Video Interviews of Stefano Harney (original) (raw)
Related papers
The meaning in seeing: visual sustainability in the built environment
Meaning is the luggage, sustainability is the leaving. Visual sustainability is simply the process by which people are sustained and enriched in daily life through the visual relationship they hold dear to their surroundings. Aesthetics in cities is only important if visually rich, which is only important if meaningful. Visual meaning is only important if sustainable. Visual sustainability is only important if it serves human life. Morphology-based claims that 75\% of the world?s population will be urbanised by 2050 are compounded by extended urbanisation theories more focused on process. We have created forests full of strange objects that stare back; surrounded by artefacts validating our existence but no longer enriching our lives. Ignoring all warnings of this creeping phenomenon the perpetuation of corruption of meaning and artistic expression continues unabated. As people wrestle with the scientification of their existence, cities increasingly symbolise compression chambers of consciousness, emotion, alienation, and isolation. This study avoids the developmental and environmental bias in modern-day sustainability; focusing instead on absence of meaning. There is more to ?meaning in seeing? than visual literacy or visualisation. In bridging theory with practice we must reset priorities, replacing sustainability driven by sustainability, with sustainability driven by pedagogy; through affordance properties ?created to support activity? and meaning. We should look beyond a fallacy of ambiguity, towards epistemically objective science of ontologically subjective domains of knowledge. In this study, relational validity of meaning is explored through the lens of direct perception. Now is the time to make the connection that appears to be absent from urban discourse, between visual richness and sustainability; reconciling non-visual planning processes with the concept of sustainable visual meaning. We must promote the effectiveness, for the builders of our cities, of visual sustainability planning {--} as well as {--} the importance, for sustainability planners, of building visually responsive cities.
Announcement trailers and the inter-temporality of Hollywood blockbusters
International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2019
This article examines the blockbuster ‘announcement’ trailer. As teasers-for-the-teaser-trailer, these ephemeral texts invite audiences to look forward to an upcoming film while also calling on them to look back to a previous cinematic encounter. Moreover, their specific reveal-conceal structure also encourages fans to scan the text for clues (to look inward) while making connections to previous texts (to look outward). Building on Jonathan Gray’s concept of ‘speculative consumption’, wherein audiences ‘create an idea of what pleasures any one text will provide’, this article refers to this textual construction and affective sensation as speculative nostalgia, asserting that it is constitutive of today’s blockbuster culture. When situated into the contexts of their industrial and spectatorial temporality, announcement trailers prove to be rich sites for examining blockbusters, not only as intertextual commodities which spread far and wide, but also as inter-temporal commodities in which specific temporal structures are shaped, shared, revised, and felt.
Data, data everywhere, not a lot in sync: reconciling visual meaning with data
ENQUIRY: The ARCC Journal |Special Edition: Urban Data Assemblage, 2019
Up to 100 billion devices will be seeking to visually map out our existence over the internet by 2020 (UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser 2014). Just as the urban is a forcefield “of spatial transformations… that takes many different morphological forms” (Brenner 2014), this paper explores another underlying forcefield: our visual relationship with data. The most important piece of data, the individual, exists in the city as both prey and predator; having evolved from a “passive aesthetic view of the city” (Appleyard 1979, 144); transformed through shared territory (Evans and Jones 2008); and forged into impressively intricate sets of power relations through collective intentionality (Searle 2011). Through the presentation of self (Goffman, 1969, cited in Appleyard 1979, 146) we inhabit another home: the digital; in which we are simultaneously co-existent and removed by synchronisation of data. Traditionally, the software authoring the physical production of ‘space/hardware’ has been value driven (Raban, 1974, 128, cited in Appleyard 1979, 146). In a parallel universe, algorithms drive the data. For Ellis (2012) it is in the software, that meaning resides. What then is the allure of data to the individual? And what is the allure of the individual to data? It lies arguably in the perception of power and control through meaning (Appleyard, Searle et al.). We seek in the new reality to “discover where the real power lies” (Appleyard 1979, 146). Curiously, the power of data appears to increase the irrelevancy of ownership, between “ours” and “theirs” (Appleyard 1979, 152). This paper analyses past, present, and future states of data production. The data we get from data; data produced from objects; and objects produced from data. In closing, a speculative working hypothesis is presented of visual data production, which hopefully encourages further research reconciling data with meaning in the context of visual sustainability.
VVitchVVavve: Post-Digital Aesthetics Symposium
VVitchVVavve, 2019
VVitchVVavve: Post-Digital Aesthetics Exhibition, Symposium and archive (2018-9) VVitchVvavve curated by Nancy Mauro-Flude and Thomas Penney responded to Cramer’s (2012) interrogation of Post-digital Aesthetics (PDA) “does the term still make any sense? By surveying practitioners who adapt a critical approach to digital culture not widely examined in Australia, the event proved the term still does make sense. Artists were curated principally for their artisanal approach computational media, including, but not limited to performances, yarning circles, Virtual (VR) and Augmented reality (AR). Encouraging dialogue with key International figures around the ambiences of the PDA field and the political contradictions we face in the age of designed obsolescence through uncovering the power relations lurking behind digital tools knowledge of the genre was expanded. The event was significant in benchmarking PDA to assume digitality and raw ubiquity, embracing curious imperfection, mawkish neomateriality rather than sterilised digital ideals of perfection. The Post-Digital Aesthetics Exhibition Symposium, and VVitchVVavve.me archive is available publicly for access to the documented event, in an effort to influence future work by researchers. Focusing on the interrelation between post-digitality and veracity, the platform connects local digital practices including indigenous practitioners with nationally recognised and prominent international theorists F.Cramer(R’dam), A,Dekker(Amsterdam), high profile VR artist T.Trian(LA), speculative designer M, Dolejšová(CZ) among others, making a strong intervention into the field. Recognised by discipline peers as helping to shape the discipline was a subject of review in a credible source evidencing significant impact a conversation piece in unMagazine a respected independent contemporary art magazine distributed to art institutions around Australia and internationally.
Perceptions of bias, sensationalism, ulterior motives, and other forms of subversiveness identified in journalistic practice and among journalism practitioners are not merely critiques enabled by the hyper-mediated, hyper-mediatized information age and economy we presently inhabit. They have always co-existed with the activity and profession of journalism as long as “mass media” has existed as such. This paper, speculative at times though underpinned by empirical (meta)observations, seeks to understand the discursive bases and interactional incentives for journalistic bias and subversion, as well as how this is received by audiences at multiple levels of social scale. Specifically, it will focus on the role of subversive media practice in enflaming or even instigating social conflict and cultural division. It intersperses examples drawn from the media worlds of Hiphop, video gaming and American national news, including the contents of a multi-part Hiphop documentary series that explores dozens of historical conflicts or ‘beefs’ from the perspectives of principals and journalists that reported on them, as well as a variety of snippets from American cable television and several non-institutional, non-professional (amateur) critics on YouTube.
New and Speculative Organisational Aesthetics
2015
The paper attempts to raise the question whether human perception is still central to organisational aesthetics, especially if we start to give a stakeholder position to artificial systems and when organisational designs and processes have ceased to rely only on human agency. Algorithmically driven, autonomous agents like high-frequency trading (HFT), already exist and are acting within the timeframes (milliseconds) and space (global market) that are unreachable for human perception. All that calls for serious consideration whether emerging philosophical trends, such as Speculative Realism, Object-Oriented Ontology, New and Speculative Aesthetics have their impact on organisational perception and design.
The Stone Is Inside My Mind (When Cut The Durée Leaks Out)
In Schrodinger’s film a tree falls in the forest and it may or may not make a sound of a clapperboard. Are there correlations between the ‘spooky action at a distance’ quantum world and moving image and sound? Who is the ‘agent-viewer’? Is the ‘chronon’ a viable philosophical tool?
"Creativity Studies", 2020
The problematization of the idea of creativity resulting in the revision of concepts about autonomous, creative, and human self has been a reality since the end of modernism, or maybe even longer. Postmodernism, as well as theories of posthumanism and new materialism, dealing with categories such as materiality, virtual reality, transgression, hybridization, etc., offer some reflections on the idea of non-human creativity, which is no longer an attribute immanently assigned to human , but a result of interaction between human and non-human elements, including the affective friction of bodies made of matter. Mostly inspired by the theories and methodologies of posthuman studies, studies in new materialism, and new media studies, the article aims to answer the question about the types of creativity appearing in a new YouTube phenomenon-autonomous sensory meridian response videos massively published in recent years. The article is an attempt to give a comprehensive account of the idea of posthuman creativity-with its sub-types like sensual creativity or techno-creativity-visible in extremely popular, however under-researched, autonomous sensory meridian response artworks. The paper puts forward the thesis about autonomous sensory meridian response being a model artistic phenomenon in which the entanglement of human and non-human matter results in a form of posthuman creativity. Numerous examples of autonomous sensory meridian response videos have been analysed, pointing to the specific modes of creative collaboration of human and non-human elements on the film set. In conclusion, it has been shown that autonomous sensory meridian response artworks become the product of posthuman creativity resulting from mutual, affective interaction of bodies.
Scholars' Press, 2019
Simulation arguments that the universe and our experience of it may be computer simulations constructed by advanced civilisations (either alien or our human/posthuman descendants) have been the subject of widespread debate since Bostrom’s original philosophical formulation of the principal position in 2003. Since then the key elements of the argument – boosted by ‘The Matrix’ film and its sequels and spin-offs covering similar scenarios – have been discussed critically by philosophers, psychologists, literary critics and scientists, and there is now a large body of literature on the topic. The principal theme of this monograph is that this simulation literature offers immense potential for learning and teaching in a wide range of domains. After examining the main claims of the argument – and the key criticisms of simulation hypotheses – the implications of this debate in the spheres of ethics, epistemology and metaphysics are examined with a view to offering practical recommendations for potentially fruitful philosophical and educational discussion topics.
Tickle Torture: Science, Sex, and the Species Divide
Although a long tradition of philosophy and science has maintained that humans are the “laughing animal,” that assumption has been tested first by science’s attention to the great apes, and second by tests conducted on so-called “lower” creatures, such as rats. This essay reviews some of the most important debates about and experiments regarding interspecies laughter, focusing on the phenomenon of tickling. By attending to the important relationships between science and popular culture, it teases out the erotics intrinsic to interspecies tickling and the close relationships between pleasure and pain. It ends with raising questions about the tickling, consent, and the ethics of tickling research.