‘@AP: Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured’. So read a tweet sent from a hacked Associated Press Twitter account @AP, which affected financial markets, wiping out $136.5 billion of the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index’s value. While the speed of the Associated Press hack crash event and the proprietary nature of the algorithms involved make it difficult to make causal claims about the relationship between social media and trading algorithms, we argue that it helps (...) us to critically examine the volatile connections between social media, financial markets, and third parties offering human and algorithmic analysis. By analyzing the commentaries of this event, we highlight two particular currents: one formed by computational processes that mine and analyze Twitter data, and the other being financial algorithms that make automated trades and steer the stock market. We build on sociology of finance together with media theory and focus on the work of Christian Marazzi, Gabriel Tarde and Tony Sampson to analyze the relationship between social media and financial markets. We argue that Twitter and social media are becoming more powerful forces, not just because they connect people or generate new modes of participation, but because they are connecting human communicative spaces to automated computational spaces in ways that are affectively contagious and highly volatile. (shrink)

In social and cultural theory, topology has been used to articulate changes in structures and spaces of power. In this introduction, we argue that culture itself is becoming topological. In particular, this ‘becoming topological’ can be identified in the significance of a new order of spatio-temporal continuity for forms of economic, political and cultural life today. This ordering emerges, sometimes without explicit coordination, in practices of sorting, naming, numbering, comparing, listing, and calculating. We show that the effect of these practices (...) is both to introduce new continuities into a discontinuous world by establishing equivalences or similitudes, and to make and mark discontinuities through repeated contrasts. In this multiplication of relations, topological change is established as being constant, normal and immanent, rather than being an exceptional form, which is externally produced; that is, forms of economic, political and cultural life are identified and made legible in terms of their capacities for continuous change. Outlining the contributions to this Special Issue, the introduction discusses the meaning of topological culture and provides an analytic framework through which to understand its implications. (shrink)

These introductory remarks outline the German concept of Kulturtechniken (cultural techniques) by tracing its various overlapping meanings from the late 19th century to today and linking it to developments in recent German theory. Originally related to the agricultural domain, the notion of cultural techniques was later employed to describe the interactions between humans and media, and, most recently, to account for basic operations and differentiations that give rise to an array of conceptual and ontological entities which are said to constitute (...) culture. In the second part of the essay, cultural techniques are analyzed as a concept that allows theorists to overcome certain biases and impasses characteristic of that domain of German media theory associated with the work of the late Friedrich Kittler. (shrink)

This paper offers a brief introduction and interpretation of recent research on cultural techniques (or Kulturtechnikforschung) in German media studies. The analysis considers three sites of conceptual dislocations that have shaped the development and legacy of media research often associated with theorist Friedrich Kittler: first, the displacement of 1980s and 1990s Kittlerian media theory towards a more praxeological style of analysis in the early 2000s; second, the philological background that allowed the antiquated German appellation for agricultural engineering, Kulturtechniken, to migrate (...) into media and cultural studies; and third, the role of these conceptual dislocations in enriching media-genealogical inquiries into topics such as life, biopolitics, and practice. (shrink)

In this article I investigate the necessarily interdisciplinary nature of our contemporaneity, from the perspective of works by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Bruno Latour and Michel Serres. While we often find that academia, society and governments push us towards interdisciplinarity, it is also true that those same institutions and powers, distance us from that purpose. Opposing this aporetic situation we come up against the Deleuzian concept of ‘contamination’, or the well-known ‘science of Venus’ concept of Michel Serres. In doing so, (...) we attempt ‘to put the tracing back on the map’, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, and try to see the epistemological becomings that we find in contemporary culture. The main indicators which we use to study these contaminations and hybridisations are cinema and Bio Art. In both cases we observe that the real creative production is closer to ‘contamination’ than to the ‘purification’ and deletion of metabolic and hybrid processes criticised by Bruno Latour. (shrink)