We are pleased to announce a lecture by
Marek Wojtaszek
(University of Łódź)
Sensory Interface and Algorithmic Desire in a Society of Anticipation
The lecture is going to be a part of the
American Studies Colloquium Series.
Thursday, December 6, 2018
at 4:00 p.m
Where?
American Studies Center, room 317,
al. Niepodległości 22, Warsaw.
What?
What do US drone strikes, Apple, online services of infidelity and the film Her (dir. Spike Jonze, 2013) have in common? As Americans run their lives through networked computers, we witness a new digital form of communitarianism emerge with its paradox of techno intimacy—the simultaneous desire for omniconnectivity and for individual difference from the multitude. Digital code, paired with computational networks, has succeeded in beguiling American mentality, which—as I will argue—is due to their sensorial aptitude to s(t)imulate addiction. I will explore how computational media equipped with sensors of advanced body-infiltrating power and endowed with superb datacrunching, AI and profiling capacities, romance the senses and algorithmically design experience through customization and social anticipation. The digitally enhanced capitalism, guided by Moore’s Law and iterative and simulative design, thus promotes anticipatory experimentalism as a novel foundation of American morals, revealing that the provisional is the ultimate object of desire. By engaging with the opening examples, I will demonstrate how the optimization-fixated sensory media algorithmically feed-forward the data, thus promulgating a forever accomplished future.
Who?
Marek Wojtaszek is assistant professor at the Faculty of International and Political Studies at the University of Lodz, Poland, affiliated with the Department of American and Media Studies, and the Women’s Studies Center. His main areas of research include: visual and algorithmic cultures and aesthetics and environmental media, Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, and the relationship between body and space. He graduated from American Studies at the University of Lodz, Poland, Études européennes at the Jean Moulin Université in Lyon, France, and completed a postgraduate program in cultural and media studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Marek holds a Ph.D. in the Humanities (literary studies). He teaches media and cultural studies as well as in an international didactic program Joint European Master’s Degree in Women’s and Gender Studies (GEMMA). He is a beneficiary of European Commission (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina), Polish Science Foundation (University of Tel Aviv, Israel), and Polish-American Fulbright Commission (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign). Marek has English publications in the fields of aesthetics, critical theory, gender, media studies, psychoanalysis and visual culture. His recent publications include: “Dreamingmachine: Diurnal Insomnia in Digital Wonderland” (Angles: French Perspectives on the Anglophone World journal), “The Volatile and the Chimeric: A Hermeneutic of Interauthenticity” (in Interpreting Authenticity. Translations and Its Others, edited collection, Peter Lang). He has coauthored one book on men’s violences and co-edited three volumes on American Studies. His own book Masculinities and Desire. A Deleuzean Encounter will be published by Routledge and released in January 2019.
