[csaa-forum] ::fibreculture:: Full program of Platform Blues, November 21, 2024

[Ned Rossiter]

Hello CSAA list - in case you are around Canberra in November. This may 
interest you.

Ned


-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: 	full program of Platform Blues, November 21, 2024
Date: 	Thu, 10 Oct 2024 08:08:01 +0200
From: 	Geert Lovink <geert at xs4all.nl>
To: 	Ned Rossiter <ned at nedrossiter.org>



Platform Blues - November 21, 2024


One day conference at University of Canberra

Building 1, Level A, Room 21 (Theatre), Bruce (ACT), Australia


More information: 
https://networkcultures.org/events/platform-blues-one-day-conference-at-university-of-canberra/


Free entrance but please register here: 
https://events.humanitix.com/platform-blues


Opening: 10:00 – 10:15am
Welcome – Geert Lovink and Denise Thwaites


Session 1: 10: 15 – 11:15am
*Hiding in and from the internet: Avoidance and Dissociation*
Moderator: Nicole Curato


Ella Barclay – ‘Unkempt Cognition’, re: Doomscrolling, Dissociating from 
World


This talk provides an overview of her current research, including her 
recent institutional solo exhibition /Unkempt Cognition/ at Canberra 
Contemporary Art Space and her research as a 2024 fellow at ZK/U: The 
Centre of Art and Urbanistics, Berlin. Ella’s work engages with 
thematics of agency and fatigue in a 21^st Century connected landscape.

Caroline Fisher – Young People, Internet and News Avoidance


More than two-thirds of Australians actively avoid the mainstream news, 
higher than in many other countries. News avoidance is particularly high 
among Gen Z and Y, who have the lowest interest in mainstream news and 
feel the most ‘worn out’ by it. This sense of fatigue is strongly linked 
to the use of social media and feeling unable to avoid unwanted news in 
their feeds. Drawing on ten years of news consumption data and 
qualitative research, this presentation examines these news avoidance 
trends among young Australians in the context of an everchanging hybrid 
media landscape.

Morning break (15mins)


Session 2: 11:30 – 1:30pm
*Volatile Spaces: Toxicity and Transformation*
Moderator: Ashley van den Heuvel


Erin K. Stapleton – Catastrophic Loss in Computational Systems: Mass 
Accumulation


/My personal archive is on Instagram.
I rely on cloud computing for my externalised visual memory.
And at any moment, it could all be lost.
And that is completely beyond my control. /


The term ‘catastrophic loss’ describes total, /irretrievable/ 
destruction. While it is a term generally used to describe environmental 
disasters, the mechanics of digital storage beckons for archival loss on 
a parallel scale. Here, I explore catastrophic loss as the tension 
between permanence and instability in digital systems and the constant 
threat of accumulative overwhelm, irretrievable glitches, absolute 
obsolesce they offer, while operating in response to the processes of 
material destructions that loom across our material and social worlds. 
Computational systems are designed for automation, smoothing difference 
and complexity into binary, hierarchical and comparative data 
categories. The storage of digital data operates through reduction of 
complexity and automated efficiencies, risking the complexities of the 
information it stores. Simultaneously, digital storage efficiencies 
encourage the mass production, dissemination and accumulation of data 
across social media platforms. An abundance of images, videos, sound, 
artefacts, the possibilities of access to these overwhelm, mirroring and 
distracting from the material destructions that produced them.


David Nolan – A Fast-Moving Slow-Motion Car Crash: The 2023 Voice 
Referendum in Today’s Media Ecology


14 October 2023 was one of the bluest days in recent memory, taking its 
place among  a roll call of dates of extreme settler-colonial violence 
in Australian history.  This paper reflects on the dynamics of a media 
ecology that constituted both a structure and vehicle of that violence, 
positioning it as a moment of realism and disillusionment. We have lived 
through two decades in which resistant practices deploying the 
affordances of social media have offered crumbs of hope that platforms 
might offer an ‘innovative’ alternative space to contest and disrupt 
oppressive mediated politics.  This paper reflects on findings relating 
to the communicative dynamics at play during  the 2023 Referendum on an 
Indigenous Voice to Parliament to argue that this position is 
fundamentally flawed. Despite, and in some respects because of, the 
desire, celebration and performance of fresh online voices and 
interventions, the contemporary media ecology contributes to and 
constitutes a politics that remains and is increasingly - perhaps 
overwhelmingly -  dank in nature.


Temple Uwalaka – Social Media Activism in Nigeria


Socio-political activism and its relationship with digital media 
diffusion are an ongoing subject of considerable debate among observers 
and scholars of social movement. This work discusses the research 
trajectory on the impact of networked activism. Using the Nigerian 
economic and socio-political arena as a case study, the paper 
investigates the contributions of social media in the implementation of 
contentious politics in Nigeria. It argues that social media platforms 
play significant roles in the success of socio-political protest 
movements in the country. The paper discusses how social media platforms 
give voice and visibility to Nigerians and how this prominence is 
eroding the power of the political class, as well as creating 
alternative deliberative arenas. The paper demonstrates how this 
innovative use of technology has shaken the political nerve centre of 
Nigeria. Finally, reactions from the political elites about these 
changes are outline.


Phoebe Quinn – Live Polis Experience: Tackling Academic Flying and 
Climate Change


This interactive session invites participants to experience Polis, a 
digital democracy platform that has been touted as a 'pro-social' 
alternative to conventional social media. Drawing from recent research, 
we’ll have a mini-conversation on a hot topic within universities: what 
to do about staff air travel emissions. Through this hands-on demo, 
we'll experience the platform’s design features and critically examine 
Polis' capacity to foster productive democratic discussions.


Lunch (1hr)


Session 3 : 2:30 – 4:30pm
*Bittersweet Stories: Making Sense of Uncertainty and Chaos*
Moderator: Geert Lovink


Sophie Dumaresqu – Inter-Species Connection to Find Joy and Love Among 
Platform Blues


What is in a postcard? Baby, I Just Want to Make You Smile is an ongoing 
series of recorded and live cinematic endurance performances. The 
performances consist of the artist (Sophie Dumaresq) attempting to share 
a sunset with her handmade 100 kilo, 5 metres long mechanical 
shark(Baby) by pulling the shark up a hill. Frankie, the artists' dog is 
equipped with their own camera recording and sharing in the performance 
with Dumaresq. In this talk, the artist will discuss their experience in 
collaborating with both humans and non-humans in creating the different 
iterations in which the work exists. The artist explores how the goofy 
and vulnerable nature of hybrid material and digital collaborative 
performance work can liberate the romantic from the Romantic with a 
capital R.


Catherine Page Jefferey – Collective Anxiety and Media Panics in an Age 
of Social and Digital Media

Collective concern about young people’s access to digital media 
technologies has increased significantly in recent years, culminating in 
widespread calls to ban social media completely for young people under a 
certain age both in Australia as well as overseas. These concerns are 
based on a range of purported harms including the impacts of social 
media on young people’s mental health, online bullying, exposure to 
pornography and violent content, algorithmic profiling, and online 
extremism. These calls have emerged against the backdrop of a long 
history of media panics about young people and digital media.


Tyne Sumner – TLDR: The Failure of the Internet Novel


What would happen if we read the internet like a novel? Or, what happens 
when novelists write about the internet? The rise of the so-called 
‘internet novel’ genre suggests that there is something worth pausing at 
in the relation between the novel and contemporary online culture—its 
immediacy, its banality, its humour, its loneliness, and its 
fragmentation. But why would someone want to read about the dystopian 
hellscape that many of us now actively try to get away from? Is it 
possible to find leisure in the very thing that produces so much 
anxiety? Perhaps the proliferation of the internet novel can be 
explained by the innately masochistic drive in human nature. As Sylvia 
Plath, for instance, wrote: ‘I desire the things which will destroy me 
in the end.’ This paper begins by asking why several recent internet 
novels are so terrible. It ends with an attempt to be reasonable, and 
possibly even optimistic.


Mathieu O’Neil – Countering Platform Blues: Strategies against 
Disinformation, Toxicity and Polarisation


When people can no longer tell truth from fiction, we are in an 
epistemic crisis. For Haidder and Sundin this primarily stems from 
algorithmic curation by online platforms: information is increasingly 
/volatile/ (the origins or status of fast-changing newsfeed content is 
uncertain), /fragmented/ (complex knowledge is re-arranged in 
continuously shifting shapes), and /personalised/ (access is 
individualised). Aggravating factors are hostile influence campaigns 
seeking to worsen social divisions. The crisis increases distrust 
towards the institutions of liberal democracy such as the news media, 
science, and representative politics. Alternative sources are on the 
rise. Health influencers have huge audiences; toxic masculinists are 
idolised by boys and young men. How can democratic education systems 
counter platform blues? In this talk will I outline three strategic 
avenues: against disinformation: instilling effective information 
processing and curating skills; against toxicity: reclaiming martial 
arts; against polarisation: fostering collaborative values.


Afternoon break (15 mins)


*I got the Right to Sing the Blues*

Session 4: 4:45 – 6:30pm
Moderator: Denise Thwaites


Melinda Rackam – The Tawdry Nostalgia for Past Forms


I didn’t care about the legacy of -empyre- global media arts list 
founded in 2002 as part of my PhD in Virtual Worlds. Then, after 22 
years of robust dialogues between many hundreds of guests and thousands 
of members, books, in-person meet ups and exhibitions including 
/Documenta/ /12/, it went silent. A cybersecurity sweep of the servers 
at UNSW Art & Design had disappeared it and they weren’t talking (to 
me). My simultaneous umbrage and tawdry nostalgia for the lost -empyre- 
has generated an internal debate on list death as an urgent loss to 
research culture necessitating reconstruction, or a prompt to forget it 
and move on?


Litia Roko – Performance


Questioning examples of institutional trolling as community-building 
praxis or fleeting antidote in the face of a culture of 24/7 networked 
dejection, this lecture-performance will pick at the ways that museums 
relate to platforms. In an all-consuming landscape of doom-scrolling, 
fragmentation, and the general misery of the bind in which we find 
ourselves, why do institutions continue to approach platforms and the 
internet as a tool rather than a culture, and how can we intervene?

Geert Lovink – From Sad by Design to Platform Brutalism


Brutalism is the title of Achille Mbembe’s 2020 book. Known as the 1950s 
rough-concrete architecture style, Mbembe presents the concept as a 
‘thought image’ that can be seen as a not-so elegant synonym for the 
economic laws associated with the term capitalism in which the emphasis 
shifts from profit to violence. Mbembe explains: “Brutalism is the name 
given to this gigantic process of eviction and evacuation as well as to 
the draining of vessels and emptying of organic substances.” This 
results in naturalizing social war, a development many see unfolding 
since Covid and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. In this lecture I will map 
my own trajectory, from Zoom fatique and the use of memes as copium to 
the weaponization of social media today. Once we’re stuck on the 
platform long enough, will the mood inevitably turn violent?


—


*Speaker biographies:*


*Ella Barclay* is a Senior Lecturer at ANU’s School of Art and Design on 
unceded Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country, Australia. Her written, 
curatorial, and contemporary art practices engage with network 
aesthetics and the politics of technological development. Recent 
exhibitions include Unkempt Cognition, Canberra Contemporary Art Space 
(2024); Openhaus, ZK/U, Berlin (2024); No Easy Answers, MAMA, Albury 
(2023); The Ramsay Art Prize, Art Gallery of South Australia (2021); 
Stacks and Sleeves: a PostHuman Landscape, Gallery Lane Cove, Sydney 
(2019); Experimenta Make Sense: International Triennial of Media Art 
(2017-2020); Curious and Curiouser, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery 
(2018-19); Soft Centre, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Western Sydney 
(2018); Light Geist, Fremantle Art Centre (2016-17); Bodies Go Wrong, 
Orgy Park, NY (2016); That Which Cannot Not Be, Vox Populi, Philadelphia 
(2016); Almost, Instant 42, Taipei (2016); I Had to Do It, UTS Art, 
Sydney (2016); and Elemental Phenomena, Griffith University Art Museum, 
Brisbane (2015). Her work resides in multiple government, institutional, 
corporate, and private collections and she has received several 
commissions, residencies, scholarships, and awards.


*Nicole Curato *is a Fillpina sociologist best known for her academic 
work on deliberative democracy, and her media work providing academic 
commentary on politics in the Philippines. She took her bachelor's 
degree of Sociology at the university of the Philippines Diliman and her 
Master's and Doctoral Degrees in Sociology in the UK.**Curato is the 
recipient of Discovery Early Career Research Award Fellowship at the 
Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the 
University of Canberra. The award is funded by the Australian Research 
Council.


*Sophie Dumaresq* is an interdisciplinary artist who brings perspectives 
of absurdity, queerness and humour to creative, critical robotics, 
automata and mechanics. Working across photography, video installation, 
sculpture and performance, her work explores what it is to try and 
communicate in a universe filled with beings whose brains, existence and 
or bodies are built inherently differently to that of your own. Her 
artistic practice explores what it means to share joy, love and laughter 
in our relationships with both other humans and non-humans.


*Caroline Fisher* is an Associate Professor of Communication, and core 
member of the News and Media Research Centre at in the Faculty of Arts 
and Design. Caroline is a co-author of the annual Digital News Report: 
Australia and CI on two ARC Discovery Projects: ‘The rise of mistrust: 
Digital platforms and trust in news media’; ‘Valuing News: Aligning 
Individual, Institutional and Social Perspectives’. Prior to academia 
Caroline worked in journalism and politics.


*Ashley van den Heuvel* teaches in the Heritage and Indigenous Studies 
program at the University of Canberra. She is completing a PhD at UC 
called 'Flight across Country' under an ARC Linkage project called 
Heritage of the Air. Her research interests link visual culture, 
technology, connections to Country and storying. Her research interests 
link visual culture, technology, connections to Country and storying. 
These interests are linked to her cross-cultural experiences as a 
Walbanja woman from the South Coast of NSW.


*Geert Lovink *is a Dutch media theorist, internet critic and activist. 
His recent books: Organization after Social Media (with Ned Rossiter, 
2018), Sad by Design (2019), Stuck on the Platform (2022) and Extinction 
Internet (2022). He studied political science at the University of 
Amsterdam (UvA) and received his PhD from the University of Melbourne. 
In 2003 he was postdoc at the University of Queensland. In 2004 he 
founded the Institute of Network Cultures  at the Amsterdam University 
of Applied Sciences (HvA). In 2022 he was appointed Professor of Art and 
Network Cultures at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), art history 
department.


*David Nolan* is Associate Professor in the News and Media Research 
Centre at the University of Canberra.  His work focuses on journalism 
studies and contemporary mediated politics, particularly in relation to 
the politics of race, ethnicity and belonging. He has led major research 
projects and produced a wide range of international research outputs 
related to these themes, and in 2021-2022 was President of the Australia 
and Aotearoa New Zealand Communication Association (AANZCA).


*Mathieu O’Neil *is Professor of Communication in the University of 
Canberra’s Faculty of Arts and Design and Honorary Associate Professor 
of Sociology at the Australian National University. His research 
interests lie at the intersection of political communication and 
sociology. Mathieu co-founded the Australian National University’s 
Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online networks.


*Catherine Page Jefferey* is a lecturer and researcher in the Discipline 
of Media and Communication at the University of Sydney. Catherine’s 
current research addresses digital media and families, with a particular 
focus on parenting in the digital age. She is currently a Chief 
Investigator on an ARC funded Discovery Project exploring digital sexual 
literacy amongst Australian adults.

*Phoebe Quinn* is a Research Fellow and PhD candidate at the University 
of Melbourne, and associate of the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and 
Global Governance at the University of Canberra. Her work focuses on 
community wellbeing in the context of climate change and disasters. 
Through her doctoral research, she is exploring the role of innovations 
in digital democracy in addressing these challenges, conducting action 
research using the platform Polis.


*Melinda Rackham* is adjunct research professor at  UniSA Creative in 
Adelaide. She woves tales of intimacy and identity in networked and 
virtual worlds when the net was young. Founder of /-empyre-/, an online 
platform for other voices in media arts, their practice expanded to 
curate, direct, mentor and produce. Melinda’s latest book /CoUNTess: 
Spoiling Illusions since 2008, /co-authored with Elvis Richardson, 
probes the persistence of gender asymmetry in Australia’s artworld.


*Litia Roko *is an artist interested in the politics of art, the 
politics of technology, and the politics of art + technology. She lives 
and works on unceded Ngunnawal land.


*Erin K Stapleton* is a Lecturer in Communication and Media at the 
University of Canberra. They research in the intersections between 
gender, colonialism and queer theory, digital and media cultures, 
critical theory, and continental philosophy. Their book /The 
Intoxication of Destruction in Theory, Culture and Media: A Philosophy 
of Expenditure After Georges Bataille/ was published by Amsterdam 
University Press in 2022.


*Tyne Sumner* is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow in English 
& Digital Humanities at the Australian National University. Her primary 
research areas are C20th and C21st literature, surveillance studies, and 
digital humanities. She also has expertise in poetry and poetics, 
critical infrastructure studies, and digital culture. Her current 
project is SurveiLit <https://www.surveilit.com/>, which examines the 
representation of new and emerging forms of surveillance in contemporary 
global literature. She has published widely on topics ranging from 
facial recognition technology and surveillance software to Australian 
poetry and cultural databases. She is President of the Australasian 
Association for Digital Humanities (aaDH) and is on the international 
steering committee of the Art, AI & Digital Ethics 
<https://www.unimelb.edu.au/caide/research/caide-art,-ai-and-digital-ethics> 
research collective.


*Denise Thwaites *is a curator, writer and researcher specialising in 
contemporary cultural economies, who is currently Senior Lecturer in 
Interdisciplinary Arts at the University of Canberra. Denise was awarded 
her PhD in Aesthetics through The University of New South Wales 
(Australia) and l’Université Paris 8, Vincennes – Saint-Denis (France), 
before joining UNSW iCinema Research Centre as a Postdoctoral Fellow. 
She has worked in the contemporary arts sector at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, 
Australia Council for the Arts and the Museum of Contemporary Art 
Australia, and has curated independent projects for cultural 
organisations across Australia and internationally. Her research 
harnesses poetic, experimental and collaborative modes of working to 
destabilise political, cultural and economic imaginaries.


*Temple Uwalaka* is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Deliberative 
Democracy and Global Governance and a Research Associate at the News and 
Media Research Center. He also lectures at the School of Arts and 
Communication, Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra, 
Australia. His research interests include digital activism, digital 
journalism, brand activism, social marketing campaigns and the use of 
online and mobile media to influence political change.


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