Network_Ecologies

Jussi Parikka is a media theorist, writer, and professor in Media & Design at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton). In his presentation "Microtemporalities in Network Ecology: In Bursts, Not Flows," Parikka evokes Ernst’s argument for “a different sort of temporality…one of meticulous microengineering of network temporalities, their bursting nature, a world of data queues and synchronization.” Duke’s Mark BN Hansen, one of the leading scholars in the field of media theory and philosophy, responds to Parikka’s keynote afterwards. Parikka has a PhD in Cultural History from the University of Turku, Finland and in addition, he is Adjunct Professor (“docent”) of Digital Culture Theory at the University of Turku, Finland. In addition, he is a Senior Fellow at the Winchester Centre for Global Futures in Art Design & Media. Mark BN Hansen is a professor with Program in Literature and with the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies here at Duke. Hansen is also a media theorist and cultural critic whose work focuses on the experiential impact of new media technologies. His current research explores the experiential challenges posed by 21st century media, with particular emphasis on the expansion of sensibility through microcomputational sensing and the anticipatory, future-directed operation of data-driven media forms.

Dr. Reagan Moore, from UNC’s RENCI presents “Policy-Based Data Management” that will cover the following ideas: A network can be viewed as the development of a consensus by a community on approved interactions. The community consensus defines the expectations associated with the community interactions. Based on this viewpoint, a shared data collection can be described by the policies that enforce a community consensus on desired collection properties. The policies are mapped to computer actionable rules to automate enforcement of collection properties. Examples will be given based on multiple science and engineering domains.

In the dark age of digital games, located between the labs and arcades of the 60's and 70's and the networked communities of the late 90's, single-system software was designed for private play. Game designers mistook the one-player game as a technological constraint rather than a genre and players forgot that video games were also toys. Phantom author functions were spoon-fed to consumers in the form of industry produced player’s guides, official hotlines, and advertising magazines which simultaneously taught consumers the “right” way to play while strategically masking the fact that video games are agnostic to how they are played. After the home-console era, players began to produce experiences independent from the logic of the market and, as a result, games have changed (though the fantasy for an autonomous, ahistorical, and authored experience continues to drive the desire of both consumers and producers.) While Nintendo continues to ship the same ROM dumps to virtual consoles, Super Mario Bros. (1985) cannot be the same game that was first played almost thirty years ago. The intimate, serialized experience of private play has been radically transformed and reinvented through the physical network and the networked subjectivities of contemporary players. Once players began distributing ROM hacks online, building new multiplayer interfaces, competing in telematic races, and imagining the game in terms of a cultural history rather than software and hardware, Super Mario Bros. began to operate as a medium for making metagames, “ontological toys” (Bardee) with an infinite shelf life that thrives within a “playable network” (Novello). Based on the game, design, and philosophy practiced by speedrunners, sequence breakers, bug hunters, romhackers, modders, artists, and everyday players, Patrick LeMieux shares five project sketches within the framework of a network ecology. Artist, game designer, and Duke Ph.D. student, Patrick LeMieux designs art & videogames as theoretical tools to think with.

In 2007, Durham-based Duda/Paine Architects devised seven design principles, called the Seven Wonders, which were to be the mobilizing design features for a library building concept. Inspired by the library’s themes of Emerging Technologies and Emerging Information, the Wonders – as speculative concept models – were to be the basis of their building construct. Since conceiving the Seven Wonders, Turan Duda says he is “finding now that these issues are pervasive in all the work we are doing now. They are ever-present.” Duda says these Wonders address the kind of phenomenology he finds in the work being done at Duda/Paine and in the work that, for him, can be done with architectural design. "As Architects, we are often asked to reside in two worlds simultaneously. We are trained to think analytically in the abstract world of geometry, physics, and problem solving. And yet, as human beings, we experience the world with our bodies and all our senses. It is ultimately the attribution of meaning that binds these two worlds together." What are the tools of design that provide the means for integrating these contrasting realms of scale, typology and experience?