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Playing with the News on Reddit: The Politics Game on r/The_Donald
Get PDFResearch into online forms of far-right, alt-right, populist and supremacist politics has raised questions about the extent to which social media enables or constitutes extremist affects and ideologies. Building on this research, and through a case study of how a pro-Trump community on Reddit made sense of news events and sought to contest their representation, this paper explores the relationship between games and politics, arguing that digital platforms encourage people to apprehend, interpret and contest political ideas and information as if engaged in a kind of video game. We show how the group sought to manipulate platform affordances, waging a kind of Info War rooted in an understanding of politics as a pure space of conflict. We show how social media orients people to politics, phenomenologically, through the logics, structures and narratives of online games and argue that this affects not only online behaviours but more general apprehensions of politics
"The most burning question for contemporary thinking about art": Art Competitions and the Discourse on Painting in Reproduction in Weimar Germany
No full textColour and surface functional properties of wool fabrics coated with gallnut, feijoa skin, and mango seed kernel tannin-stabilised Ag nanoparticles
Get PDFIn the textile industry, textile materials are dyed and multi-functionalised by multi-step treatments that considerably increase the environmental impacts by increasing water, and energy usage along with increasing the generation of volume of effluent. In this work, Ag nanoparticles (Ag NPs) were in-situ formed and stabilised with gallnut, feijoa fruit skin, and mango seed kernel-derived tannins, and wool fabrics were coated simultaneously with these Ag NPs in the same bath. The Ag NP treatment produced dark to light olive-brown shades on wool fabrics. The treatment conditions for the treatment with Ag NPs were optimised to achieve the best results. The colour intensity, UV radiation absorption, antibacterial activity, surface electrical resistance, and durability of the treatment to washing were assessed by various methods. The gallnut-derived tannin (GNT)-stabilised Ag NP-coated wool fabrics showed overall the best results including excellent antibacterial activity against various types of bacteria. The treatment was durable to at least 20 cycles of IWS 7A washes (equivalent to 80 domestic washes). For the 0.5% Ag NPs on the weight of fibre (owf) dosage, the UV light transmission through the trisodium citrate-stabilised Ag NP-coated fabric at 365 and 311 nm was 6.37 and 0.95% respectively, which reduced to 1.63 and 0.20% for the fabric coated with GNT-stabilised Ag NPs providing excellent protection against UV radiation. The surface resistivity of wool fabric reduced from 1.1×1012 Ohm/cm for the untreated fabric to 1.1×109 Ohm/cm for the fabric coated with 2.0% owf GNT-stabilised Ag NPs. The stabilisation of Ag NPs with GNT prolonged the wash-durability by reducing the leaching of Ag NPs from the treated fabric. The developed method could be a sustainable alternative to traditional multi-stage treatments conducted in the textile industry with toxic synthetic dyes and finishing agents for the colouration and multifunctionalisation of wool fabrics
From A-Z: an Alphabetarium of Resistance
Get PDFTo map a place is to reveal and simultaneously undo. Some maps seek clarity and borders, perceptions of common understanding, counteracting thresholds and 'non-spaces'. Maps are the prerequisite for bordering forms of geopolitics and increasingly activate technologies of surveillance. Maps attune one to a particular way of knowing that reinforces what is valued as knowledge, what is deemed knowable, usually for the extraction of goods or accessibility, such as for tourism and against vernacular forms of memory. To find the unknown within structures of the known requires time. To make one's own memory in a place, spatially and otherwise disoriented upon arriving: when you get lost, you will start to know it.
Here I map the initials of my name, from A to Z and in-between
Meditative Enquiry
Get PDFI have devised a method, as my original contribution in the PhD, that is called meditative enquiry (Stephens 2021), and am completing my PhD by publication. I propose to present a variation of meditative enquiry in the form of a type of ‘Imaginary Conversation’ combining poetry and short-form prose; a type of theoretical, speculative fiction, a type of poem and prose combination; a type of prose-poem, that interrupts itself. I can read from extracts of the text that has been sent to a publisher.
This latest enquiry is based on Maurice Blanchot’s work on ‘Reading’ in The Space of Literature as the primary source, in addition to The Writing of the Disaster, with extracts from Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace, Waiting on God, her text on Reading, as well as some other of their texts. Both thinkers were highly politically motivated. Blanchot was ‘radically engaged’ in the May 1968 protests in Paris. Weil’s political work championed the cause of French manual and factory labourers and included writing on colonialism and the French state. Other sources I draw on include naturalist writers Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Teaching a Stone to Talk, and from Thoreau who offers themes from Faith in a Seed and Waldon, who both ‘read’ nature. Freire’s, is another voice that appears at the end of the dialogue, and is very sympathetic with both Weil, and Blanchot. Freire’s words will be taken from an interview with him, in the year prior to his death, conducted by a friend, Sean Taylor. The auto-biographical operates within any meditative enquiry.
Chris Small, who was one of my teachers, gives me, as the author, a key idea in composition of the material context of music. He argues for an active verb, musiking, that always better describes music as a common event, inspired by both African and African American and folk music in particular. If musiking, like ‘poetry reading’ is always a political and relational event, it critiques the largely modern, northern - aristocratic and industrial - paradigm, and production of the solitary reader. This presentation will elaborate on my notes and citations – echoing themes of citational justice that will I relate to, as an academic of colour, through Sara Ahmed’s On being included: racism and diversity in institutional life and Living a feminist life. This relates to the above writers in multiple ways.
My recent PhD work focussed on the meta-issues of nonself through my meditation practice, writing, and reading. I define this as meditative enquiry, a form of postidentity politics, embodied practice research sympathetic with a materialist, posthumanist perspective connected with social justice.
I am part of a research group at UAL’s LCF called the SoWhat Matters Lab, which references posthumanist and feminist thinking ‘to explore and probe radical future practice models that address the interconnected climate, social, cultural, and economic crisis’.
Key reference: Stephens, T. (2021) A meditative enquiry into presence: Unmaking the autoethnographic self. Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, Vol.14 Issue 2. Available at: https://arts-london.academia.edu/Stephen
Spontaneous transmedia co-location: Integration in memory
Get PDFThe unanticipated product of a survey involving 190 non-professional readers, this first-report paper looks at the way memories from different source media overlap, along with the potential consequences of this phenomenon for existing approaches to reader behaviour.
The paper begins with a focus on how everyday readers articulate their recollection of literary works, in particular those moments they found most memorable. We identify a common situation in which participants ‘mix up’ recollections of a book's content with memories of their respective film or TV adaptations. We offer the term spontaneous transmedia co-location to describe this form of effortless recall involving memories of literary texts which spontaneously trigger memories of other, visual media. We outline five preliminary modes of spontaneous transmedia co-location (STC) and explain what they consist of.
Finally, we elaborate how STC ties into wider theories of how readers and other consumers interact with media, and how they tend to remember and otherwise connect them in a transmedia space
At the End of Work
No full textBen Cain is a multidisciplinary British artist whose practice focuses on the effects of changing work conditions on the contemporary individual. In the post-industrial era, human labour has transformed on many levels, and Cain specifically examines how these changes influence the human body, self-identity, and interpersonal relationships. His artistic work is characterised by a broad spectrum of media, encompassing installation, sculpture, photography, video, performance, text, and sound. In his first solo exhibition in Split, titled “At the Edge of Work,” he turns the exhibition space into a “pseudo-factory” using sculptural objects, spatial installations, textile works, and sound. The specific layout does not provide concrete depictions of post-work but invites the audience to reconsider what work means, looks like, and feels like in today’s world and, ultimately, explores the potential of the artist / artistic work in generating insights into key aspects of contemporary society.
In this respect, textile works that refer to traditional work clothes are especially interesting. The artist himself explains the context: “When I was an art student in the North of England in the 90’s some of my tutors wore faded cobalt blue French worker’s jackets. No doubt attracted by cut, colour, comfort, high-quality long-lasting material, but also perhaps because of a desire to align with ‘the worker’, and therefore with the idea of art being a physical and/or intellectual process that represents a kind of ‘labour’ which might be quotidian, non-rarefied, part of everyday spaces of making and producing that constitute, or more importantly invent or realise the most basic requirements of society?”
JB
The exhibition space will act as a pseudo factory involving various types of production. The individual works and the environment itself all present forms of adaptation, digestion, and coping with a life-work situation in which ‘work’ is somehow everywhere and nowhere, omnipresent, and invisible. People talk about the ‘heart being taken out’ of things, out of work, meaning that there’s a lack of feeling or humanity. Perhaps there’s a vacuum in the gap between industry and post-industry, an enormous open empty space, a ruin, a sudden shift that left a huge amount of people feeling entirely lost, disenfranchised. However, that generation is fading, and new generations might find it hard to recognise any sort of ‘heart’ in spaces of industry. Some of the sculptural works explicitly look at the deconstruction of a clear or perhaps romantic notion of the ‘worker’, some present ‘work’ with a veneer of ‘leisure’, others set up situations where labour of some sort is latent or immanent. Most of the spaces and sculptures here assume the audience to be some sort of potentially active worker within a working environment.
This exhibition is far from a comprehensive study of industrial and post-industrial work patterns and environments, but it does intend to raise questions about conditions of work that are ‘human’ (or humane), and desirable, and therefore there’s an invitation to think how and if we might work differently. The exhibition confesses to a confusion about which periods and forms of work are damaging or liberating in terms of the potential of individuals and communities to impact positively on one-another and their environment, i.e., to realise agency, social consciousness and fulfilment. Should we expect any of these things from our engagement with ‘work’? It's clear that work or labour is increasingly omnipresent in all our lives (automation hasn’t given us a post-work leisure utopia, and most of the ‘leisure’ activities we are pursuing are the work of ‘working-out’, bench-pressing, replacing for example die-casting), and so it feels necessary to continually ask how we used to work, how we work now, and how we want to work – these are some of the questions this exhibition wants to struggle with.
The contemporary worker’s body is dispersed in actual space, virtual space, and in time, working on demand, over-time and with no set hours. Perhaps in the case of ‘industrial labour’, although often displaced, and travelling across borders to find work, the body is static. All the body’s moves happen in one small area, and in tight bond with its’s machine. But what about office-work, desk-based work prevalent since the mid 19thC, McDonald’s – is that industrial labour, service industry, or both and more?
A clear idea of what work is, what it looks like and where it takes place has been dismantled and with it a coherent sense of self? But we ought to be very careful about a promoting a notion of the heroic dignified worker – it’s clearly the product of myth, nostalgia, and romance? There’s no denying that the material and spatial, sculptural in fact, characteristics of industrial labour are deeply impressive, attractive, phenomenal, even awesome, and these factors make it easy for that period of work to be aestheticized, smothered in nostalgia, exoticized and consequently monetarized through for example the hip re-branding of workwear by everyone from top-end fashion houses, to domestic-scale ‘artisan’ production houses, down to mundane hyper-conservative high-street stores such as Gap.
The majestic sunlight on monumental structures and beautiful erstwhile ruddy-cheeked faces in the images of Tošo Dabac and Walker Evans is deeply captivating and persuades us of the dignity of that work -and not unreasonably- the euphoria of socialism and the familial support and comfort of work-place community. Everywhere we are surrounded by the contemporary lack of this type of work? This work, and that world, is omni-present in the landscape of many European countries, in cultural industries inhabiting ex-factory space ruins, and in the ‘chore jackets’ on everyone’s backs that are now cultural icons. The ruins of work are acutely visible. Faced with the constant presence of the signs of what work apparently once was before some workers became walking commodities and PR assistants to themselves, it’s hard not to think about the role of ‘work’ in our lives and our society, and with all this in mind, it’s hard for me not to make work about work.
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Television will archive itself: Channel 4’s role in revalorising ‘old’ TV
Get PDFA notable feature of Channel 4’s scheduling in the 1980s was the extent to which it drew upon repeats of archive television, long-unseen US and UK sitcoms and cult dramas either providing a nostalgic reminder of yesteryear or being discovered afresh by new generations. In addition, the themed archive evenings that began at Christmas 1982, culminating in 1992's extensive TV Heaven season, now seem prescient in an era when digital channels such as GOLD, Yesterday, Dave and Talking Pictures TV draw extensively upon the archive to compile their schedules. Channel 4’s use of archive programming receives little attention in academic histories, aside of Maggie Brown’s dismissal of its repeats as ‘tellyfilla’. This article redresses the balance, drawing upon publicity material from Channel 4’s press packs, research into patterns of repeats and original interviews with those involved in the curatorial process to investigate the extent to which Channel 4’s decision to revisit the archives was born of economic pragmatism, or was in fact a conscious act of contextualisation, re-evaluation and revalorisation
Maud Sulter: You are my kindred spirit
No full textThis immersive exhibition of the Scottish-Ghanaian poet, artist, photographer, writer, curator, gallerist and publisher Maud Sulter (1960 – 2008) showcases Sulter’s rarely-screened entire art film corpus, together with photographic series based on her family archives, spoken word performances of her poetry, and the soundscapes she created for her installations. Key themes include her explorations of family and kinship, her experiences of growing up in Glasgow in her white, working-class family, the erasures and (in)visibilities of women of colour including Jeanne Duval, best known as the companion of poet Charles Baudelaire, Berthe Mason, the “mad woman in the attic” in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the many Afro-German women murdered in Nazi Germany