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Postdigital synchronicity and syntopy: the manipulation of universal codes, and the fully automated avantgarde

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Abstract

In recent years, the use of new (both linguistic and non-linguistic) literary codes has accelerated due to the global technological intermediations between writers, scientists and artists, and to the increase and diversification of human–machine interactions. The new codes emerging from this new set of global interactions are often re-interpretations of literary and artistic methods and devices developed by modern and postmodern avangardist movements; however, they present some new interesting features when expanding through postdigital environments, where a novel universe of data/symbols are manipulated by a variety of human–machine assemblages with different modes of implication in performance-driven collaborative arrangements. This article critically reviews and reflects on literary works entering and exploring this postdigital space by using innovative art/writing codes.

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Notes

  1. “Twenty-First-Century Media open a new, properly post-phenomenological and non-prosthetic phase of technical distribution in which human experiencers become implicated in the larger, environmental processes to which they belong but to which they have no direct access via consciousness.” (Hansen, 2015, Kindle 1529)

  2. <https://paracode.wordpress.com/2016/03/05/computosophy-2/> (accessed February 2016).

  3. “Potentiality, explores the expansion of causal efficacy that is generated by data-intensive media. Its central aim is to thematize the potential for contemporary microcomputational sensors to directly mediate the domain of sensibility and thereby to facilitate a form of indirect human access to this domain, via the operation of “feed-forward.” Feed-forward names the operation through which the technically accessed data of sensibility enters into futural moments of consciousness as radical intrusions from the outside: it is, I shall suggest, the principal mode in which contemporary consciousness can experience—in the phenomenological sense of live through—its own operationality.” (Hansen 2015, Kindle 736)

  4. For a detailed and extense review of Accelerationism see Mackay and Avanesian (2014) #Accelerate. The accelerationist reader. Urbanomic.

  5. “Syntactic Apocalypse elicits a kind of “madness” that goes beyond classic and Deleuze-Guattarian ideas of schizophrenia—which is mainly understood as a cognitive disease or a potential of becoming, while this different kind of madness affects primarily to sensoriomotor networks, and just secondariliy to cognition—:“Madness” means here the recurrence of seizing activity throughout a system composed by an extraordinary large number of unequal, assimetrical objects that can only be related to each other by “unnatural” synchronization patterns. Deep media objects do not “become”—they “burst”. Deep media are not social media (collective, shared subjectivity), but swarm media (unsubjective). As recurrent, unexpected seizures—intense, paroxysmal, meaningless but efficient rhythmic activity—is how deep media fictions are best defined.” (Sierra 2016b)

  6. <http://okhaos.com/plantoid/> (accessed February 2016).

  7. “Archives made by artists as a gesture of alternative knowledge or countermemory might be described as an anarchival impulse. Counter-archives (and counter-monuments) are collections of that which has been silenced or buried.” (Boscacci 2015)

  8. “Dietmar Kamper, philosopher and sociologist, used to insist in public debates that the verb illudere not only means to feign or simulate something, but also includes the sense of risking something, perhaps even one”s own positions and convinctions.” (Zielinski 2008, p. 10)

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Grant FFI 2012-35296 from the Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte (Spain) to Prof. Anxo Abuín González.

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Correspondence to Germán Sierra-Paredes.

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Sierra-Paredes, G. Postdigital synchronicity and syntopy: the manipulation of universal codes, and the fully automated avantgarde. Neohelicon 44, 27–39 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-017-0379-8

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