Goldsmiths, University of London

Faculty Member, Centre for Cultural Studies

Dr Luciana Parisi

Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths University of London

About

Luciana Parisi conveys the MA Interactive Media: Theory and Practice at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths University of London (UK). Her research looks at the asymmetric relationship between science and philosophy, aesthetics and culture, technology and politics to investigate potential conditions for ontological and epistemological change.  Her work on cybernetics and information theories, evolutionary theories, genetic coding and viral transmission has informed her analysis of culture and politics, the critique of capitalism, power and control. During the late 90s she worked with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick and has since been writing with Steve Goodman (aka kode 9). In 2004, she published Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (Continuum Press), where she departed from the critical impasse between notions of the body, sexuality, gender on the one hand, and studies of science and technologies on the other. Her work engaged with ontological and epistemological transformations entangled to the technocapitalist development of biotechnologies, which un-intentionally re-articulated models of evolutions, questioning dominant conceptions of sex, femininity and desire.  Since the publication of Abstract Sex, she has also written on the bionic transformation of the perceptive sensorium triggered by new media, on the advancement of new techno-ecologies of control, and on the nanoengineering of matter.  She has published articles about the relation between cybernetic machines, memory and perception in the context of a non-phenomenological critique of computational media and in relation to emerging strategies of branding and marketing. Her interest in interactive media has also led her research to engage more closely with computation, cognition, and algorithmic aesthetics. She is currently writing on architectural modeling and completing a monograph: Contagious Architecture. Computation, Aesthetics and the Control of Space  (MIT Press, forthcoming).


Teaching
MA Interactive Media: Theory and Practice.

In the last ten years interactive media have become increasingly part of the new exciting field of computational culture. No longer can computation remain a property of specialized expertise. We believe that coding, programmability and modelling are investing culture by operating as open-source platforms forms of knowledge, aesthetic and power. Interactive media are for us agents of computational cultures ready to re-formalize what we take theory and practice to be.

Our students’ projects are speculation into the power of computation. At our 2010 EXPO students’ projects combined art methodologies, technical knowledge, socio-cultural investigations, and aesthetic frameworks to map the tensions between coding, culture, power, perception, media agency.

We want you to join us at this cutting edge of media theory and practice. We are looking for students from design, scientific, artistic, cultural, philosophical, and/or political backgrounds who have felt the polarity of their disciplines and are looking for a critical environment in which the practical and theoretical carry equal weight and are not simply merged. You will be tutored by leading theorists including Luciana Parisi (author of Abstract Sex) and award-winning practitioners Graham Harwood (transmediale festival prize 09), with special input from Bernard Stiegler (author of Technics and Time) Matthew Fuller (editor of Software Studies) and Scott Lash (author of Critique of Information). You will be studying a vibrant research field leading our students to work as creative technologist (Joao Wilbert MA 2008), NGO researcher and adviser (Jean Demars MA 2009), Editor and Researcher for Mute Magazine (Caroline Heron MA 2008), PhD researcher in Computational Aesthetics (Beatrice Fazi MA 2008), art projects initiatives in urban media (Vincent Van Uffelen  MA 2009).

This MA develops a new philosophical direction in the study of interactive media and computational cultures. Help us speculate: prodding and poking computational media machines, following their pathologies, and diagnosing our futures.