Transcriptions

The English Department’s Transcriptions Center presents the 5th Annual Research Slam

Friday, May 25, 2012
1 pm – 5:00 pm
University of California, Santa Barbara
Department of English
South Hall 2509

One of the goals of UCSB’s Transcriptions Center is to investigate and highlight innovative ways of combining traditional humanities research with information media and technology. In this tradition, the Transcriptions Center is hosting the fifth annual Research Slam to showcase the unique work done by scholars interested in these intersections.

The goal of the Research Slam is to combine the best features of traditional academic humanities venues like lectures and roundtables with the free-flowing and participatory focus of the poster session and poetry slam. The format includes a series of parallel presentations, followed by a plenary discussion at the end of the afternoon.

A Research Slam is:

• Non-linear intellectual encounters
• Smaller, more personalized discussions, followed by a large group session
• Multi-media, multi-modal, multi-temporal
• Inclusive of faculty and students
• Performative, interactive, playful
• Burning man without the fire
• A Poetry/Art slam without the judging
• Interested in new paradigms of sharing scholarly work

A Research Slam is not:

• Hierarchically divided into presenters & audience
• Rigidly structured
• Quiet
• Lecture-based
• Traditional

Simon Biggs, “Multiple Voices, Multiple Perspectives”
Friday, April 6, 12:00pm
SH 2635

Transcriptions is pleased to host media artist Simon Biggs on Friday, April 6, for a lecture about his practice.

Simon Biggs (born Adelaide, Australia 1957. UK since 1986)
is a media artist, writer and curator with interests in digital poetics,
auto-generative/interpretive (affective) systems, interactive and performative
environments, interdisciplinary research and co-creation. His work has been
widely presented, including at Tate Modern, Institute of Contemporary Arts,
Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts, Kettles Yard, Pompidou Centre, Academy de
Kunste, Berlin Kulturforum, Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Maxxi Rome, Macau Arts Museum,
San Francisco Cameraworks, Walker Art Center and Art Gallery of New South Wales.
He has been keynote at many conferences and lectured internationally, including
ISEA, ePoetry, SLSA and FILE conferences and Cambridge, Brown, Newcastle,
Cornell, Paris8, Sorbonne and Bergen Universities, amongst others. Publications
include Autopoeisis (with James Leach, 2004), Great Wall of China (1999), Halo
(1998), Magnet (1997) and Book of Shadows (1996). He is lead investigator on a
number of major research projects and Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts,
Edinburgh College of Art at the University of Edinburgh, where he directs the
Masters by Research in Interdisciplinary Creative Practices and several PhD
students. http://www.littlepig.org.uk http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/

Transcriptions is pleased to sponsor a lecture by Jessica Pressman in spring term. She will be speaking on “The Undead Book: Jonathan Safron Foer’s Tree of Codes as Bookwork.”

Date:  Wednesday, April 4 (3pm)

Jessica Pressman is Assistant Professor of English at Yale, where she works on literary experiments from the 20th and 21st centuries and across media forms. Her first book project, Digital Modernism: Making it New in New Media, reads contemporary works of digital literature in relation to literary modernism and her current research, which she will present, focuses on how 21st-century literature—both in print and online— responds to the threat of an increasingly paperless and multimodal society.

Speculative Futures invites you to a talk by Professor Marieke de Goede. Professor de Goede will be speaking about her new book, Speculative Security: The Politics of Pursuing Terrorist Monies. Please join us Friday, March 9th 2012 at 11:00am in South Hall 2509. Marieke de Goede is professor of politics at the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of Virtue, Fortune, and Faith: A Genealogy of Finance (Minnesota, 2005) and coeditor, with Louise Amoore, of Risk and the War on Terror.

Visit the Speculative Futures website for more information.

CONTAGION/CONTROL: Speculative Futures Graduate Colloquium
University of California, Santa Barbara
May 10-11, 2012
Keynote Speaker: Priscilla Wald
Details at Website

The recent fabrication of the N5N1 supervirus in a Dutch lab, manufactured in an effort to preempt possible bioterrorism, draws attention to the contemporary interpenetration of discourses on risk, security, and infection. The ensuing media frenzy emphasizes the uncanny alignment of science and fiction and foregrounds the potential risk of global catastrophe. The scale of threats such as this has invited the mobilization of a number of containment strategies, including the modeling of pandemics, the mapping of disease networks, and the performance of emergency management scenarios. Such threats also emphasize particular relationships between the local and the global: the asymmetrical production and distribution of risk and discrepancies between spaces of contagion and places of control. Furthermore, outbreak narratives are typically caught between the temporal imaginaries of immediate threat and the always unknowable future. We invite proposals of 200-250 words for graduate student papers or presentations that address questions of contagion, control and tactics that disrupt such control. We especially welcome non-traditional presentations and interventions. Possible topics include:

biopolitics
mutation
borders
surveillance
security
sabotage/play
speculation
global north/global south
zoonoses
transmediation/bioinformatics
viral media
the “doom boom”
simulation/modeling

This colloquium is part of UCSB’s Speculative Futures series. Please send abstracts and a short bio to: speculativefutures@gmail.com no later than March 10, 2012.

The Transcriptions Center, in conjunction with a number of courses, will be hosting a screening of Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell. The film explores the question of humanity and its relation to machines, especially cyborgs and androids. An urban cyberpunk adventure that probes philosophical, moral, and aesthetic issues, the film is relevant to a variety of contemporary discourses including those of the posthuman and security. Please join us tomorrow, Wednesday 2/22 at 4pm in SH 2617.

***CALL FOR PARTICIPATION***

Transcriptions and the Arnhold Undergraduate Research Fellows Program present the 5th Annual
Research Slam

Friday, May 25, 2012
1 pm – 5:30 pm
University of California, Santa Barbara
Department of English
South Hall (various locations)

One of the goals of UCSB’s Transcriptions Center is to investigate and highlight innovative ways of
combining traditional humanities research with information media and technology. In this tradition, the
Transcriptions Center and the English Department’s Arnhold Undergraduate Research Fellows Program
are hosting the fifth annual Research Slam to showcase the unique work done by scholars interested in
these intersections.

The goal of the Research Slam is to combine the best features of traditional academic humanities venues
like lectures and roundtables with the free-flowing and participatory focus of the poster session and poetry
slam. The format includes a series of parallel presentations, followed by a plenary discussion at the end
of the afternoon.

A Research Slam is:

• Non-linear intellectual encounters
• Smaller, more personalized discussions, followed by a large group session
• Multi-media, multi-modal, multi-temporal
• Inclusive of faculty and students
• Performative, interactive, playful
• Burning man without the fire
• A Poetry/Art slam without the judging
• Interested in new paradigms of sharing scholarly work

A Research Slam is not:

• Hierarchically divided into presenters & audience
• Rigidly structured
• Quiet
• Lecture-based
• Traditional

The Transcriptions Center is now soliciting multimedia projects, research posters, and other creative or
scholarly works taking advantage of the intersections between culture, information and technology to
showcase at the Slam, regardless of department, class level, or period of focus of the contributor. If you
think your project fits the structure of the event, we invite you to participate!

Here are some suggestions for possible presentation formats:
• posters
• original media pieces
• software / hardware demonstrations
• performative scholarship
• live coding
• audio work
• robots
• short films
• digitized interpretation

Project descriptions are due on Friday, April 22, 2011. Please send a 300 word abstract, a short bio and
any equipment requirements to transcriptions.ucsb@gmail.com.

Friday, February 10
12:00pm
Transcriptions SH 2509
Light refreshments

Please join us for Dr. Jussi Parikka’s video lecture entitled “What is Media Archaeology?” Because of the format, the talk will be somewhat shorter than usual and the Q&A somewhat longer.

Dr Jussi Parikka is media theorist, writer and Reader in Media & Design at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton). Parikka has a PhD in Cultural History from the University of Turku, Finland and in addition, he is Adjunct Professor (“docent”) of Digital Culture Theory at the University of Turku, Finland. In addition, he is a Senior Fellow at the Winchester Centre for Global Futures in Art Design & Media.

Parikka’s books include Koneoppi, (2004, in Finnish) and Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses is published by Peter Lang, New York, Digital Formations-series (2007). The recently published Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (2010) focuses on the media theoretical and historical interconnections of biology and technology and was published in the University of Minnesota Press Posthumanities-series. The co-edited collection The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture is published by Hampton Press, and Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, Implications came out with University of California Press (June 2011). In addition, the edited collection Medianatures: The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste is out in the new Living Books About Life-project (Open Humanities Press). His next book, What is Media Archaeology?, is forthcoming in Spring 2012 from Polity Press.

His articles have been published e.g. in Theory, Culture & Society, CTheory, Media History, Parallax, Postmodern Culture, Game Studies and Fibreculture, as well as in several Finnish journals and books. In addition to English and Finnish, his texts have been published in Portuguese, Polish, and Indonesian. Currently Parikka is interested in the concept of the aesthetico-technical.

Friday January 13th, 2012
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB, 2–6 pm

Catastrophic events produce radical uncertainty. The temporality of such events varies: they could be sudden, unexpected, but ever–possible (e.g. natural disasters or terrorist attacks) or protracted events whose long duration escapes the human imagination (e.g. radiation toxicity). Speculative projections of disaster, catastrophe, and crisis trigger endless efforts at securing a collective future against various forms of macroscalar destruction. This symposium hosts two distinguished speakers, Professor Peter van Wyck (Professor of Communications Studies, Concordia University, Montréal) and Professor Andrew Lakoff (Professor of Anthropology, University of Southern California), who have variously addressed speculations of catastrophe in their work. Professor van Wyck has written extensively on nuclear threats (Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat, 2005) and Professor Lakoff on public health and biosecurity (Disaster and the Politics of Intervention, ed., 2010).

Speakers: Professor Peter Van Wyck (Concordia University) and Professor Andrew Lakoff (USC)

An Archive of Threat, Peter Van Wyck

I will be presenting a text in development that attempts to follow an itinerary of images from Signs of Danger, and Highway of the Atom. In this text I trace a route from Canada’s far north, to Japan, Finland and New Mexico. A history written not with lightening, but close; a history written with the energy of restless, recalcitrant matter. I want to convey some small piece of this story of the nuclear, at least as I have been following it. For this, to paraphrase Isabelle Stengers, is not simply a matter of power, but an affair of a process, or processes that one must follow. Here, as elsewhere, my concern is about the constellation of effects wrought by atomic and nuclear threats and disaster. In particular I am interested in aspects of memory in relation to traumatic transformations of place, of landscape.

Biopolitics in Real Time: The Actuary and the Sentinel in Global Health, Andrew Lakoff

Focusing on recent developments in biosecurity and global health, this talk contrasts two ways of understanding and managing catastrophic disease threats. Whereas an actuarial approach projects the past into the future, a sentinel–based approach assumes that the future cannot be known and that one must remain vigilantly prepared for surprise.

Oct.14 (Fri), 2-5 pm
Symposium: Perspectives on Risk
(Wallis Annenberg conference room at SSMS 4315)

Serving as an introduction to programs on “Speculative Futures” (the Critical Issues in America theme for 2011-2), the talks offer both history and post-mortem: the pasts of contemporary risk discourse and the impact of thinking about futures on the present.

2:00-3:00
Professor Wolf Kittler (UCSB), “Origins of Risk”

The talk will trace the long history of risk. First used by dolce stil novo poets in the thirteenth century, the word was soon applied to maritime insurance by North Italian bankers, “the Pope’s Merchants,” as they were called, who brought the word and the idea from Lombardy to Lombard Street in London. After the Italians had been expelled, their business was taken over by the coffee house owner Edward Lloyd and his descendants who made a fortune in the slave trade. At the end of the nineteenth century, when new forms of danger had emerged in the industrial revolution, the Accident Insurance Act, which was issued by the new German Reich in 1884, transferred the term risk from maritime law to the legislation on firm land. Since Ulrich Beck’s book Risk Society, which was published in 1986, the extension of the term has acquired global dimensions.

3:00-3:30       Coffee Break

3:30-4:30
Professor Colin Milburn (UC Davis), “Post-mortem: the Necrosis of Nanotechnology”

This talk will attend to the necropolitics of the molecular sciences, the ways in which nanotechnology and related fields now mobilize dead matter–even the concept of death as such–in the service of a speculative “postmortal” future, making death a new way of life. It is about various technical agendas to produce life after death, to reanimate, to resurrect dead bodies–both human and nonhuman. It is about the speculative visions that inhabit the technological present. In other words, this talk is about zombies.

Transcriptions, begun in 1998, focuses on work in digital humanities and new media.  Our overall goal is “to build a working paradigm of a humanities department of the future that takes the information revolution to its heart as something to be seriously learned from, wrestled with, and otherwise placed in engagement with the lore of [...]