2018 Issue No. 31 – Technoaffect: Bodies, Machines, Media

The body and affect have always been technological. Technologies of the body circulate affect, producing flows and forms of feeling that are economically and politically situated. Contemporary digital practices are inevitably corporeally enframed (Hansen), calling upon and creating bodily norms. People diversely experience new ‘configurations of bodies, technology and matter’ (Clough 2) that are accompanied by reworked public feelings (Stewart) and structures of feeling (Williams). Sticky affects glue together ‘ideas, values and objects’ and arrange boundaries between peoples and worlds (Ahmed 29). All too often the resulting inclusions and exclusions reinforce problematic structures of domination.  At the same time affective technologies can be a site for challenging past marginalisations and reworking experiences and understandings of affect, as evidenced by creative and scholarly practices in this area.

This special issue of Transformations pays critical attention to the circulation of affect by bodily technologies. Demonstrating the centrality of affect to the cultural, critical and creative analysis of technologies, these papers explore affect’s movement in and through virtual reality, artificial intelligence, gaming, disconnection, drones, Facebook, blogging, and e-sports.

Works Cited

• Ahmed, Sarah. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
• Clough, Patricia. “Introduction.” The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Eds P. T. Clough and J. Halley. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
• Hansen, Mark B. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
• Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007.
• Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Issue editors: Erika Kerruish and Rebecca Olive.

Within the poetic digital space of Virtual Reality philosophical and cultural narratives collide. Do artistic experiments in VR provide the ultimate freedom for our development as a species or plunge it into passive reception of pure violence ? This article aims to chart a path through a small slice of thought and affective experiences of VR on the basis of a practical application of phenomenological reflection and the somatic movement practice Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT). The practical experiences of VR to be discussed are based on one particular VR artwork: MAN A VR by Gibson / Martelli. Affect, by way of phenomenology, bridges virtual reality and embodied lived experience. The result is an expansion of the somatic register of VR.

Keywords
Virtual Reality, Affect, Somatic, Phenomenology, Skinner Releasing Technique

Avatars and gamers create channels of affective flow through their connection to a gameworld. Elsewhere (Wilde and Evans) I have explored this flow as an empathic exchange, wherein the desires of each must be aligned with the other in order to progress in-game. More than this, avatars themselves incite a range of affective and emotional responses. Drawing on my autoethnographic immersion in the game World of Warcraft, in the following article I consider feelings I have towards my avatar, ranging from affection to annoyance. Exploring her affective potential, I ask what these feelings can tell us about our relationships with technology and conclude that the way we are able to affect and be affected by others and environments around us shows us to be the entangled beings posthumanism suggests, and the avatar-gamer is one example that demonstrates the intimacy that emerges between human and machine in contemporary societies. This paper therefore contributes to debates that renounce the view of technology as subservient, seeing it instead as equal, thereby reworking past considerations through affective understanding.

Keywords
Affect, avatar, autoethnography, posthuman, World of Warcraft

This article examines how the emergence of speech-driven interfaces for computational devices alters our affective relationships with machines, and argues that the rise of intelligent personal assistants such as Siri, Watson and Alexa calls for the question of affect to be brought to the centre of discourse around artificial intelligence (AI). It departs from the early imaginings and manifestations of human-computer conversations in the work of Turing and Weizenbaum, then introduces a Spinozan framework for theorising the transmission of affect and its ethical implications. It examines the affective economy engendered by vocal interfaces, drawing on a range of theories which focus on sound not only as an object of study, but also as a conceptual paradigm. It concludes by arguing that the machine voice constitutes a form of embodiment, and that according computers this “body” and inviting us to converse with them enhances our ability to enter into a sensuous relationship with them.

Keywords
Artificial intelligence; affect; Turing test; voice; sonic theory

In this article, my intent is to theorise the intricate relation between technology and affect by considering questions of digital vulnerability – of disconnections, breaks, and delays – as a way of rethinking our affective attachments to digital devices. By extension, I also connect this argument with a framework of queer theory, as an opportunity to think differently about relations through questions of technological ruptures and deferrals. My bassline for this endeavour is the idea of the break as formative for how we can both sense and make sense of digital connectivity, in so far as the break has the potential to bring forth what constant connectivity means, and how it feels. Similarly, the break can potentially make tangible relational norms around continuous, coherent, and linear ways of relating and connecting, and thus provide alternative models for ways of being with digital devices, networks, and each other. If constant connectivity provides us with a relational norm of sorts, then disconnection could function as a queer orientation device with the potential of creating openings for other ways of coming together, and other ways of staying together.

Keywords
Affect theory; digital connectivity; disconnection; Spinoza, queer relationality

Like so many technologies before it, the drone promises liberation from the burdens of human existence: from work, wanting, waiting and even war. The drone, we are told, will watch our cities and our borders, it will deliver our goods and dispose of our enemies. It will do all this while keeping human bodies – or, rather, certain select human bodies – safe from harm (Chamayou 2015). Yet once the drone is abstracted away from the unmanned aerial vehicle and understood as the figure of autonomous, sensing technology (Andrejevic 2015), its logics become ubiquitous and its complex imbrications with our bodies inescapable. Essential to the emergent drone assemblage and to the affective form of its promise is the rising tide of techno-capitalism: military manufacturers, tech giants, start-ups, robotics labs, venture capitalists (Benjamin 2013, Gusterson 2017). This enfolding of military, industry and finance capital into the networked and mediating infrastructures of contemporary life means that drone capital is increasingly entangled in daily life, impinging upon bodies and producing new modes, forms and flows of relation between the corporeal and the technical. Thus the promise of the drone is also the promise of a future transformed: of modes and flows of capital freed even further from the strictures and constraints of human labour; of space and temporality controlled; of technoaffected experiences of the body itself. Tracing the movements of drone capital from military expenditure, automated finance and logistics, this paper maps the affects of hope and anxiety that accumulate around the ambivalent figure of the drone and its bodily entanglements, impingements and potentials.

Keywords
Drone, enclosure, affect, capital, autonomous technology

What happens when we are spoken to softly, with a sense of playfulness, by the symbolic apparatus of the carceral state? Invoking the concept of “affective mimicry,” this paper examines the digital means by which law enforcement agencies attempt to realise a sense of trust, intimacy, and emotional entanglement with the cyber-public. With a focus on the social media presence of the Australian Police, it will be argued that a strategic synthesis of memes, humorous language, and innocuous imagery with incarcerations, mugshots, and criminal descriptors abstracts the very materiality of law enforcement; its role, its potential misuse of power, and, by extension, state-sanctioned violence. Furthermore, the paper will suggest that the techno-affective cues embedded within these digital posts are vital in actively fostering intimate, off-screen solidarities between civilian users and the police force – solidarities which are oriented towards the visible, and always accessible, criminal other (with haptic contact evoked through virtual commentary and reactions). It will be posited that these interactions exist as potential avenues for exculpation, with digital posts momentarily capturing an affect and subsequently utilising it to bolster state governance. In this case, it happens to be the appropriation of a pre-existing, emotive lexicon, one commonly circulated in the context of community and friendship. The paper will also draw upon Louis Althusser’s analysis of the Ideological State Apparatus by conceptualising digital affect as possessing an interpellative function, much like classical forms of subjectification by the state, whereby the police are imagined as one of the primary social actors transforming individuals into subjects. However, Althusser’s point will be complicated through a recognition of social media’s emphasis on the general public as arbiters and decision-makers, an emphasis facilitated by the structural hyper- connectivity of digital communication, as well as the symbolic ideological terrain within which popular social media platforms have emerged. Indeed, the developmental system within which digital interactions between the state and its subjects occur ultimately obfuscates police subjectification and complicity for harm enacted. Considering all of this, the question remains: do we respond to friend requests sent by the force? If so, do we accept or reject?

Keywords
Affect, intimacy, state apparatus, governance, social media, memes, police

The aim of this paper is to investigate how blogging creates opportunities for autistic women to resist against patriarchal medical epistemology that has long determined the profile for Autism Spectrum Disorder. Musings of an Aspie, which is written and managed by American autistic author Cynthia Kim, is one of many examples of how technology poses a way for autistic women to become legitimate and legible subjects by creating a kind of “digital” body that gives them access to a political sphere that is otherwise closed to them. While exploring two particular blogposts, this paper will take theories of affect into consideration. This paper draws upon a Spinozist conception of affect, one concerned not simply with emotion or structures of feeling, but with the capacity of bodies to relate and become. The paper’s analysis turns to Spinoza’s bodily ethics to think through bodily capacities as they are described by the autistic women in Kim’s online community.

Keywords
Blogging, Affect, Autism, Women, Technology

This paper explores the internet hype surrounding the Eurovision Song Contest victory of Austrian drag artist Tom Neuwirth/Conchita Wurst in Copenhagen, 2014. In particular, it looks at the resonating affective intensities that have shaped the circulation of Conchita’s body image on YouTube and Tumblr. Drawing from the interactive dynamics of these platforms, the (hyper-)mediated eventfulness of Conchita’s Eurovision will be examined as (1) derived from the anomalous entanglements of everyday media use, (2) transformed and transforming in its spread through a variety of viral memetic practices, and (3) characterized by both dominant and deviant articulations of visual social engagement. The complexly modulated queer workings of these entanglements will be argued to perform through networked and seriated dynamics of digital affect.

Keywords
Digital Affect, Virality, Visual Social Media, Eurovision, Conchita

This essay takes as its focus the phenomenality of broadcast professional videogaming, or electronic sport (e-sport) – understood as how complex processes in high-level gaming are organised as to become accessible to viewer consciousness through the technologies and techniques – or technics – of broadcast. I argue that the technics of broadcast e-sport creates the capacity for viewers to discriminate subtle variations in play and as such, become affected in particular ways through watching. This fleshes out current understandings of e-sport as a significant part of modern gaming’s “attention economy.” Through the description and analysis of four examples, I contend that the technics of broadcast e-sport work to channel affect: ordering our understanding of the temporally fine-grained and complex moments of expert play, as well as shaping viewers’ own embodied states in watching particular matches.

Keywords
Videogames, affect, technology, e-sport, Dota, phenomenality