information

We live in a time of “fake news”... and not just “fake news” fake news for real people and real news about fake people, but fake news about fake news for fake people about fake people. So what does it mean to be “fake” in an age of accelerating information? The Congress of Fakery, a roundtable conversation on frauds, hoaxes, and other forms of informational flimflam by artists in the realm of electronic literature, aims to take up this question with a specific eye on its history, epistemology, practice, and possibilities for future fakery. Gaps we will address are: the real and the fake, the fake and the imaginary, the sender and receiver, differing cultures of reception, official and unofficial, and other rifts in the flow of information.Historical perspectives on fakery would include: discussions of the willing (and unwilling) suspension of disbelief in print traditions; hucksters, crackpots, and quacks; and various manufactured mass misconceptions. Epistemological discussions would include: discussions of authenticity and affect; what makes a fake really fake; and attempts to institutionalize speculative knowledge. Practical discussions would explore propaganda, psyops, and behavioral engineering as tools for the certification of knock-off knowledge.The most significant portion of this roundtable presentation would be a ranging conversation on the political and aesthetic possibilities in the area of synthetic knowledge production especially in an electronic environment. In the face of all this fakery, what can educators do to develop strategies for media literacy? What can activists do with the unstable conditions of post-factual societies? What does art add to the artificial?

On Joseph McElroy’s Fiction as a lifelong, dramatic investigation of noesis - that abstract butevocative concept rooted in Platonic idealism and redefined(through Phenomenology) asthose ineluctable acts of consciousness that constitute reality.

Marc Bousquet discusses university labor delivered in “the mode of information.

(Source: EBR)

In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" Star Trek-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age.

Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the liberal humanist "subject" in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the "posthuman."

Ranging widely across the history of technology, cultural studies, and literary criticism, Hayles shows what had to be erased, forgotten, and elided to conceive of information as a disembodied entity. Thus she moves from the post-World War II Macy Conferences on cybernetics to the 1952 novel Limbo by cybernetics aficionado Bernard Wolfe; from the concept of self-making to Philip K. Dick's literary explorations of hallucination and reality; and from artificial life to postmodern novels exploring the implications of seeing humans as cybernetic systems.

Although becoming posthuman can be nightmarish, Hayles shows how it can also be liberating. From the birth of cybernetics to artificial life, How We Became Posthuman provides an indispensable account of how we arrived in our virtual age, and of where we might go from here.

(Source: University of Chicago Press catalog copy)

Also titled "Looking Backward: Visual Culture and Virtual Aesthetics, 1984-1998" -- the online essay presents a history of visual cultural, virtual aesthetics and visualization

A review of Alan Liu's The Laws of Cool.