Haunted Data: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science

Description

Haunted Data explores the concepts that are at work in our complex relationships with data. Our engagement with data – big or small – is never as simplistic or straightforward as might first appear. Indeed, Blackman argues that our relationship with data is haunted with errors, dead ends, ghostly figures, and misunderstandings that challenge core assumptions about the nature of thought, consciousness, mind, cognition, affect, communication, control and rationality, both human and non-human. Using contemporary controversies from ‘weird science’ including the field of priming and its uncanny relations to animal telepathy, as well as artificial intelligences and their curious relation to psychic research (‘clairvoyant computers’), Blackman shows how some of the current crises in science in these areas reveal more than scientists are willing or even able to acknowledge. In addition to proposing a new theory of how we might engage with data, Haunted Data also provides a nuanced survey of the historical context to contemporary debates, going back to the 19th Century origins of modern computation and science to explain the ubiquity and oddness of our data relations. Drawing from radical philosophies of science, feminist science studies, queer theory, cultural studies, and the field of affect studies, the book develops a manifesto for how artists, philosophers and scientists might engage creatively and critically with science within the context of digital communication Title Page Copyright Page Contents Acknowledgments Preface: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science Affect Data and affect Questions and challenges Engaging with science The politics of data Conclusion: The politics of change, truth and indeterminacy Part One: Priming and Networked Affect: Data Mediation and Media Contagions Chapter 1: Transmedial Storytelling, Weird Science and Archives of the Future Introduction: Weird science Governing through the affective Methodological reflections Conclusion: Digital archive fever and archives of the future Chapter 2: Social Media Contagion(s): An analysis of Priming Controversies within Cognitive Science Introduction: From thinking without thinking to psychic animals – The case of Clever Hans and the strange coupling of Mr von Osten and Professor John Bargh Scientific communication is down at the moment, please check later3 Scene 1. Priming horses and new media worlds: The case of Clever Hans It’s all in the mind but whose mind? Conclusion Chapter 3: Data-Mediation and Hauntological Analysis: The ‘Clever Hans Charge’ Introduction: Haunting as a form of mediation Data and the traces of software-driven media Scene 2. Clever Hans: The horse that won’t go away Scene 3. Berlin’s wonderful horse, synecology and feminist/queer diffraction Conclusion: Affect and future psychology Part Two: Feeling Futures: Mediating Futures Introduction: Mediating futures Chapter 4: Feeling the Future Introduction Scene 1: The “Buzz on Bem” Conclusion Chapter 5: Pornception and Big Data Scene 2. The Experiments: Time-Travelling Porn, the Political Economy of Pornception and Big Data Conclusion Chapter 6: Open Science and Quantum Matters Scene 3. Statistical Imaginaries; Telepathy; #replication; The Chorus of Sceptics; Open Science; Quantum and Non-local Consciousness; Quantum Retrocausality; New Materialisms; Clairvoyance; Moralizing the Future; Conspiracy theories; OOO and Orch OR Introduction #Replication and the chorus of sceptics Open science Quantum and non-local consciousness16 Quantum retrocausality Moralizing into the future – or can you replicate something that doesn’t exist? Quantum mind-matter relations Chapter 7: Conclusion: Affect and Archives of the Future Hauntological media Haunted lives Seven points to feed-forward. Speculative manifesto for affect and the more-than-human: Loving the alien Notes Preface Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Part 2 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Bibliography Index