creativity/machine

How I wish I could find an excuse to go to this…but I haven’t got one. I guess I’ll be left behind and sour…I wonder if they have a vacancy for a back scrubber?

Manchester Institute of Popular Culture
Manchester Metropolitan University

April 8th and 9th 2005

The Smiths have had a singular impact on popular culture. They looked like nobody else and sounded like nobody else. The music of The Smiths contained an emotional depth and a technical virtuosity that moved people in a way that almost no other band has managed before or since. In spite of their enormous cultural significance and personal resonance, The Smiths have yet to receive sustained academic attention. To date, there have been remarkably few serious examinations of the band. The purpose of this symposium is to put that right. The event seeks to draw together academics and others who wish to critically examine what The Smiths meant and continue to mean almost two decades after their untimely demise. Among the themes that we hope to address are: gender and sexuality, race and nationality, a sense of place, the imagination of class, the significance of Manchester in popular music, the aesthetics of the band, fan cultures and musical innovation.

Abstracts for proposed conference papers should be no longer than 200 = words and should be sent (via email) no later than January 10th 2005 to = Dr Fergus Campbell, School of Historical Studies, University of = Newcastle Upon Tyne, F.J.M.Campbell@newcastle.ac.uk; Dr Sean Campbell, = Department of Communication and Media Studies, APU, Cambridge, = s.campbell@apu.ac.uk, and Dr Colin Coulter, Department of Sociology, = National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Ireland, colin.coulter@may.ie

The BBC website has launched a new digital storytelling portal

There are more of these wondrous timekeeping contraptions at Klockwerks.

As avid blog-readers will know, I’ve been reading Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality - a fascinating manifesto which, in the edition I’ve got, comes in a slim paperback volume bound in Revolution Red and lettered in stark bold type that is set on a provocative diagonal. It has occurred to me after reading various discussions of McKenzie Wark’s Hacker Manifesto (an earlier version is also available here) just how productive it is for me to read these two works alongside each other, particularly when reading them through the cool/uncool concepts our CSAA panel is currently grappling with as we shape our presentation/s.

Illich uses conviviality, not in the sense of a cosy afternoon of jocularity at the local pub, but in its classic sense:

to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others, and by a manmade environment. I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value.

Each of the authors proceeds from some kind of neo- or post-Marxist-inflected standpoint, and both are concerned with the ways in which power works in and through technologies of various kinds. It is understandable that Illich, writing in the late 1960s, sees computers as destructive of individual agency (but not only computers: like Wark, also compulsory education and the dominance of the managerial, or, for Wark, “vectoralist” class), whereas for Wark it is the privatization of information and representation that are the site of struggle. So thinking about how “coolness” gets in the way whenever I try to look at everyday agency in digital culture from a cultural studies point of view: on the bus on the way home this afternoon I started turning over the words “cool” and “warm” in my head - the “conviviality” that Illich speaks of exhudes premodern (or post-postmodern) human warmth, making it seem quaint in a way, but fundamentally imbued with positive, constructive energy; on the other hand, resistance is negative energy. Information work as “hacking” is equally energetic, but to my ears it is “cool” not only as in seductive and instantly usable, but also “cool” as in cold and counter-human. Of course, Wark is dealing with a different world from the late 1960s South America with which Illich was concerned: for Wark, the abstraction of private property must be countered with abstract creativity:

34. Through the application of abstraction, the hacker class produces the possibility of production, the possibility of making something of and with the world - and of living off the surplus produced by the application of abstraction to nature - to any nature. Through the production of new forms of abstraction, the hacker class produces the possibility of the future - not just ‘the’ future, but an infinite possible array of futures, the future itself as virtuality.

But I insist on wondering whether the effect of the aesthetic of the aphorism, the insistence on abstraction and virtuality in Wark’s work really function as he intends.

To take another, far more conventional, example, “social networks” is a cold concept - I have begun to doubt we can activate it in the service of any goal that has human agency at its core. Instead, I suggest we start talking about the ways in which human relationships and representations of self connect to and dynamically relate to each other as something warm: something like very much like seething, humid, leaky interbreeding human viruses.

…the Porn issue of M/C: Journal of Media and Culture is now available online. It was co-edited by Andrew King and me.

EditorialThe history of public discourse (and in many cases, academic publishing) on pornography is, notoriously, largely polemical and polarised. There is perhaps no other media form that has been so relentlessly the centre of what boils down to little more than arguments ?for? or ?against?; most famously, on the basis of the oppression, dominance or liberation of sexual subjectivities. These polarised debates leave much conceptual space for researchers to explore: discussions of pornography often lack specificity (when speaking of porn, what exactly do we mean? Which genre? Which markets?); assumptions (eg. about exactly how the sexualised ?white male body? functions culturally, or what the ?uses? of porn actually might be) can be buried; and empirical opportunities (how porn as media industry connects to innovation and the rest of the mediasphere) are missed. In this issue, we have tried to create and populate such a space, not only for the rethinking of some of our core assumptions about pornography, but also for the treatment of pornography as a bona fide, even while contested and problematic, segment of the media and cultural industries, linked economically and symbolically to other media forms. [continued]

I’m shocked - if there was a Most Mundane Local Current Affairs award for Australian television, Brisbane Extra would have to win it. Normally they run shows about when to prune your garden, how to wash your car, and where to buy the cheapest petrol.

And yet, tonight they ran an upbeat story on Bookcrossing, exhorting people to jump in on the craze and set their books free…not only that, but the previous story was about a local amateur ukelele craze that is apparently sweeping the suburbs.

So creatively communing with strangers and amateur creativity are now the stuff of really, really mainstream television. Is this good? Is my PhD wired or expired? Or, as I suspect, is there a disconnect between mainstream reality/TV and the super-cool of the really big creative industries?

I like Receiver magazine. Although the Vodafone reps at the AMTA congress seemed to “get” the complexity and creativity of their users more than the others, I’m still pleasantly surprised to see something like this being actively used by a mobile telecom as part of their brand-building strategy.

Although there are problems with referring to technologies as “tools” (which implies that they are relatively neutral conduits for solely human-derived action), I love this Ivan Illich quote that Digital Storytelling maestro Daniel Meadows brought to my attention:

“Tools are intrinsic to social relationships. An individual relates himself in action to his society through the use of tools that he actively masters, or by which he is passively acted upon. To the degree that he masters his tools he can invest the world with his meaning; to the degree that he is mastered by his tools, the shape of the tool determines his own self-image. Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision.”

So, which tools for creative content production and distribution are most “convivial”? Those that are relatively open and complex and invite social connection (e.g. open source software with its collaborative configurability and non-didactic, but often difficult GUIs?); or sole-user black boxes (closed but designed to “guide” the inexperienced user along familiar pathways to enable easier content production - like iMovie)?

Jacques Derrida has died of pancreatic cancer:

… from the invisible inside , where I could neither see nor want the very thing that I have always been scared to have revealed on the scanner, by analysis - radiology, echography, endocrinology, hematology - a crural vein expelled my blood outside that I thought beautiful once stored in that bottle under a label that I doubted couldavoid confusion or misappropriation of the vintage, leaving me nothing more to do, the inside of my life exhibiting itself outside , expressing itself before my eyes, absolved without a gesture, dare I say of writing if I compare the pen to a syringe, and I always dream of a pen that wouldbe a syringe, a suction point rather than that very hard weapon with which one must inscribe, incise, choose, calculate, take ink before filtering the inscribable, playing the keyboard on the screen, whereas here, once the vein has been found, no more toil, no responsibility, no risk of bad taste or violence, the blood delivers itself all alone, the inside gives itself up and you can do as you like with it, it’s me but I’m no longer there, for nothing, for nobody , diagnose the worst… )

Now that disbelieving horror has given way to grief, shame, but not quite yet anger…

I had a nice day out on the water, far away from my fellow Australians, over half of whom voted, not only to keep the current government, but also to strengthen their hold over the Senate into a vice-like grip. Never in my own lifetime have I felt such fear that democracy might really, truly be endangered. And despite people telling me to cheer up, telling me that it’s cyclical and to remember the long Menzies years, I just don’t feel well.

I can’t look at my neighbours or my fellow commuters, because I can only talk about The Election in the company of people whose politics I know and trust.

And I have been wandering around today with the unfamiliar feeling that there is a blurred, blank space where the meaning of the phrase “I am an Australian” used to be. Not because I am full of bitter rebellion and refusal about Howard winning the election, but because the election was won on the basis of (lies about) interest rates, and especially because for most of the decade Howard has been precisely like a cultural Dementor, droning on in his grey voice, sucking the life and passion out of us all and replacing the vigour of the dissent that is essential to democracy with nothing but the emptiness of the aspiration to be “relaxed and comfortable”.

And as for the Family First party…

There are more articulate responses at mc gregg, Junk for Code and Barista.