Tag Archives: machine

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CHI2013: The Future Robot Enslavement of Humankind

Partly inspired by Ruairi Robinson‘s excellent short Blinky TM, which I saw at the Rio Short Film Festival in 2011, I’ve co-authored a paper with Shaun Lawson, Conor Linehan and Ben Kirman from the Lincoln Social Computing Research Centre at Lincoln University, being given tomorrow at ACM CHI2013: Changing Perspectives in Paris (3-letter code ANS).

from Ruairi Robinson’s BlinkyTM

The Sinister Tech Research tumblr nails it. If you’re in Paris, come along. Your presence won’t change anything – the future still belongs to robots. But at least you’ll know why.

Edit, 2.5.2013: the slides are now available here, and the full paper can be downloaded here.

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Forthcoming talks, part 1

A proleptic roundup of some conference talks & guest lectures:

On the 24th of April I’m speaking at Modernism and Utopia: Convergences in the Arts about “The Machinery Underground: Subterranean Space and Modernist Utopias”. This is a 2-day conference on the 23rd and 24th at the University of Birmingham, UK.

On the 11th of June I’m talking with Alex Burghart at l’Université Paris IV-Sorbonne on “Ruins of statues and the dystopian landscape”. This presentation is part of a book we’ve been writing on the apocalyptic imaginary in English and American history; the event is a symposium organized by Prof. Jacques Carré on «Utopie, ville et paysage dans le monde anglophone». It runs on the 11th and the 12th.

On the 17th & 18th of September at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany, I’ll give a paper at the conference Contemporary British Fiction: Narrating Violence, Trauma and Loss, on “Traumatic Irony: A Model of Unintentional Disclosure”.

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Further details on UCD

Next week the events at UCD take place. On Wednesday the 4th of April I’ll be giving a lecture on “Deleuze and the Machine in Schizophrenic Art”; this will take place in the School of English at 4pm. On the following day, I’ll be running a workshop on key concepts in Deleuze and Guattari, from 10am ’til 5pm. This session is aimed at non-philosophers who are using, or who are considering using Deleuze in their own work. Which of Deleuze’s concepts are best suited to the varied tasks and sub-fields of criticism?

During the workshop we’ll be working initially on basic concepts, and then on some examples of their application in literary criticism, film studies, queer theory, and archival work. By focusing on the methodological problems specific to these disciplines, we should be able to identify which of Deleuze’s concepts are most appropriate to each discipline; we should also be able to discard those concepts which are less suited to the work of criticism.

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Another Deleuze lecture at Cologne

Guest lecture at Cologne

On the 1st of February I’ll be once again at the University of Cologne. The lecture will deal with the difficulty in diffentiating between abstract machines as components of the virtual, and machinic assemblages as components of the actual. How can we perceive abstract machines, if they exist only as virtual diagrams?

By looking at some examples of machinic assemblages in art, literature, and psychiatry, I’ll present a technique whereby we can analyse the relation of these assemblages to their abstract machines. The job of measuring the degree to which any assemblage is actualized or virtualized is what Deleuze calls schizoanalysis. I’ll be suggesting a way in which we can schizoanalyse all artefacts, whether they be artistic, literary, or technological.

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