[iDC] Introductions

Alessandra Renzi a.renzi at neu.edu
Fri Jun 20 01:05:02 UTC 2014 

Hi there,

As Marco just mentioned, we will be presenting on crowdsourced labour, bots and activism.

I am an Assistant Professor in Emergent Media cross-appointed in the Department of Art + Design and in the Program in Media and Screen Studies at Northeastern University. In general, my work explores the linkages and relays between media, art and activism through ethnographic studies and multimedia projects. My scholarship focuses on developing and testing out militant research methods with activists, often using technology.  My recent book Infrastructure Critical: Sacrifice at Toronto’s G8/G20 Summit, co-authored with Greg Elmer is a companion to the forthcoming open source collaborative documentary Preempting Dissent: Policing the Crisis produced at the Infoscape Centre in Toronto. Both book and film evolved out of work done at the alt media center during the anti-G20 convergence in Toronto. I’m now finishing a book manuscript on emerging forms of media activism based on my fieldwork in Italy. As an activist, I also collaborate with insu^tv media collective in Italy and have created, with Roberta Buiani, Activism beyond the Interface: the Sandbox Project, an art project located at the intersection between face-to-face and interface. 

I look forward to meeting you all (and to seeing some familiar faces) at the conference,

Alessandra
––––––––––––––––––––––
Alessandra Renzi, PhD
Assistant Professor in Emergent Media 
Program in Media and Screen Studies 
Department of Art + Design 
Northeastern University
360 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA 02115
repurposing-research.org




On Jun 19, 2014, at 8:30 PM, <idc-request at mailman.thing.net> <idc-request at mailman.thing.net> wrote:

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> Today's Topics:
> 
>   1. Re: introductions (Stefan Heidenreich)
>   2.  introduction (Andreas Wittel)
>   3. introduction (Thorsten Busch)
>   4. Re: introductions (Aleena Chia)
>   5. Re: introductions (Deseriis, Marco)
> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 09:59:29 +0200
> From: Stefan Heidenreich <mail at stefanheidenreich.de>
> To: idc at mailman.thing.net
> Subject: Re: [iDC] introductions
> Message-ID: <53A146E1.5000601 at stefanheidenreich.de>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
> 
> Hi All,
> arriving little late to the list, I had the pleasure to read a lot of 
> introductions, and am very curious to meet everyone in November.
> 
> At the conference I will try to think about work as relational activity, 
> or simply doing stuff for others. As activities of all sorts are being 
> wrapped in layers of data, paid labor along the model of factory work 
> may no longer serve as the most appropriate frame to grasp work in its 
> connectedness. The relevance, or the value of what one does or makes may 
> have little to do with the scarcity of goods, but more with links, or 
> 'likes', along the thoughts of Enzo Rulani.
> From here there is a second step to be taken into account. Networks and 
> databases would theoretically allow for modes of allocation and 
> distribution without money. (See "Money as Memory" by N. Kocherlakota 
> and also my recent a talk on Non-Money at the Moneylab Conference, 
> Amsterdam) From there, I'll try to sketch out what doing stuff for 
> others could mean in a world of non-money and lots of data.
> 
> As for my academic affiliation, I currently hold a  research position at 
> the Centre for Digital Cultures in L?neburg. Besides, I am involved in 
> building up a Berlin-based start-up on Social Media Analysis, and active 
> as an art-critic in my spare time.
> 
> Looking forward to seeing all of you at the #dl14
> Stefan
> 
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 2
> Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 11:52:38 +0100
> From: Andreas Wittel <andreas.wittel at gmail.com>
> To: "idc at mailman.thing.net" <idc at mailman.thing.net>
> Subject: [iDC]  introduction
> Message-ID:
> 	<CAOAyO5To+2cxdboZeo421WSdFSHzyFB-e1k1O5s8XRUXHiO+BQ at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I am teaching and researching in the UK, at Nottingham Trent University. My
> research is about the intersection of capitalism and digital technologies.
> I am particularly interested in the digital commons and its potential for a
> new mode of production. At the conference I will discuss some of the
> obstacles that the development of the digital commons is facing. They have
> a lot to do with labour - however not so much with free labour, but with a
> general state of exhaustion created in the neoliberal wage labour society.
> 
> Most of my work can be accessed here:
> https://nottinghamtrent.academia.edu/AndreasWittel
> 
> Looking forward to meeting everyone at the conference.
> 
> Andreas
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> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 3
> Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 20:38:23 +0200
> From: Thorsten Busch <thorsten.busch at unisg.ch>
> To: idc at mailman.thing.net
> Subject: [iDC] introduction
> Message-ID:
> 	<OFD37B9564.7415CA2D-ONC1257CFB.0066643C-C1257CFB.00666446 at unisg.ch>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
> 
> Hi everyone,
> 
> Thanks much for sharing all those interesting and entertaining introductions! I'm going to try and keep mine relatively short, but if you'd like to know more, please feel free to check out this link:?http://www.iwe.unisg.ch/ueber+uns/team/busch.aspx
> 
> So yeah, the short version is that I'm a postdoctoral fellow with Mia Consalvo at Concordia University, Montreal. From a digital business ethics perspective, I study how companies govern digital publics, especially with regard to social network sites and gaming platforms. The paper Mia and I will be presenting focuses on how the ginormous online game League of Legends governs its community by utilizing players' labor when it comes to regulating and reviewing toxic player behavior. If you happen to be interested in any of these issues, please feel free to get in touch.
> 
> Looking forward to seeing you in NYC,
> 
> Thorsten
> 
> 
> -----
> 
> Thorsten Busch, Ph.D.
> / Postdoctoral Fellow, Technoculture, Art & Games, Concordia U
> / Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Business Ethics, U of St.Gallen
> / twitter.com/DigitalEthics
> 
> 
> 
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> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 4
> Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 17:40:34 +0200
> From: Aleena Chia <achia at indiana.edu>
> To: idc at mailman.thing.net
> Subject: Re: [iDC] introductions
> Message-ID:
> 	<CALc+7LQBe4W=dniU9oh-+bEJHooWJvUb+FcbTTY35SUH5UxabA at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> 
> Dear List,
> 
> I'm a PhD Student at Indiana University studying bureaucratic and affective
> consumer labor. I'm interested in the cultural politics of fantasy,
> ideologies of productivism, and systems of social compensation, as they
> interplay in branded game worlds. This research draws from a year and a
> half of ethnographic fieldwork with player collectivities of *World of
> Darkness* live-action role playing games and *EVE Online* massively
> multiplayer game. These gaming properties are connected through their
> management by CCP Games, which has sought to brand itself as a developer of
> open game worlds animated by player created content across transmedia
> platforms.
> 
> 
> I will present "Magic Nerd Money: Work and Compensation in Ludic
> Bureaucracies." This paper reconstructs two transformative clashes between
> players and producers. I suggest how contrastive communicative scales,
> structures, and understandings of laborious contributions to a transmedial
> commons may account for different modes of collective action. On the one
> hand, the live-action format is played out through bureaucratic structures.
> This organizational structure may have facilitated collective legal action
> by players against the company. On the other hand, the massively
> multiplayer format is often played through consumer collectivities with
> network enterprise structures. This organizational structure may have
> facilitated collective ludic actions such as in-game protests and
> rage-quiting, which unlike the aforementioned legal action, are contained
> within and arguably absorbed by the contractual frame between producers and
> consumers.
> 
> 
> In contrast to the voluntary, modular, flexible, and creative work that
> make up consumer publics, consumer bureaucracies are maintained by
> obligatory work that is often tedious, feminized, and undervalued. In other
> words, unlike unpaid digital labor of fans and gamers, the labor in
> consumer bureaucracies feels unmistakably like work. Unlike unpaid digital
> labor that can be compensated by informal reputation systems, bureaucratic
> work demands compensation with ludic rewards in highly codified systems
> that anchor and perpetuate player investment. This compensation system
> highlights the strengths and weaknesses of consumer bureaucracies -
> non-portable investments of labor facilitate enhanced motivations for
> collective action; however, coordination capacities limit its operational
> complexity and scale.
> 
> 
> Looking forward to the discussion at the Conference!
> 
> 
> Aleena Chia
> 
> PhD Candidate
> 
> Indiana University
> 
> *achia at indiana.edu <achia at indiana.edu>*
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> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 5
> Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 09:36:28 +0000
> From: "Deseriis, Marco" <m.deseriis at neu.edu>
> To: "idc at mailman.thing.net" <idc at mailman.thing.net>
> Subject: Re: [iDC] introductions
> Message-ID:
> 	<33EBE0F61BB0764797810FADB5E8768B064C531D at BOS8021.nunet.neu.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"
> 
> Dear all,
> 
> even though i am always uncomfortable with the performance of the 'I' 'i' will try to do my best explain briefly what this guy who goes by this name does.
> 
> Marco is an assistant professor in the program in media and screen studies at northeastern university and his work revolves mostly around the production of subjectivity in the information society. His forthcoming book Improper names (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) is a genealogy of shared pseudonyms that brings together the history of the labor movement (Ned Ludd, Alan Smithee) with the post-modern avant-garde (Monty Cantsin, Karen Eliot) and current struggles for the commoning of information and information technologies (Luther Blissett, Anonymous). As assemblages of enunciation that are simultaneously common and singular, impersonal yet individuated, improper names allow us to think of a third way between the quantified self of the Web 2.0 and the specular politics of anonymity and obfuscation.
> 
> At the conference, Alesanda Renzi and Marco will be presenting a paper on the impact of crowdsourcing on media activism and hacktivism. In particular we will return to Deleuze and Guattari's distinction between social subjection and machinic enslavement to analyze two distinct yet interrelated phenomena: 1) the use by media activists of crowdsourcing platforms for the collaborative production of documentaries; 2) and the use of botnets for the organization of DDoS attacks for political ends.
> 
> Looking forward to meet you all!
> Marco
> 
> 
> 
> Marco Deseriis, Ph.D.
> Assistant Professor
> Program in Media and Screen Studies
> Northeastern University
> 360 Huntington Ave., 114 Holmes
> Boston, MA 02115
> ________________________________
> From: idc-bounces at mailman.thing.net [idc-bounces at mailman.thing.net] on behalf of Benj Gerdes [benj at clnswp.org]
> Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2014 4:18 PM
> To: idc at mailman.thing.net
> Subject: Re: [iDC] introductions
> 
> Dear List,
> 
> To echo others, apologies for being slightly late on this introduction. I have enjoyed reading those from many of you, and look forward to meeting in person and learning more about much of the research that has been touched upon. I attended some of the sessions in 2009, and am pleased to be presenting at #DL14.
> 
> I am an artist  working at the intersection of art, documentary, and activist practices, and am Assistant Professor of Media Arts at Long Island University - Post. I teach a combination of moving image production courses and theory, in which I am often interested in the relationship between social movements and media production, with a specific focus on questions of activism, organizing, and motivational factors for political participation (as well as apathy). Much of my own work, as well as that emerging from my courses, explores (via ad hoc groups and social experiments) collaborative production and nontraditional divisions of labor. As someone whose work is often invested in a critique of current forms of professionalization and entrepreneurialism as prioritizing individual gain and self-interest over broader collective aims, I also must admit I sometimes find the format of introductions such as these difficult (albeit necessary).
> 
> At the conference, I will give a presentation that explores a personal displeasure at my own demographic for accepting certain terms and conditions for laboring and the contemporary creation of value, while at the same time allowing this discussion to implicate my own hypocrisy and fatigue in relationship to the development of actually existing or viable alternatives.
> 
> You are welcome to read my bio below or visit my (not up-to-date) website, URL also below.
> 
> Looking forward,
> Benj
> 
> 
> Benj Gerdes Bio
> www.clnswp.org<http://www.clnswp.org>
> Benj Gerdes is an artist , writer, and organizer working in film, video, and other public formats, individually as well as collaboratively. He is interested in intersections of political discourse, knowledge production, and popular imagination. His individual and collaborative work focuses on the affective and social consequences of economic and state regimes through historical research, dialogue, and participatory or aleatory formalizations. His work has been exhibited and screened at venues including the Tate Modern, REDCAT Gallery, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, Rotterdam International Film Festival, and the National Gallery of Art. Writings have been published in October, The Journal of Aesthetics + Protest, Incite! and Rethinking Marxism. He has lectured and taught widely in the United States, including at Cooper Union, Bard College, and Parsons the New School for Art and Design. He is Assistant Professor of Media Arts at Long Island University ? Post.
> 
> 
> Benj Gerdes
> Assistant Professor, Media Arts
> School of Visual and Performing Arts
> Long Island University - Post
> Humanities 003A
> Brookville, NY 11548
> (516) 299-2751
> benjamin.gerdes at liu.edu<mailto:benjamin.gerdes at liu.edu>
> 
> 
> On Jun 16, 2014, at 5:14 PM, Orit Halpern wrote:
> 
> Hello Everyone,
> I am looking forward to the conference. I was a fond participant in the 2009 event.
> 
> I am an assistant professor at the New School in Historical Studies and in the Design Studies MA program at Parsons. My work is on histories of big data, cybernetics, and interactivity.  Currently, I work a lot on ubiquitous computing, responsive environments, and smart cities, particularly in East Asia. I also work on histories of intelligence, all forms--CIA, neuro-science, financial agents, neural nets--many of which are linked.
> 
> At the conference, I will be presenting a history of agent based intelligence/modelling, and the transformations of crowds into clouds. Its part of a new book project I am doing titled Strange Agency:A History of Post-War Intelligence.
> 
> If you want to know more, you can check my website: www.orithalpern.net<http://www.orithalpern.net/>
> 
> I look forward to the conference and meeting everyone!
> Take care,
> -Orit
> 
> 
> --
> Dr. Orit Halpern
> Assistant Professor
> History
> The New School for Social Research/Eugene Lang College
> 80 Fifth Avenue
> Room 507
> New York, NY. 10011
> w: www.orithalpern.net<http://www.orithalpern.net/>
> 
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> End of iDC Digest, Vol 91, Issue 19
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