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After two long days of digesting the intellectual content of your peers, come and join us for complementary wine and the magic of La Red. The reception will be held at 7:30 pm in Wollman Hall on Friday and at 7pm in Wollman Hall on Saturday. Hope to see you all there.

Dealing with Disorder: Visual Complexity and the Uncertain Whole

As the concept of complexity evolves, its implications have extended beyond specialized disciplinary fields in physics and mathematics, to information and systems theory and, increasingly, to the social sciences. One of the principal ways to represent and engage with complexity is through visual models, maps, and interactive visual mechanisms, which are readily accessible through scholarly publications as well as public and semi-public forums. This study of images will employ a visual ethnography that asks: who makes these images and why are they important? This paper has three purposes: to briefly sketch the evolution of complexity and introduce its current definitions, to provide an ethnographic analysis of an array of examples of visual complexity from fields as diverse as news media and neuroscience, and to analyze the value of such visualizations for the field of social science. This paper will argue that the creation and increasing popularity of these complex visualizations is symptomatic of the anxiety in social science about the disorder and uncertainty posed by the breakdown of specialized disciplines. Furthermore, that increasing complexity in the visual ecology creates artifacts of individual artists’ and scientists’ struggle with meaning-making in modern information society.

Neither Here nor There: Deconstructing Urban Simulation

The city is to society as the body is to the mind. This paper explores this hypothesis by way of a discussion of a project on which I have been working for the last year with my collaborator, Marek Walczak, entitled “[here][now]”. The project is manifested as site-specific, interactive, immersive virtual reality installations. Each location-specific iteration begins with workshops, where residents of a city investigate their surroundings via psychogeographical methods. First individually (such as mapping paths through physical and social space), and then collectively (by finding common elements among these diagrams), the workshops generate what we call “aggregated subjectivities” which are then translated into a system of 3D forms that populate a virtual world, which is interactively projected into the installation space. This essay cites the work of David Gunkel who builds on Derrida’s idea of deconstruction to explain how virtual reality systems can displace the traditional binary opposition of real/virtual to move beyond simply satisfying “the search for the ultimate visual display medium.” By empowering individuals to collectively articulate a typology of their actual/idealized spatial surroundings, the project creates a real/virtual equivalence that provides a new way of visualizing our urban spaces. This project has been shown in the International Digital Art Festival (INDAF) in Incheon, Korea, and the essay includes results from workshopping and installing the project there.

A ‘Politics’ of Mapping, Or How to Produce a Whatever Documentary

What are the emerging politics of our new media environment? Is “politics” even the appropriate term to be using? It is not the goal of this paper to offer any simple solutions to these questions, or really any “solutions” at all, instead the present paper develops a (creative) way of understanding the developing political atmosphere from the perspective of an ever changing and fluid media landscape. Through an interdisciplinary approach it will follow in the footsteps of the thinkers that it draws on, such as Jodi Dean, Giorgio Agamben, Thacker and Galloway, Paolo Virno, Geert Lovink, and Deleuze and Guattari. By outlining the movement from the centralized televisual media landscape to the distributed network of the web this paper will combine Deleuzian theories of rhizomes and “mapping” with ideas for “new documentary” in order to create a creative and experimental way of working with both theory and practice- and subsequently gain a fuller insight into our developing “politics.”

Sounds and Silences: Affective Use of Music and Silence in The Twilight Zone

In various episodes of The Twilight Zone, what is on-screen often contradicts what is heard, thereby setting the viewer up for the series’ trademark twist ending. While the music that was composed for the series served to heighten the anxieties that the episode sought to invoke, it also was often used to convey insight into the episode’s subtext. But one other aural element contributes to this: the lack of music.

In studies of film and television music, one of the most prevalent dualities often overlooked is that of music and silence. Like the use of music, the absence of music appears at dramatically crucial moments. This paper examines the use of silence, or absence of music, in various episodes of the television series The Twilight Zone and how the absence of music plays as crucial a role in the interpretation of the episode as the music.