Intersections 2010: Encounters

Opening Keynote
Friday, March 12, 2010 at 7 pm
Student Campus Centre, Room SCC 115
Ryerson University
55 Gould Street

Google You, Google Me: Encountering the Culture of Search
Ken Hillis
Professor of Media and Technology Studies
Department of Communication Studies
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

Google's metaphysical vision is to archive the universe, from Google Earth to Google Mars and beyond. Google Book aims to build "a comprehensive index of all the books in the world." Such ambition recalls Jorge Luis Borges' The Library of Babel (1941), in which the universe is conceived as a library holding all knowledge. Without effective search mechanisms, however, the library's contents remain useless. Despair propels librarians to imagine two "magical" technologiesÑthe Crimson Hexagon and the Man of the Book. These technologies are indices of all the other books. The librarian who finds them will be "analogous to a god." Google has taken on the role of that god. In adopting "Don't Be Evil" as its mantra, Google implicitly acknowledges that building the ultimate index usurps not only powers once accorded the divine, but also state powers and those of civil society institutions.

Google's project to build a universal index is crucial to the ways the firm accrues power. Within an emerging culture of search, individuals self-fashion as searchers. In trusting Google, searchers allow themselves to be seduced into accepting that they should allow themselves to be searched. Google's project, I argue, reveals how metaphysics and political economy conjoin.

Ken Hillis is Professor of Media and Technology Studies in the Department of Communication Studies at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received his Masters in Environmental Studies (Planning) from York University in 1991 and his Ph.D. in Human Geography from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1996. His overall research agenda probes what is given up in exchange for what is gained via the rapid social and spatial diffusion of information machines. He has published widely, including three books: Digital Sensations: Space, Identity and Embodiment (Minnesota 1999); the anthology Everyday eBay: Culture, Collecting and Desire (Routledge 2006, with Michael Petit); and Online a Lot of the Time: Ritual, Fetish, Sign (Duke 2009). Currently he is working on a fourth book, Google and the Culture of Search, to be published by Routledge in 2011.

http://www.unc.edu/~khillis/

Peer Address
Saturday, March 13, 2010 at 1:15 pm
George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre, Room ENG-LG11
Ryerson University
245 Church Street

Unstable Radio, Respirations, and Reverie
Anna Friz
PhD Candidate
York and Ryerson Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture

Radio art practitioners have long sought to transform radio from an apparatus of information diffusion to an apparatus of communication. My research additionally proposes radio as an apparatus for sonification of the electromagnetic spectrum, for experiencing radio as instrument, as landscape, and as space of social self-consciousness and reverie. Radio becomes a frame for a series of relationships, near and far; of visible gestures meeting invisible electro-magnetic interactions; of a circuit built, played with, and played within.

Over the past 12 years, I have worked with radiophony in order to investigate persistent questions of human communication, phenomenologies of wirelessness (particularly the mediated experience of distance and time), and relationships of sociality and technology. In this presentation, I will discuss the central concerns in my Ph.D. research, where I employ a process of 'creation as research' together with textually-based methods such as literary criticism and philosophies of technology. Specifically, I engage in transmission art experiments with micro-watt multi-channel radio transmission, live radio theatre, and 'performed installations' to develop and extend ideas about transception, embodiment, empathy, and resonance.

Anna Friz is a sound and radio artist, a doctoral candidate and SSHRC Doctoral Fellow in the Joint Program in Communication and Culture at York University. She is a recipient of the President Susan Mann Dissertation Scholarship in 2009-2010. Since 1998 she has predominantly created self-reflexive sonic art/works for broadcast, installation or performance-- from a childhood fiction of "the little people in the radio" to multi-channel radiophonic installations. She also creates sound works for theatre, dance, and solo performance. Friz has widely performed and exhibited installation works at festivals and venues across North America, Europe, and in Mexico. Her multi-channel radio/sound installation "Respire" was commissioned for Nuit Blanche Zone B in Toronto in 2009. Her research has been published in anthologies such as Islands of Resistance: Pirate Radio in Canada (New Star, 2010), Re-inventing Radio: Aspects of Radio as Art (Verin werks, 2008), In the Place of Sound: Architecture|Music|Acoustics (Cambridge Scholars, 2007), and in journals like Acoustic Space, The Cinema Journal, Musicworks, PAJ: Journal of Performance Art, Public, and Wi: Journal of Mobile Media. Her radio art/works have been heard on the airwaves of more than 15 countries. She is a founding member of the L.O.T. Collective, and a free103point9.org transmission artist.

http://nicelittlestatic.com

Creative Keynote
Saturday, March 13, 2010 at 7 pm
Student Campus Centre, Room SCC 115
Ryerson University
55 Gould Street

Visceral encounters
Tagny Duff
Assistant Professor in Communication Studies
Concordia University, Montreal

Cellular tissue, genetically modified organisms and biotechnological practices such as tissue engineering and genetic engineering practices are emerging materials and techniques in "new" media art practices, or biological art. Artists are now working in science laboratories, and creating art objects with biological techniques and materials.

While the wet, fleshy, visceral quality of such work generates copious material for theoretical writing on the changing status of bodies, art, technology and science, the artworks proper (and organisms featured within them) are rarely encountered in physical form. Rather, the encounter is mediated through documentation circulated via various distribution networks in the form of epi-texts, websites, PowerPoint presentations, photographs and video documents. These documents are often read as indexical references to the biological art work and/or the process of its making, when in fact, such representations are heavily mediated and can be read as generating legitimacy and authority to the scientific, biomedical image. These documents accrue symbolic value for works that most viewers will never experience in meatspace. Why and how are biological works rarely accessible in public presentation yet simultaneously generating and regenerating plentiful substitutes and documents?

This presentation will explore some of the aforementioned concerns in relation to the projects Living Viral Tattoos and Cryobook Archives created in collaboration with scientists, a plastic surgeon and artists between 2007-2009. These biological art projects featured the use of biological virus (lentivirus cloned HIV1) and donated human ex-plant tissue. Corporeal materiality is foregrounded in these works at a time when digital media technologies, such as anatomical/surgery dissection procedures using computer simulation software, full-body x-ray scans at border crossings, digital finger and retinal scans, and thermal imaging software are changing conventional forms of visceral encounters with wet bodies.

Tagny Duff is an artist, researcher and educator based in Montreal. Her biological art works, performances, videos, and net art works have been exhibited nationally and internationally for over a decade. Recently, Living Viral Tattoos (2008), the installation, was officially selected for the ISEA 2009 Exhibition (Belfast, Ireland). The video component was featured at the Moscow Biennial (2009), National Centre for Contemporary Art 2008 (Keliningrad, Russia) and IX MediaForum and Moscow International Film Festival 2008 as part of Evolution Haute Couture, curated by Dmitry Bulatov. Other recent exhibitions include Performing Diagnostics (2009) Articule (Montreal, Canada), Moist Media Archives Prototypes (2008) Perth Institute of Contemporary Art 2008 (Perth, Australia) and Recursive Symmetry (2008) Gallery Aferro (New Jersey, USA). Living Viral Tattoos (2008) and Cryobook Archives (2009) were created during two separate residencies at SymbioticA, The Centre for Excellence in Biological Arts in Perth, Australia between 2007-2009. The works will be featured in a solo exhibition Viral Memorabilia at the FoFa Gallery (Concordia University, Montreal) in 2011. Duff is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University and is the founder of Fluxmedia, a research/creation network for artists and researchers interested in the convergence of art, science and technology.

http://coms.concordia.ca/faculty/duff.html

Communication and Culture Roundtable
Sunday, March 13, 2010 at 3:30 pm
George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre, Room ENG-LG11
Ryerson University
245 Church Street

Prospects for Communication and Culture in Canada
A special roundtable discussion in recognition of the 10th anniversary of the creation of the Joint Program in Communication and Culture of York and Ryerson Universities
Chair: Matthew Flisfeder
Featuring: Roberta Buiani, Lewis Kaye, Ganaele Langlois, Tanner Mirrlees and Wade Rowland

This roundtable seeks to address and motivate discussion on the current state of communications and cultural studies in Canada. What are the most pressing concerns facing new researchers in the fields of communication and cultural studies? Which debates are central to these fields? Who are the figures that we need to follow in the contemporary context of communication and cultural research? Which directions need to be pursued? Five alumni from the Joint Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture – Roberta Buiani, Lewis Kaye, Ganaele Langlois, Tanner Mirrlees, and Wade Rowland – return to take up these significant questions, concerns and debates.

Roberta Buiani writes, "I am a theorist in progress, a media-activist and a cultural agitator. I work at the crossroad between science, technology and the arts, challenging their traditional functions and looking for threads that facilitate their cross-communication. When I am not trying to turn my dissertation on 'viral cultures' into a book, applying for jobs and grants that 'never quite fit' my 'academic' profile, or teaching courses that I haven't designed, I reward myself by curating and coordinating a monthly arts & science gathering in Toronto called artscisalon. I have published in Parachute, Fibreculture, Public, The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn and Other Anomalies From the Dark Side of Digital Culture and other quite diverse journals, magazines and books. My 'viral' interventions ('The Viral-Knitting Project,' 'Megaphone Choir,' 'YorkisUs,' 'Precarity Canada') are the result of collective inspirations and collaborations and always contain a satirical component. I believe that the 'organic intellectual,' a figure almost extinct in today's individualistic and de-humanized university-factory, can save the university from its otherwise inevitable implosion. I am not sure if I want to spend the rest of my life working for some well-defined department or I’d rather choose intellectual and/or academic nomadism. Taking my chances....

Lewis Kaye has a Ph.D. from the Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture at York and Ryerson Universities in Toronto, where his dissertation explored the relationship between technology, space and the social organization of aural experience. He maintains a wide range of research interests, examining questions of intellectual property and digital culture, the social practice of telecommunications, interactivity and media art, the political economy of communication, and the history and development of cultural policy in Canada. Lewis is also a practicing sound artist whose work explores the aesthetics of space and multimedia performance. His mobile sound project, You Are Here, was commissioned as the official MP3 audio guide for Toronto's first Nuit Blanche in 2006. Formerly the Access Coordinator at the InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre in Toronto, he also works as a freelance media art consultant and technician.

Ganaele Langlois is Assistant Professor of Communication in the Faculty of Criminology, Justice and Policy Studies at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology and Associate Director at the Infoscape Research Lab, Ryerson University. She was a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the Infoscape Research Lab at Ryerson University in 2008-2009. She completed her Ph.D. in May 2008 in the Joint Programme in Communication and Culture at York/Ryerson Universities. Her research focuses on the technocultural aspects of language, discourse and signification online, on developing critical approaches to the politics of online participatory communication, and on defining new methodologies for analyzing online communication. Her work is influenced by Maurizio Lazzarato, Deleuze and Guattari, software studies, and Actor-network theory. Her publications have appeared in the Canadian Journal of Communication, Fibreculture, and New Media & Society.

Tanner Mirrlees holds a BA and MA in English and Theatre Studies from the University of Guelph. He earned his PhD from the joint York University and Ryerson University Communication and Culture program in 2008, where he was also awarded the Governor General's Gold Medal. Tanner teaches courses at the University of Guelph-Humber and Ryerson University on media and globalization, technology and power, and new media cultures. He is completing a manuscript entitled The New Imperial Culture Industry, which will be published by the University of British Columbia Press. Tanner's most recent scholarly article "Digital Militainment by Design: Producing and Playing SOCOM: Navy Seals" was published in the Fall 2009 issue of International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics.

Wade Rowland was the first PhD graduate in the York-Ryerson Communication and Culture program in 2005 – the beta version. He was hired the following year by the Atkinson Faculty of Arts and Letters and currently teaches in York's Department of Communication Studies, and in Comcult. His research interests are broad, and include the history and philosophy of science and technology, particularly as it relates to communication; communication ethics; critical realism and the Frankfurt School of social theory; political economy of public broadcasting; the modern business corporation and its moral identity. Recent books include: Greed, Inc.: Why Corporations Rule Our World; Galileo’s Mistake: the Archaeology of a Myth; Spirit of the Web: the Age of Information from Telegraph to Internet; Ockham’s Razor: a Search for Values. His work is also published in the Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Corporate Citizenship, Social Epistemology and International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics. He has had a long professional career in print journalism and as producer and senior manager in network television news.