Geert Lovink Research Articles

REVOLUTIONARY DISCOURSES IN A TIME CAPSULE: A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ANALYSIS OF CANONICAL, INTELLECTUAL LITERATURE CONCERNING THE SOCIAL IMPACT AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INTERNET.

Whilst the internet’s development can be traced back to the 1940s (Turner, 2006; Flichy 2015), the rhetoric of a digital revolution primarily emerged during the early 1990s and mid-00s and was often produced by the US-based academic community which has been intrinsically involved with the advancement of the internet. The dominant conceptualizations put forward in their popular, scholarly writings about the technology’s past and future, became authoritative in our academic understanding of the internet’s social impact and significance. Subsequently, notions like ‘the electronic highway’ were adopted in legislative and popular discourse which, in turn, influenced how the internet was understood, designed, and used on a broader, societal level. Notable authors of these influential texts - Howard Rheingold, Nicholas Negroponte, Sherry Turkle, and Geert Lovink - wrote their findings based on their own experiences with internet initiatives and from their particular theoretical backgrounds and positionality. Most importantly, these texts present valuable information as if coming from a time capsule; often framed with a rhetoric of transformation, the writers themselves contribute to the idea of a revolutionary internet following optimistic notions of digital utopianism and technological solutionism, situated in a particular Zeitgeist. The aim of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of how these revolutionary notions developed over time and what their grander impact was on our contemporary conceptions, in and outside the influential American context. This is achieved by conducting a critical, historiographical analysis of canonical, intellectual literature about the early internet and thus re-contextualizes it as historical traces itself.

Satellite surveillance and the orbital unconscious

Satellite data are frequently attached to discourses of infallibility, objectivity and omnipresence. Yet the value of satellite data in everyday society largely depends on the strength of our interpretations, interpretations which are easily misled. Satellite images can be fabricated, misread and restricted, yet companies like Google encourage users to see themselves as active agents in a collaborative process of accumulating data, obscuring users’ true relations with satellite technology and giving them a false sense of power and anonymity. In this sense, satellites constitute a new unconscious terrain of perception. For Geert Lovink, we have reached an age where we can ‘read satellites as metaphors, as a new type of technological mirror’ and as ‘an unconscious apparatus’. This article argues that our lack of conscious awareness around the presence, nature and infrastructure of satellites allows them to thrive under the radar as a new species of unconscious surveillance technology.

Psofotopias

Psofotopias is an essay that observes how different media, cultural artifacts, and narratives depict dreams and the act of dreaming. I connect these popular media examples to critiques of contemporary technology and media theory, to brain science and philosophy of noise, and I conclude with a commentary on one of my recent art installations. This text is inspired by an interview with Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter published under the title “Dreamful Computing”, which takes a quote by the late Bernard Stiegler as its prompt: “In order to do politics today, we must dream”. Their overall interest is that of “designing theories that don’t disavow the uncertainty, noise, and contingency of the situation of media”, an interest that I align with in refusing the often clear-cut separation of dreams and nightmares into either utopias or dystopias. By treating dreams with moral indeterminacy, a space for interpretation, analogy, and (trans)individuation is opened up. This space of ambiguity and uncertainty is what I call a “psofotopia”. Psofotopia is a portmanteau (psofos, noise; topos, place) that allows me to argue that dreams, with their cognitive, interpretive, and affective ambiguity, are “spaces of noise” that offer a model to deal with complexity. The dreaming, and its hallucinatory qualities, produces a para-conceptual and para-real psofotopia, a space that triggers collisions and clashes between the immaterial and the physical. An analogy can be drawn between the para-reality of dreams and that of the virtual space, initially imagined by cyberpunk authors as a consensual hallucination that would free humans from their bodily constraints, and eventually developed into an expensive technological infrastructure that aims to perpetuate interpassivity. I will conclude with a discussion about my new work, NNNV XR, an expanded dream that utilizes VR in combination with a sound installation and custom-made transducing furniture producing haptic signals. The installation connects the virtual and the physical world, allowing the experiencer to dream along my dreams. By navigating the sensorial inputs of NNNV XR, the experiencer inhabits the multimedia psofotopia I propose while being aware of the threads that connect the immaterial and the tangible through the para-real.

Organizational Aesthetics: On Certain Practices and Genealogies

Abstract “Organizational Aesthetics” traces the genealogies of artistic practices engaging socially, politically, and aesthetically with form to enter into fundamental debates about hierarchy, horizontality, and centralization. Against the background of historical conflicts over relational aesthetics and tactical media, the essay problematizes the exclusive focus on physical gatherings as the exclusive site of relationality. Instead, it offers an analysis that revolves around the dialectic of such gatherings and the organizational and technological structures that subtend and transcend them. Spanning the mid-1990s to the present, this account of organizational aesthetics includes critical discussions of artists, activists, theorists, and collectives including BüroBert, Alice Creischer, Andrea Fraser, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Geert Lovink, ruangrupa, and Jonas Staal.

Review of Mieke Gerritzen and Geert Lovink (2019). Made in China, Designed in California, Criticised in Europe: Amsterdam Design Manifesto

Review of Mieke Gerritzen and Geert Lovink (2019). Made in China, Designed in California, Criticised in Europe: Amsterdam Design Manifesto

Cibertiempo, o el régimen temporal de la modernidad comunicacional

espanolCibertiempo es un termino relativamente nuevo que parece ser la contracara o el complemento de ciberespacio. Sin embargo, no es necesariamente asi. El concepto, pese a ser enunciado ya a fines de la decada de 1990, no ha sido explorado sistematicamente, al menos con relacion a la construccion sociohistorica del tiempo. Los antecedentes se reducen, casi con exclusividad, a algunos trabajos del estadounidense Lance Strate (1996), del ingles Sean Cubitt (2000), del rumano Adrian Mihalache (2002) y de los neerlandeses Jos De Mul (2010) y Geert Lovink (2006; 2019). Casi ninguno de estos autores esta traducido aun al castellano. Muchas de las referencias se enfocan en el mundo de la economia. No obstante, es llamativa la escasa atencion que merece el termino con relacion a las teorias de la comunicacion o la sociologia, como si las temporalidades producidas por las redes y la virtualidad fueran un producto del ciberespacio. Sobre este particular llamaba la atencion Cubitt en “Cybertime: Ontologies of digital perception”, publicado en 2000. EnglishCybertime is a relatively new term that seems to be the counterface or complement to Cyberspace. However, it is not necessary as well. The concept, despite eing stated and late 1990s, has not been systematically explored, at least in relation to the socio-historical construction of time. The background is reduced, almost exclusively, to some works by the american Lance Strate (1996), the english Sean Cubitt (2000), the romanian Adrian Mihalache (2002) and the dutch Jos De Mul (2010), and Geert Lovink (2006; 2019). Almost none of these authors is still translated to Spanish. Many of the references focus on the world of the economy. However, the scarce attention that the term deserves in relation to the theories of communication or sociology is striking, as if the temporalities produced by networks and virtuality had a product of cyberspace. About this particular situation, Cubitt called attention on “Cybertime: Ontologies of digital perception”, published in 2000.

Articulating Alternatives: Moving Past a Plug-and-Play Prosthetic Media Model

Articulating Alternatives: Moving Past a Plug-and-Play Prosthetic Media Model

Secretive organisations: anarchism after platform capitalism

Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter's Organization After Social Media interrogate what our relation to the Internet in general, social media platforms, and organised networks in particular should be after botched Twitter revolutions, NSA counter-insurgencies and a rising disillusionment with "platform capitalism." Seeking to find a way for activists to operate in secret networks the authors suggest a future between what they see as the double pitfalls of crises-ridden conventional organisations and offline romanticism.

Going on a Field Trip: Critical Geographical Walking Tours and Tactical Media as Urban Praxis in Sydney, Australia

Going on a Field Trip: Critical Geographical Walking Tours and Tactical Media as Urban Praxis in Sydney, Australia

Interfacing counterculture and digital cultures: an interview with Geert Lovink

The famous Dutch media theorist and net activist Geert Lovink stood at the crossroads of several players and stages of cyberculture in the 90s, trying to assemble a disparate crowd of media activists and media artists, programmers, designers, cultural producers and researchers. In this interview he looks back at his involvement in Mediamatic magazine from 1989 till 1994, the co-creation of the community access network De Digitale Stad Amsterdam,which started in 1994 as a freenet initiative in Amsterdam and the nettime email list in 1995. He also discusses the spirit of the 90s decade and the role of counter-cultural movements in the genesis and development of digital cultures.

Imagination of our Present: Jean Baudrillard from the The System of Objects to the Domotics and the Internet of Things

The article reflects on the connections between Baudrillard’s first reflections on space, design and technology and the contemporary innovations that blurred completely the border between virtual and real. Just because not so present in the international debate on the new web as in the nineties, Jean Baudrillard’s work still deserves to be rediscovered and applied to the innovations that mark our time. Probably only authors such as Geert Lovink (2011) are using the reference to the French philosopher to establish a union trait between the old web and the so-called web 2.0. This is why it might be more useful to reflect on how the visionary character of Baudrillard has anticipated a future vision, still to be explored systematically. For this reason in the following article I will try to compare Baudrillard’s first work which is an insightful dissertation on the relationship between the virtual space of communication and the physical space of the architecture, forerunning one of the latest trends in digital innovation that is the integration between bits and atoms as in the recent debate on the end of the ‘digital dualism’ (Jurgenson, 2011).

The Alt-social Network of Natalie Bookchin’s Testament

This article addresses issues of user precarity and vulnerability in online social networks. As social media criticism by Jose van Dijck, Felix Stalder, and Geert Lovink describes, the social web is a predatory system that exploits users’ desires for connection. Although accurate, this critical description casts the social web as a zone where users are always already disempowered, so fails to imagine possibilities for users beyond this paradigm. This article examines Natalie Bookchin’s composite video series, Testament, as it mobilizes an alt-(ernative) social network of vernacular video on YouTube. In the first place, the alt-social network works as an iteration of “tactical media” to critically reimagine empowered user-to-user interactions on the social web. In the second place, it obfuscates YouTube’s data-mining functionality, so allows users to socialize online in a way that evades their direct translation into data and the exploitation of their social labor.

Exploring YouTube as a Transformative Tool in the “The Power of MAKEUP!” Movement

Exploring YouTube as a Transformative Tool in the “The Power of MAKEUP!” Movement

Completing (Public) Spheres: Theatre and the Media in the Baltic States

The article deals with two interconnected issues: the issue of theatre interacting with the media and digital network, and the problem of theatre functioning as a public sphere. Both questions are addressed by the analysis of three case studies from contemporary Baltic theatre: two productions of Henrik Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” staged by Lithuanian director Jonas Vaitkus in 2011 and Latvian director Alvis Hermanis in 2013, and the political project of Estonian theatre NO99, called “Unified Estonia” performed in 2010. The focus of the analyses is not on the dramatic or aesthetic structures of the productions, but on their communication as in all three cases the communication using the media and the network was an important part of the theatrical events. How the theatre producers in the Baltic States approach and deal with mass media and the digital web? What new concepts of the relationship between live physical, placed dialogue and distributed media communication are there in contemporary public sphere? What could be the contribution of the communicative practices of contemporary theatres to the development of democracy and the public sphere? Should theatres offer a radical subversion or rather a critical intervention into the political democracy dominated by electronic, digital or social media? The theoretical background of the analyses is supported by the Habermasian concept of the public sphere, but it also considers the contradictions of this theory as well as its further development in contemporary reflections on the media, social media and the network by Therese F. Tierney, Geert Lovink, Christopher Balme and Luke Goode. The concept of distributed aesthetics is discussed as a proper analytical tool for conceptual analysis of the political projects in contemporary Baltic theatre. The analysis of the three theatre productions in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania point out how local artistic practices through mass media can reach an indefinite number of recipients and inspire further discussions in the places and communities that were usually ignored by traditional routes of theatre communication. The article stresses the possibility and the need for contemporary theatre to shift, intervene, move beyond live experiences, be in more than one place and time in the age when public and democracy does the same.

The Garden Is the Machine: New Media and Technology in American Studies

The Garden Is the Machine:New Media and Technology in American Studies Iván Chaar-López (bio) Digital Memory and the Archive. By Wolfgang Ernst. Edited by Jussi Parikka. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 256 pages. $75.00 (cloth). $25.00 (paper). Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process. By Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. 288 pages. $32.00 (cloth). Networks without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media. By Geert Lovink. Cambridge: Polity, 2011. 220 pages. $69.95 (cloth). $22.95 (paper). In his editorial for American Quarterly’s 2006 special issue on technology, Siva Vaidhyanathan invited American studies scholars to grapple with the strong influences of techno-fundamentalism—the “misguided faith in technology and progress.”1 To challenge this faith, Vaidhyanathan asserted, one must ask the following questions: Who decides what technologies are developed, bought, sold, and used? Who creates technology and for whom? What are the cultural and economic assumptions influencing a particular technology’s operations and its effects?2 This special issue displayed how the fields of technology studies, communication, and history of technology can come together through the critical endeavor of American studies. One salient example is Caitlin Zaloom’s complex study of technology through the creation of a new trading floor for the Chicago Board of Trade in 1930 and the opening of a Chicago-style dealing firm in 2000 London.2 Zaloom claims that the design of spaces for market processes, either face-to-face or face-to-screen, marked an important event in the articulation of neoliberal ideals. As Zaloom argues, technological and social arrangements presume a conscious effort in designing around constraints exerted on the process. She notes that “focusing attention not only on a single new technology, but also on the blend of devices, social forms, and human skills that are necessary to make them work … expand[s] both the empirical frame and the analytic [End Page 1143] categories for cultural studies of technology.”3 Zaloom reframes the study of technology in a broader milieu of human power relations, interventions, and limits. Yet machine agency and machinic time remain out of the frame. What can technological specificity tell scholars about the arrangements that Zaloom and American studies wish to elucidate? How can scholars approach the ways that technology demarcates and challenges what is possible? What does it mean when life itself is mediated? These are some of the questions that Networks without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media, Digital Memory and the Archive, Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process, and the present essay address. Machines and technology have been subjects of inquiry in our field for many decades. One of the foundational works in American studies, Leo Marx’s Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964), casts machines as tropes of industrial power in the writings of canonical US authors. Marx elaborated this trope to explain how machines suddenly intruded on the sanctity and serenity of the natural environment—the “garden” of the title.4 Literary images of the-machine-in-the-garden underscored the tensions between civilization and nature; they also functioned as tactical maneuvers against industrialization. The 2006 special issue of American Quarterly revisited Marx’s critical examination of how technology was conceived, represented, and used. Like Marx, the issue’s authors criticized the narrative of technological progress and how it obscures many of the injustices produced by technological change. The garden, nonetheless, is a design, a construction appeasing our nostalgic longing for “nature” and the “real,” which are themselves constructions. Even “in the garden” subjects are not outside the machine and its software of representation and power/knowledge. The issue at stake, then, is not to think of new media and technologies as mere extensions of human agency but to scrutinize their specific operations, procedures, and structures while engaging their associations across agents (both human and nonhuman). From this perspective, not only are new media tools through which human subjects enact their desires; they also produce and delineate those same subjects as they autonomously associate with other agents. Though the books reviewed here fall “outside” American studies, they have...

When dress absorbs technology: An interview with Susan Elizabeth Ryan by Rebecca Louise Breuer and Geert Lovink

Abstract

Black Twitter? Racial Hashtags, Networks and Contagion

Race itself has become a digital medium, a distinctive set of informatic codes, networked mediated narratives, maps, images, visualizations that index identity. (1) There is a growing body of research exploring issues of race and ethnicity in digital environments. Social networking relations, modes of online communication and digital identities have been revealed to be far from race-neutral. (2) Research has raised questions concerning how extant racial segregations and inequalities have spilled over into the virtual realm, highlighting the creation of new kinds of digital divides. The oft-cited, iconic 1993 New Yorker cartoon by Peter Steiner announcing 'On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog' captured the apparent freedom of a blossoming World Wide Web. However, the original cyberspace promise of 'leaving the meat (body) behind' has done little to withstand the racialization of online spaces. The internet has always been a racially demarcated space and today the plethora of online communication platforms (instant messaging, email-lists, blogs, discussion forums and social media) continue to exhibit varying degrees of identity marking and racialized segregation. (3) The internet, in other words, is a manifold set of sociotechnical practices, generative of digital privileges and racial ordering. It has become apparent that online race is complex and mutable. This picture supports Geert Lovink's declaration that: 'The idea that the virtual liberates you from your old self has collapsed. There is no alternative identity'. (4) That digital media should be understood as merely an adjunct to the 'real' world is, then, an increasingly tenuous standpoint. But this should not be taken to mean that there is a static replication of 'off-line' identities online, far from it. Online racial inclusions and exclusions are dynamically transforming, augmented by the explosion of 'Web 2.0' social networking sites, and modes of access (broadband and mobile phones). For instance, the rise of social networks witnessed the 'white flight' of users from MySpace towards Facebook. (5) And variations in the adoption of social media by different ethno-racial groups have become more visible. (6) The hype of Web 2.0 celebrating user participation and content generation has obscured the racialized protocols that circumscribe our online interactions. (7) Web studies exploring race and ethnicity have principally conceived identity as a 'lived' social construction or hegemonic mode of representation. The relationship between communication platforms and identity practices is difficult to unravel, particularly as research in this field risks essentialising online activity in relation to supposed ethno-racial designation. The rapidly expanding digital landscape poses a further challenge to researchers, as the 'real-time' speed, propagation and irruptions of race online create a presentism that seemingly resists critical analysis. (8) Modalities of race wildly proliferate in social media sites such as Facebook, Youtube and Twitter: casual racial banter, race-hate comments, 'griefing', images, videos and anti-racist sentiment bewilderingly intermingle, mash-up and virally circulate; and researchers struggle to comprehend the meanings and affects of a racialized info-overload. (9) The complexity of online racial formations raises the question of whether adequate attention is being paid to the significance of the online environments that race exists in: how are both race and digital networks transformed in their mutual encounter? This essay offers an analysis which centres upon exploring the technosocial production of race. Digital networks are generative of race and can be grasped by an approach attentive to the operations of online platforms. My contention is that a move to a materialist understanding of digital media and networks (10) opens up new possibilities for rethinking how race works online. Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White intimate that 'race itself has become a digital medium'; thus the materiality of both race and the digital can prompt an alternative approach and method, beyond the mantra of race as a social construction. …

Book Review: Networks Without a Cause by Geert Lovink

Networks Without a Cause offers a provocative and critical review of today's well established social media. The book departs from the recognition that new media has reached a second phase of maturation, after Wikileaks and the Arab Spring demonstrated the politically crucial dimension of the Internet. This political shift is accompanied by growing criticism over corporations such as Facebook or Google, and a general concern about Net Neutrality and regulation of the Internet. In the words of the author, “the friction-free days of a 'multi-stakeholder' governance [of the Internet] are now over,” (P. 1) and what comes next is a confusing struggle for the definition of the technological foundations of our society.

Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader

As part of the CPOV project with the Institute of Network Cultures, we published a Wikipedia reader titled Critical Point of View. The Reader is edited by Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz. The essays, interviews and artworks brought together in this reader form part of the overarching Critical Point of View research initiative, which began with a conference in Bangalore (January 2010), followed by events in Amsterdam (March 2010) and Leipzig (September 2010). The Reader collects original insights on the next generation of wiki-related research, from radical artistic interventions and the significant role of bots to hidden trajectories of encyclopaedic knowledge and the politics of agency and exclusion.

Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture Fred Turner (bio) Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture. By Geert Lovink. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Pp. xxviii+312. $95/$27.95. If the internet were a city, Dutch media theorist Geert Lovink would be the Baedeker of its bohemian quarter. Zero Comments represents his fourth book-length tour of the net’s intellectual hubs since 2003. Like its predecessors, it delivers its readers into the digital salons of the blogosphere and the many online networks in which coders come together to make everything from software to music. It also surveys regions of heady offline debate—contemporary German media theory, for instance, and transatlantic colloquies on the role of the aesthetic in organizing networked labor. Though the book never attempts to sustain a single argument across its pages, it makes an excellent introduction to some of the most current debates within and about internet culture. The book’s currency depends on Lovink’s own mobility. Though appointed as a professor at the University of Amsterdam and widely read in academic circles, Lovink has long functioned as a public intellectual. In the 1980s, he participated in Adilkino, also known as the Foundation for the Advancement of Illegal Knowledge, an influential group of media theorists; later, he became an editor of the media art magazine Mediamatic and a cofounder of the Dutch community network Digital City. More recently, he has convened a slew of gatherings, online and off, and led discussions on the future of digital art, new media technologies, and collaborative labor. Zero Comments synthesizes Lovink’s roamings into eleven essays. Each addresses a single area of debate, such as the social impact of blogging, tactics for media activism online, or the complex politics of online cooperation. The essays also hum with the voices of Lovink’s many and well-selected conversation partners. In his essay on alternative media tactics, for [End Page 508] instance, he offers a brief but very useful history of online social movements devoted to media activism. He then analyzes contemporary debates about those movements, first in his own voice and then, increasingly, by incorporating long passages of commentary first posted online by a range of other writers. In one sense, the essay devolves: Lovink’s singular voice and whatever linear case the essay hoped to make begin to disappear. In another sense, though, it evolves: the essay itself becomes a cocktail party into which Lovink has invited his reader. Insights ping around the room, so to speak. Lovink’s own range from the banal (“the strength of tactical media is that it can bring people together”) to the provocative (“the concept of a digital multitude . . . is based entirely on openness”) to the acute (in online production “the contradiction between selfishness and altruism has proven to be a false one”). Those of his collaborators range as well. At their best, the essays function as mirrors of the discussions within which Lovink first developed them. In an essay on “distributed aesthetics,” for example, he introduces Anna Munster, with whom he convened a 2006 conference in Berlin. Though he writes solely in his own voice, Lovink introduces a theory of aesthetics that, as he acknowledges, owes much to her thinking. In their joint view, European and American culture are leaving a moment in which digital technologies support a separate online world and entering one in which we inhabit “relays of entwined and fragmented techno-social networks.” These networks in turn require that artists and others develop ways of representing links, patterns, distributed groupings—i.e., a distributed aesthetic. Historians of technology in the arts might point out that over the last forty years, everyone from mail artists to installation builders has been preoccupied with representing social and sociotechnical relationships. They would be right, but they would miss the point: Zero Comments does not aim to be a comprehensive survey of emerging cultural forms so much as a model of intellectual engagement with the people and ideas shaping those forms. It raises more questions than it answers, but at the same time it presents a sharp-eyed look at the collisions of machine and culture, amateurism and professional...