Audio-Visual Material
Figurations for the Future
Invited talk, 'Figurations for the Future’, Colloquium XXXIII: 'Archipiélago Crítico. ¡Formado está! ¡Naveguémoslo!', 17, Institute for Critical Studies, Mexico City, July 6. (In Spanish translation with English subtitles.)
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This City Does Not Exist
In December 2021, Mel Jordan and I gave a joint talk called ‘This City Does Not Exist’ at the City, Public Space & Body conference, Institute for Creative and Culture Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths, University of London.
‘The city’ for us (as for this conference) is not something that can be known in advance and thus taken-for-granted. Each city contains a pluriverse of cities. In this sense, the city does not already exist, having been created by architects and planners, say. Such an approach risks limiting responses to the city to critiquing or otherwise tactically engaging with it – as famously with the flaneur, the derive, and the male citizen who psycho-geographically walks through a pre-given urban space. The city, for us, is neither mass nor abstract, formal nor technical. Instead, we see the city as something that has to be invented and called forth in relation to specific contexts and situations: artistically, practically, theoretically.
For anyone interested, Mel and I are in session 11: The Making of Cityness, which is here and below:
You can now access all of the recorded sessions and presentations of the conference here
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Mesa del Center for Posdtigital Cultures, University of Coventry
A panel showcasing the work of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, at the 17, Institute for Critical Studies colloquium on 'Economic Imagination', Mexico City, June 25, also featuring Janneke Adema, Mel Jordan and Ady Evans.
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Can We Unlearn Liberal Individualism?
Gary Hall in conversation with Carolina Rito about his new book A Stubborn Futury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain, Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University, March 25, 2021.
Other questions that were addressed during the event include:
· How come so much writing in England is realist, humanist and anti-intellectual?
· Is all great literature pirated?
· Why are Oxbridge-educated journalists obsessed with protecting ‘ordinary’ people from difficult language?
· What do we need most – another theory of revolution or a revolution of theory?
· Is everyone writing their memoirs today or does it just seem like it?
· And why is Gary so mean to Tom McCarthy?
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Data Commonism versus ÜberCapitalism
Talk at ‘The Digital University in a Neoliberal Age’ symposium, University of Birmingham, November 8, 2017.
How can we affirmatively disrupt the übercapitalism of Airbnb, Deliveroo and Academia.edu in order to invent a different, more caring future: for the sharing and gig economies, for post-industrial, post-capitalist society, and for individual life too? This paper will argue that in order to do so we need to experiment with new ways of living and working; ways that are based far less on self-centred individualism, competition and celebrity.
The university has an important role to play in this process. After all, this is where the 24-hour artistic/entrepreneurial subjectivity that is a feature of contemporary capitalism and its creative industries was first developed, before it was exported throughout society more widely. (Hence Facebook’s HQ is known as a ‘campus’.) The university is thus a particularly appropriate place to experiment with developing a counter-subjectivity to the hyper-competitive, neoliberal microentrepreneurs of the self that übercapitalism is pushing us to become.
Accordingly, this talk endeavours to provide a sense, both of the neoliberal intensification and acceleration that is lying in store for many us over the course of the next few years, and what we can do about it.
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Alternative modes of academic research and publishing
Talk on Alternatives Modes of Academic Research. Starting from the Million Mask March and student protests against tuition fees of November 2015, it takes in 'post-theory theories' associated with the nonhuman, the posthuman and the crisis of life itself that is expressed by the Anthroprocene. This short talk was given as my contribution to a panel organised by Martina O’Sullivan, Senior Commissioning Editor, Cultural Studies, Rowman & Littlefield International, as part of Academic Book Week, and held at the Maughan Library, King’s College, London, November 10, 2015.
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Piracy and Open Access
Talk at The Post-Digital Scholar conference, Hybrid Publishing Lab and Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University, Germany, November 12-14, 2014.
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Introduction to posthumanities
Keynote lecture, Knowledge Machines: The Potential of the Digital, University of Kent, September 27.
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What are the digital post-humanities?
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Why open access is important for the humanities, the university, everyone…
Talk given at the Open Access Week event, The Humanities and Open Access: Opportunities and Challenges organised by University of St Andrews Library in October 22-26, 2012.
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Questions & answers
Talk given at the Open Access Week event, The Humanities and Open Access: Opportunities and Challenges organised by University of St Andrews Library in October 22-26, 2012.
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Copycats vs Mr Big
Panel on copyright/copyleft with AND Publishing, Lucifer, and Joost Smiers, for Truth is Concrete, part of Steirischer Herbst festival, Graz, Austria, September 27, 2012.
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The post-secret state: openness and transparency in the era of gov. 2.0
‘The Post-Secret State: Openness and Transparency in the Era of Gov 2.0’ (co-authored with Clare Birchall and Pete Woodbridge) - this is the third episode of Liquid Theory TV, a series of Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) programmes. 'The Post-Secret State' first appeared in Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy, vol.1, 2012. It is accompanied there by a short essay, ‘How to Do Justice to Media Specificity: or, Should This Video Be Left to Speak for Itself?’. (The first and second episodes of Liquid Theory TV are available below.)
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Living books about life
Funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and published by Open Humanities Press (OHP), Living Books About Life is a series of curated, open access books about life -- with life understood both philosophically and biologically -- which provide a bridge between the humanities and the sciences. Produced by a globally-distributed network of writers and editors, the books in the series repackage existing open access science research by clustering it around selected topics whose unifying theme is life: e.g., air, agriculture, bioethics, cosmetic surgery, electronic waste, energy, neurology and pharmacology.
By creating twenty one ‘living books about life’ in just seven months, the series represents an exciting new model for publishing, in a sustainable, low-cost manner, many more such books in the future. These books can be freely shared with other academic and non-academic institutions and individuals. Taken together, they constitute an engaging interdisciplinary resource for researching and teaching relevant science issues across the humanities, a resource that is capable of enhancing the intellectual and pedagogic experience of working with open access materials.
All the books in the series are themselves ‘living’, in the sense that they are open to ongoing collaborative processes of writing, editing, updating, remixing and commenting by readers. As well as repackaging open access science research -- along with interactive maps, visualisations, podcasts and audio-visual material -- into a series of books, Living Books About Life is thus engaged in rethinking ‘the book’ itself as a living, collaborative endeavour in the age of open science, open education, open data and e-book readers such as Kindle and the iPad.
Living Books About Life is a collaboration between Open Humanities Press and three academic institutions: Coventry University, Goldsmiths, University of London, and the University of Kent.
Series editors: Clare Birchall (University of Kent), Gary Hall (Coventry University), Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths, University of London)
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Media gifts
Media Gifts - in March 2011, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London hosted an event called ‘Radical Publishing: What Are We Struggling For?’. It featured a lot of talk from speakers such as Bifo, Peter Hallward and Mark Fisher of K-Punk fame about politics understood according to the most conventional signposts, most of which had to do with the production of political transformation elsewhere: the past, the future, Egypt. But, surprisingly, given the title of the event, very little about anything that would actually affect the work, business, role and practices of the speakers themselves. So there was no discussion of radical ideas of publishing, authorship, copyright, intellectual property and so on.
As a result, the event in the end seemed to be more about a few publishers – including Verso, Pluto and Zero Books – who may publish supposedly radical content, but who in fact run according to quite conventional business models, promoting their authors and their products, and providing more commodities for us to buy (there was a stall outside the lecture theatre selling copies of the speakers' books). The content of their publications might be radical and transformative, however their publishing model certainly is not, with political phenomena such as the student protests and ideas of communism all being turned into marketable commodities to be bought and sold. It is some of these issues that are addressed in this lecture.
Media Gifts was given as the Closing Keynote at Repository Fringe 2011, University of Edinburgh Informatics Forum, August 3-4, 2011. (Unfortunately a problem with the video recording means the video cuts off before the end. For notes on the last section please see the conference's liveblog of the day: http://rfringe11.blogs.edina.ac.uk/2011/08/04/liveblog-de.)
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On liquid, living books
'On Liquid, Living Books' - addresses the subject of the unbound book from the viewpoint of the question: ‘What do we have the right to bind as a book, legally, materially, economically and conceptually; and just as importantly, what do we have the right not to bind as a book?’ Thanks to open access, WordPress, Scribd, Smashwords and Aaaarg.org, producing a book is something nearly everyone can do today in a matter of minutes. Yet what is so interesting about recent developments in electronic publishing is not that bringing out a book is steadily becoming more like blogging or vanity publication, with authority and certification provided as much by an author’s reputation or readership, or the number of times a text is downloaded, cited, referenced, linked to, blogged about, tagged, bookmarked, ranked, rated or ‘liked’, as it is by conventional peer-review or the prestige of the press. All of those criteria retain fairly conventional notions of the book, the author, publication and so on. Far more interesting is the way today, in the era of online authorship, comment sections, social tags, RSS feeds, streaming video, augmented reality, 3D graphics, interactive information visualisations, geolocation search capabilities, remixes, mash-ups, and texts being generally connected to a network of other information, data and mobile media environments, the book is in effect liquid and living, open to being continually and collaboratively annotated, updated, supplemented, revised, re-ordered, remixed and reimagined. Consequently, what we think of as ‘publication’ is no longer an end point. Publication is rather just a stage in an ongoing process of unfolding. So much so that perhaps soon we’ll no longer call such things books at all, e-, unbound, remixed or otherwise.
In this respect, 'On Liquid, Living Books' anticipates a new future strategy for scholarly production, and for the performance of contemporary theory in particular. It is a strategy that has moved away from thinking of writing and publishing primarily in terms of books and even essays and journal articles. Instead, the focus is on developing an expanded economy characterized by a multiplicity of models and methods of creating, writing, performing, disseminating, collecting, grouping, binding, storing, depositing, labelling, reading, searching and inter-acting with academic research and scholarship.
'On Liquid, Living Books' was given at The Unbound Book conference, Amsterdam Central Library and the Royal Library in Den Haag, May 19-21. A written version is due to appear as ‘Force of Binding: On Liquid, Living Books (Version 2.0: Mark Amerika Mix)’, remixthebook.com, the companion website to Mark Amerika, remixthebook (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
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Radical open access in the humanities
'Radical Open Access in the Humanities: or, Will the Future Editors of Žižek Have to Publish His Tweets?' - argues that open access is not only a viable option for the humanities, but a revolutionary one. In the process, it examines a number of different open access initiatives in the humanities and discusses their implications for our notions of academic authorship, the book, content creation, and publication. 'Radical Open Access in the Humanities' was given at Columbia University for Open Access Week (Oct. 18-22, 2010) and as part of the Research Without Borders speaker series, Scholarly Communication Program, Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, Columbia University, New York, October 18. The event was cosponsored by the School of the Arts and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University.
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Radical open access in the humanities - short version
A shorter 'highlights' version of 'Radical Open Access in the Humanities: or, Will the Future Editors of Žižek Have to Publish His Tweets?' given at Columbia University for Open Access Week (Oct. 18-22, 2010).
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Deleuze's 'postscript on the societies of control'
'Deleuze's "Postscript on the Societies of Control"' (with Clare Birchall and Pete Woodbridge) - this is the second episode of Liquid Theory TV, a series of Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) programmes experimenting with new and different ways of acting as a ‘public intellectual’ in the current media environment. 'Deleuze's "Postscript on the Societies of Control"' first appeared in Culture Machine 11, 2010. It is accompanied there by an introductory essay. (The first episode of Liquid Theory TV is available toward the bottom of this page).
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'Follow the money': the political economy of open access publishing in the humanities
'"Follow the Money": The Political Economy of Open Access Publishing in the Humanities' - a plenary lecture on open access in the humanities presented at the 1st Open Access Conference on scholarly publishing in Lund, Sweden, September 2009.
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Liquid theory tv
Liquid Theory TV (with Clare Birchall and Pete Woodbridge) – this is the introduction to a series of Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) programmes experimenting with new ways of acting as a ‘public intellectual’ in the current media environment by communicating academic research and ideas to a wider community both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the university. First published in Culture Machine 10, 2009.
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The impact of the humanities: or, what's next for open access
'The Impact of the Humanities: or, What's Next for Open Access', Berlin 5 Open Access conference, Padua, Italy, 19-21 September 2007, organised by the Max Planck Institute.