Code Drift

CTHEORY is an international peer-reviewed journal of theory, technology and culture edited by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. Articles, interviews, and key book reviews in contemporary discourse are published weekly as well as theorizations of major “event-scenes” in the mediascape. CODE DRIFT: Essays in Critical Digital Studies is a special issue based on the work presented at two workshops held at the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture, University of Victoria and the first of a continuing series of publications and workshops on the digital future.

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Prefaced by the Kroker’s, CODE DRIFT contains the following 15 essays:

1. Code Drift by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
2. Fractal Philosophy (and the small matter of learning how to listen): Attunement as the Task of Art by Johnny Golding
3. Illuminated Darkness: Nightmares, Blind Spots and Biofeedback by Ted Hiebert
4. Digital Resisto(e)rs by William Bogard
5. Something is Happening by Jordan Crandall
6. A Conversation with Spirits Inside the Simulation of a Coast Salish Longhouse by Jackson 2Bears
7. Becoming Dragon: A Transversal Technology Study by Micha Cardenas
8. Lenticular Galaxies – Aesthetic Debates in Data Visualization by Sara Diamond
9. Toward a Theory of Critical Computing: The Case of Social Identity Representation in Digital Media Applications by D. Fox Harrell
10. Moving Across the Internet: Code-Bodies, Code-corpses, and Network Architecture by Christopher Parsons
11. Code and The Technical Provenance of Nihililsm by Brad Bryan
12. Creative Destruction Versus Restrictive Practices: Deleuze, Schumpeter and Capitalism’s Uneasy relationship with Technical Innovation by Simon Glezos
13. Digital Magic, Cybernetic Sorcery: On the Cultural Politics of Fascination and Fear by Stephen Pfohl
14. A Sonic Economy by Stephen Kennedy
15. Atmospheric Alienation, Carbon Tracking and Geo-Techno Agency by Anita Girvan

FROM THE PREFACE

Tracing the curve of technology as it now arcs relentlessly, and with no small measure of ideological hubris, towards mobility, connectivity and augmentation, a creative group of digital theorists gathered at PACTAC on two occasions — June 2009 and March 2010 — to collectively consider the specter of the digital future. Travelling from many different parts of the digital spectrum — visual artists, photographers, philosophers, computer theorists, performance artists, thinkers of the sonic, capitalist and genomic economies — there was a very real sense of code drift in the air. Somehow within the creative mystery of collective reflection on a common digital project, barriers to thought were successfully eclipsed by the creative imagination, allowing the full complexity of the digital future to reveal itself. How else to explain what happened: stories of code drift inflected by the rich imaginary of fractal philosophy, becoming dragon, illuminated darkness, digital resisto(e)rs, technology as magic, lenticular galaxies, phantasmal media, digital conversations in a coast Salish longhouse, and augmented realities in life and fiction. Here, the spirits of many different thinkers, from Borges to Deleuze, were summoned to stand at the gateway of the digital future, not so much to haunt the present as to remind us again and again that in Code Drift: Essays in Critical Digital Studies there is rehearsed anew the traditional practice of the intellectual imagination — namely mixing past, present and future into sensitive attunements for understanding issues related to technology and society.

—Arthur and Marilouise Kroker

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To view the complete CODE DRIFT online, please visit: CTHEORY.NET

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