I want to suggest that there is also something at stake in the remake of new media as a quest for ‘total’ artwork or for an engagement with the artwork via total sensory immersion that is not merely Romanticist but belongs to a contemporary politics of digital proto-fascism. If new media, and especially new media art, does elicit a kind of synaesthetic re-organisation of sensory modalities, then how might this be understood as productive of new/different rather than given/existing sensory interrelations? How might new media open up and onto the immanent relation that sensation carries to something outside itself? I am clearly not interested, then, in understanding new media syn-aesthetics on the current ‘model’ of neurologically-based synaesthesia, especially if we understand synaesthesia here as an originary integrative state or process. And yet I am interested in invoking a transdisciplinary understanding that gets at a certain ’stickiness’ between the digital and cognition and perception. In pulling out the threads of this ’stick’, we might get at ways in which to understand distributive forces and relations as transformative within digital aesthetics and as fundamental modes of organising cognitive-perceptual systems. Having said as much, I am not offering any contributions to neurological knowledge here; instead I want to enact the slippage of neurosciences and digital aesthetics via other vectors than unitary ones.

There may be a different way of understanding both synaesthesia and data relationally rather than according to a totalising imperative. By taking this approach, the neurological and the digital might inhabit each other rather differently. But this necessitates first understanding synaesthesia via a rethinking of Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of the different processes and expressions of synthesising – connective, disjunctive and conjunctive and their interrelation (rearticulated with reference to Brian Massumi and Jose Gil’s work on synaesthesia). In particular, I am interested in understanding the ’syn’ in synaesthesia as accumulation, operations of joining and of the transduction of sensory modalities and data formats rather than the presumption of an originary unity that organises either the sensory and/or informatic fields.

Data, too, needs to be seen equally as a relational field especially with respect to its immanent capacity for programmability.That is to say, there is no pure data – data exists only in a relation to software, or as Florian Cramer puts it:
‘There is, after all, no such thing as data without programs, and hence no digital arts without the software layers they either take for granted, or design themselves.’
To understand both the synaesthetic and new media aesthetics relationally, then, is to move away from the desire and economy for primary perceptual unity or total artwork and to seek instead another arena for understanding relationality – that of the difference engine.

We can proceed by looking at the extent to which an overlap exists between prominent neurological conceptions of the synaesthetic and dominant models of the movement and flows of data articulated within new media aesthetics. Contemporary research in the neurosciences generally accepts synaesthesia as a real and anatomically based phenomenon of human perception that is located in some form of neurobiological architecture. While there is variation in the ways in which synaesthesia manifests in perception - coloured-hearing, coloured-graphism, visual-smelling and so forth – most neuroscientists agree that synaesthesia involves the human involuntary and repeated invocation of one sensory modality by another in response to a perceptual stimulus. (See R. Cytowic). Recent neurological research into synaesthesia can be ’sorted’ into two prevailing approaches: the idea that ordinary neural ‘pruning’ in human development fails to occur leaving in place an originary synaesthetic brain; the idea that different sensory modalities and their functions are located in separated areas or modules of the brain, which are ‘cross-activated’ in synaesthetes. (Hubbard and Ramachandran, 2005)

There are two major competing neurological hypotheses for synaesthesia: Cross-Modal Transfer (CMT) and Neonatal Synaesthesia (NS). In fact, one derives from the other but makes more radical neurological claims. The CMT hypothesis is slightly older, gaining ground during the late 1970s and 1980s and was developed by Meltzoff and Borton. and posits that infants have the ability to recognise objects in more than one sensory modality. So, for example, something that a baby has only touched can nonetheless be visually recognised by it. Although the process involved in this common infantile experience involves the transfer of sensory ‘data’ across modes – haptic to visual – the recognition has, at its basis, an ability to abstract representations of objects by infants (observed in as early as a 29-day old infant). And it is this capacity for abstraction that points to a potential arena for the joining – the ’syn’ – of all the sensory modalities. The CMT hypothesis rests upon the proposition that synaesthesia is primarily a function of inherent cognitive capacities for abstraction and representation in the human brain.

The NS hypothesis – more recent and supported by neurologists such as Simon Baron-Cohen – asserts, instead, that synaesthesia is a primary and originary state of infantile perception rather than cognition. Up until about 4 months, the ’state’ of sensory input is undifferentiated and cross-modal. It is neurological development from this period on that then begins the process of ‘normal’ sensory differentiation into separate modes. However, some human brains do not fully differentiate, leaving these originary ‘cross-modal’ pathways active. In these cases, adult synaesthesia will persist and a person may experience the typical ’symptoms’ of involuntary call-up of colours in conjunction with hearing certain sounds. The NS hypothesis rests upon the notion that the originary totality of perception can be sought in the idea of neonatal sensory nondifferentiation.

In the CMT model, it is only abstraction which makes cross-modal between the senses possible; in the NS model it is totalisation that supports interrelations of sensory pathways. There is a fundamental symmetry, then, between the competing hypotheses even though they differ as to their developmental positioning and neuro-systemic location (cognition vs. perception) of synaesthesia. In other words, at the heart of both understandings of the synaesthetic lies the ‘ground’ of an originary unity of the individual brain - either fundamentally perceptual or cognitive. A number of neuroscientists have attempted to explain the basis for this unity - locating it in genetic factors or via an understanding of neural architecture as modular (See, Mark E.S. Bailey and Keith J. Johnson, ‘Synaesthesia: Is a genetic analysis Feasible?’ Synaesthesia: Classic and Contemporary Readings,John E. Harrison and Simon Baron-Cohen eds, Blackwell: Oxford, 1997,pp.182–207; Gabriel M.A. Segal, ‘Synaesthesia: Implications for Modularity of Mind” Synaesthesia: Classic and Contemporary Readings,pp211–23). Others stay put at the presumption of the originary infantile unity as a kind of precondition for synaesthesia. At any rate, whether explained by this unity or by some preceding unit - the gene, the module – unity is deemed sufficient cause. The problem I wish to return to here is that it is precisely the unity that requires explanation and explanation cannot be furnished by recourse to some smaller unit and its concerted interrelations with other units in either genetic or modular neural networks. For in fact what we are seeking is an understanding precisely of the sensory, perceptual or cognitive actions of unification (or rather of joining) by investigating synaesthesia in the first place…

This of course brings us to the problems posed by classical models of ontogenesis, which, as Gilbert Simondon pointed out, attempt to explain a process via the outcome of that process (’The Genesis of the Individual’ Incorporations, Zone Books, MIT Press, 1992). Hence the ‘unity’ of synaesthesia (emergent outcome) becomes an explanation for how it is that the senses join or cross. The latter, I am suggesting by referring this problem to the question of individuation that Simonodon raises, are therefore processes not simply outcomes. I will return to this point later in this post when I attempt to understand current artistic experiments in cross-processing digital signal syn-aesthetically. What I want to suggest is that similarly we cannot approach the digital as exemplary of synaesthetic experience, if by this we mean that interfacing with digital art presents us with a totality of sensory engagement. If we are to deploy a digital syn-aesthetics, this must be sought in the extent to which artwork incorporates us into its unfolding as processual transformation(s). But this may also necessitate giving up the idea of the artwork as a totality to be had in the realm of experience, where it seems to have shifted since losing its objecthood. New subjectivations must follow from this – not only for ‘the artist’, ‘the viewer’ but also for ‘art’. It would seem obvious that if we are to take the idea of a network society seriously, then we must also take seriously the distributed forces and formations through which cultural and aesthetic experience and engagement are also making themselves. We need to look not for art in the net but the networks that inhabit art and that produce its deformations.
To be continued…

DataCloud2 is ‘information space containing a vast collection of media-objects’ with their own characteristics, reviewed as metatags. It’s specifically built for idiosyncratic collecting of different media elements, and for the support of community.

I’m hoping to interview Sher later this week.

ACT - assemblage for collective thought – is an ongoing conceptual and aesthetic collaboration, an assemblage of technologies and techniques for collaboration. It enables participants to think collectively. By “think” here we do include thinking conceptually. However, following a century that has had to come to terms with thinking through aesthetic processes, we also mean thinking affectively, via images, texts and sounds. More than this, ACT asks what kind of thought is produced in the mix - in the middle of the very act of collaboration, when DJing, VJing, dancing in front of a camera perhaps, are all opened up to the mix. Is there a different quality of thought? A different experience of thinking? An especially collaborative thought?

So much new media composition and production still concerns itself with technological conduits and infrastructure. We wanted to fashion a kind of assemblage that explored new media to produce new concepts. The assemblage, then, had to be mediated via technologies and software such as wikis, distributed media sites and servers and video and audio editing and remixing packages. But none of these are the focus of or rationale for ACT. New media as various systems of technics (that is, the deployment of technologies as part of the constitution of ourselves as humans, sentient beings and subjectivities) are seen as some ‘collaborators’ among others in this project. Although not autonomous, the machines and technologies we deploy in making mediated concepts play a part in changing and shaping the collectivity of ACT’s thinking processes. We found ourselves following particular pathways in the process of collaboration and in remixing all the media material for ACT performances as a result of both the potentialities and constraints of the media assemblages we contrived and which contrived us.

Screenshot from ‘Task 4: Become empirical -
‘radically’ of the ACT wiki

[for video rough cuts without sound - re-assemble the assemblage,
radical empiricism]

ACT began in 2006, using rich and networked media, remix software and techniques. Its first manifestation involved a small group of invited participants who work with text, video, audio and software in and on collaboration: Dragana Antic, Michele Barker, Gillian Fuller, Mathew Fuller, Lisa Gye, Ross Harley, Brett Neilson, Anna Munster, Andrew Murphie, Kate Richards, Trebor Scholz and Mat Wall-Smith. For a two week period during June 2006, this group contributed to a structured wiki by responding to ‘tasks’ concerning collaborative thought, relations and partnerships. Material deposited in the wiki space and in external web publishing portals such as YouTube and Multiply was downloaded, reformatted (text was converted to audio, for example) and taken into VJing and DJing packages. It was then re-presented as two different remixes at the ISEA 2006 (International Symposium of Electronic Arts), ZeroOne San Jose Festival in San Jose on August 12 as the final performance/event of the ISEA Symposium. The mixes took place using the sound system of the large auditorium, along with its three large screens and many flat screen televisions distributed throughout the audience.

In the first mix, brain scans met low-res video of dogs fetching sticks from the water, animated graffiti and a morphed video looping between Immanual Kant and Robert Moog (both champions of synthesis). Carefully modulated computer vocalisations of texts about honey as the result of making collective thought ‘in the hive’ met transmissions caught from Messier74, “a spiral galaxy that makes up part of the Pisces constellation” (Mat Wall-Smith). The latter were caught, “using a satellite dish (mixing bowl) and some custom electronics”.

The second remix of the material followed directly afterwards and included the use of live feeds - camera and microphone available for use by the audience on the day.These were remixed into, and used to trigger different visual effects upon, the ACT material. The audience brought cut-out shapes and textures (such as scrunched plastic), objects (cigarette lighters), their faces, their dancing bodies, into the mix in real time. After the performance, one of the audience members commented on the visual effect of mixing pre-produced material with live audience participation. She noted that this gave a kind of layering effect to the mix, where ‘hi-tech’ met ‘lo-tech’ and that what was interesting about that kind of remixing was they way it visually revealed the material strata of media technologies.

This initial collaboration and performance comprise the first stage in an ongoing production of assemblages that thinks collectively - assemblages through which you think, which think through you, and which “evolve” along with shifts in thought. With this initial event we are dipping our toes into the technozoosemiotic “ether” within which diverse and rapidly mutating semiotic forms, along with diverse mediated and collective practices, have drawn breath. The aim for the future is for divergent forms of ACT to take on a life of their own. Maybe in a DVD-ROM that is infinitely remixable and which helps you take your thoughts places you never expected. Maybe in a shifting online database of media elements, codes, and evolving tags (thanks to Kate Richards for this idea..).

ACT also stages the inevitable tensions raised between “forced collaboration” and “free cooperation” in thought production with other humans and nonhumans. At the same time, in constantly returning the process of collaboration to the mix, it attempts to draw collaboration away from the temptation to freeze the process in one iteration of it. There is a sense in which ACT only occurs within the movement of the images and sounds, the bodies thinking through the encounters within this mix. Collaboration here is indeed forced, but in a very different sense to common network models of collaboration in infocapitalism; that is, where everyone profits by pooling their pre-existing institutional needs for funding and recognition. In ACT, collaborators are propelled into the mix, away from pre-existing stances, assumptions and forms of recognition. Cooperation is free - although here freedom is only the freedom to cooperate in forms of expression here and now. Cooperation is also premised on the project itself - commitment to its continuation, deformation and mutation rather than to obligation to other players. Freedom is also freedom to leave the project and the mix without remorse and regret, to take the project somewhere else, to let the project continue without an individual’s presence.

ACT responds to the stagnation of new media orthodoxies as these rapidly fall back into a sometimes high tech version of old media efficient communications bound up with new forms of property. It is also a response to the provocations of the like of Trebor Scholz, Geert Lovink and Christoph Spehr, concerning new forms of collaboration and the need to open up these within new media. Scholz, Spehr, Lovink and others held a conference on Free Cooperation where the idea of using networks and art to explore processual collaboration was worked through. In a similar way, we hope that ACT will remain responsive to change, to the fact that, as Brian Massumi puts it, “change changes” constantly (Parables for the Virtual: 10).

The processes of making and remaking ACT felt like thinking collectively. Not only ideas, but images evolved, mutated, merged, diverged. The mix was a constant surprise, especially when it involved the audience - there was a real sense that thinking was occurring collaboratively. One could never say - “that’s beautiful and I made it”, only “that’s beautiful” or even, “that’s awful but that’s what happened through the project and in the mix”.

There was some stringency needed to realise a colloborative working space, especially as we wanted to enact it remotely. We had to really think through the tasks in both rigorous and open term and provide formats and ‘rules’ for images, video, length of text and so on. The latter were, of course, ignored from the beginning, although not, we are pleased to say, the former. So whereas rules were transgressed, tasks were committed to – a nice balance. Each task had its own wiki page, with an extra page for an optional related task. Of course, ACT is infinitely open to other tasks, but the recent version had six:

1. Return to Nature

Task 1. Collaborate with the natural world
Find a relationship in nature which assists you to produce thought, image, video or sound. Produce the text, images, video or sound and leave them below.
Task 1.1 optional.
Become either cellular or marine in your mode of collaborating.

(for video go here - this is a rough cut without sound)

2. Be Passionate

Task 2. Be passionate with another
Give vent to any passion that was produced in relation to another living or nonliving thing. Leave your response below.
Task 2.1 optional.
Make it almost monochrome.

3. Work the Abstract

Task 3. Create an abstract collaborative relationship
By this we mean you could also do something very concrete, like using sound to feedback on itself and modify the original signal in order to embody the abstract process of modulation.
Task 3.1 optional
Modulate the modulation.

4. Become Empirical - Radically

Task 4. Work the real, experienced relations in a radical empiricism, as per William James
Only deal with the real relations and the transitional experience involved.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system. Elements may indeed be redistributed, the original placing of things getting corrected, but a real place must be found for every kind of thing experienced, whether term or relation, in the final philosophic arrangement. (William James, Essays in Radical Experience:42)

Task 4.1 optional
record the changes in your immediate relations.

5. Re-Assemble the Assemblage

Task 5. Re-assemble the assemblage
Create changes in the social and technical assemblages so that all the elements participate differently.
Task 5.1 optional
Make the assemblage cycle.

6. Conserve the Virtual

Task 6. Make a contribution to virtual ecology
Do your bit for conservation - make something that preserves or enriches our relations to the virtual. By the virtual we
mean the real reservoir of relations between all the different potentials in the assemblage.
Task 6.1 optional
…in 3 seconds

ACT is special not in its originality, but in its tendencies - its very own desire to keep changing, to diverge, to find new homes and turn them upside down, to try things out, to break down (the eternal accident of mix technologies as they stretch the assemblage), to reform differently. One of these tendencies is movement away from the proprietal, from funding regulation - towards the new emerging culture of constant co-creation which truly makes mass media redundant. Its politics is something like that of an open source, multi-mediated, cross-signal processing folk culture. But it does not value ‘openeness’ per se. Rather it wants to contribute to an ecology of media practices that respects the interrelations of open and closed systems and the elements that comprise and cut across all of these. ACT is desperate to break out of the academy with its specialisation and management of performance. We think it would work well in clubs where a space and time for thought might just add something to that mix.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about publishing as a crucial component of dynamic media - and also as a register of a changes in practices and concepts involving dynamic media. I’ve blogged elsewhere about some of this, and responded to Nat Muller and Alessandro’s interesting introductions to the issues, and there’s some good material on the European LabforCulture site (another discovery courtesy of Documenta12).

Something that I found very interesting however, towards the last third of the podcast “How to Survive the Paper Industry”, which can be downloaded from here, was Simon Worthington of MetaMute’s detailed discussion of Open Source publishing, print on demand, a complete use of open source applications for everything involved with publication, including for example graphic design, and networked distribution. MetaMute’s initiative in all these areas is OpenMute - interesting also when we consider developing our own form of publishing for this project.

General changes in forms of publishing are occurring across a lot of registers - online and offline, publishing as increasingly cross or inter-media, the different social and commercial arrangements implied (from the problems of the music industry - in which it is now clear that new forms of publishing and distribution, music industry woes aside, have led to a massive increase in diversity of music, and a new health to the live music scene - to the massive transformations now making the print/pixel publishing side of things very interesting). They also arguably make not only for new social forms, but for a new kind of social (so are crucial to consider both in terms of social and artistic innovation). So we need to think about publishing increasingly - especially as more things, processes and events become publishable - imagine open source publishable VR environments and elements, or the publishing of genetic elements … or just of new technics - this is my new saying - “clone and publish your technics for social innnovation”.

To some extent the Dynamic Media project is a collaborative/cooperative publishing project.

… the mobile phone projects are far away from our traditional background. They are nomadic devices, and they make us think of different artistic interventions conceived to be experienced on the move, in between, while doing other things. They are not contemplative at all .. they point to new reading contexts, and as always, it is important to keep in mind that you do not talk about a world of reading without talking about a reading of the world. In this sense, they will probably force us to redefine our understanding of what is art. They demand new concepts and art experiences tuned with entropy and acceleration. (Meta/Data: 270)

New forms of “singularization” (that allow some room for play and invention, modes of living, that are not pre-determined by “outcomes” and so on) involve shifts in our “ethico-aesthetic” paradigm, as Guattari called it. This is more or less how ethics and embodied experience come together in specific contexts, as described in my previous post as the way in which love and work come together in an often networked experience. The ongoing task is to find singular alternatives within the new mobility that escape the “mobilization” of mobility in the direction of standardization and performativity or simplistic understandings of the social in terms of basic economic productivity. To do this within the context of mobility, we need new concepts and aesthetic paradigms that deal with the new forms of social “entropy and acceleration”. And as much as I like “contemplation” it is also true that, whether this is to survive or not, what we used to gain (and lose) from the contemplative needs perhaps to be reconfigured, precisely as networked embodied experience, subject to new entropies and accelerations.

In reality, mobility is today both poison and cure. Increased mobility, and new mobile techologies are given as the solution to the problem of mobility itself. In such a context, what are the new relations between social collectivity and new mobile media?

To what extent do mobile technologies (and concepts, techniques of mobility) allow us to become mobile in what might best be called an experimental way? To live, love and work in a better way?

On the other hand, to what extent is the proliferation of new technical and social practices of mobility swept up in something like the “mobilization” described by Isabelle Stengers (in The Invention of Science)? This is a mobilization now found in the arts and social sciences as much as the physical sciences, in art itself as much as science (even as the borders between the all these blur). For Stengers, “mobilization” accompanies the very real, experimental “proliferation of practices” [114] in science. In that these practices inevitably depart from the old, a “mobilizing model”, along with a series of rhetorics, is designed to recapture them. In “mobilization” a model (or series of models) is mobilized to maintain “order in the ranks of researchers” and “arm them against what would otherwise disperse their efforts” (something like mobilization might even be found in the “models” of social relations within the naming of the “Creative Industries” - that is of course the risk taken by the term and the discipline). These models re-affirm certain disciplines against that which escapes them. There is a price to pay. As Stengers asks, “what knowledges and practices will be destroyed, or prevented from being invented, in the name of what must be called a ‘mobilizing belief’ - namely, the faith in a future where the body will show that its rational representatives were indeed right”?.

Many questions follow this contest between invention, experiment, mobilization and capture. What modes of living survive? What are the forms of suffering found within the contested flows of the new mobilities. If, as Freud noted in Civilization and Its Discontents, “The communal life of human beings had … a two-fold foundation: the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity, and the power of love…”, what are the precise conditions of work and love in the new mobilities? Are the intertwined fates of love and work the two key issues within the new mobilities?

First - work. Psychoanalyst of work, Christophe Dejours, has suggested that suffering is the very essence of working. This is a particular kind of suffering. Here “suffering” “means bridging the gap between prescriptive and concrete reality“. This definition of work perhaps allows us to rethink the relations between technics, the prescriptive reality of models or “mobilizations”, lived experience and the necessity of experiment. As Dejours puts it -

… there is no such thing as purely mechanical work.

This means that there is always a gap between the prescriptive and the concrete reality of the situation. This gap is found at all levels of analysis between task and activity, or between the formal and informal organisation of work. Working thus means bridging the gap between prescriptive and concrete reality. However, what is needed in order to do so cannot be determined in advance; the path to be navigated between the prescriptive and the real must constantly be invented or rediscovered by the subject who is working. Thus, for the clinician, work is defined as what the subjects must add to the orders so as to reach the objectives assigned to them, or alternately, what they must add of themselves in order to deal with what does not function when they limit themselves to a scrupulous execution of orders. (”Subjectivity, Work and Action,” Critical Horizons 7(1), 2006:45-62)

I love this definition because it rings so true of the experience of work, its mediation of model, demand and contingency - contingency in the sense not only of changing circumstances but in the sense of a changing change which evades models. The questions that arise? What are the gaps that must be bridged between prescriptive and concrete reality in a world immersed in the models, practices and concrete if fluid realities of mobilities? Who and what are put at risk in order to maintain social order in the new space of flows? And if the new mobilities for the first time begin to take note of the complexity of relations between virtuality and actuality, if only because they capitalise on them, does this only mean there is more work to be done? More bridging the gaps that keep opening up in the production of the real? In short, is “concrete reality” a lot less “concrete” these days (or … is concrete reality more fully revealed as a fraud by the new technics of mobility)? Does the new mobility demand a new materialism while drawing attention to the poverty of the old (one that still informs so much disciplinary work, so many models of mediation, so many demands in the workplace)? Or does the new mobility demand an ongoing reconciliation of prescription, model, and variation - a reconciliation that is at best partial and always unravelling?

If this sounds apocalyptic, the case is the opposite. Despite the new “mobilizations” that accompany contemporary mobility, there might be many aspects to the suffering or bridging gaps between prescription and concrete (if both virtual and actual) reality that are liberating. If so, in what sense would we mean “liberation” here? What would a genuine social or artistic innovation using mobile (or dynamic) media be? Is it just a question of creating forms of mobility escape mobilization? How are these to be nurtured? Is it time for the individual again, released by the new mobility, even for the collective individual? Does it depend totally on context?

Is this simply a question of practice (although of course questions of practice are never simple, especially in this context)? What are the concrete (a “concrete” taking account of both virtual and actual) alternatives within the new mobilities in terms of social organization, individuation and concrete modes of living?

One practical solution that is already underway: Let us list and share the new practices and principles. Databases should - more than they perhaps do - form nodes of replication of these practices - not just classification and conservation. Technical “life” and social life should support each other productively (while leaving behind the overcoding mobilization of “productivity”). Is that what mobile media are really for, even if such practices and principles are always also “mobilized” in the service of the new dot.coms?

Or are we so busy liberating ourselves with mobile media, or just “bridging so many gaps” that they open up - in short, overworking - that we are lost before we begin? Should we be refusing this work (even as, in sociable media, it masks itself as leisure)? Franco Berardi, in returning to an older refusal of work in Operaism, suggests that -

Virtual workers have less and less time for attention , they are involved in a growing number of intellectual tasks, and they have no more time to devote to their own life, to love, tenderness, and affection. They take Viagra because they have no time for sexual preliminaries.
The cellularisation has produced a kind of occupation of life. The effect is a psychopathologisation of social relationships. (“What is the Meaning of Autonomy Today?”)

Are we then, addressing the wrong questions in trying to pin down the nature of new media (as I asked at the beginning - “What exactly are the new technics of mobility?”)? Is there too much “work” being done on this kind of question. Is constantly going back to this question a misplaced suffering, even if the question itself is not intrinsically incompatible with the questions of work and love? Would it be better to ask clinical questions of mobility - that is, questions of diagnosing the health or available capacities in a situation. Would this diagnostic approach allow that mobility might well be the cure to its own problem, in the right circumstances?

Perhaps this is a question of therapy. In Sydney in 2004, Berardi finished a talk by remarking -

The problem of therapy is at the centre of the next phase of the movement .. the media (media activism) has to become a process of reactivation of social emotion, of social affection, of social ability to love.

This “therapy/activism” might engage - in a “clinical manner” - with the embodied individuation of network experience (here the value of the like of Gerard Goggin’s interest in disability and contemporary media). In simpler terms this might be to question the “relation” between mobility, the “compulsion to work” and the “power of love” described by Freud (of course, this is not a questioning that needs to take place in Freudian terms). Anna Munster frames such questions this way in Materializing New Media -

…”digital embodiment” is an unstable and uneven condition produced out of the differential impact of bodies and technologies as they globally impinge upon each other in widely varying circumstances. Material differences make themselves felt by being produced rather than inhering to substances .. it is the movements, modulations and transformations peculiar to global digital culture that make the political and ethical relations we form (or deny) with other bodies so important. [184-185].

So far much thinking about mobility has made much of this a secondary issue, if one at all (even if work and love are in fact, in everyday life, the “material differences” produced in a new way by mobile media). It has been more concerned with dealing with the situation as a to and fro between stasis and change, that is mobility. Social effects become a much measured (somewhat secondary) measure of this to and fro (”64% of those surveyed about their mobile phone use said …”). However, even if one is thinking - perhaps necessarily - in these terms, things are more complicated than is often allowed. Mobile media technologies - and the modes of life they are in symbiotic relationship with - are themselves constantly moving, evolving. As Brian Massumi puts it, “change changes”constantly (Parables for the Virtual:10). This is a difficult - if not impossible - fact for disciplinary forms of knowledge, models, rhetorics and other “mobilizations” to digest (not only in the academy, but in the workplace, even in relationships outside of work). This perhaps explains our rather torn - at best ambivalent - thinking about mobile media. No discipline, no model, no rhetoric can ever capture the mobility of mobility. Indeed, we inhabit this enhanced and increasingly self-reflexive “changing change” by working the gaps between theory and “concrete reality”. In this context we should perhaps be aware that our very thinking through of mobilities (whether in the serviced of social innovation or the established “Creative Industries”) is “cognitive labour” in Dejours’ sense. Although again, despite its demands, work does not inhabit this changing change alone. It does so in a series of tense relationships with the problems of “social affection”.

It is therefore perhaps through the questions - and practices - of love and work that we should locate mobile media, and the broader problematic of mobility. This will always be a question of ongoing experiment, whether in the reactive attempt to capture this change or in the attempt to find new ways of loving and working.

A good indication that perhaps the best collaborative models are the simplest.

There are very many relevant links in the curatorial section of Cont3xt worth looking out for their approach to databases, collections, and etc.