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Critical studies in new media
Organizers - Fred Turner : Michael Shanks : Sebastian De Vivo
Image - Tilda Swinton, directed by Lynn Hershman - Teknolust - the movie
Lynn Hershman is part of The Presence Project at Stanford, Exeter, London
Focus for 2006-2007 - The politics of presence
In its first two years, 2003-2005, the workshop took a broad view of new media in its readings, discussions and guest speakers. (See Past events and Workshop brief - 2004/2005)
This has enabled us to take up a specific focus again for 2006-2007 - one with far-reaching relevance and implication - the politics of presence.
Our aim is to examine and debate cutting edge thinking around this topic of the politics of presence.
The group will, as before in this workshop, be one that radically crosses the conventional boundaries between different approaches to media. It will combine media practice, perspectives from media industries and institutions, and socio-political critique.
Intellectual edge and cutting across conventional fields of understanding and practice - this is what distinguishes our workshop from other courses and seminars in media at Stanford, and makes it unique.
Objectives - to convene the group commited to exploring key issues every two weeks during quarter; to organize two colloquia in April and May (2007); to manifest this interest in an on-line collaboratory (this web site).
Presence is a contested aspect of social and cultural experience. Notions of presence hinge on the relationship between the live and mediated, on notions of immediacy, authenticity and originality. Presence prompts questions of the character of self-awareness, of the presentation of self. Interaction is implicated — presence implies being in someone's presence. And agency - one's ability to effect such representation and relationship. Location too — to be present is to be somewhere. Hence presence also directs us outside the self into the social and spatial. And also, of course, presence directs us into temporality — a fulcrum is tense and the relationship between past and present.
An aspect of presence is representation - both mimesis and political representation. Hence presence fundamentally implicates the communicative relationship between what or who is represented and how. At the heart of presence is politics and the polis.
We propose that the workshop focuses on this theme of the politics of presence - matters of power, agency, and identity in the ways that media experiences generate and manage presence.
Key questions and fields revolve around agency, site/location and the body.
Agency
How do infrastructures (of any kind - social, political, material) shape the ability of the individual to have political presence?
What are we to make of the increasing expression of politics as media experience?
How are media companies, political agencies and/or other organizations using media to shape the experience of presence in culturally or institutionally determined ways?
What's the difference between presence, agency and representation?
What happens when media generate mixed realities that subvert the distinction between real and represented, original and simulated?
These questions raise the topic of "virtual communities" and socio-media, new forms of (political) association.
Site/location
Media and mediation are always located. Media technologies always connect with place. They are mediating forms, between people and structures/institutions.
How are media implicated in politically charged locations?
Surveillance and mutual monitoring are relevant here.
How do we think about immersive environments - fused intermedia as well multiple media ensembles - in relation to presence, identity and agency?
How are media involved in the generation of corporate presence beyond the individual in places like department stores, malls and airports?
Body
How are the truth and knowledge of one's self and being shaped by mediating forms/technologies?
What happens when there isn't an individual to be present anymore, because they are dispersed through multiple media?
What happens when the individual is dispersed through mediating forms such that the absolute distinction between self and representation is less relevant than notions of iterative remediating processes?
What happens when the enviornment within which we're present finds its home inside our bodies, when media and bodies merge? Key issues here are immersive media environments, cyborg bodies and emerging nano technologies.
Change and history
Agency, site/location and body need to be understood in historical perspective.
How should we think about presence in the present in relation to presence in the past?
What about immersive environments and other media management of presence in the past?
Media history - what is new about new media and their relation to presence?
Are these really issues of "new" media?
The workshop meets four times per quarter. Meetings focus on discussing key issues that will enable us to think through our topic.
Workshop members are invited to chair and present their own views on the chosen works and to make contributions to this collaborative on-line forum in the way of summary, commentary and further resources for understanding the politics of presence.
In May we will organize colloquia where we will discuss the politics of presence.
For a detailed list of meetings, please see our Schedule
For a list of participants and interests, please go to Participants
A fusion of interest dictated by the media themselves:
This workshop is complemented by "The Presence Project" - a major collaboration of performance artists, theorists and computer scientists, running 2005-2010 and based at Stanford, Exeter and London UK.
