Network Notion #5 – How To Not Dissolve Completely

It seems increasingly impossible to imagine human life without technology. Ranging from sociality, to medicine, to the military—the industries that preserve as well as destroy life are mediated through digital technologies on a planetary-scale. While big corporations keep growing with seemingly endless resources and capital, human realities are increasingly marked by precarity and an impending feeling of doom. There is little space left for agency and maneuvering when going against systems that cultivate the myth of their own infinity. The reinsertion of materiality, of humanness, and eventually of death into the understanding of technologically-mediated life can also, in turn, provide us with alternative ways of being.

This publication is composed of two essays which grapple with the slippery and ever-fluctuating nature of data and technology. By placing them side by side, a new dialogue emerges. Coming from different contexts and grounded in different cases, they surprisingly often speak in tandem. To write about fast-changing technologies and the conditions they give rise to is to accept a certain tension. Moving, fleeting, and breaking digital bodies resist the fixity of written text. The essay form, however, opens up more possibilities. Thoughts, observations, and interpretations do not have to be proven. It is composed of precariously dependent concepts that, for the time and place of the essay, become neighbors. They can live in harmony, but they can also quarrel. Reinserting these processes lies at the heart of this publication.

Mela Miekus deals with a rethinking of death, positioning breakdown as the counter force to cultural stasis through a study of net art.  Ruben Stoffelen dives into the the theory of data through the spatial logics of the shipping container morphology, discussing fragmented forms of data infrastructure and the way in which they facilitate technocapitalist control.

(PDF freely available online)