http://www.vectorsjournal.net en-us http://www.vectorsjournal.net/images/vectorsRssHeader.jpg http://www.vectorsjournal.net 144 21 Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular
This issue is dedicated to the memory of Roy Rosenzweig, a true pioneer of the digital humanities.

Over the last several years, I have simultaneously been doing two very different kinds of writing about new technology, one examining race and digital media, often in relation to representation and identity, and one engaging the formal and phenomenological structures of new media. I am continually amazed by how easy it is to hold these two types of work apart and have come to believe that the very forms of electronic culture encourage just such a partitioning or modularity, making it hard to sustain connections across fields of knowledge. In our engagement with digital media, we tend to focus at one level or on isolated examples, unable to move between modules or across scales.

Many writing on new technology in the mid 1990s commented on the parallels between the ways of knowing modeled in computer culture and in theories of poststructuralism. Meanwhile, critical race and postcolonial scholars have highlighted how certain tendencies within poststructuralist theory simultaneously respond to and marginalize blackness. This maneuver may at least partially be possible because of a parallel and increasing dispersion of electronic forms across culture, forms which simultaneously enact and shape these new modes of thinking. Certain modes of racial visibility and knowing coincide or dovetail with specific technologies of vision: if the electronic underwrites today's key modes of vision and is a central technology in post-World War II America, these technologized ways of seeing and knowing took shape in a world also struggling with shifting knowledges and representations of race.

In trying to understand how difference matters in the digital era, we should perhaps suspect that the very structures of our information economy (and of the code that underwrites it) look a particular way today precisely because the Civil Rights and other freedom movements happened at mid-century. Both cybernetics and Civil Rights were born in quite real ways of World War II and are caught in tight feedback loops. Certain aspects of modularity, fragmentation, and dispersion that are endemic to digital media also structure the more covert forms of racism and racial representation that categorize post-Civil Rights discourse. I am not so much arguing that one mode is causally related to the other, but, rather, that they both represent a move toward fragmentary or modular ways of knowing and of organizing information, knowledges increasingly prevalent in the later half of the 20th century. From Charles Babbage’s 19th century "Difference Engine" to Derrida’s 1980s neographism "Diff?nce," the notion of difference has served as a provocative metaphor for thinking about language, culture, politics, technology and identity, while it has simultaneously fueled our thinking about both race and identity.

This issue of Vectors stages multiple examinations of the notion of difference as it plays out in a variety of spheres, discourses and practices, while also privileging race and ethnicity as a central throughline of digital culture, a recurring ghost in our networked machines. Wendy Chun's "Programmed Visions" queries the work of the archive in the 20th century, investigating in particular our continued cultural beliefs that race is somehow knowable and mappable. In creating a kind of anti-archive, this project hints at the many ways in which race and (genetic) code mutually construct each other. In "Nation on the Move," Minoo Moallem deploys the Persian carpet as a powerful analytic for the varied ways that nations travel and differences are consumed. The project toggles across scales, moving fluidly between theoretical paradigm and lived reality and resisting the temptation to fix the meaning of the carpets in only one register or place. Jennifer Terry's "Killer Entertainments" seeks to contextualize a diverse collection of video footage related to the Iraq War, drawing out threads of connected meaning between what might seem to be diverse clips. She asks probing questions about each video, designed to focus our attention on the larger political and social webs of meaning that engender each excerpt's production and circulation.

Projects by David Goldberg and Christian Sandvig also tease out the oft-repressed connections that structure diverse aspects of daily life, in times of both crisis and normalcy. "Blue Velvet's" evocative explorations of the cityscapes of New Orleans both pre- and post-Katrina help us to understand that the seeds of the devastation wrought by Katrina were sown years before the storm touched ground. In mining the subterranean layers of the city's history -- from historic redlining to the budget cuts of the neoliberal era -- the project powerfully connects the dots between culture, politics, economics, and ideology. In "The RED Project," Sandvig and his team extend our conceptions of redlining from real estate or insurance policies to the invisible Wi-Fi networks that enable so much of our privileged connectivity in the present. They have created a prediction machine that refuses the purely indexical and quantitative dreams of so much of technology, instead pushing us to question what operations of power such mimetic fantasies paper over or conceal.

Mark Kann likewise questions a certain faith in predictability or rationality. In "Deliberative Democracy and Difference," he argues that theories of deliberative democracy must suppress certain variables or predispositions in order to model a world of rational discourse and democracy and instead offers a simulated glimpse into how such theories are likely to fall short. The final project of this issue, "ThoughtMesh," continues our goal of including in each issue lively "tools to think with," projects that serves as springboards to collaboration or interaction rather than as mostly "finished" pieces. As with "The RED Project," the team behind ThoughtMesh invites you to push beyond the surface of your screen and the modular nature of much of digital culture toward larger enmeshed meanings.

--Tara McPherson]]> 2006-05-02
"Blue Velvet: Re-dressing New Orleans in Katrina's Wake" represents our most sophisticated exploration of the city of New Orleans both before and after Hurricane Katrina. Combining sound, text, photography, video, and several maps, Blue Velvet sculpts an evocative and poignant landscape that nonetheless refuses all registers of nostalgia, insisting as it does that we locate Katrina and the Crescent City among multiple trajectories of policy, memory, and representation.It is crucial that we continue to underscore - as "Blue Velvet" so powerfully does - that the tragic events that unfolded in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast were possible precisely because of years of neoliberal policies that underwrote the conditions of possibility for such devastation in the first place. ]]> 2006-05-02
During the past decade and a half, leading theorists such as John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas have formulated theories of "deliberative democracy" in an effort to join rational discourse to political equality. Web designers have adapted deliberative democracy to the Internet, developing online forums intended to invigorate public-sphere discourse and extend participation to previously excluded citizens. This project illustrates two difficulties with joining rational discourse to political equality in societies with histories of systematic differences and inequalities. Simulation One focuses on the difficulty of maintaining rules of reason when some participants rely on different, potentially contradictory, epistemologies as their source of meaning and value. Simulation Two examines the impact of participants' gendered predispositions on the outcomes of deliberations. One conclusion is that deliberation may be less important to fostering democracy than other modes of political participation.]]> 2006-05-02
Jennifer Terry's analysis of videos taken by soldiers in combat in Iraq, Killer Entertainments offers an unflinching look at how the war is being fought on the ground and the sometimes contradictory ways it is being represented by those who are most directly affected by it. ]]> 2006-05-02
This project focuses on the “Persian carpet” as a commodity interrogating notions of sexual and cultural difference as well as aesthetic pleasures arising from the conveniences and commodiousness of repetitious consumer activities in everyday life. I am interested in examining the most popular aspects of culture in relation to the carpet, meaning commodity culture, interior design, and advertisement in various sites: museums, bazaars, shopping malls, art galleries, cyberzones, and ethnic TV auctions. I use the concept of the “nation-on-the-move” to capture the ways in which the Persian carpet has mobilized a complex set of identifications within Iran while simultaneously transporting Iranian national identity throughout the world. In this project, I rethink a number of issues in a radically different fashion. Firstly, I problematize the separation of arts, crafts, and commodities in modern regimes of differentiation as they participate in the separation of politics from the realms of culture and economy. Secondly, I question the discourses of gender, sexuality, and race in the production of identity and difference in commodity culture and consumerism. Thirdly, I elaborate on the importance of the scopic economy at the intersection of consumerism, media technologies and cyberspace in shedding light on new and emerging forms of cultural citizenship. ]]> 2006-05-02
This project grapples with this paradox: the discrediting of race as a biological category has not led to the end of race or raced images, but rather to their proliferation. To explain this phenomenon, it examines what work "knowing race" does--how the drive to "know race" is intertwined with the very truth mechanisms of visual media and technologies, the logic of genetics, and the banal everyday actions of our governments. The project builds an archive of diverse texts, from early 20th century American eugenics textbooks to Toni Morrison's _The Bluest Eye_, from late 19th century British texts on fingerprinting to the UNESCO statements on race."Programmed Visions" stems from a larger book project of the same title that traces the surprising resonances between software and race as forms (or alleged forms) of archival knowledge. This book investigates race and software as visualizations of supposedly transmissible, trackable, yet invisible technological, biological or cultural sources--software, dna, race as ahistorical programmed histories. ]]> 2006-05-02
The RED Project is a Web-based mapserver that predicts the density of Wi-Fi networks near any address in the US and visualizes the result using Yahoo! Maps. This includes a tour of the Wi-Fi in five neighborhoods. The project is intended as a contribution to debates about "open spectrum" and the use of advanced wireless communication technologies.]]> 2006-05-02
ThoughtMesh is an unusual model for publishing and discovering scholarly papers online. It gives readers a tag-based navigation system that uses keywords to connect excerpts of essays published on different Web sites.]]> 2006-05-02