<nettime> Rice Seminar - Chronotopic Imaginaries: The City in Signs,

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

http://hrc.rice.edu/2016_2017_riceseminar

Excerpt

The 2016-17 Rice Seminar proposes to look at specific nodes along a 
network of contemporary life. These nodes, or intelligent 
"end-points" able to communicate without hierarchical agency, are the 
very cities that today aspire to be mega, ideal, sustainable, 
virtual, smart, or resilient formations.

Linked by computers, mobile devices, and real time sensors, these are 
places where the implicit connectedness of how we ought to live 
together depends on distributed networks, rules, codes, protocols, 
and infrastructures, all bound by a paradoxical, if not 
panopticistic, social contract now located in Cyberia.

In such cities, the social fabric continues to collude (and 
potentially collide) with the very resilience of disciplinary and 
control societies. The regularity of social or architectural form 
has, in fact, become far less relevant than the orchestration of the 
data that a city produces, collects, and curates. The promise of 
democracy in the connected city is "always already" contradicted by a 
strict hierarchy that either structures access to information or that 
predetermines how (and by whom) the very tools of communication talk 
to each other.

As Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, once put it, there is 
"one centralized Achilles' heel" to the Web's otherwise decentralized 
system: computers may be free to talk to each other, but only if they 
abide by given naming conventions. This means that the system can, in 
theory, be brought to a halt by whomever is in control of a limited 
number of root name servers, which until recently added up, ominously 
enough, to the mere number of 13.

http://hrc.rice.edu/call_mellonpostdocs

Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows [Rice Seminar 2016-17]

The position is for July 1, 2016 through June 30, 2017. Fellows 
receive a $50,000 salary, benefits eligibility, and an allowance for 
research and relocation to Houston. Primary obligations include an 
active participation in all aspects of the Rice Seminar and 
collaborating on spatial humanities projects currently underway at 
Rice. In addition, fellows will develop or continue their own 
research projects and give a presentation to colleagues at Rice. 
Fellows will also design and teach (or co-teach) two semester-long 
undergraduate courses, the topics of which will be determined in 
consultation with the HRC and/or appropriate department.


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