1st Edition

Diffractive Technospaces A Feminist Approach to the Mediations of Space and Representation

By Federica Timeto Copyright 2015
    224 Pages
    by Routledge

    218 Pages
    by Routledge

    The entanglements of information and materiality in our media environment, that new information and communication technologies make increasingly mobile and locative, changes the mediations between space and society. The fluidity and continual reworking of the boundaries of contemporary technospaces - the sociotechnical environments in which humans and machines relate and intersect - is key to the production and consumption of contemporary technologies. Theoretical analyses of communication and space have tended to engage in the representation of such changes without interrogating the representational instruments used at a broader methodological level. Articulating a non-representational perspective on knowledge production and artistic practices, combined with an analysis of space, this book offers a new performative and relational re-turn to representation in contemporary technospaces. The radically materialist, posthumanist and performative position from which this situated aesthetics of technospaces is elaborated, aligns this book not only with non-representational theory, but also with the theories of material feminism, feminist geography, situated epistemologies, science and technology studies, actor-network theory, performance studies and new media studies.

    Contents: Introduction; Space and representation; Reconceiving representation; Location, mobility, perspectives; Diffracting technoscience; Opening conclusions: performing represent-actions; Bibliography; Index.

    Biography

    Federica Timeto is Lecturer of Sociology of New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts, Palermo, Italy.

    ’Federica Timeto's outstanding book re-thinks the traditional feminist politics of representation and location, standpoint epistemologies and situated knowledges by introducing performative and technologically mediated spaces teeming with entanglements, intra-actions, interferences and diffractions. Densely theoretical, beautifully intermingled with careful readings of film, video and multimedia art, Diffractive Technospaces is an impressive contribution to new feminist cartographies of technospaces.’ Tiziana Terranova, University of Naples 'L'Orientale', Italy ’Space is never a given. It is always in formation, an impasto of the like and unlike in which the work of mediation never stops. Timeto is exceptionally good at both pointing to this quality and making something of it through a concentration on information technologies as both spatial conveyors and conveyors of space. This is an important book showing once again why the non-representational turn is crucial to understanding the modern world.’ Nigel Thrift, University of Warwick, UK