[ecrea] Digital Infrastructures and Economy, International Symposium & Masterclasses

*Digital Infrastructures and Economy, International Symposium*

*Digital Life Research Program, Institute for Culture and Society*

*Western Sydney University, Parramatta Campus, 3-5 November 2015*

http://www.westernsydney.edu.au/ics/home

*Event organizers: *Ned Rossiter, Juan Francisco Salazar and Liam Magee

*Summary*

Digital media technologies of Internet communication and software
coupled with supporting infrastructures of storage and transmission have
resulted in the production, sharing and distribution of knowledge and
culture on scales previously unseen in the history of human life. More
recently, the rise of big data analytics associated with sensor
technologies and the biometric monitoring of social, urban, industrial
and ecological systems has seen the empirical being redefined by
algorithmic operations. It is no surprise that finance capital and new
economies of exchange are closely tied to many of these developments.
Spot rates, for example, are hedged against the delivery times of
shipping containers in the maritime industries. Health industries are
flourishing with the widespread adoption of consumer self-tracking
devices and the scramble for standards designed to subsume life into
measures optimised for the sale of medical products. The quantified self
has become the exemplary subject around which the design and
distribution of a wide array of knowledges across life and labour is
organized.

Within this maelstrom of change, knowledge orientates itself across
public and private institutions, unbound from the university and its
attendant ecologies of knowledge production. But while users have come
to play a central role in the reorganization of how knowledge is
created, distributed and valorised, their influence on the
infrastructures structuring and sustaining these knowledges has been
especially limited. At the same time, the infrastructural dimension of
digital economies is receiving increasing attention, from the shift to
low-latency networks and centralized storage systems to the logistical
technologies ensuring the synchronization of networked activities.

Within such contexts, it makes sense to move outward from the user, now
situated and redefined as a node of multiple infrastructures. Yet rather
than focusing on this networked self, or the urban equivalent of
Sassen’s global city, this international symposium maps these
overlapping infrastructures that constitute users as a new kind of
economic and epistemological subject. Such an undertaking is no longer a
matter of making visible the invisible. What needs to happen is an
exploration of how the digital economy changes the way we understand and
constitute infrastructure. To effectively address such concerns, the
need to develop a conceptual idiom capable of comprehending the scope of
digital infrastructures and their economies becomes all the more
apparent: from anonymous grassroots activists in support of independent
media to hackers able to control industrial infrastructures, from the
anonymity of high-frequency trading that complicates the analyses of
financial crises to the anonymity of users who prefer to cooperate in
their exodus from the world of corporate communications infrastructures.

Cutting across sociology, media theory, cultural research, anthropology,
science and technology studies, economic geography, computer science,
urbanism and design, this two-day international symposium and
masterclasses address topics such as the following:

- Media infrastructures

- Cultural infrastructures

- Logistical infrastructures

- Management infrastructures

- Knowledge infrastructures

- Finance infrastructures

- Transactional infrastructures

- Health infrastructures

- Human rights infrastructures

- Polar infrastructures

- Post-planetary infrastructures

Participant numbers for both events are limited, so please be sure to
register (details below). Registration is free.

*Digital Infrastructures and Economy Masterclasses*

3 November 2015

Venue: EB3.17 Parramatta South

10.30-12.30 – Tomás Ariztía, Universidad Diego Portales

‘Researching Knowledge Making Practices in Market Settings: From
Creative Spaces to Digital Infrastructures’

Register for this masterclass at:

https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/masterclass-with-tomas-ariztia-tickets-19245340331

http://tinyurl.com/o4sbtoh

2-4pm – Akseli Virtanen, Robin Hood, Robin Hood Minor Asset Management
Cooperative

‘Finance as a Place of Creation: Hacking Finance Capital with
Parasitical Algorithms’

Register for this masterclass at:

https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/masterclass-with-akseli-virtanen-tickets-19245415556

http://tinyurl.com/qeb3qst

*Digital Infrastructures and Economy International Symposium *

4-5 November 2015

Day 1: EZ.G.36, Female Orphan School (Westwing), Parramatta South

Day 2: EB3.17, Parramatta South

Register for the symposium at:

https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/digital-infrastructures-and-economy-international-symposium-tickets-19245875933

http://tinyurl.com/oaolqze

*Program*

*4 November – Symposium Day 1*

10am – coffee/tea, registration

10.20-10.30am – Welcome: Professor Paul James, Director, ICS

10.30am – Introductory comments: Ned Rossiter, Liam Magee, Juan
Francisco Salazar

10.45-12.15 – Mark Burry, ‘Gaudí, Cerdà and Big Data: Pre and Post
Digital Infrastructure Challenges and Opportunities’

12.15-1.15 – lunch

1.15-2pm – Tanya Notley, ‘Satellites as Human Rights Infrastructure’

2-3.30 pm – Justine Humphry, ‘Infrastructures of Survival: New Relations
of Inclusion and Exclusion in the Digital Reform of Health and
Emergency Services’

3.30-4pm – afternoon tea/coffee

4-5.30pm – Tomás Ariztía, ‘Consumer Databases as Practical Accomplishments’

*5 November – Symposium Day 2*

10 – coffee

10.15-11.45am – Akseli Virtanen, ‘Social Architecture for Distributed
Capital: Robin Hood 2.0’

11.45am-1.15pm – Laura Lotti, ‘There is no Blockchain without Bitcoin:
Toward a New Mode of Accounting (for) in Distributed Networked Economies’

1.15-2pm – lunch

2-3.30 – Armin Beverungen, ‘Managed by Machines? Enterprise Software,
Corporate Power, Algorithmic Management’

3.30-4pm – afternoon tea/coffee

4-5.30pm – Juan Francisco Salazar, ‘Polar Infrastructures’**

5.30-6pm – Closing panel


—
Ned Rossiter
Professor of Communication
Institute for Culture and Society /
School of Humanities and Communication Arts
Western Sydney University
Parramatta Campus
Locked Bag 1797
Penrith NSW 2751
Australia


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