The Derivative Machine: Life Cut, Bundled and Sold

This gathering will be a seminar-style event featuring some hypotheses on the current modus operandi of cinematic and digital technologies in relation to the financializaton of everyday life and of… nearly everything. The talk will allude to and develop ideas from a set of essays that participants are encouraged (but not required) to read in advance. I will try to offer some questions and provocations and then facilitate a conversation among seminar participants so that we can constellate our collective thinking on some of the fundamental questions of visual-computational culture, epistemology and, geopolitics.

DATE: Thursday, 19th April 2018 (11H00- 14H00);
ROOM: Room ID 0.06, Edif I&D, Floor 0, Lotação 36, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da UNL, Av de Berna, 26, Lisboa;
THEME: "The Derivative Machine: Life Cut, Bundled and Sold", held by Jonathan Beller (Pratt Institute).

Readings: "Informatic Labor in the Age of Computational Capital”, "The Cinematic Program” and “The Fourth Determination."

Jonathan Beller is Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute. Books and edited volumes include The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle; Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Visuality, Nationalist Struggle and the World-Media System; The Message is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital; and Feminist Media Theory (a special issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online). Current book projects include Computational Racial Capital and The Fourth Determination. Beller has been a fellow at the Barnard Center for Research on Women and Gender, serves on the editorial collective of Social Text, and is the director of The Graduate Program in Media Studies at Pratt.