CFPs & Events

Launch Event:

Computational Culture, Issue Two,
Virality, Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks, by Tony D. Sampson
Evil Media, by Matthew Fuller & Andrew Goffey

Free, all welcome

22nd October
6pm
Room RHB 342
Goldsmiths
New Cross
Location Information

To celebrate these publications, informal presentations will be made by the authors of Virality and Evil Media and contributors to Computational Culture.

‘Computational Culture’  is an online open-access peer-reviewed journal of inter-disciplinary enquiry into the nature of cultural computational objects, practices, processes and structures.  The new issue presents articles by Carlos Barreneche, Jennifer Gabrys, Robert W. Gehl & Sarah Bell, Shintaro Miyazaki, Bernhard Rieder, Bernard Stiegler, Annette Vee and reviews by Chiara Bernardi, Greg Elmer, KevinHamilton, Boris Ružiæ, Felix Stalder and an anonymous contributor.

In ‘Virality’ Tony D. Sampson presents a contagion theory fit for the age of networks. Unlike memes and microbial contagions, Virality does not restrict itself to biological analogies and medical metaphors. It instead points toward a theory of contagious assemblages, events, and affects. For Sampson, contagion is not necessarily a positive or negative force of encounter; it is how society comes together and relates.
[University of Minnesota Press]

‘Evil Media’ invites the reader to explore and understand the abstract infrastructure of the present day. From search engines to flirting strategies, from the value of institutional stupidity to the malicious minutiae of databases, this book shows how the devil is in the details.  The title takes the imperative “Don’t be evil” and asks, what would be done any differently in contemporary computational and networked media were that maxim reversed.
[The MIT Press]

In ‘Sensing an Experimental Forest’, her article for ‘Computational Culture’ 2, Jennifer Gabrys discusses fieldwork conducted at an environmental sensor test site, the James Reserve in California.  The use of wireless sensor networks to study environmental phenomena is an increasingly prevalent practice, and ecological applications of sensors have been central to the development of wireless sensor networks that now extend to numerous ‘participatory’ applications.

Virality
http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/virality

Evil Media
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12995

Computational Culture
http://www.computationalculture.net/