From Form to Platform: Designing For Connectivity
Sara Dean, MSDR, College for Creative Studies in Detroit & Institute of Improbable Machanics

Friday, March 08, 2013, 1:30 - 3:00, NWQB 3511

Connective technology has a constant presence in our daily lives and activities. But, beyond its ubiquitous accessibility, it has created a deeper digital inundation: these interactions have changed even our most analog cultural experiences, our understanding of place, and our sense of self. This coded, variable, and connected understanding of even non-digital objects, events, and interactions also suggests new tools. These tools emphasize multiplicity, iteration, anonymity, collection, and remixing. They call into question long standing connections between cultural value and durability, singularity, authorship and permanence. This talk will consider these new tools of design through a discussion of a recent interactive work – Anecdoted City – created by the collective 1/X as a crowd-sourced exhibition platform and real-time collection of Detroit. This project examines the gallery as an interactive platform, focusing on the systems of engagement rather than a conclusive form. In fact, by design, the show opened with no objects; it grew and evolved over the course of the exhibition through a collaboration with the people of Detroit. Materially, Anecdoted City is diligently, purposefully crafted and comprised of physical objects and physical labor; methodologically, it trades on new mentalities of real-time rates, collective authorship and open-source knowledge.

The Dark Side of the Digital seeks proposals for critical, historical, and theoretical papers and creative presentations that shed light on some of the dangerous but overlooked consequences of the 21st-century transformation from mechanical reproduction to digital remediation. We are especially interested in work that pays particular attention to the conjunction of neoliberalism and socially networked digital media, in order to offer some suggestions about how the digital can best move forward in the 21st century. In particular we seek papers and presentations that pursue instances of specific digital technologies in such realms as:surveillance and security; cyberwar and drone warfare; technoscience; media, arts, or culture; communication; education; economy and finance; energy, resource, and waste management; and medicine and healthcare.

Proposals should also address strategies for resisting some of the more perfidious elements of the digital, including those that emerge from and must remain in the interstices of the 21st century networked society of control. We invite contributions from practitioners of digital arts and sciences, media theorists and philosophers, historians, cultural critics, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and other analysts of digital technologies and culture.

The Center for Information Policy Research welcomes Dr. Rina Ghose as the 2012-2013 Senior Research Fellow.

Dr. Ghose is an associate professor in the UW-Milwaukee Department of Geography, with research interests in Critical GIS/GIS and Society, which aims to critically examine the intertwined relationships between GIS and society through the lens of various social theories. Specifically, Dr. Ghose's research examines ethical and legal issues related to "big geographic data" systems (such as GPS and RFID systems), as well as concerns of equitable access to GIS systems and data for citizen participation and activism.

Dr. Alessandra Renzi will be the first Social Studies of Information Research Group (SSIRG) Postdoctoral Fellow beginning this fall. Dr. Renzi, originally from Italy, has an interdisciplinary MA degree in North American Studies from the Free University in Berlin, Germany. She went on to complete her PhD in Sociology and Equity Studies in 2010 from the Ontario Institute for the Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Her focus was on media studies and the title of her dissertation was "From Collectives to Connectives: Italian Media Activism and the Repurposing of the Social."

While at SOIS, Dr. Renzi will be teaching as well as continuing with her research. She says she is excited to work with SOIS faculty: "Before I saw the position, I was already familiar with the work of some of the SOIS faculty. This is, for me, a great opportunity to work with scholars I respect and to be embedded within a school of information studies that welcomes interdisciplinary researchers and is interested in supporting sociological research on information."

The Center for Information Policy Research (CIPR) is seeking a Senior Research Fellow for the 2012-2013 academic year.Established in 1998 within the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Information Studies (SOIS), CIPR is a multidisciplinary research center for the study of the intersections between the policy, ethical, political, social and legal aspects of the global information society.