Talks
TALKS
Alexis Brailas & Ismini Katsarou (Panteion University)
Learning Networks, Micro-communities, and Digital artifacts: A Data Story of Becoming
Social media allows any individual to address directly a (potential) global audience. Back in 2012, massive open online courses or MOOCs were hyped as a disruptive technology that would transform tertiary education. A few elite universities would attract thousands of students to enroll in their online courses, forming large scale learning communities. In 2015, Umberto Eco made the (controversial) statement that: “Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community.” In 2018, Mark Zuckerberg highlighted in his manifesto for Facebook that: “Building a global community that works for everyone starts with the millions of smaller communities and intimate social structures we turn to for our personal, emotional and spiritual needs.” After MOOCs failed to live up their hype, and after the alleged rise and amplification of extremists’ voices on social media (Trumpism, Brexit), it seems that Zuckerberg recognizes a need to put cultural mediators, in the form of small-scale communities, between the individual and the global community.
In this paper, we discuss our practice for developing micro-learning communities in a series of academic courses offered to a small number of students (usually between 10 to 25), during the last four years, in the Department of Psychology, at Panteion University. These courses employ the following techniques and affordances:
Our analysis focuses on the special affordances of micro-communities, the “difference that makes the difference” in comparison with large scale learning networks. The paper itself will be presented in a non-linear nomadic way. We will begin our exploration by experiencing some representative digital artifacts produced over all these years. Plateaus (in Deleuzian terminology) of the context, the initial design, the implied theory, lessons learned, best practices, challenges and open questions will be added gradually.
Nikos Bubaris (University of the Aegean)
On Kinesthetic Narratives
In this presentation I will discuss the processes through which spatial data, in conjunction with the practice of walking and the use of mobile media, create embodied experiences of narrating a place. The talk consists of three parts. In the first part I will critically address the concept of spatial data by focusing on its temporal dynamics. Far from manifesting a fixed reality and objective knowledge, spatial data chart provisionally changing relations in the world, act as nodes and always appear on the level of interfacing. They are inherently ambiguous being both “cooked” and “raw”, active and passive, outcomes and starting points of actions. Spatial data has indeterminate form and effects. In temporal terms, spatial data mark the mutability of the present by alternating between actualization and virtualization.
In the second part, I draw a conceptual outline of media walks as intensive fields of interrelation between humans and the environment. Analytically, both media and walking are considered processes of “bringing together” humans and the environment through similar, different and complementary practices. Indicatively, walking and media blur the boundaries between humans and the environment through embodiment and mediatization respectively. In so doing, media (and) walking do not simply stand between humans and the environment but they also constitute them as they interconnect them. Following this, I will elaborate on the multiple relational practices of media walking by drawing critically on basic principles of post-phenomenology in order to discuss the ways in which walker and location are mutually constituted.
In the third part of the presentation, the dynamic production of spatial data and the formation of walker-location relation are combined and discussed as meaningful sequences of interactions between people, technical affordances and places. To this end, I introduce the concept of “kinesthetic narratives”. Kinesthesia develops a background multisensorial condition against which disperse spatial data can be coherently put together through a series of corporeal responses of a body in motion. With reference to different media walk projects, I will elaborate on the various practices that these series of responses form as kinesthetic narratives that allow walkers to perceive both themselves and a place as a unified spatial event.
Ismini Gatou (University of the Aegean)
Narrative(s) in Transition: Representational and More-than-Representational Aspects of Locative Media
Locative media form liminal zones. They ‘bring-together’ constructed representational content with performed actions and embodiments through the interweaving of digital data with physical locations and events. Τhis convergence requires a radical reassessment of the nature of representation, something which is directly related to important ramifications for the narrativity of the medium.
The ‘crisis of representation’ has always been at the center of ethnographic and cultural studies, regarding how stories, memories and performed identities are mediated, either as delegation or as description. Elaborating on the above, our main research question will focus on how locative media expand notions of representation -and through this, of narrativity- through the conjoinment between discursive storytelling approaches with embodied, sensorial and affective circulations and flows in public space.
Speculating on the affordances and potentialities of the medium to fuse representations and performativities through non-linear and interactive narrative forms, we see narration in locative media as an ‘event’, a space for affective encounters and creative re-enactments. Narrativity in locative media lies in hybridity, shaking the fixed boundaries between the digital and the physical, the cognitive and the corporeal, and so on. It is a narrative ‘in transition’, where thoughts, stories, senses and emotions are brought together rhizomatically, as the ‘moving body’ navigates itself though the digital and the non-digital. Locative media do not only remediate a web of digital narratives, re-presenting the stories of ‘others’ in just a discursive way, but go beyond this, touching more-than-representational strands, where speech-acts, body-acts, social relations and materialities assemble in situ. Following this line of thought, we acknowledge the virtuality of the 'locative narrative', not as a simulation of something ‘else’, but -drawing on Massumi- as a constant displacement and openness to that which 'is not yet'.
In this context, we will look into specific case studies of locative media projects, examining how, what and why is being represented/embodied each time, in order to critically review their ‘politics of narrative’. Aiming to approach locative media both as a technological medium and as a methodological research tool, we will focus on how specific applications might bring visibility/audibility to stories -especially those which do not coincide with the ‘grand narratives’ of a place- and, at the same time, how they might reveal ‘hidden’ relationalities of embodied experience in a public space.
Such an approach to locative media, could have important implementations in multimodal ethnographic research, especially when using them as a collaborative and creative methodological tool. And this, because the 'locative narrative' might open up new ‘spaces’ for subjectivities to form and express, through articulations and performativities in public space, unveiling parts of the existing flows of human (or non-human) interaction (or lack of interaction) that were previously not ‘seen’, while -at the same time- creating new ones.
Grigoris Gkougkousis (Panteion University)
Locating “Romeo”: Geo-sociality and Virtual Embodiment in the PlanetRomeo Dating App
In the last years the use of dating apps has reached new heights making them an important part of the digital economy with a big impact on the everyday lives of users.
For the MSM (Men who have Sex with Men) communities there is a constantly growing plethora of dating social networks that are marketed and utilized as the new – digital -- places for gay sociality and the expression of homoerotic desire, all of them based on geo-locative technologies in order to display the spatial distance between users.
In this presentation I critically engage with and examine the uses of the PlanetRomeo smartphone application, a geosocial dating network for gay men with thousands of users in Greece and millions around the world. Drawing on a digital ethnography conducted for my bachelor’s thesis for the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University using participant observation on the network, interface analysis, casual online chatting with users as well as semi-structured interviews and in depth conversations with 10 of them living in Athens and other locations across Greece, this case study attempts a theoretical examination of concepts such as space, body and sexual desire in a constantly shifting digital context.
PlanetRomeo as a geosocial service for online communication and offline dating is by definition centered on its user’s physical locations and bodies, marking them through GPS technologies, and asking gay men to complete individual user profiles with their face and body photos and detailed descriptions of their physical characteristics and sexual preferences. Following these main features and the ways they are used, the aim of this paper is to contest the assumption of online interaction as an ethereal and disembodied experience and to explore the ways body, space and desire are (re-)constructed, communicated and experienced virtually through analytical schemes such as embodiment, practice and performativity.
Thus my analysis focuses on the gendered and sexual implications of physical and virtual spaces, the correlations between online and offline geographies and the ways dominant discourses and hegemonic representations of masculinity drawing from pornography are involved in – and shape the- subjectivities of gay users online through non-linear embodiment and performative reproduction. The above are perceived and enacted in the context of ambivalent processes of subjection, through which users craft their digital embodiments, share their fantasies and prosume desired images and identities. In this attempt I follow a reworked phenomenological approach that helps us move beyond the ideological divide between the real and the virtual, the symbolic and the experiential and deconstruct the perception of aesthetic images as representations and look closely to their embodying and performative dimensions.
Magdalena Góralska (Kozminski University in Warsaw, Oxford Internet Institute)
Public Care and Digital Distrust: An Ethnography of Knowledge Activism in Times of Misinformation
This paper critically examines grassroots knowledge activism among social actors engaged in the producing, receiving, and sharing of expert information through digital means of communication. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork of online open collaboration communities, I provide insight into how different platforms, acting as infrastructures, help to facilitate, crystallize and materialize various new relations of public engagement among different prod-users (Bruns, 2008), disrupting existing power relations around knowledge production. With an example of pro-mainstream-science and alternative-science/pseudo-science advocates operating in a transmedia environment, I show how various alternative communication routes are used to influence discourses in areas of science, health and nutrition. In collaboration with some, and against others, these social actors use both traditional media, micro-blogging platforms, as well as social networking sites, to convey their messages, in their mission to provide ‘public care’ as complex knowledge translators in the era of the internet of misinformation. The study, while predominantly qualitative, takes advantage of the affordances of digital media to gather digital traces that research participants leave behind. Using Social Network Analysis (SNA) methods, I support ethnographic data with publicly accessible information on relations between particular social actors, which are reflected in links between the effects of their digital work – articles written by them, their posts, shares, and likes on Facebook and Twitter. By examining the work of my interviewees, I highlight their ambiguous role in the expert authority crisis of the reflexive modernization era.
By analysing narrative practices of my interviewees, I propose a novel theoretical approach – a concept of digital distrust – that might prove useful as an interpretative tool for those studying the social web. In the light of recent academic interest in online misinformation, I argue that the so-called digital turn brought distrust into social interactions, enhancing a need to verify claims and arguments of others, in a variety of social settings. The internet, with its abundance of information, isn’t democratic in a sense that its ability to empower is limited by the social and cultural capital of its users. It indeed encourages us to seek answers, and question, to an extent that to trust an expert by not immediately verifying their words is to give away some of the potential power, coming from an ability to google things, doing one’s own research on a given topic in order to have an opinion. Through their digital advocacy practices, my interviewees become new authorities in the entangled networks of online communication.
Elpida Karava, Silas Michalakas, Valia Papastamou & Ioanna Zouli (Centre of New Media and Feminist Practices in Public Space & University of Thessaly)
Aesthetic Techniques and the Gendered Body: Towards a Narrative in the ‘Expanded Field’
The Centre of New Media and Feminist Practices in Public Space based in the Department of Architecture of the University of Thessaly explores the perspectives of feminist practices in public space, aiming to support the political potency of feminist practices that interweave art, architecture, media, ethnography, activism and different systems of knowledge in relation to public space and public claims. One of the projects in progress, coordinated by the artist Vassiliea Stylianidou, is developing around two recent events of extreme public violence, homophobia and misogyny, raising questions about the relationship between public space, violence and the gendered body, as well as the possible ways through which artistic practices attempt to question the public narratives produced around these issues. Zak Kostopoulos’ / Zackie Oh!’s inhuman lynching and murdering in public view in the center of Athens not only happened in temporal proximity to the rape and killing of Eleni Topaloudi in Rhodes, but it is also a symptom that indicates the vulnerability of specific, targeted bodies. The female* body, as well as the body of queer and trans* subjects, is perceived as a vulnerable body in public space, as a body without protective tissue. Starting with a recording of a performative reading by Vassiliea Stylianidou, we will present the development of a multimodal narrative focusing on the interrelation of new media with the experience of space (virtual, public, common, intimate) and consider how this affects our perception of space, the body and the self. Using this showcase, we explore the implications of digital and networked distribution of information and of language formations, the production rather than the collection of data, as well as the use of certain ‘aesthetic’ techniques towards a ‘narrative in the expanded field’.
Pafsanias Karathanasis (Athens Ethnographic Film Festival - Ethnofest)
Street Art and Urban Interventions in the Center of Athens: Presentation of an Ongoing Video-walk project for Ethnographic Research and Pedagogical Purposes
Having long ethnographic experience in street art, graffiti, and political interventions on the streets of central Athens, I started recently to use video in my presentations and lectures in order to better describe and communicate the active involvement of visual interventions in shaping the sensorial experience of urban landscape in the everydayness of the city. In contrast with static photographs, video offers the opportunity to viewers to experience not only the image produced, but also movement and sound. In this way, viewers (students and beyond) can better grasp the place such interventions occupy in the multiplicity of public space, but also understand the relations they form with the surrounding material elements and the built environment, and the way in which those relations can alter our understandings of the same interventions. While video is a very interesting tool to work with in the classroom or in the conference venue, during the past years I have been also working with guided walks for students, through which we can discuss in-situ the different ways in which visual interventions relate to the different built environments of central Athens.
In an attempt to further elaborate my work studying visual interventions in public space, and to also experiment with multimedia ethnography through the use of different digital tools, I have recently started working on the idea of video walks. I consider the tool of video walks, either guided or not, as a way to combine the ethnographic study of interventions in public space with the guided walks I have already been offering to students, and this is for different reasons. A video walk provides the means to discuss and present the ways in which changes in the urban environment (time of day, period of the year, etc.) can affect the ways in which we encounter public interventions. Moreover, through the use of a video walk we can also provide further information on the sociopolitical and cultural context of different areas in which such interventions are being placed, but also discuss the changes on specific walls through the numerous interventions that have been placed on them throughout the years.
Thus, in the Data-Stories Conference, I would like to present a theoretical paper, firstly, on the ways in which a digital tool like the video walk can facilitate a further understanding of the multiple relations between interventions and public space, by combining in-situ discussions with historical views and temporal changes. Secondly, in my presentation I will also discuss the use of the video walk as a tool for pedagogical reasons in teaching about graffiti, street art and visual interventions in the public space of our constantly changing urban environments. In addition, I will screen parts of the ongoing video walks project I have been working on.
Aikaterini Kasimi (Panteion University)
Mapping the Senses: Introducing the Digital ASMR Phenomenon within the Sensory Field of Modernity
This study is focused on a relatively new category of YouTube videos, known as ASMR. The videos in question have as a prime purpose the provocation of a particular sensory experience, through auditory stimuli or other means, in order to achieve a state of relaxation, stress and insomnia relief. The acronym ASMR corresponds to Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, a term which was created within a “health forum” in order to describe an “offline” sensory experience caused by a person whispering softly, usually in a caring manner. The sensory effect is described as a “tingling sensation on the scalp and down the spine” followed by a feeling of numbness and euphoria and is often correlated with a child’s memory of relaxation, almost a hypnosis, under the influence of gentle whisper or a caring monotonous voice. Under this framework, ASMR is itself the sensory experience which the homonymous videos wish to provoke.
The study's purpose is to introduce ASMR as a field of digital ethnography through the analysis of its sensory hypostasis, as well as its capability to create a “therapeutic” digital soundscape. The fact that a formerly anonymous “offline” feeling has been transformed via the web and the YouTube platform into an identifiable sensory experience is of particular interest. While experimenting with the various methods that “trigger” the desired experience, a corpus of informal records of the physical and mental responses to the phenomenon (through the comments sections and the videos) has been created around the ASMR community, “mapping” the sensory journey in a “realité virtuelle”. It is also equally important that the main ASMR value was detected in the “materiality of the sound”, and hence shifted away from the dominant opticocentricism, but later on embraced various other forms of sensory triggers (audible and visual stimuli, performativity of ASMRtist etc.) each of which hold their own analytical value. This digitally-triggered sensory experience raises many questions, concerning the potential biopolitics of sensory obedience in the near future, inside and outside the ASMR community.
In addition to this, ASMR has established itself as a therapeutic digital narrative, drawing an increasingly growing audience to the ASMR scene. It is presented as a “self-care” procedure, guided by the ASMRrtist (ASMR + artist), aka the creator of the ASMR content and YouTuber. This stress- relief method, which is clearly influenced by New Age practices and theories of spirituality, is now embedded in many people's everyday routine. From people who claim to be greatly helped by ASMR (and consequently by the ASMRtist) during times of mourning, mental illness or physical pain, ASMR could be perceived as a “transcendent experience”, similar to guided meditation. This “ritual” part of ASMR is being examined in the framework of modernity, where the self-care process takes place individually and is dictated indirectly by the imperatives of modern neoliberal society.
Steffen Köhn (Freie University Berlin)
Window, Threshold, Frame - Towards an Anthropology of Interfaces
In the light of Internet-based forms of communication and the rise of social media, the screens of our computers, mobile phones, and tablets, have become primary sites for worldly interaction. Their graphical user interfaces now mediate our engagement with the wider world, frame our public self-expressions, and constitute the places where we live out a good deal of our social relations. For Alexander Galloway (2012, 32f.), interfaces are autonomous zones of aesthetic activity with their own ability to generate new results and consequences that can tell us something about our contemporary lives. Contrary to popular perception, he argues that they are not transparent ‘doors’ or ‘windows’ that merely mediate seamlessly between our bodies and the external world of devices but rather produce effects, processes, and translations. In this article, I therefore want to propose the desktop screen not only as an important site for ethnographic research, but also as a possible filming location for an emerging mode of documentary filmmaking that fully embraces the poetics of digital culture. I will discuss a range of films that are created not with conventional film cameras but with screen recording and compositing software and that interweave audiovisual material such as screencasts, internet found footage, feed from webcams or devices’ in-built-cameras, or imagery from the real-time computer graphics engines of online video games. Hence, they propose an innovative cinematic form for exploring contemporary social reality by working with everything computers put in front of our eyes and ears and by mobilizing all the means they offer us to manipulate reality. These desktop documentaries examine the affordances and constraints of digital mediation by reflecting their subject matter in their aesthetic form. They employ the computer screen as both a camera lens and a canvas and use interfaces to tell their stories in a cinematic way.
Violetta Koutsoukou (University of Thessaly)
Audiovisual Traffic & Cosmopolitan Communities
My research experience on the instant – still archived -- everyday exchange of photographs focused on the user-generated footage of new media applications. Posts on platforms like Facebook, imo and messenger create personal visual and audiovisual footage (selfies, Facebook live, 360° videos, group chats and more) that were part of my ethnography on the diasporic Pakistani community of Volos.
Looking at photographic practice as an integral technology of diasporic subjectivity (Papailias, 2012: 340), I am interested in how tagged photography ‘enlists’ co-presence and a sense of belonging. Regarding selfies and their non-linear course on the (by far now expanded) sphere of language, one can agree that social networks (that are being continually com-posed) “challenge dominant cultural narratives”. Being critical of terms such as culture, identity and image, I would like to speak of the performance of diasporic non-representational practices as a challenge to the temporalities and spatialities that emerge through tag events. In my study, personal photographs performed a connective tissue between subjects, communities, languages, diasporas, belonging and co-presence in space and time.
The plurality of photographs that was being exchanged the last days of Ramadan 2018 between my interlocutors and their friends (through smartphone applications) brought up the tensions of self-expression. ‘Tagging’ and ‘being with’ as a performative practice shakes that way, the claims to identity, presence and authenticity of emplaced experience. On the multitude of tagged posts of in-situ festival photographs that I followed, friends and families living in the overseas diasporas joined in the picture. It’s these, amongst other digital media practices, which seem to relocate the cosmopolitan self, a self within fluid, interacting movements. Diasporic Ramadan festivities do critically push the limits of presence and co-presence. From my perspective the hybrid space of belonging became visible, celebrated, dwelt-in and reprocessed.
Relating to the aesthetics/performance part of the conference, I would like to expand more on the non-representanional turn of photographic practices (Frosh 2015). After all, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s concept of an “elsewhere within here” has stuck in my mind. This is a concept in which imagination and practice affect the bonds of space through time. As in the digital practice that the Data-stories conference welcomed, community is a sense of belonging, no matter how (far).
Leandros Kyriakopoulos (Panteion University)
On the Network Culture of Electronic Dance Music in Austerity Athens
The main subject and the argument of the paper revolve around the recent rise of Electronic Dance Music (EDM) culture in Greece and Athens in particular. Athens has witnessed a surge of Techno production and rave parties in the last decade of severe austerity measures and unemployment. This (re)ascendance of EDM has been facilitated and even co-introduced with the corresponding increase of social media's use. The paper addresses the ways with which the rise of EDM in Athens is associated with the modalities of appearance, recognition and mobility opened up by social networking. The fact that Athens has been saddled with the burdens of austerity more than any other city in Greece is central to the above inquiry. Techno music aesthetics emerged within the experience of recession and grassroots (re)negotiation of progress and development. Since its sonic identity formation in 1970s Detroit and 1980s Berlin, it has been by itself an audio palimpsest inscribed with memories of everyday austerity, desire for creative expression and claiming of a bohemian lifestyle of partying.
Techno production in austerity Athens is attuned to this somehow vital negotiation of the fable of progress and accomplishment. Within an everyday life of austerity dominated by the neoliberal ideals of individual success, local musicians invest in music experimentation and production longing for an 'authentic' lifestyle and acknowledgment in the public sphere. To what extent is the desire for innovation, publicity, cosmopolitan belonging and lifestyle experimentation, which characterize EDM consumption culture, intertwined with social media’s modalities of self- presentation, aesthetic expression and recognizability? Such a question urges us to reflect on lifestyle experimentations in EDM party culture as a crucial dimension of self-management via social media in conditions of austerity where neoliberal ideals of success fail to provide a sense of authenticity and cosmopolitan belonging.
Kārlis Lakševics (University of Latvia)
Violence Interfaced: Designing Modes of Attention and Interaction in E-learning for Kindergarten Safety
E-learning production has been a part of the digital economy for a while, especially for large companies seeking to save resources for training their employees in work skills and compliance. At the same time, it is less established in NGO practices of training as the costs of production are not that accessible and the conduct of training to their target audiences less predictable than the regular trainings in large companies. While an open-access interactive course can make the training significantly more accessible to people in capacity to transform a social issue in question, the question of what kind of conditions of possibility e-learning can offer to solving complex social issues remains fully unexplored.
In this paper, I explore an e-learning course developed for kindergarten teachers aiming to improve their skills of recognizing and dealing with violence and establishing a safe environment for children. The paper is based on a self-reflectional insider approach of working as an e-learning instructional designer and as an anthropologist researching violence. I use interviews with both the producers of content and the kindergarten teachers on their user experience to explore the ways that interactions produced in e-learning enable or are limited in addressing embedded and embodied contexts of violence. The ways violence is represented, defined, described and implied in affective stock pictures and hinted at as a part of the broader narrative confronts the learner with potentials for affective experiences, while also being a part of technologization of the senses within the storytelling interface used. Furthermore, the ways the course talks to the learner, the buttons it instructs to click, the plasticity and interruptions that its trajectory presents, the testing questions it poses, as well as its structuring of time, produces modes of attention whose potential for interventions in situations of conflict can be questioned.
From juxtaposing interaction and content analysis with user interviews, I argue that the affective engagements are based not only on the frameworks of discursive content, but on the ways the designed interactions are given or lack meaning. The user experiences of enclosure or disorientation in storified digital interactive environments can present a distance in the modes of attention it produces. On the other hand, other ‘lively’ interactions a few clicks away can be experienced as rather in sync with empowering a safe social environment and the learners’ positioning within it. Rather than critiquing e-learning as missing the face-to-face interactivity or analyzing only the forms of narrative and discourse, it is more fruitful to treat it as a very particular range of articulation with the contexts of violence. This framework taken from software studies allows both for more critical ethnographic engagements with e-learning experiences and serves as a ground for designing interactions that motivate learners to facilitate social change.
Vasiliki Lalioti & Manolis Patiniotis (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens)
Do Stories Have Emotions?
“San Junipero” is one of the most popular episodes of the Black Mirror series. Like many other episodes, its main focus is the possibility of a purely digital existence and its relation to the physical status of individuals. Contrary to other episodes, though, “San Junipero” is surprisingly optimistic and seems to reproduce some trivial claims: Mind uploading, the claim of Paradise and digital self-realization.
The first claim has to do with the philosophically and biologically controversial view that the mind resides in the brain and is independent from the body. Thanks to a specialized device, it may be independently uploaded to the digital realm. The second claim concerns the possibility for the uploaded “psyches” to live eternally in a simulation especially designed to secure their eternal bliss. And the third claim pertains to the widespread perception that the transition to the digital realm allows the individuals to become what they always wanted to, but were unable due to social and moral conventions.
However, it seems that a more radical contemplation underlies this smooth interpretation. The universe of San Junipero is more like a platform that encompasses the “virtual” and the “natural” alike, in the sense that it affords a particular set of technological possibilities that affect the decisions of the individuals in all spheres of their lives (and deaths). From this perspective, the episode seems to be about the making of the self. But it is not about the digital self; rather it is a digital allegory about the making and performing of one’s self. The presentation will focus on the basic concepts that underpin this claim: The modularity of space and time, which backs up the ability of the individuals to put their stories together in a variety of ways. A database that contains the building blocks of virtual personal stories, associated with particular nostalgic signifiers. And the technology of navigation that allows the individuals to compose on the fly the virtual map where their stories unfold. But if this is the case, namely if the individuals compose themselves from the available digital or cultural components and if, in the final analysis, they are no more than autobiographical narratives, then the question is: Where does their ability to perform their selves come from? Do stories have emotions and motives?
Neoklis Mantas & Αlex Deffner (University of Thessaly)
Urban Story-Telling in Metamodern Times: Finding Oneirotopia or Joining the Pixels of Digital Urban Dreams
At the dawn of the new millennium, cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van der Akker (2010) witnessed the emergence of a new ‘structure of feeling’ named metamodernism. By the end of the first decade of the 21st century and due to certain material events (terrorism, financial crises, digital revolution) and intangible developments (critique by the market, différance into pop culture, social media), metamodernism has evolved into the dominant cultural logic of Western capitalist society (Vermeulen & Akker, 2018) and an answer to the insufficiency of modernism and postmodernism in describing cultural contemporaneity.
The first part of the paper is structured around the observation that the driving cultural logic beneath the conceptualization of the ideal city has not remained unaffected. Both modern grand narratives for an anonymous universal city (Utopia- Mantas & Deffner, 2017) and postmodern narrations about nostalgically photogenic, opulent global cities (Imageeria- Mantas & Deffner, 2017) seem to be obsolete. In a hyperconnected, diverse and heavily-digitized world, the contemporary ideal city cannot be described successfully in terms of a collective social vision (progress through scientific realism) or idiosyncratic daydreams that are exhausted by virtual consumption (cultural virtuality). The metamodern ideal city has dreamy qualities and stands as a digital amalgam of actual and virtual elements that emerges amid the refuted modern utopism and melancholic postmodern knowingness. Digital oneirotopia [όνειρο (dream) + τόπος (place)] arises as the inner ideal city that once was envisioned (modern visualization), but was never fully experienced (postmodern anticlimax). A reflection on that dreamy conception is to be applied in this paper.
Within that framework, an expedition shall be attempted within the uncharted territory of digital oneirotopia. Thus in its second part, the paper proceeds to a phenomenological analysis of Neoklis Mantas’ blog (stigmography.tumblr.com), an e-diary that is filled with moments of unscheduled wandering in Volos and Athens. The process is akin to New Age flâneurie: the stigmographer walks through the urban landscape seeking to encounter felt phantasmagorias (Pile, 2005) while capturing digital images with his mobile device (virtual depiction of reality). Then, he edits the photograph (attribution of oneiric qualities to the photo though photo-editing) and tries to explain the dynamic memoir of that instantané through words (digital storytelling). While the stigmographed storytelling reveals a postmodern interchange between actual spaces, virtual places and literary time, at the same time there is a lurking metamodern mythopoeia (Dempsey, 2015) –beyond modern mythologies-- that seems to keep together the digitally fragmented ideal city. The metamodern phantasmagoric dream vanishes when the socio-economic reality sheds light on it, but its experience seems to be the silent driving force towards a contemplative, ever uncertain, future.
Ezekiel Morgan (Freie University Berlin)
360° Cameras + Algorithmic Interpolation: Digital Tools for a Relational Ethnography
Relational ethnography rejects both the God position and one of plurality ‘for a position that is not really a position at all but something more like swimming’ (Taussig 2006). Rather than approaching the world as constituted by a multiplicity of discrete ‘things’ that are then ‘interrelated’ via relations found external to and between these things, relational ethnography explores a universe of ‘intra-relatedness’ (Barad 2012, de la Cadena 2015) where there are no longer singular self-contained things, but, only, relations, ‘relations between different kinds of relations - relations everywhere’ (Holbraad, Pederson 2017). Tools for doing relational ethnographic work are underdeveloped. Referring to my project, “•” (2018), this presentation will explore how new digital technologies, namely 360° cameras and algorithmic interpolation, can be useful tools for conducting relational ethnographies.
“•” involved two significant stages. The first was to develop a small, lightweight and robust 360o camera housing, that allowed the camera to record while spinning and rolling in directions and in environments beyond which the human body can go. The second stage was to process this footage using a video time remapping software that algorithmically interpolates the missing frames required to digitally make footage appear slower than the speed at which it was originally recorded. When footage is extremely slowed down using this software, as in the case of “•”, the algorithm finds it difficult to differentiate between foreground and background, as well as between other ‘things’ depicted in the footage, with the result that a morphosis occurs. What to make of this material? If no longer exclusively bound to the human body, what dispersive perspective, if any, might this camera provide? And what of these morphing frames, which are at once interpolated by the algorithm and are therefore new, and, yet, based on source material? Should they be encountered as digital manipulation or might they be seen to describe a given “reality”, a relational reality?
Maria Pantsidou (University of Lancaster)
Navigating the Wasteland: Narrating the Post-apocalypse in Fallout 4 and Psycho: A Fallout Machinima
This paper considers the ways with which the video game Fallout 4 engages with post-apocalyptic narratives and argues that the machinima Psycho: A Fallout Machinima satirises, offsets and subverts the avatar’s actions in the form of “narrative contextualisation” (Kemmer, p. 101) In the post-apocalyptic world of the role-playing game Fallout 4, a character called simply “Sole Survivor”, awakes from a long-term cryogenic stasis in Vault 111, long after a nuclear holocaust has caused devastation throughout the United States. The world that remains includes the city of Boston and the surrounding Massachusetts region known as “The Commonwealth”, which the protagonist navigates in order to find his/her missing son, after the murder of their partner. The player subsequently has to construct their character addressing a wide array of pre-conceived, external stimuli in order to increase their abilities and level up. Exploring the game’s almost completely annihilated world, the player has to complete quests, assist factions and manage settlements, by constructing and even deconstructing them.
The Fallout universe is largely influenced by retro-futuristic aesthetics, as imagined in pulp sci-fi fiction of the 1950s, a recurring paradigm in the representations of atomic age narratives. Theoretically indebted to Timothy Morton’s “Poisoned Ground: Art and Philosophy in the Time of Hyperobjects” (2013), where he argues that this is the moment in history where “a new phase of art is best thought as a strange asymmetry between equally matched forces: the human capacity for computation on the one hand, and the gigantic and withdrawn hyperobjects on the other” (Morton, 2013), the present paper seeks to investigate contemporary ecological assumptions in video game narratives, as they are materialised in the worlds of Fallout 4 and Psycho: A Fallout Machinima. Also, the genre of machinima will be explored as a new documentary medium, as it remediates the meaning of the ‘original’, and produces a whole new narrative in which the main characters combine elements of superhero movies, the Star Wars and the Matrix franchises, navigating the post-fallout wasteland. Drawing from Kath Weston’s Animate Planet: Making Visceral Sense of Living in a High-Tech Ecologically Damaged world (2017), where she demonstrates the ways with which humans are entangled with technologies they have created, tracing compositional intimacies that tie humans and other living entities with affective bonds, this paper argues that machinima offers a performative expression of this entanglement. Machinima, viewed in the present paper as a cultural production practice, creates an affective narratology and re-imagines the contours of the post-apocalyptic world.
Charis Papaevangelou (Utrecht University)
Serious Games and Procedural Rhetoric: The Case of “Bury Me, My Love” and the Uneasy Feeling of Virtually Stepping in One’s Shoes
This paper aims to explore how video games can make use of modern digital artefacts, such as instant messaging, to augment the conveyance and fostering of sentiments, such as empathy. Specifically, this paper revolves around the game Bury me, my love (The Pixel Hunt), as a case in point of how video games may take advantage of their digital inherence by adopting platform-specific characteristics to amplify their communicative pοwer. Bury me, my love is a game about the refugee crisis, emphasising that behind the reported numbers of refugees, both dead and alive, are actual people. The user is called on to play as Majd, the husband of Nour who has begun a dangerous journey from Syria to Germany, and the only way to communicate with her (and play the game) is via an instant messaging application, very similar to WhatsApp (Facebook). In this paper, I will be focusing my attention on the primary version of the game, that is the mobile one, because it offers a much more visceral experience than the desktop version; even the developers admit on their website, that it was “designed for mobile phones.” Firstly, I will be discussing a term borrowed by Ian Bogost and other serious-games aficionados, “empathy games.” Specifically, I will be studying how digital games can effectively influence social wellbeing by getting players to enable and experience events, something innately unique to the medium. To this end, I will be also consulting Cristoph Klimmt’s work on “serious games and social change.” Secondly, I will be employing Bogost’s “procedural rhetoric” conceptual framework to study the game at hand, as a novel way of integrating “change related messages” into game design, thus answering Klimmt’s critical question on how to “synthesize the change related message with the interactivity of the medium.” By applying Bogost’s concept to my approach, it is made evident that certain mechanisms (e.g. Bury me, my love’s real-time notifications) greatly augment the game’s “persuasive power” (Bogost). Furthermore, I reckon that Matthew Curinga’s take on affordances, as “interpretive” instances of interactive software, will critically benefit my inquiry both as a theoretical and a methodological framework. Finally, I will be discussing how game creators can further make use of procedural rhetoric to create meaningful and memorable experiences that strengthen social values and empower players to actively reflect on societal change.
Alexandros Papageorgiou (University of Thessaly), Joy Al-Nemri (Bard College), Penny Paspali (University of Łodz-University of Oviedo) & Nicholas-George Sykas (University of Thessaly)
Know-What-I-Meme: An(other) Experiment in Producing and Disseminating Knowledge.
What if memes were used as a tool to democratize knowledge and help forge a more empathetic and informed public? What if social scientists were part of the “meme-ification of knowledge”, actively participating in public fora by using a combination of tools to share their positions and discuss with non-academic publics? What if anthropologists worked more in teams rather than individually? What if social scientists talked openly about (or even performed) their fears and doubts?
Two years ago this team created a project as part of the 2017 Pelion Summer Lab for Cultural Theory and Experimental Humanities, organized by the Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology and the Laboratory of Social Anthropology of the University of Thessaly. That project represented a theoretical, practical, and ethical provocation toward ourselves, our colleagues, and our discipline. It brought the fore issues like social media representation, contemporary processes of knowledge production and performativity, as well as the mechanisms that govern the regimes of truth, and the position of academic knowledge in a rapidly changing, increasingly interconnected world. We used a “what if” approach in order to help ourselves and our peers reflect on how to fine-tune the pertinence of the questions that we are asking.
Drawing on Butler’s account of affective performativity, we ask: since precarity tends to be the norm, rather than an exception, and produces subjectivities that embody and embed precarity, in which ways can we resist this? We propose memes as a means to convey a counter-discourse, capable of enacting collective self-reflection, as well as enabling the formation of affective networks of solidarity. Furthermore, we think of memes not only as mere objects of communication, information and education, but also as having their own agency as well as their own material and discursive capacity to affect and be affected. Challenging the limits of academia, we argue that memes can function as communicative bridges between academia and society at large. Reflecting on that: are memes disruptive enough?
In this year’s presentation, we aim to further explore the potential of memes and other media to convey knowledge and experience that is usually captured in textual form. We will experiment with different modes of storytelling, testing the limits of censorship, jurisdiction and legitimacy regarding the production and dissemination of academic knowledge.
Daria Radchenko (KB Strelka Institute, Russia)
Translating Ethnography: Social Media Data in Urban Planning Process
Participant and non-participant observation have for decades been key methods of anthropological research. A classically-trained anthropologist would spend months with the community he or she is interested in, observing its everyday life, feasts and rites and doing a "thick description" (Geertz 1973) of the norms and values underlying these practices. Today applied urban anthropology, however, finds itself under serious time pressure: it needs to get as much information on the life of a city within weeks rather than months.
Digital anthropology seems to be one of the answers to this challenge. Research of online traces of human activity (including texts, likes, shares and photos) allows us to get a look inside everyday practices and festive rituals of a city, performed throughout the yearly cycle. Importantly, these traces are a subject of social norms and attitudes, and thus they give an insight not only into lives of individuals, but also give an understanding of what urban objects the community considers to be valuable and prestigious. At KB Strelka, this information is used in pre-project complex analysis – and thus the data from social media serve to improve the cities.
Importantly, digital anthropology (which in this case goes hand in hand with GIS-analysis and data analysis) has some less obvious functions. It does not only "tell the story" of a city's life - through using multi-method approach with both quali- and quanti-analysis, maps, graphs and other visualizations, it becomes a specific way to translate and legitimize the findings for the publics that in many cases have never worked with long ethnographic narratives: architects and urban planners, city administration, urban activists, etc. In this paper, I'll provide "an ethnography of data ethnography": how it collaborates with various actors of urban planning, what are the possibilities and dark sides of this collaboration, how does it come that data from social media can be seen as more reliable than field anthropology.
Giorgos-Ilias Sakkas (Panteion University)
’What Do I Like? Digging Deep into the Data’ – Individual and Social Bodies’ Construction Through ‘Digital’ Porn Experiences
This presentation concerns specific pornographic websites and the ways their digital content is consumed and navigated. More specifically, by approaching the content and the form of these sites as part of discourses and practices on the body and sexuality that are produced in social media, I examine how subjects shape their perceptions concerning the body, sexuality and the self through an embodied participation in the pornographic material and an interactive consuming experience.
This essay mainly draws on a small-scale digital ethnography on Pornhub’s network done as part of my master’s 2018 thesis entitled: “Surfing Pornhub – digital practices of individual and social bodies’ construction”. By focusing on specific practices of digital porn experiences, I will argue that the human and nonhuman assemblages that constitute the Pornhub network, such as online interaction, the performative practices accompanying it, the digital environment and the circulating content operate as a kind of soft, if not strong, biopolitical process through which, data is collected and bodies and populations are identified and formed between virtual and “real” worlds. In this process, elements of material and digital culture, e.g. data, platforms, algorithms, cookies, are of great importance. They play a regulatory role in online pornographic experience and they significantly contribute to the formation of individual and social bodies. The users cease to be the only agents in such online experiences, but parts of the 'responsibility of their selves' are distributed to algorithms (Foucault 1984). New forms of digital control emerge through digital practices, such as metrics, massive data collection, content recommendations for subjects’ sexual pleasure, and are applied not only “on the users’ bodies”, but also “through their bodies”. Subjects' - or better prosumers' - role is not passive. Through embodied practices of producing, circulating, consuming content and through navigating, the users play active parts in self-constructing procedures which therefore become dynamic, ambiguous and negotiable. Fields located in the conjunction between the “the real” and the virtual, where subjects’ pleasure and sexual desire meet individual and social bodies’ identification, formation and management are considered as highly important for understanding digital ways of self-constitution in historical and social contexts, where “the digital” turns out to be increasingly important for the subjects’ social life.
Eleni Sideri (University of Macedonia)
My Post-doc in Three Pictures: Data Visualisation and Ethnographic Writing/representation
In their comparative exploration of the interwoven relations between ethnography and semiotics, Deltsou and Tsibiridou (2016) concluded that the transformations of globalisation in the last decades make imperative the need to open up ethnography beyond participant observation. My post-doc concerned film co-productions in Southeast Europe and the idea of European-ness. Ι focused on three festival co-production markets, Sarajevo, Tbilisi and Thessaloniki. In terms of methods, the research combined database analysis to explore the varied histories of co-productions of these three industries, short field trips for interviewing festival professionals and creators, and keeping a diary. Τhe results of database analysis were visualized by using the open access software GEPHI. The programme generated maps based on the notion of proximity (degree of centrality, betweenness centrality, size etc.). This notion will be used as a way to explore “database inclusivity” and “narrative selectivity” (Hayles 2007). The video-presentation will start from three co-production maps/networks that depict much of the research conclusions and then it will combine found footage (co-productions from the three countries) and sound (voice-over from the interviews and diaries) in order to produce a multiple mode of representation that shares the intricacies of the the ‘field’.
Yannis Skarpelos & Sophia Messini (Panteion University)
Digital Storytelling and the Story of the Present
"The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller” - Steve Jobs
According to Steve Jobs – the "evangelist"" of the digital age – the world's most powerful person is the narrator. The one who narrates a series of information, events and actions that have taken place in the past. All these are structured to compose a complete story. One that the listener or reader can understand instantly and effortlessly.
In the digital age, storytelling is being exploited in both journalism and social media. In journalistic media, the storyteller is the journalist, who focuses on attracting readers, in contrast to social media where this role is taken over by the citizens. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc., besides being tools of interpersonal communication, also disseminate information, news and narratives, even in real time. A story, a fact, or an event triggers a network of interactions that evolves over that narrative. This network highlights the identities of individuals, as well as conflicts between them, and creates nuclei with similar views, ideologies and characteristics.
It is sentiment and public opinion that made Twitter a tool for political communication. Politicians aim to attract their target groups through Twitter and influence political opponents, in an attempt to strengthen their political power and consolidate their place on the national political scene.
But what happens when a story is being 'narrated' through social media in real time? Is there always a narrator? Or is it a story without a narrator? How can we visualize the mechanisms of modern forms of communication through the canvas of information visualization, while an event is taking place? How does visualization highlight the unconscious co-operative formation of a narrative without a narrator, where data narrate a story without a hero? Real-time data mining through Twitter answers such questions, scrutinizing the validity of Steve Jobs's opinion.
Eleni Tsatsaroni (University of Thessaly)
The construction of humanoid robot identity in HBO’s Westworld series
This paper examines the TV series Westworld (HBO, 2016-2018) as a cultural product of western society through which we can question what the main characters of these series (the host subject) symbolize in the contemporary social imaginary. In order to investigate the subjectivity of Westworld’s hosts, I use its narrative as a field of study, the representational product per se, as well as the digital field of reddit, a digital platform where fans communicate and discuss.
Following the history of the creatures, whose subjectivity captured my interest in this paper, I detected the emphatic representation of the body, a body which is totally humanlike. This stunning superficial resemblance between hosts and humans triggers a new discussion in relation to the digital field and the way it affects social reality. Thus, one of the main questions this paper aims to address is how contemporary humans perceive the social concept of reality.
As the digitality of contemporary everyday life is being construed as a means to interpret human experience, the reality constructed by the combination of these digital experiences is being treated as a downfallen reality. The contrast between tangible materiality of the world which traditionally is understood as “real” and the immaterial status of digitality is the main argument for the exclusion of the digital field from the realm of reality.
The distinction between the two realities, which are considered qualitatively different from one another, concerned me in particular through the way it affects the social construction of memory. Recording, saving and reproduction of lived experiences as digital footprints, brings the postmodern human closer to the condition of the host subject, whose memory of lived experience is flawless, objective and unquestionable. This new relation between society and memory leads to a revisiting of our views in relation to the supremacy of memory over oblivion.
This deceptive similarity of humans with their high-tech substitutes causes the urge to look for the distinction between the two subjects in attributes beyond the body. Information and data are both the solution and problem to this puzzle. Creators and viewers’ anguished effort to define human subjectivity as opposed to host subjectivity reveals the difficulty of contemporary humans have in understanding themselves as something completely different from their digital components.
Iraklis Vogiatzis (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens)
My Office as a Database: Labor in Microwork Platforms.
For over two decades scholars have tried to investigate the ways that digital technologies transformed labor. A huge amount of research has been produced about the new ways of creating value in post-industrial societies and the changing boundaries between leisure and working time. At the same time, the pervasiveness of digital technologies in production has raised the alarm about employment and new forms of labor exploitation. This paper examines the contemporary academic discourse concerning the transformations of labor in the digital age particularly focusing on forms of labor employed by Microwork platforms. I will present a brief overview of the current sociological and theoretical discourses about the new forms of labor and the main theoretical perspectives enjoyed by various academic disciplines. In doing so, I will focus on theories stemming from the tradition of Autonomous Marxism, like Maurizio Lazzarato’s analysis of “immaterial labor”. In the wake of such theories, many scholars suggested new types of labor: creative, estranged, free and digital, resulting in a “rhizome” of epithets that were associated with the word “labor”. I will argue that this rich theoretical background fails to capture the new questions raised by the transformation of labor brought about by microworking platforms like Mechanical Turk, Fiverr, and Clickworker. Microwork platforms outsource series of small tasks that existing algorithms cannot fulfill to people around the globe. Such platforms function by matching the database of workers with databases of tasks, establishing a new Taylorism and, thus, reconceptualizing the “line of production” (Manovich). My purpose is to outline the limits of the existing theoretical account by asking questions such as: How is labor reorganized in these platforms? How does the modularity of labor affect the self-perception of microworkers? What kind of narratives ensue from their “databased” relationship with their creative activity? Can we conceive of Microwork as a virtual assembly line 2.0? Is there any historical continuity between the traditional organization of labor in the factory with microworking? The aim of the presentation is to lay out some preliminary theoretical concerns and invite further discussion on the crucial issue of the transformation of labor in the wake of the digital era.
John von Bergen (Bard College Berlin)
Exploring VR in the Studio Arts Classroom
Google’s “Tilt Brush” VR program has proven to be a beneficial instrument for teaching studio arts, as we recently experienced with two courses offered this past year at both Bard College Berlin and Bard College New York. Students were given prompts for creating spaces and situations, and most importantly, new experiences. They also fearlessly engaged in their own themes and interests as wide-ranging as abstract painting, game design, environmental concerns, music video, cartooning, and coding. We will discuss how the potential for developing pedagogical directions with VR can be a promising new tool for art student production.
Mariana Ziku (KU Leuven)
Datafying and Visualizing Digital Community Imaginaries: An Experimental Approach
The presentation will review art and science projects of data analysis and visualization that attempt to understand the way digital communities interact and how their supporting infrastructures function. It is concerned with the contemporary web practice of massive participation in user-based micro-content platforms and p2p services in which contingent, vast flows of data are being exchanged in real-time. The presentation will focus on the collective aesthetic and narrative manifestations within these ecologies, from a computational art theoretical/curatorial point of view. In particular, it will inquire into new modes of digital curatorial practices such as community-based curation and reflect on narrative concepts such as micro-culture or micro-genre and techniques that bring to light the shared imaginaries of digital communities.
Even though efforts proliferate for modelling professional databases where cultural-related content is carefully organized for optimal use, an exponential growth rate of bulk data is happening outside of such repositories. This condition lets a diverse ground of cultural practices and processes to emerge, where more complex agencies such as digital collectivities and machine computation develop new modes of curation, cultural exchange and narratives. In view of this “wild frontier” of digital information, cultural creation models can be studied that open up our understanding of the synthesis and function of grassroots aesthetics and narratives as well as our awareness of the digital interfaces of human-machine interaction. How do collective cultural practices function in decentralized web spaces? How do aesthetic and narrative patterns evolve through open massive participation, when there are no top-down theorization models? What are the sensibilities of immersion in user-generated collective micro-worlds?
Alexis Brailas & Ismini Katsarou (Panteion University)
Learning Networks, Micro-communities, and Digital artifacts: A Data Story of Becoming
Social media allows any individual to address directly a (potential) global audience. Back in 2012, massive open online courses or MOOCs were hyped as a disruptive technology that would transform tertiary education. A few elite universities would attract thousands of students to enroll in their online courses, forming large scale learning communities. In 2015, Umberto Eco made the (controversial) statement that: “Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community.” In 2018, Mark Zuckerberg highlighted in his manifesto for Facebook that: “Building a global community that works for everyone starts with the millions of smaller communities and intimate social structures we turn to for our personal, emotional and spiritual needs.” After MOOCs failed to live up their hype, and after the alleged rise and amplification of extremists’ voices on social media (Trumpism, Brexit), it seems that Zuckerberg recognizes a need to put cultural mediators, in the form of small-scale communities, between the individual and the global community.
In this paper, we discuss our practice for developing micro-learning communities in a series of academic courses offered to a small number of students (usually between 10 to 25), during the last four years, in the Department of Psychology, at Panteion University. These courses employ the following techniques and affordances:
- Face-to-face weekly sessions
- Digital artifacts used in the lectures
- Extended time devoted to work in small groups
- Process over content
- Reflective practice in personal blogs
- The Monday Notes technique
- Development of digital artifacts by the participants
- Instructor as facilitator, and co-creator of digital artifacts
Our analysis focuses on the special affordances of micro-communities, the “difference that makes the difference” in comparison with large scale learning networks. The paper itself will be presented in a non-linear nomadic way. We will begin our exploration by experiencing some representative digital artifacts produced over all these years. Plateaus (in Deleuzian terminology) of the context, the initial design, the implied theory, lessons learned, best practices, challenges and open questions will be added gradually.
Nikos Bubaris (University of the Aegean)
On Kinesthetic Narratives
In this presentation I will discuss the processes through which spatial data, in conjunction with the practice of walking and the use of mobile media, create embodied experiences of narrating a place. The talk consists of three parts. In the first part I will critically address the concept of spatial data by focusing on its temporal dynamics. Far from manifesting a fixed reality and objective knowledge, spatial data chart provisionally changing relations in the world, act as nodes and always appear on the level of interfacing. They are inherently ambiguous being both “cooked” and “raw”, active and passive, outcomes and starting points of actions. Spatial data has indeterminate form and effects. In temporal terms, spatial data mark the mutability of the present by alternating between actualization and virtualization.
In the second part, I draw a conceptual outline of media walks as intensive fields of interrelation between humans and the environment. Analytically, both media and walking are considered processes of “bringing together” humans and the environment through similar, different and complementary practices. Indicatively, walking and media blur the boundaries between humans and the environment through embodiment and mediatization respectively. In so doing, media (and) walking do not simply stand between humans and the environment but they also constitute them as they interconnect them. Following this, I will elaborate on the multiple relational practices of media walking by drawing critically on basic principles of post-phenomenology in order to discuss the ways in which walker and location are mutually constituted.
In the third part of the presentation, the dynamic production of spatial data and the formation of walker-location relation are combined and discussed as meaningful sequences of interactions between people, technical affordances and places. To this end, I introduce the concept of “kinesthetic narratives”. Kinesthesia develops a background multisensorial condition against which disperse spatial data can be coherently put together through a series of corporeal responses of a body in motion. With reference to different media walk projects, I will elaborate on the various practices that these series of responses form as kinesthetic narratives that allow walkers to perceive both themselves and a place as a unified spatial event.
Ismini Gatou (University of the Aegean)
Narrative(s) in Transition: Representational and More-than-Representational Aspects of Locative Media
Locative media form liminal zones. They ‘bring-together’ constructed representational content with performed actions and embodiments through the interweaving of digital data with physical locations and events. Τhis convergence requires a radical reassessment of the nature of representation, something which is directly related to important ramifications for the narrativity of the medium.
The ‘crisis of representation’ has always been at the center of ethnographic and cultural studies, regarding how stories, memories and performed identities are mediated, either as delegation or as description. Elaborating on the above, our main research question will focus on how locative media expand notions of representation -and through this, of narrativity- through the conjoinment between discursive storytelling approaches with embodied, sensorial and affective circulations and flows in public space.
Speculating on the affordances and potentialities of the medium to fuse representations and performativities through non-linear and interactive narrative forms, we see narration in locative media as an ‘event’, a space for affective encounters and creative re-enactments. Narrativity in locative media lies in hybridity, shaking the fixed boundaries between the digital and the physical, the cognitive and the corporeal, and so on. It is a narrative ‘in transition’, where thoughts, stories, senses and emotions are brought together rhizomatically, as the ‘moving body’ navigates itself though the digital and the non-digital. Locative media do not only remediate a web of digital narratives, re-presenting the stories of ‘others’ in just a discursive way, but go beyond this, touching more-than-representational strands, where speech-acts, body-acts, social relations and materialities assemble in situ. Following this line of thought, we acknowledge the virtuality of the 'locative narrative', not as a simulation of something ‘else’, but -drawing on Massumi- as a constant displacement and openness to that which 'is not yet'.
In this context, we will look into specific case studies of locative media projects, examining how, what and why is being represented/embodied each time, in order to critically review their ‘politics of narrative’. Aiming to approach locative media both as a technological medium and as a methodological research tool, we will focus on how specific applications might bring visibility/audibility to stories -especially those which do not coincide with the ‘grand narratives’ of a place- and, at the same time, how they might reveal ‘hidden’ relationalities of embodied experience in a public space.
Such an approach to locative media, could have important implementations in multimodal ethnographic research, especially when using them as a collaborative and creative methodological tool. And this, because the 'locative narrative' might open up new ‘spaces’ for subjectivities to form and express, through articulations and performativities in public space, unveiling parts of the existing flows of human (or non-human) interaction (or lack of interaction) that were previously not ‘seen’, while -at the same time- creating new ones.
Grigoris Gkougkousis (Panteion University)
Locating “Romeo”: Geo-sociality and Virtual Embodiment in the PlanetRomeo Dating App
In the last years the use of dating apps has reached new heights making them an important part of the digital economy with a big impact on the everyday lives of users.
For the MSM (Men who have Sex with Men) communities there is a constantly growing plethora of dating social networks that are marketed and utilized as the new – digital -- places for gay sociality and the expression of homoerotic desire, all of them based on geo-locative technologies in order to display the spatial distance between users.
In this presentation I critically engage with and examine the uses of the PlanetRomeo smartphone application, a geosocial dating network for gay men with thousands of users in Greece and millions around the world. Drawing on a digital ethnography conducted for my bachelor’s thesis for the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University using participant observation on the network, interface analysis, casual online chatting with users as well as semi-structured interviews and in depth conversations with 10 of them living in Athens and other locations across Greece, this case study attempts a theoretical examination of concepts such as space, body and sexual desire in a constantly shifting digital context.
PlanetRomeo as a geosocial service for online communication and offline dating is by definition centered on its user’s physical locations and bodies, marking them through GPS technologies, and asking gay men to complete individual user profiles with their face and body photos and detailed descriptions of their physical characteristics and sexual preferences. Following these main features and the ways they are used, the aim of this paper is to contest the assumption of online interaction as an ethereal and disembodied experience and to explore the ways body, space and desire are (re-)constructed, communicated and experienced virtually through analytical schemes such as embodiment, practice and performativity.
Thus my analysis focuses on the gendered and sexual implications of physical and virtual spaces, the correlations between online and offline geographies and the ways dominant discourses and hegemonic representations of masculinity drawing from pornography are involved in – and shape the- subjectivities of gay users online through non-linear embodiment and performative reproduction. The above are perceived and enacted in the context of ambivalent processes of subjection, through which users craft their digital embodiments, share their fantasies and prosume desired images and identities. In this attempt I follow a reworked phenomenological approach that helps us move beyond the ideological divide between the real and the virtual, the symbolic and the experiential and deconstruct the perception of aesthetic images as representations and look closely to their embodying and performative dimensions.
Magdalena Góralska (Kozminski University in Warsaw, Oxford Internet Institute)
Public Care and Digital Distrust: An Ethnography of Knowledge Activism in Times of Misinformation
This paper critically examines grassroots knowledge activism among social actors engaged in the producing, receiving, and sharing of expert information through digital means of communication. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork of online open collaboration communities, I provide insight into how different platforms, acting as infrastructures, help to facilitate, crystallize and materialize various new relations of public engagement among different prod-users (Bruns, 2008), disrupting existing power relations around knowledge production. With an example of pro-mainstream-science and alternative-science/pseudo-science advocates operating in a transmedia environment, I show how various alternative communication routes are used to influence discourses in areas of science, health and nutrition. In collaboration with some, and against others, these social actors use both traditional media, micro-blogging platforms, as well as social networking sites, to convey their messages, in their mission to provide ‘public care’ as complex knowledge translators in the era of the internet of misinformation. The study, while predominantly qualitative, takes advantage of the affordances of digital media to gather digital traces that research participants leave behind. Using Social Network Analysis (SNA) methods, I support ethnographic data with publicly accessible information on relations between particular social actors, which are reflected in links between the effects of their digital work – articles written by them, their posts, shares, and likes on Facebook and Twitter. By examining the work of my interviewees, I highlight their ambiguous role in the expert authority crisis of the reflexive modernization era.
By analysing narrative practices of my interviewees, I propose a novel theoretical approach – a concept of digital distrust – that might prove useful as an interpretative tool for those studying the social web. In the light of recent academic interest in online misinformation, I argue that the so-called digital turn brought distrust into social interactions, enhancing a need to verify claims and arguments of others, in a variety of social settings. The internet, with its abundance of information, isn’t democratic in a sense that its ability to empower is limited by the social and cultural capital of its users. It indeed encourages us to seek answers, and question, to an extent that to trust an expert by not immediately verifying their words is to give away some of the potential power, coming from an ability to google things, doing one’s own research on a given topic in order to have an opinion. Through their digital advocacy practices, my interviewees become new authorities in the entangled networks of online communication.
Elpida Karava, Silas Michalakas, Valia Papastamou & Ioanna Zouli (Centre of New Media and Feminist Practices in Public Space & University of Thessaly)
Aesthetic Techniques and the Gendered Body: Towards a Narrative in the ‘Expanded Field’
The Centre of New Media and Feminist Practices in Public Space based in the Department of Architecture of the University of Thessaly explores the perspectives of feminist practices in public space, aiming to support the political potency of feminist practices that interweave art, architecture, media, ethnography, activism and different systems of knowledge in relation to public space and public claims. One of the projects in progress, coordinated by the artist Vassiliea Stylianidou, is developing around two recent events of extreme public violence, homophobia and misogyny, raising questions about the relationship between public space, violence and the gendered body, as well as the possible ways through which artistic practices attempt to question the public narratives produced around these issues. Zak Kostopoulos’ / Zackie Oh!’s inhuman lynching and murdering in public view in the center of Athens not only happened in temporal proximity to the rape and killing of Eleni Topaloudi in Rhodes, but it is also a symptom that indicates the vulnerability of specific, targeted bodies. The female* body, as well as the body of queer and trans* subjects, is perceived as a vulnerable body in public space, as a body without protective tissue. Starting with a recording of a performative reading by Vassiliea Stylianidou, we will present the development of a multimodal narrative focusing on the interrelation of new media with the experience of space (virtual, public, common, intimate) and consider how this affects our perception of space, the body and the self. Using this showcase, we explore the implications of digital and networked distribution of information and of language formations, the production rather than the collection of data, as well as the use of certain ‘aesthetic’ techniques towards a ‘narrative in the expanded field’.
Pafsanias Karathanasis (Athens Ethnographic Film Festival - Ethnofest)
Street Art and Urban Interventions in the Center of Athens: Presentation of an Ongoing Video-walk project for Ethnographic Research and Pedagogical Purposes
Having long ethnographic experience in street art, graffiti, and political interventions on the streets of central Athens, I started recently to use video in my presentations and lectures in order to better describe and communicate the active involvement of visual interventions in shaping the sensorial experience of urban landscape in the everydayness of the city. In contrast with static photographs, video offers the opportunity to viewers to experience not only the image produced, but also movement and sound. In this way, viewers (students and beyond) can better grasp the place such interventions occupy in the multiplicity of public space, but also understand the relations they form with the surrounding material elements and the built environment, and the way in which those relations can alter our understandings of the same interventions. While video is a very interesting tool to work with in the classroom or in the conference venue, during the past years I have been also working with guided walks for students, through which we can discuss in-situ the different ways in which visual interventions relate to the different built environments of central Athens.
In an attempt to further elaborate my work studying visual interventions in public space, and to also experiment with multimedia ethnography through the use of different digital tools, I have recently started working on the idea of video walks. I consider the tool of video walks, either guided or not, as a way to combine the ethnographic study of interventions in public space with the guided walks I have already been offering to students, and this is for different reasons. A video walk provides the means to discuss and present the ways in which changes in the urban environment (time of day, period of the year, etc.) can affect the ways in which we encounter public interventions. Moreover, through the use of a video walk we can also provide further information on the sociopolitical and cultural context of different areas in which such interventions are being placed, but also discuss the changes on specific walls through the numerous interventions that have been placed on them throughout the years.
Thus, in the Data-Stories Conference, I would like to present a theoretical paper, firstly, on the ways in which a digital tool like the video walk can facilitate a further understanding of the multiple relations between interventions and public space, by combining in-situ discussions with historical views and temporal changes. Secondly, in my presentation I will also discuss the use of the video walk as a tool for pedagogical reasons in teaching about graffiti, street art and visual interventions in the public space of our constantly changing urban environments. In addition, I will screen parts of the ongoing video walks project I have been working on.
Aikaterini Kasimi (Panteion University)
Mapping the Senses: Introducing the Digital ASMR Phenomenon within the Sensory Field of Modernity
This study is focused on a relatively new category of YouTube videos, known as ASMR. The videos in question have as a prime purpose the provocation of a particular sensory experience, through auditory stimuli or other means, in order to achieve a state of relaxation, stress and insomnia relief. The acronym ASMR corresponds to Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, a term which was created within a “health forum” in order to describe an “offline” sensory experience caused by a person whispering softly, usually in a caring manner. The sensory effect is described as a “tingling sensation on the scalp and down the spine” followed by a feeling of numbness and euphoria and is often correlated with a child’s memory of relaxation, almost a hypnosis, under the influence of gentle whisper or a caring monotonous voice. Under this framework, ASMR is itself the sensory experience which the homonymous videos wish to provoke.
The study's purpose is to introduce ASMR as a field of digital ethnography through the analysis of its sensory hypostasis, as well as its capability to create a “therapeutic” digital soundscape. The fact that a formerly anonymous “offline” feeling has been transformed via the web and the YouTube platform into an identifiable sensory experience is of particular interest. While experimenting with the various methods that “trigger” the desired experience, a corpus of informal records of the physical and mental responses to the phenomenon (through the comments sections and the videos) has been created around the ASMR community, “mapping” the sensory journey in a “realité virtuelle”. It is also equally important that the main ASMR value was detected in the “materiality of the sound”, and hence shifted away from the dominant opticocentricism, but later on embraced various other forms of sensory triggers (audible and visual stimuli, performativity of ASMRtist etc.) each of which hold their own analytical value. This digitally-triggered sensory experience raises many questions, concerning the potential biopolitics of sensory obedience in the near future, inside and outside the ASMR community.
In addition to this, ASMR has established itself as a therapeutic digital narrative, drawing an increasingly growing audience to the ASMR scene. It is presented as a “self-care” procedure, guided by the ASMRrtist (ASMR + artist), aka the creator of the ASMR content and YouTuber. This stress- relief method, which is clearly influenced by New Age practices and theories of spirituality, is now embedded in many people's everyday routine. From people who claim to be greatly helped by ASMR (and consequently by the ASMRtist) during times of mourning, mental illness or physical pain, ASMR could be perceived as a “transcendent experience”, similar to guided meditation. This “ritual” part of ASMR is being examined in the framework of modernity, where the self-care process takes place individually and is dictated indirectly by the imperatives of modern neoliberal society.
Steffen Köhn (Freie University Berlin)
Window, Threshold, Frame - Towards an Anthropology of Interfaces
In the light of Internet-based forms of communication and the rise of social media, the screens of our computers, mobile phones, and tablets, have become primary sites for worldly interaction. Their graphical user interfaces now mediate our engagement with the wider world, frame our public self-expressions, and constitute the places where we live out a good deal of our social relations. For Alexander Galloway (2012, 32f.), interfaces are autonomous zones of aesthetic activity with their own ability to generate new results and consequences that can tell us something about our contemporary lives. Contrary to popular perception, he argues that they are not transparent ‘doors’ or ‘windows’ that merely mediate seamlessly between our bodies and the external world of devices but rather produce effects, processes, and translations. In this article, I therefore want to propose the desktop screen not only as an important site for ethnographic research, but also as a possible filming location for an emerging mode of documentary filmmaking that fully embraces the poetics of digital culture. I will discuss a range of films that are created not with conventional film cameras but with screen recording and compositing software and that interweave audiovisual material such as screencasts, internet found footage, feed from webcams or devices’ in-built-cameras, or imagery from the real-time computer graphics engines of online video games. Hence, they propose an innovative cinematic form for exploring contemporary social reality by working with everything computers put in front of our eyes and ears and by mobilizing all the means they offer us to manipulate reality. These desktop documentaries examine the affordances and constraints of digital mediation by reflecting their subject matter in their aesthetic form. They employ the computer screen as both a camera lens and a canvas and use interfaces to tell their stories in a cinematic way.
Violetta Koutsoukou (University of Thessaly)
Audiovisual Traffic & Cosmopolitan Communities
My research experience on the instant – still archived -- everyday exchange of photographs focused on the user-generated footage of new media applications. Posts on platforms like Facebook, imo and messenger create personal visual and audiovisual footage (selfies, Facebook live, 360° videos, group chats and more) that were part of my ethnography on the diasporic Pakistani community of Volos.
Looking at photographic practice as an integral technology of diasporic subjectivity (Papailias, 2012: 340), I am interested in how tagged photography ‘enlists’ co-presence and a sense of belonging. Regarding selfies and their non-linear course on the (by far now expanded) sphere of language, one can agree that social networks (that are being continually com-posed) “challenge dominant cultural narratives”. Being critical of terms such as culture, identity and image, I would like to speak of the performance of diasporic non-representational practices as a challenge to the temporalities and spatialities that emerge through tag events. In my study, personal photographs performed a connective tissue between subjects, communities, languages, diasporas, belonging and co-presence in space and time.
The plurality of photographs that was being exchanged the last days of Ramadan 2018 between my interlocutors and their friends (through smartphone applications) brought up the tensions of self-expression. ‘Tagging’ and ‘being with’ as a performative practice shakes that way, the claims to identity, presence and authenticity of emplaced experience. On the multitude of tagged posts of in-situ festival photographs that I followed, friends and families living in the overseas diasporas joined in the picture. It’s these, amongst other digital media practices, which seem to relocate the cosmopolitan self, a self within fluid, interacting movements. Diasporic Ramadan festivities do critically push the limits of presence and co-presence. From my perspective the hybrid space of belonging became visible, celebrated, dwelt-in and reprocessed.
Relating to the aesthetics/performance part of the conference, I would like to expand more on the non-representanional turn of photographic practices (Frosh 2015). After all, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s concept of an “elsewhere within here” has stuck in my mind. This is a concept in which imagination and practice affect the bonds of space through time. As in the digital practice that the Data-stories conference welcomed, community is a sense of belonging, no matter how (far).
Leandros Kyriakopoulos (Panteion University)
On the Network Culture of Electronic Dance Music in Austerity Athens
The main subject and the argument of the paper revolve around the recent rise of Electronic Dance Music (EDM) culture in Greece and Athens in particular. Athens has witnessed a surge of Techno production and rave parties in the last decade of severe austerity measures and unemployment. This (re)ascendance of EDM has been facilitated and even co-introduced with the corresponding increase of social media's use. The paper addresses the ways with which the rise of EDM in Athens is associated with the modalities of appearance, recognition and mobility opened up by social networking. The fact that Athens has been saddled with the burdens of austerity more than any other city in Greece is central to the above inquiry. Techno music aesthetics emerged within the experience of recession and grassroots (re)negotiation of progress and development. Since its sonic identity formation in 1970s Detroit and 1980s Berlin, it has been by itself an audio palimpsest inscribed with memories of everyday austerity, desire for creative expression and claiming of a bohemian lifestyle of partying.
Techno production in austerity Athens is attuned to this somehow vital negotiation of the fable of progress and accomplishment. Within an everyday life of austerity dominated by the neoliberal ideals of individual success, local musicians invest in music experimentation and production longing for an 'authentic' lifestyle and acknowledgment in the public sphere. To what extent is the desire for innovation, publicity, cosmopolitan belonging and lifestyle experimentation, which characterize EDM consumption culture, intertwined with social media’s modalities of self- presentation, aesthetic expression and recognizability? Such a question urges us to reflect on lifestyle experimentations in EDM party culture as a crucial dimension of self-management via social media in conditions of austerity where neoliberal ideals of success fail to provide a sense of authenticity and cosmopolitan belonging.
Kārlis Lakševics (University of Latvia)
Violence Interfaced: Designing Modes of Attention and Interaction in E-learning for Kindergarten Safety
E-learning production has been a part of the digital economy for a while, especially for large companies seeking to save resources for training their employees in work skills and compliance. At the same time, it is less established in NGO practices of training as the costs of production are not that accessible and the conduct of training to their target audiences less predictable than the regular trainings in large companies. While an open-access interactive course can make the training significantly more accessible to people in capacity to transform a social issue in question, the question of what kind of conditions of possibility e-learning can offer to solving complex social issues remains fully unexplored.
In this paper, I explore an e-learning course developed for kindergarten teachers aiming to improve their skills of recognizing and dealing with violence and establishing a safe environment for children. The paper is based on a self-reflectional insider approach of working as an e-learning instructional designer and as an anthropologist researching violence. I use interviews with both the producers of content and the kindergarten teachers on their user experience to explore the ways that interactions produced in e-learning enable or are limited in addressing embedded and embodied contexts of violence. The ways violence is represented, defined, described and implied in affective stock pictures and hinted at as a part of the broader narrative confronts the learner with potentials for affective experiences, while also being a part of technologization of the senses within the storytelling interface used. Furthermore, the ways the course talks to the learner, the buttons it instructs to click, the plasticity and interruptions that its trajectory presents, the testing questions it poses, as well as its structuring of time, produces modes of attention whose potential for interventions in situations of conflict can be questioned.
From juxtaposing interaction and content analysis with user interviews, I argue that the affective engagements are based not only on the frameworks of discursive content, but on the ways the designed interactions are given or lack meaning. The user experiences of enclosure or disorientation in storified digital interactive environments can present a distance in the modes of attention it produces. On the other hand, other ‘lively’ interactions a few clicks away can be experienced as rather in sync with empowering a safe social environment and the learners’ positioning within it. Rather than critiquing e-learning as missing the face-to-face interactivity or analyzing only the forms of narrative and discourse, it is more fruitful to treat it as a very particular range of articulation with the contexts of violence. This framework taken from software studies allows both for more critical ethnographic engagements with e-learning experiences and serves as a ground for designing interactions that motivate learners to facilitate social change.
Vasiliki Lalioti & Manolis Patiniotis (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens)
Do Stories Have Emotions?
“San Junipero” is one of the most popular episodes of the Black Mirror series. Like many other episodes, its main focus is the possibility of a purely digital existence and its relation to the physical status of individuals. Contrary to other episodes, though, “San Junipero” is surprisingly optimistic and seems to reproduce some trivial claims: Mind uploading, the claim of Paradise and digital self-realization.
The first claim has to do with the philosophically and biologically controversial view that the mind resides in the brain and is independent from the body. Thanks to a specialized device, it may be independently uploaded to the digital realm. The second claim concerns the possibility for the uploaded “psyches” to live eternally in a simulation especially designed to secure their eternal bliss. And the third claim pertains to the widespread perception that the transition to the digital realm allows the individuals to become what they always wanted to, but were unable due to social and moral conventions.
However, it seems that a more radical contemplation underlies this smooth interpretation. The universe of San Junipero is more like a platform that encompasses the “virtual” and the “natural” alike, in the sense that it affords a particular set of technological possibilities that affect the decisions of the individuals in all spheres of their lives (and deaths). From this perspective, the episode seems to be about the making of the self. But it is not about the digital self; rather it is a digital allegory about the making and performing of one’s self. The presentation will focus on the basic concepts that underpin this claim: The modularity of space and time, which backs up the ability of the individuals to put their stories together in a variety of ways. A database that contains the building blocks of virtual personal stories, associated with particular nostalgic signifiers. And the technology of navigation that allows the individuals to compose on the fly the virtual map where their stories unfold. But if this is the case, namely if the individuals compose themselves from the available digital or cultural components and if, in the final analysis, they are no more than autobiographical narratives, then the question is: Where does their ability to perform their selves come from? Do stories have emotions and motives?
Neoklis Mantas & Αlex Deffner (University of Thessaly)
Urban Story-Telling in Metamodern Times: Finding Oneirotopia or Joining the Pixels of Digital Urban Dreams
At the dawn of the new millennium, cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van der Akker (2010) witnessed the emergence of a new ‘structure of feeling’ named metamodernism. By the end of the first decade of the 21st century and due to certain material events (terrorism, financial crises, digital revolution) and intangible developments (critique by the market, différance into pop culture, social media), metamodernism has evolved into the dominant cultural logic of Western capitalist society (Vermeulen & Akker, 2018) and an answer to the insufficiency of modernism and postmodernism in describing cultural contemporaneity.
The first part of the paper is structured around the observation that the driving cultural logic beneath the conceptualization of the ideal city has not remained unaffected. Both modern grand narratives for an anonymous universal city (Utopia- Mantas & Deffner, 2017) and postmodern narrations about nostalgically photogenic, opulent global cities (Imageeria- Mantas & Deffner, 2017) seem to be obsolete. In a hyperconnected, diverse and heavily-digitized world, the contemporary ideal city cannot be described successfully in terms of a collective social vision (progress through scientific realism) or idiosyncratic daydreams that are exhausted by virtual consumption (cultural virtuality). The metamodern ideal city has dreamy qualities and stands as a digital amalgam of actual and virtual elements that emerges amid the refuted modern utopism and melancholic postmodern knowingness. Digital oneirotopia [όνειρο (dream) + τόπος (place)] arises as the inner ideal city that once was envisioned (modern visualization), but was never fully experienced (postmodern anticlimax). A reflection on that dreamy conception is to be applied in this paper.
Within that framework, an expedition shall be attempted within the uncharted territory of digital oneirotopia. Thus in its second part, the paper proceeds to a phenomenological analysis of Neoklis Mantas’ blog (stigmography.tumblr.com), an e-diary that is filled with moments of unscheduled wandering in Volos and Athens. The process is akin to New Age flâneurie: the stigmographer walks through the urban landscape seeking to encounter felt phantasmagorias (Pile, 2005) while capturing digital images with his mobile device (virtual depiction of reality). Then, he edits the photograph (attribution of oneiric qualities to the photo though photo-editing) and tries to explain the dynamic memoir of that instantané through words (digital storytelling). While the stigmographed storytelling reveals a postmodern interchange between actual spaces, virtual places and literary time, at the same time there is a lurking metamodern mythopoeia (Dempsey, 2015) –beyond modern mythologies-- that seems to keep together the digitally fragmented ideal city. The metamodern phantasmagoric dream vanishes when the socio-economic reality sheds light on it, but its experience seems to be the silent driving force towards a contemplative, ever uncertain, future.
Ezekiel Morgan (Freie University Berlin)
360° Cameras + Algorithmic Interpolation: Digital Tools for a Relational Ethnography
Relational ethnography rejects both the God position and one of plurality ‘for a position that is not really a position at all but something more like swimming’ (Taussig 2006). Rather than approaching the world as constituted by a multiplicity of discrete ‘things’ that are then ‘interrelated’ via relations found external to and between these things, relational ethnography explores a universe of ‘intra-relatedness’ (Barad 2012, de la Cadena 2015) where there are no longer singular self-contained things, but, only, relations, ‘relations between different kinds of relations - relations everywhere’ (Holbraad, Pederson 2017). Tools for doing relational ethnographic work are underdeveloped. Referring to my project, “•” (2018), this presentation will explore how new digital technologies, namely 360° cameras and algorithmic interpolation, can be useful tools for conducting relational ethnographies.
“•” involved two significant stages. The first was to develop a small, lightweight and robust 360o camera housing, that allowed the camera to record while spinning and rolling in directions and in environments beyond which the human body can go. The second stage was to process this footage using a video time remapping software that algorithmically interpolates the missing frames required to digitally make footage appear slower than the speed at which it was originally recorded. When footage is extremely slowed down using this software, as in the case of “•”, the algorithm finds it difficult to differentiate between foreground and background, as well as between other ‘things’ depicted in the footage, with the result that a morphosis occurs. What to make of this material? If no longer exclusively bound to the human body, what dispersive perspective, if any, might this camera provide? And what of these morphing frames, which are at once interpolated by the algorithm and are therefore new, and, yet, based on source material? Should they be encountered as digital manipulation or might they be seen to describe a given “reality”, a relational reality?
Maria Pantsidou (University of Lancaster)
Navigating the Wasteland: Narrating the Post-apocalypse in Fallout 4 and Psycho: A Fallout Machinima
This paper considers the ways with which the video game Fallout 4 engages with post-apocalyptic narratives and argues that the machinima Psycho: A Fallout Machinima satirises, offsets and subverts the avatar’s actions in the form of “narrative contextualisation” (Kemmer, p. 101) In the post-apocalyptic world of the role-playing game Fallout 4, a character called simply “Sole Survivor”, awakes from a long-term cryogenic stasis in Vault 111, long after a nuclear holocaust has caused devastation throughout the United States. The world that remains includes the city of Boston and the surrounding Massachusetts region known as “The Commonwealth”, which the protagonist navigates in order to find his/her missing son, after the murder of their partner. The player subsequently has to construct their character addressing a wide array of pre-conceived, external stimuli in order to increase their abilities and level up. Exploring the game’s almost completely annihilated world, the player has to complete quests, assist factions and manage settlements, by constructing and even deconstructing them.
The Fallout universe is largely influenced by retro-futuristic aesthetics, as imagined in pulp sci-fi fiction of the 1950s, a recurring paradigm in the representations of atomic age narratives. Theoretically indebted to Timothy Morton’s “Poisoned Ground: Art and Philosophy in the Time of Hyperobjects” (2013), where he argues that this is the moment in history where “a new phase of art is best thought as a strange asymmetry between equally matched forces: the human capacity for computation on the one hand, and the gigantic and withdrawn hyperobjects on the other” (Morton, 2013), the present paper seeks to investigate contemporary ecological assumptions in video game narratives, as they are materialised in the worlds of Fallout 4 and Psycho: A Fallout Machinima. Also, the genre of machinima will be explored as a new documentary medium, as it remediates the meaning of the ‘original’, and produces a whole new narrative in which the main characters combine elements of superhero movies, the Star Wars and the Matrix franchises, navigating the post-fallout wasteland. Drawing from Kath Weston’s Animate Planet: Making Visceral Sense of Living in a High-Tech Ecologically Damaged world (2017), where she demonstrates the ways with which humans are entangled with technologies they have created, tracing compositional intimacies that tie humans and other living entities with affective bonds, this paper argues that machinima offers a performative expression of this entanglement. Machinima, viewed in the present paper as a cultural production practice, creates an affective narratology and re-imagines the contours of the post-apocalyptic world.
Charis Papaevangelou (Utrecht University)
Serious Games and Procedural Rhetoric: The Case of “Bury Me, My Love” and the Uneasy Feeling of Virtually Stepping in One’s Shoes
This paper aims to explore how video games can make use of modern digital artefacts, such as instant messaging, to augment the conveyance and fostering of sentiments, such as empathy. Specifically, this paper revolves around the game Bury me, my love (The Pixel Hunt), as a case in point of how video games may take advantage of their digital inherence by adopting platform-specific characteristics to amplify their communicative pοwer. Bury me, my love is a game about the refugee crisis, emphasising that behind the reported numbers of refugees, both dead and alive, are actual people. The user is called on to play as Majd, the husband of Nour who has begun a dangerous journey from Syria to Germany, and the only way to communicate with her (and play the game) is via an instant messaging application, very similar to WhatsApp (Facebook). In this paper, I will be focusing my attention on the primary version of the game, that is the mobile one, because it offers a much more visceral experience than the desktop version; even the developers admit on their website, that it was “designed for mobile phones.” Firstly, I will be discussing a term borrowed by Ian Bogost and other serious-games aficionados, “empathy games.” Specifically, I will be studying how digital games can effectively influence social wellbeing by getting players to enable and experience events, something innately unique to the medium. To this end, I will be also consulting Cristoph Klimmt’s work on “serious games and social change.” Secondly, I will be employing Bogost’s “procedural rhetoric” conceptual framework to study the game at hand, as a novel way of integrating “change related messages” into game design, thus answering Klimmt’s critical question on how to “synthesize the change related message with the interactivity of the medium.” By applying Bogost’s concept to my approach, it is made evident that certain mechanisms (e.g. Bury me, my love’s real-time notifications) greatly augment the game’s “persuasive power” (Bogost). Furthermore, I reckon that Matthew Curinga’s take on affordances, as “interpretive” instances of interactive software, will critically benefit my inquiry both as a theoretical and a methodological framework. Finally, I will be discussing how game creators can further make use of procedural rhetoric to create meaningful and memorable experiences that strengthen social values and empower players to actively reflect on societal change.
Alexandros Papageorgiou (University of Thessaly), Joy Al-Nemri (Bard College), Penny Paspali (University of Łodz-University of Oviedo) & Nicholas-George Sykas (University of Thessaly)
Know-What-I-Meme: An(other) Experiment in Producing and Disseminating Knowledge.
What if memes were used as a tool to democratize knowledge and help forge a more empathetic and informed public? What if social scientists were part of the “meme-ification of knowledge”, actively participating in public fora by using a combination of tools to share their positions and discuss with non-academic publics? What if anthropologists worked more in teams rather than individually? What if social scientists talked openly about (or even performed) their fears and doubts?
Two years ago this team created a project as part of the 2017 Pelion Summer Lab for Cultural Theory and Experimental Humanities, organized by the Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology and the Laboratory of Social Anthropology of the University of Thessaly. That project represented a theoretical, practical, and ethical provocation toward ourselves, our colleagues, and our discipline. It brought the fore issues like social media representation, contemporary processes of knowledge production and performativity, as well as the mechanisms that govern the regimes of truth, and the position of academic knowledge in a rapidly changing, increasingly interconnected world. We used a “what if” approach in order to help ourselves and our peers reflect on how to fine-tune the pertinence of the questions that we are asking.
Drawing on Butler’s account of affective performativity, we ask: since precarity tends to be the norm, rather than an exception, and produces subjectivities that embody and embed precarity, in which ways can we resist this? We propose memes as a means to convey a counter-discourse, capable of enacting collective self-reflection, as well as enabling the formation of affective networks of solidarity. Furthermore, we think of memes not only as mere objects of communication, information and education, but also as having their own agency as well as their own material and discursive capacity to affect and be affected. Challenging the limits of academia, we argue that memes can function as communicative bridges between academia and society at large. Reflecting on that: are memes disruptive enough?
In this year’s presentation, we aim to further explore the potential of memes and other media to convey knowledge and experience that is usually captured in textual form. We will experiment with different modes of storytelling, testing the limits of censorship, jurisdiction and legitimacy regarding the production and dissemination of academic knowledge.
Daria Radchenko (KB Strelka Institute, Russia)
Translating Ethnography: Social Media Data in Urban Planning Process
Participant and non-participant observation have for decades been key methods of anthropological research. A classically-trained anthropologist would spend months with the community he or she is interested in, observing its everyday life, feasts and rites and doing a "thick description" (Geertz 1973) of the norms and values underlying these practices. Today applied urban anthropology, however, finds itself under serious time pressure: it needs to get as much information on the life of a city within weeks rather than months.
Digital anthropology seems to be one of the answers to this challenge. Research of online traces of human activity (including texts, likes, shares and photos) allows us to get a look inside everyday practices and festive rituals of a city, performed throughout the yearly cycle. Importantly, these traces are a subject of social norms and attitudes, and thus they give an insight not only into lives of individuals, but also give an understanding of what urban objects the community considers to be valuable and prestigious. At KB Strelka, this information is used in pre-project complex analysis – and thus the data from social media serve to improve the cities.
Importantly, digital anthropology (which in this case goes hand in hand with GIS-analysis and data analysis) has some less obvious functions. It does not only "tell the story" of a city's life - through using multi-method approach with both quali- and quanti-analysis, maps, graphs and other visualizations, it becomes a specific way to translate and legitimize the findings for the publics that in many cases have never worked with long ethnographic narratives: architects and urban planners, city administration, urban activists, etc. In this paper, I'll provide "an ethnography of data ethnography": how it collaborates with various actors of urban planning, what are the possibilities and dark sides of this collaboration, how does it come that data from social media can be seen as more reliable than field anthropology.
Giorgos-Ilias Sakkas (Panteion University)
’What Do I Like? Digging Deep into the Data’ – Individual and Social Bodies’ Construction Through ‘Digital’ Porn Experiences
This presentation concerns specific pornographic websites and the ways their digital content is consumed and navigated. More specifically, by approaching the content and the form of these sites as part of discourses and practices on the body and sexuality that are produced in social media, I examine how subjects shape their perceptions concerning the body, sexuality and the self through an embodied participation in the pornographic material and an interactive consuming experience.
This essay mainly draws on a small-scale digital ethnography on Pornhub’s network done as part of my master’s 2018 thesis entitled: “Surfing Pornhub – digital practices of individual and social bodies’ construction”. By focusing on specific practices of digital porn experiences, I will argue that the human and nonhuman assemblages that constitute the Pornhub network, such as online interaction, the performative practices accompanying it, the digital environment and the circulating content operate as a kind of soft, if not strong, biopolitical process through which, data is collected and bodies and populations are identified and formed between virtual and “real” worlds. In this process, elements of material and digital culture, e.g. data, platforms, algorithms, cookies, are of great importance. They play a regulatory role in online pornographic experience and they significantly contribute to the formation of individual and social bodies. The users cease to be the only agents in such online experiences, but parts of the 'responsibility of their selves' are distributed to algorithms (Foucault 1984). New forms of digital control emerge through digital practices, such as metrics, massive data collection, content recommendations for subjects’ sexual pleasure, and are applied not only “on the users’ bodies”, but also “through their bodies”. Subjects' - or better prosumers' - role is not passive. Through embodied practices of producing, circulating, consuming content and through navigating, the users play active parts in self-constructing procedures which therefore become dynamic, ambiguous and negotiable. Fields located in the conjunction between the “the real” and the virtual, where subjects’ pleasure and sexual desire meet individual and social bodies’ identification, formation and management are considered as highly important for understanding digital ways of self-constitution in historical and social contexts, where “the digital” turns out to be increasingly important for the subjects’ social life.
Eleni Sideri (University of Macedonia)
My Post-doc in Three Pictures: Data Visualisation and Ethnographic Writing/representation
In their comparative exploration of the interwoven relations between ethnography and semiotics, Deltsou and Tsibiridou (2016) concluded that the transformations of globalisation in the last decades make imperative the need to open up ethnography beyond participant observation. My post-doc concerned film co-productions in Southeast Europe and the idea of European-ness. Ι focused on three festival co-production markets, Sarajevo, Tbilisi and Thessaloniki. In terms of methods, the research combined database analysis to explore the varied histories of co-productions of these three industries, short field trips for interviewing festival professionals and creators, and keeping a diary. Τhe results of database analysis were visualized by using the open access software GEPHI. The programme generated maps based on the notion of proximity (degree of centrality, betweenness centrality, size etc.). This notion will be used as a way to explore “database inclusivity” and “narrative selectivity” (Hayles 2007). The video-presentation will start from three co-production maps/networks that depict much of the research conclusions and then it will combine found footage (co-productions from the three countries) and sound (voice-over from the interviews and diaries) in order to produce a multiple mode of representation that shares the intricacies of the the ‘field’.
Yannis Skarpelos & Sophia Messini (Panteion University)
Digital Storytelling and the Story of the Present
"The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller” - Steve Jobs
According to Steve Jobs – the "evangelist"" of the digital age – the world's most powerful person is the narrator. The one who narrates a series of information, events and actions that have taken place in the past. All these are structured to compose a complete story. One that the listener or reader can understand instantly and effortlessly.
In the digital age, storytelling is being exploited in both journalism and social media. In journalistic media, the storyteller is the journalist, who focuses on attracting readers, in contrast to social media where this role is taken over by the citizens. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc., besides being tools of interpersonal communication, also disseminate information, news and narratives, even in real time. A story, a fact, or an event triggers a network of interactions that evolves over that narrative. This network highlights the identities of individuals, as well as conflicts between them, and creates nuclei with similar views, ideologies and characteristics.
It is sentiment and public opinion that made Twitter a tool for political communication. Politicians aim to attract their target groups through Twitter and influence political opponents, in an attempt to strengthen their political power and consolidate their place on the national political scene.
But what happens when a story is being 'narrated' through social media in real time? Is there always a narrator? Or is it a story without a narrator? How can we visualize the mechanisms of modern forms of communication through the canvas of information visualization, while an event is taking place? How does visualization highlight the unconscious co-operative formation of a narrative without a narrator, where data narrate a story without a hero? Real-time data mining through Twitter answers such questions, scrutinizing the validity of Steve Jobs's opinion.
Eleni Tsatsaroni (University of Thessaly)
The construction of humanoid robot identity in HBO’s Westworld series
This paper examines the TV series Westworld (HBO, 2016-2018) as a cultural product of western society through which we can question what the main characters of these series (the host subject) symbolize in the contemporary social imaginary. In order to investigate the subjectivity of Westworld’s hosts, I use its narrative as a field of study, the representational product per se, as well as the digital field of reddit, a digital platform where fans communicate and discuss.
Following the history of the creatures, whose subjectivity captured my interest in this paper, I detected the emphatic representation of the body, a body which is totally humanlike. This stunning superficial resemblance between hosts and humans triggers a new discussion in relation to the digital field and the way it affects social reality. Thus, one of the main questions this paper aims to address is how contemporary humans perceive the social concept of reality.
As the digitality of contemporary everyday life is being construed as a means to interpret human experience, the reality constructed by the combination of these digital experiences is being treated as a downfallen reality. The contrast between tangible materiality of the world which traditionally is understood as “real” and the immaterial status of digitality is the main argument for the exclusion of the digital field from the realm of reality.
The distinction between the two realities, which are considered qualitatively different from one another, concerned me in particular through the way it affects the social construction of memory. Recording, saving and reproduction of lived experiences as digital footprints, brings the postmodern human closer to the condition of the host subject, whose memory of lived experience is flawless, objective and unquestionable. This new relation between society and memory leads to a revisiting of our views in relation to the supremacy of memory over oblivion.
This deceptive similarity of humans with their high-tech substitutes causes the urge to look for the distinction between the two subjects in attributes beyond the body. Information and data are both the solution and problem to this puzzle. Creators and viewers’ anguished effort to define human subjectivity as opposed to host subjectivity reveals the difficulty of contemporary humans have in understanding themselves as something completely different from their digital components.
Iraklis Vogiatzis (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens)
My Office as a Database: Labor in Microwork Platforms.
For over two decades scholars have tried to investigate the ways that digital technologies transformed labor. A huge amount of research has been produced about the new ways of creating value in post-industrial societies and the changing boundaries between leisure and working time. At the same time, the pervasiveness of digital technologies in production has raised the alarm about employment and new forms of labor exploitation. This paper examines the contemporary academic discourse concerning the transformations of labor in the digital age particularly focusing on forms of labor employed by Microwork platforms. I will present a brief overview of the current sociological and theoretical discourses about the new forms of labor and the main theoretical perspectives enjoyed by various academic disciplines. In doing so, I will focus on theories stemming from the tradition of Autonomous Marxism, like Maurizio Lazzarato’s analysis of “immaterial labor”. In the wake of such theories, many scholars suggested new types of labor: creative, estranged, free and digital, resulting in a “rhizome” of epithets that were associated with the word “labor”. I will argue that this rich theoretical background fails to capture the new questions raised by the transformation of labor brought about by microworking platforms like Mechanical Turk, Fiverr, and Clickworker. Microwork platforms outsource series of small tasks that existing algorithms cannot fulfill to people around the globe. Such platforms function by matching the database of workers with databases of tasks, establishing a new Taylorism and, thus, reconceptualizing the “line of production” (Manovich). My purpose is to outline the limits of the existing theoretical account by asking questions such as: How is labor reorganized in these platforms? How does the modularity of labor affect the self-perception of microworkers? What kind of narratives ensue from their “databased” relationship with their creative activity? Can we conceive of Microwork as a virtual assembly line 2.0? Is there any historical continuity between the traditional organization of labor in the factory with microworking? The aim of the presentation is to lay out some preliminary theoretical concerns and invite further discussion on the crucial issue of the transformation of labor in the wake of the digital era.
John von Bergen (Bard College Berlin)
Exploring VR in the Studio Arts Classroom
Google’s “Tilt Brush” VR program has proven to be a beneficial instrument for teaching studio arts, as we recently experienced with two courses offered this past year at both Bard College Berlin and Bard College New York. Students were given prompts for creating spaces and situations, and most importantly, new experiences. They also fearlessly engaged in their own themes and interests as wide-ranging as abstract painting, game design, environmental concerns, music video, cartooning, and coding. We will discuss how the potential for developing pedagogical directions with VR can be a promising new tool for art student production.
Mariana Ziku (KU Leuven)
Datafying and Visualizing Digital Community Imaginaries: An Experimental Approach
The presentation will review art and science projects of data analysis and visualization that attempt to understand the way digital communities interact and how their supporting infrastructures function. It is concerned with the contemporary web practice of massive participation in user-based micro-content platforms and p2p services in which contingent, vast flows of data are being exchanged in real-time. The presentation will focus on the collective aesthetic and narrative manifestations within these ecologies, from a computational art theoretical/curatorial point of view. In particular, it will inquire into new modes of digital curatorial practices such as community-based curation and reflect on narrative concepts such as micro-culture or micro-genre and techniques that bring to light the shared imaginaries of digital communities.
Even though efforts proliferate for modelling professional databases where cultural-related content is carefully organized for optimal use, an exponential growth rate of bulk data is happening outside of such repositories. This condition lets a diverse ground of cultural practices and processes to emerge, where more complex agencies such as digital collectivities and machine computation develop new modes of curation, cultural exchange and narratives. In view of this “wild frontier” of digital information, cultural creation models can be studied that open up our understanding of the synthesis and function of grassroots aesthetics and narratives as well as our awareness of the digital interfaces of human-machine interaction. How do collective cultural practices function in decentralized web spaces? How do aesthetic and narrative patterns evolve through open massive participation, when there are no top-down theorization models? What are the sensibilities of immersion in user-generated collective micro-worlds?