3:15 p.m., Saturday, April 14, room 404

Faculty respondent: Shannon Mattern (bio)

Gazing Into the Abyss: Death, the Internet & Monstrosity

In this paper, I intend to explore the increasingly insidious connection between our real, subjective bodies and our online, objectified bodies-by-proxy. The “net” is shifting: Facebook has gone from a casual space of social networking to a veritable catalog of our life “events” (the wunderkid’s “timeline,” which takes us all the way back to our virtual “birth”). I will argue that this fundamental change, this movement into the hyperreal, has altered our expression of what is, arguably, the most real--Death. It’s a distasteful joke made by RIP Trolls, a morbid collection of photographs, a shared video of someone falling off a cliff, getting shot in the head, blown up, castrated, decapitated. We cease to be subjects on the internet, instead, we are objects; isolated things that lack a core, an original. The internet is a body destroyed, fragmented into a billion gory shards, spread and mingled and numb. Technology has built this modern Frankenstein, and its growing ability to deconstruct us, the passive user, is a monstrous one indeed. Primarily using the work of Jean Baudrillard as a platform, I plan to investigate the prevailing culture of death on the internet, and how this changes the way we see and consume death, and how greatly this impacts our “IRL” bodies.

The Ticker: An Archaeology of Data, Finance, and Media

From the vantage point of an occupied Wall Street, critiques of finance abound. As personal data explodes into a new asset category, so-called "Big Data" is a hot but ambiguous topic with seemingly limitless implications. This paper takes a critical, historical approach toward understanding these related, emerging phenomena. I offer a media archaeology of a specific financial instrument, the stock ticker.

Drawing on archival material including investor manuals, memoirs, and even board games, I present an eclectic history of the stock ticker that explores the medium’s effects on financial practices, work spaces, and economic theory. Underlying the argument are two related questions: how is data produced? and what is the relationship between data and the world? First I offer a history of the stock ticker that contextualizes the invention within larger systems of financial information. I argue that through a process of increasing abstraction, the stock ticker fundamentally altered older, interactional conceptions of markets. By creating a dynamic of continuity, the ticker brought into existence new mental and social models of finance. While the stock ticker represents only one of many possible genealogies of "Big Data," its role in the social and material revolutions in finance feel particularly of the moment.

My methodological thinking is influenced by media archaeologist like Huhtamo, Parikka, and Kluitenberg, and Zielinski. In order to theorize how the ticker abstracts markets and to analyze the informational networks it creates, I rely on the work of Bruno Latour.

if ( ) then { } : A Genealogy of the Computer Program

To the extent that our lives are mediated by “new media,” they are mediated by computer programs. This paper, a summary of my Masters Thesis, asks the question: what can we learn about new media by studying them at the level of the computer program itself? What are the affordances and limitations of programming as a media practice? What creative possibilities does it enable, and what does it foreclose? Beyond this, the question becomes not simply what can media theory tell us about computer programming, but rather, what can computer programming tell us about media theory.

Wolfgang Ernst calls computer programming “the cultural force of today” and implores us to study it through a media archaeological approach – defined as an analysis “close to the machine,” at subsemantic and nondiscursive symbolic levels.

In the context of computer programming, where do we find these lower levels? To answer this, I introduce the notion of the stack: an oft-cited diagrammatic illustrating how protocol functions within networked systems, but that also manifests in many other areas of computer science. The stack is the structure of technological abstraction, and reveals a dualistic tension: while “higher” abstractions open up new space for creativity, they are also always constrained and preconditioned by “lower level” infrastructure – by the milieus and circumstances of their production.

This paper includes a brief traditional computing technology history, then turns to a media archaeology of the program citing disparate examples including: Leibniz, current software engineering practices, and lesser known historical computer scientists.

Big Data, computer programming, death, dissociative media, fragmentation, Jean Baudrillard, media archaeology, new media, sociology of finance, software, stock ticker, the body, the hyperreal, the internet, the stack

3 Comments for Digital excavations: Explorations in Media Archaeology

Author comment by rory | April 12, 2012 at 7:49 pm

I’m super excited for our panel! I’m sure we will have lots to talk about in person. For now I have one comment about another research interest of mine that I think is very relevant to Eugenia’s project, but which I won’t be presenting at this panel — unfortunately, given the connections. I am interested in a similar idea but focussing the question more on the “low level” technologies that support the Internet and sites like Facebook — namely, the database. It is interesting how similar our conclusions are: by considering technical database operations/terms like normalization and decomposition, we can see how the subject in the database is very much fragmented across a vast technology infrastructure, and indeed, perhaps surprisingly, cemeteries and other types of human “storage” provide macabre models that we can use to understand these structures.

I guess the main question I have related to this is about how we can productively push this phenomenon even further in the political sense. Also, I think many theorists have addressed this idea similarly in terms of a “decentered subject” in relation to past media (for example Deleuze in relation to what he called modern cinema), and I wonder if this is different in the context of digital media, and if so how.

any thoughts? hopefully we can continue this on saturday …

Alex | April 13, 2012 at 5:03 pm

Interesting thoughts, Rory. And as improbable as it may seem, I think there might even be connections to the stock ticker here, especially your phrase about the fragmentation of data. One of the strands in my arguments is that the stock ticker permits a purely formal, mathematical theorization of markets, and I see this trend being expanded to humans via database technologies, particularly in the idea of the social graph. For me, much of it comes back to Latour, translating our impossibly complex existence into discrete, standardizable units, database entries.

I love the comparison between databases and cemeteries as human storage centers. I feel like Eugene Thacker would definitely appreciate that one. Looking forward to talking with everyone on saturday.

-Alex

Eugenia | April 13, 2012 at 10:53 pm

Hey! I’m a little late here, and also pretty exhausted from traveling–but wanted to say that yes, I am so excited (and pretty nervous, actually) for our panel! I think we’ve got a lot of stuff to talk about.

Leave a comment!