The journal NAVIGATIONEN is published by Prof. Dr. Jens Schröter (together with Prof. Dr. Benjamin Beil, Cologne).

The current issue, edited by Miglė Bareikytė and Julia Bee has the topic »Delivery« and collects numerous contributions that discuss different aspects of this contemporary facet of capitalism and the new logistics, aesthetics and forms of work connected with it.

OPEN ACCESS here!

International Workshop, organized by Anna Echterhölter and Markus Ramsauer in cooperation with the working group “How is AI Changing Science”, University of Vienna, and the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK).

Date: November 28-29, 2024

Venue: International Research Center for Cultural Studies (Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften), Reichsratsstraße 17, 1010 Vienna (ground floor). The Zoom link will be accessible via http://automated.order.univie.ac.at/

https://fsp-wissenschaftsgeschichte.univie.ac.at/

https://howisaichangingscience.eu/

AI has given new instruments to the sciences, and the social sciences in particular, which have co-evolved with the production of data about societies. One of the key elements in unsupervised learning is clustering. Thus, this particular data practice sits at the core of modern Artificial Intelligence, which is based on artificial neuronal networks. Whereas classification operates by organizing labeled data into specific categories, clustering relies on cheaper, unlabeled data for deciphering similarities inside a given set.
The workshop poses the open question if unsupervised data clustering has the potential of identifying and generating new patterns of the social. Can clustering come up with tribes, discerned by patterns of movements identifiable from telephone data, political party affiliation, friendship or kinship-patterns that are not blood-related, and thus resemble totemistic orders? Or does automatization in the analysis of social data reproduce older hierarchies and familiar stratifications with necessity? While it is crucial not to fall prey to techno-utopian fantasies of non-situated (AI) technologies »overcoming« race, class or gender, the transformative potential of clustering practices for analysis and reorganization of society and resource management in crisis will be discussed.

As part of the workshop, we have organized three public events that are open for registration:

Fr 29.11.2024 | 18:00-19:30 (CET)

Keynote: Cédric Durand (University of Geneva)

Ecological Planning and the Problem of Knowledge in the Anthropocene 

(Abstract in Attachment)

Sa 30.11.2024 | 09:00-10:30  (CET)

Keynote: Attila Melegh (University of Budapest)

Non-Capitalist Mixed Economies: A Polanyian Approach

(Abstract in Attachment)

Sa 30.11.2024 | 17:30-19:30  (CET)

Panel Discussion: How to democratically plan social metabolism and technological change?

Discussants: Cédric Durand, Aaron Benenav (Cornell University), Cecilia Rikap (UCL), and Christoph Sorg (HU Berlin)

Moderator: Jens Schröter (University of Bonn)

»Theorie der Fotografie« is a famous series of books, canonizing the theory of photography. 

See here a link to an official announcement of Schirmer and Mosel.

And here you can buy the volumes I-IV in one go!

Here is the link to the Facebook-page of the symposion!

Register here, if you want to participate in presence in Bonn!

Here is the official announcement in English!

Radio Bonn on the symposion!

No other computing platform has become such a well-known cultural icon as the Commodore 64 (also known as the C64, Cevi or affectionately known as the »breadbin«). The figures vary between 11 and 30 million units produced, which were sold between the appearance of the 8-bit computer in September 1982 and its (premature) end of production in April 1994. Already during this time, a rich culture developed around the system in numerous countries – first in the West, but after the end of the Cold War also rapidly in the East. Countless peripherals and hardware extensions, software, especially games, books, magazines, clubs, scene meetings and much more were developed for the C64 during this time. All of this forms a cultural history of computing that is unsurpassed in diversity and of which the Commodore 64 became a symbol.

The symposium "Commodore 64 – Past, Present, and Future of a Home Computer" aims to discuss some of these even less illuminated or almost forgotten historical discourses and objects. The fact that the C64 still plays an important role in the present, not only in retrocomputing communities, but also in research and teaching in various disciplines, will also be discussed and demonstrated with examples. However, the fact that a computer, more than forty years after its release and twenty years after its production stop, still has such a lasting effect on culture, education and science also suggests that the C64 will continue to play a role in the future. The symposium also aims to draw attention to this in lectures and discussions and to outline perspectives.

The international plenary session of the symposium brings together collectors, museum curators, retrocomputing enthusiasts, computer scientists, historians, media scientists, artists, hackers and nostalgics who will discuss their work on and with the C64. After two days of lectures, game evenings and a SID chiptunes lecture performance (where dancing is allowed), the organizers offer a C64 hackathon on the third day, where various coding contests, experiments and applied hacks can be implemented on the original systems in BASIC and Assembler.

The symposium will take place at the Department of Media Studies at the University of Bonn from July 5 to 7, 2024. All presentations will be held in English and will be streamed over the Internet. It is open to the public and admission is free. For more information, see http://rtro.de/c64.