Digital Marketing as Generalized Snooping: On Virilio’s Information Bomb

Let’s begin with some examples that will update aspects of Virilio’s argument in The Information Bomb. 1. “The Reality Mining Dataset: The Reality Mining project represents the largest mobile phone experiment ever attempted in academia. We are collecting an unprecedented amount of data on human behavior and group interactions that we plan on anonymizing and [...]

Deleuze and Foucault on Marketing as Control

Gilles Deleuze never to my knowledge wrote extensively on marketing, but he had some choice words for it in “Postscript on Societies of Control.” I quote them below. I lectured today, minutes ago actually, on Foucault’s panopticism and Deleuze’s modulated control to my first year marketing and communication course at QMUL. I tried to make [...]

More Composite Photos

This video is a montage of the images with their digital “originals.” I think the video helps defetishize the images, that is it makes the compositing processes a little more palpable. Changing the level of detail changes the sharpness of the color transitions. The processes involved in perception traversing these gradients is what I have [...]

Composite Photos

These photos seem to me to have come together quite by chance, but then they also emerged from patterns of behavior and forms of style, against the backdrop of flows of people, traffic, capital, information. In India today these patterns are emerging through a new ecology of sensation. But I make no claim for these [...]

Sense, Value, Force in Indian Mobile Phone Cultures

According to Deleuze, Nietzsche’s favorite method is to consider a thing’s plurality of senses depending on the many forces that can take possession of it (N+P 143). Thus there are many types of religions depending on the forces dominant and minor in it. This method is particularly useful in considering media today. There are many [...]

Arco Madrid

It was my first, and I hope not last, visit to ARCO, an international arts market. It was interesting, if only because of the anxiety of being a part of an institutional machinery for assigning an exchange value to what should have no fixed exchange or use value. The discursive context fed into my project [...]

Memory, Sensation, Duration in Contemporary Media Assemblages in India

I am attempting to think through the implications for media assmeblage analysis of the connection that Bergson makes between the body and duration. This is an excerpt from an article I recently wrote. It may appear in South Asian Culture and History. The main point here for the purposes of this paper, is that Office [...]

On Mark Hansen’s Bodies in Code

Hansen writes: “Forging such a cultural image of the body is crucial if we are to forestall the instrumentalization of the body and all that follows from it, above all the foreclosure of being-with or the finitude of our form of life. Far from being a mere ‘instrument’ or the first ‘medium’ (as some versions [...]

The Value-Added Image: Media Assemblages as Ecologies of Sensation

It is not right to say that the cinematographic image is in the present. What is in the present is what the image ‘represents’, but not the image itself, which, in cinema as in painting, is never to be confused with what it represents. The image itself is the system of the relationships between its [...]

On the Work of Art Today: Benjamin and the Machinic Phylum

We will begin here with Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” (Second Version of 1936). (I’m not going to justify using this version except to say that there are aspects to it that exceed Adorno’s policing of Walter!) W.J.T. Mitchell has clarified the genealogy that ties Benjamin’s “Artwork” [...]