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Image courtesy of Pietro Jeng, 2017.
March 2022
The Centre for Postdigital Cultures brings together postdigital media theorists, practitioners, activists and artists to critically investigate some of the core foundational concepts and values of the arts and humanities. By drawing on cross-disciplinary ideas associated with feminist theory, experimental publishing, AI and algorithmic cultures, immersive media, ludic culture, and art, space and the city, we endeavor to help 21st century society and its cultural institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, museums etc.) respond to the challenges they face in relation to the digital at a global, national and local level.
Highlights
- Project Start SPACEX: Spatial Practices in Art & Architecture for Empathetic Exchange
- GameChangers wins gold in the QS Reimagine Education Awards
- 'Women’s Health Technology Could Be So Much More Than Period Trackers' by Lindsay Balfour
- 28th -31st March: Educational Metaverse session at EDUCON 2022
- 7th March: Coventry Cultural Theory talk with Professor Jackie Stacey
- 24th March: Experimental Publishing VI - Critique, Intervention, and Speculation with Winnie Soon & Roopika Risam
Spotlight on CPC Research Theme:
Art, Space and the City
As part of Coventry Creates "Art and the Urban Commons" project, the Partisan Social Club has produced a poster, entitled, How to practice culture-led re-commoning of citites, which sets out a plan for commoning in the city as a part of addressing some of the fundamental inequalities present in urban space. We use the term ‘re-commoning’, in order to go beyond historical articulations of the commons as a place of shared land use, and we think (as do others) the use of commons is a contingent and iterative process of living together.
PROJECT START!
SPACEX
13 universities and academies | 16 cultural organisations across | 11 EU countries with 1 partner in Palestine
More info: https://www.spacex-rise.org @SpaceXEUH2020
Politicising Artistic Pedagogies edited by Ian Bruff and Mel Jordan
The first special issue of the Art & the Public Sphere Journal seeks to disrupt more conventional understandings of art, politics and pedagogy through deliberate juxtaposition of contributions that would not normally be seen together ranging from academic activism to guerilla art and alternative cultures of learning. The issue is also being featured on the University of Sydney's Progress in Political Economy forum.
Art and the Urban Commons Project
Spatial Practices in Art and ArChitecture for Empathetic EXchange (SPACEX) is a transdisciplinary research action that utilises secondments between academic institutions and third sector organisations in order to scope and map European spatial practices. SPACEX aims to test, map, analyse, communicate and maximize the ways in which spatial practices in art, architecture and design instigate public exchange and promote empathetic ways of living together in urban space.
Centre News
STEAM Stars Call for Educators
Are you a teacher/informal educator interested in giftedness? Do you want learn how to teach gifted learners using a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Maths) approach? The European project STEAM Stars is looking for you! Email us at: ad8063@coventry.ac.uk
Shakespeare's New Place Xtended Reality
The Xtended Reality project for Shakespeare's New Place was curtailed during the COVID-19 pandemic but is resuming shortly, we will be researching the visitor experience of virtual and augmented reality in New Place, one of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust properties in Stratford Upon Avon. The project is a collaboration between CPC, The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and AI Solve. We will be looking for budding researchers to help us through the Enhancing Futures 2022 scheme.
GameChangers Gold Winners
British Academy: Horizon Europe Pump Priming Award UK/EU
Professor Sylvester Arnab and Dr Petros Lameras won a British Academy award for developing UK-EU collaborations for investigating the evolving and emerging cultural and social identities, values and impact of European Games and play habits and practices. The aim of this project is to instigate collaborative activity between researchers at Coventry University in the UK and researchers at EU institutions acting as partners to develop a Horizon Europe Pillar 2 project proposal within the culture, creativity and inclusive society cluster.
Led by Professor of Game Science Sylvester Arnab from the Centre for Postdigital Cultures (CPC), GameChangers has won the Science of Learning award in the 2021 QS Reimagine Education Awards. Also known as the ‘Oscars of Education’, the awards are the largest in the world for teaching and learning, recognising cutting edge innovators in the world of educational technology.
'The Processual Book: How Can We Move Beyond the Printed Codex?'
In LSE Impact Blog
Discussing her recent MIT monograph Living Books: Experiments in the Posthumanities, Janneke Adema explores how open online tools have given expression to procedural aspects of scholarly publishing and points to how they provide a space in which to re-consider long-held practices regarding the academic book. Read here.
Publications
In Globalisation, Societies and Education
Social resilience has become increasingly important as we respond to the challenges the COVID-19 pandemic poses to education. As individuals, we are expected to act for the communal good by wearing masks, following social distancing and allowing contact tracing. At the institutional level, education providers have responded to the current situation to a great extent by rapidly moving education online. However, online education provision has connotations which threaten the quality of education provision for minorities (ethnic, religious, and others). This paper looks at potential scenarios of online education disadvantaging minorities and suggests principles which can guide socially resilient education transformation in response to crises like the global COVID-19 pandemic.
'Art, Politics, Pedagogy: Juxtaposing, Discomfiting, Disrupting' by Ian Bruff and Mel Jordan
The article discusses the authors' understanding of art, politics and pedagogy by drawing on Juliet Hooker’s work on juxtaposition.
Further discussion on the University of Sydney's Progress in Political Economy blog.
GATE:VET: The Handbook for Game-Based-Learning (in 4 languages)
The Handbook for Game-Based-Learning (GBL) as part of the Erasmus + GATE:VET project may be used by teachers and practitioners alike to create an awareness of theoretical and practical aspects of GBL and links to practical resources and materials that can be used for designing and delivering practice. The aim of GATE:VET is to expand the methodological repertoire of teachers at vocational schools by giving them the opportunity to enrich their classes with educational games.
The Handbook is available in English, German, Danish and Romanian.
'Women’s Health Technology Could Be So Much More Than Period Trackers' by Lindsay Balfour
In The Conversation.
"From ovulation and reproductive trackers to contraceptive microchips, in recent years, there has been a surge of digital health products marketed to women. Known as “femtech” or female technology, this rapidly evolving global industry is expected to be worth US$60 billion (£44 billion) by 2027...."
More about Lindsay Balfour's research here.
New Publications from OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS
Edited by Bernard Stiegler and the Internation Collective. Edited and translated by Daniel Ross
"The collective work that produced this book is based on the claim that today’s destructive development model is reaching its ultimate limits, and that its toxicity is generated above all by the fact that the current industrial economy is based in every sector on an obsolete physical model – a mechanism that ignores the constraints of locality in biology and the entropic tendency in reticulated computational information. In these gravely perilous times, we must bifurcate: there is no alternative."
Fabricating Publics: The Dissemination of Culture in the Post-truth Era, edited by Bill Balaskas and Carolina Rito.
"Fabricating Publics explores how cultural practitioners and institutions perceive their role in the post-truth era, by repositioning their work in relation to the notion of the “public”. The book addresses the multiple challenges posed for artists, curators and cultural activists by the conditions of post-factuality."
Fabricating Publics is published in OHP's DATA Browser series, which is edited by Geoff Cox and Joasia Krysa.
Edited by Jennifer Mae Hamilton, Susan Reid, Pia van Gelder and Astrida Neimanis
If the Anthropocene heralds both a new age of human supremacy and an out-of-control Nature ushering in a premature apocalypse, this living book insists such assumptions must be hacked. Reperforming selections from three live events staged in 2016, 2017 and 2018 in Sydney, Australia, Hacking the Anthropocene offers a series of propositions that suggest alternative entry points for understanding shifting relationships between humans and nature. Feminist, Queer, Anticolonial Propositions for Hacking the Anthropocene is an OHP Labs Seedbook.
On July 1, 2020, reforms to the Federal Copyright Act (LFDA, for its acronym in Spanish) entered into force in Mexico responding to the primarily economic requirements of the renewed free trade agreement with the United States and Canada, the USMCA. Facing these reforms, a group of Mexican and international associations and individuals raised their voices due to the numerous implications that they entailed for free speech, due judicial process, access to culture and education, technological sovereignty and their environmental impact, among others.
'Power to the Teachers: An Exploratory Review on Artificial Intelligence in Education' by Petros Lameras and Sylvester Arnab
In Information.
"This exploratory review attempted to gather evidence from the literature by shedding light on the emerging phenomenon of conceptualising the impact of artificial intelligence in education. The review utilised the PRISMA framework to review the analysis and synthesis process encompassing the search, screening, coding, and data analysis strategy of 141 items included in the corpus. Key findings extracted from the review incorporate a taxonomy of artificial intelligence applications with associated teaching and learning practice and a framework for helping teachers to develop and self-reflect on the skills and capabilities envisioned for employing artificial intelligence in education."
In Journal for Artistic Research.
"Our research focuses on the broader issue of the ‘time crisis’ as identified by sociologists, chronobiologists, and philosophers, as a result of acceleration processes driven by digital technologies and contemporary 24/7 societal norms. We address this by bringing together Helga's research on ‘uchronia’ (temporal utopia or non-time) and Kevin's anthropological perspective on designing embodied experiences."
Find out more about Uchronia.
In e-flux journal #123 Dialogues on Recursive Colonialisms, Speculative Computation, and the Techno-social edited by the Critical Computation Bureau, of which Oana Pârvan is a founding member. "The current pandemic illuminates how formal rights and legal statuses are less and less guarantees of actual equal access to welfare, public space, and mobility. Thus, at the core of a radical politics of redistribution are struggles against heterogenous bordering mechanisms, which cut across citizenship status. Both “migrants” and some citizens are turned into a source of value extraction while at the same time they are impoverished and destitute, even if this operates according to differential degrees of precarity."
(Italian) Ecologies of Care. Transfeminist Perspectives edited by Maddalena Fragnito and Miriam Tola
'Caring is a devalued job and, at the same time, a form of relationship involving humans, non-humans and technologies. What does it mean to take care at a time of soaring social inequalities, health and ecological crises? By starting from different geopolitical coordinates and transfeminist and anti-racist perspectives, the book brings together contributions that focus on the ambiguities and paradoxes of care. It explores theories and practices of self-defence, repair and healing that support bodies and communities searching for alternatives to the neoliberal organisation of care. Rather than assuming it as positive sentiment, this book problematises care to reorient it in the time ahead.'
CPC Reviews
'An Intersectional Analysis of Our Robotic Future' by Lindsay Balfour. Book review of Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures by Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora.
In the journal Cultural Studies.
"The relationship between machines and humans has been imagined across time and disciplines and, in many ways, the philosophical and social debates over robots long pre-date the hardware and technologies that make them possible..."
Guest post on Border Criminologies blog of the Faculty of Law of the University of Oxford.
Now Available Online
"During the Spineless Wonders Conference on 12 November 2021, Patrick Hart and Rebekka Kiesewetter discussed the ways in which scholarly OA output — and modes of engagement with it outside the Anglo-American global North — articulate with questions of the global, globalisation, and globality."
The City Does Not Exist by Gary Hall and Mel Jordan
Talk within the Conference City, Public Space & Body at the Institute for Creative and Culture Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths, University of London. More videos.
"The poem itself was auto-generated from a small PHP web application I wrote. By taking every line of dialogue from the Invitation to Love scenes in Twin Peaks, this site produces a randomised arrangement of those lines every time the page is refreshed." Refresh to regenerate the poem.
'Invitation to Love' Auto-generated Poetry programmed by Simon Bowie
Janneke Adema, Associate Professor in Digital Media at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University, busts a widespread myth about OA books: Publishing my book Open Access will not advance my career.
Save the dates!
Dr Petros Lameras, Prof Sylvester Arnab and Dr Panagiotis Petridis are organising a special session at the EDUCON22 conference on Morphing to an Educational Metaverse: AI, open practice, and playful designs for situated relational and immersive learning experiences. "The Educational Metaverse can push the boundaries of free human expression, empowerment, embodiment, symbolic multimodal representations, equity, openness, and cultural freedom. The special session aims to present and elucidate on immersive technologies and media that will set the grounds for realising a Metaverse for education."
7th March: Coventry Cultural Theory
Personal Value, Impersonal Subjects Jackie Stacey Professor of Media and Cultural Studies University of Manchester
Date: 7th March 2022
Time: 18:00-19:30pm (UK Time)
Venue: Online on Zoom
Language: English. Register here.
Series Information: Often defined by the term ‘auto-theory’, recent shifts in cultural theory have seen a move to self-reflexivity, creative and hybrid texts, the polemic and the memoir as a way to write theory into the fabrics of everyday life. These phenomena include new forms of feminist writing, such as those embodied by recent black, immigrant and indigenous feminist works, and new genres of queer fiction and non-fiction. What this means for the politics of everyday life remains however unaddressed. Where does theory go? What is the constituency? How does it circulate? What might be its political effects? And why is auto-theory one of the few forms of theory that is still acceptable to the literary and cultural mainstream nowadays? Organising committee: Prof Angela McRobbie, Dr Lindsay Balflour, Prof Gary Hall, Dr Adrienne Evans.
24th March: Experimental Publishing VI Symposium
Experimental Publishing VI Symposium with Winnie Soon and Roopika Risam, as part of the Post-Publishing programme. Thursday the 24th of March 5-7pm GMT, online.
More info & registration here.
This is the sixth in a series of symposia hosted by the Centre for Postdigital Cultures (CPC) exploring contemporary approaches to experimental publishing. Over the course of the series, we will ask questions about the role and nature of experimentation in publishing, about ways in which experimental publishing has been formulated and performed in the past, and ways in which it shapes our publishing imaginaries at present.
