News

Metric Culture: The Quantified Self and Beyond
International Conference, 7-9 June 2017
Organised by: Btihaj Ajana, AIAS and King’s College London
Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Denmark

Dr Elena Marchevska:
Intimacy without cause: self-tracking and the quantified self in the net-art work of Igor Štromajer
London South Bank University, UK
Panel: Quantified Self and capitalist value

Photo: Christopher Till ©

+ Programme (PDF)

Abstract:

Data is money, data is power, data is everything and everything can be data. Yet data is simply a set of information on a world that is messy, irrational, unstable, and emotional. In the V2 catalogue for the show ‘Data in the 21st Century’, the curator states that: ‘The rise of so-called big data and the emergence of technologies that are able to quantify our every move, preference and behaviour, have demonstrated where the friction lies between the unpredictable reality that we live in and the desire to capture it in data.” (2015).

The paper will look into the performative work of Igor Štromajer and his projects ‘Expunction’ (2012) and ‘Multifeminist studies’ (2016) run by/on his Intima Virtual Base production site. Through these projects he is working on simple technological solutions for handling data and emotional strategies. His role of being both performer within the work and simultaneously viewing oneself from an external position (watching yourself on screen to see how you fit in) in order to gauge avenues for proceeding is both disorienting and extremely engaging. As Štromajer summarises: ‘’’Intimacy without a cause’ today is the most radical resistance to capital. ‘ (2005:149) Both projects raise questions about temporality, duration and availability of net art project that deal with data which change over time and slowly, but persistently lose their utility and, accordingly, their content.

© Elena Marchevska

Voicetracks
Attuning to Voice in Media and the Arts
By Norie Neumark

The MIT Press, Hardcover, 232 pp., 6 x 9 in, 26 b&w illus., May 2017, ISBN: 9780262036139 (eBook, May 2017, ISBN: 9780262339827)
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In her new book, Norie Neumark also writes about Ballettikka Internettikka.

Moved by the Aboriginal understandings of songlines or dreaming tracks, Norie Neumark’s Voicetracks seeks to deepen an understanding of voice through listening to a variety of voicing/sound/voice projects from Australia, Europe and the United States. Not content with the often dry tone of academic writing, the author engages a “wayfaring” process that brings together theories of sound, animal, and posthumanist studies in order to change the ways we think about and act with the assemblages of living creatures, things, places, and histories around us.
Neumark evokes both the literal—the actual voices within the works she examines—and the metaphorical—in a new materialist exploration of voice encompassing human, animal, thing, and assemblages. She engages with artists working with animal sounds and voices; voices of place, placed voices in installation works; voices of technology; and “unvoicing,” disturbances in the image/voice relationship and in the idea of what voice is. She writes about remixes, the Barbie Liberation Organisation, and breath in Beijing, about cat videos, speaking fences in Australia, and an artist who reads (to) the birds. Finally, she considers ethics and politics, and describes how her own work has shaped her understandings and apprehensions of voice.

Norie Neumark, a sound and media artist, is Honorary Professorial Fellow at Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, and Emeritus Professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne. She coedited At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet and VOICE: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media, both published by the MIT Press.