APRJA14 - editorial

WIP version

In physics, distance is measured as the product of speed and time; in mathematics, it is defined as the total path traveled by an object from one point to another. Both definitions share an operational clarity but capture only a single dimension of the relationship between objects. The lived reality of distance—and its counterpart, proximity—resists such simplifications. As the Uruguayan poet Cristina Peri Rossi once wrote, “in love as in boxing, everything is a matter of distance, invoking a layered and ambiguous interplay in which closeness and separation constantly reconfigure one another while also engendering feelings that defy to be framed into a formula, or so we think.

One recurring question in the contributions that follow is how space itself is produced, shaped, and manipulated in contemporary techno-culture. Proximity today is engineered through techniques of approximation—statistical modes of patterning identities, collectivities, and affective bonds to corporate infrastructures. Critical vocabularies have long privileged distance—critical distance, aesthetic distance—but we are already immersed in these approximations as we are addressed, enrolled, and captured through platforms and other interfaces of affective persuasion. The challenge, then, is to ask: how might critical digital culture research manoeuvre in this terrain—from platforms to infrastructures, from interface to aesthetics, from love to boxing?

The texts in this issue shift across different media - from sound to software, visual cultures to performance. The authors explore how bodies move, how cities move, how bodies are captured in algorithmic technologies, and what is not captured in the dynamics of near-distant-remote modes of sensing and modeling. All this implies different scales and recalibrations where proximity is not necessarily near in the traditional sense (but it can be); remoteness is not necessarily only far. The algorithmic politics of distance must also contend with the logistics of approximation, i.e. the statistical basis that is evident for example in machine learning technologies, including their potential modes of violence. A violence that is both geo-political, takes place in systemic exclusions of people, and generative forces activated by near or far relations that pull in human, nonhuman and more-than-human bodies into datasets, representing them as numbers that can be pulled and pushed into exponentially evolving input and output relations.

The publication offers various interpretations of such relations, and it builds on the process that itself offers different constellations and connections, including the research workshop organised by DARC/Digital Aesthetics Research Center (Aarhus University) in collaboration with transmediale festival for art and digital culture, Berlin, in 2025. It expands on workshop’s 'proceedings', a process started in the run to the transmediale festival when participants, prior to meeting IRL, circulated and commented on essays of 1,000 words. Essays have been published, edited and commented on a shared wiki (using Media Wikii software), discussed (and reduced) at a workshop, published and distributed at the festival using web-to-print techniques that build on the JavaScript library Paged.js and the works of an extended community network.

We use the word ‘proceedings’ as a verb and an action as we continue to interrogate how proximity and distance unfold in the production of academic writing, for instance the idea peer review, or the conventions of formats and formatting, or the use of particular software for text processing or print. To proceed with is a continuous action that unfolds in multiple ways and over time, with multiple methods, across a shared space of inquiry which sometimes is the networked server, or the rooms in Salient Green where participants and contributors to this issue gathered. To proceed with research is to continuously redefine relations and distances; stretching, spacing, pulling things, concepts and bodies into and out of relations that can be processed or (mis)understood, or explained, or followed, scaled, or reduced, fit into tables or expanded into cities and streets. In these movements relations are re-composed and experienced in different ways proposing new interpretations and constellations of reading and moving bodies that are not just human.

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Works Cited

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Biographies

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