Mél Hogan
YOU?
Author Swipe
View article: Getting democracy wrong
Getting democracy wrong Open
Recent developments in large language models and computer automated systems more generally (colloquially called ‘artificial intelligence’) have given rise to concerns about potential social risks of AI. Of the numerous industry-driven prin…
View article: The making of critical data center studies
The making of critical data center studies Open
In this article, the authors demonstrate how the data center has become a key site, object, and metaphor for interdisciplinary scholarship of the internet. While the data center is a fabrication of engineering, computer science, and cognat…
View article: Archiving for Extinction
Archiving for Extinction Open
Anjali Arondekar, Wendy H. K. Chun, Verne Harris, N. Katherine Hayles, Shannon Mattern, Saidiya Hartman, and Kate Eichhorn, among other scholars of the archives, have questioned the presumption of the archive as complete, whole, legitimate…
View article: “Environmental media” in the cloud: The making of critical data center art
“Environmental media” in the cloud: The making of critical data center art Open
Despite the numerous projects and exhibitions dedicated to technology and Internet infrastructure, “Data Center Studies” has not yet fully grappled with art’s role in the wider intervention critical scholarship is making via the data cente…
View article: 5 Things about Critical Data Center Studies
5 Things about Critical Data Center Studies Open
The three of us have been writing an article together called "The Making of Critical Data Center Studies," in which we track its development over the past decades to establish it as a field in its own right. 1 In planning these Five Things…
View article: 5/ Writing and filming queer deaths
5/ Writing and filming queer deaths Open
This is part 5 of 6 of the dossier What do we talk about when we talk about queer death?, edited by M. Petricola. The contributions collected in this article sit at the crossroads between thanatology, critical animal studies, and the posth…
View article: 6. Sustainable DNA
6. Sustainable DNA Open
Big Tech supports social media, the stock market, insurance companies, scientific research, financial transactions, mass surveillance and monitoring, the ‘Internet of things’, ‘smart city’ sensors and grids, and mobile communications for I…
View article: 6. Sustainable DNA: In Conversation
6. Sustainable DNA: In Conversation Open
Big Tech supports social media, the stock market, insurance companies, scientific research, financial transactions, mass surveillance and monitoring, the ‘Internet of things’, ‘smart city’ sensors and grids, and mobile communications for I…
View article: Data Segregation and Algorithmic Amplification: A Conversation with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Data Segregation and Algorithmic Amplification: A Conversation with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun Open
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication. She has studied both systems design engineering and English literature, which she combines and mutates in her current …
View article: Cheating the Network: How Gamers Play the Infrastructure
Cheating the Network: How Gamers Play the Infrastructure Open
Background This article looks at how video game players interact directly with the infrastructure and networks that support digital games. To win, players are no longer simply “cheating the game,” as with traditional behaviour considered d…
View article: Surveillant Intimacies
Surveillant Intimacies Open
We often think of surveillance as ubiquitous, secretive, top-down, corporate, and governmental—and in many ways, it is. Through three vignettes, this essay prods at the ways in which our everyday tools, technologies, and gestures extend su…
View article: Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth
Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth Open
For this special issue of b2o, we explore Musk’s SpaceX, the NSA’s control room, Biosphere 2, HI-SEAS, and Apple’s new “Spaceship” headquarters. In these projects and artifacts we find highly politicized deployments of Silicon Valley-style…
View article: Retrofitted data centres: a new world in the shell of the old
Retrofitted data centres: a new world in the shell of the old Open
This contribution looks specifically at the process of redeveloping data centre infrastructure: how the value of past capital investments in the built environment can be preserved and multiplied through further capitalist development. We a…
View article: Data is airborne; Data is inborn: The labor of the body in technoecologies
Data is airborne; Data is inborn: The labor of the body in technoecologies Open
This article presents a feminist argument about the evolution of data storage in relation to the body — from our current state of wirelessness that relies on data centers for processing and containment, to future imaginaries about embedded…
View article: Introducing Location and Dislocation: Global Geographies of Digital Data
Introducing Location and Dislocation: Global Geographies of Digital Data Open
---
View article: Another) Battle in the Clouds
Another) Battle in the Clouds Open
At age ten, in 1918, Rachel Carson entered a writing contest and won. In "Battle in the Clouds", Carson wrote about the sky as a battlefield, where a soldierâs life is momentarily spared because of an act of bravery undeniable even by hi…
View article: Scholarship as Cultural Production in the Neoliberal University: Working Within and Against ‘Deliverables’
Scholarship as Cultural Production in the Neoliberal University: Working Within and Against ‘Deliverables’ Open
This article focuses on the idea of scholarly work as cultural production to help understand how the tensions of precarious, early-career academic employment are articulated on a day-to-day basis in the context of pressures to efficiently …
View article: The Archive as Dumpster
The Archive as Dumpster Open
In four exploratory theoretical gestures (appraise, dispose, hoard and mediate), I propose the ‘archive as dumpster’ as a framework for returning to the physical conditions of memory, where “picking through the trash” subverts traditional …
View article: Data flows and water woes: The Utah Data Center
Data flows and water woes: The Utah Data Center Open
Using a new materialist line of questioning that looks at the agential potentialities of water and its entanglements with Big Data and surveillance, this article explores how the recent Snowden revelations about the National Security Agenc…
View article: Out of Site & Out of Mind: Speculative Historiographies of Techno Trash
Out of Site & Out of Mind: Speculative Historiographies of Techno Trash Open
Out of Site & Out of Mind: Speculative Historiographies of Techno Trash by Mel Hogan and Andrea Zeffiro. Our contribution to the “Aesthetics of Trash” introduces an online participatory storytelling project, Speculative Historiographies of…
View article: Information Ownership and Materiality in an Age of Big Data Surveillance
Information Ownership and Materiality in an Age of Big Data Surveillance Open
Can private data “havens,” localized servers, and offline infrastructure empower secure and private user control over data? Contrasting Sealand's counter-surveillance policies with the NSA's Utah Data Center mass surveillance apparatus, th…
View article: Information Ownership and Materiality in an Age of Big Data Surveillance
Information Ownership and Materiality in an Age of Big Data Surveillance Open
Can private data “havens,” localized servers, and offline infrastructure empower secure and private user control over data? Contrasting Sealand's counter-surveillance policies with the NSA's Utah Data Center mass surveillance apparatus, th…