The ever-growing economic and ecological crisis in the contemporary world marks the dominance of a technological rationality whose major goal is valorization of everything in order to feed the accumulation of capital. In response, we invest in forms and networks of praxis that invert the contemporary enframing of technological systems and their underlying colonial, racial, and patriarchal epistemologies. To this end, we dig into forgotten and suppressed past futures and speculative nows to envision, encounter, and enact alternative modes of computing – informing, scaling, modeling, mapping, speculating, rhythming, networking, communalizing and (…).
COUNTER-N is a web-based publishing, exchange, and research collection curated by Shintaro Miyazaki and Özgün Eylül İşcen. To counter means to go or engage against, while to encounter means to meet or come across, thus is less aggressively narrow-minded, but more open and vague. As a noun, counter means a table, where accounts are made or persons meet, thus an object, which is in opposition. A counter is also a device that counts. As an adverb, it describes a way that opposes something. It operates as a prefix to something to oppose or to react to. Counter-N, where N is meant as an open variable to occupy, thus Counter-N unfolds a vast possibility space of practices, concepts, institutions, and more, which are not merely encountered, tackled, met and opposed, but reconstructed, reimagined, and reformulated, so that alternatives are proposed. Counter-N thus is a sort of constructive critique, which not only dissects, analyzes, debunks, and decomposes the subjects it opposes, but a form of critique, which is also constructive and puts together. This is why N stands for a verb form (-ing), highlighting its both active and processual nature.
Readers could go to → Counter-N? A First Conversation (PDF,+more) by the editors/ curators for an introduction or proceed directly to..
→ decolonial computing, Stefanie Wuschitz, (PDF,+more)
→ dreamful computing, Ned Rossiter, Geert Lovink, (PDF,+more)
→ frictional computing, Diego Gómez-Venegas(PDF,+more)
→ insurgent computing, Anna Engelhardt, (PDF,+more)
→ minimal computing, Andrew Lison, (PDF,+more)
→ more-than-binary computing, Juan Pablo García Sossa, (PDF,+more)
→ permacomputing, Marloes de Valk, Ville-Matias Heikkilä (PDF,+more)
→ unstable computing, MELT, (PDF,+more)
→ relational computing, Nicola Bozzi, (PDF,+more)
(…more to come…)
→ queer futuring, Yener Bayramoğlu, (PDF,+more)
→ weird futuring, Bahar Noorizadeh, (PDF,+more)
→ counter futuring, Jussi Parikka, (PDF,+more)
→ token futuring, Antonia Hernández, (PDF),+more)
→ metabolic futuring, Jamie Allen, (PDF,+more)
(…more to come…)
→ Computing Instability (PDF,+more)
→ counter dancing, Shintaro Miyazaki, (+more)
→ (…more to come…)
→ Counter-Futuring Symposium at ICI-Berlin, 22_Sep_2022, more..
Özgün Eylül İşcen is a postdoc fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. She received her PhD in Computational Media, Arts and Cultures from Duke University in 2020. Her dissertation examines counter-visual artistic practices that intervene in the material conditions and ethico-legal systems underlying the extractive operations of computational media in the context of the Middle East.
Shintaro Miyazaki is a (junior)-professor in "Digital Media and Computation" (with tenure track) at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He studied media studies, philosophy, and musicology in Basel, and Berlin, where he received a PhD in media studies in 2012. His thesis work centered on the history of digital technologies, with a focus on algorithms and their rhythms, leading to »algorhythmics.«
COUNTER-N is online since April 2021 and supported by Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. All content is CC BY 4.0 (and subvariants). You can reference this website as, Shintaro Miyazaki, Özgün Eylül İşcen (2021), counter-n.net, introduction, viewed DD MM YY, http://counter-n.net/.