officials in the UK, to understand the role of both data-gathering and trade unions in the digital landscape of labour and the physical landscape of the office.

Joseph Cook is a PhD Researcher in Digital Anthropology at University College London (UCL), and a Research Assistant at UCL’s Urban Laboratory. Previously working in architecture, his current ethnographic research is interested in links between architectural design and organisational culture, the anthropology of work and data, and historical and novel forms of measurement in the workplace.