2018-19: The Mechanical Bro
McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man acts as inspiration for this year’s investigation of machinic logics in culture. Evolving from last year’s considerations in MsUnderstanding Media, the series asked what it looks like if we don’t believe the hype.Delving into smart cities, data justice, robots + AI, hard + software, quantified selfhood, alternative sensory experiences, and militaristic media it raises questions: What is the consensual narrative of the “tech bro” today? What are the implications of this folklore on how we both understand and act in our day-to-day lives? What is the promise and where is it not being kept? How do we use technology to upend the machinic logics of the Mechanical Bro?
- 12 Monday Night Seminars
- 8 working groups
- 5 special events
- 2 PhD fellows
- 1 special issue publication
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.
New Technological Ir/rationalities
April 1, 2019
Join us for an evening discussing how digital propaganda and social media targets emotions and affects, from "neuromarketing," to extreme right, and trolls--how should we understand, measure, and theorize the medium and the message when these "bypass" users' rational awareness? Guests Whitney Phillips, Sun-Ha Hong, and Selena Nemorin will address these New Technological Ir/rationalities.
Source Code: Illegible
March 18, 2019
Simone Browne is Associate Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her first book, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, examines surveillance with a focus on transatlantic slavery, biometric technologies, branding, airports and creative texts. For 2018-2019 she is a Visiting Presidential Fellow at Yale University where she will teach as well as conduct new research on electronic waste to ask questions about the ecology of surveillance technologies. Simone will be in conversation with the Illegible Media PhD Working Group (Jessica Lapp, Rebecca Noone, Karen Dewart McEwen, and Rianka Singh).
A Pedestrian View of Sidewalk Toronto
March 4, 2019
Conversations on smart cities with guests Beth Coleman, Shannon Mattern and Bianca Wylie.
deBrogramming App Studies
February 25, 2019
Despite the many millions of mobile apps, app production and consumption seems to follow traditional patterns. Game and dating apps have emerged as dominant genres, thereby importing systemic labour and diversity issues that have plagued these industries for decades. Come join in on a conversation with Stefanie Duguay, Aphra Kerr, and David Nieborg to discuss where a new subfield of study—App Studies—should or could be heading.
ctrl alt DIRT
February 25, 2019
Clarity, openness, transparency! For whom we wonder? Join us for a night on designing digital strategies and technological tactics beyond respectability, hygiene, publicness and respectability. On Feb 11 come to the coach house and lose ctrl, think alt, and get into the DIRT with Zach Blas, T.L. Cowan and Jasmine Rault.
Of Other Internets
January 28, 2019
Join us for a night of nets - the soviet net, the queer net and ARPA-net. How do specific network structures determine different political possibilities? We'll take a deep web dive into this question with guests Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cait McKinney, and Benjamin Peters.
Re/Figuration: Digital Tactics 4 Digital Colonialism
December 3, 2018
Featuring a lecturu and performance, followed by discussion. Morehshin Allahyari (b. 1985 in Tehran, Iran) is a media artist, activist, educator, and curator who uses computer modelling, 3D scanning and digital fabrication techniques to explore the intersection of art and activism. Inspired by concepts of collective archiving, memory, and cultural contradiction, Allahyari’s 3D printed sculptures and videos challenge social and gender norms. “I want my work to respond to, resist and criticize the current political and cultural situation that we experience on a daily basis,” she explains. She is developing a new body of work on digital colonialism and ‘re-figuring’ as a feminist and de- colonialist practice, titled She Who Sees the Unknown.
#Fitter #Happier #MoreProductive
November 19, 2018
Melssa Gregg, Alison Hearn and Natasha Dow Schüll come together to unpack technologically-mediated self-improvement. Copies of Gregg's book Counterproductive: Time Management in the Knowledge Economy (Duke UP) will be available for sale onsite.
Senses_Sensibilities + Touch_Technologies
November 5, 2018
Reconceiving touch an in an age of computing with David Parisi and Rhonda McEwen.
CTRL:CMD:EXE [an evening on media war]
October 22, 2018
An evening on a media theory for war with Megan Boler, Jeremy Packer, and Geoffrey Winthrop Young.
Building: Black Feminist/Queer Digital Justice > Query: Community Activators
October 1, 2018
Presented by this year's Black Technoscience “Here” working group, community organizers and researchers Ladan Siad (Data Justice Researcher, Technoscience Research Unit, Toronto) and Nasma Ahmed (Director, Digital Justice Lab, Toronto) will be in conversation on how data justice practices and visions are being created among Black feminist/queer data justice communities in the city of Toronto and beyond. The event reflects the Black Technoscience "Here" Working Group’s mission to disrupt understandings of technoscientific thought through artistic, aesthetic, technological and scholarly work on (anti)blackness, science, technology, and material cultures within North America and throughout the African diaspora.
platform mechanics and the undercommons
September 17, 2018
Join us with Lisa Nakamura and Tara McPherson for a night on the logics of the platforms. We will touch upon how platform mechanics facilitates white supremacist activity, the machinic desire for authentic contact with others, and how racial empathy is becoming increasingly automated.
Working Groups
A primary mode of research is the support of interdisciplinary working groups whose novel approaches to culture and technology are appropriate to the challenges of the moment while drawing from the spirit of McLuhan’s attention to the medium. Working groups consist of faculty and graduate students across the University of Toronto and are funded for up to one year to engage symposia, performances, installations, lecture series, workshops, writing retreats, and other public events. The working groups also work in consultation with the Director, Professor Sarah Sharma, to run a Monday Night Seminar.
This year the Centre received 18 working group applications and funded 8.
Black Technoscience "Here"
Lead Convener
Nicole Charles (Associate Professor, Women and Gender Studies)
Research
Signifying a simultaneous disruption to and opening up of technoscience, this working group engages with the rich body of aesthetic, artistic and scholarly work on (anti)blackness, science, technology, material cultures, health, consent and ethics both within North America and throughout the African diaspora. The intention is to collectively question what it means to activate black technoscience thought HERE, in Toronto, at this moment, within the confines of the neoliberal university. In conversation with critical technoscience scholars who have spoken against both the eurocentrism and US-centrism of technoscience, we will think alongside Black scholars, artists and activists who have offered to present and perform across the themes of blackness, ethics and material cultures. By centering transnational and diasporic Black technoscientific praxes and methodologies, our group’s primary goals are to radically expand how we conceive technoscientific thought and method, and to recognize the politics of doing so within Canada, as part of a transnational dialogue.
Illegible Media
Lead Conveners
Karen Dewart McEwen (PhD student, Faculty of Information)
Jessica Lapp (PhD student, Faculty of Information)
Rebecca Noone (PhD student, Faculty of Information)
Rianka Singh (PhD student, Faculty of Information)
Research
This working group brings together doctoral students around the theme of mediated legibility/illegibility. Refuting the assumption that legibility is always empowering, we instead examine along what lines, and to what ends distinctions between legibility and illegibility are drawn. While the research projects of the group’s co-convenors cover a broad range of topics – the (il)legibilities of bodies and activities in the insurance industry; the (il)legibilities of location- awareness and wayfinding within the conditions of geomedia; the (il)legibilities of reification and representation in community-run archives; the (il)legibilities of the spatial strategies of resistance in the digital age – we share a commitment to understanding the power dynamics at work in contemporary and historical systems of archiving, mapping, and categorizing lived experiences.
Affect, Propaganda and Political Imagination
Lead Convener
Megan Boler (Full Professor and Acting Chair Social Justice Education Department, OISE)
Research
This working group creates opportunities to exchange and disseminate interdisciplinary approaches to the study of emotion, digital media and politics, to address urgent questions: How are political actors targeting emotions through digital media "platform politics" (Gillespie, 2010) to exacerbate racism, misogyny, and xenophobia, spread disinformation, and influence political behavior? How, in the age of big data, can we effectively study, track and counter these new and powerful tactics? The overall goals of the proposed project are: (a) to exchange and develop interdisciplinary research on the complex role that emotion and affect play in "platform politics"-- the social media platforms that shape political discourse and public opinion; (b) to increase public awareness of platform politics and new modalities of propaganda, and support public, professional, government and academic stakeholders to develop digital literacy required for navigating disinformation in the era of big data.
What is Left for Humans?
Lead Convener
Tero Karppi (Assistant Professor, ICCIT and Faculty of Information)
Research
The aim of this working group is to ask how do new media technologies, economic powers and new formations of subjectivity subscribe to neoliberal ideologies and could they also challenge those ideologies. For example, we are interested in questions such as what is left for humans if AI takes our jobs, or can we vision an AI that is not based on a neoliberal understanding of subjectivity? Do fields like neuroeconomics and affective capitalism merely expand the idea of a neoliberal subjectivity or can they also challenge the figure of homo economicus? Are our online selves the crystallization of how neoliberal subjectivity is being managed and performed?
Digital Islamophobia
Lead Convener
Victoria Tahmesabi-Birgani (PhD student, Women and Gender Studies)
Zeinab Farokhi (PhD student, Women and Gender Studies)
Research
In the decade following the events of 9/11, Western mainstream media has become obsessed with Islam, often sensationalizing Muslims as inherently violent, barbaric, and rife with terrorists. In the current technological era, the number of users who have taken to digital media, such as Social Networking Sites (SNS), to express their anger, hatred, and make death threats towards Muslims has been increasing dramatically. The anonymity of social media provides perpetrators of online harassment and violence an ideal platform to target vulnerable religious minorities. This working group will organize a symposium highlighting the different ways in which Islamophobia is challenged both online and offline bringing together media activists and scholars from various disciplines to debate and develop current understandings of the (digital) media’s role in the construction and perpetuation of Islamophobia. A particular focus on the technological will form a backdrop for this research with a focus on the the relationship between (digital) media and Islamophobia and asking: How does digital media and in particular social media sites reconfigure Islamophobia?
You're Deactivated
Lead Convener
Alessandro Delfanti (Assistant Professor, ICCIT)
Research
Extended from 2017, You’re Deactivated focuses on the message of the Platform and how workers resist the casualized and precarious work conditions of the digital economy by repurposing, hacking, or refusing platform labour. While technology intensifies work, it is constantly met with resistance from workers. Think of the Fordist assembly line, or the Taylorist numerical control machine and the cycles of struggles they generated. Yet, while the platform may be today’s assembly line, only recently research in media studies has started to focus on workers in the digital economy as active subjects that challenge the patterns shaped by the platform as they unionize, or organize to fight for improved conditions, higher wages, predictable scheduling, and better benefits. The message of this medium demands new forms of resistance.
Advancing "App Studies"
Lead Convener
David Nieborg (Assistant Professor, Arts Culture and Media)
Research
This group will conduct new research interested in advancing political economic work on cultural and economic diversity, and cultural policy as it relates to gaming apps. Moving beyond an approach to apps as standalone objects, this working group conceives of apps as specific articulations of their technicity (how they are designed, built, updated), economic conditions (how they are valued, monetized), social and cultural practices (how they are used, interpreted, imagined), data (what they collect, require), third parties (how they are re-interpreted, extended), and their politics (how they negotiate among stakeholders, interests).
6 Place Toronto
Lead Convener
Petros Babasikas (Assistant Professor, Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design)
Research
This working group and research project seeks to explore, document and broadcast six different conditions where media and infrastructure intersect with urban and post- urban space in Toronto. It investigates the layered and latent existence of public space in the city –as medium, practice, network, artifact and material space– and with this the possibility of reclaiming it. 6 Place Toronto brings together a multidisciplinary team of scholars working in related fields in order to develop a dialogue between media studies, infrastructure studies and urban studies, to confirm a series of field research locations and operations, and to follow an interdisciplinary methodology for mediation and urbanism. It focuses on 6 ‘loaded,’ significant spaces in Toronto –between the infrastructural and the civic, landscape and object, pathway and node, common and public– all in a way either existing or potential public spaces.
Special Events
phd Fellows
This was the inaugural year for our PhD Fellowships. The fellowship program was created to realize part of McLuhan’s original plan and vision for the Centre. They are part of the Faculty of Information Doctoral Program and were awarded to incoming doctoral students whose research overlaps with research and scholarship taking place at the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology. This was an opportunity for students to take part in, conduct, and collaborate with the Director, and affiliated faculty, on McLuhan Studies.
Alexander Ross (PhD student, Faculty of Information)
Grayson Lee (PhD student, Faculty of Information)
Publications
A collection of publications resulting from research, events, and initiatives held at the Centre for Culture and Technology.
Journal articles and special issues
Log Out! The Platform Economy and Worker Resistance
Edited by Alessandro Delfanti
Special issue of Notes from Below (Spring 2019)
A special issue based on Delfanti's LogOut Symposium held at the Centre for Culture and Technology in March 2018.
