<nettime> special issue of SPEED about Paul Virilio

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

From: Robert Nideffer <nideffer@arts.ucsb.edu>


                      S   P   E   E   D

               AN ELECTRONIC JOURNAL OF
         
          TECHNOLOGY, MEDIA AND SOCIETY

        _______________________________
        http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/~speed
                    speed@arts.ucsb.edu

++--------------------------------------------------------------

*  1.  Announcement of Issue 1.4, special issue on Paul Virilio
*  2.  About SPEED
*  3.  Calls for Papers/Participation: 
                Terminals: Identities of Death/Technology. 
			   (DEADline Aug. 1, 1997!!!)
                Information Labor issue. 
                Technology and Sexuality issue. 
*  4.  Upcoming Guest Edited Issues
*  5.  How to Contact SPEED
*  6.  Please redistribute.

--------------------------------------------------------------++

*  1.  Announcement of Issue 1.4, special issue on Paul Virilio

SPEED is pleased to announce that our special issue on Paul Virilio is now
available. Point your browser to: 

                http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/~speed

for this and all issues of SPEED.

Paul Virilio is the preeminent theorist of the configurations of
globalization and technology, the mass-mediation of the city, the
militarization of architecture, the virtualization of cinema, the
simulation of transportation and the mechanization of social space.  

His work necessarily crosses boundaries between the technical and the
moral, the ecological and the aesthetic. For Virilio, politics is a form
of the technical, just as the technical is political. Between the two
lies the art of war -- and the necessity for radical critique -- not
just of the institutions of mechanization, but of the unguided
derangements of space and time that they afford us. For Virilio, the
great danger is not technology's amorality, but the popular passivity
that projects all capacity for judgment onto fantastic dreams of a
final inertia.

Issue 1.4 of SPEED collects  critical reflections on the work of Virilio
in French, English, Japanese, Dutch, German and Italian, and includes
contributions from James Der Derian, Jun Tanaka, Niels Brugger, Lev
Manovich, Fabian Winkler, Kiesuke Oki, Mick Drake, Patrick Crogan,
Olivier Auber, Ian Robert Douglas, Linda Brigham, Shawn Wilbur,
Filippo Bianchi, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Magasumov Aidar, Studiozone,
Pat Lichty and Jon Epstein, and Paul Virilio.

Paul Virilio currently teaches at l'Ecole Speciale d'Architecture in
Paris. His recent published works include La Vitesse de Liberation,
L'Art du Moteur  which has been translated as The Art of the Motor by
Julie Rose and published by University of Minnesota Press, and La
Machine de Vision also translated by Julie Rose and published by Indiana
University Press. Many of his earlier works including L'Espace Critique,
L'Aesthetic de la Disparation, Vitesse et la Politique, La Defense
Populaire et La Lutte Ecologique have translated into English and
published by Semiotext(e).

__________________________________
*  2.  About SPEED

SPEED is produced and edited by Benjamin Bratton and Robert Nideffer at
the University of California, Santa Barbara.

SPEED is an electronic journal of technology, media and society, a
high-end multidisciplinary, multimedia and multilinguistic forum for the
exploration of the cutting edge technologies of everyday life. 
Electronic Artists, Sociologists, Architecturalists, Novelists,
Computer Scientists, Journalists, Media Theoreticians, Humanists and
Social Critics of all stripes and backgrounds have made SPEED into one
of the smartest (and most unpredictable) projects on the web.

SPEED has been recognized for numerous awards including "Humanities Site
of the Year" by The Net magazine, and several others for design and
editorial excellence.

                http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/~speed

__________________________________
*  3.  Calls for Papers/Participation: 
                Terminals: Identities of Death/Technology.
			   (DEADline Aug. 1, 1997!!!)
                Information Labor issue. 
                Technology and Sexuality issue.

-++------------------------+------
TERMINALS: IDENTITIES OF DEATH/TECHNOLOGY

Terminal: the final, the last, the closing. 
Terminal: the killing  malady.
Terminal: the office of the future. 
Terminal: either end of an electric circuit, transportation line,
          station or city. 
Terminal: the last and most complete value or form given
          to an expression. 
Terminal: from Latin, terminus, a boundary. 
Terminal: the certainty of death. 
Terminal: a remote device, a station, an interface, a node, a machine of
          thought; a prosthetic territory into which the cogito of 
          transnational capital escapes. 
Terminal: the site haunted by the vehicle/host from which it came.

Ecology: technology as a source of death. Death as the moment by which
the social body becomes most completely technologized -- made into an
inert assemblage of organs. 

SPEED is currently preparing a special issue "Terminals: Identities of
Death/Technology" and SEEKS SUBMISSIONS of currently completed or near
completed works that address this subject. SPEED is a multimedia and
mulitingual forum for the development of electronic theory, art and
politics. Works of all technical genre and form are welcomed. 

This issue of SPEED is being developed in coordination with a special
limited release Book/CD-ROM (2000 copies, shipped to libraries worldwide,
published through UC Inter Campus Arts).

-++------------------------+------
WORK: INFORMATION LABOR 

The transformation to a global information economy has changed the
conditions of human labor. Information becomes work, and work becomes
information; this much is clear, but little else. For some
post-industrial workers, the worlds of work and leisure merge into a
privileged life of expression and reflection. For others life is a
never-ending search for itinerant incarceration. There can be no unified
approach to the issue. While issues of power and domination do not
disappear in a utopic Third Wave of computerization, but nor are they
necessarily created by one either. 

If our Northern Hemisphere cities, homes, and suburbs have become where
we think about what to do with all the data/capital we produce manually
in the cities, homes and rural areas of our Southern Hemisphere, what
does "local politics" mean? In the integration of our globalized social
networks, in the power relations of global technology, all labor,
however symbolic or manual, is interdependent -- and therefore
"accountable."

The "Californian Ideology" -- the new cyber-libertarianism -- is a
high-tech cop-out, perfect for the age of the blind-invested mutual
fund. The hard issues remain ... well, hard. In our integrated networks,
in the power relations of global technology, all labor, however symbolic
or manual, becomes interdependent. The globalization of culture moves
cultural work of all sorts closer to the social structures of wealth
production and distribution. 

In a postmodern economy, the sometimes deadly power of the semiotic
commodity is never superstructural. Perhaps this is a wholly new
condition; or perhaps it is a recognition that expressive, symbolic
exchange is still at the center of social formation, however "advanced."
It is not to say that economics is secondary, but rather that it
operates upon principles other than its own. Where then is the real
vanguard of information politics?

This issue of SPEED will provide a forum for multidisciplinary and
multilingual projects that investigate the peculiarity of work in a
information society. Projects that demonstrate, as well as analyze, that
peculiarity are especially encouraged. There is much to be learned about
the role technology plays in how we connect and disconnect from each
other, and about what it conceals from us and reveals to us. One casting
of that role is through our economies of labor.

WE ARE CURRENTLY ACCEPTING PROPOSALS for projects relating to (but not
exclusive to) global studies, philosophy of technology, anthropology  of
development and professional occupation, the phenomenology of the image,
alternative and independent media, cybereconomics, white-collar sweat
shops, neo-organizational heresies, electronic privacy, workplace
sabotage, art in a market economy, graffiti television, information
socialism, and other explorations that shed light on the work we need to
do.  

-++------------------------+------
PLAY: TECHNOLOGY AND SEXUALITY 

What, after all, is not a fetish? Technology is a question that asks
how humans relate objects in the world to each other, and how humans
integrate themselves into the industry of nature. Sexuality is a
question that asks how human relate themselves to each other, and how
the exchange cycles of production are brought outward from within. There
is clearly a strong relationship between the questions, and perhaps an
even stronger relationship between their corresponding answers.
Psychoanalysis has long understood how technology is sexualized, and
sexuality technologized. Many other approaches have explored or ignored
these commingling in their own ways. Now, as more things have come to be
defined as "technological," so too have more things come to be defined
"sexual"; these are growth discourses that depend on each other's
successes. We may not desire their interrelations, but their
interrelations feed our desires. 

This issue of SPEED will provide a forum for multidisciplinary and
multilingual projects that reconsider technosexuality/sexual technics.
What is now needed, besides a cyborg theory of fucking, is an open
reconsideration of how we differentiate instrumental and expressive
action. For example, if the omnipresent power of our global social
economy is to some extent dependent upon a reflexive ignorance on our
part concerning the eroticization of the inorganic and the mechanization
of the fleshy, a more direct and inlcusive exchange would help produce a
new politics of the global body (and perhaps body-in-the-global?). 

WE ARE CURRENTLY ACCEPTING PROPOSALS for projects relating but not
exclusive to the philosophy of technology, post-psycho analysis,
transfeminism, S&M Studies, Future Sex, product design, new XXX media,
sexual politics of war, consumer society and the erotic economy, the
sexual history of science, and other as yet unnamed points of
convergence and difference. 

__________________________________
*  4.  UPCOMING GUEST EDITED ISSUES: 

We are currently planning three guest-edited issues: 

A. A Night in the Life of American Television 
B. Multi-User Environments
C. Japanese Media and Urban Theory

These three special issues will redefine the future of the web, and
perhaps the future of humankind itself. By integrating state-of-the-art
pyramid marketing flim-flam with retro-futurist neologisms, SPEED will
solve the problems of society by virtualizing them. 

__________________________________
*  5.  HOW TO CONTACT SPEED

Please send all submissions, criticisms, praise, suggestions, or
anything else you have on your mind to:

                speed@arts.ucsb.edu

If for whatever reason you need to communicate with us via the U.S.
Postal Service, please send your correspondence to:

SPEED
c/o Benjamin Bratton
Department of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA  93106

SPEED
c/o Robert Nideffer
Department of Art Studio
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA  93106

__________________________________
*  6.  PLEASE REDISTRIBUTE this announcement. SPEED welcomes and
encourages participation and submission from all readers ...





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