Abstract
Thinking through digital media highlights collaborative and participatory aspects of media practice to convene critical micropublics, yet it also highlights the potential for control and surveillance. One of the primary objectives of the hacker ethos of “taking things apart” is to understand the invisible and inaudible aspects of digital media as well as the larger networks that shape social interactions and productions of knowledge along with state and corporate structures that seek to contain them. Hacking and pirating draw upon Marxist theories about the materiality of media as well as the political economies of its production, circulation, and meaning. Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, for example, theorized photographic and cinematographic possibilities like the close-up and slow motion that could reveal what the human eye, trained by conventions of everyday life, overlooks. Benjamin hoped that “the work of art” would counter the rise of fascism; Kracauer believed film could bring about the “redemption of physical reality.”1 Hacking and prirating offer comparable strategies to make visible—in this case, propiatary locks on creativy and innovation. Transnational corporations, such as Apple, market and promote a discourse of do-it-yourself (DIY) that suggests that anyone and everyone can control the means of both production and distribution.
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Notes
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 217–251;
Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960; rpt. Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 1997).
Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984), 25th anniversary ed. (Sebastopol: O Reilly, 2010): 27–38.
For the larger context of interventionist art, see Nato Thompson and Gregory Sholette, with Josepth Thompson, Nicholas Mirzoeff, and Ondine C. Chavoya, The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life (North Adams: MASS MoCA, 2004).
We thank Michael Chanan for his insightful queries about political economy and political exigencies in relations to our theorizations of locative media, especially his cautionary arguments about overinvesting in the utopianism of digitality in the context of how digital networks inscribe power differently and more insidiously. For a clear exposition of how digital networks organize themselves around code, which facilitates control and power, see Alexander Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2004).
Bill Nichols has advanced the important idea that documentaries engage what he terms discourse of sobriety that is located within epistetophilia, in his Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). For an exposition of postcolonial historiography that is less interested in what constitutes the past than in how the past can be rethreaded through different imagined registers and vectors, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincilaizing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2000).
For a discussion of locative media, see Jason Nolan, Steve Mann, and Barry Wellman, “Sousveillance: Wearable and Digital Tools in Surveilled Environments,” Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools, ed. Byron Hawk, David M. Rieder, and Ollie Oviedo (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008): 179–196.
See Thomas Kellein, Fluxus (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995) for examples of the Fluxus movement, linking the everyday, the performative, and the audience.
For examples of how audience participation and relational aesthetics evolved in subsequent decades internationally, see Claire Bishop, ed., Participation (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2006). 9. A variety of digital theorists have questioned how to consider the issues of digital networks and political actions.
For example, see Geert Lovink, Zero Comments: Plugging and Critical Internet Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2008);
Mark Poster, Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006);
Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (New York: Penguin, 2006).
Many writers and organizations have observed what has been dubbed the “newly emerging transnational media ecology” as a shift away from conceptions of mainstream and alternative media, and profit/nonprofit. See Richard Kahn and Douglas Kellner, “Technopolitics, Blogs, and Emergent Media Ecologies: A Critical/Reconstructive Approach,” in Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools, ed. Byron Hawk, David M. Rieder, and Ollie Oviedo (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 22–37;
Michel Feher, ed., with Gaelle Krikorian and Yates McKee Nongovernmental Politics (New York: Zone, 2007);
National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture, Deep Focus: A Report on the Future of Independent Media (San Francisco: NAMAC, 2004).
For a cogent discussion of collaborative media practices, see Helen De Michiel, “A Mosaic of Practices: Public Media and participatory Culture,” Afterimage 35.6 (May–June 2008): 7–14.
The developing literature on critical cartography has explored the relationship between navigation, networks, digitality, rendering invisible patterns visible through visualizations and graphics, and alternative design. For an excellent overview of this field, see Janet Abrams and Peter Hall, eds., Else/Where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
Wendy Hui Kyong Chong, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2008).
Lev Manovich, “Cinema and Digital Media,” in Technology and Culture: The Film Reader, ed. Andrew Utterson (London and New York: Routledge, 2005): 27.
See Ayhan Aytes, “Return of the Crowds: Mechanical Turk and Neoliberal States of Exception,” in Digital Labor: The Internet, the Playground, and Factory, ed. Trebor Scholtz (New York and London: Routledge, 2013): 79–97. MTurk is available at https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome.
Christiane Paul, “Contextual Networks: Data, Identity, and Collective Production,” in Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts, ed. Margot Lovejoy, Christiane Paul, and Victoria Vesna (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2011): 116–117.
Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009): xiv.
Ravi Sundaram, Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbanism (London and New York: Routledge, 2010): 4.
Sundaram, Pirate Modernity, 123; Brian Larkin, “Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy,” Public Culture 16.2 (spring 2004): 290.
Monica Narula, “Sarai: One Year in the Public Domain,” Television New Media 3 (November 2002): 338.
Mark Andrejevic, iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 2007): 23–24.
See Rachel Greene, Internet Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004): 64–65.
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© 2015 Dale Hudson and Patricia R. Zimmermann
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Hudson, D., Zimmermann, P.R. (2015). Taking Things Apart to Convene Micropublics. In: Thinking Through Digital Media. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137433633_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137433633_2
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