Editorial: Everything is a matter of distance
Christian Ulrik Andersen, Jussi Parikka, Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver, Søren Pold, Pablo Velasco,
The Uruguayan poet Cristina Peri Rossi painfully states that, in love as in boxing, everything is a matter of distance.[1] The elliptic, gelatinous relationship between proximity and distance is the central dynamic for the publication and the research workshop behind, organised by DARC/Digital Aesthetics Research Center (Aarhus University) in collaboration with transmediale festival for art and digital culture, Berlin, with participation of a number of PhD and/or artist researchers whose works and thoughts on the 2025 festival theme are now presented here.[2]
A recurrent focus is how space is produced and manipulated in current techno-culture. Proximity is managed through techniques of approximation, of statistical modes of patterning identities, collectivities, and affective modes of attachment to corporate infrastructure. Distance is the usual preferred term for critical vocabularies, but we are always already immersed in such approximations as we are involved, addressed, captured in platforms and other interfaces of affective persuasion. We ask, what then are the best ways critical digital culture research can do in manoeuvring this situation 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 mobilize their knowledge in 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 of reworking our brief: proximity is not necessarily "near" in the traditional sense (but it can be); remoteness is not necessarily only "distant", and questions of other scales of algorithmic politics have to take into account 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.
The publication functions as workshop 'proceedings'. Here, though, the word is used as a verb and an action; it interrogates 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 - a continuous action that unfolds in multiple ways, with multiple methods, across a shared space of inquiry, pulling things, concepts and bodies into and out of relations that can be processed or (mis)understood, or explained, or followed. The publication is the result of a collective action and reflection on the contributions to the workshop. Prior to the workshop, participants circulated and commented essays of 1,000 words. Essays have been published, edited and commented on a shared wiki (using MediaWiki software), discussed (and reduced) at a workshop, and published using web-to-print techniques that build on the JavaScript library Paged.js[3] and the works of an extended community network.[4] In the same mode as previous editions of the Peer-Reviewed Newspaper [5], this one is also a proceeding experiment with collective making and publishing. Following the workshop, the contributions will be elaborated further for publication in A Peer-Reviewed Journal About [6]_
- ↑ Peri Rossi, Cristina. Otra vez eros. Lumen, 1994.
- ↑ This publication is edited by all participants in the workshop: Daria Iuriichuk, Christoffer Koch Andersen, Maya Erin Masuda, Magda Tyżlik-Carver, Sami Itavuori, Paul V. Schmidt, Ruben van de Ven, Pablo Velasco, Matīss Groskaufmanis, Kola Heyward-Rotimi, Maja Funke, Jussi Parikka, Megan Phipps, Katya Sivers, Nico Daleman, Søren Pold, Nicolas Malevé and Christian Ulrik Andersen
- ↑ https://pagedjs.org/
- ↑ https://servpub.net/
- ↑ https://darc.au.dk/publications/peer-reviewed-newspaper
- ↑ https://aprja.net/
