2023-24: How Media Count
In Understanding Media, McLuhan writes that “number is an extension and separation of our most intimate and interrelating activity, our sense of touch” (107). “Money,” meanwhile, “as a social medium or extension of an inner wish and motive creates social and spiritual values” (135). Number is often understood as the most abstract, impersonal, or objective measure of the world; McLuhan teaches us that number is also intimate, spiritual, and expression of ourselves. Digital media we all know, are all numerical media; it’s all just 0s and 1s. And these days, all media is digital.
The Centre for Culture and Technology will dedicate its programming in the 2023/24 academic year to the problem of how media count. We mean this in at least two senses. First, we want to understand how counting—aggregating, numbering, calculating, quantifying—has been a core social, political, and aesthetic activity of media, across many domains and through long histories. Our contemporary media count clicks, measure engagement, sell ads. They articulate us aggregates of data. As thinkers like John Cheney-Lippold, Kris Cohen, and Wendy Chun have noted, contemporary computational media deal with users as members of a population. Political economists of platform economies and computational capitalism, like Nick Srnicek and McKenzie Wark, show us how new forms of aggregation and counting bring into being new kinds of power relations, and altering the warp and weft of social fabrics. That said, computational media have always been media that count. IBM got its start building counting machines for the 1890 US census. As Matthew Jones points out, Charles Babbage was the last in a long line of inventors who failed to build the calculating machines they dreamt of; Babbage inherited Blaise Pascal’s problems.
And, second, we want to know how our counting media come to count for us, how they matter. Filthy lucre is an extension of an inner wish. Number is intimate, and has been far more than a simple adding-up across media’s long sweep. How does counting come to matter? What isn’t computable or countable? How do new AI computational technologies set uncomputable facets of life into relief? Moreover, how do certain technologies—machines that count—come to count as “media,” while others are excluded, occluded, made minor?
“How Media Count,” then, is an inquiry into the contemporary mattering of our digital media, as it continues the long, often occluded, historical development of media that count. In 2023 and 2024, counting will be the activity around which our programming will cluster. Together, we will sound out counting’s political, aesthetic, technological, and historical valences.
The Centre hosted a number of new and returning programs dedicated to exploring the theme of How Media Count. Programming included:
- 1 Artist in Residence
- 3 Faculty Fellows
- 4 Graduate Fellows
- 4 working groups
- regular programming of Monday Night Seminars
Monday Night Seminars
The Monday Night Seminars carry on the tradition of the Centre for Culture and Technology's public seminars at the University of Toronto, first established by Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan. They are designed to challenge prevailing cultural notions about technology and provoke new insight on the possibilities for a more equitable technological future.
Matt Nish-Lapidus
April 1, 2024
An artist talk by Matt Nish-Lapidus on his varied practice, processes, and works-in-progress.
Melody Jue & Zoe Todd
March 18, 2024
An online seminar hosted by the Math for Minerals working group, featuring guest scholars Melody Jue and Zoe Todd.
Miriam Posner
March 4, 2024
Miriam Posner (UCLA) discusses the technologies of supply-chain management and the vision of global economics embedded in software and data.
Queer Media Archaeology w/ Jacob Gaboury
February 26, 2024
Jacob Gaboury (UC Berkeley) shares material from his ongoing research on queer figures in the early history of computer science.
Mendi & Keith Obadike
February 5, 2024
An artist talk by Mendi and Keith Obadike, whose collaborative practice spans sound, experimental media, performance, and writing.
Queer Data Studies
December 11, 2023
Book event for Queer Data Studies (University of Washington Press, 2024). With contributors Harris Kornstein, and Shaka McGlotten.
David Rokeby
November 27, 2023
"Surfing the Manifold: Adventures in Latent Space", an interactive demonstration of AI systems with BMO Lab Director David Rokeby
Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta
November 20, 2023
Book launch: Together, Somehow: Music, Affect, and Intimacy on the Dancefloor (Duke University Press, 2023) by Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta
Eric A. Stanley
October 30, 2023
Book talk by Eric A. Stanley (University of California, Berkeley)
Simone Jones (Artist in Residence)
October 2, 2023
Exhibition tour and artist talk by Simone Jones on the solo exhibition "How Media Count", on view at the CCT Coach House Fall 2023.
Artist in residence
The Centre for Culture and Technology is delighted to announce How Media Count, a solo exhibition by Simone Jones. Produced as part of the second annual Artist-in-Residence Program, this project responds to the Centre’s annual theme (How Media Count), which engages questions of quantification, datafication, numbering, and counting in media.
Simone Jones is a multidisciplinary artist who works with the moving image, sculpture, programming, and electronics to explore shifting relationships between time and space. A key component of these investigations is the performative nature of the work itself. Jones’ works uncover the tensions that can arise between illusion and reality as they apply to modes of perception, representation, and the body. Jones graduated from the Ontario College of Art (OCA) with a concentration in Experimental Art and received her MFA in Sculpture Installation from York University in Toronto. Jones is a Professor in the Integrated Media program at OCAD University.
See the exhibitionFaculty Fellows
The Centre's three Faculty Fellows (two external, one internal) will conduct research, deliver a lecture and participate in programming that intersects with the annual theme and the work of the Artist in Residence.
Jennifer Rhee
Jennifer Rhee (Virginia Commonwealth University)'s research analyzes artificial intelligence and robotics technologies in relation to race, gender, and labor. More specifically, she examines the different visions of humanness that shape AI technologies and bring these technologies into conversation with theorizations of AI in speculative fiction and art. Her scholarship and teaching are in the areas of speculative fiction studies, literature and science, feminist science and technology studies, critical AI studies, and ecocritical media studies.
Jaqueline D. Wernimont
Jacqueline D. Werinmont (Dartmouth University) specializes in long histories of digital media, histories of quantification, and technologies of commemoration. She also has active research on the resource consumption of intensive computing applications, using digital tools to understand and communicate medical history and practices, and on the use of off-the-shelf tools to transform data into something we can engage with all 5 senses (data visceralization).
David Cecchetto
David Cecchetto (York University) studies critical digital theory, sound, and experimental media. He has published widely, including the monographs Ludic Dreaming: How to Listen Away from Contemporary Technoculture (co-authored with The Occulture; Bloomsbury, 2017), Humanesis: Sound and Technological Posthumanism (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), and Listening in the Afterlife of Data (Duke UP, 2022). He is a Series Editor of the para-academic Catalyst book series (Noxious Sector Press) and is Co-Editor of the Proximities: Experiments in Nearness book series (University of Minnesota Press).More...
Graduate Fellows
This year we welcome four Graduate Fellows whose scholarly work engages with questions of contemporary or historical media and mediation, using humanistic or social scientific approaches.
Réka Gál
Réka is a fourth year PhD candidate at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto returning to the Centre for 2022/23 as a Graduate Fellow. She completed her master’s in Cultural Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her work unites feminist media theory and feminist and decolonial technoscience and explores how technological tools and scientific methods are employed to purportedly solve socio-political problems. In her master’s thesis Cosmic Colonial Fantasies, she explored the historical stages through which outer space colonial fantasies evolved, from ancient Greece until the 18th century. She is extending this research during her PhD to investigate contemporary outer space colonial initiatives, focusing on the implications of human-machine interdependence in outer space as it relates to issues of sustainability and environmental justice. She is excited for the opportunity to engage with the Centre and to participate in interdisciplinary conversations about technology and culture.
Camille Intson
Camille is a PhD Candidate within the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information, completing collaborative specializations in both Sexual Diversity Studies and Knowledge Media Design. Her doctoral research leverages research-creation, queer and feminist phenomenologies, and sensory analyses of contemporary performance works to explore trans-feminist and queer futurities though emerging technologies. This work has been generously funded by a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship – Doctoral Award and two Marcia J. Nauratil Memorial Fellowships. Over the last three years, she has worked as both a Graduate Fellow and Research Assistant at the Centre for Culture and Technology, as well as the Sexual Representation Collection.
Yolanda Zhang
Yolanda is a PhD candidate in information studies at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. Her doctoral research examines the convergence of agrifood systems with the platform economy and the industrialization of AI. Her research has appeared in Media, Culture & Society, Cultural Politics, Roadsides, and the Canadian Journal of Communication.
Christian Zeitz
Christian is a PhD Candidate at the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. His dissertation draws on recent theories of posthumanism so as to rethink the status and significance of Orientalism and Islamophobia in contemporary German-language television and post-television narratives. His other, broader research interests and expertise revolve around theories of media and culture, intersections between the postcolonial and the posthuman, as well as questions of popular culture and cultural representation, specifically as they pertain to the politics and aesthetics of contemporary German & European (TV and streaming) series.
Working Groups
Working groups will convene from September 2023 to April 2024 (8 months). Comprised of faculty and/or graduate students across the University of Toronto, these interdisciplinary groups will undertake research, scholarly, and creative exchange, engaging fundamental questions about media and mediation and supplementing our 2023-2024 programming at the Centre.
Beating Time
Lead Convener
Josh Dittrich (Lecturer, Communications)
Research
Continuing their interdisciplinary discussion of rhythm as a critical and creative concept, this working group explores how contemporary scholars and artists sketch and sound out those areas of thought, experience, and mediation (distinct from language, ideology, or the psychoanalytic unconscious) in which the mind blurs into its own non-conscious processes, affects, and rhythms; and which serve, increasingly, as interfaces with digital technologies (and 24/7 grind culture) at the same time.
With a broad focus on critical theory in dialogue with Black, Queer, and Crip phenomenologies of time and technology, they explore how such non-conscious experiences count as experience in the first place; and how, if at all, we can critically account for their potential as sites of agency, resistance, or liberation
Generative Sound
Lead Conveners
Beth Coleman (Associate Professor, Faculty of Informations)
Mitchell Akiyama (Assistant Professor, Faculty of Landscape, Architecture and Design)
Research
This working group engages with sound in/as media, exploring histories and possibilities of sonic architecture, machinic and other modalities of generativity, as well as topoi of a sonic generativity as locating place.
Their cultural and technological investigation will explore aesthetic histories in relation to the evolution of “generative” as a technical and conceptual space in sound art. They will also address sound as an immersive and locative phenomenon, not bounded by the framework of “music.”
Getting Played
Lead Conveners
Alex Ross (PhD Candidate, Faculty of Information)
Christine Tran (PhD Candidate, Faculty of Information)
Research
This working group will look to gaming cultures both as competitive activity and sport but also as metaphor from which to begin theorizing grift: how do contemporary digital media function as games to play groups/truths against each other? What is the media a priori of the game/grift? How do media condition whose play counts as play, and whose as grift–that is, as inauthentic or deceitful?
Working across critical media studies, political economy, game studies, and platform studies to trace the affinities of “play” and grift across disciplines, the group seeks to build a multidisciplinary understanding of the ways that diverse that cultural life becomes (in)validated, cheated, and transgressed from the enclosures of acceptable communication.
Co-sponsored by the UTM Program in Game Studies.
Math for Minerals
Lead Conveners
Upasana Bhattacharjee (PhD Candidate, Faculty of Information)
Réka Gàl (PhD Candidate, Faculty of Information)
Research
This working group engages with materialist media theory which investigates how elemental and geological forces shape media as the constitutive forces in our technological realities and political economies. They engage with recent works within media theory which investigate how the affordances of media are shaped by the geological elements they are made of. The group will also explore media theoretical approaches which frame “natural” environments themselves as media.
By placing these two connected conceptual approaches in conversation, this group aims to critically investigate the contributions of these diverse approaches to media theory, seeking to understand how what counts as media are impacted through this focus on the geological and elemental.
Media Architectures
Lead Convener
Nadine Chan (Assistant Professor, Cinema Studies Institute)
Research
This working group mobilizes the term “media architectures” as a theoretical framework for thinking the effects of media in terms of spatial, environmental, and infrastructural techniques. Functioning as both a noun or as verb (such as in to structure or to design), “architectures” is a conceptual framework through which we interrogate medias of recursivity, contingency, and design in environmental and systems thinking.
Bridging cybernetics and cinema studies, computational and indexical media, virtual and material forms of mediation, and more, this group's approach to media as architecture is one that demands a traversal across medium specificity, interested in how myriad architectural medias produce subjectivity through deliberate technological design.
Centre Events
2024 Fellows Day: How Media Count
April 15, 2024
The Centre for Culture and Technology presents its first annual Fellows Day conference. This conference convenes our 2023-24 Artist-in-Residence, Simone Jones (OCAD), with our Visiting Faculty Fellows: David Cecchetto (York), Jennifer Rhee (Virginia Commonwealth), and Jacqueline Wernimont (Dartmouth). Esteemed cultural critic Jeanne Randolph will also make a special guest appearance.
The Visiting Faculty Fellows will present new scholarship that engages the Centre’s annual programming theme, “How Media Count.” Their work proceeds in conversation with Jones’sat the Centre in fall 2023. Join us as we engage the politics and aesthetics of counting, quantification, and computation.
2024 Ursula Franklin Lecture: McKenzie Wark
March 25, 2024
The Franklin Lecture features invited scholars who bring the critical study of science, media and politics to bear in their visions of new political futures.
Writer and scholar McKenzie Wark presents the 2024 Ursula Franklin Lecture, "From Automatic Writing to Automated Writing", in which she will discuss recent AI text-generation technologies within the context of longer histories of the technics of writing and automation:
Media Architectures Symposium
March 22, 2024
“Media architectures” can be described as a theoretical approach toward the study of media as a structure for prefiguring, processing, and worlding environments. Functioning as both a noun or as a verb (as in, to “structure” or to “design”), “architectures” is a conceptual framework through which we interrogate medias of recursivity, contingency, and design in environmental and systems thinking. Bridging cybernetics and cinema studies, computational and elemental media, virtual and built environments, and more, our approach to media as architecture is one that demands a traversal across medium specificity and instead insists on approaching the question of media as cultural technique. That is, we are interested in how myriad medias architecture subjectivity, systems, and environments through deliberate technological design.
This day-long symposium is co-sponsored by the Centre for Culture and Technology, the Cinema Studies Institute, the Institute for Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology, and the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs.
