Friday, February 12, 2016 at 7pm
To Be Is to Be Updated: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn
Organized in collaboration with Triple Canopy.
Media theorist Wendy Chun will discuss her forthcoming book Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. Chun argues that our technologies matter most not when they are new but when they have become obsolete—when they have moved from the bleeding edge to the realm of the everyday, when our use of them has become habitual. Habits are automatic—they “remain by disappearing from consciousness”—but also voluntary and even creative: we are constantly encouraged to seek better habits, better patterns. Habits make us like our peers, demarcating social class; they are also deeply personal. Chun explores how the slow, “creepy” accretion of habits—both conscious and unconscious—relate to distinctions between public and private, memory and storage, individual actions and social systems.
Chun will be joined by Brian Droitcour to discuss how our habitual uses of media relate to the standardization and regulation of social and economic life.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Professor and Chair of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She has studied systems design engineering and English literature, which she combines and mutates in her work on digital media. She is the author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT Press, 2006), and Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT Press, 2011). She is the co-editor of a special issue of American Literature entitled New Media and American Literature; a special issue of Camera Obscura entitled Race and/as Technology; and the book New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (Routledge, 2015). She has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and a Wriston Fellow at Brown. Her latest book, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media, will be published by MIT Press in May 2016.
Brian Droitcour is a writer, critic, translator, and associate editor at Art in America.
Tickets - $5, available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served.