Network Ecologies Symposium
The Network_Ecologies Symposium brought together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to collectively and collaboratively discuss networks and network(ed) ecologies.
The Network Ecologies Symposium was a multi-disciplined, multi-format symposium held in the new PhD Scholar Lab at Smith Warehouse, October 18-19, 2013. Friday’s events were invite-only but Saturday’s event were open to the public. The symposium extended the contributions and conversations taking place on our invitee-only online forum Ecology of Networks and featured Jussi Parikka—author of Insect Media, Media Archaeology and more recently work on Media Ecology—as our keynote. In his presentation In Bursts, Not Flows: Microtemporalities and Engineering Network Politics, Parikka evoked Ernst’s notion of microtemporality to argue 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, responded to Parikka’s keynote.
Other scholars included:
Drew Burk, a media philosopher who specializes in French media theory, lead a Saturday lunch seminar on Fernand Deligny’s work regarding the network as a mode of life.
Duke’s Dr. Clare Woods (Classical Studies) presented her project mapping intellectual networks in early medieval Europe.
Artist, designer, scholar Florian Wiencek introduced our Symposium with an invite-only PhD Lab Friday presentation on “Digital Cultural Learning: Traversing Networks and Activating the Archive.”
Dr. Reagan Moore, from UNC’s RENCI joined us with a presentation titled “Policy-based consensus building” 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 were given based on multiple science and engineering domains.
Turan Duda, co-owner and lead architect of DudaPaine Architects joined us to present “Seven Wonders, A network of ideas (conceptual) and memories (experiential).”
Leadership entrepreneur Jonathan Kroll presented an interactive/experiential presentation titled “Developmental Networks: Mentorship For A Better Me” during which we explored traditional one-to-one mentoring, developmental networks, as well as an alternative approach to mentorship: group mentoring. The developmental network approach, Kroll believes capitalizes on one-to-one mentoring by purposefully pursuing multiple dyadic mentoring relationships.
Dr. Stephanie Boluk‘s talk “Symbolic Xchanges: Poetry, Money, ARGs” examined the dialectic between money and language as well as the relationship of electronic literature to emerging cultures of financialization through an analysis of Speculation (http:// speculat1on.net), an alternate reality game (ARG) directed by Katherine Hayles, Patrick Jagoda, and Patrick LeMieux.
In his talk “Networking the NES: Beyond the Dark Age of Digital Games” artist/game designer/scholar Patrick LeMieux theorized nonhuman play, networked subjectivities, and metagaming by presenting games he’s made to interrogate these emerging ecologies.
Duke’s S-1 Speculative Sensation Lab, including Mark Hansen, Mark Olson, Patrick LeMieux, Amanda Starling Gould, Luke Caldwell, David Rambo, Max Symuleski, & Yair Rubinstein enacted a network(ed) art-game intervention.
The artist, designer, and speculative (neuro)biologist Pinar Yoldas presented her work in conjunction with the Speculative Sensation Lab art intervention.
Also: Have a look at conversations on Twitter that happened around the Symposium under the Hashtag #netcologies.
