CFPs & Events

Call for Abstracts (Deadline: September 15, 2024)

En/Countering Tracking. Resisting spatiotemporal media operations in computational culture
A special issue of Computational Culture, a Journal of Software Studies
Edited by Kathrin Friedrich and Sebastian Randerath

Tracking takes place ubiquitously and at different scales – from satellite-based wildlife tracking (Benson 2010) to automated monitoring of supply chain workers through radio-frequency identification (RFID) (Hayles 2009; Kanngieser 2013) and to ubiquitous self-surveillance through self-tracking apps (Lupton 2021). With the expansion of sensor-based geomedia as well as embodied computing, tracking also becomes a key media operation for environmental sensing or virtual reality experiences (Egliston and Carter 2022; Gabrys 2019).

Tracking as a spacetime-critical media operation is engendered by complex media infrastructures, which automatically capture objects or processes, sustain software-based data collection and storage, and provide different kinds of interfaces of (non-)human interaction (Friedrich 2021). Tracking is deeply related to critical issues of today’s computational culture, such as automation, (non-)human agency and capitalist politics. Software studies approaches have provided important cues for critically analyzing the computational logics of tracking, especially in regard to the socio-material impacts on the co-constitutions of software and the work it performs in relation to (non-)human actors in time and space (Kitchin and Dodge 2011). Critiquing tracking is strongly connected to different scholarly discourses on software studies. These approaches have also provided important critical impulses in regard to the capitalization (Rossiter 2016), more-than-human interactions (Gabrys 2012) and racializing dynamics (Chun 2018) of spatiotemporal software technologies and tracking (Chun 2018; Sansone Ruiz 2023).

The computational logics of tracking result in new aesthetic and operational regimes that diminish sensory perception and privilege logics of calculation, which in turn co-constitute mobile forms of (non-)human action and tactical interventions (Crandall 2010; Hansen 2015). Countering tracking has become a key form of resisting the logics of computational culture. Subversive encounters have emerged in recent years as counterpoints to the hegemonic logics of web infrastructures (Christl and Spiekermann 2016), platform labor (Heiland 2021) and racial capitalism (Russell and De Souza 2023). These attempts to counter tracking take forms that range from investigative visualizations (Fuller and Weizman 2021) or provoking glitches in tracking infrastructures (Leszczynski and Elwood 2022) to uncovering web-based tracking (Sharelab 2015), building counter-infrastructures for labor resistance (Qadri and D’Ignazio 2022), or using sensors and satellite images for critical investigations (Ballinger 2023; Boyd et al. 2018). Countering tracking becomes a resistant media operation itself, disentangling hegemonic spatiotemporal regimes and their socio-political forces. These forms of countering tracking challenge existing theoretical approaches to the critical analysis of tracking and open up new perspectives on subversion and resistance in computational culture.

We invite critical encounters through and of tracking, which enable new perspectives on computational infrastructures, software, (non-)human aesthetics and operative interactions by means of theoretical reflections, critical making or activism.
We aim at gathering submissions that 1) render existing tracking operations perceivable; 2) disrupt tracking infrastructures; or 3) operationalize tracking itself for resistance:

1) Countering tracking renders existing tracking operations perceivable: Critical approaches of countering tracking aim at making existing tracking processes visible or establishing alternative visualities of locative media (Brown 2018; Fuller and Weizman 2021). Tactical media operations of countering tracking aim at reversing the aesthetic regimes of tracking through image operations, investigative aesthetics, diagrammatics, counter-cartographies or synesthetic approaches. In doing so, some approaches towards countering tracking (re)produce narratives of “objective” imagery and locative truth, while some approaches are explicitly developed to counter these narratives (Forensic Architecture 2014).

2) Countering tracking disrupts tracking infrastructures: Resistant media operations of countering tracking disrupt or interrupt socio-material tracking infrastructures. Localizability through tracking infrastructures is accompanied by planned and random interruptions, such as “glitches” (Leszczynski and Elwood 2022). Interruptions of tracking infrastructures provoke resistant epistemologies of tracking and support resistances, which are negotiated both informally and collectively (Qadri and D’Ignazio 2022). Strategies of countering tracking can act both critically, e.g. as a conscious disruption of hegemonic tracking infrastructures, and affirmatively, e.g. as forms of repair towards existing tracking infrastructures (Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior 2023). In this process, countering tracking establishes alternative epistemologies and practices of spatiotemporal infrastructures (Qadri 2021).

3) Countering tracking operationalizes tracking itself for resistance: Tactical approaches to countering tracking operationalize existing tracking media, such as sensor technologies, apps, web algorithms or satellites (Boyd et al. 2018; Brown 2018; ElonJet 2023; Peeters 2021). Employing existing tracking media offers new perspectives on the negotiation of counter-surveillance (Monahan 2006), tactical media and subversive media operations through (software) infrastructures. Here the critical analysis of strategies that use tracking itself to counter tracking expands discourses on countersurveillance, tactical media and subversive media operations by focusing on different spatiotemporal regimes and their involvement of human and non-human actors. In particular, this raises questions of how tracking itself can be employed as a media operation of resistance.

The special issue invites theoretical, conceptual and performative approaches from fields such as media studies, visual studies, artistic research, sociology and critical geography, to address the question of how tracking becomes a repressive, subversive or activistic media operation. How is countering tracking by means of tracking possible in different contexts and in relation to software, infrastructures and aesthetics?

Topics and projects might include:
● Inventive methods that repurpose tracking infrastructures, sensors, software and data to research computational culture
● Detailed empirical and critical studies exploring the relations of en/countering tracking in computational culture
● En/countering tracking in labor resistance and platform capitalisms
● Critical theoretical conceptualization of tracking or countering for the study of computational culture
● Critical explorations of the chronopolitics, timescapes and spatiotemporal regimes of tracking
● Activist media, counter-surveillance, tactical media, decolonial, (glitch) feminist and resistant epistemologies of tracking
● En/countering relations between political economy, racialized capitalism and tracking
● Visual cultures, (in-)visualities and aesthetics of en/countering tracking
● En/countering tracking in media art and artistic activism

Schedule
750-word abstracts should be emailed to en_countering_tracking@uni-bonn.de by September 15, 2024. Abstracts will be reviewed by the special issue editors and the Computational Culture editorial board.

Authors of selected abstracts will be notified by October 30, 2024 and invited to submit full manuscripts by March 1, 2025. These manuscripts are subject to full blind peer review according to Computational Culture’s policies. Possible costs for proofreading incurred by the authors are not covered by the editors or the journal. There are no open access or processing charges for this special issue.

Computational Culture is an online open-access peer-reviewed journal of interdisciplinary enquiry into the nature of cultural computational objects, practices, processes and structures.

Any queries can be addressed to the special issue editors at: en_countering_tracking@uni-bonn.de

References
Ballinger, Ollie. “Grain Trail: Tracking Russia’s Ghost Ships with Satellite Imagery.” Last modified May 11, 2023. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2023/05/11/grain-trail-tracking-russias-ghost-ships-with-satellite-imagery/.
Benson, Etienne. Wired wilderness: Technologies of tracking and the making of modern wildlife. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.
Boyd, Doreen S., Bethany Jackson, Jessica Wardlaw, Giles M. Foody, Stuart Marsh, and Kevin Bales. “Slavery from Space: Demonstrating the role for satellite remote sensing to inform evidence-based action related to UN SDG number 8.” ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing 142 (August 2018): 380–388.
Brown, Imani Jacqueline. “Follow the Oil—Louisiana is Unraveling.” Accessed April 23, 2024. http://followtheoil.org/.
Christl, Wolfie and Sarah Spiekermann. Networks of Control: A Report on Corporate Surveillance, Digital Tracking, Big Data & Privacy. Wien: Facultas, 2016. https://crackedlabs.org/en/networksofcontrol.
Crandall, Jordan. “The Geospatialization of Calculative Operations: Tracking, Sensing and Megacities.” Theory, Culture & Society 27, no. 6 (November 2010): 68–90. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276410382027.
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. “Queerying Homophily.” In Pattern Discrimination, edited by Clemens Apprich, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Florian Cramer, and Hito Steyerl, 59-97. Lüneburg: meson press, 2018.
Egliston, Ben, and Marcus Carter. “The material politics of mobile virtual reality: Oculus, data, and the technics of sensemaking.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 28, no. 2 (April 2022): 595–610. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565211072342.
ElonJet. “Elon Musk’s Jet.” Mastodon. Accessed July 27, 2023. https://mastodon.social/@elonjet.
Forensic Architecture, ed. Forensis: The architecture of public truth. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014.
Friedrich, Kathrin. “Tracken.” In Historisches Wörterbuch des Mediengebrauchs, edited by Heiko Christians, Matthias Bickenbach, and Nikolaus Wegmann, 631-649. Weimar: Böhlau/UTB, 2021.
Fuller, Matthew and Eyal Weizman. Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth. Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2021.
Gabrys, Jennifer. „Sensing an Experimental Forest: Processing Environments and Distributing Relations.“ Computational Culture 2, (September 2012). http://computationalculture.net/sensing-an-experimental-forest-processing-environments-and-distributing-relations/.
Gabrys, Jennifer. “Sensors and Sensing Practices: Reworking Experience across Entities, Environments, and Technologies.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 44, no. 5 (September 2019): 723–736. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243919860211.
Hayles, N. Katherine. “RFID: Human Agency and Meaning in Information-Intensive Environments.” Theory, Culture & Society 26, no. 2-3 (March/May 2009): 47–72. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276409103107.
Hansen, Mark B. N. Feed-forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Heiland, Heiner. “Controlling space, controlling labour? Contested space in food delivery gig work.” New Technology, Work and Employment 36, no. 1 (March 2021): 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12183.
Kanngieser, Anja. “Tracking and Tracing: Geographies of Logistical Governance and Labouring Bodies.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31, no. 4 (August 2013): 594–610. https://doi.org/10.1068/d24611.
Kitchin, Rob and Martin Dodge. Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262042482.001.0001.
Leszczynski, Agnieszka and Sarah Elwood. “Glitch epistemologies for computational cities.” Dialogues in Human Geography 12, no. 3 (November 2022): 361–378. https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206221075714.
Lupton, Deborah “Self-Tracking”. In Information: Keywords, edited by Michele Kennerly, Samuel Frederick, and Jonathan E. Abel, 187-198. New York/Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.7312/kenn19876-016.
Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. “Animal-powered tracking. A new tracking device is powered by an animal’s own movements, solving problem of battery life.” Last modified June 15, 2023. https://www.ab.mpg.de/539037/animal-powered-tracking.
Monahan, Torin. “Counter-surveillance as Political Intervention?” Social Semiotics 16, no. 4 (2006): 515–534. https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330601019769.
Peeters, Stijn. “Brightbeam.” Digital Methods Initiative. Accessed April 23, 2024. https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/ToolBrightbeam.
Qadri, Rida. (2021) “Platform workers as infrastructures of global technologies.” Interactions 28, no. 4 (July-August 2021): 32–35. https://doi.org/10.1145/3466162.
Qadri, Rida and Catherine D’Ignazio. “Seeing like a driver: How workers repair, resist, and reinforce the platform’s algorithmic visions.” Big Data & Society 9, no. 2 (July-December 2022): 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517221133780.
Rossiter, Ned. Software, Infrastructure, Labor: A Media Theory of Logistical Nightmares. New York: Routledge, 2016.
Sansone Ruiz, Nicole. “Days Without Clouds: Realism, Images, and Target Classifiers at Google Earth Engine.” Computational Culture, no. 9 (July 2023). http://computationalculture.net/days-without-clouds-realism-images-and-target-classifiers-at-google-earth-engine/.
Russell, Emma K. and Poppy de Souza. “Counter-mapping the mobile border: Racial surveillance and data justice in spaces of disappearance.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 41, no. 3 (June 2023): 494-512. https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758231179224.
Sharelab. “Invisible Infrastructures: Online Trackers”. Last modified March 6, 2015. https://labs.rs/en/invisible-infrastructures-online-trackers/.

Previous Calls

Apps and Infrastructures

A special issue of Computational Culture, a Journal of Software Studies
Edited by Carolin Gerlitz, Anne Helmond, David Nieborg, and Fernando van der Vlist

Outline

Apps have become an important new cultural, technical, and economic software form. Most of today’s apps are designed to run on smartphones and other mobile devices and provide functions previously possible with other software forms (Morris and Elkins, 2015). However, they represent new ways in which software artefacts are developed, tested, packaged, promoted, distributed, monitored, monetised, downloaded, integrated, updated, stored, accessed, archived, interpreted, and used. To foreground the relational and material dimensions of apps, research should not only account for them as discrete media objects, but needs to approach apps as part of their multiple infrastructures and environments including app stores, development platforms, advertising technologies, analytics tools, and cloud services, among others.
App stores set the conditions for users and developers to distribute, browse, promote, monetise, rate, and download apps developed for Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, or other mobile operating systems. Developers draw on a variety of both official and third-party developer tools, including developer pages and reference documentation, application programming interfaces (APIs), software development kits (SDKs), integrated development environments (IDEs), and dedicated programming languages. Such resources are commonly employed in order to build, test, and monitor apps whilst appropriating the features and constraints of particular platforms and devices, thereby participating in the re-interpretation and re-evaluation of platform features and data. Furthermore, apps may also utilise a device’s built-in sensors for continuous data collection of movements, practices, and environments whilst being wirelessly connected to the cloud or other infrastructures,without the user necessarily knowing exactly when, how, or where (Mackenzie, 2010).
Approaching apps from an infrastructural perspective allows attending to the various socio-technical actors, layers, and inscriptions that inform app development, distribution, and usage in situated, distributed, and often dissimilar ways. Within such stacked intermediary infrastructures, platform logics of negotiation among heterogeneous stakeholders are multiplied and nested. This raises questions about the material and technological boundaries of apps and the subsequent need for methodologies to study apps’ socio-technical assemblages on multiple scales, attending to inbound and outbound data flows, governance and power, valuation, their political economy, and material semiotics. Previous research on apps – initially emerging at the intersection of mobile studies and media studies – considered mobile apps as a form of mobile or location-based media transforming and generating new forms of communication and sociality, places, and publics through the affordances and practices associated with mobile artefacts (Goggin and Hjorth, 2014). While these studies raised general questions about the boundaries of apps, attention was primarily directed to apps as compartmentalised software applications and their relations with affect, bodies, and locales (Farman 2012; Matviyenko et al., 2015; Morris and Elkins, 2015). A second strand of app research has moved beyond such a single app focus and directed primary attention to the materialities and infrastructures of apps by engaging with their data cultures, material connections, political economic underpinnings, and ecologies (Albury et al., 2017; Farman, 2015; Goldsmith in Goggin and Hjorth, 2014; Horst, 2013; Nieborg, 2017; Wilken, 2015).
This special issue of Computational Culture welcomes proposals and projects from scholars and practitioners from across different disciplines interested in the advancement of app studies at the intersection of apps and infrastructures. Studies of mobile apps, platform native apps, and web browser apps or extensions are particularly encouraged. We specifically seek articles that bring together conceptual work with a technically and empirically grounded perspective, addressing the methodological challenges associated with the critical study of apps and their intricate relations to other software, platforms, and infrastructures. Contributors are encouraged to move beyond studies of single apps and their users in favor of approaches that explore apps as material artefacts alongside the infrastructures, political economy, and environments in which they are embedded and situationally enacted. We thus encourage interdisciplinary contributions that traverse boundaries between the fields of software studies, platform studies, cultural and media studies, science and technology studies, as well as political economy and data critique.

Topics and projects might include:

  • The relations between apps and their wider material and infrastructural environments, including app stores, development platforms and toolkits, analytics tools, advertising technologies, and cloud services.
  • The methodological and empirical challenges associated with the critical study of apps, including concerns about accessibility to mobile app backends and the limits of data retrieval through APIs or scraping methods as used in web research.
  • Studies of apps as articulations of technicity (e.g., how they are designed, built, maintained, and updated) and the data cultures they produce (e.g., what data do they collect or require).
  • Detailed empirical and critical studies exploring apps’ data cultures, usage tracking, technical dependencies and app permissions, sensor technologies, and wireless access points.
  • Inventive methods to conceptualise how apps are located or situated, given they are utilising a mobile device’s built-in sensors as well as accessing other resources from remote cloud infrastructures.
  • Studies of the political economy of apps (e.g., how apps are valued and monetized), the role of industry partnerships and third parties (e.g., how apps are re-interpreted or extended), and the politics of operability (e.g., how apps negotiate among stakeholders or interests).
  • Explorations of the techno-economic relations between the web and app ecosystems, including the dependencies of apps on web platforms and cloud services, as well as the regulations and limits of app development by device manufacturers and mobile operating systems like Android and iOS.
  • Explorations of the ways and mechanisms through which multiple apps are interconnected, forming collections, ecologies, and chains of apps in specific practices (e.g., task and content automation).
  • Media archaeologies exploring historical constellations of apps and their wider material and infrastructural environments and other historical approaches to app research.
  • Explorations of app stores as the primary environment or infrastructure for mobile apps, including contributions focusing on non-Western apps and app stores, apps’ update cultures, and their development cycles.
  • The ways in which different material and infrastructural environments, such as app stores, cater to distinct mobile operating systems, devices, and geographic regions.
  • Critical artistic interventions and research software tools that repurpose the affordances of apps, app stores and other native environments, and explore their data cultures.

Schedule

750 word abstracts should be emailed to apps.infrastructures@gmail.com by April 1, 2018.
Any queries can be addressed to the editors at apps.infrastructures@gmail.com.
Abstracts will be reviewed by the Computational Culture Editorial Board and the special issue editors.
Authors of selected abstracts will be notified by May 1, 2018 and invited to submit full manuscripts by September 15, 2018.
These manuscripts are subject to full blind peer review according to Computational Culture’s policies. The issue will be published in March 2019.
Computational Culture is an online open-access peer-reviewed journal of interdisciplinary enquiry into the nature of cultural computational objects, practices, processes and structures.
http://computationalculture.net/

References

  • Albury K, Burgess J, Light B, et al. (2017) Data cultures of mobile dating and hook-up apps: Emerging issues for critical social science research. Big Data & Society 4(2).
  • Farman J (2012) Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media. New York: Routledge.
  • Farman J (2015) Infrastructures of Mobile Social Media. >em>Social Media + Society 1(1).
  • Goggin G and Hjorth L (eds) (2013) The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media. Oxford: Routledge.
  • Goldsmith B (2014) The Smartphone App Economy and App Ecosystems. In: Goggin G and Hjorth L (eds), The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media, New York: Routledge, pp. 171–180.
  • Horst HA (2013) The infrastructures of mobile media: Towards a future research agenda. Mobile Media & Communication 1(1): 147–152.
  • Mackenzie A (2010) Wirelessness: Radical Empiricism in Network Cultures. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  • Matviyenko S, Ticineto Clough P and Galloway AR (2015) On Governance, Blackboxing, Measure, Body, Affect and Apps: A conversation with Patricia Ticineto Clough and Alexander R. Galloway. The Fibreculture Journal (25): 10–29.
  • Morris JW and Elkins E (2015) There’s a History for That: Apps and Mundane Software as Commodity. The Fibreculture Journal (25): 63–88.
  • Nieborg, DB (2017) Free-to-Play Games and App Advertising: the Rise of the Player Commodity. In: Hamilton JF, Bodle R and Korin E (eds), Explorations in Critical Studies of Advertising, New York: Routledge, pp. 28–41.
  • Wilken R (2015) Mobile media and ecologies of location. Communication Research and Practice 1(1): 42–57.

Critical Approaches to Computational Law

A special issue of Computational Culture, a Journal of Software Studies
Edited by Simon Yuill

Outline

There is a long-standing relationship between the development of modern computing and legal theory and the application of computer systems to legal practice that can be followed through the modelling of legal problems in terms of Game Theory, the creation of AI based legal expert systems, in ideas of cyberspace as a distinct legal realm and the legal framing of cyber warfare. In recent years several new developments have raised significant questions as to how law is practised and what constitutes legal ‘thinking’ in the 21st Century. These include the delegation of aspects of legal reasoning and process to algorithms in areas such as automated vehicle and robotic combat devices, automated contractualism in high-velocity trading and new digital currency systems, the use of machine learning and large scale data sets (Big Data) in gathering evidence and identifying behavioural and normative patterns that may be subject to legal scrutiny, and the use of physical and agent-based simulation in developing new legal regimes and frameworks. Whilst there has been substantial critical writing on the application of law to the use of computing, as in issues such as copyright and IP, there has been less analysis of how law and computing may be changed by the integration of legal and computational systems into one another. What questions do these developments raise and what critical and theoretical approaches are required to address them?
This special issue of Computational Culture welcomes proposals from researchers and practitioners within law and computing, legal and computational cultural studies, and others from across different disciplines interested in the topic of computational law. Documentation and analysis of artistic and activist responses and interventions are also encouraged. We specifically seek articles and projects that focus on critical, theoretical and methodological questions rather than on ‘black letter’ law or primarily practical evaluations of the applications of technology and law in this context.

Topics or projects might include:

  • The relations between computing and law as forms of applied ‘logic’, what logic might be and how it is situated/performed/constructed within each area.
  • How the use of computational systems within law such as machine learning, agent-based simulation or computational dialectics might change how law is practised and what legal ‘thought’ might be.
  • How approaches to law such as, but not restricted to, critical law theory, feminist law theory and critical race theory may be developed in analyses of Computational Cultures and law.
  • How different critical approaches to law, software and computing may relate to and learn from one another.
  • How automated and algorithmic forms of legal practice relate to debates on formalist versus hermeneutic approaches to law.
  • The relation between protocols and contracts in regard to issues of social structure, control and governance.
  • How computational law systems potentially alter the relation between the law, the state and the citizen.
  • The delegation of legal process onto algorithms, i.e. automated contracts.
  • The delegation of legal reasoning to algorithms, i.e. forms of automated risk assessment or verification, identifying valid targets in robotic warfare.
  • The algorithm as a form of legal ‘thinking’ or genre of legal writing.
  • What the limits of computational law might be, how do law and computation fail one another?

Schedule

750 word abstracts should be emailed to sos01sy[at]gold.ac.uk by 31st August 2016.
Any queries can be addressed to Simon Yuill at sos01sy[at]gold.ac.uk.
Abstracts will be reviewed by the Computational Culture Editorial Board and the special issue editor. Authors of selected abstracts will be notified by 30th September 2016 and invited to submit full manuscripts by 1st March 2017. These manuscripts are subject to full blind peer review according to Computational Culture’s policies. The issue will be published in May 2017.
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.
http://computationalculture.net/

Computing the Corporeal

A special issue of Computational Culture, a Journal of Software Studies
Edited by Nicolas Salazar Sutil, Sita Popat, and Scott deLahunta

Outline

Intersections between human movement, computer science and motion-tracking/sensing technologies have led to novel ways of transferring body data from physical to digital contexts. From a practical perspective, this integration requires engagement across key disciplines, including movement studies, kinesiology, kinematics, biomechanics, biomedical science and health studies, dance science, sports science, and computer science. This development has also provoked theoretical and critical discourse that has tried to preserve, based on its grounding on bodily and kinetic practice, the differentiation of lived-in and body-specific knowledge. Here is a mode of datarization perhaps closer to what Deleuze (1988) called “immediate datum”: i.e. information stemming not from an abstract and re-moved conceptualization, but from real-world experience of movement, and the immediate perception or capture of kinetic information through physical or sensorial means. Within the field of software studies, advancing a sense of digital materialism has raised concerns for the materiality of technological media, for instance by focusing on the physical constraints of data storage, or the material dimension of computing. But what about “immediation”, i.e. immediate computation of bodily movement by machines for immediate expression, representation or enactment in digital contexts? And what of the representability of such immediation? How can we describe movement and preserve its datum of difference within a scriptable or graphicable computer language without falling into a universal sameness, a movement without bodies?
Whilst the idea that immediate data may demand a “bodying forth” (Thrift 2008), a traffic of bodiliness from biological to technological contexts, it is necessary to de-homogenise the ‘body’ category. Perhaps what is needed is an understanding of “corporeality” that assume multidimensional and relativistic realities of bodies instead, opening up nuanced discourses based on specific body-related ontologies (corpuscles, builds, anatomies, skeletons, muscle systems) all making up a non-singular sense of the bodily real. As such, this collection poses the problem of criteria. Our question is this: how and to what effect does the research community adopt arbitrary criteria in order to compute the body and bodily movement? Can we define narratives emerging from this body-computing arbitration to provoke a critique?
There is a possible tension between “bodying forth”— the idea of a single body operative across both biological and computational contexts—and corporeal relations. We would like to focus this critical edition on the relations between differentiated anatomical or bodily systems (skeletal, muscular, nerve, etc.), and different modes of computation, as well as different theoretical discourses stemming from this experiential basis. If we recognize the problem of relationality we must assume that more than one complex set of co-relations meet when the machine computes the moving human body. How do we start the process of computer-generated learning in terms of selecting body parts, functions, organs, processes, on the one hand, and key languages, code, or indeed technological tools for capture on the other? To what extent does corporeal computing contribute to certain bodily systems (or perhaps even body types) becoming the key agents of action, and indeed learning, in such contexts? How do we respond critically to privileged systems (the skeletal, the muscular), and body types (so called ‘normal bodies’)? To what extent are computational paradigms still dominated by spatial, extensive and quantitative determinations (i.e. the tracking of skeleton, body geometry, kinematic shapes, etc.) that hide other, more intensive, modes of corporeality? And finally, how do we reintegrate the multiplicity of the corporeal in a computational synthesis? For instance, how can we understand the quantitative and qualitative (dynamics, effort, tone, intensity, etc.) as overlapping data priorities?

Topics or projects might include:

  • Computable relations between bodies and digital avatars, digital dance representations, digital sports representations, digital health representations, digital animation— digital bodies in general.
  • Computable relations between biological bodies and robotic systems.
  • Computing relations between physical movement and abstract thought, automated thought (AI) or machine learning.
  • Computing mobility studies (i.e. relations between body and automobile, body and assisted mobility machines, body and prosthetics).
  • Computing sociokinetic material (i.e. computing the movement of groups of bodies).
  • Affective corporeal computing— the capacity to process psychophysical and cognitive processes within corporeal movement (e.g. computing effort, dynamics, tonicity, emotion).
  • Integration of quantitative and qualitative body datasets.
  • Metabody theory and notions of meta-anatomy, meta-strata in the ontological literature (i.e. movement of digital ghosts, sprites, techno-animism, etc.)

750 word abstracts should be emailed to n.salazar(at)leeds.ac.uk by April 17th.
Any queries can be addressed to Nicolas Salazar Sutil at n.salazar(at)leeds.ac.uk, or Sita Popat at s.popat(at)leeds.ac.uk, or Scott deLahunta at scott(at)motionbank.org.
Abstracts will be reviewed by the Computational Culture Editorial Board and the special issue editors. Authors of selected abstracts will be notified by April 24th and invited to submit full manuscripts by September 26th. These manuscripts are subject to full blind peer review according to Computational Culture’s policies. The issue will be published in January 2017.
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.
http://computationalculture.net/