Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture (PACTAC)
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The Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture is a research institute of and for the future, combining streamed electronic seminars, print and net publications, digital resources, and a video archive of lectures, interviews, and panels hosted at the centre.
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Item 99 Year Phone Call(CTheory, 1997) Kroker, Arthur; Kroker, Marilouise; Cohen, LewisItem The Acceleration of Inertia: The Political Economy of Speed(Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture, 2009-06-06) Glezos, SimonThis paper consists of a Deleuzian reading of Schumpeter’s account of technological innovation within capitalism. It describes the tension in Schumpeter between creative destruction (the drive to innovate), and what he calls restrictive practices (the drive to conserve and forestall change). In Deleuzian terms this becomes modeled in the tension between capitalism as a deterritorializing machine and an apparatus of capture. I then use this theoretical framework to investigate the digitization of information, noting how capitalism seeks to accelerate information processes to improve efficiency, but in doing so, runs the risk of losing control of that information (the rise of piracy, creative commons projects, consumer created content, remixing, etc.). It involves a discussion of the interplay of technological and legal restraints on information (DRM as well as Patents) to attempt to control access to information, and technological, social and legal attempts to circumvent them.Item Acting in an Uncertain World: Thinking Techno-Ecologically?(Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture, 2011-03-18) Girvan, AnitaBorrowing the title from an essay by Michael Callon and his colleagues working at the intersection of science and technology studies and politics, this presentation, “Acting in an Uncertain World”, attempts to think through questions of environment and technology in a time of proliferating ecological crises. These crises, no longer conceived of as ‘natural’ disasters, or ‘human’ problems but deep entanglements, suggest new forms of technologically enabled democracy, where both slowness (slowing down to institutionalize deliberative processes) and speed (especially in communicating to inform an engaged citizenry) may interact in novel ways.Item The Aesthetics of Digital Longing(Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture, 2011-05-25) Murray, TimProfessor Tim Murray, Director of the Society of the Humanities and curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media discusses “The Aesthetics of Digital Longing” by way of an evocative discussion of Rancière and Deleuze in the content of interactive installations. He illustrates his talk with a number of installations and sound pieces from Asia that are rarely discussed, in the interests of broadening the global perspective of what we think of as politics and art.Item After Life(Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture, 2008-11-21) Thacker, EugeneEugene Thacker is Assistant Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the author of Biomedia (University of Minnesota Press, 2004) and The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture (MIT Press, 2005).Item After the Drones(Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture, 2014-10-27) 2bears, Jackson; Kroker, Marilouise; Kroker, ArthurText and voices by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, video art and sound by Jackson 2bears.Item Androids: A Remarkable Approximation to the Organic(Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture, 2011-03-18) Walraven, AyaThis talk walks through a brief history of androids in the past and present. Citing Japan as a special case, Aya Walraven explores how androids, cyborgs, and humans alike fit into society with a growing need for robotic assistance and enhancement, and touches upon the cultural roots and psychology that affects how we receive our mechanical partners.Item AR Futurology(Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture, 2010-03-12) Walraven, AyaAya Walraven gives a presentation entitled, "AR Futurology." Aya Walraven is a digital media and internet enthusiast who primarily works in video and web. She is an editorial assistant at CTheory and head of PACTAC’s Software Analysis Lab. A self-appointed internet-culture historian and archivist she observes and documents online behavior, particularly in Japanese youth and anonymous communities.Item Atmospheric Alienation, Carbon Tracking and Geo-Techno Agency(Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture, 2010-03-12) Girvan, AnitaAnita Girvan is an interdisciplinary PhD student with a concentration in Cultural, Social, and Political Thought. Her PhD project focuses on the mediating role of the metaphor of the ‘carbon footprint’ in responses to climate change, and her broader interests are in the cultural and geo-material loops of language, narrative and ecology. She is also a Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS) Fellow at the University of Victoria.Item ‘Because None of Us Are As Cruel As All of Us’: Anonymity and Subjectivation(Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture, 2010-03-12) Mitchell, LiamLiam Mitchell is a PhD candidate in Cultural, Social and Political Thought at the University of Victoria. His research concerns social media and boredom. He is the editor of a new graduate journal in political theory called Peninsula: A Journal of Relational Politics.Item Becoming Dragon: An Epistemology of Transition(Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture, 2009-06-04) Cárdenas, MichaHow are technologies of transformation facilitating new becomings, new modes of learning and new sites of knowledge? The performance Becoming Dragon sought to explore two lines of technology, Multi-User Virtual Environments and biotechnology. Following Anna Munster’s call for Transversal Technology Studies, this paper is an attempt to map two transversal lines between these two directions of technology: transition or becoming as a mode of being and mixing of realities, genders and sexualities as a strategy of subversion. The intersections of these lines of technology and transversal strategies of action will be examined as operating within and against two fields of knowledge production, phenomenology and what Ricardo Dominguez has called “science of the oppressed”.Item Before Foucault: Power & Cynical Ideology(Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture, 2006-03-13) Kroker, ArthurDr. Arthur Kroker of the Department of Political Science, University of Victoria gives a lecture entitled, "Before Foucault: Power & Cynical Ideology" at the Michel Foucault's Legacy symposium.Item Before Foucault: Scepticism, Relativism, and Modernity(Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture, 2006-03-14) Magnusson, WarrenDr. Warren Magnusson of the Department of Political Science, University of Victoria, gives a lecture entitled "Before Foucault: Scepticism, Relativism and Modernity" for the Michel Foucault's Legacy Symposium.Item Body Invaders: panic sex in America(New World Perspectives, 1987) Kroker, Arthur; Kroker, MarilouiseBody Invaders explores the fate of the body in the postmodern condition. Introduced by theses on power and sexuality, it proceeds to analyze the key theoretical contributions of Bataille, Foucault, Baudrillard, and Kristeva, and ranges widely over the suppressions and obsessions which mark theoretical discourse and public policy in relation to sexual eroticism, fashion, reproduction and bodily decay.Item Born Again Ideology(Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture, 2005-01-20) Kroker, ArthurArthur Kroker of the Department of Political Science, University of Victoria gives a talk entitled "Born Again Ideology" for the Politics in the Age of Empire Symposium.Item Born Again Ideology: Religion, Technology, and Terrorism(CTheory Books/NWP, 2007) Kroker, ArthurCity Upon a Hill, the American Dream, a sacred covenant—the United States has done that most elusive and perhaps ineffable of all things: wrapped together the language of god and technology into a powerful, adventurous political experiment which is “premodern” in its (religious) sensibility and “posthuman” in it (technological) enthusiasm.Item C.B. Macpherson: Dilemmas of Liberalism and Socialism(New World Perspectives, 1988) Leiss, WilliamCanada’s preeminent political theorist, C.B. Macpherson, won his international reputation for his controversial interpretations of liberalism. This book—the first to examine the entire range of his writings—seeks to place that interpretation of liberalism within the overall framework of his intellectual development. Focusing on two key themes—property and the state—C.B. Macpherson: Dilemmas of Liberalism and Socialism tracks Macpherson’s analysis of the contradictions of liberal-democracy through all of his writings. More than a text on Macpherson, this book contains an explosive historical thesis: the notion of the quasi-market society as the common fate of contemporary capitalist and communist societies.Item Can We Play ‘Fun Gay’? Disjuncture & Difference in Millenial Queer Youth Narratives(Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture, 2009-06-04) Bryson, MaryIt has become commonplace for narratives concerning youth whose lives are situated within cultures saturated by convergent media, unproblematically to reproduce assumptions regarding the meliorative role of access to networked digital media. In these accounts, learning is co-extensive with play, access with participation, logging in with belonging, and the consumption of digital artifacts is read as meaningful engagement in networked socialities. Techno-rationalist accounts concerning Net Gen youth and new media likewise tend to consolidate in narratives that foreground a putative impact accorded to access to techno-social networks, the possibility to overcome inequities that would otherwise accrue as a function of problematic participation and citizenship in a public. This paper attends to the generative role of the Internet in accounts of sexual self-formation by millennial queer youth – youth whose adolescence is situated in a networked, digital culture. With particular attention to the contingent assemblage of gender, sexuality and other modes of identification, this research counters and complicates decontextualized, celebratory notions of queer youth and cyberspace.Item Cancer Knowledge in the Plural: Communicability of Presence, Trans/Media and the Queer Biopolitics of Prosthetic Mobilities(Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture, 2012-06-17) Bryson, MaryDr. Mary Bryson, Professor, Language and Literacy Education, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia gives a presentation entitled, "Cancer Knowledge in the Plural: Communicability of Presence, Trans/Media and the Queer Biopolitics of Prosthetic Mobilities."Item Cardboard Resistance(Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture, 2004-11-26) Vannini, PhillipPhillip Vannini is a professor at Royal Roads University in Victoria, BC. His published works on music and popular culture theory have dealt with issues of commodification of memory, seduction, and standardization of taste.