Rethinking affordance

n/a – Critical survey essay retheorising the concept of 'affordance' in digital media context. Lead article in a special issue on the topic, co-edited by the authors for the journal Media Theory

Reconsidering the substance of digital video from a Sadrian perspective

The digitisation process is debated as video’s deficiency, where pixels are conceived as isolated fragments without an existential link to the source image. This article explores the ontology of digital-video through Mulla Sadrā’s (1571–1641) theory of Substantial Motion. Sadrā, a Persian-Islamic existentialist, proposed that substance (material/visible and immaterial/invisible) undergoes an internal change. Through imperceptible internal change, intimate connections exist between the smallest parts and the One, visible and invisible. We can think of these dynamic connections in terms of pixels and frames. From the view of Sadrā’s substance, pixels are explored as open to change. The apparent weaknesses of digital materiality become potentials towards understanding its existence in time

16th century Persian tiles in dialogue with 21st century digital tiles in the Sadrian universe

This article brings together tiles of 16th century Persian architecture and 21st century digital tiles of moving image to explore new potentials beyond the perceived image. As minimal parts of a bigger image, they both appear still and motionless. However, Persian Islamic philosopher, Mulla Sadrā Shirazi’s (1571-1640) theory of ‘substantial motion’ (al-harakat al-jawhariyya) argues that, at the level of substance, an invisible internal motion and change takes place. Due to this internal change, aspects of the Divine Being constantly manifest in the existence of entities. Sadrā’s unique view on existence suggests that all living and non-living entities, as manifestations of the Divine Being, have certain experiences of the universe. To think that an image, a tile, or a pixel, as an existing entity, has certain experiences can unfold new avenues for creative thinking/making in digital moving image that can reveal what is hidden from human perception

Maintenance & Repair in Science and Technology Studies

This essay contains an overview on worldwide researches on Maintenance and Repair topics in Science and Technology Studies

Fragmentation and the digital city: An analysis of Vicente Luis Mora's circular 07. Las afueras

This essay juxtaposes three recent publications, Vicente Luis Mora's Circular 07. Las afueras (2007-), Kenneth Goldsmith's Capital: New York, Capital of the 20th Century (2015), and Jorge Carrión's Barcelona. Libro de los pasajes (2016), in order to explore how contemporary digital technologies construct and fragment urban experience on a global scale. Despite their different political intentions, these three works share a common aesthetic of appropriation, unoriginal quotation, and fragmentation, as they are also all modelled after Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. Just like Benjamin did with Paris, each of these works focuses on a particular Western city-Madrid, New York, and Barcelona-now being proposed as paradigmatic representations of urban experience, which is meant to mimic digital media's modularity and disintegration. Goldsmith's use of appropriation is read as a blank endorsement of digital mediation of everyday life, which sits in opposition to Carrión's and Mora's political projects. Circular 07 and Barcelona mix unoriginal writing techniques, like Goldsmith's conceptual writing, with other experimental methods to warn readers against apolitical adoption of digital technologies. Fragmentation is still proposed as the most important aesthetic form of twenty-first century writing, but these two Spanish works strive for its contextualization as a complex mechanism structured around reader/writer subjectivity. Finally, this essay ponders how to consider new reader/ writer subjectivities within the larger context of global cities in late capitalism

Undesigning Culture. A brief reflection on design as ethical practice

This essay furthers the understanding of design as ethical practice.\ud Based on a perspective on the relationship between humans and technology as a\ud material-discursive practice, an argument is developed in which the meaning and\ud matter of a technology is not perceived as the effect of use only. Matter and\ud meaning emerge in each iteration in the design process of a technology. A design\ud strategy is presented in which ethics becomes an integral part of the design\ud process

Sean Sayers' Concept of Immaterial Labor and the Information Economy

The concept “immaterial labor” is one of the most hotly debated topics in contemporary social theory. In his 2007 work The Concept of Labor: Marx and His Critics, Sean Sayers offered an extensive response to several critical redefinitions of labor (Habermas, Benton, Arendt) and immaterial labor (Lazzarato, Hardt and Negri). Sayers returned to the subject in his more recent book, Marx and Alienation: Essays on Hegelian Themes.1 As one of the few accounts that contests the contemporary Marx critics with regard to fundamental concepts such as labor and immaterial labor, his contribution should be taken seriously

The Remanence of Medieval Media

The Remanence of Medieval Media (uncorrected, pre-publication version) For: The Routledge Handbook of Digital Medieval Literature, edited by Jen Boyle and Helen Burgess (2017