Dear all,
First, our upcoming seminar on Mark Hansen, critique, and the digital has a new time and place for the seminar next week: 13.15-15.00 in N1052V or zoom (https://lnu-se.zoom.us/j/4131583665)
The reason for this change is that LIMO offers a very promising lecture by media scholar Oddgeir Tveiten in Kalmar at 10.15: 21st century Communication and the Age of AI - centennial canons, concepts and contexts (see more including zoom-link below). Tveiten's lecture speaks to similar qustions and problems that we are dealing with in our seminar, but with a different emphasis.
As a reminder concerning our seminar: under the topic Critique and the digital we are discussing the forms that critique may take in relation to contemporary algorithmic cultures and media environments. To give the conversation a direction we ask you to read Hansen, Mark B. N. ”The Critique of Data, or Towards a Phenomenotechnics of Algorithmic Culture”. I Critique and the Digital, redigerad av Erich Hörl, Nelly Y. Pinkrah, och Lotte Warnsholdt. Critical Stances. Diaphanes, 2021. The seminar will be introduced by Erik Erlanson and Per Israelsson.
Best wishes,
Erik Erlanson
Below is the invitation to the LIMO lecture:
We are happy to invite you to the next LiMO research seminar with Oddgeir Tveiten on 25 February 10-12 followed by an informal lunch.
Topic: “21st century communication and the age of AI – centennial canons, concepts and contexts” (abstract, see below)
Venue: Ra1141
Recurring zoom-link: https://lnu-se.zoom.us/j/62094123938<https://fojo.us19.list-manage.com/track/click?u=587ae68969dad8cd07b603c28&i…>
Please contact LiMO-coordinator Andreas Önnerfors for more information: andreas.onnerfors(a)lnu.se<mailto:andreas.onnerfors@lnu.se> +46 (0)70 270 27 78
Abstract
“21st century communication and the age of AI – centennial canons, concepts and contexts”
The opening question is one that an increasing number of researchers and educators in higher education all ask: How are we to understand the meaning of Artificial Intelligence and what do we do with it?
While these concerns seem to point towards philosophy, technology design and education science, they also foundationally address 100 years of communication research as a scholarly field.
The introduction of ChatGPT in 2020’s impacted profoundly on communication institutions and social practice, reminding us that 100 years of communication research – developing models, concepts, theories and paradigms – now stands at a new juncture. The history of communication research is a history of observing the disruptive power of technology. A quarter into the new millennium the extension and intensity of 21st century communications technology is more profound than ever. Impacts on society and civic webs of meaning now challenge communications research to critically assess canonical models, concepts, and theories: The question is how.
Lofty words such as these might be put to better use through anchoring more concretely and quite pragmatically in already existing debates about these issues: In the presentation, the starting point will be the 1983 special issue Ferment In The Field, published by Journal of Communication, issue edited by George Gerbner. In that volume, contributors looked backwards, sideways and forward in search of answers to where communications research was at, at that time. Later volumes coming out on the same theme represent updates on a fast- expanding global field of research within the humanities and social science, but not with the same discursive force. Not even the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the subsequent demise of the Soviet Union, rendering the US as the sole superpower, created a comparable intellectual thrust within the communication research community.
To this and to a wide array of subsequent research publications exploring 'ferment', one might ask: Starting with the introduction of '.html code, also in 1989, what's AI got to do with it?
AI not being a new invention, the introduction of 'large language models' such as ChatGPT in 2022 and a host of others, could lead one to argue that not only do existing paradigm assumptions in communication research have to be rewritten (and indeed, are being rewritten); profound ontological and epistemological questions concerning what technology is and does, should be firmly placed on both the research agenda and the education agenda. On that order, what insight and what perspective might a review of key canons in communication research provide?
Sent from Outlook for Mac
Dear all, Swedish, Intermedial, international friends and colleagues to Ola.
This is a terrible message to write. I must inform you that our friend and colleague Ola Ståhl from Design passed away Tuesday February 3rd. I have not been informed about the cause of death.
I met Ola about a decade ago at a weird research speeddating event and we quickly found out that we clicked: we had common interests in art, theory, experimental literature and, slightly later, the ecological crisis and the idea of the “anthropocene". Among other things. We liked to hang out in Malmö, to have a beer or to check out an exhibition.
Our collaboration grew tighter over the years: with other colleagues we developed and co-taught the Climate Emergency Studies MA-course and BA-course, we taught classes at Design, we were part of exciting EUniwell-collaborations and shared long train rides to Kassel, Köln, Venice, Florence. For me it was an intellectual adventure. We had a great time and I learned a lot from Ola.
Charming, lively, engaged Ola was loved by students, and I think teaching was what he enjoyed most in academia - apart from sketching future projects and events perhaps.
A few years ago he became part of the IMS where he was involved in the Artist in Residence program and he lead the IMS: Green group, first with Niklas, then with me.
I know many of you have had conversations with Ola, met him at seminars and events, perhaps taken part of his knowledge on art, Documenta, Deleuze or Guattari, Krautrock or something else. Ola was a great addition to IMS, and we will miss him. I have lost an inspiration and a friend and a creator of new exciting milieus and educations; engaged in things that matter.
If some of you need to talk I am of course available - just send a mail or call me. On February 24 11.00 there will be a memorial event at Lnu in Växjö - more information via Medarbetare soon.
Let us take a moment to remember the wonderful smile and the charm and intelligence of kind Ola. I hope he will rest in peace.
Jørgen
Sent from Outlook for Mac
Dear all,
this is just a (late!!) reminder about today’s zoom-presentation that has clear environmental correlations! - info here:
/////
Welcome to next week’s IMS seminar with Asun López-Varela, titled “Intermedial Semiosis and the Agency of Attention: “Serious Noticing” in the Eco-Poetry of Kathleen Jamie”. The seminar will take place on Wednesday the 4th of February, 10.15-12.00, in room Dacke and on zoom: https://lnu-se.zoom.us/j/61066906240?pwd=RjgAgFEaHu7bPTOSzC7nyK3nYDXayL.1
Abstract
Contemporary ecopoetry has increasingly challenged anthropocentric conceptions of perception, creativity, and agency by foregrounding the relational entanglement of language, matter, and environment. Rather than treating poetic expression as the projection of a sovereign human consciousness onto a passive landscape, recent work within intermedial and semiotic theory invites us to understand poetic form as emerging from dynamic exchanges among heterogeneous material supports—bodily perception, inscriptional practices, environmental processes, and cultural memory. This article proposes a theoretical account of Kathleen Jamie’s eco-poetry through the lens of Charles S. Peirce’s semiotics and the intermedial aesthetics, arguing that poetic “noticing” functions as a distributed semiotic practice rather than a purely subjective act of observation.
Drawing on Peirce’s triadic model of the sign and his phenomenological categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, the study conceptualises Jamie’s poetics as a field in which sensation, encounter, and habit converge to produce meaning across human and more-than-human agencies. Intermediality is thus understood not merely as the combination of verbal and visual forms, but as a process of transduction in which wind, stone, tide, birdcall, and inscription co-participate in signification. Language becomes one medium among others within a broader ecological semiosis.
Central to this account is Jamie’s practice of “serious noticing,” which the article interprets as an ethical and aesthetic mode of attention that redistributes agency away from the observing subject toward the relational event itself. Noticing operates as a form of interpretant activity: it mediates between material presence and symbolic articulation, allowing the poem to emerge as the trace of an encounter rather than an imposition of mastery. Through close readings of selected poems, the paper demonstrates how Jamie’s work enacts a non-anthropocentric poetics in which perception becomes participatory, writing becomes a site of intermedial translation, and the environment asserts its own semiotic force.
By situating Jamie’s eco-poetry within a Peircean and intermedial framework, the article ultimately advances a model of literary agency grounded in attentiveness, reciprocity, and material co-production, proposing “noticing” as both a methodological principle and an ecological ethics of form.
Bio:
Asun López-Varela is Assoc. Prof. at Facultad Filología, Universidad Complutense de Madrid<https://www.ucm.es/>. She holds a PhD Anglo-American Culture and Literary Studies (2002), a Diploma of Advanced PhD Studies in Spanish Literature from UNED (2004), and a Master in Education Management from the Open University London (2000). Her research interests are Comparative Literature, Science & Literature, Cultural Studies, Cognitive and Intermedial Semiotics and Green Humanities and Sustainability. <https://www.ucm.es/siim/eurasia-foundation-complutense-2022-lectures-webina…>
