Welcome to a K3 seminar with Eric Snodgrass, PhD student in Media and Communication Studies. This will be Eric’s 90 percent PhD seminar, and Jennifer Gabrys, Goldsmiths, University of London, will function as respondent. The seminar will take place on Tuesday, May 9, between 13.15 and 15.00 in room NIC 0541 (The Open Studio) at Niagara.

The title of the talk is Ecologies of the Executable

Here is an abstract for the talk:

This research looks to develop methods for describing and engaging with dominant expressions of power as they can be seen to be at work in contemporary networked and computationally-informed situations. In doing so, it adopts a “material discursive” approach that aims to pay particular attention to the mutually constitutive material and discursive forces involved in any particular set of relations, aiming to show how any executing practice in the world involves an ongoing negotiation of these forces. Each of the examples worked through (including early developments in computing, the Facebook Like button, a user video live-stream and the EU’s border surveillance regime) highlights how dominant executing practices and powers of the present can be seen to descend from and emerge within active and intersecting sets of orientations and affordances, with the research aiming to pay particular attention to some of the ways in which these technologically-informed practices achieve their particular forms of dominance. In seeking as it does to address the seemingly basic question of “what is executing here?” the intention is not only to develop concrete methods for describing and understanding these computational and networked practices, but also to show how in doing so one might be able to strategically question the sense of any dominant practice as given, pointing to other possibilities of execution and its material discursive enactment in the world.