Annotated Bibliography Assignment

By Zach Horton, Collaborative Media Commons Team

 1. Alex Rivera. Sleep Dealer.  2008. Film.

Alex Rivera. Sleep Dealer. Science Fiction, 2008. 

This 2008 film by Alex Rivera is a rare example of a cyberpunk film that deals explicitly with social and labor relationships in the global world. It tells the story of Memo, a peasant in a tiny village in Oaxaca, Mexico, sometime in the near future. His farmer father is killed by a U.S. Military drone when he is mistakenly targeted as a terrorist. Memo, in an attempt to escape his backwater village, travels to Tijuana and gets “nodes” implanted into his nervous system, which allow him to interface directly with machines. He is employed by the new global economy as the operator—through virtual reality—of a remote construction robot. The film depicts a world in which the U.S. dream of “work without the workers,” has become a literal reality and transformed global labor. No longer able to cross the border, “migrant” Mexican workers can sell their labor to the global rich at a distance. This low-budget film manages to combine a brand of techno-enthusiasm with deconstruction.  This functions at the level of the narrative and the technologies of cinema itself: Narratively, Memo is an electrical tinkerer who dreams of transcending his spatial and economic situtation through first satellite communication and then technologically-mediated labor.  The film's performed technology, however (including the computer-generated virtual first-world workspaces, military drones, etc.), make visible the labor differentials exploited by global capital.

2. Google Wave 

Wave is a collaborative document editing, media sharing, and messaging platform designed by Google. While media sharing (in the form of wikis and blogs), document editing (Google Docs and many other technologies), instant messaging (IM), offline messaging (email), and discussion threads (social media sites and blogging platforms) all exist separately, Google Wave's combination of them all into a single technology is far more than the sum of its parts: it enables nearly limitless implementations of an online commons. This alone makes possible fluid academic collaborations that generate their own form. That is, instead of taking place within a hierarchically structured, pre-designed form, they can grow and morph organically to spontaneously fit the collaboration itself. Shared work can be the basis for a discussion that can itself be the basis of pre-existing work, the spontaneous erecting of collaborative work, further discussion, etc.  Central to the Google Wave user experience is its rich media environment.  Far more than a wiki, this allows not only for the sharing of media, but the utilization of sound, images, and video as communicative text.  For instance, an embedded video can serve--in conjunction with text or alone--as an answer to a question, as a statement, or indeed as a question.  Media and text are coextensive.  In addition, the open-source nature of the Wave APIs will allow for extensibility that will serve in the future to help organize the information contained and generated within particular waves, as well as allow it to “cascade” from wave to wave according to pre-determined rules.

3. Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, technology and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century.” Technology, and Socialist (1991).

Haraway's classic text figures science fiction as charting a possible intersection of feminism, materialism, and socialism. It does this by imagining the cyborg, a fusion of human and machine that explodes the binary categories undergirding Western ideology. With even such basic distinctions as organism vs. machine dissolved in the myth of the cyborg, space is cleared for a new politics built upon the realization that we are moving from “an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system.” Science fiction for Haraway both prefigures and mythologizes this shift to informatics, to the immaterial. What is at stake, what is possible, is a new form of narrative production that can “subvert command and control,” the traditional coding of information in a hierarchy of domination.

Haraway's manifesto points to the importance of science fiction as a genre capable of dissolving boundaries and categories that are notoriously difficult to deconstruct in other discourses, emphasizing the mutually constitutive nature of this mythologizing narrativization and a move to unify radical theoretical traditions (in this case feminism, post-structuralism, and materialism).

4. Hoetzlein, Rama. “Quanta.” http://www.rchoetzlein.com/quanta/index.htm

Rama Hoetzlein's 2007 MAT Master's Thesis at UCSB is a knowledge organization system consisting of a proprietary browser and underlying database that allows interdisciplinary information of all sorts (images, scientific concepts, atomic elements, literary texts, etc.) to be semantically linked and navigated utilizing a variety of visual metaphors (timelines, spatial knowledge maps, etc.).  Quanta is designed from the outset to be interdisciplinary, displaying information from traditionally distinct domains as semanticly linked sets.  In this sense Quanta can be thought of as both a tool and as a metaphor (or series of metaphors) that mediates the organization, navigation, and visualization of information.

5. Milburn, Colin. Nanovision : engineering the future. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.

Colin Milburn tackles nanotechnology from a cultural/science studies perspective, focusing on nanotech discourse within scientific communities, the popular media, and science fiction. His basic thesis is that when we trace these narratives out, we find them inextricably linked to one another as mutually constitutive: nanotech research is prescribed by the nanotech discourse. The conflation of science and science fiction permeates the discourse: He notes that nanowriting (“visionary” texts by nanotech proponents) is explicitly futurist, “strongly inclined to speculate on the far future and to prognosticate its role in the radical metamorphosis of human life.” (23) Nanotechnology as a field is animated as much by possible applications of hypothetical future technology as by actual technological achievements. In this sense it is uniquely speculative, equally fictional and scientific, a relationship formulated by Milburn as “Science (fiction).” Milburn claims that nanotechnology research is uniquely articulated between seeing and manipulating. Its ultimate dream, arising out of science fiction, is to gain complete control over all matter (from the bottom up, as it were), but this is only conceptually and technically possible through imaging: The primary device used by nanoresearchers is the Scanning Tunneling Microscope, which images at the atomic level (in a process that is already metaphorical) as well as allowing researchers to “drag” individuals atoms into new configurations. Ultimately, for Milburn, nanotechnology exposes a fundamental dicursive drive to conquer (nano discourse is directly linked to Westward Expansion, the “frontier,” nano “landscapes” to be colonized, etc.) as well as a potentially generative blurring of categories (organic-machinic, the human, the unitary organism, life itself) that undergird Western social relationships. In this sense Milburn is directly descended from Donna Haraway.

“Nanovision” is one starting point for a consideration of contemporary scientific practice and discourse, situated at the crossroads between narrativization and imaging. That is, it articulates some possible meanings and implications of working with scientific information that threatens the conceptual (and physical) unity human subject itself. Milburn's questions are our questions: How do narratives frame and visualize information? What is the nature of the imaging-imagining articulation? How does this articulation enable manipulation, the dream of control? At what point does the human dissolve?