bio
Dr. Natasha Lushetich is an artist and theorist. She is the recipient of numerous artistic residencies and fellowships, such as Fulbright, NYU; Steim, Amsterdam; Norderzon, Groningen; and ArtsLink, NYC/Cleveland. Currently, she is Senior Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Practices & Visual Studies at LaSalle, Singapore, having previously lectured at the University of Exeter, UK. Natasha’s research focuses chiefly on intermedia; art as philosophy; theories of hegemony; the status of sensory experience in cultural knowledge; and biopolitics and performativity. She is the author of two books, Fluxus: The Practice of Non-Duality (Rodopi 2014), and Interdisciplinary Performance (Palgrave 2016). She is also co-editor of On Game Structures (2016). Natasha’s recent writing has appeared in Babilónia: the Journal of Cultural Studies; Environment, Space, Place; Performance Research; TDR; Text and Performance Quarterly, The Journal of Somaesthetics; and Total Art Journal as well as in a number of edited collections.
title
"Is Big Data a New Medium?"
abstract
Contrary to Agamben’s theorisation of biopolitics (1998), and, in particular, of homines sacri as excluded from the political system (and included only by way of exclusion), Han (2017) suggest that, in the psychopolitical regime characteristic of neoliberalism, homines sacri are shut into the system. In contrast to biopolitics, which regulated the body’s productivity by regulating its assignments of energy, the digitally aided psychopolitics rewrites neuronal circuits irreversibly turning desires into drives. Adopting a (media-)theoretical approach, this paper compares big-data-related digital farming/modeling to the ‘new media’ of the 20th century–the camera and television, both of which recoded reality (by recoding space, time, perception and interaction). The purpose here is threefold: 1) to theorise the efficacy of this new medium (for McLuhan, what mattered was not what we watched on TV, but the fact that we spent x hours a day passively receiving televised information); 2) to understand the ways in which the seemingly unstoppable exteriorisation of information, networks, and emotions, creates what might be termed a nervous bio-digital Moebius strip; and 3) to establish a dialogue between media theory, Han’s psychopolitics, and the ethical questions surrounding neuroplasticity as related to the unction of repair as well as destruction (Malabou 2015).
