[ecrea] Conference: APPS AND AFFECT, University of Western Ontario, October 2013, CFP

APPS AND AFFECT

Faculty of Information and Media Studies (FIMS)

Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism (CSTC)

University of Western Ontario

London, Ontario, Canada

October 2013

There has been a palpable shift in the digital world, primarily 
motivated by the growing popularity of the raise of an app as a new 
signifier, media object, and technique of ubiquitous computing.  
Although the term has been in use colloquially since 2009 (following 
Apple’s iPhone ad campaign built upon the slogan “There’s an app for 
that”), the rapid adoption of the term and the tool was unforeseen by 
media theorists.  Nonetheless, many social, cultural and media theorists 
predict the death of the Web, the reinforcement of control and 
censorship of the online content, and the end of a general purpose 
computer (Zittrain). Whereas the logic and environment of the Web is one 
of open, free, and constantly changing or updating (i.e. mutating) 
networks, it is argued that mobile computing operates upon semi-closed 
platforms that are driven by specialty software with single-purpose 
designs (Anderson and Wolff).

How do apps as ‘cultural technique’ (Siegert) and ‘technics’ (Stiegler) 
channel our ways of maintaining relations with/in media environment?  Do 
the specific and circumscribed operations of individual applications 
foster or foreclose what media theorists call the transformative and 
transductive potential of collective technological individuation 
(Simondon)? Do apps represent “a new reticular condition of 
transindividuation grammatising new forms of social relations” 
(Stiegler)? Or do they signal instead the triumph of “regulatory” 
networks over “generative” ones (Zittrain)? This conference sets out to 
examine the relations between mobile apps and their networked/internet 
context.

Possible paper topics / fields of inquiry include (but not limited to):

Apps and affect: connecting technical objects and the constitution of 
subjectivity, information and feeling, data and desire, as well as 
organic and inorganic machines. How is the mutual circulation of apps 
and affects constitutive of new biopolitical assemblages in zones of 
work and consumption, surveillance and escape, trauma and therapy, 
laboratory and studio? App ‘addiction’, and habit-formation (e.i. 
mnemotechnics and technical prostheses, attentional forms and the 
psychical effects of application software).

Apps and the networking drive: facilitating the enactment of the loss of 
symbolic efficiency; assisting the force shared within the network that 
circulates in order to produce satisfaction despite missing the aim of 
grasping the desired, yet unreachable object – the setting for our 
activity as communicating subjects of the network.

Apps and political economy: micro-object of digital labour, virtual 
consumption  and networked value extraction; tether to branded mobile 
platforms, trading- off openness, to  attract developers and consumers, 
against  profit-harvesting, from sales and surveillance; site of new 
pirate, hacking and jail-breaking practices; a new front line between 
cognitive capital and communal digitization.

Apps and trans-individuation or disassociation: the fostering and/or 
foreclosing of technical trans-individuation and new forms of social 
relations by apps; apps and the implications of ubiquitous computing and 
digital mediation, especially ambi-informatic ‘everyware’ (Greenfield).  
How might we think about the social, political and technical 
implications of such this movement away from 
open-ended/trans-individuating networks like the internet towards 
specific, focused, and individualized modes of computing?

Send abstracts of 250 words to the conference committee at 
(apps.and.affect /at/ gmail.com) by September 8th, 2012.

For inquiries:

Susan M. Knabe at (sknabe /at/ uwo.ca)

Svitlana Matviyenko at (svitlana.matviyenko /at/ gmail.com)

Conference information can be found here: http://appsandaffect.blogspot.ca


Conference committee:

Nandita Biswas Mellamphy

Nick Dyer-Witheford

Alison Hearn

Susan M. Knabe

Svitlana Matviyenko


--
Alison Hearn,
Associate Professor
Rogers Chair of Studies in Journalism and New Information Technology,
Coordinator, Media Studies Graduate Program
Faculty of Information and Media Studies,
North Campus Building,
University of Western Ontario,
London, Ontario
Canada
N6A 5B7

Phone: 519-661-2111 ext. 81228
email: (ahearn2 /at/ uwo.ca)

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