Index: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/AffectiveInfrastructures

Affective Infrastructures Intro

“What remains for our pedagogy of unlearning is to build affective infrastructures that admit the work of desire as the work of an aspirational ambivalence. What remains is the potential we have to common infrastructures that absorb the blows of our aggressive need for the world to accommodate us.”
Lauren Berlant

This study circle examines the role of affect-driven and affect-generating infrastructures in the formation of contemporary lived experience. It looks into how technologies with increasingly sentic properties, machines that feel, hear and see promise to make users themselves more aware, sensible and empathetic. It examines how infrastructures of care and policing detect and classify habits, synch behaviours and are able to manage collective feeling. Bringing together scholars, artists and activists, the study circle focuses on the ways we sense the world as feelings and affects are captured, measured and orchestrated. Acknowledging the inseparability of mind and body and of cognition to affect, it raises the following questions:

How do the affordances of contemporary technologies affect one’s capacity to affect and be affected in a period of socio-political conflicts and divides? How are bodies shaped by today’s media, and how are they changed, enhanced but also controlled? How are bodies read, profiled, categorised and interpreted? What role do the fixed classifications and residual interpretations play and how can they be opposed? Which forms of learning and doing can help in this process?

The Study Circle on Affective Infrastructures takes such questions as a starting point in order to one hand address the process of today’s sovereign systems and on the other hand to examine the potential for transformational ones. If as Berlant puts it affects, habits and behaviours are themselves an infrastructure that binds us to each other and to the world, then these elements can be used as a methodology for reinhabiting existing systems and building new ones. The creation of new living classifications as Bowker & Leigh Star named them, ones that would be open to ambiguity, multiplicity and constant movement, is of interest for this study circle. The understanding of the body as an expression for structures of feeling and a repository for alternative ways of knowledge and lived experience can greatly assist in this process. Embracing technologies of kinship, tools of conviviality and a logic of critical care -a notion of Puig della Bellacasa-, the discussions, interventions and prototypes of this study circle will aim to re-imagine the potential of building new bonds among each other and the surrounding environment

More info on transmediale 2019: https://transmediale.de/

Study Circle Working Meeting 29.10. 2018, 10:30am

Tier.Space, Donaustraße 84, 12043 Berlin
http://tier.space/

With:
Study Circle: Maya Ganesh & Femke Snelting (moderating), Marija Bozinovska Jones, Lou Cornum, Tung Hui Hu, Nadège & Fernanda Monteiro, Pedro Oliveira,
transmediale: Daphne Dragona, Kristoffer Gansing, Inga Seidler
TIER.space: Lorenzo Sandoval, Benjamin Busch
Daniel Salomon

Agenda

10.30 Arrival of participants

11:00 Welcome by Benjamin Busch & Lorenzo Sandoval (Tier Space)
11:15 Introducing the Study Circle as a format, the specific theme (affective infrastructures) and its relation to the theme and structure of transmediale 2019 by Daphne Dragona, Inga Seidler and Kristoffer Gansing.
11.30 'Affective Infrastructures': Situation + invitation by Maya Ganesh & Femke Snelting. General tour through readings, programme of the day, rhythm of the study circle + first observations. Tools + platforms we will use in our time together.

12:00 Group exercise. Everyone is invited to bring one immaterial or material object, word, experience, event, or practice that will allow you to share what 'affective infrastructures' means to you and your practice. Continuing with the notion of the 'Circle', we want to sit together and share these contributions as an introduction to ourselves, our reflections on the theme and the readings (and all this in ten-fifteen minutes per person!). We do not rush in immediately to organize or categorize these contributions; this may come later.

Part A - Responses by: Tung Hui Hu and Lou Cornum (online), Pedro Oliveira, Marija Bozinovska Jones

13:00 Lunch conceptualised and prepared by Daniel Salomona

14:00 Part B - Responses by: Nadege & Fernanda (online), Lorenzo, Daphne, Femke, Maya,
and (tbc): Benjamin, Daniel, Kristoffer, Inga, Amelie.

15:30 Discussion: How can we organise these ensembles responsibly, allowing for messiness and awkwardness? How could we bring the items we brought into an imaginary glossary/cabinet/inventory/altar/collection for/of Affective Infrastructures that map out its domain of knowledge, and discuss its mode of organisation?

16:30 Coffee Break

17:00 Filter: Parsing conversations from the day to focus on specific questions, methods and objects of study. What is missing, what are the gaps? How will we take this to the next level as a process among ourselves as a Study Circle, and to the festival?

18:00 Next Steps by Inga Seidler and Daphne Dragona

19:00 Gettogether
Encounter with Daniel Solomon & Introduction of Infratekture Project by Tier.Space

Affective Infrastructures - Study Circle Member Bios

Moderators

Maya Indira Ganesh is a technology researcher and writer who works with industry, arts and culture organisations, academia and NGOs. She is a doctoral candidate at Leuphana University, Lüneburg, Germany working on a PhD investing the relationship between human and machine autonomy. Her research and advocacy work has spanned concerns around digital security and privacy; gender and technology; values and design in technology; trust, identity and biometrics; post-humanism and human-non-human relationships; and the politics of constructions of ethics in AI.

Femke Snelting works as artist and designer, developing projects at the intersection of design, feminism and free software. In various constellations she has been exploring how digital tools and practices might co-construct each other. She is member of Constant, a non-profit, artist-run association for art and media based in Brussels. Since 1997, Constant generates performative publishing, curatorial processes, poetic software, experimental research and educational prototypes in local and international contexts. With Jara Rocha she activates
Possible Bodies, a collective research project that interrogates the concrete and at the same time fictional entities of “bodies” in the context of 3D tracking, modelling and scanning. She co-initiated the design/research team Open Source Publishing (OSP) and formed De Geuzen (a foundation for multi-visual research) with Renée Turner and Riek Sijbring. Femke teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute (experimental publishing, Rotterdam) and is currently curator of the Research Centre at a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies, Brussels).

Key Members

Marija Bozinovska Jones explores links between social, computational and neural architectures. Her work revolves around technocapitalist amplification and perpetual online presence, probing the self as a datafied and distributed identity through MBJ Wetware. Unpacking cryptic ways of forging subjectivity, she contemplates gamification, intelligence within artificial, auto-regulation and coping mechanisms: from trends in self improvement to decentralized technologies. Under the MBJ Wetware proxy, Jones creates heterotopian landscapes to be collectively inhabited; first manifesting as a model on NVIDIA GeForce Graphics Cards and currently as an Intelligent Voice Assistant interface. MBJ graduated MA in Computing at Goldsmiths and BA in Arts and Design at Central Saint Martins. She is current studio resident at Somerset House Studios in London.

Lou Cornum was raised in Arizona, lives in Brooklyn, and studies smutty science fiction at the CUNY Graduate Center. Their cultural criticism and science fiction writings have appeared in Art in America, The New Inquiry, and the edited collection Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Stories from Turtle Island.

Tung-Hui Hu is an associate professor in the English department at the University of Michigan. He completed a BA in comparative literature at Princeton University, an MFA in creative writing at University of Michigan, and a PhD in film studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Hu is the author of three books of poetry, The Book of Motion (Georgia, 2003), Mine (Copper Canyon, 2007), and Greenhouses, Lighthouses (Copper Canyon, 2013), as well as a study of digital culture, A Prehistory of the Cloud (MIT, 2015). His research has been featured on CBS News and BBC Radio 4, and in the Boston Globe and New Scientist. Hu has received grants and awards from the MacDowell Colony, National Endowment of the Arts, Yaddo, San Francisco Foundation, and the University of Michigan’s Humanities Collaboratory. Hu is currently a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. In his Academy project, Hu plans to articulate the ambivalence of being caught inside digital systems of surveillance and algorithmic control.

Nadège is part of Kéfir, a cooperative in Latinamerica that seeds and nurtures libre, autonomous and feminist digital ecosystems and former co-accomplice of Laboratorio de Interconectividades. They also freelance in web/graphic design and development, translation, writing, research and consultancy in gender and tech.
&
Fernanda Monteiro is a brazilian independent technology researcher, photographer and digital artist, whose research subjects comprehend philosophy, urbanism, neuropsicology and sociology through the perspectives of technopolitics and social interseccionality. Interested in multisensoriality, urban exploration, feminisms, artificial inteligence, with a passion for creation and change. She contributes as a maintainer for Marialab Hackerspace and also as technical consultant for InfoPreta and Vedetas feminist infrastructure.

Pedro Oliveira holds a Ph.D in Design Research from the Universität der Künste Berlin. He is also one half of "A Parede" and one-eighth of the "Decolonising Design" group.
Oliveira is currently a lecturer and research associate in Media and Cultural Studies at the Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf (Germany).
His research investigates the coloniality of sonic violence, with a focus on articulations of racialized police violence and the policing of bodies through sound and listening practices. Through his artistic work he also intervenes on decolonizing pathways of sonic insolence and auditory fabulation.

Further Reading

Key references

(O) = Open Access
(S) = Available online, Shadowlibraries
(NA) = Not available for free online

(O) Lauren Berlant, The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0263775816645989

(S) Geoffrey C. Bowker & Suzan Leigh Star &, Sorting things out
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/sorting-things-out
https://library.memoryoftheworld.org/b/oyizox_D9ED2wCnV8ERwlVvGbay_nCETKDI1PyrMzqzaALD5

(S) Maria Puig de la Belacasa, Nothing comes without its world: Thinking with care
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263529571_'Nothing_comes_without_its_world'_Thinking_with_care
https://sci-hub.tw/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2012.02070.x

// I get the following message when attempting to access via a VPN:
"We've picked up some unusual traffic from your network and have temporarily blocked access from your IP address. Are you a researcher? To avoid being denied access, log in if you're a ResearchGate member or create an account if you're not." --nadege

José Esteban Muñoz - Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect «--- link?
(there's a paper which is a shortened/previous version of what would become the book. I can share it later (Pedro)

Sher Doruff - Improvisational Necessity and its After Affects
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327791833_Improvisational_Necessity_and_its_After_Affects

Ben Anderson - Affect and biopower: towards a politics of life
https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/38252047/Affect_and_Biopower.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1541169310&Signature=ubT0KRw%2FsWfs%2BcWYQPIdWHnPCbI%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DAffect_and_Biopower_Towards_a_Politics_o.pdf

Raymond Williams, Structures of Feeling
https://www.uib.no/sites/w3.uib.no/files/attachments/15_williams-structures_0.pdf

(S) Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft
http://kellereasterling.com/books/extrastatecraft-the-power-of-infrastructure-space
https://library.memoryoftheworld.org/b/izBrRD7iK2r4Le4ox1Vh1ulLpKC3har2CdQTreTExCMap2sj

Books

Can we access to these books? -- nadege - Some of us have downloads and copies that we can share but mostly only of articles and papers. We are going to confront the reality of publishing too in our 'study circle' ! In the meantime, Memoryoftheworld.org is a good place to check-MG

N.Annand, A.Gupta, H.Appel, The Promise of Infrastructure (2018)
https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-promise-of-infrastructure

(S) Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism
https://www.dukeupress.edu/Cruel-Optimism/
https://library.memoryoftheworld.org/b/AR0A8pvmDsIfcQL472rrgQRXF9kfrAV1_tm3_pENY8TyDW3H

(S) Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/matters-of-care
https://library.memoryoftheworld.org/b/msw22C8c5VB2RUyZucWg6nwOdg6TPnyTt9Bwl1hNeH_F7lMQ

Tony D. Sampson,The Assemblage Brain Sense Making in Neuroculture
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-assemblage-brain

(O) Eric Snodgrass, Executions
https://muep.mau.se/bitstream/handle/2043/22834/snodgrass-executions-low.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y

(O) Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, Undercommons
http://www.tenstakonsthall.se/uploads/141-The_Undercommons_Harney_Moten.pdf

If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution’, part of the programme ‘Edition IV – Affect’ (2010-2012): Reading/Feeling

(NA) Wendy Chun, Updating to Remain the same
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/updating-remain-same

(NA) Harsha Walia – Undoing Border Imperialism (specially the last chapter "Journeys towards Decolonization")
https://www.akpress.org/undoing-border-imperialism.html
(I have an .epub of the book, I can put it somewhere for us)

Marina Garcés - Un Mundo Común
https://www.scribd.com/document/328798436/Un-Mundo-Comun-Marina-Garces

Articles

(S) Rebecca Coleman, Theorizing the present: digital media, pre-emergence and infrastructures of feeling
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09502386.2017.1413121?src=recsys
http://twin.sci-hub.tw/6614/d784b7329b6c626c9939fa22bd2c4db1/coleman2017.pdf

Laurent Berlant and Micheal Warner, Sex in Public
http://sites.middlebury.edu/sexandsociety/files/2015/01/Berlant-and-Warner-Sex-in-Public.pdf

Laurent Berlant, Structures of Unfeeling

(A) Transformative Images, Temporality and Infrastructures of feeling
https://research.gold.ac.uk/16850/1/421-780-1-PB.pdf

(O) Kara Keeling, Queer OS
http://www.zachblas.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/keeling_queer-OS_cinema-journal_2014.pdf

(O) Queer OS: A users manual
http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/56

(NA) Aryn Martin, Natasa Myers, The politics of care in technoscience
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0306312715602073

(NA) Carolyn Pedwell, Transforming habit: revolution, routine social change
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09502386.2016.1206134
https://sci-hub.tw/10.1177/0306312715602073

(NA) Carolyn Pedwell, Mediated habits
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09502386.2016.1206134
https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2016.1206134

(O) Decolonial aesthetics,
https://transnationaldecolonialinstitute.wordpress.com/decolonial-aesthetics/

(O) Spideralex & Sophie Toupin, Introduction: Radical Feminist Storytelling and Speculative Fiction: Creating new worlds by re-imagining hacking,
https://adanewmedia.org/2018/05/issue13-toupin-spideralex/

(O) Design Justice, A.I., and Escape from the Matrix of Domination by Sasha Contanza-Chock
https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/costanza-chock

(NA) Opacities: An Introduction + Biometrics and Opacity: A Conversation, a conversation with Zach Blas
http://www.zachblas.info/writings/opacities-introduction-biometrics-opacity-conversation/

John E. Drabinski - Affect and Revolution: On Baldwin and Fanon
https://ojs.uwindsor.ca/index.php/phaenex/article/view/3815

Christian Ulrik Andersen & Søren Bro Pold - Affective Interfaces: Reading-Writing the Metainterface Body

Roberto E. Barrios - Governing Affect Neoliberalism and Disaster Reconstruction
https://library.memoryoftheworld.org/#text=Governing+Affect+Neoliberalism+and+Disaster+Reconstruction&property=title

Silvia River Cusicansqui - THE HISTORICAL HORIZONS OF INTERNAL COLONIALISM
http://www.web.ca/~bthomson/bobs_files/Cusicanqui_Historical_Memory.pdf

(O) Marina Garcés - What are we capable of?
http://eipcp.net/transversal/0808/garces/en

Online magazines and news

Elvia Wilk, Trauma Machine
https://popula.com/2018/07/09/virtual-reality-empathy-trauma/

Elisa Gabbert, Is compassion fatigue inevitable
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/02/is-compassion-fatigue-inevitable-in-an-age-of-24-hour-news

The internet apologizes
http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/04/an-apology-for-the-internet-from-the-people-who-built-it.html

Oliva Rosane, Empathy Machines
http://reallifemag.com/empathy-machines/

Judith Sulevitz, Alexa should we trust you?
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/alexa-how-will-you-change-us/570844/

Texts, Projects, Inputs by Study Circle Members

Lou Cornum, The Space NDN’s Star Map
https://thenewinquiry.com/the-space-ndns-star-map/

The Irradiated International
https://datasociety.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/ii-web.pdf

Marija Bozinovska Jones
http://marijabozinovskajones.com/fascia/

Kefir & Vedetas, # from steel to skin
https://fermentos.kefir.red/english/aco-pele/

Nadege
https://www.genderit.org/feminist-talk/keywords-internet-fraying-edges-algorithmic-production

https://www.genderit.org/articles/feminist-autonomous-infrastructure-internet-battlefield-zombies-ninjas

https://www.takebackthetech.net/blog/ongoing-conversation-about-k%C3%A9fir

Tung-Hui Hu, The Prehistory of the Cloud
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/prehistory-cloud

Maya Ganesh
https://ourdataourselves.tacticaltech.org/posts/50-fintech-aadhaar-and-contesting-identities/

Constant
The Techno-Galactic Guide to Software Observation
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/tgsoguide_1806051351.pdf
Are You Being Served + A Feminist Server ...
http://areyoubeingserved.constantvzw.org/
https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/feministserver

Possible Bodies (Jara Rocha + Femke Snelting)
https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org

Pedro Oliveira
https://soundcloud.com/partido-alto/border-vocalities-quelque-chose-de-suspect-brussels/s-cUlTT
http://a-pare.de/2017/yarn-sessions/

Infra-
Objectologies' research and learning zones on the politics, ethics, erotics and aesthetics embedded on infrastructures
(mediations are gestures in roughness)
http://i--n--f--r--a.tumblr.com/about

Artistic Projects / Examples
Mediengruppe Bitnik!
Hyphen Labs
Rory Pilgrim
Elisa Giardina Papa
Erica Scourti
If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution’, programme ‘Edition IV – Affect’
Henning Nörenberg - The Embodied Affective Dimension of Collective Intentionality
Rietveld Academie - Hold Me Now – Feel and Touch in an Unreal World
Brody Condon
Paul Maheke
Ian Cheng

What is Affect Theory?
(I had to write a very reductive definition of affect theory for work a few years ago after going through priliminary literature, intended only as a VERY basic intro for those who are unlikely to parse the literature)

Affect Theory
Like most broadly-reaching theoretical umbrellas, Affect Theory, is a contested field with no uniform agreement as to what affects are and how they operate. Generally speaking, however, the ‘Affective Turn’ in discourse since the mid 90’s, can be framed as responding to the need for new modes of psycho-social analyses or approaches to the world, given the “growing dependence of contemporary political action on mediatized strategies of affection”, and, due to the increased instrumentalization of ‘affective facts’ to legitimize preemptive political tactics (i.e. politics played in the virtual realm of a threatening future, that demand action now, like the Iraq War). These ‘affective facts’, like those at work in our post-truth world, defy binary categorization of either truth or falsity, but materialize in reality because they are simply felt into being, and because they are always futural, they can never be falsified; their ‘truth value’ can be indefinitely postponed. Similarly, unreal, but highly operational nonetheless, are also the affective structures at work in sustaining certain fantasies, like the ‘good life’ in a neoliberal order - wherein hopefulness is captured by “compromised conditions of possibility” leading to a “cruel optimism”, or the pleasure of being part of a relation, despite the disabling empirical content of that relation. Not unlike ideology critique, Affect Theory concerns itself with the manipulability of bodies/subjects prior to conscious reasoning (captured by the ‘missing half-second’ of the body’s sensation of an event and it’s correlating response - a uptake of neuroscientific discovery, that has not gone undisputed).

Affect theory is less focused on constructing philosophical positions, and more attuned to processes at work between bodies; between words and their meaning; atmospheres/moods; and the circulation between signs and (material) collective bodies. Affect describes a liminal or neutral force in the interval of acting and being acted upon. ‘Neutral’, in the sense discussed by Roland Barthes, not as political indifference, but as that which complicates polar oppositions or negations; the ‘neutrality’ of affect is due to its relational, interstitial character, not because it is a category, but because it relates across categories. This neutrality highlights it’s sheer, unstructured potential in both hopeful and destructive ways, prompting Brian Massumi to ask: ‘Is affect a promise or a threat?’ Theorists following the Spinozist/Deleuzian line, portray affect as an ‘intensity’, a pre-cognitive, non-linguistic state that most often evades conscious figuration. Affects precede activity, they are unpremeditated (Kant), they are not what one feels, but what one feels with; they are what influences the intensity (quantity) of a feeling (quality), prompting several theorists to distinguish between feelings (as being personal), emotions (as socially conditioned), and affects (as prepersonal).

Affect Theory pursues the dissolving of figure/ground schemas, where the continuity or reciprocity between bodies and their environment is of primary, investigative importance. Affect Theory is largely a theorisation of the encounter between entities and bodies, be it via miniscule atmospheric perturbations (a ‘philosophy of moments’ as Henri Lefebvre suggested), or turbulent transformations) and their material, or bodily incarnation. Spanning the diverse fields of psychoanalysis, neurobiology, sociology, gender studies, sociology and politics, Affect Theory largely attempts to address the incorporation or embodiment of the nonrational atmospheric conditions of emotional transmissability and the impacts these bring to the material domain; the ways in which these precognitive forces condition and are materialized in our everyday socio-political (ideological) reality.

Marie-Louise Angerer, Bernd Bösel, Michaela Ott, introduction to Timing of Affect, eds. M.-L. Angerer, B. Bösel, M. Ott, (Zürich: Diaphenes, 2014), 7-16.
Brian Massumi, “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact”, in The Affect Theory Reader, eds. M. Gregg, G.J. Seigworth, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 52-70.
Lauren Berlant. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke UP, 2011.
Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect”, in Cultural Critique, No. 31, The Politics of Systems and Environments, Part II. (Autumn, 1995), pp. 83-109.
Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique”, in Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 434-472.
Melissa Gregg, Gregory J. Seigworth, “An Inventory of Shimmers” in The Affect Theory Reader, eds. M. Gregg, G.J. Seigworth, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 10.
Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).
Eric Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect”, in M/C Journal, Vol. 8, #6, (2005). <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php>.