Abstracts
Ned Rossiter –
001 Report: Creative Labour and the role of Intellectual Property
This article reports on findings from a survey posted to the fibreculture
mailing list prior to the 3rd annual fibreculture meeting in Brisbane
this July. Broadly speaking, the survey was interested in the extent
to which the exploitation of intellectual property defines the condition
of labour within the creative industries. At a methodological level,
the article challenges prevailing assumptions about conducting empirical
research in new media studies and enlists a processual media theory
approach as a technique for drawing out the relationships between
the condition of creative labour and reflexive, non-linear media-information
systems of communication. Central to this article is an argument
about the merits of the Italian autonomist concept of 'immaterial
labour' against what I term 'disorganised labour'. The article suggests
that the latter more accurately describes the current condition
of creative labour. The article concludes by advocating the political
strategy of organising creative labour in the form of networks rather
than the traditional model of the party, as adopted by various unions.
Gillian Fuller
– 002 Perfect
Match: Biometrics and Body Patterning in a Networked World
Bodies are increasingly becoming collectively integrated into informational
processes which are open to biotechnical forms of regulation. Biometrics,
the use of body measurements such as retina scanning, face recognition
and fingerprinting is now being uncontroversially introduced throughout
the world under the aegis of security and efficient traffic management.
Fields that once molded the individual through bodily confinement
and observation are dispersing and converging into the regimes of
logistics and control.
This paper looks at the operations of biometrics to consider the
biopolitical ramifications of body measurement as power is made
operational by controlling movement via the haptic techniques of
information architecture rather than the more familiar modes of
discipline and panoptical vision machines. Biometrics is the perfect
control for the networked individual as we divide across infinite
planes and dimensions, reconfiguring endlessly to become pattern
matches in expanding databases of everyday life.
Jon Marshall –
003 Internet Politics
in an Information Economy
It is argued that models of the "new" Information economy
are in many ways incompatible with the more free wheeling modes
of exchange which were part of the traditions of online society.
The so called "hacker ethic" built around the prestation
of open or free software seems to be under challenge, and not, as
Pekka Himanen suggests, the forerunner of a new freer society. Knowledge
workers may not be particularly powerful, or part of any kind of
democratic vanguard. A contestation over types of property is occurring
and apparently being won by the corporate sector. Furthermore it
seems the "information society" may favour inaccuracies
and certainty in information, rather than a kind of problem solving
democracy based on factuality. As a result expectations that the
Internet may lead to a revitalisation of democracy, or discussion,
are probably over optimistic.
Stephen Stockwell
and Adam Muir –
004 The Military-Entertainment
Complex: A New Facet of Information Warfare
The second Gulf War will become synonymous with the emergence of
fully-fledged information warfare where the military-entertainment
complex has so influenced strategic and logistic possibilities that
it becomes apparent that the war was waged as entertainment. This
is entertainment not as an amusement or diversion but utilising
the techniques and tropes of the burgeoning entertainment industry
as a means to achieve military objectives. This paper offers a short
history of the military-entertainment complex as reality and simulation
become fused in the practices of the US military machine. The paper
then briefly explores three central aspects of this phenomenon evident
in recent developments: the military function of computer games;
the role of the Hollywood scenario and the blurring between news
and reality TV. Finally the suggestion is made that subverting,
co-opting and reconstructing the military-entertainment complex
provides new possibilities for alternative strategies of information
warfare.
Belinda Barnet –
005 The Erasure of
Technology in Cultural Critique
How can we think technology in its material specificity? Contemporary
critical theory treats technology as a trope or representation rather
than a physical reality in the world. The "machine" is
not just a metaphor for a particular technology, but for technology
itself. And at a deeper level, this metaphor enframes technology
within a semiotically constituted field. US critic Mark Hansen argues
that this perspective gives us no access to the materiality of technology
itself, to its impact on our embodied lives. We should abandon the
systemic-semiotic approach, or at least find an alternative.
In this essay I explore Hansen’s argument and claim that it
constructs this as a choice – we either approach technology
through the body, or we approach it through language. I argue for
a different reading: a reading which does not create a choice between
text and materiality, text and technology – but at the same time,
a reading which does not depend entirely on cognition and representation,
which does not dissolve materiality into thought. I want to think
technology as at once material opacity and as representation. And
I believe that the elements for this can actually be found in the
work of Bernard Stiegler and Jacques Derrida.
I want to extricate a politics of technology that sacrifices neither
side of the equation, that addresses the specificities of new media
technology through the concept of the archive.
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