The Experts below are selected from a list of 60 Experts worldwide ranked by ideXlab platform

Bruno Latour - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • Network theory Networks societies spheres reflections of an actor Network Theorist
    International Journal of Communication, 2011
    Co-Authors: Bruno Latour
    Abstract:

    In one way or another, we are all in this room responsible for having given to the notion of Network an immense, and some could say, a hegemonic extension. Either because some of you have created the hardware or software infrastructure that has added digital Networks to the already existing water, sewage, road, rail, telegraph, telephone Networks, or because others, through media studies, sociology, history, political sciences, and even philosophy and brain science, have tried to capture what is so original in the new Networky world generated by those new socio-technical assemblages. The reason I have welcomed the kind invitation of Professor Manuel Castells is that, because of the very extension of Network (as a thing of the world as well as a concept), the time has come to check what it really means and maybe to shift somewhat its ambition and modify its real import. When a notion has become enshrined into a work of art like James Cameron’s “Avatar” with the planet Pandora itself sprouting its billions of webby connections and the very notion of communication among the Na’vis and their creatures being materialized by a real plug-in of hair, tails, and manes, it might be time to stop and ask: “What have we done?”

  • Networks, societies, spheres: Reflections of an actor-Network Theorist
    International Journal of Communication, 2011
    Co-Authors: Bruno Latour
    Abstract:

    In one way or another, we are all in this room responsible for having given to the notion of Network an immense, and some could say, a hegemonic extension. Either because some of you have created the hardware or software infrastructure that has added digital Networks to the already existing water, sewage, road, rail, telegraph, telephone Networks, or because others, through media studies, sociology, history, political sciences, and even philosophy and brain science, have tried to capture what is so original in the new Networky world generated by those new socio-technical assemblages. The reason I have welcomed the kind invitation of Professor Manuel Castells is that, because of the very extension of Network (as a thing of the world as well as a concept), the time has come to check what it really means and maybe to shift somewhat its ambition and modify its real import. When a notion has become enshrined into a work of art like James Cameron’s “Avatar” with the planet Pandora itself sprouting its billions of webby connections and the very notion of communication among the Na’vis and their creatures being materialized by a real plug-in of hair, tails, and manes, it might be time to stop and ask: “What have we done?”

Stefania Charitou - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • The film multiple : technologies, sites, practices
    2020
    Co-Authors: Stefania Charitou
    Abstract:

    This thesis examines the shifting conditions of the material and technological properties of the object of film and subsequently of the idea of cinema, in the light of the transition from analogue to digital technologies. I suggest that this technological transition has ontological dimensions, which I examine by looking at spaces and places that encompass this transition, materially and conceptually. The study argues that the nature of film and cinema is multiple, in continuous states of ‘becoming’. The anchor of this study is post-Actor Network Theorist Annemarie Mol’s philosophical argument that objects ‘come into being’ according to the practices and sites in which they are placed. The thesis examines situated practice-based interactions between the two technologies, which shape relationships of power, replacement, exchange and collaboration. I explore those issues at four specific institutional sites: the gallery, focusing on three moving image exhibitions in London, the British Film Institute’s Archive in Berkhamsted, LUX, the UK agency of artists’ moving image distribution and collection, and the movie theatre’s projection room that gradually displays only digital films. This survey examines the situated practices of presentation, exhibition, print checking, archiving, restoration and theatrical projection of film. The aim of this study is to present a multiple object and a multiple idea that is defined not merely by technology, but rather by sites and in particular their operational practices, objectives and organization. By evaluating how analogue and digital technologies interplay in these sites, the study aims to highlight issues of film’s and cinema’s multiplicity that unfolds and shifts both in space and time. The investigated practices evolve in electronic spaces, physical sites and particular locations. Furthermore, they expose different temporalities for analogue and digital film and indicate cinema’s virtual nature to be transcending in time. The situated practices unite and divide the analogue and digital technologies, exposing a manipulative relationship between tangible space, formed by the mechanical apparatus of projection and Network space, marked by the digital’s temporal and spatial ubiquity. At the same time, cinema is actualized in measurable time, while its phenomenon is formulated in the continuous movement and differentiation of duration.

Mohammad Hossein Namazi - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • Online Specificity: Live Event Artworks and the Inner Continuity of the Network.
    2018
    Co-Authors: Mohammad Hossein Namazi
    Abstract:

    This practice-based research analyses the encounter of Net/Web artworks, their materiality and their space-time condition. I analyse a selection of online-specific artworks to examine their materiality and experiential features in an investigation into how they can offer a varied encounter atypical to offline artworks. The research suggests that these encounters have the potential to disturb a familiar linear or chronological sense of space-time. In line with this enquiry, the research explores qualities found in online-specific artworks that are analogous with the encounter of duree (i.e. duration). This concept was first theorised by Henri Bergson in 1886 as an experience of time with a heterogeneous nature that takes place in the inner self of human experience. I examine this theory to consider whether online-specific artworks are more capable of precipitating experiences associated with duree and its understanding of memory. In order to do so, I examine the materiality of these artworks (e.g. HTML/CSS) and their temporal existence in the Network duration when online users establish a net connection to retrieve them (e.g. URL, HTTP). This research analyses the state of the Network as a heterogeneous reality, as described by Network Theorist Tiziana Terranova (2004), in order to explore how such qualities impact the encounter of online-specific artworks as inherent assets of the Network duration. The thesis proposes that the transitory reality of these time-based artworks are only operative in the live stream of the information flux that resides in the virtual state of the Network. As a result, such encounters are analysed through a new notion of event described in the research as live events. From this perspective, the research explores similar experiential aspects that are shared between online-specific artworks and offline time-based artworks (e.g. Standing Wave (1920) by Naum Gabo) due to a live encounter during their temporal activation. Subsequently, this research analyses the materiality of telecommunication technology, especially within the protocol system (e.g. TCP/IP) operative in the architecture of the Net/Web to illustrate the transitory reality of online-specific artworks. Furthermore, through a genealogy of historical references the research selects a number of offline and online artworks to analyse their experiential aspect in relation to their time experience, materiality and method of realisation. The nature of web-based artworks and their encounter is recognised in the research through the iterative possibility of their ‘assets’ in the Network and their potential capability to introduce new memory experiences specific to an online encounter.

Anthea Nicholls - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

Maria Schwertl - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • "We Have a Situation Here!": On Enactment as a Middle Ground between Practice and Performance
    Cultural Analysis, 2020
    Co-Authors: Maria Schwertl
    Abstract:

    Enactment in the Post-Actor-Network Theory of Annemarie Mol So I need a word that doesn't suggest too much, a word with not too much of an academic history. The English language has a nice one in store: enact" (Mol 2002, 33). When looking for a word to describe the multiple doings and beings of one disease, post-Actor-Network-Theorist Annemarie Mol came up with the concept of "enactment" in her book the body multiple, claiming that it had less baggage or discussion connected to it than the concept of "performance" (2) and a different notion of daily routines as well. (3) The term "enactment" was intended to reflect her understanding, that in each practice one might encounter in a hospital--therapy, operation or diagnosis--a slightly different version of disease would be enacted by the situational actants, because the disease is very different depending whether you look at it through a microscope, listen to it through the narrations of patients, or face it in the operating room. As she describes it: A patient information leaflet might describe atherosclerosis as the gradual obstruction of the arteries, but in hospital practice this one medical condition appears to be many other things. From one moment, place, apparatus, specialty, or treatment, to the next, a slightly different 'atherosclerosis' is being discussed, measured, observed, or stripped away. (blurb) Thus there are multiple diseases enacted that hang together somehow, connected through certain translation processes and practices that make one specific enactment of the disease transportable from one part of the hospital to another. Actor-Network-Theory (ANT)--which has also been called the Sociology of Translation (cf. Callon 1986)--is concerned with the construction of knowledge and technology not as a singular or linear process but as Network (cf. Sorensen 2012, 327). This means less a simple focus on materialities than is often implied. Rather, ANT is about (actor-) Networks and situations, or, as Bruno Latour has stated, a view in which "attachments are first, actors are second" (2005, 217). Phenomena and entities are formed only through the interplay of diverse actants. Their potentials and possibilities are only realized in specific human (and non-human) actor Networks or interactions. The easiest example to sum up this perspective is the interplay of gun and human. When looking at gun shooting, Bruno Latour asks: Who is firing, the gun or the human? The answer to this question also bears on how to prevent gun violence: Should we have stricter restrictions on firearms or should we have more social workers or psychological facilities throughout the country? To argue that the reason for gun shootings is that there are too many guns out there would be techno-deterministic, while arguing that people who have become mentally unstable or violent due to their childhoods or social environments cause gun violence would be socio-deterministic. Thus, Latour argues instead that guns and humans form a situational hybrid that shoots. Only when the potentialities and dispositions of gun and human come together does a shooting occur. Actor-Network-Theory has been called postconstructivist because it looks at the situation and practices of knowledge or technological production (cf. Degele and Simms 2004, 259). Originating in Science and Technology Studies, it has been widely influential in urban studies (cf. Farber 2014; Farias and Bender 2010), economics (cf. Callon 2007), and political science (cf. Latour 2002), and has been combined with other theoretical approaches (cf. Dolemeyer and Rodatz 2010; Kendall and Wickham 1999; van Dyk 2010; Walters 2012). Furthermore, while ANT started by looking at stabilizing and closing processes (cf. Callon 1986), it now has turned more and more to the transformative, fluid aspects of actor-Networks, especially in the work of Helen Verran (2001) and Annemarie Mol, which has earned them the label "Post-ANT". …