Materialities of the Digital: Bodies

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

Much popular discourse positions digital technologies as either phantom or prosthetic—presence without substance, or extension that enables new experience of the world. Think: Twitter and Google Glass. This phantom/prosthetic dichotomy is a curious one, one that demands scrutiny and challenge. What are the materialities of the digital? And what do we embrace—and hide—when we position them so?

We investigate materiality broadly here. We include hardware and network materialities such as data centers and undersea cables, transistors and LCD crystals. Such materialities are often transmuted by metaphor: the cloud, the highway, the screen. Why are these materialities treated as elusive? What details are visible without this obscuring/illumination?

We include classic bodily materialities, bodies themselves, but also physical extensions through tactile interfaces and digital sex toys like RealTouch. What are the material practices of the digital? How do the shapes of bodies and selves change as digital technologies transform boundaries and surroundings? As bodies/objects cross from one material channel to another?

And we include relative materialities, such as language and script, bits and pixels, avatars and alts. Materialities that arise from their use as building blocks and tools, from their use as faces and agents that speak and remember. Components that undergird everything from affective emoji play to bots that shop the darknet. What does it mean to understand materiality as relative and relational?

For this panel we invite papers drawing on diverse methodologies, from media studies and digital anthropology to feminist and queer theory, biomedicine, crip theory and disability studies, critical race studies, and neuroscience and neuroeconomics.

Sub Unit

• 4S Annual Meeting – Denver

Chairs

• Amy Johnson, MIT

• Mitali Thakor, MIT

Individual Presentations

• Desire by Design - Patrick Keilty, University of Toronto

• From Feeling the Digital to Becoming the Digital - Jason Archer, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Go-go gadget vision or a cure for the blind? A rhetorical analysis of Google X's bionic contact lens - Kirsten Ellison, University of Calgary; Isabel Pedersen, University of Ontario Institute of Technology

• Making meaningful materialities of technology and Swedish sign language. - Rebekah Cupitt, Department of Media Technology & Interaction Design, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

• Material matters: a reflection about physical art in video games - Federica Orlati, IT University of Copenhagen