Panel Statement

Panel: Don’t Anthropomorpise Me: Electronic Performance Tools, Automatons and The Vanity Apocalypse

My con­tri­bu­tion to this panel seeks to analyse syn­cretic, hy­bridized agency, par­tic­u­larly in mixed re­al­ity data trans­fer sys­tems. Syn­cretism has tra­di­tion­ally been re­garded as an at­tempt to har­monise and anal­o­gise (in other words seek­ing like­ness within un­like things, and unity in dif­fer­ence,usu­ally rel­a­tive to dis­parate be­liefs and cul­tural prac­tices. Re­cent de­vel­op­ments in bridg­ing au­tonomous re­la­tion­ships with ma­chines through mixed re­al­ity in­ter­fac­ing has brought about the need for fur­ther analy­sis of these new post-bi­o­log­i­cal, hy­bridized states of being that tra­verse tra­di­tional par­a­digms of time and space. Syn­cretism may fa­cil­i­tate fur­ther un­der­stand­ing of multi-lay­ered world views, both ma­te­r­ial and meta­phys­i­cal, that are emerg­ing from our en­gage­ment with such per­va­sive com­pu­ta­tional tech­nolo­gies and post-bi­o­log­i­cal sys­tems. It is a pop­u­lar be­lief that we are now, through a media con­ver­gent, par­tic­i­pa­tory cul­ture (that is in­te­grated so­cially through a sub­net­work of plat­forms) cre­at­ing a ‘col­lec­tive in­tel­li­gence’ that ex­ists in a ‘global vil­lage’ of knowl­edge (data) trans­fer. This per­spec­tive evades tra­di­tional mytho­log­i­cal no­tions of an­thro­po­mor­phic in­ter­ac­tion as it moves be­yond the in­di­vid­ual and into a uni­ver­sal model of open ac­cess.

• Ju­lian Sta­don is a PhD can­di­date at Curtin Uni­ver­sity of Tech­nol­ogy, Aus­tralia. Ju­lian’s re­search has in­cluded res­i­den­cies with the In­ter­face Cul­tures, Linz; Sal­ford Uni­ver­sity, Man­ches­ter; Human In­ter­face Tech­nolo­gies Lab, New Zealand (HIT­LabNZ), The Aus­tralian Cen­tre for Vir­tual Art (ACVA), Mel­bourne, The Fogscreen Re­search Cen­tre, Fin­land and The Banff New Media In­sti­tute, Banff. At Curtin Uni­ver­sity, Ju­lian is a mem­ber of the Cen­tre for Re­search in Arts Sci­ence and Hu­man­ity (CRASH), The Media Arts Post­grad­u­ate. Ju­lian lec­tures in the School of Art and De­sign and the School of Media, Cul­ture and Cre­ative Arts at Curtin Uni­ver­sity and com­puter tech­nolo­gies and mar­ket­ing at the SAE/Quan­tum In­sti­tute, Perth. Re­search as­sis­tant for the Na­tional Or­gan­i­sa­tion of New Media Arts Data­base (NOMAD), and the di­rec­tor of Dork­bot Perth. His the­sis title is Post Bi­o­log­i­cal Dig­i­tal Iden­tity in Ar­ti­fi­cial Mixed Re­al­ity Real Time Data Trans­fer Sys­tems.
  

 Full text (PDF) p. 2300-2304  [title somewhat different]