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This paper concerns the problem of “negation” in the context of a philosophy of culture. The leading question is whether the concrete negation of culture – that is, its destruction – can be thought consistently. Ernst Cassirer’s rather constructive take on negation as a necessary element in the process of cultural formation is considered with a focus on the dialectic of mythical consciousness. This view is, then, contrasted with Theodor W. Adorno’s decidedly negative philosophy, and his understanding of cultural criticism in particular – including the infamous statement about poetry after Auschwitz. My interpretation of Cassirer seeks to reveal his rich and complex view on cultural progression as the continuous self-transgression of symbolic forms which, in truly Hegelian spirit, is driven by contradiction. In discussing Adorno, I show how his philosophy – arguably the most consequent negative philosophy at hand – allows to address devastating destruction without diminishing it. While this seems an advantage over Cassirer, it turns out that Adorno’s view cannot make intelligible how the process of culture goes on after what he calls the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. In the end, neither perspective can offer a fully satisfactory way of theorizing the negation of culture consistently, yet both are needed as steps towards a comprehensive theory of cultural destruction.

What eventually determines the semantics of algorithmic decision-making is not the program artefact, nor—if applicable—the data used to create it, but the preparatory (enabling) and consequent (enabled) practices holding in the environment (computational and human) in which such algorithmic procedure is embedded. The notion of responsibility captures a very similar construct: in all human societies actions are evaluated in terms of the consequences they could reasonably cause, and of the reasons that motivate them. But to what extent does this function exist in computational systems? The paper aims to sketch links between several of the approaches and concepts proposed for responsible computing, from AI to networking, identifying gaps and possible directions for operationalization.

Paradigmatic as Beauvoir’s thinking is for contemporary Western feminism, in the light of global developments, it is important to note that her feminist ideals surpass the dominant forms of Western liberalism in substantial ways. Her positive concept of ‘ethical’ freedom does not correspond to Western liberalism’s negative concept of freedom as the absence of constraints. Nor does her gender egalitarian concept of society resemble Western liberalism’s model of society with its dichotomous organization of labor and care. It is argued that Western feminism, as it was conceived by Beauvoir, can be elaborated substantially, as well as strategically, into an inclusive feminism for a globalizing, yet culturally plural world.

Internet research, and especially social media research, has benefited from concurrent factors, technological and analytical, that have enabled access to vast amounts of user data and content online. These trends have accompanied a prevalence of Big Data studies of online activity, as researchers gather datasets featuring millions of tweets, for instance – here, Big Data is a reference not solely to the size of datasets but to the wider practices and research cultures around large-scale and exhaustive (and often ongoing) capture of data from large groups, often (but not always) studied quantitatively (see Kitchin and Lauriaut 2014a; Crawford et al. 2014). However, the accessibility of “big social data” (Manovich 2012) for Internet studies research is not without its limitations and challenges, and while extensive datasets enable valuable research, combining them with small data can provide more rounded perspectives and encourage us to think more about what we are studying. Similarly, privileging the online-only or the quantitative analysis of social media activity may overlook or mask key practices and relevant participants not present within the datasets. We argue for a blended data model as a critique and complement for different social media datasets, drawing in part on our research into social movements and activists’ use (and non-use) of online technologies. Together, these approaches may overcome and negotiate the respective limits and challenges of social media data, both big and small.

This essay addresses Julia Kristeva’s concept of semanalysis in view of the legacy of Émile Benveniste . Both scholars shared a critical approach to semiotics. Kristeva followed Benveniste’s footsteps in looking for support in psychoanalytic theory in order to better understand the genealogy of the signifying process as well as the heterogeneity of texts. Benveniste’s notion of the speaking subject becomes crucial for Kristeva’s semiotics. While making the concept of signifiance central to her scholarship, after 1969 Kristeva continued to rework this and other notions of Benveniste, such as histoire (narrative) in relation to discourse. The chapter by and large follows a historical trajectory and traces the theoretical development of semiotics in the works of Kristeva and Benveniste up to date. The concluding section of the chapter addresses the role of Kristeva in inspiring some recent developments in edusemiotics. Her conceptualizations of semanalysis, subject in process , jouissance , revolt, and others—especially when positioned in the context of philosophy of education and not philosophy of language—surpass their purely theoretical significance and demonstrate a number of significant implications at the level of cultural practices. Notably, the latest Kristeva herself expanded the field of theoretical semiotics to incorporate socio-cultural and political dimensions of human experience that are proving to be of immense value for educational theory .

An investigation into user profiling and adaptation with exhibition booth as a case study is reported. First a review of the field of exhibitions and trade fairs and a summary introduction to adaptation and profiling are given. We then introduce three criteria for the evaluation of exhibition booth: effectiveness, efficiency and affect. Effectiveness is related the amount of information collected, efficiency is a measurement of the time taken to collect the information, and affect is the perception of the experience and the mood booth visitors have during and after their visit. We have selected these criteria to assess adaptive and profiled exhibition booths, we call smart exhibition (SmartEx). The assessment is performed with an experiment with three test conditions (non-profiled/non adaptive, profiled/non-adaptive and profiled adaptive presentations). Results of the experiment are presented along discussion. While there is significant improvements of effectiveness and efficiency between the two-first test conditions, the improvement is not significant for the last test condition, for reasons explained. As for the affect, the results show that it has an under-estimated importance in people minds and that it should be addressed more carefully.

People are more involved with media than ever but news about media as an industry is less than optimistic. The number of people across the creative industries who are losing jobs illustrates all too well. Media managers seem at a loss in developing survival strategies, and specifically in organizing entrepreneurial working conditions that would support and sustain the creative process needed to meet the demands of a global market saturated with media. This chapter integrates theories of how media industries function in society with theories of how media professionals manage their individual careers and professional identities in the context. We draw on case-based research about how media industries and professionals alike are managing creativity and innovation. Media management is conceptualized both as the management of companies and as individual careers in the media and thus not only in a more traditional hierarchical view. A general context for managing media workers across creative industries is outlined, with specific application to what generally defines and also drives cultural workers: their sense of self in terms of a professional identity.

In iTV and online video, narrative interaction has long been a Holy Grail for both audiences and creators of these digital audiovisual works. On the one hand, interactive digital narrative promises interactors some exciting opportunities: to enter the world of the story, to affect the story and perhaps even to control its outcome, and in the process to gain a transformative self-revelation. On the other hand, this new medium changes the role and craft of the author and entails a host of technological, conceptual, and institutional challenges. The authors describe these opportunities and challenges in detail, before examining various projects that have attempted to realize this vision and grapple with the challenges. Works discussed span several decades, from the late 1960s to 2015. They also span a variety of forms, including interactive cinema, online video, interactive television, and both video- and animation-based games. Particular emphasis is given to contemporary interactive documentaries (iDocs). The chapter further discusses current research directions, such as explorations of the increasing incorporation of the interactor’s body and affects as well as second-screen and cross-device integration, and concludes with a fresh look at the original vision in light of conceptual and design approaches, current technological developments, their implications on the changing landscape of audiovisual content creation and consumption, and the new creative space of opportunities that they open up.

Der Beitrag konzipiert den Western als eine symbolische Form, die uber Prozesse der Mythenbildung signifikant an der Konstitution der Idee eines „Imperium Americanum“ mitgearbeitet hat. In ihrer Ambivalenz zentral fur das US-amerikanische Selbstverstandnis, schlagt sich das Konzept des US-Imperiums auch in der Popularkultur des 20. Jahrhunderts nieder, und ganz besonders im Western von Classical Hollywood, der den Mythos der frontier in eben dieses Jahrhundert weitertragt und dabei simultan neu erfindet. An Sam Peckinpahs The Wild Bunch (1969) – der mit einigem Recht zugleich als letzter klassischer und erster postklassischer Western gelten kann – forscht der Autor nach der mehrdimensionalen Uberlagerung von imperialer Idee und Western-Mythos.

Stanley Cavell’s comedies of remarriage sometimes end up in court. When they do, the law featured in these films is not be mocked. In all seriousness, Cavell claims that these courtroom comedies pertain to the morality of law. To be sure, these films are not about front-page moral dilemmas. They are about what usually remains unnoticed about morality: its being engrained in everyday life. The special courtroom setting lets the everydayness of morality come into view. Adam’s Rib makes clear that the private lives of its lawyer protagonists sometimes are on public display in the courtroom. This turns out not to be a mistake but a precondition for their marital success. Mr. Deeds Goes to Court uses the courtroom stage for the display of the privacy of public moralities. In terms of Charles Sanders Peirce, morality in courtroom cinema works as the habit that comes into view because a change in that habit retrospectively makes us realize that we had a habit in the first place. These courtroom comedies are not asinine pastimes; rather, in so far as they bring into view what before remained unacknowledged, that is, the morality of everyday life, they are, as Peirce would have it, intelligent entertainment.

In my wallet I always keep my membership card of a road service company, my organ donor card, a blood group card, and a ragged piece of paper stating my living will.

Mr. Kalisvaart is almost 90 years old. He has been a very independent and active man all his life. Since 15 years he suffers from glaucoma in both his eyes, and by now he is almost completely blind. His hearing has also much declined in recent years. He is therefore unable to listen to classical music which used to be his passion. Moreover, as a result of disc degeneration he has serious back pain.

Virtual Repatriation has caught the attention of the anthropological, archaeological, museological, and indigenous communities in recent years. The conjoined terms have been applied to everything from an alternative for material repatriation, to Reciprocal Research Networks, to almost any form of digital data sharing with source communities. There is no doubt that there is, and has been, a great number of good works that designate themselves as Virtual Repatriation. However, the problem, as we see it, is not the works themselves, in most instances, but the conjunction of the "virtual" with "repatriation." In this chapter, the authors will challenge the use of the terms "virtual," but mostly the term "repatriation" in conjunction with anything but patrimony. The challenge is not merely pedantic, but points to the larger social and political implications, and communal and historic consequences, of collapsing patrimony with their representations.

Since the early 1990s is has been our habit to publish regularly volumes with a collection of essays that are indicative of the kind of developments taking place at that moment in the study of argumentation. These volumes are intended to be a service to the discipline by presenting a selection of representative specimens of the state of the art to researchers and students of argumentation theory. As a rule the essays included in these volumes are based on papers presented at the preceding ISSA Conference. Among the earlier volumes are Argumentation Illuminated (van Eemeren et al. 1992), Logic and Argumentation (van Benthem et al. 1996), Anyone Who Has a View (van Eemeren et al. 2003), Argumentation in Practice (van Eemeren and Houtlosser 2005), Controversy and Confrontation (van Eemeren and Garssen 2008), Pondering on Problems of Argumentation (van Eemeren and Garssen 2009). Topical Themes in Argumentation Theory fits into this tradition - as does, by the way, Exploring Argumentative Contexts (van Eemeren and Garssen 2011a, b).

Much of the research and development effort in the IDS community is guided by a design approach, according to which user desires, expectations and agency are central. This approach may place unnecessary limitations on the design space. I argue for the validity and significance of an alternative, expressive approach, which may be more appealing to artists, and offer some formal parameters of IDS-as-Art. These open up for authors the ability to explore the creation of vastly complex and dynamic storyworlds that highlight contingency and probability; and the possibility of manipulating agency as subject matter to implicate users, through userly performance, in the storyworld’s meaning. IDS can thus offer users an opportunity to reflect upon various aspects of their performance, including un- and subintentional aspects.

In this chapter van Eemeren, Garssen and Meuffels explore the possibilities of effectiveness research within the pragma-dialectical framework of argumentation. The introduction of the concept of strategic maneuvering into the pragma-dialectical theory makes it possible to formulate testable hypotheses regarding the persuasiveness of argumentative moves that are made in argumentative discourse. After summarizing the standard pragma-dialectical approach to argumentation, van Eemeren, Garssen, and Meuffels explain what the extension of the pragma-dialectical approach with strategic maneuvering involves and discuss the fallacies in terms of the extended pragma-dialectical approach as derailments of strategic maneuvering. Then they give an empirical interpretation of the extended pragma-dialectical model in which they report the testing of three hypotheses which formulate preliminary conditions for effectiveness research within the framework of the extended pragma-dialectical theory and the results of the tests they consecutively carried out.

The methodological controversy in the humanities and the social sciences between the advocates of an explanatory approach similar to that of the natural sciences (erklaren) and the proponents of an interpretative perspective (verstehen) has its roots in a wide-ranging cultural transformation that took place in Europe around 1800. Traditionally, this transformation has been described as the shift from Enlightenment to Romanticism, involving, among other things, the rise of a new, expressivist conception of art and the substitution of a universal notion of rationality by an emphasis on the incommensurability of individual ages and cultures. A different account of the cultural transformation of the early nineteenth century is given by Foucault (1966, 314-354). According to Foucault, a fundamental epistemological rupture took place in the period around 1800, which he describes as the shift from the classical to the modern episteme. A crucial aspect of the rise of the modern episteme is the discovery of man as a transcendental subject that can also be the object of empirical knowledge. Furthermore, in contrast with the emphasis on stable taxonomies of the classical age, the modern episteme perceives the order of things as essentially historical.

Taking seriously Andrew Stern's aspiration that IDS become a premier art form for the 21st century, this paper re-examines agency, understood as the ability to freely control the plot, as a key concept in IDS aesthetics. Tracing the origins of this notion in IDS theory, this paper suggests that "true" agency is a myth, and that even restricted agency is too constrained to serve as a desirable goal for IDS-as-art.

From material processes to elusive patterns, artists and scientists seek models of explanation. Sometimes illusionally evocative, sometimes rigorously formulaic, and at other times sculpturally bounded, these conceptualizing tools have historically linked art and science. Bring to the fore new technologies, digitally driven, and a vast array of alternative schemes become possibilities. High resolution images of cells, scanned helical DNA structures and synaptic neural connections can presently be viewed in real time. Add to the mix embodied transgenic life forms and fabricated animal models, and our conceptualizing tools expand the possibilities for dimensional invention. The accelerating dynamic between cultural and genetic evolution produces what can be termed a co-evolution between technical knowledge and living matter. And it is this co-evolution between technical expertise and animate matter we term technogenesis. 2 In other terms, technogenesis is the way in which the interactions between technology and biology impact our understanding of how nature exists, or would be, conceived and reconfigured in the future. But how do art practices and the life sciences rely on the efficacy of images? And what part do these images play in the acquisition, comprehension, dissemination and even funding of visual or scientific study? In what ways do images reflect the socio/ economic and cultural conditions of producing knowledge? Located somewhere between illusion, proof and cognitive projection, images, hence, become critical fictions operating within the cultural imaginary. They often traverse contested territories situated elsewhere on the axis between fact and fiction. These visualizing models, ubiquitously employed by artists, scientists, designers, corporate advertisers, journalists and politicians, clarify, mislead, aggrandize, stimulate and document. In brief, they are representations embedded in social structures, policy decisions and commercial ventures. As aesthetic devices such images perform their semiotic function activating thought and emotion by their salient powers of communication and circumscribed belief.