WIAS Seminar: Critical Theory in the Digital Context: Search Engine Labour and Creative Production
Wed 28 June 2017
18:00 – 20:00
University of Westminster
309 Regent Street, UG04
London, W1B 2HW
Critical Theory in the Digital Context: Search Engine Labour and Creative Production
A WIAS Seminar with International Research Fellows Paško Bilić and Ergin Bulut
How are major search algorithms produced? How is their global relevance sustained and promoted? What is the role of creativity in digital games production? How do creative producers cope with contradictions in their precarious workplaces?
Focusing on search engines and the digital games industry, the speakers will explore various angles of critical theory. Concepts such as technological rationality, alienation, bio-political production and exploitation will be evoked to understand the specifics of labour processes in digital contexts.
Paško Bilić is Research Associate at the Department for Culture and Communication, Institute for Development and International Relations in Zagreb, Croatia. Paško is based at WIAS from 2 May to 31 July 2017. During his fellowship, he will be focusing on algorithms, their role in sustaining and shaping capitalist social relations, and global digital economy. He is currently co-editing a book for Palgrave Macmillan entitled “Technologies of Labour and the Politics of Contradiction”.
Ergin Bulut is Assistant Professor at the Department of Media and Visual Arts at Koc University, Istanbul. His research interests cover political economy of media and media labour, critical/cultural studies, game studies, and philosophy of technology. He is based at WIAS in June and July 2017. His is currently working on an ethnography of labour practices in the game industry, which will be published by MIT Press in 2018.
We still have seats left for Digital Objects, Digital Subjects – An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Activism, Research & Critique in the Age of Big Data Capitalism on May 20-21 in Little Titchfield Street, London: