Black Box Allegories of Gulf Futurism:The Irreducible Other of Computational Capital

Given the prospect of post-oil futures, this chapter historically situates contemporary Gulf Futurism within cybernetic and logistical aspirations underlying the current global trend of the smartness mandate. Working through the complex visuality that the cybernetic black box animates, the chapter revisits Fredric Jameson’s cognitive mapping as an allegorical model for the inherent frictions of computational capital. To this end, it discusses Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri’s artistic practice that reclaims a right to speculate while condensing material reality and imaginative threads, thereby going beyond a mere gesture of unveiling or mapping.Özgün Eylül İşcen, ‘Black Box Allegories of Gulf Futurism: The Irreducible Other of Computational Capital’, in The Case for Reduction, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Jakob Schillinger, Cultural Inquiry, 25 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 91-115 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-25_05

Counter-N?

Not Reviewe

Revisiting Cognitive Mapping

The increasingly complex, algorithmically mediated operations of global capital have only deepened the gap between the social order as a whole and its lived experience. Yet, Fredric Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping, attentive to the conflicting tendencies of capitalist operations, is still helpful for addressing the local instantiations of capital’s expanding frontiers of extraction. I am interested in tracing the historicity of those operations as well as the totality they are actively part of in the present from the vantage point of the Middle East, especially along with the entangled trajectories of oil, finance, and militarism. To this end, I examine countervisual practices in the realm of media arts that contest the aesthetic regime through which the state-capital nexus attempts to legitimize its imperial logic and violence. My reconfiguration of cognitive mapping as countervisuality in Nicholas Mirzoeff’s terms demonstrates that there is no privileged position or method of cognitive mapping, which ultimately corresponds to an active negotiation of urban space across the Global North/ South divide

Theorizing Through the Global South

How is it possible to theorize not only on the so-called Global South, but also in, from, and through it? What appears as the universal often involves a gestureduc of generalization, flattening and dominating the particular, predominantly from a Eurocentric perspective. This workshop will discuss ways to unsettle the very distinction between the general and the particular that underlies claims to universality and simultaneously retain the claim to the universal that makes theorization generative and relevant. In this vein, it will reflect on the following questions: How are theoretical affinities transformed through contexts in the Global South? How can theoretical work be made relevant to the larger audience beyond particular region or area studies? What are possible strategies to present the theoretical impact of one&#8217;s work despite its constant peripheralization as a case study? How can one maintain a critique of the Eurocentric gaze without falling into the traps of ethnocentrism? What are the affordances that particular disciplines and institutions could offer to tackle such theoretical and methodological challenges? What methodologies can be employed to expand, if not transform, current understandings of the universal? Scholars from a variety of fields who undertake such inquiries are invited to jointly develop novel methods, approaches, and styles of knowledge production and circulation.Theorizing Through the Global South, workshop, ICI Berlin, 10–11 March 2022 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e220310

Tech Imaginations

Prof. Dr. Jens Schröter, Christoph Borbach, Max Kanderske und Prof. Dr. Benjamin Beil sind Herausgeber der Reihe. Die Herausgeber*innen der einzelnen Hefte sind renommierte Wissenschaftler*innen aus dem In- und Ausland.Technologies and especially media technologies are pervasive in modern societies. But even more omnipresent are the imaginaries of modern technologies – what technologies are thought to be capable of or what effects they are supposed to have. These imaginations reveal a lot of the political and ideological self-descriptions of societies, hence the (techno-)imaginary also functions as a kind of epistemic tool. Concepts of the imaginary therefore have experienced an increasing attention in cultural theory and the social sciences in recent years. In particular, work from political philosophy, but also approaches from science and technology studies (STS) or communication and media studies are worth mentioning here. The term "techno-imagination", coined by Vilém Flusser in the early 1990s, refers to the close interconnection of (digital) media and imaginations, whose coupling can not only be understood as a driver of future technology via fictional discourses (e.g. science fiction), but much more fundamentally also as a constitutive element of society and sociality itself, as Castoriadis has argued. In the first part of the issue several theoretical contributions add new aspects to the discussion of socio-technical imaginaries, while in the second part a workshop held in January 2022 at the CAIS in Bochum is documented, in which the case of the imaginaries of “Future Internets” was discussed

The Geopolitical Aesthetic of Digital Media and Theorizing Through Arts

Özgün Eylül İşcen, ‘The Geopolitical Aesthetic of Digital Media and Theorizing Through Arts’, talk presented at the workshop Theorizing Through the Global South, ICI Berlin, 10–11 March 2022, video recording, mp4, 18:08 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e220310_3

Revisiting Cognitive Mapping: Extractive Capitalism and Media Arts in the Middle East

The increasingly complex, algorithmically mediated operations of global capital have only deepened the gap between the social order as a whole and its lived experience. Yet, Fredric Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping, attentive to the conflicting tendencies of capitalist operations, is still helpful for addressing the local instantiations of capital’s expanding frontiers of extraction. I am interested in tracing the historicity of those operations as well as the totality they are actively part of in the present from the vantage point of the Middle East, especially along with the entangled trajectories of oil, finance, and militarism. To this end, I examine countervisual practices in the realm of media arts that contest the aesthetic regime through which the state-capital nexus attempts to legitimize its imperial logic and violence. My reconfiguration of cognitive mapping as countervisuality in Nicholas Mirzoeff’s terms demonstrates that there is no privileged position or method of cognitive mapping, which ultimately corresponds to an active negotiation of urban space across the Global North/ South divide

The Dialectical Condition of Diasporic Post-Internet Aesthetics

Özgün Eylül İşcen, ‘The Dialectical Condition of Diasporic Post-Internet Aesthetics’, talk presented at the symposium Haunted by Homes, ICI Berlin, 5–6 May 2022, video recording, mp4, 25:06 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e220505_04

Introduction

Introduction to the workshop Theorizing Through the Global South, ICI Berlin, 10–11 March 2022, video recording, mp4, 08:12 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e220310_1

Counter-Futuring

Since the 2008–09 global financial crisis, the neoliberal ethos has come forth via the technocratic premises of finding market-led and technology-enabled solutions to the ever-growing economic and ecological crises occurring at a planetary scale. The growth of automated and predictive technologies has reorganized the realms of finance, security, environment, energy, urban planning, as well as the global supply chain. The spectacles of what Orit Halpern, Robert Mitchell, and Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan call the ‘smartness mandate’ (2017) prescribe profit-driven imaginaries of risk and hope for the future to absorb the recurring crises of capitalist modernity. In contrast, Counter-Futuring invests in forms and networks of praxis that invert the contemporary enframing of technological systems and their underlying colonial, racial, and patriarchal regimes of space, time, and visuality. Counter-Futuring aims at demystifying and contesting the material conditions of hegemonic forms and narratives of futurity integral to the extractive mechanisms and imperial violence of capitalist operations. It reconfigures the aesthetic and political potentials of a given technology by shifting the registers of the archive, information, and futurity. Counter-Futuring attends to the ongoing decolonial, anti-racist, feminist, queer, and migrant struggles taking place within and beyond socio-technical interventions while highlighting the verb form in the present tense of futuring. This one-day symposium will gather artists and scholars whose works generate critical yet creative responses to the imperial aspirations of computational capital as manifested within and beyond Western settings. Indeed, Counter-Futuring is part of a larger project Counter-N, which is a web-based publishing, exchange, and research collection curated by Shintaro Miyazaki and Özgün Eylül İşcen, and is supported by Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.The title is inspired by Jussi Parikka, who in his contribution to the collection coined the term mainly in reference to Kodwo Eshun’s writings on Afrofuturism. Ultimately, this symposium seeks to initiate a series of conversations to collectively reclaim the acts, techniques, and infrastructures of speculating and commoning otherwise. The event will take place in a hybrid format, some speakers will participate virtually.Counter-Futuring, symposium, ICI Berlin, 22 September 2022 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e220922