<nettime> Latest INC Publications--Readings for the Hungry Souls

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

The Cloud Sailor Diary--Shanghai Life in Times of Coronavirus by Tsukino T. Usagi, a very personal 
account of these times, published as INC Longform.
https://networkcultures.org/longform/2020/03/19/the-cloud-sailor-diary-shanghai-life-in-the-time-of-coronavirus/ <https://networkcultures.org/longform/2020/03/19/the-cloud-sailor-diary-shanghai-life-in-the-time-of-coronavirus/>

Covid-19 Diary by Ruth Les
https://networkcultures.org/nofun/2020/04/02/covid-19-diary-01/ <https://networkcultures.org/nofun/2020/04/02/covid-19-diary-01/>

Maisa Imamović, Aesthetics of Boredom in Times of Corona
https://networkcultures.org/livingindustry/2020/03/31/aesthetics-of-boredom-in-times-of-corona/ <https://networkcultures.org/livingindustry/2020/03/31/aesthetics-of-boredom-in-times-of-corona/>

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The Arab Archive: Mediated Memories and Digital Flows, ed. by Donatella Della Ratta, Kay Dickinson & Sune Haugbolle (INC Theory on Demand #35) on history and representation after 2011. 
As the revolutions across the Arab world that came to a head in 2011 devolved into civil war and military coup, representation and history acquired a renewed and contested urgency. The capacities of the internet have enabled sharing and archiving in an unprecedented fashion. Yet, at the same time, these facilities institute a globally dispersed reinforcement and recalibration of power, turning memory and knowledge into commodified and copyrighted goods. In The Arab Archive: Mediated Memories and Digital Flows, activists, artists, filmmakers, producers, and scholars examine which images of struggle have been created, bought, sold, repurposed, denounced, and expunged. As a whole, these cultural productions constitute an archive whose formats are as diverse as digital repositories looked after by activists, found footage art documentaries, Facebook archive pages, art exhibits, doctoral research projects, and ‘controversial’ or ‘violent’ protest videos that are abruptly removed from YouTube at the click of a mouse by sub-contracted employees thousands of kilometers from where they were uploaded. The Arab Archive investigates the local, regional, and international forces that determine what materials, and therefore which pasts, we can access and remember, and, conversely, which pasts get erased and forgotten.

Download here as pdf or e-pub or order a print copy on Lulu: 

https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/tod35-the-arab-archive-mediated-memories-and-digital-flows/ ; <https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/tod35-the-arab-archive-mediated-memories-and-digital-flows/>
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README.first–Essays on film and technology, catalogue produced with Institute of Network Cultures for the first (cancelled) edition of the Amsterdam-based Plokta festival, now celebrating its online-only start as https://plokta.nl/tv <https://t.co/WzVdq82EJC?amp=1>.
README.first is a bilingual (ENG/NL) collection of mini-essays, published in the run up to the Plokta <https://plokta.nl/> filmfestival. We’ve asked writers, researchers, theorists, artists, programmers, and others to pick an online video that functions as a stepping stone for their thought and practice and to comment shortly on why they find the video so significant, funny, or outright disturbing. The resulting reflections speak about Silicon Valley obsessions, our mediated social lives, the impact of technology on centuries old games, and more.

Plokta showcases film as a frame of socio-technological themes and discussions. With these essays we want to broaden the scope to one of the most significant developments in visual culture of the past decades: the rise of online video. At the Institute of Network Cultures (INC), online video has been a research topic already since 2007, in a continuous project named Video Vortex. Together, Plokta and INC, hope to stimulate reflections before, during and after the festival on what the moving image has to say to us

https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/readme-first-essays-on-film-and-technology-essays-over-film-en-technologie/ <https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/readme-first-essays-on-film-and-technology-essays-over-film-en-technologie/>

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TOD#34, Ana Periaca, The Age of Total Images: Disappearance of a Subjective Viewpoint in Post-digital Photography, Institute of Network Cultures, 2020

The Age of Total Images, art historian Ana Peraica focuses on the belief that the shape of the planet is two-dimensional which has been reawakened in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and the ways in which these ‘flat Earth’ conspiracy theories are symptomatic of post-digital image culture. Such theories, proven to be false both in Antiquity and Modernity, but once held to be true in the Medieval Period, have influenced a return to a kind of ‘New Medievalism’.
By tracing visual representations of the planet across Western history and culture, Peraica provides support for a media-based explanation behind the reappearance of flat Earth theories. Through an adventurous exploration of the ways the Earth has been represented in sculptural globes, landscape painting, aerial photography, and even new media art, she proposes that a significant reason for the reemergence today in the belief that the world is flat lies in processes and practices of representation which flatten it during the compositing of photographs into ‘total images’. Such images, Peraica argues, are principally characterized by the disappearance of the subjective point of view and angle of view from photography, as the perspectival tool of the camera is being replaced with the technical perspective of the map, and human perception with machine vision, within a polyperspectival assemblage. In the media constellation of these total images, photography is but one layer of visual information among many, serving not to represent some part of the Earth, but to provide an illusion of realism.

https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/tod34-the-age-of-total-images-disappearance-of-a-subjective-viewpoint-in-post-digital-photography/






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