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Vladan Joler, Explorer of Contemporary Phenomena. Image by ELISAVA, 2020.
Signal Space
Signal Space
Vladan Joler
15 September, 19 EET
At this moment in the 21st century, we see a new form of extractivism that is well underway: one that reaches into the furthest corners of the biosphere and the deepest layers of human cognitive and affective being. The stack behind contemporary technological systems goes well beyond the multi-layered ‘technical stack’ of data modeling, hardware, servers and networks. The full stack reaches much further into capital, labor and nature, and demands an enormous amount of each. The true costs of these systems – social, environmental, economic, and political – remain hidden and may stay that way for some time.
Maintenance of the media technology
Maintenance of the media technology
Miglé Bareikytė
22 September, 19 EET
Situating the Internet through the three angles of labor, geopolitics and critique Miglé Bareikytė's talk 'Materiality and maintenance of the media' will present her fieldwork research in Lithuania's telecom industry. In her fieldwork, Bareikytė carried out interviews, observed telecom workers in the company Telia Lietuva as well as carried out archival research within Lithuania's telecom industry. This research aimed to situate and ground what is often perceived as an abstract, immaterial digital media technology - the Internet - in a place that is often neglected in Western-oriented discourses of digitalisation not for the sake of nationalist celebration, but to explicate and complicate narratives around labor, geopolitical imaginaries and critique in a post-socialist realm by taking fieldwork participants utterances and practices seriously. The fieldwork developed between 2017-2018 resulted in her PhD thesis and the upcoming book ‘The Post-Socialist Internet: How Labor, Geopolitics and Critique Produce the Internet in Lithuania’ with transcript Verlag.
Image by Miglé Bareikytė.
Cell antennas atop Hotel Supreme. Image by Rahul Mukherjee.
Radiant infrastructures
Radiant infrastructures
Rahul Mukherjee
29 September, 19 EET
Cell towers and nuclear reactors, like railways and hydroelectric dams, have often been credited as bringing development and progress. But unlike dams and railways, infrastructures like cell antennas and atomic power plants emit radiant energies in the form of electromagnetic signals and radioactive rays. For outward demonstrations of radiance (electrical illumination and information communication), internal operations in nuclear reactors and cell antennas involve invisible processes that scatter radioactive particles and spread electromagnetic rays. Radiant infrastructures as a conceptual heuristic, folds in both these glittering and impalpable aspects of radiance. It is important to go beyond theorizing radiant infrastructures as specific objects, and consider their uncertain environmental (and health) effects along with the wider environments (including air) that the radiation emissions permeate through. Studying radiant infrastructures involves transcending visible light to account for other waves in the electromagnetic spectrum. The uncertain effects of spectral exchanges between infrastructural emissions and human bodies (that mediate radiation) is crucial to theorizing radiant infrastructures. In particular, the talk navigates across phenomenologies of exposure, autonomy, sensitivity, sensing and (wireless) saturation through analysis of case-studies from several regions (India, United States) dealing with biopolitical and infrastructural thresholds.
NOISE
NOISE
Adriana Knouf
6 October, 19 EET
Noise is both sonic and informatic. From information theoretic definitions that define noise as either the unwanted signal or the source of originality, to sonic definitions that foreground the destructive or constructive possibilities of noise music, noise evades easy categorization. Through an exploration of some of my own artistic practices, especially recent radio art work, as well as those of other allied artists, we will encounter the potentials of noise to disrupt the seemingly stable signal. This disruption cannot be easily valorized as something positive or negative, and instead needs to be understood in its full complexity.
Color bands switching. Image by Adriana Knouf.
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