Materializing digital collecting: an extended view of digital materiality

If digital objects are abundant and ubiquitous, why should consumers pay for, much less collect them? The qualities of digital code present numerous challenges for collecting, yet digital collecting can and does occur. We explore the role of companies in constructing digital consumption objects that encourage and support collecting behaviours, identifying material configuration techniques that materialise these objects as elusive and authentic. Such techniques, we argue, may facilitate those pleasures of collecting otherwise absent in the digital realm. We extend theories of collecting by highlighting the role of objects and the companies that construct them in materialising digital collecting. More broadly, we extend theories of digital materiality by highlighting processes of digital material configuration that occur in the pre-objectification phase of materialisation, acknowledging the role of marketing and design in shaping the qualities exhibited by digital consumption objects and consequently related consumption behaviours and experiences

Curating Objects from the European Border Zone : The “Lampedusa Refugee Boat”

The cultural politics of the present encourage museums and artists to seek an ethical vision within Europe navigating the knowledge of ongoing mass death at the border. This is one explanation for the interest in objects symbolising present-day irregular border crossing among museum curators, artists, designers and activists. Wooden fishing boats, inflatable dinghies and life jackets appear regularly in exhibitions and installations. This chapter focuses on the meaning of “the Lampedusa boat” and argues that the narrative context within which the boats are exhibited guides the work of imagination that animates the object. While exhibiting the boats carries the critical potential to relocate the border and make it visible, this potential is disrupted by a political context that simultaneously militarises and humanitarianises the border.peerReviewe

Surveillance in the digital enclosure

Popular portrayals of ubiquitous computing downplay the surveillance implications of emerging forms of networked interactivity. This essay supplements such accounts by analyzing interactive spaces as digital enclosures which restrict access to the means of interaction to those who “freely” submit to the detailed forms of monitoring that take place within them. It supplements privacy-based critiques of surveillance with questions about the ownership and control of such data and the implications of this control for networked communication