Book Launch and Panel /
“The Imaginary App,” with Paul D. Miller, Svitlana Matviyenko, Patricia Ticineto Clough, Robbie Cormier, Simon Critchley, and Lev Manovich
Date: Tuesday, 7 October 2014, 7–9 pm
Location: Cabinet, 300 Nevins Street, Brooklyn (map and directions here)
FREE. No RSVP necessary
Please join Paul D. Miller and Svitlana Matviyenko, the editors of The Imaginary App (MIT Press), for a celebration of the publication of their new book, as well a discussion on apps, performativity and interactivity, big data, machinic intelligence, our image of technology, and the meanings of being mobile. The editors will be joined by several of the media theorists and philosophers who have contributed to the book, including Patricia Ticineto Clough, Robbie Cormier, and Lev Manovich, as well as by philosopher Simon Critchley.
The Imaginary App is an anthology exploring the changes and challenges that have accompanied the emergence of mobile apps, which offer gratifyingly immediate access to a world of connectivity and entertainment. The array of available apps may come from the cloud, but they attach themselves firmly to our individual movements from location to location on Earth. In The Imaginary App, writers, theorists, and artists see apps variously as “a machine of transcendence” and “a hulking wound in our nervous system.” They ask whether the app is an object or a relation, and if it could be a “metamedium” that supersedes all other artistic media. They consider the control and power exercised by software architecture; the app’s prosthetic ability to enhance certain human capacities, in reality or in imagination; the app economy; and the app as medium and remediator of reality.
The discussion will begin at 7:00 pm. Copies of The Imaginary App will be available for purchase.
About the Participants
Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid) is a composer, a multimedia artist, and a writer. His written work has appeared in the Village Voice, the Source, Artforum, and the Wire. Miller’s work as a media artist has appeared at the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Biennial for Architecture, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, in the Kunsthalle in Vienna, in the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and in many other museums and galleries. Previous books include Rhythm Science (MIT Press), Sound Unbound (MIT Press), and The Book of Ice (Thames and Hudson/Mark Batty). Miller is a contributing editor to C-Theory and the arts editor of Origin.
Svitlana Matviyenko is a media scholar. She has a PhD in Critical Theory, Film Theory, and Psychoanalysis from the University of Missouri and she is now pursuing her second doctorate at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University. She writes on psychoanalysis, topology, posthumanism, mobile apps, and the networking drive. Her work has been published and is forthcoming in Digital Creativity, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Krytyka, Kino-Kolo, and (Re)-Turn: A Journal of Lacanian Studies, where she serves as associate editor.
Patricia Ticineto Clough is a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her books include Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (University of Minnesota Press) and The End(s) of Ethnography: From Realism to Social Criticism (Lang). Among the volumes she has edited are The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (with Jean Halley; Duke University Press), Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death (with Craig Willse; Duke University Press), and Intimacies: A New World of Relational Life (with Alan Frank and Steven Seidman; Routledge). Her forthcoming book is titled The End(s) of Measure.
Robbie Cormier is a doctoral student in the Department of Philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook. His research concerns recursive/reflexive logics and their alternatives; topology and automata theory; vitalism; and organicism.
Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas Professor at the New School for Social Research. His books include Very Little…Almost Nothing (Routledge), Infinitely Demanding (Verso), The Book of Dead Philosophers (Vintage), The Faith of the Faithless (Verso), The Mattering of Matter: Documents from the Archive of the International Necronautical Society (with Tom McCarthy; Sternberg Press) and Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (with Jamieson Webster; Pantheon). An experimental new work, Memory Theatre (Fitzcarraldo Editions), and a book called Bowie (O/R Books) were published in September 2014. He is the moderator of “The Stone,” a philosophy column in the New York Times, to which he is a frequent contributor.
Lev Manovich is the author of Software Takes Command (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database (The MIT Press), and The Language of New Media (The MIT Press). He is a professor at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and a director of the Software Studies Initiative, which works on the analysis and visualization of big cultural data.
