The Digital Condition: An Experiment in Mediated Dialogue

What does it mean to speak of a digital condition? How can we describe, explain and understand our digital condition? What is it, that we are trying to come to terms with? Where exactly does ‘the problem’ of technology lie? Beginning in October 2019 we will embark on an experimental discussion group centred around those questions.

Each week we will collectively engage with one text before moving on to a jarringly different take on ‘the digital condition’ in the following week. Instead of presenting a syllabus with a canon of text, our intention is to produce a participatory anti-canon that doesn’t follow a straight line but disorients, refracts, shocks and meanders.

We are therefore asking anyone interested in participating to send us a suggested reading. What text do you think is important to make sense of the digital condition? What text would like to introduce to and discuss with a larger, interdisciplinary group? This can be any text (journal article, book chapter etc) by any author, but please bear in mind an appropriate length for a weekly reading.

To participate please send a suggested text and 100 word description of your choice and a short biographical note to mark@markcarrigan.net and contact@milanstuermer.com by September 30th 2019.

We will select 10 texts from contributions on the basis of the following imperatives. Our intention is to produce an anti-canon, assembled in a participatory way through the juxtaposition of submissions:

Maximising the disciplinary diversity of contributors
Maximising the disciplinary diversity of contributions
Minimising thematic and substantive replication amongst contributions

If your suggestion is selected, we would ask of you to write a short article about it to kick off the week’s discussion, as well as to give a brief, five-minute audio introduction to the text which addresses the following questions: