All posts tagged with 'deleuze'
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Vanessa Meyer is a graduate of the Communications undergraduate program at Concordia University and is currently completing her final year in The New School Media Studies Masters program. Her work is fundamentally interdisciplinary in that she makes a conscious effort to bridge the field of critical media studies with other domains, such as philosophy, political science, cultural theory, sociology, and art criticism. Along with this academic project, Vanessa maintains the importance of integrating a strong practical element into her work. She is currently working on experimental ways of conceiving of and producing documentary.
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.”
Jedd Wilcox is a staff member at Parsons The New School for Design and a student in the Graduate Program in Media Studies at The New School, where he co-chaired the 2009 Critical Themes in Media Studies Conference and is completing his Master’s thesis on technological mediation and everyday sustainability this Spring. His interests include sustainable design, DIY culture, participatory media, and appropriate technologies.
A Certain Convocation of Politic Worms: Assembling Community Vermiculture and the Ecological Collective
In this paper, I examine the growing trend of urban vermiculture, the practice of composting organic waste with worms, through the lens of the machinic assemblage (Deleuze) and the collective (Latour). Informing this inquiry is data drawn from traces of the vermiculture community’s discourse via Web-based discussion (i.e. vermicomposting blogs, discussion boards, etc.) and Do-It-Yourself (DIY) guides (i.e. online “instructables”), as well as from the larger public discourse surrounding the practice as it is represented in the press.
In examining the emergence of vermiculture as a “sustainable” practice related to waste minimization and local food sourcing, I investigate the role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT’s) in the representation of the system’s heterogeneous actors and their ontological perspectives. To what extent do the affordances of DIY participatory media make possible the political “representation” (in keeping with both Cultural Studies’ as well as Latour’s overtly political deployment of the term) of the human and non-human actors involved? Is a resolution of the tension between an anthropocentric, instrumental conception of the actors involved (including made artifacts and the worms themselves) and an ecological, collective approach possible?