[-empyre-] A Virtual Body Politic

[VJ Um Amel]

Hello Everyone,

Thank you Soraya for moderating this interesting conversation and for your generous introduction. I’m looking forward to our discussion this week. I have a couple points I would like to raise. One is concerning the choice of terminology: Arab Spring, a decidedly Western nomenclature. And I want to also discuss performing scholarship and various artistic ruptures, databending, and glitch. However, to begin with I would like to introduce a concept I have been thinking about for a while: what I call, “a virtual body politic.” As I conceive it, this construction offers a way of understanding people’s interactions and hermeneutics online. Thus, on this first day on empyre’s theme of social media/identity/intervention, I would like to share an excerpt from a recent article I published. 

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FROM: Shereen Sakr, Laila. “A Virtual Body Politic: Mobilizing Information Patterns,” Networking Knowledge: Journal of the Media, Communication, and Cultural Studies Association. Special Edition, Vol. 8. No. 2., (March 2015).

"The joint availability of massive social and cultural data sets (including social media and digitized cultural artifacts) make possible fundamentally new paradigms for the study of social and cultural activities and histories. Open source industry models, social media platforms, and Arabic software localization have reframed access to information and justice in the Arab world. But these changes have yet to be meaningfully analyzed or even accounted for by scholars studying either social media or the societies in question.

This investigation is in fact one layer removed from the individuals and communities themselves. My inquiry examines various assemblages of people in the virtual world through their words, their sharing, and their posts online. By examining traces that people leave online through posts, tweets, retweeting, sharing, this chapter formulates and studies various assemblages of people and their ideas—creating alternative geographies of movement and new spatialities of information patterns. The question is not to identify “who” the people are ontologically, but how they form networks of solidarity, and around production of knowledge, on the Internet. This project studies the flows of cultural production and consumption in real-time, so that the assemblages are in constant flux.

A difference between the body politic and the virtual body politic is that the former is an abstraction of a group of people governed by one authority. More importantly, the latter is that abstraction of people who exchange ideas publicly online about the governance of an authority through visual representations of bodies as a site of political control. More than the accumulation of data, in this discussion I am concerned with public sharing among global witnesses—a virtual body politic. The notion of witnessing culture, while science gives us a means to speak about the implications, is powerful. In some respects, and not incidental to the virtual body politic, the sharing of tweets creates an “immediate publicity”[ii], which really broadens who can be a witness, who can be counted as a witness. This work presents a media-enhanced method of scholarship, a media praxis, to analyze and demonstrate the negotiation between the materiality (the analogue) and information patterns (the data points). In this context, virtuality itself is a friction point between material bodies in political operation and information patterns.

In his article, “The Arab revolutions; the emergence of a new political subjectivity,” Sari Hanafi (2012) argues that the Arab youth feel that they have become a Homo sacer, in the sense of Agamben, which means that this was the revolt of “bare lives”; that is, of defenseless hungry bodies that the regime had stripped of political identity and of the right to belong to such groups as the Islamic Renaissance Movement “al-Nahda”, the Tunisian Communist Labor Party, and the Muslim brotherhood. In Homo Sacer, Agamben connects the problem of pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. 

My point on the virtual body politic is that actual material bodies are writing the information patterns we read on social media. And with social media, for the first time, we are seeing media being circumscribed by millions and millions of users rather than one state-run apparatus like a newspaper or television network. These authors have become a plethora of different bodies—big ones, black ones, brown ones, Muslim ones, Atheist ones, queer ones, and all the variations. It is this largeness[i] in daily political movement and operations that is defining the social media production of knowledge. It is revolutionary."

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[i] Reference to excerpt from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: “Do I contradict myself?/ Very well then, I contradict myself./ I am large. I contain multitudes.”
[ii] “A revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is the age of advertisement and publicity. Nothing ever happens but there is immediate publicity everywhere”  (Kierkegaard, 1962).


Laila Shereen Sakr  </VJ Um Amel>
PhD in Media Arts and Practice
USC School of Cinematic Arts
http://vjumamel.com
http://r-shief.org
+1-202-462-6242


On Apr 1, 2015, at 11:07 AM, Soraya Murray <semurray at ucsc.edu> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Greetings -empyre,
> 
> I will be introducing a new topic each week. The WEEK 1 theme is generally grouped around SOCIAL MEDIA / IDENTITY / INTERVENTION, and looks at the use of social media tools in both organized political identity/action and in more individuated political acts of self-representation. Welcome to our wonderful guests!   
> As their work may be new to some empyreans, I would like to begin by asking each of our guests to talk a little bit about a recent project, and outline some of their intellectual investments, or individual "stake" in the week's topic. 
> 
> Guests for Week 1: SOCIAL MEDIA / IDENTITY / INTERVENTION
> Derek Conrad Murray (US) / Dalia Othman (US) / Laila Shereen Sakr (US)
> Biographies:
> 
> DEREK CONRAD MURRAY is an interdisciplinary theorist specializing in the history, theory and criticism of contemporary art, African-American/African Diaspora art and culture, Post-Black art and aesthetics, theoretical approaches to identity and representation, critical issues in art practice, and the methodologies and ethics of Art History and Visual Studies. He has contributed to leading magazines and journals of contemporary art such as American Art, Art in America, Parachute, Art Journal, Exit EXPRESS, the Documenta 12 Magazine Project, Public Art Review, Third Text and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art (Duke University Press), where he currently serves as Associate Editor. Murray is also currently serving on the Editorial Advisory Board of Third Text.
> Murray’s book Regarding Difference: Contemporary African-American Art and the Politics of Recognition will be published by Manchester University Press (UK) as a part of the series Rethinking Art’s Histories (ed. Amelia Jones and Marsha Meskimmon).
> Murray is also in the process of completing a book entitled Queering Post-Black Art: Artists Rethinking African-American Identity After Civil Rights which will be published by I.B. Tauris (UK) in 2015. 
> 
> 
> DALIA OTHMAN is a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and a Visiting Scholar at MIT's Center for Civic Media. At Berkman, Dalia has been researching online civic engagement in the Arab World, focusing on analyzing the Arab Blogosphere and Twitter networks in various countries within the region. She is also part of the Media Cloud project at Berkman that works on analyzing Media's impact and discourse on major news events, her most recent work included analyzing media's community discourse in relation to the 2014 Gaza War.  
> She dedicates the rest of her time exploring different themes around digital storytelling and tech literacy. Dalia is currently building a resource platform that will help communities tell powerful stories online.
> Prior to Berkman, Dalia was an Adjunct Professor teaching New media at both Bard College- Abu Dis and Birzeit University. She was also the Senior Manager of Community Project at Souktel Inc. - a mobile services company that designs SMS platforms for the aid of local communities across the globe.
> 
> 
> LAILA SHEREEN SAKR
> Laila Shereen Sakr is a digital media theorist and artist known by her moniker, VJ Um Amel, and for creating the archive media system, R-Shief. Her PhD in Media Arts + Practice from the University of Southern California will confer in May 2015. She begins her appointment as Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara in July 2015.
> With a background in video production and web development, she specializes in immersive cinema, global media analytics, and digital media theory. Her doctoral project used media analytics, visualization, and immersive storytelling techniques to map how participation in virtual worlds and networked publics have influenced the formation of a virtual body politic. This research led her to design a media system for archiving and analyzing content from social networking sites using innovative computation. Today, R-Shief houses one of the most unique archives of multilingual social media content from the 2011 Arab uprisings, Occupy movements, Turkey, Gaza, and non-Middle Eastern countries like Spain and Brazil. As a VJ, she uses computational art and live cinema to document how embodied habits of communication are expressed virtually, and to understand how communities use technology to design their own narratives and worlds.
> Recognized for her outstanding achievements, she has shown in solo and group exhibitions and performances at galleries and museums across the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East, and has published extensively. Starting February 2015, she publishes a monthly media-enhanced article with data visualizations on Arab media analytics for Jadaliyya. She holds an M.F.A. in Digital Arts and New Media from University of California, Santa Cruz and an M.A. in Arab Studies from Georgetown University. Recent reviews appear in The Wall Street Journal, Science, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Fast Company, Voice of America, Art Territories, Digital Media and Learning, Egypt Independent, and The Creators Project.
> For more info, see: http://vjumamel.com
> 
> 
> 
> ___________________________
> Soraya Murray, Ph.D.
> Assistant Professor 
> Film + Digital Media Department
> University of California, Santa Cruz
> 
> ___________________________
> Soraya Murray, Ph.D.
> Assistant Professor 
> Film + Digital Media Department
> University of California, Santa Cruz
> _______________________________________________
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