Network Culture

A Cube Has Six Sides investigates the relationship between the documentation image and the architecture of the White Cube. Through the lens of Network Culture, and in two parts, this publication connects the proliferation of documentation images online as the primary cause of the philosophical explosion of the White Cube. In part one, the author traces the history of art documentation from H.W. Janson’s History of Art (1962) to Post-Internet art (2008), in an effort to understand the structures at play when documenting works of art and how they have shifted in the last ten years. From cave paintings to the establishment of the Museum of Modern Art, part two charts the rise and fall of the Modernist White Cube in order to understand its significance today. Through an in depth analysis of the White Cube’s architectural features, and their influence on contemporary art, the author speculates the emergence of the White Cube as an artistic medium.

This article approaches the second major change of medium that literature went through, from print to digital, and it explores how this change influenced the reading and understanding of narratives. The appearance of the digital created the need for the definition of new terminological webs and facilitated the emergence of a corpus of literary works. This study provides a comparative description of the digital as a medium for literature and a classification of concepts used in the analysis of digital narrative literature, as well as the working paths for the preservation of digital texts and their inclusion under the proposed umbrella term of “network literature.”

In connection with network organizations role increase in modern public policy the article purpose is the expansion and specification of the notion ―network culture‖. The author understands it as a type of socium culture having the network logic of structure formation and management system. In the article the main principles of network culture are formulated valid for both its narrow interpretation (culture of Internet-interaction) and its wide definition. In the context of civil network communications the notion―civil abilities‖ is introduced as the activity characteristic of network interaction in public policy.

Critiquing ‘free culture’ as a utopian gesture that fails to engage with the material circuits of cognitive capitalism, this paper proposes a political economy attendant to the circulation of capital at all layers of the communications network. Applying the newly invigorated theories of ‘rent’ to the shifting commons/property dialectics of the information economy, we explore the role of network infrastructure in the extraction of surplus. How is surplus from the digital commons channelled through a material substrate? How is network infrastructure transforming in response to the fluid and fluctuating dynamics of cognitive capitalism? Finally, what possibilities for political engagement and material exploit are emerging?

Liveness seems to have a mimetic charge that dichotomously disavows the need to prove a point by argument and proof, a temporal framework that empowers the protagonist with the invincible prowess of addressing the whole nation at a time, of binding a community with the ‘instantaneous’ or, as one can possibly say, the ‘moment of the Global’. Apart from such orders of engagement with a de-territorialized and networked public by actually objectifying television or radio, Indian popular films have increasingly started employing a certain representational form of liveness or, to be more precise, news television. This paper tries to read the order of the ‘televisual’ in some of the contemporary popular Hindi films, not in the manner of simply tracing ‘influences’ or locating aspects of television represented in films, but of focusing exclusively on the issue of liveness that engenders a certain temporality and ideology. The purpose is to investigate how post-liberalization popular cinema in India positions itself vis-à-vis the emergent public that is networked by the temporal grid of simultaneity. Television figures in this paper as an apparatus that forces a reconsideration of the ways in which the categories of publicness, globality and network have been theorized in Film Studies.

Conference publication of Art Servers Unlimited, held in 1998 in London, the first event to bring together initiatives which support the blend of creative, experimental, non-commercial, socio-cultural, artistic, critical use of the internet. This can include providing internet access, bursaries, space for collaboration, meeting or presentations, sharing of skills.

Following the ethnographic work of Anna Lowenhaupt-Tsing's matsutake mushroom trade, this paper applied the tools that were unpacked in the study by analysing #Radiohed and Nusantao Soundscapes, both were non-authored collaborative artistic-cultural projects. These projects were also put in conjuncture with Edouard Glissant's "Right to Opacity", Vicente Rafael's poetic claim of language as a historical agency, and the relevance of a computer program Codec in making sense of our undeniable precarious relations today. This paper was commissioned by Display Distribute as part of an outsourced project by Sema Biennale 2018.

In January 2006, Bubble by indie darling Steven Soderbergh was released simultaneously in multiple formats and media.  It's distribution was a new industrial strategy, and the film's marketing fanfare emphasised the uniqueness of its delivery.  This strategy and the hype surrounding it rely on a deeply technologised culture, which is absent from the world depicted in the film.  This tension between embracing and eliding the network society means that the film offers a sharp critique of contemporary media culture.

NB Download here is an extract only.  Please consult the book or contact me for a copy of the chapter.

Claire Perkins and Constantine Verevis (Eds) US Independent Film After 1989: Possible Films, Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 2015.

Built environment is a continuously evolving dynamic entity. The role of designers is to mediate between stability and change. Design is thus an act of morphing built form and space to align people and their environment with change, yet retaining the vitality of fundamental human needs– dwelling, community and place. The transient nature of the built environment and indeed life is as crucial as the three physical dimensions of our perception.
This paper explores the above discussed theme in the context of today's "network culture", where digital network technology has become a dominant cultural logic. Contemporary life increasingly dwells in the virtual information realm, apart from our familiar physical environs. Boundaries of time and space are shrinking, and fundamental notions of "program" and "typology" are being challenged. Consequently, built environment will be characterized by homogeneity and generic nature of spatial use and character.
Having said so, the "atemporality" and "location free" nature of activities and virtual interactions that have become possible, should only reinforce the need for the "local" / "specific" / "physical". This forms the premise to envision a new adaptable spatial system equipped to bring about an appropriate local-global / real-virtual relationship.

You can’t understand where mind-amplifying
technology is going unless you understand where it came from.
(Howard Rheingold)


The World Wide Web made the long-lived dream of a universal library – the bibliotheca mundi – a reality. Knowledge is no longer a tower to be conquered by few, but a dispersed network for all to navigate. At the same time, information overload and lack of source hierarchy can lead to a so-called “post-truth” society.
This talk discusses how issues concerning the way we deal with knowledge in the present digital network society have been explored ahead of our time by two of the most internationally acclaimed Italian authors, Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco.
In his novel Invisible Cities (1972), Calvino considered the potential of non-linear narrative and anticipated many of the crucial concepts defining hypertext as we know it. The novel, significantly, is set in Kublai Khan’s palace, Xanadu: in 1967, the computer pioneer Ted Nelson named the first project on hypertext and computer networks ‘Project Xanadu’.
In his novel Foucault’s Pendulum (1988), Eco narrated the story of a computer processing and connecting a high volume of information so as to create a very convincing conspiracy theory leading to the protagonists’ death. In this prescient novel, fake news creates real tragic events and users drown, rather than roam freely, in the network.
Treating these two books as case studies, the talk explores how Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco contributed to shape the concept of network culture and, more broadly, how the intellectual work done upstream by writers often inform our understanding of digital technologies.

Social media is restructuring urban practices–through ad-hoc experimentation, commercial software development, and communities of participation. This book is the first to consider how practices contained within social media are situated within a larger genealogy of public space, including theories of communal identity, civitas and democracy, the fete, and self-expression. Through empirical research, the actual social practices of participants of networked publics are described and analyzed.

Documenting how online counterpublics use the Internet to transmit classified photos, mobilize activists, and challenge the status quo, Tierney argues that online activities do not stop in online conversations; they are physically grounded through mobile GPS coordinates which are then transformed into activities in physical space—the street, the plaza, the places where people have traditionally gathered to demonstrate and express their opinions publicly.

Tekste kalbama apie visuomenės posūkį įsitinklinimo linkui, jo priežastis ir galimus tolesnius kelius. Visą laiką lieka atviras klausimas: ar tinklo kultūra sėja didesnį dalyvavimą demokratijoje ir apmąstymuose, ar ji teliks naudojama jau panašiai mąstantiems žmonėms mobilizuoti.

International Correspondents Interpret Video Spheres

Though English is the most common language of international communication, in the Russian Internet, behind the Chinese firewall and in African countries active social (video) networks are constructed with completely unique subcultures. Through YouTube channels, blogs and other social media, personal and often erratic insight is possible. But what is negotiated on the micro level, how is video use in the web changing and what new phenomena stand out?

Before Video Vortex #9: Re:assemblies of Video takes place in Lüneburg, international correspondents began in autumn 2012 to comment on and post videos in Athens, Beijing, Istanbul, Seoul, Lagos and Berlin, among other places. In the conference context, these contributions resurface as reference material to create a closer connection between (theoretical) discourse and digital practice—as known formats and media intermix into new hybrids.

During transmediale, we switch to three “studios” and with the help of video samples, jump over the “language bubble” with our correspondents. Ma Ran introduces video parodies in the Chinese Internet, Matthew Andeiza from Nigeria questions stereotypical representations of Africa, the Korean Sungyoun Kim looks at videos that become part of a global culture and thus lose significance, and Boaz Levin investigates the movement of media toward immediacy.