The biggest global conference on Human-Computer Interaction, CHI 2014, took place in Toronto in May. Last year at CHI I collaborated with the Lincoln Social Computing Research Centre on a paper called ‘The Future Robot Enslavement of Mankind’, which looked back from an imaginary future to congratulate Homo Sapiens on its contribution to its own near-obsolesence.

This year we collaborated once again to contribute a paper called ‘Fifty Shades Of CHI’, which “uses the form and language of erotic BDSM romance fiction to present a critical lens on the nature of power in the relationship between people and contemporary technology”. The official download is here, as is the video; or you can download the e-print from the Lincoln repository. I’m wondering where we can go next year in terms of genre. With scifi and porn done and dusted, the options are limited.

Shortly before that, I finally published “Deleuze, diagramas, e arte esquizofrênica”, the talk I gave at  Colóquio Deleuze & Guattari: Filosofia Prática in Rio de Janeiro in 2011. (It’s in Portuguese, but you might want to download it just for the pictures: e-print here).

My reason for not being in Toronto in May was that I was speaking about J. G. Ballard at the very splendid Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery at the University of Leeds. The occasion was a wonderful, intense conference called Landcapes of Tomorrow: J. G. Ballard in Space and Time. Apparently one of the highlights of the conference was my description of the ur-accelerationist Mr Toad having an orgasm as he crashes an imaginary car in The Wind and the Willows. Audio of the talk is allegedly available somewhere on the internet.

In the middle of all this, in late May I managed to fail to speak at the University of Lincoln conference As Above, So Below: A Colloquium on Drone Culture: a huge disappointment to me, both because it turned out to be a fabulous conference and as I’d been looking forward to returning to Lincoln so much. My intention is to polish the paper I wished to give into at least open-access format and make it available here on my site and/or on academia.edu.

And in June I spoke at the British Association for Modernist Studies conference Modernism Now! at Senate House, the University of London, about ‘Beckett, Acceleration, and the Ruin of Language’. This I took as an opportunity to fill some of the literary lacunae in the reading lists of the accelerationists du jour; there’s a lot more work to be done on that front.

It’s been a busy few months – and this is without even mentioning a couple of very productive trips to Poland, a fascinating private view courtesy of the Ballard estate, a very strange interview with the New Scientist, and a new post in London.  But news of all that can wait.