Davin Heckman’s RetroTechnics

Call for papers - LEA New Media Subversion
Editors: Davin Heckman and Hai Ren

The Leonardo Electronic Almanac (ISSN No: 1071-4391) is inviting papers and artworks that address aspects of “Subversion” in the era of New Media.

In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey defines “Neoliberalism” as the idea that “the social good will be maximized” by “bring[ing] all human action into the domain of the market” (3). Harvey continues, explaining that  Neoliberalism “requires technologies of information creation and capacities to accumulate, store, transfer, analyse, and use massive databases to guide decisions in the global marketplace” (3).  In other words, new models of liberty are tied to new technologies and new economic practices.

The avant-garde tradition in the arts, on the other hand, prides itself in its ability to resist, critique, and subvert the dominant order.  Art’s most tepid manifestations provide flights of fancy, its most radical manifestations call for revolution.   But in the age of Neoliberalism, what restrictions does art aim to subvert?  What liberty does it hope to achieve?  What strategies and tactics might it employ in pursuit of its goals?

This special issue of LEA aims to explore opportunities for and obstacles to subversion in the age of New Media.

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My book, A Small World: Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day is tentatively scheduled for publication in early 2008 (January or February) by Duke University Press.  It’s my first book, so I am pretty excited.  You can email me if you want to know more.

With the rise of consumer culture, the advent of “postmodernism,” and the emergence of the information economy, the American home has undergone a transformation. From being a site of production, where good citizens are made and middle class values reproduced, to being a site of consumption, where media is consumed and lifestyles adopted; the dream house has been replaced with the “smart home,” enriching itself and its users through interactive processes of information exchange. Embarking on a discussion of industrial developments during the early Twentieth Century and the introduction of electric appliances and scientific management into the space of the home as a technique of “time management,” continuing through the postwar emergence of the digital computer and the advent of electronic household appliances and the space age “house of tomorrow,” and culminating in the automated house of today, the smart home, this book considers the home within the context lifestyle and consumer narratives.

Building on the tension between agency and control that are exist within the walls of the smart home, this project engages existing ethicopolitical debates about lifestyle and consumer culture, posthumanism and rights under the destabilizing influences of consumer technologies, and the utopian/dystopian potential of New Media forms. Considering interactivity as a refinement of disciplinary form, even as it liberates subjects from the constraints of more static media, this book concludes by introducing the concept of “the Perfect Day,” or, a technosocial attempt to institutionalize everyday life as the ultimate consumer practice and to remove or avoid undesired ethical impediments to the realization of the self in the consumer world.