Revisiting digital technologies: envisioning biodigital bodies

In this paper the contemporary practices of human genomics in the 21st century are placed alongside the digital bodies of the 1990s. The primary aim is to provide a trajectory of the biodigital as follows: First, digital bodies and biodigital bodies were both part of the spectacular imaginaries of early cybercultures. Second, these spectacular digital bodies were supplemented in the mid-1990s by digital bodywork practices that have become an important dimension of everyday communication. Third, the spectacle of biodigital bodies is in the process of being supplemented by biodigital bodywork practices, through personal or direct-to-consumer genomics. This shift moves a form of biodigital communication into the everyday. Finally, what can be learned from putting the trajectories of digital and biodigital bodies together is that the degree of this communicative shift may be obscured through the doubled attachment of personal genomics to everyday digital culture and high-tech spectacle.Keywords: genomics, biodigital, bodies, spectacle, everyda

The Possibilities and Potential Pitfalls of Contemporary Global Environmental(ist) Imaginaries: The Human/Nature Project and Philip Krohn’s EARTH Sticker

Located at the gradually emerging juncture between the current discourses on the global and art in ecocritical scholarship, this article explores how contemporary works of art such as EARTH Sticker (2005) by the North American artist Philip Krohn and artist residency and exhibition projects such as Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet (2008) parse, represent, and imagine the political, socioeconomic, cultural, and especially ecological implications of globalization. EARTH Sticker and two contributions to Human/Nature, the sculptures Sapukay: Cry for Help and Teko Mbarate: Struggle for Life by the Portuguese artist and current San Francisco Bay Area resident Rigo 23, present different environmental imaginaries that challenge and simultaneously rely on the material contexts and conditions on which the increasingly globalized production of art is always predicated. As Krohn and Rigo 23 demonstrate, even art that is created in an environmentalist context (Human/Nature) or with an ostensible activist purpose (EARTH Sticker) cannot escape this double bind. To identify this dilemma is not to dismiss these works of art as self-contradictory failures, but to highlight precisely Krohn’s and Rigo 23’s important insights with regard to this embedment for other global environmental imaginaries and particularly for further ecocritical analysis. Emphasizing the material and institutional conditions, current means and sites of cultural production, and technologies for the dissemination of information, these works of art thus foreground and perform what is often erased from the equation and from critical analysis

Conceptualizing a distributed, multi-scalar global public sphere through activist communication practices in the World Social Forum

This article contributes to debate about how to conceptualize the global public sphere. Drawing on media practice theory and ethnographic research on media activism in the World Social Forum, it shows how ‘global publics’ can be constituted through a diverse range of activist communication practices that complicate both conventional hierarchies of scale and contemporary theorizations of publics as personalized networks. It develops an understanding of the global public sphere as an emergent formation made up of multiple, interlinked publics at different scales and emphasizes the significance of collective communication spaces for actors at the margins of the global network society

The moral technical imaginaries of internet convergence in an American television network

How emergent technologies are imagined, discussed, and implemented reveals social morality about how society, politics, and economics should be organized. For the television industry in the United States, for instance, the development of internet “convergence” provoked the rise of a new discourse about participatory democracy as well as the hopes for lucrative business opportunities. The simultaneity of technical, moral, and social ordering defines the “moral technical imaginary.” Populating this concept with ethnographic and historical detail, this article expands the theory of the moral technical imaginary with information from six years of participant observation, interviews, and employment with Current TV, an American-based television news network founded by Vice President Al Gore to democratize television production. This chapter explores the limits of political participation and morality when faced with neoliberal capitalism

Culture and Code: The Evolution of Digital Architecture and the Formation of Networked Publics

Culture and Code traces the construction of the modern idea of the Internet and offers a potential glimpse of how that idea may change in the near future. Developed through a theoretical framework that links Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim’s theory of the sociotechnical imaginary to broader theories on publics and counterpublics, Culture and Code offers a way to reframe the evolution of Internet technology and its culture as an enmeshed part of larger socio-political shifts within society. In traveling the history of the modern Internet as detailed in its technical documentation, legal documents, user created content, and popular media this dissertation positions the construction of the idea of the Internet and its technology as the result of an ongoing series of intersections and collisions between the sociotechnical imaginaries of three different publics: Implementors, Vendors, and Users. These publics were identified as the primary audiences of the 1989 Internet Engineering Task Force specification of the four-layer TCP/IP model that became a core part of our modern infrastructure. Using that model as a continued metaphor throughout the work, Culture and Code shows how each public’s sociotechnical imaginary developed, how they influenced and shaped one another, and the inevitable conflicts that arose leading to a coalescing sociotechnical imaginary that is centered around vendor control while continuing to project the ideal of the empowered user

Terraforming tech city: place branding and spatial imaginaries in inner East London

This paper performs a mixed-methods analysis of place-branding strategies developed in the ‘Tech City’ cluster initiative in Inner East London, drawing on ethnographic material, semi-structured interviews and visual content. Using Jessop’s concept of the spatial imaginary, we explore key foundational geographies, trace the emergence of the ‘Silicon Roundabout’ and Tech City concepts between 2008 and 2014, then discuss Tech City’s governance and progress, highlighting both day-to-day challenges and more basic tensions. We contrast this experience with that of ‘Here East’, a new regeneration space across the city in the Olympic Park