Platform as Method: Strategies for Counter-Cartographic Research in Beijing, Ningbo and Shanghai
Seminar: Laboratory on Urban Research, http://urbanresearchlab.net/
Presenters: Ned Rossiter
Date: Sunday 25 April, 2010
Time: 2-4pm
Fee: free
Abstract
Platforms organize. They bring bodies and brains into relation. While they require highly distributed formats of digital communication and translation, platforms must connect with off-line worlds. Practices of collaborative constitution hold a generative capacity that invent new institutional forms. When multiplied across time and space, platforms connect seemingly disparate events along circuits of experience and experimentation. The work of platforms at once tests and produces concepts. Platforms address contingency and movements as constitutive methods of analysis and organization.
This paper asks how the organization of platforms can serve as a research tool and method for transcultural mapping in urban settings. Taking examples from urban research projects in Beijing, Ningbo and Shanghai, the paper investigates how the city becomes the site of a research platform that combines online and offline methods to gather researchers from across the world and bring them into collaborative relation with local participants through workshops, site visits, symposia, exhibitions, mailing lists, blogs and publishing. The aim is to flee the data-mined, self-referential universe of social networking sites by building a multilingual environment for collaborative invention and the common production of knowledge.
Bio
Ned Rossiter is an Australian media theorist and Associate Professor of Network Cultures, University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China and Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney, Australia. He is author of Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions (2006) and co-editor of numerous volumes, including (with Geert Lovink) MyCreativity Reader: A Critique of Creative Industries (2007).
