::fibreculture:: Digital Infrastructures and Economy, International Symposium & Masterclasses

[Ned Rossiter]

Digital Infrastructures and Economy, International Symposium
Digital Life Research Program, Institute for Culture and Society
Western Sydney University, Parramatta Campus, 3-5 November 2015
http://www.westernsydney.edu.au/ics/home

Event organizers: Ned Rossiter, Juan Francisco Salazar and Liam Magee

Summary
Digital media technologies of Internet communication and software 
coupled with supporting infrastructures of storage and transmission have 
resulted in the production, sharing and distribution of knowledge and 
culture on scales previously unseen in the history of human life. More 
recently, the rise of big data analytics associated with sensor 
technologies and the biometric monitoring of social, urban, industrial 
and ecological systems has seen the empirical being redefined by 
algorithmic operations. It is no surprise that finance capital and new 
economies of exchange are closely tied to many of these developments. 
Spot rates, for example, are hedged against the delivery times of 
shipping containers in the maritime industries. Health industries are 
flourishing with the widespread adoption of consumer self-tracking 
devices and the scramble for standards designed to subsume life into 
measures optimised for the sale of medical products. The quantified self 
has become the exemplary subject around which the design and 
distribution of a wide array of knowledges across life and labour is 
organized.

Within this maelstrom of change, knowledge orientates itself across 
public and private institutions, unbound from the university and its 
attendant ecologies of knowledge production. But while users have come 
to play a central role in the reorganization of how knowledge is 
created, distributed and valorised, their influence on the 
infrastructures structuring and sustaining these knowledges has been 
especially limited. At the same time, the infrastructural dimension of 
digital economies is receiving increasing attention, from the shift to 
low-latency networks and centralized storage systems to the logistical 
technologies ensuring the synchronization of networked activities.

Within such contexts, it makes sense to move outward from the user, now 
situated and redefined as a node of multiple infrastructures. Yet rather 
than focusing on this networked self, or the urban equivalent of 
Sassen’s global city, this international symposium maps these 
overlapping infrastructures that constitute users as a new kind of 
economic and epistemological subject. Such an undertaking is no longer a 
matter of making visible the invisible. What needs to happen is an 
exploration of how the digital economy changes the way we understand and 
constitute infrastructure. To effectively address such concerns, the 
need to develop a conceptual idiom capable of comprehending the scope of 
digital infrastructures and their economies becomes all the more 
apparent: from anonymous grassroots activists in support of independent 
media to hackers able to control industrial infrastructures, from the 
anonymity of high-frequency trading that complicates the analyses of 
financial crises to the anonymity of users who prefer to cooperate in 
their exodus from the world of corporate communications infrastructures.

Cutting across sociology, media theory, cultural research, anthropology, 
science and technology studies, economic geography, computer science, 
urbanism and design, this two-day international symposium and 
masterclasses address topics such as the following:
- Media infrastructures
- Cultural infrastructures
- Logistical infrastructures
- Management infrastructures
- Knowledge infrastructures
- Finance infrastructures
- Transactional infrastructures
- Health infrastructures
- Human rights infrastructures
- Polar infrastructures
- Post-planetary infrastructures

Participant numbers for both events are limited, so please be sure to 
register (details below). Registration is free.

Digital Infrastructures and Economy Masterclasses
3 November 2015
Venue: EB3.17 Parramatta South

10.30-12.30 – Tomás Ariztía, Universidad Diego Portales
‘Researching Knowledge Making Practices in Market Settings: From 
Creative Spaces to Digital Infrastructures’

Register for this masterclass at:
https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/masterclass-with-tomas-ariztia-tickets-19245340331
http://tinyurl.com/o4sbtoh

2-4pm – Akseli Virtanen, Robin Hood, Robin Hood Minor Asset Management 
Cooperative
‘Finance as a Place of Creation: Hacking Finance Capital with 
Parasitical Algorithms’

Register for this masterclass at:
https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/masterclass-with-akseli-virtanen-tickets-19245415556
http://tinyurl.com/qeb3qst

Digital Infrastructures and Economy International Symposium
4-5 November 2015
Day 1: EZ.G.36, Female Orphan School (Westwing), Parramatta South
Day 2: EB3.17, Parramatta South

Register for the symposium at:
https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/digital-infrastructures-and-economy-international-symposium-tickets-19245875933
http://tinyurl.com/oaolqze

Program
4 November – Symposium Day 1
10am – coffee/tea, registration

10.20-10.30am – Welcome: Professor Paul James, Director, ICS

10.30am – Introductory comments: Ned Rossiter, Liam Magee, Juan 
Francisco Salazar

10.45-12.15 – Mark Burry, ‘Gaudí, Cerdà and Big Data: Pre and Post 
Digital Infrastructure Challenges and Opportunities’

12.15-1.15 – lunch

1.15-2pm – Tanya Notley, ‘Satellites as Human Rights Infrastructure’

2-3.30 pm – Justine Humphry, ‘Infrastructures of Survival: New Relations 
of Inclusion and Exclusion in the Digital Reform of Health and Emergency 
Services’

3.30-4pm – afternoon tea/coffee

4-5.30pm – Tomás Ariztía, ‘Consumer Databases as Practical Accomplishments’

5 November – Symposium Day 2
10 – coffee

10.15-11.45am – Akseli Virtanen, ‘Social Architecture for Distributed 
Capital: Robin Hood 2.0’

11.45am-1.15pm – Laura Lotti, ‘There is no Blockchain without Bitcoin: 
Toward a New Mode of Accounting (for) in Distributed Networked Economies’

1.15-2pm – lunch

2-3.30 – Armin Beverungen, ‘Managed by Machines? Enterprise Software, 
Corporate Power, Algorithmic Management’

3.30-4pm – afternoon tea/coffee

4-5.30pm – Juan Francisco Salazar, ‘Polar Infrastructures’

5.30-6pm – Closing panel

—
Ned Rossiter
Professor of Communication
Institute for Culture and Society /
School of Humanities and Communication Arts
Western Sydney University
Parramatta Campus
Locked Bag 1797
Penrith NSW 2751
Australia