Past-President of the American Society for the Study of Social Problems and an acclaimed social theorist, Professor Pfohl explores the fallout from the imploding American dream in a time of economic insecurity, political insurgency, and campaign politics.

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Professor Tim Murray, Director of the Society of the Humanities and curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media discusses “The Aesthetics of Digital Longing” by way of an evocative discussion of Rancière and Deleuze in the content of interactive installations. He illustrates his talk with a number of installations and sound pieces from Asia that are rarely discussed, in the interests of broadening the global perspective of what we think of as politics and art.

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Dr. Murray’s research and teaching crosses the boundaries of new media, film and video, visual studies, twentieth-century Continental philosophy and English and French early modern studies. His books include among others, Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds and the forthcoming title, Immaterial Archives: Curatorial Instabilities @ New Media Art.

This research project maps emotions and visualises the virtual emergence of emotions. Rauch uses 3D-surface capturing devices to scan facial expressions in animals (taxidermy) and humans to then sculpt with the Phantom Arm/ SensAble FreeForm device in 3D virtual space. When working with the haptic sculpting tool one receives a physical feedback on the hand and arm; the experience of touching and sculpting digital data in cyberspace is still awkward, as if the virtual data was not quite real data.

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Rauch has recently morphed 3D laser scans of taxidermy with a large database of the human face. She aims to show an evolution of facial expressions of emotions. The application developed to further access faces and expressions that the human face was never able to express and rapid form printed objects allowed us to bring these composites of synthetic and real data back into the material reality.

The talk is a case study about synthetic emotions. It is a reflection on some practical work that was conducted at UCL in London, UK. The work has then progressed into a discussion about artificial expression and artificial emotion and affect. To present this material of an artificial evolution of emotions, the audience is asked to go back and forth from digital data to physical/ actual output.

Dr. Barbara Rauch is an artist practitioner and research academic. She is currently in a tenure-track teaching/ research position at OCAD University, Toronto in the Faculty of Art and Digital Futures Initiative. Rauch is the Director of the e_Motion Laboratory, researching the development of emotion with the facilitation of data analysis, using advanced technology in 3D printing and visual analysis.

Rauch is collaborating researcher on three major research projects, Neutral Carbon, a Federal Development initiative, medical data visualization through Ontario Research Funds – Research Excellence Round 4 competition: Project Title: Centre of Innovation in Information Visualization and Data Driven Design (CIV/DDD) and GRAND, a SSHRC supported project, where she works in the field of autism and haptic emotion studies with researchers across Canada.

Ted Hiebert’s talk is an exploration of the technological imaginary, with a particular focus on the area of overlap between digital culture and artistic practice. Bringing together Roland Barthes’ theory of technology as an extension of theatre and Nicolas Bourriaud’s formulation of relational art, the talk examines spaces where technology might be understood as relational, deeply embedded in discourses of aesthetics and performance, but equally invested in maintaining the creative possibilities of social living. Situated amidst questions of theatre, technology and art, this talk is also as a series of reflections on the possibilities of posthuman living. Using three art projects as catalysts for the discussion, a theory born of photographic practice will be expanded, as a visualization of technology and of the aesthetics of posthuman possibility.

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This is the imagination seen technologically; technology seen photographically; and, photography understood for its deep relationship to the paradoxes of representation and performance. These are the stories of werewolves, magnetic fields and fingerprints of a technological imaginary — a story of delirious subjectivity, a story of imagination fields and a story of the encounter with darkness.

Ted Hiebert is a Canadian visual artist, curator and theorist, and an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts at the University of Washington Bothell. His artworks have been shown in Canada and abroad, most recently at Shift Collaborative Studio (Seattle, WA), the Xi’an Academy of Fine Art (Xi’an, China) and Truck Contemporary Art (Calgary, AB). Recent curatorial projects have included “More Often Than Always, Less Often Than Never,” (Richmond Art Gallery, Richmond BC) and the 2010 World Telekinesis Competition (Center for Serious Play, University of Washington Bothell, WA).

He is the author of several articles and chapters on the imagination and digital culture, published in such journals as CTheory, The Psychoanalytic Review, Technoetic Arts and others. Hiebert is a member of the Editorial Board of CTheory. http://www.tedhiebert.net

Faced with growing unrest that is (at least in part) facilitated by digital communications, repressive nation-states have integrated powerful new surveillance systems into the depths of their nations’ communications infrastructures. In this presentation, Christopher Parsons first discusses the capabilities of a technology, deep packet inspection, which is used to survey, analyze, and modify communications in real-time. He then discusses the composition of the Iranian and Tunisian telecommunications infrastructure, outlining how deep packet inspection is used to monitor, block, and subvert encrypted and private communications. The presentation concludes with a brief reflection on how this same technology is deployed in the West, with a focus on how we might identify key actors, motivations, and drivers of the technology in our own network ecologies.

Note: For more information on the Iranian use of deep packet inspection, see ‘Is Iran Now Actually Using Deep Packet Inspection?‘

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Christopher Parsons is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria. His research focuses on how privacy is affected by digitally mediated surveillance, and the normative implications that such surveillance has in (and on) contemporary Western political systems. His dissertation, titled “What’s Driving Deep Packet Inspection? Motivations, Regulations, and Public Involvement in Telecommunications Regulatory Processes,” draws together Internet governance, traditional social sciences, and critical digital studies literatures to provide a holistic accounting of deep packet inspection’s powerful and plastic control-based processes. Christopher has published in CTheory, has a forthcoming publication in M. Moll’s and L. R. Shade’s (eds.) Establishing an Election Connection: Telecom Policy, and a forthcoming co-authored publication in W. Dutton’s (ed.) Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies. He regularly writes about surveillance, security, technology, and their implications at his website.

In this talk, Meagan Timney draws on McLuhan’s notions of the medium and the message to question how our interaction with the world around us changes through the use of the technologies that facilitate information transfer. Using examples from both past and present, she discusses how these technologies extend the human self through the creation of a virtual avatar.

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Meagan Timney is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory at the University of Victoria. Her research interests include information architecture, human-computer-interaction, technology and society, and the future of the book.

This talk walks through a brief history of androids in the past and present. Citing Japan as a special case, Aya Walraven explores how androids, cyborgs, and humans alike fit into society with a growing need for robotic assistance and enhancement, and touches upon the cultural roots and psychology that affects how we receive our mechanical partners.

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Aya Walraven is a digital media and internet enthusiast who primarily works in video and web. She is the editorial assistant and media designer at CTheory and head of PACTAC’s Software Analysis Lab. Aya is also responsible for the technical inner-workings of the PACTAC facility. A self-appointed internet-culture historian and archivist she observes and documents online behaviour, particularly in Japanese youth and anonymous communities.

Borrowing the title from an essay by Michael Callon and his colleagues working at the intersection of science and technology studies and politics, this presentation, “Acting in an Uncertain World”, attempts to think through questions of environment and technology in a time of proliferating ecological crises. These crises, no longer conceived of as ‘natural’ disasters, or ‘human’ problems but deep entanglements, suggest new forms of technologically enabled democracy, where both slowness (slowing down to institutionalize deliberative processes) and speed (especially in communicating to inform an engaged citizenry) may interact in novel ways.

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Anita Girvan is a research associate at PACTAC. Her PhD project focuses on the mediating role ‘carbon footprint’ metaphors in responses to climate change, and her broader interests are in the cultural and geo-political loops of language, narrative and ecology. She is also a Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS) Fellow at the University of Victoria and recipient of a Joseph Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship.

Anita Girvan is an interdisciplinary PhD student with a concentration in Cultural, Social, and Political Thought. Her PhD project focuses on the mediating role of the metaphor of the ‘carbon footprint’ in responses to climate change, and her broader interests are in the cultural and geo-material loops of language, narrative and ecology. She is also a Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS) Fellow at the University of Victoria.

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Aya Walraven is a digital media and internet enthusiast who primarily works in video and web. She is an editorial assistant at CTheory and head of PACTAC’s Software Analysis Lab. A self-appointed internet-culture historian and archivist she observes and documents online behavior, particularly in Japanese youth and anonymous communities.

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