[ecrea] APPS AND AFFECT Conference

APPS AND AFFECT: October 18-20, 2013

University of Western Ontario (Faculty of Information and Media Studies 
and Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism)

London, Ontario, Canada


Keynote speakers:

Jodi Dean (Hobart and William Smith Colleges)

Mark Andrejevic (Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies)

Patricia Ticineto Clough (Queens College and The Graduate School, CUNY)

Ed Keller (Parsons The New School for Design)

Alexander Galloway (New York University)

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky



Website: http://appsandaffect</x>.blogspot.ca/



There has been a palpable shift in the digital world, primarily 
motivated by the growing popularity of the iPhone model of mobile 
computing and 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 
(atapps.and.affect /at/ gmail.com) by October 1st, 2012.

For inquiries, please contact:
Svitlana Matviyenko at (svitlana.matviyenko /at/ gmail.com)
Susan M. Knabe at (sknabe /at/ uwo.ca)
Venue: Museum London (London, Ontario, Canada) http://www.museumlondon.ca/



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