*It's like the first robin in spring!
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CTHEORY: THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 33, NO 1-2
*** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***
CDS001 04/14/2010 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
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CODE DRIFT
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Dear CTheory Readers,
We are very pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of
_Code Drift_ – a special issue of CTheory based on the work
presented at two Critical Digital Studies workshops held at the
Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture, University of Victoria.
The essays will be published on a rolling basis of two or three each
week and will be available at the CTheory website
beginning April 15th. We will build to a final PDF version of the
essays which will be made available on the CTheory Books website.
We are very excited about the truly innovative, creative, and
intellectual nature of every essay to be published as part of this
special issue of CTheory.
Kind regards,
Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, editors CTheory
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Code Drift
~Arthur & Marilouise Kroker~
What is the fate of the regime of computation? A global
techno-culture inscribed by the terrorism of the code or an emergent age of networked individualism driven onwards by the ecstatic visions of augmented reality, mobility, and connectivity? (((Do we get a choice? Wow!)))
When the regime of computation suddenly slams into the real world of globalization, when code is forced to tangle with the always messy world of blown away referential values – the real world of gender trouble, stormy challenges to the big signifiers of race, class and ethnicity – we finally know that we are living in the beginning days of something radically new, namely a culture of code drift. (((Man, no WONDER I'm living in an Italian migratory favela listening to Brazilian podstreams! I KNEW there was something hairy going on with that 2Ist-century class and ethnicity thing – I was Twittering that to my Serbian spouse just yesterday!)))
All the pure signs are present in code drift, from the radiating
positivity of the terrorism of the code to the irrepressible
creativity of augmented reality. How could they not be? The formal
structure of all programming language also carries within itself
traces of the modernist episteme with its endless variations of the
supposedly counter-languages of form and syntax. So too, code drift is most certainly always framed by the politics of the pure signs of these the most computational of all times: pure cybernetic terrorism, pure mobile contingency. (((I'm just grateful that I've still got Arthur around to point these things out for me.)))
But for all that, when the language of the code follows its fatal, but no less inevitable, passage across the real world of globalization, when form is deeply inflected with the
syntax of the human, non-human, and post-human, we are suddenly propelled into a new era of indeterminate trajectories, unpredictable inflections, strange complexities. Call it what you will – hauntologies, specters, disavowals, disappearances, (((Gothic High-Tech))) the missing third term – one thing is clear, understanding code drift urgently requires that the technical language of the regime of computation be supplemented by that which it thought it had successfully excluded, namely the always doubled imagination of the artist, the poet, the philosopher, the hacker, the gender outlaw, (((Favela Chic))) the systems administrator gone bad, the visionary of unknown borderlands of the body, mind, and spirit.
For all these, a digital culture moving at the speed of light
is most interesting when emphasis is placed on that which is the
dreaded object of escape velocity – the surrounding darkness with
its complex passages between light and dark, speed and slowness,
exclusions and inscriptions, codes and remainders, computation and that which is irresistibly - indeed joyfully inevitably - incapable
of being numerically signified under the sign of the bin or the hex.
Tracing the curve of technology as it now arcs relentlessly, and with no small measure of ideological hubris, towards mobility,
connectivity and augmentation, a creative group of digital theorists
gathered at PACTAC on two occasions – June 2009 and March 2010 – to collectively consider the specter of the digital future. Travelling from many different parts of the digital spectrum – visual artists, photographers, philosophers, computer theorists, performance artists, thinkers of the sonic, capitalist and genomic economies – there was a very real sense of code drift in the air. (((Boy, I bet.)))
Somehow within the
creative mystery of collective reflection on a common digital
project, barriers to thought were successfully eclipsed by the
creative imagination, allowing the full complexity of the digital
future to reveal itself. How else to explain what happened: stories
of code drift inflected by the rich imaginary of fractal philosophy,
becoming dragon, illuminated darkness, digital resisto(e)rs,
technology as magic, lenticular galaxies, phantasmal media, digital
conversations in a coast Salish longhouse, and augmented realities in life and fiction. (((And to think I was just sitting here under an encrouching cloud of Icelandic volcanic ash while staring at Milanese furniture!)))
Here, the spirits of many different thinkers, from
Borges to Deleuze, were summoned to stand at the gateway of the
digital future, not so much to haunt the present as to remind us
again and again that in _Code Drift: Essays in Critical Digital
Studies_ there is rehearsed anew the traditional practice of the
intellectual imagination – namely mixing past, present and future
into sensitive attunements for understanding issues related to
technology and society. That the digital future will be replete with
complex iterations and slippery codes was hauntingly brought into
presence by Stelarc’s performance lecture, "The Comatose, the
Cadaver, and the Chimera: Avatars have no Organs," presented as part of the continuing Critical Digital Studies workshop at PACTAC.
Supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada [Image, Text, Sound & Technology (ITST)], sponsored by New World Perspectives, convened under the auspices of CTheory, and held at the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture at the University of Victoria (Canada), _Code Drift_ is the first of a continuing series of publications and workshops on the digital future.
We are most grateful for the hard work and dedication of Ted Hiebert, Aya Walraven, and Simon Glezos in helping with the organization and tech support for the workshop as well as presenting at the workshop itself. We would also like to thank Nicholas van Orden (English, UVic) for his careful copy-editing of the text.
Editors, CTheory
Pacific Center for Technology and Culture
University of Victoria
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Code Drfit: Essays in Critical Digital Studies:
Table of Contents
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1. Preface
Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
2. Code Drift
Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
3. Fractal Philosophy (and the small matter of learning how to
listen): Attunement as the Task of Art
Johnny Golding
4. Illuminated Darkness: Nightmares, Blind Spots and Biofeedback
Ted Hiebert
5. Digital Resisto(e)rs
William Bogard
6. Something is Happening
Jordan Crandall
7. A Conversation with Spirits Inside the Simulation of a Coast
Salish Longhouse
Jackson 2Bears
8. Becoming Dragon: A Transversal Technology Study
Micha Cardenas
9. Lenticular Galaxies – Aesthetic Debates in Data Visualization
Sara Diamond
10. Toward a Theory of Critical Computing: The Case of Social
Identity Representation in Digital Media Applications
D. Fox Harrell
11. Moving Across the Internet: Code-Bodies, Code-corpses, and
Network Architecture
Christopher Parsons
12. Code and The Technical Provenance of Nihililsm
Brad Bryan
13. Creative Destruction Versus Restrictive Practices: Deleuze,
Schumpeter and Capitalism’s Uneasy relationship with Technical
Innovation
Simon Glezos
14. Digital Magic, Cybernetic Sorcery: On the Cultural Politics of
Fascination and Fear
Stephen Pfohl
15. A Sonic Economy
Stephen Kennedy
16. Atmospheric Alienation, Carbon Tracking and Geo-Techno Agency
Anita Girvan
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*
* CTHEORY is an international peer-reviewed journal of theory,
* technology and culture. Articles, interviews, and key book
* reviews in contemporary discourse are published weekly as
* well as theorisations of major "event-scenes" in the
* mediascape.
*
* Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
*
* Editorial Board: Paul Virilio (Paris), Bruce Sterling (Turin),
* Siegfried Zielinski (Academy of Media Arts, Cologne), Stelarc
* (Nottingham Trent University), DJ Spooky [Paul D. Miller] (New
* York City), Lynn Hershman Leeson (San Francisco), Stephen Pfohl
* (Boston College), Andrew Ross (New York University), Timothy
* Murray (Cornell University), Eugene Thacker (Georgia Institute of
* Technology), Steve Dixon (Brunel University), Anna Munster
* (University of New South Wales), Warren Magnusson (University of
* Victoria), Paul Hegarty (University College Cork), Joan Hawkins
* (Indiana University), Frances Dyson (University of California
* Davis), Mary Bryson (University of British Columbia), William
* Bogard (Whitman College) Andrew Wernick (Trent University),
* Maurice Charland (Concordia University).
*
* In Memoriam: Jean Baudrillard and Kathy Acker
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* Editorial Assistant: Aya Walraven
* WWW Design & Technical Advisor: Spencer Saunders (CTHEORY.NET)
* WWW Engineer Emeritus: Carl Steadman
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