Paper accepted for ISEA!

I'm incredibly happy to write that my paper was accepted for "ISEA 2008":http://isea2008.org/! ISEA stands for the "International Symposium on Electronic Art":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-Society_for_the_Electronic_Arts and is one of the premier new media/digital art/emerging technologies conferences out there. I was bummed that I wasn't able to go the conference that happened in 2006 in San Jose, but am really excited to be going to the conference this year in Singapore! My paper is about the "fluid networking":http://zeitkunst.org/blog/2007/12/07/fluid-networking-for-activists/ project I blogged about earlier. The title, as it is right now, is somewhat unwieldy: "Reinterpreting networks of people as fluid for political purposes". The full abstract is below. I'll certainly be writing more about this in the coming months, and will hopefully be blogging parts of the conference when I'm there! *Abstract*: Social networks have become not only an online artifact used by millions, but also a means of describing real-life interactions between people. Humans as nodes, and social connections between people as edges; the metaphor is the graph or network, inheriting all of the abstracting nature of this mathematical formalism. Even within science and technology studies, and specifically actor-network theory, is there use of the network metaphor to describe complicated assemblages of human and non-human actors. Yet this reappropriation of a computer science term is not without its problems, specifically the way in difference is erased when a human is transformed into a node that is simply like all the others. The network itself is political, as the choice of who is represented is vitally important and too-often ignored. This paper begins as a critique of network views of reality, starting with the view that to completely represent the world through a graph is an impossible task. I then move into a consideration of actor-network theory, and the ways in which this expansion of the network to include non-human actors is still problematic as a result of the need to make choices of who or what to represent. These joint critiques enable me to see human and non-human assemblages as fluid and ever-forming and breaking. I end with a description of a present project of mine that uses mobile phones as participants in these ad-hoc associations as carriers of data. The mobile phone, via temporary Bluetooth connections, acts to pass messages from one person to another, without a top-down topology, bypassing centralized networks and enabling activists to continue communications surreptitiously, even when access to other technologies, such as the Internet or phone network, are disabled or destroyed. Fluidity becomes an asset with the software designed to take advantage of the movement of people for political purposes.

Comments

Great abstract, Nick. Have you, per chance, read Galloway and Thacker's, <a href="http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/G/galloway_exploit.html" rel="nofollow"><em>The Exploit</em></a>? I haven't yet, but, based upon what you have here, I'd be interested in your thoughts. Be in touch. All the best.

Thanks Jentery! I haven't seen that book of Galloway and Thacker's, but yeah, it's definitely directly related to what I'm doing. I just picked it up from the library and will try to get to it soon. A quick skim of it suggests that it's also an experiment in form and style, which I'm eagerly looking forward to exploring, almost as much as the "content" itself (knowing that they really can't be separated from each other, of course!).

[...] Esto posibilita una comunicación subrepticia a través de la actividad diaria, en una visión fluida de la realidad. Además, Fluid Nexus se puede usar como plataforma hiperlocal de mensajes, asociada indirectamente al espacio físico. http://zeitkunst.org/blog/2008/01/20/paper-accepted-for-isea/ [...]

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