Social Media: Enlarging the Space for User-Generated Community Journalism

Social media have to a large extent competed with the traditional media in terms audience size. Social media have enjoyed a large following because of interactivity and utility in bringing about User-Generated community journalism. Social media have also brought about re-definition of news and news determinants as well as enhanced democratization of communication. For the traditional mass media to remain effective or relevant to their audience, social media and their contents should be incorporated into their channels. By so doing, contents of the mass media would go a long way to reflect the interest of the community or their audience members. Keywords: Social media, enlarging the space, use-generated community journalism

Digital aesthetics: the discrete and the continuous

Aesthetic investigations of computation are stuck in an impasse, caused by the difficulty of accounting for the ontological discrepancy between the continuity of sensation and the discreteness of digital technology. This article proposes a theoretical position intended to overcome that deadlock. It highlights how an ontological focus on continuity has entered media studies via readings of Deleuze, which attempt to build a ‘digital aisthesis’ (that is, a theory of digital sensation) by ascribing a ‘virtuality’ to computation. This underpins, in part, the affective turn in digital theory. In contrast to such positions, this article argues for a reconceptualization of formal abstraction in computation, in order to find, within the discreteness of computational formalisms (and not via the coupling of the latter with virtual sensation), an indeterminacy that would make computing aesthetic qua inherently generative. This indeterminacy, it is argued here, can be found by reconsidering, philosophically, Turing’s notion of ‘incomputability’

Digital Anxieties: Affect and Technological Governance in the Works of Cécile B. Evans and Ryan Trecartin

This thesis considers the shifting relationships between affect, governance, and technology, by examining two contemporary video installations: What the Heart Wants (2016) by Belgian-American artist Cécile B. Evans (b. 1983), and Roamie View: History Enhancements (2010) by American artist Ryan Trecartin (b. 1981). I argue that these works allow viewers to better conceptualize the media and socio-political environments surrounding them by drawing attention to contemporary affective experiences and to digital anxieties such as confusion, competition, fatigue, and performativity. What the Heart Wants presents digital infrastructures as affective and woven within modern intimacies, ultimately critiquing the notion of a programmed sociality. Roamie View: History Enhancements hyperbolizes info-glut and conjures an understanding of contemporary cognition as affective, and of the performativity of neoliberal networked subjects. In both works, I also examine the artists’ approaches to representation and identity. In different ways, these works fulfill technological governance in its totality, and through these intensifications, shatter common assumptions about networked life. Evans presents a world reduced to a controlling, confused, and anxious digital system, while Trecartin’s characters, living with cameras 24/7, lose their bearings and are caught in endless loops of performance. Both works come to question and document the seamless integration of platform technologies as “companion systems” (James Williams) of users’ affective lives. By examining the relationship between technology and emotions, these artists recognize the socio-political qualities of emotions, and their inextricable ties to history. This allows viewers to better see the potent influence of digital systems on affect, and to engage in a politics of emotions

A practice-led investigation into the role of play as a feedback mechanism between the human and technological systems - as revealed through art & technology projects

This research project will develop existing philosophical concepts of technic, and technicity. This research project will explore the techno-social coalescences (assemblages) that are formed around my Art & Technology projects and their audiences (recipients). A practice-led approach to framing these engagements enables this research to diagram these assemblages. These novel distributions of content and expression will lead to the conceptualisation of new notions of art, play and technology that emerge through these activities. In such ways this research will enhance our understandings of the relationships between humans and technology

Immediation II

All “media-tion” stages and distributes real, embodied – that is, immediate, events. The concept of immediation entails that cultural, technical, aesthetic objects, subjects, and events can no longer be abstracted from the ways in which they contribute to and are changed by broader ecologies. Immediation I and II seek to engage the entwined questions of relation, event and ecology from outside already claimed territories, nomenclature and calls to action