Nishant Shah

The 2019 GEM Lab Seminar in Media and Political Theory* showcases works in progress examining the paranoid potentialities of digital media technologies and the computational imagination. By highlighting new attentional forms, which correspond to the creative and productive side of paranoia, we investigate strategies of coping and making do with the increasingly complex world we live in. How might the productivity of paranoiac knowledge provide entry points for grappling with current crises in cognitive and imaginative forms, as well as larger technological, financial, or political flows? How can we contribute to or reframe debates about digital cultures and their politics by investigating the technological mechanisms at the heart of contemporary paranoia: from data-violence and algorithmic segregation to new attention economies and uncertain futures. The workshop asks how paranoid epistemologies may serve as a method to analyze cultural and political shifts shored up by digital media technologies. Schedule April 25th – Keynote + Reception ​5.00pm Nathan Su (Forensic Architecture): »The Digital Media Complex« [EV 1.605] ​​ 6:30-8pm Reception with Dr. Chris Salter at the Speculative Life Lab: »Totem – or can an inert Continue Reading …

There is palpable excitement as the most populous democracy in the world goes out to vote. Last election, which saw the saffron sweep, we realised the role of social media platforms in electoral politics. From the controversial selfie by the aspiring Prime Minister flaunting the lotus symbol, that was reported as violating the advertisement rules set by the Election Commission, to the mass mobilisation of ideology-based voters, orchestrated by automated bots and the hashtag brigades of #acchedin, there was no denying that digital strategies are going to form the backend of a robust political campaign. In a country of hypervisible lynch mobs staged via WhatsApp, polarised hatred exacerbated by armies of trolls, and the fluency with which hate speech has been normalised on the tweetosphere, social media and digital apps are front and centre in this election. People are coming out of voting booths and, even before the exit pollsters catch them, they are making Snapchat videos and “I voted” selfies, clearly identifying the parties they support. The verified social media accounts of leading political parties are doubling down on Continue Reading …

What do we become, when we talk to machines? Talking to our machines has become a naturalized habit. In the age of ubiquitous computing, where human beings are outnumbered by machines that perform the act of talking to, with, against, and without us, it is perhaps time to ask, what this does to our understanding of being human. This talk locates this condition of talking to machines in the paradigm of ‘information overload’ and maps out for us the challenges to questions of agency, subjectivity, rights, and safety that the digital turn has posited to us. Instead of approaching the algorithmic through a pre-wired response of resistance or usage, it constructs the new terrains where questions of identity politics, social justice, and equitable societies are going to be built.

Feeling molecularized? Tagung / Konferenz / Symposium 27.03. – 28.03.2019, 09:30 – 20:00 Toni-Areal, Pfingstweidstrasse 96, Zürich Symposium, Master of Arts in Fine Arts, ZHdK, March 27–28, 2019 With contributions by Sophie Jung, Omsk Social Club, Johannes Paul Raether, Tabita Rezaire, Pamela Rosenkranz, Nishant Shah, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Lucie Tuma, Hannah Wallenfels. “Technology is not neutral. We’re inside of what we make, and it’s inside of us. We’re living in a world of connections—and it matters which ones get made and unmade.” Donna Haraway, 1985 Recent conceptualizations of the world are increasingly determined by divisions into micro- and nanostructures and their translation into patterns and metadata. Feeling molecularized? will engage with the latent imaginaries of extreme fragmentation, hybrid diffraction, and virtual abstraction in our quotidian environments. It raises the following questions: How can these manifold changes—which are often mere assumptions—modifications, and modulations, focusing on the minutest level, be negotiated when there are so few conventions governing how we speak about, show, or perform them? Could artistic practices play a role in allowing us to affect and activate these molecular strategies Continue Reading …

The digital interrupts our conversations of intimacy in social movements. The conversations about networked technologies and affect often take up predictable routes: we talk about the reorganization of intensities and intensification of connections in the distributed networks. And also of the granular alienation and distributed disaffection that arises out of the weak links. Especially in the wake of the #MeToo movements, the role of digital networks and their presence in our humanist movements have often been under scrutiny. In this lecture I propose that in the dominant response to digital networks, the networked technicity and the affective ideological are often positioned as separate and discrete. Drawing from personal experiences of queerness, and of the debates that grew in India in the #MeToo movements, I want to show another register of thinking through the intimacies of our movements as shaped and contained by the networked technologies, to think of more effective and affective tactics. venue University of Bern, main building, lecture hall 201Hochschulsstrasse 6 3012 Bern organizer Interdisciplinary Center for Gender Studies (IZFG)Mittelstrasse 43 3012 Bern

TL;DR: The effects of the rise of right wing populism are not dramatic and visible. Often they just involve an excruciating micronegotiation of your body and its place in geographies of suspicion. Do you know what happens when you wear skin and body of suspicion? In a country that overnight feels hostile because of an abhorrent act of terrorism, and an election that exercised the democratic will of bringing into power a fundamental extremist political party, you scan your everyday modes of being. The routines and ruts of habitual living suddenly become unfamiliar, suspect, alien. You take on the double weight of the loss and grief of the victims and the shame and repentance of the perpetrator. You inherit pity and terror of the tragedy with no catharsis. And you see yourself change. Instantaneously. 1. You find yourself smiling more. Whenever you are in public, you make an extra effort to smile at strangers, to convince them that the bag on your shoulders only has your laptop and no other weapon. 2. When you see the increased security, you try Continue Reading …

It was a day of chilly silence. I first registered something was wrong when the phone, that one true love, seemed to be giving me the silent treatment. The purple, blue and red lights that mark the notifications from three of my most-used apps — Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — were missing from my daily habits. When I tried to open and refresh the apps and nothing showed up, I confess I had a sense of foreboding. Three immediate scenarios came to my mind. I surreptitiously looked outside the window to see if I had missed the memo for the apocalypse while I was reading. However, because there were no zombie masses thronging the streets, I realised that the collapse of my information channels was not the end of the world. I also tried to see if the internet in the house had cracked, because surely, if Facebook wasn’t loading, the problem must be with my local service providers. But even as I looked around, all the Internet of Things devices at my home beeped, chirped, winked, and flashed merrily, Continue Reading …

The information overload of social media sharing can make us act against our better judgement. I had to do a double take when the post flashed on my feed. It was a post filled with armchair bloodlust, calling for war and justifying it through emotional bulls***. In many ways, it wasn’t shocking, because in its misdirected anger and emotional patriotism, it mimicked the charged nature of conversations that we have naturalised on the social web. It also followed the familiar paths of writing about action — from the safety and comfort of a sheltered life, where it is clear that the people sharing it would never have to participate in the war that they are baying for, and that even the destructive aftermath of the war would not interrupt their latte lifestyles. It was clearly authored by one of those social media savants who indulge in random acts of capitalisation, which give you a brain rash. It did not even claim to be factual — the excesses of exclamation points were supposed to make up both for the hate speech Continue Reading …

In one of those blue-funk I-need-to-digitally-detox modes, I went offline for 48 hours. It was interesting to just turn the internet off — putting all the devices on flight mode and doing other things — and spend an entire weekend away from screens and home assistants. The world felt a little empty and silent without the constant chatter of all my smart devices. When I woke up on Monday morning and brought the internet back into my life, my phone vibrated for five minutes flat as all the different apps woke up to the sweet smell of connectivity and started downloading information in an apocalyptic frenzy. Every notification sound that has ever been set on my phone and other devices, competed with another to ring the loudest and announce the world waiting at my doorstep. I was curious to know what this extraordinary traffic could be about. My work email was more or less where I had left it before I signed out, but everywhere else was chatter. I had more than a 100 notifications of birthdays, events, and important Continue Reading …