Ania Malinowska | University of Silesia in Katowice (original) (raw)

BOOKS AND EDITED VOLUMES by Ania Malinowska

Cambridge University Press, 2022

This book outlines the environments of loving in contemporary technoculture and explains the chan... more This book outlines the environments of loving in contemporary technoculture and explains the changes in the manner of feelings (including the experience of senses, spaces, and temporalities) in technologically mediated relationships. Synchronic and retrospective in its approach, this Element defines affection (romance, companionship, intimacy etc.) in the reality marked by the material and affective 'intangibility' that has emerged from the rise of digitalism and technological advancement. Analysing the (re)constructions of intimacy, it describes our sensual and somatic experiences in conditions where the human body, believed to be extending itself by means of the media and technological devices, is in fact the extension of the media and their technologies. It is a study that outlines shifts and continuums in the 'practices of togetherness' and which critically rereads late modern paradigms of emotional and affective experiences, filling a gap in the existing critical approaches to technological and technologized love.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/abs/love-in-contemporary-technoculture/074FE883A89E836B494D581E7C74A3AB?fbclid=IwAR29WReMn5UMp0OnjwQi8RtHqlmRHyBWwTwGAbbOlwgon1wRopnbZVOcgtY

Intellect, 2021

Data Dating is a collection of ten academic essays accompanied by works of media art that provide... more Data Dating is a collection of ten academic essays accompanied by works of media art that provide a comprehensive insight into the construction of love and its practices in the time of digitally mediated relationships. The essays come from recognized researchers in the field of media and cultural studies.

INTRODUCTION
Introduction: Dating (the) Data and Other Intimacies
Ania Malinowska and Valentina Peri

1. WIRED LIMERENCE (feat. Deep Love by Antoine Schmitt)
Technology, Commerce and the Intimacy Revolution
Lauren Rosewarne

2. LOVE INFO-STRUCTURES (feat. Glaciers by Zach Gage)
Romance in a Time of Dark Data
Lee McKinnon

3. MEDIATED MATCHMAKING (feat. A Truly Magical Moment by Adam Basanta)
Fast Love. Temporalities of Digitized Togetherness
Ania Malinowska

4. EMOTIONS WITH THE MACHINE (feat. Ashley Madison Angels at Work by !Mediengruppe Bitnik)
‘Emotoys’: Ethics, Emotions and Empathic Technologies
Andrew McStay and Gilad Rosner

5. SELF-FASHIONING DESIRE (feat. Kill Your Darlings by Jeroen van Loon)
The Greatest Love of All: Recognition, Self-Love and the Imaging of Desire
Derek Conrad Murray

6. DIGITAL ONSCENITIES (feat. Peeping Tom (Porn Version) by Thomas Israel)
The New Onscenity. Navigating Digital Desires in the Twenty First Century Pornoscape
Lynn Comella

7. LIBIDINAL TECHNO-SCAPES (Webcam Venus by Addie Wagenknecht and Pablo Garcia)
The Proxemics of Digital Intimacy
Kyle Machulis

8. TOUCHLESS EMBRACES (feat. VR Hug by Tom Galle and Moises Sanabria)
Virtual Hugs and the Crises of Touch
David Parisi

9. SOUNDS OF FEELING (feat. Digital Synaesthetic E.E.G. Kiss by Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat)
I Can Hear Your Feelings
Andrew Blanton

10. INTERFACES OF EMOTIONAL SURVEILLANCE (feat. Face Messenger by Tom Galle and John Yuyi)
Timestamp Anxieties
Kristin Veel and Nanna Bonde Thylstrup

The interest of the book is in love and materiality analyzed in relation to ways in which affecti... more The interest of the book is in love and materiality analyzed in relation to ways in which affection has been materialized in a cultural practice. Drawing on love studies and research in material cultures, the book is seeking to re-examine love through materiality studies (especially their recent incarnations: new materialism and object-oriented philosophy) to spark a debate on the relationship between love, objects and forms of materializing affection. It aims to analyze the role of things and material culture in practicing and conceptualizing love. Also, it intends to provide an insight into how materiality (in its broadest sense) impacts the understanding of love today (its meanings and practices), and reversely, how love contributes to the production and transformation of the material world.

Open Cultural Studies, 2017

The intervention of digitalism and the new media into “a whole way of life” (Williams 1960) has h... more The intervention of digitalism and the new media into “a whole way of life” (Williams 1960) has had a significant effect on human emotions and the ways we express and experience feelings in daily interaction. Changes in communication patterns have gestated new manners of conduct, visible in phenomena such as virtual love, cyber touching or digital kissing [the latter carried out by means of emojis or, more recently, with the use of KISSENGER – a real-time internet kiss interface for mobiles to be introduced to mass markets in two years or so (Zhang, Nishiguchi, Cheok, Morisawa 2016)].

There has been a suspension between new and old modalities of life, marked by constant oscillation between the virtual and the real, the tangible and the intangible, the haptic and the sensory. These new modalities point to a change in the cultural condition which, associated with liquefaction (Bauman 2003, 2005), connects to the rise of new forms of solidity that uncover new capacities and affordance for our emotional selves.

The focus of this special issue is the new media and emotion, analyzed in relation to changing life environments and human emotional interactions. We invite papers that will re-examine the relationship between new media forms, media-ridden realities, and emotional structures (interactions, reactions, affordances etc.) with respect to cultural processes examined from a myriad of scholarly perspectives and methodological approaches.
(The issue available here: https://www.degruyter.com/page/1389)

This book critically approaches contemporary meanings of materiality and discusses ways in which ... more This book critically approaches contemporary meanings of materiality and discusses ways in which we understand, experience, and engage with objects through popular culture in our private, social and professional lives. Appropriating Arjun Appadurai’s famous phrase: "the social life of things", with which he inspired scholars to take material culture more seriously and, as a result, treat it as an important and revealing area of cultural studies, the book explores the relationship between material culture and popular practices, and points to the impact they have exerted on our co-existence with material worlds in the conditions of late modernity.

PAPERS by Ania Malinowska

International Handbook of Love, 2025

This chapter describes the phenomenon of love tester machines: the first psychologically informed... more This chapter describes the phenomenon of love tester machines: the first psychologically informed mechanisms designed and used to estimate the romantic compatibility between people. Love tester machines are amusement devices, often found in arcades, carnivals, and entertainment venues, designed to measure or simulate romantic affinity or “love potential.” Typically, these machines feature a scale that lights up or gives a reading when the user grips metal handles or places their fingers on buttons or sensors. The result is displayed in playful categories, such as “Hot Stuff” or “Cold Fish,” implying a level of romantic prowess or desirability. Though often marketed as reliable assessment tools, these devices work through basic principles like rotation motor, skin conductivity, temperature, or simply random algorithms and are intended purely for entertainment. Among the various technological artifacts that have explored human emotional makeup for effective matchmaking, love testers hold a unique place. They represent a fusion of technological advancement, entertainment, psychological inquiry, and the quest for understanding a romantic union. The history of those devices, their cultural significance, and technological evolution contribute new insight into the role of psychometrics, data, and algorithms in modern-day relationship culture, which this chapter overviews by tracing early twentieth-century love testers to their contemporary digital counterparts in broad contexts.

Techniques Journal, 2024

This paper describes and discusses cutting up books as cannibalism and cannibalism as design. I d... more This paper describes and discusses cutting up books as cannibalism and cannibalism as design. I do it in relation to a tradition of voracious creative reading and writing and to a personal project carried out three years ago for a period of six months, during which I cut up over six hundred volumes of human intellectual heritage and turned them into one hundred and eleven assembled poetic paradigms. Considering the book “a body” or “a machine to think with” (Richards 1926, 1), a “simultaneously sequential and random access device” (Kirschenbaum 2008, np), and “a spiritual instrument” (Mallarmé 2014, 68), I examine the flesh of the book and the mutilation of the sacred (the untouchable) that the book object invariably represents. I also dwell on cannibalistic kinesis: cutting, dismantling, skinning, and seasoning to examine the aesthetics of pathological urges and cravings in broad cultural and creative contexts.

Postcollectivity, 2024

This contribution explores the possibility of trans-organic gender opened up by the proliferation... more This contribution explores the possibility of trans-organic gender opened up
by the proliferation of technological species into the human context (robots,
bots, digients, sims, holographic entities etc.), a proliferation that invites questions about the future of human communities and its organizing aspects.

Challenges of the Technological Mind Between Philosophy and Technology, 2024

This chapter probes the idea of the artificial mind as a condition distinct from human categories... more This chapter probes the idea of the artificial mind as a condition distinct from human categories of thinking and sees what it is. For that purpose, it describes the experiment of Hypnotic AI—an art installation in which the user interacts with a self-learning intelligent system by means of hypnotic induction. As such, it discusses AI’s “latent” or “post-material” depth emerging in the AI-user hypnotic loop. It also analyzes media material environments in connection with media material schemes, media physical structuring and media usability based on the models of altered state.

Performance Research, 2022

As our interactions get more external by means of technological solutions (ad-ons and extensions)... more As our interactions get more external by means of technological solutions (ad-ons and extensions), diagraming the ‘emotional’ gains a new meaning by becoming a form of an aesthetic (yet conceptually oriented) detachment form the physical. To explore that becoming, I engage with scientifically motivated art, specifically three works – Lancet and Maat’s E.E.G. Kiss, Noemi Iglesias’s OFF Love and Przemysław Jasielski’s Emotion Machine Unit – to delineate the abstract of diagramming feelings. Each of those works uses diagrams or schemes to narrate emotions as they perform away from the body. Each of them is also a different manifestation of the blueprinting of emotional acts in reference to scientific narratives and their histories. They all capture what it tentatively (and playfully) feelings without organs: the extra-physical feeling and the outside-of-the-body performances of the senses and organs. They all depict in diagrams to map the gaps between us and the imageries of our emotional environments.

Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture, 2022

British philosopher and author. Sadie Plant holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Ma... more British philosopher and author. Sadie Plant holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Manchester and is considered one of the leading thinkers in the cultural criticism of technology. She has contributed to cyberpunk culture with a feminist critique of technological patriarchy, defined in relation to human transfer into cyber-reality. Her work includes three critical books and numerous book chapters, journal papers, magazine entries, exhibition comments, and conference addresses. In 1995, she and Nick Land co-founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) in the Department of New Technology at Warwick University, which she directed until 1997 when she left academia. In her role as "a self-proclaimed cyberfeminist who has been described as the most interesting woman in Britain" (Treneman), Plant has also lectured at the universities of Birmingham and Manchester. She is most notably acclaimed for recognizing technology's potential for women's liberation, and for coining the term 'cyberfeminism.' Plant's writings engage with various aspects of 'new technoculture' to deal with gender hierarchy in modern technocracies. Her work challenges male visions of technological progression, historically and conceptually revisiting existing imaginaries of cyber-science

Performance Research, 2021

The proliferation of robots in performative arts has brought awareness to a new kind of performat... more The proliferation of robots in performative arts has brought awareness to a new kind of performative intervention, which -- uncanny by its very origin -- revisits the idea of human animatedness, and, more importantly, enquires after the nature and role of objects that have already functioned mostly as props. Inspired by contemporary machine performances - from Bill Vorn’s human-robot spectacles, to Marco Donnarumma’s performative fusions with technological things, to Giles Walker’s Robotic Burlesque, to Oriza Hirata’s quiet robot theatre -- the article analyses robots’ stage appearances to interpret them in terms of ‘demonic interventions’. Following the historically grounded reputation of automata as demon-like creatures, the article outlines the role of robots in performative art, with a special focus on the posthuman climax in which the human element seems to be gradually possessed by the ‘machinic’ (the robotic, the technologically engendered). The article explores the motivations of our turn to ‘technological objects’ to see why, despite much fear and scepticism, we invite them to spaces - ontological and performative - so far reserved for humans.

Data Dating. Love, Technology, Desire (Intellect) pp. 42-57 , 2021

Our technology-fuelled and high-speed culture has created an environment for fast love-a phenomen... more Our technology-fuelled and high-speed culture has created an environment for fast love-a phenomenon at the intersection of new media and romantic practices that defines the temporal modes of emotional intimacy for modern-day societies. Like fast work for professional activities and fast food for lifestyles, fast love showcases the contemporary obsession with time efficiency and the role of technological advancement in propelling new time economies for feelings. A key driver in this process-digitization-rushes romance with new developments in data gathering, transfer and exchange. According to MacKinnon et al. 'the nexus between love and digitization has become a significant matter of concern in contemporary society' (2018: 1). Love's nature (i.e. its romantic incarnation) seems to be inherently suited for the digitized domain. Although calculative and probabilistic, love owes its efficiency to numbers, data, patterns, measurement and estimation. Grounded in impatience and opting for the ultimate appositeness (at a minimum waste), love is perfectly economical and disciplined, especially in terms of time. Temporalities ascribed to romantic love are usually far from the notion of speed and usually on the side of slowness. Even love at first sight-love's major temporal trope, which ostensibly insinuates immediacy-is associated with longing and duration. The primary culturally sanctioned time unit for lovers is waiting (Barthes 1990; Lahad 2017). Love is expected to occur at the proper time and should always entail anticipation with patience (love's primary temporal virtue), to be deserved in the first place. A considerate delay in approaching and executing relationships makes a major trope of romance-as in fiction as in real life. Most modern love theory convinces that 'desire needs time to germinate, grow and mellow […]. [It] needs tending and grooming' (Bauman 2003: 11). In Bauman's view, 'a delay of satisfaction [is] no doubt the sacrifice most abhorred in our world of speed and acceleration' (2003: 12). No wonder this same world cheers fast courtship, early marriage and otherwise executed rush for coupling. According to Luhmann (1986), love is a game of chance that relies on quick reflexes. Romance is a 'matter of time' for which 'first come, first served' is not so much a dictum of digital protocols but an imperative of culturally cultivated paces of romantic praxis that those protocols invariably enhance.

Data Dating. Love, Technology, Desire (Intellect) pp. xiii-xxii, 2021

What does it mean to love in the age of the internet? How are digital interfaces reshaping human ... more What does it mean to love in the age of the internet? How are digital interfaces reshaping human interactions? What implications do new technologies carry for the future of our romantic relationships? How does mediation affect our sexual conduct? Or to be more specific, how do screens, gadgets, add-ons, platforms, wearables and other high-tech media artefacts-including technological subjects, like (ro)bots-determine emotional and intimate behaviours that are clearly being remodelled to the demand of new communication formats? Are new digital technologies shifting the old paradigms of love and erotic expression? And with respect to that, can we talk about a change in the ways we practice love or rather we should speak about reformulations of the age-old codes of loving under the new media regimes? Those questions have been in the landscape since the advent of online media. They became hot-button in March 2020, when a global pandemic placed millions of people under the coercion of a total lockdown, enforcing a transfer of most of our activities to the virtual plane. From online working to online teaching to online voting, humans all over the planet manoeuvred the discontents of social distancing, trying to live the no-contact reality as the new normal. Inefficient for all the ways of living, those efforts turned out particularly futile for intimate interactions: hookups and dating, inspiring both frustration and failed inventiveness. The follow-up debates about the future of romance inquired after the role of technology for human relations in circumstances when the non-contact status is not an alternative but a default. At the same time-as if in response to those discussions-Shinoda and Makino Lab at the University of Tokyo announced the release of the first haptoclones-touchable holograms that enable human interactions

Cultural Change in East-Central Europe and Eurasian Spaces. Post-1989 Revisions and Re-imaginings, 2021

The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication , 2020

This entry discusses human interactions with sexbots, that is, erotic software and material autom... more This entry discusses human interactions with sexbots, that is, erotic software and material automatic personalities (sex robots), to provide insight into the new dimension of love in technology and media-bound contemporary culture. It explains the working of erotic machines and digital entities (digients) as well as discusses their impact on the shaping of amorous and sexual relationships today. Outlining the inspirations behind sexbots and their technological/cultural origins, the entry discusses the tradition of nonhuman fetish and people's erotic engagement with digients and automata. With this, it analyzes the problems of posthuman love and the concerns related to the sexual fantasies that become true by means of advancing technological possibilities.

The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication , 2020

This entry outlines the waves of feminism to explain the modern history of the women's liberation... more This entry outlines the waves of feminism to explain the modern history of the women's liberation movement and how it has been shaped by women's interactions with the media (and vice versa). The media context allows for a more situated analysis of "female troubles" as it unveils the role of media forms for shaping women's cultural circumstances. The entry explains the development of the feminist movement, focusing on the chronological evolution of the movement's assumptions. It describes the main events and activists of the women's liberation front, distinguishing between the targets and tools of individual waves. The relationship between the media and feminism has been of crucial importance for the progression of contemporary communication and its structures. The reinvention of one through another by means of mutual criticism and stimulation has helped reframe the social functions of the sexes as well as open the media for uses beyond their original design.

The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication , 2020

This entry analyzes the uses of camp in popular television, explaining the nature and working of ... more This entry analyzes the uses of camp in popular television, explaining the nature and working of camp aesthetics inside and outside of the televisual context. It presents a brief history of camp's transition to popular representation against the development of camp's cultural and theoretical meanings. The entry delineates the development of camp narrative/aesthetic techniques in cinema and star performances to further explore the manifestations of camp in television with respect to music videos and other forms of popular entertainment shows.

Girls To The Front. Zine No9, 2019

This short intervention explains the problem of 'robot gender' and the potential of the 'fourth s... more This short intervention explains the problem of 'robot gender' and the potential of the 'fourth sex' lost in naturalizing design and negligent academic criticism.