ɬÀï·¬

The Department of Art History and Communication Studies welcomes , Reader in New Technologies of Communications, Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmith’s College, University of London, to speak at our annual lecture series (follow this link for a complete list of this year's speakers).

Title: "Intelligent Mediation"

Abstract: Homes, like bodies, have always functioned as media and as modes of communication and self-expression. They foreground location and identity as a counterforce to dislocation and differentiation. In this talk, I will show how they are now the locus of industry-led claims concerning the emergence of Ambient Intelligence; a branding and extension of the ubiquitous computing project that centres on the replacement of computers with computing, and the distribution of apparently more user-friendly networked intelligence among the everyday objects of the domestic environment. The futuristic vision of the smart home seems to "fulfil a long standing dream of artefacts that know us" (Suchman), but intelligent mediation in this context is not, as we might hope or imagine, about celebrating hybrid, affective, intimate human-machine relationality. It is, I will suggest, a means of repurposing the "closed-world" (Edwards) logic of Artificial Intelligence, while perpetuating the production of "homo oeconomicus" (Brown) or the subject of neoliberalism through the integration of systems of surveillance and marketing. As well as seeking to demystify the objects and rhetorics of Ambient Intelligence, I will open out the question of methodology, and experiment with modes of critique by acknowledging the performative role of science fiction in the co-constitution of the technosciences.

Biography: Sarah Kember’s research focuses on digital media, questions of mediation and feminist science and technology studies. She is currently investigating the possibilities of life after new media (studies), and has engaged in debates on artificial life and other aspects of the convergence between biology and computer science. She also works on imaging technologies and the relationship between photography and the digital and is developing an innovative approach to the question of remediation and the ‘fusion’ of science and literary fiction. Sarah is working on a novel entitled The Optical Effects of Lightning. It is a story presented as a case file on a missing person, but combines three main genres: detective, science fiction and gothic. Conceptually, the novel attempts to bring science and literary fiction into a closer, more remediating relationship. This is done partly through the agency of a photograph (censored) which shows a man running on a beach as he is struck by lightning. While working on the submission of this manuscript with Laetitia Rutherford (at Mulcahy Conway Associates Ltd.), Sarah has begun work on her next novel. This includes a first person account of the recent discovery of life on Mars.

Sarah is also working with Joanna Zylinska on a book based on their MA Digital Media: Technology and Cultural Form and the optional course entitled After New Media. This explores the concept of mediation through a range of media events including the Large Hadron Collider Project, the credit crunch and the world's first face transplant. The book is provisionally entitled Life After New Media.