Recoded: Landscapes and Politics of New Media was the first international conference of the Centre for Modern Thought at King’s College, University of Aberdeen. The centre was founded in 2005 “in order to foster dynamic and theoretically informed cross-disciplinary research. (…) In its activities, it traverses the fields of literature, philosophy, theory of art, political and legal thought, and science studies.”
The roots the centre has in all these disciplines shone through in the programme and the outcomes of the Recoded conference. The event had an impressive line-up of speakers from the field of media studies, new media, media archaeology, philosophy, military studies and more. In his introduction, professor Duncan Rice, Principal of the University of Aberdeen, noted that with this conference the Centre for Modern Thought wanted to investigate the changing position of humanities in dealing with new media.
Friedrich Kittler, who opened the event with a keynote lecture, set the tone by starting his attempt to an ontology of the media with Aristotle, as the inventor of philosophical thinking and the one who coined ‘the medium’ as a thing in itself.
Friedrich Kittler
According to Kittler, this marked an important shift from thinking of the medium as ‘in between’ to ‘the medium’. He stated that McLuhan should have attributed to Aristotle, for without him there would have been no notion of ‘the medium’. Kittler argued this marked a beginning of thinking about ‘things’, but not yet of relations between things in time and space. McLuhan’s’ “the medium is the message’, would have made no sense to Aristotle, for in his time there was no clear disinction between the oral story and its written version. With this notion, Kittler set off into an overview of relationships between things in time and place, in search of a media ontology. Heidegger,who historicized technical media such as the radio, regarded the start of the computer age a marking the end of philosophy. The question then is why philosophy led to the mechanization of thinking, and how mathematics and media theory/philosophy are related.
Kittler wasn’t the only one who took the audience back to the ancient Greek. Throughout the conference, many speakers would seek the boundaries of new media in stretching the notion of ‘media’, instead of focusing on the ‘new’ in new media, let alone the digital. This was quite striking to the new media researchers who participated in the conference (including myself), who expected maybe an exploration of “the new” or the digital, rather than revisiting “the medium”. If there would be an essential guide to new media from a modern thought perspective, it would include a lot of (Greek) philosophy.
The event had very interesting highlights, that I’d like to describe in more detail. One of these highlights was the surveillance and military thread throughout the event, which included two panels and screenings of Peter Galison’s new documentary Secrecy.
The Societies of Surveillance panel, which was moderated by blogger and curator Régine Debatty, started this strand with presentations about military secrecy. Trevor Paglen, investigative journalist and author of many books on state secrets such as Torture Taxi: On the trail of the CIA’s rendition flights (2007), held an intriguing presentation titled “Blank spots on a map: State Secrecy and the Limits of the Visible.” His talk dealt with the world of state secrets, called “the back world” funded from “the black budget” hidden from public publications. The metaphor of dark matter refers to something invisible but with effect on the visible universe. With an approach that combines investigative journalism, plane spotting (if you have tail data of cia planes, you can retrieve flight data from the Web), and landscape photography (recording black sites at extreme distances), Paglen opened up ideas about research methods and approaches. Two of his projects that really stand out are “I could tell you but then you would have to be destroyed by me” a collection of emblems and patches from the Pentagon’s black world, that were bundled in a book, and “terminal Air”. Terminal Air is an installation that attempts to envision the CIA office cum-travel agency in Langley, Virginia from which the Extraordinary Rendition Program—an initiative through which suspected terrorists captured in Western nations are transported to secret locations for torture and interrogation—is presumably coordinated. It is a project by by the Institute for Applied Autonomy and Trevor Paglen http://www.appliedautonomy.com/terminalair/index.html. Other speakers on this panel: Julia Scher and Kris Ravetto.
Trevor Paglen
The second session was titled New Media Technology and the Body Politic, which included a fascinating presentation by Thomas Keenan. He raised an important issue from the field of human rights. He asked when violence is legitimate to protect a place from violence. He referred to the journalist George Packer’s article “The Revolution will not be blogged” (http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004/05/04_200.html), in which he argues that journalists and readers need to get out of their pyjamas (referring to bloggers). He states that previously (in traditional media coverage) reality preceeded the media coverage, taping, transmitting, publishing. But with blogging the instant news is often wrong. But but now what? What with things that happen on screen, things that wouldn’t happen without a camera? Keenan refers to terrorist events that occur and are simultaneously televized, blogged and published, ad disagrees with Packer. He pointed out that the jihadi media landscape has two basic units: the threaded discussion forum (links to videotapes are “highest objects” in these posts), and the uploaded videos. This means that the Jihadi battlefield also takes place on an immaterial level (on screen). Here I’d like to point out the work of Albert Benschop, a sociologist working at the University of Amsterdam, who has published widely on the topic of the Jihad on the Web.
After the last panel of the day, we all headed off to the Belmont Picture House, where the film Secrecy was screened. This documentary, made by Peter Galison and Rob Moss in 2007, is a collection of interviews with a group of experts, varying from secret agencies (such as a former CIA agent and a National Security Agency veteran, dedicated to protecting secret information), victims of secrecy (who argue that state secrecy leads to an uninformed nation), and investigative journalists (who of course try to reveal secrets). http://www.secrecyfilm.com/
The article “Removing Knowledge” by Peter Galison, co-director of SECRECY, on the subject of government secrecy which appeared in the academic journal Critical Inquiry in 2004, is also available online. “The article describes the increasing size and scope of the secrecy system which developed in the United States during the Cold War, looking at both the practical, historical, and epistemological implications of the every-increasing regime of classified knowledge.” (Source: http://www.secrecyfilm.com/resources/)