Metamedia

The first meeting of the Critical Studies in New Media workshop for 2005 was held today on the fourth floor of the Stanford Humanities Lab. Organized by Michael Shanks, Fred Turner and Sebastian De Vivo this year's workshop examines and debates "cutting edge thinking around this topic of the politics of presence."

According to the organizers:

"The group will, as before in this workshop, be one that radically crosses the conventional boundaries between different approaches to media. It will combine media practice, perspectives from media industries and institutions, and socio-political critique.

Intellectual edge and cutting across conventional fields of understanding and practice - this is what distinguishes our workshop from other courses and seminars in media at Stanford and makes it unique.

Objectives - to convene the group commited to exploring key issues every two weeks during quarter; to organize two weekend colloquia in February and June (2006); to manifest this interest in an on-line collaboratory."

They articulate the notion of "presence" as:

"Presence is a contested aspect of social and cultural experience. Notions of presence hinge on the relationship between the live and mediated, on notions of immediacy, authenticity and originality. Presence prompts questions of the character of self-awareness, of the presentation of self. Interaction is implicated — presence implies being in someone's presence. And agency - one's ability to effect such representation and relationship. Location too — to be present is to be somewhere. Hence presence also directs us outside the self into the social and spatial. And also, of course, presence directs us into temporality — a fulcrum is tense and the relationship between past and present.

An aspect of presence is representation - both mimesis and political representation. Hence presence fundamentally implicates the communicative relationship between what or who is represented and how. At the heart of presence is politics and the polis.

We propose that the workshop focuses on this theme of the politics of presence - matters of power, agency, and identity in the ways that media experiences generate and manage presence.

Key questions and fields revolve around agency, site/location and the body.

Agency.

How do infrastructures (of any kind - social, political, material) shape the ability of the individual to have political presence?

What are we to make of the increasing expression of politics as media experience?

How are media companies, political agencies and/or other organizations using media to shape the experience of presence in culturally or institutionally determined ways?

What's the difference between presence, agency and representation?

What happens when media generate mixed realities that subvert the distinction between real and represented, original and simulated?

These questions raise the topic of "virtual communities" and socio-media, new forms of (political) association.

Site/location.

Media and mediation are always located. Media technologies always connect with place. They are mediating forms, between people and structures/institutions.

How are media implicated in politically charged locations?

Surveillance and mutual monitoring are relevant here.

How do we think about immersive environments - fused intermedia as well multiple media ensembles - in relation to presence, identity and agency?

How are media involved in the generation of corporate presence beyond the individual in places like department stores, malls and airports?

Body.

How are the truth and knowledge of one's self and being shaped by mediating forms/technologies?

What happens when there isn't an individual to be present anymore, because they are dispersed through multiple media?

What happens when the individual is dispersed through mediating forms such that the absolute distinction between self and representation is less relevant than notions of iterative remediating processes?

What happens when the enviornment within which we're present finds its home inside our bodies, when media and bodies merge? Key issues here are immersive media environments, cyborg bodies and emerging nano technologies.

Change and history.

Agency, site/location and body need to be understood in historical perspective.

How should we think about presence in the present in relation to presence in the past?

What about immersive environments and other media management of presence in the past?

Media history - what is new about new media and its relation to presence?

Are these really issues of "new" media?"

The next meeting will be held on Friday 28 Oct at 10 Wallenberg Hall 4th Floor. The workshop will focus on Geoffrey Bowker's and Susan Leigh Star's wonderful book "Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences," MIT, 2000.