Conversation pieces : on recounting new media art mailinglist cultures

In the field of media art, mailinglists such as nettime, -empyre-, SPECTRE and CRUMB have functioned as important para-institutional formations that have influentially played host to a diverse community of artists, critics, curators, activists and academics since the 1990s. These lists, we suggest, are of particular epistemological and methodological interest for the field of internet history due to their critical and experimental nature. This stems mainly from the cultivation of highly reflexive, at times ambivalent, stance towards the technical, social and aesthetic limits of such networking activity itself. In this sense, they present unique objects of study for exploring what difference computational methods might make for understanding mailinglist cultures over time; what we refer to in this article, drawing on Wolfgang Ernst, as counting and recounting the past. Our aim in this paper is, therefore, to both introduce these lists to the emerging field of internet history and scope out medium-specific methods that take the measure of concepts, discourses, cohorts, and events that have taken place through them over time

Towards edible interfaces:designing interactions with food

Food provides humans with some of the most universal and rich sensory experiences possible. For a long time technology was unable to recreate such experiences but now new innovations are changing that. Using the novel manufacturing technology of 3D printed food, I am developing ‘Edible Interfaces’. My research uses a user-centered research approach to focus on food as material for interactive experience in HCI. This will lead to development of Edible Interfaces that are built on the understanding and application of the experiential affordances of food. Designing with food allows the creation of forms of experience not possible through traditional interfaces. My studies so far have explored the perceptions of 3D printed food and potentials for food to advance affective computing. This knowledge is broadening on-going work in the field of multi-sensory HCI and delivering a new perspective on how we design for experience

An Exploration of Taste–Emotion Mappings from the Perspective of Food Design Practitioners

This paper explores taste-emotion mappings and how they may inform the design of user experience in HCI. We report interviews with 7 food industry professionals and discuss the findings against laboratory-based psychology studies. While the sweet-positive affect and bitter-negative affect mappings were confirmed, those for sour, salty and umami tastes were challenged. Our outcomes highlight a more nuanced understanding of taste-emotion mappings, the influence of taste intensity and the importance of narrative and temporality when designing taste experience in naturalistic settings

The Affordances of Replacement Narratives:How the White Genocide and Great Replacement Theories Converge in Poorly Moderated Online Milieus

This chapter takes a media studies approach to answering the question of how reactionary political opinions “meet” and converge in poorly moderated milieus, such as either entire forums, like the anonymous message board 4chan, or as specific locations of otherwise moderately moderated platforms, like the YouTube comment section. Two ideologically distinct narratives - namely, the French “great replacement” and American “white genocide” theories - and their circulation on 4chan/pol/ and the YouTube comment sections from 2013 to late 2018 are taken as case studies. The chapter argues that, in spite of their distinctions, they begin to merge ideologically by virtue of circulating in the same milieus. This is demonstrated with natural language processing (NLP) and network analyses of 4chan/pol/ posts and YouTube comments aiming to measure ideological convergence over time.</p

From Control Society to Parliament of Things: Designing Object Relations with an Internet of Things

This article discusses ways of framing Locative Media through critical theories of new media, particularly Giles Deleuze’s “control society hypothesis” and Bruno Latour’s “parliament of things”. It considers artistic practices that combine data visualization and location-awareness in order to represent public space. If Locative Media largely reworked the Situationist practice of psychogeography, in which the city was the primary site of contestation, the article looks at practices which contest ideas about Nature, in order to create “structures of participation” to address a “crisis in political agency” (Jeremijenko). The conclusion shifts Latour’s discourse on networks of non-human agency to the cognitive level in order to consider the potential impact of ubiquitous technology in terms of being

From Control Society to Parliament of Things: Designing Object Relations with an Internet of Things

This article discusses ways of framing Locative Media through critical theories of new media, particularly Giles Deleuze’s “control society hypothesis” and Bruno Latour’s “parliament of things”. It considers artistic practices that combine data visualization and location-awareness in order to represent public space. If Locative Media largely reworked the Situationist practice of psychogeography, in which the city was the primary site of contestation, the article looks at practices which contest ideas about Nature, in order to create “structures of participation” to address a “crisis in political agency” (Jeremijenko). The conclusion shifts Latour’s discourse on networks of non-human agency to the cognitive level in order to consider the potential impact of ubiquitous technology in terms of being

Meaningful disinformation: Narrative rituals and affective folktales

In this article, we review the epistemological boundaries of disinformation studies and argue that they are informed by network and transmission models where the unit of analysis (i.e., disinformation) is assumed to follow contagion growth patterns typical of population models. This framework reduces disinformation to a behavioral problem that downplays the participatory and ritualistic dimension of disinformation, which we argue cannot be reduced, and therefore cannot be corrected, by targeting individual behavior. We review seminal contributions to information and communication studies to foreground disinformation as de facto alternative social contracts that organize the overflow of information in meaningful narratives. We conclude by arguing that disinformation studies would benefit from tracing the resonance of narratives informed by lived experiences to achieve a higher-level principle that can negotiate conflicting realities