In contemporary performance, “action” seems to include acts, emergent action and the potential for action—even sometimes non-action. Performers include the human and nonhuman, the living and the nonliving. Through all this runs a complexity of technics—technologies and techniques—and these increasingly involve computational processes. How do we…[Read more]

Exploration, from 20 years ago, of the concept of the virtual in Deleuze, De Landa, Massumi, Grosz, Bergson, Zizek and others. This is the main concern though it is tie into VR and related technologies (as things were around 2004). I wrote this a very long time ago and never quite published it (I don’t think I tried). So it’s very much a draft.…[Read more]

Presented in the spirit of Open Educational Resources. Full Course Outline for The World as Medium and/vs The Third Media Revolution. Level 3 course designed across many programs (Journalism and Comms, BA, Design, PR, Screen and Sound, Law, etc). So it’s a somewhat generalist course. It begins with a summary of standard approaches (from standard…[Read more]

How did so much of contemporary technics become so disappointing, so deadening? How is technics being thought, and worked with, to enliven? What different assemblages and principles are involved? This chapter begins in sympathy with Michel Serres’ “aggrieved shame” and then moves to Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s discussion of an “undeadness” at the heart…[Read more]

Contemporary media and world are often finding what seem to be strange continuities and overlaps. Direct, exploitable and constantly inventive continuities between media and world are now the rule, not the exception. Indeed, the overlap sometimes seems almost total. Yet I will suggest that what looks strange in such assemblages
has always been…[Read more]

How possible is it for a life of ongoing feeling to hold, given the world’s current becomings? Much of this article will consider three of the most pervasive of the current disruptions as disruptions of living and feeling: climate change, social change, and, in more detail, what I will call a ‘third media revolution’. All three of these disru…[Read more]

Capacious has wisely positioned itself as a journal for “emerging affect inquiry . . . across any and all academic disciplines”1. Yet elsewhere we find something like an attempt to coalesce—occasionally even to delimit and police—a field of study. There is now—tentatively, at times argumentatively—something we call affect studies, or perhaps as…[Read more]

Audit—the ongoing evaluation of performance—began as a fairly narrow range of technical procedures in financial accounting. However, it has now expanded its range to “account” for a wide range of behaviours, thoughts and feelings, in the workplace and elsewhere. This article suggests that audit cultures are a response to the “abyss of the diffe…[Read more]