Still seeking the audience

The changing capacities to connect generated through contemporary media have implications for an understanding of the idea of ‘audience’. This paper begins a new search for an understanding of the contemporary audience and seeks this through an engagement with a few key ideas that sign-post a reconsideration of my own understanding of what an audience might become. Massumi’s idea of intensity, Bennett’s use of assemblage and the focus on event to emphasize the dynamic nature of an audience help to guide my trajectory. Finally I attempt to apply these ideas to a personal experience of becoming an audience to see how useful they might be as I continue to question my own habituated conceptualisations

The Inhuman Overhang: On Differential Heterogenesis and Multi-Scalar Modeling

As a philosophical paradigm, differential heterogenesis offers us a novel descriptive vantage with which to inscribe Deleuze’s virtuality within the terrain of “differential becoming,” conjugating “pure saliences” so as to parse economies, microhistories, insurgencies, and epistemological evolutionary processes that can be conceived of independently from their representational form. Unlike Gestalt theory’s oppositional constructions, the advantage of this aperture is that it posits a dynamic context to both media and its analysis, rendering them functionally tractable and set in relation to other objects, rather than as sedentary identities. Surveying the genealogy of differential heterogenesis with particular interest in the legacy of Lautman’s dialectic, I make the case for a reading of the Deleuzean virtual that departs from an event-oriented approach, galvanizing Sarti and Citti’s dynamic a priori vis-à-vis Deleuze’s philosophy of difference. Specifically, I posit differential heterogenesis as frame with which to examine our contemporaneous epistemic shift as it relates to multi-scalar computational modeling while paying particular attention to neuro-inferential modes of inductive learning and homologous cognitive architecture. Carving a bricolage between Mark Wilson’s work on the “greediness of scales” and Deleuze’s “scales of reality”, this project threads between static ecologies and active externalism vis-à-vis endocentric frames of reference and syntactical scaffolding

Schizoid subjectivities? : Re-theorizing teen girls’ sexual cultures in an era of ‘sexualization’

Drawing on three case studies from two UK ethnographic research projects in urban and rural working-class communities, this article explores young teen girls’ negotiation of increasingly sex-saturated societies and cultures. Our analysis complicates contemporary debates around the ‘sexualization’ moral panic by troubling developmental and classed accounts of age-appropriate (hetero)sexuality. We explore how girls are regulated by, yet rework and resist expectations to perform as agentic sexual subjects across a range of spaces (e.g. streets, schools, homes, cyberspace). To conceptualize the blurring of generational and sexual binaries present in our data, we develop Deleuzian notions of ‘becomings’, ‘assemblages’ and ‘schizoid subjectivities’. These concepts help us to map the anti-linear transitions and contradictory performances of young femininity as always in-movement; where girls negotiate discourses of sexual knowingness and innocence, often simultaneously, yet always within a wider context of socio-cultural gendered/classed regulations

Palimpsests of Immaterial Assemblages Taken out of Context: Tracing Pompeians from the Void into the Digital

This paper explores some ontological aspects of archaeological voids and enclosures together with their translations and substitutions, and considers the nature of spaces within material archaeological deposits and artefacts. The dematerialized and rematerialized bodies of the victims of Vesuvius in CE 79 are reappraised as a case study. By problematizing the voids we are able to think critically about the ontological status of the victims’ persistent traces and residues. Specifically, using Gavin Lucas’ grid of forces models, we explore how these traces and residues have been transformed into different kinds of objects, including, most recently, rematerializations in the digital, through their ongoing intra-actions within the domains of archaeology, museology, and additive manufacturing. Through this analysis the ambivalent nature of these traces and residues becomes more sensibl

Strange Assemblage

This paper contends that the power of Deleuze & Guattari’s (1988) notion of assemblage as theorised in 1000 Plateaus can be normalised and reductive with reference to its application to any social-cultural context where an open system of dynamic and fluid elements are located. Rather than determining the assemblage in this way, this paper argues for an alternative conception of ‘strange assemblage’ that must be deliberately and consciously created through rigorous and focused intellectual, creative and philosophical work around what makes assemblages singular. The paper will proceed with examples of ‘strange assemblage’ taken from a film by Peter Greenaway (A Zed and 2 Noughts); the film ‘Performance’; educational research with Sudanese families in Australia; the book, Bomb Culture by Jeff Nuttall (1970); and the band Hawkwind. Fittingly, these elements are themselves chosen to demonstrate the concept of ‘strange assemblage’, and how it can be presented. How exactly the elements of a ‘strange assemblage’ come together and work in the world is unknown until they are specifically elaborated and created ‘in the moment’. Such spontaneous methodology reminds us of the 1960s ‘Happenings’, the Situationist International and Dada/Surrealism. The difference that will be opened up by this paper is that all elements of this ‘strange assemblage’ cohere in terms of a rendering of ‘the unacceptable.'

Surveillant assemblages of governance in massively multiplayer online games:a comparative analysis

This paper explores governance in Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), one sub-sector of the digital games industry. Informed by media governance studies, Surveillance Studies, and game studies, this paper identifies five elements which form part of the system of governance in MMOGs. These elements are: game code and rules; game policies; company community management practices; player participatory practices; and paratexts. Together these governance elements function as a surveillant assemblage, which relies to varying degrees on lateral and hierarchical forms of surveillance, and the assembly of human and nonhuman elements.Using qualitative mixed methods we examine and compare how these elements operate in three commercial MMOGs: Eve Online, World of Warcraft and Tibia. While peer and participatory surveillance elements are important, we identified two major trends in the governance of disruptive behaviours by the game companies in our case studies. Firstly, an increasing reliance on automated forms of dataveillance to control and punish game players, and secondly, increasing recourse to contract law and diminishing user privacy rights. Game players found it difficult to appeal the changing terms and conditions and they turned to creating paratexts outside of the game in an attempt to negotiate the boundaries of the surveillant assemblage. In the wider context of self-regulated governance systems these trends highlight the relevance of consumer rights, privacy, and data protection legislation to online games and the usefulness of bringing game studies and Surveillance Studies into dialogue

The Allergic Bodies Conference: Postgraduate/Postdoctoral Research Conference, 2010

This is the programme document for the annual Postgraduate/Postdoctoral Research Conference with Keynotes: Dr Jennifer Bajorek (Goldsmiths), Marianne Sjelsford (National Academy of Arts, Oslo, Sweden); Dr Maarten Vanvolsem (Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography, Katholieke Universiteit, Brussels), Professor Pedro Lasch (Duke University)