Table Of ContentUnreal Objects
Digital Barricades:
Interventions in Digital Culture and Politics
Series Editors:
Professor Jodi Dean, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Dr Joss Hands, Anglia Ruskin University
Professor Tim Jordan, University of Sussex
Also available:
Cyber-Proletariat:
Global Labour in the Digital Vortex
Nick Dyer-Witheford
Information Politics:
Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society
Tim Jordan
Unreal Objects
Digital Materialities, Technoscientific
Projects and Political Realities
Kate O’Riordan
First published 2017 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Kate O’Riordan 2017
The right of Kate O’Riordan to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 3678 7 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 3674 9 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 7868 0056 5 PDF eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0058 9 Kindle eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0057 2 EPUB eBook
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the
country of origin.
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
Contents
List of Figures vi
Acknowledgements vii
Series Preface ix
1 Introduction: Problems With Objects 1
2 The Shadow of Genomics 20
3 Biosensory Experiences, Data and the Interfaced Self 45
4 Smart Grids: Energy Futures, Carbon Capture and
Geoengineering 75
5 Real Fantasies: De-extinction and In Vitro Meat 104
6 Unreal Objects and Political Realities 130
Bibliography 152
Index 168
List of Figures
2.1 Scene from Socialising the Genome series of animations:
Glitch (Thin Air Factory) 29
3.1 Image of the Fitbit interface 50
3.2 Image from Fitbit advertisement film 52
3.3 Jawbone interface showing record of activity 57
3.4 Fitbit advertising image 58
3.5 Neocomini headset with ears which move in response
to electrical brain impulses 67
4.1 GE Image of a smart grid 80
4.2 British Gas Smart Meter alongside a ‘traditional meter’
with Carol Anne Duffy 84
5.1 Homepage image on the Revive and Restore website
(reviverestore.org) 117
Acknowledgements
This book partly comes out of my experiences of a technology assessment
project called EPINET, conducted between 2012 and 2015. That research
received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework
Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement number 288971
(EPINET). Many of the people involved in the research consortium
have had a formative influence on this book. In some cases where
I’ve published on particular case studies with them, they enter into
the writing. Specific acknowledgment and thanks goes to Dr Aristea
Fotopoulou, with whom I co-authored work on biosensors, and some of
her writing has undoubtedly made it on to the page in Chapter 3. Also
acknowledgement and thanks go to Dr Neil Stephens, who conducted
ethnographic work with the in vitro meat consortium and whose
thinking and writing influences Chapter 5. Collaborative writing with
Aristea and Neil was an aspect of EPINET that I really appreciated. Roger
Strand and Kjetil Rommetveit led the EPINET consortium and their
generosity and support was very significant in making the experience
so interesting. I also learnt much from other members of the group and
note my acknowledgments and thanks for the opportunity to work with
them all. The full details of the project can be found at http://epinet.no.
During the same period I’ve been in an extended conversation with
Professor Caroline Bassett and Professor Sarah Kember, along with whom
my thinking about unreal objects has developed. They have commented
on and encouraged earlier iterations of unreal objects, and presentations
and writing around this topic. I also have to thank the Canadian Commu-
nication Association for inviting me to be their keynote speaker in 2015
during the development of this book. Having the time to give a longer
talk was a luxury, and being pushed to make it work for an international
audience helped me to bring these materials together. The feedback and
discussions at the CCA conference were supportive and critical and
helped me in my thinking. I really appreciated the opportunity to share
this work in that community.
The book is also the product of earlier projects with Professor
Maureen McNeil, Dr Joan Haran and Professor Jenny Kitzinger. It is a
viii . unreal objects
while since we worked on human cloning together, but the framework
of thinking about how science is made in the media was formed in that
work. Maureen and Joan have continued to encourage and support me
since.
Dr Joan Haran has been a writing partner and source of support and
friendship for the last decade, and she read and responded to multiple
drafts of this book. Without her input I would not have got this to
the point of publication and I have been continually inspired by her
scholarship and thinking about feminism and science fiction as well as
her friendship.
The book manuscript was completed during a period of leave from
the University of Sussex and supported by the editors of this book series.
Particular thanks go to Professor Tim Jordan who both authorized the
leave and is one of the editors.
Also at Sussex, members of the Sussex Humanities Lab (directed by
Professor Caroline Bassett) and affiliates, including Professor Sally Jane
Norman, Kate Braybrooke, Stephen Fortune, Irene Fubara-Manuel,
and participants in the Sussex-UCSC digital exchange, including Emile
Devereaux, David Harris, Mary Agnes Krell, Gene Felice II and Professors
Jennifer Parker and Sharon Daniel are all due acknowledgement and
thanks for helping me think about biosensors and art and science, as well
as being great people to work and play with. Stephen Fortune’s work on
the Quantified Self has also been influential in my thinking, especially
about big data metaphors and the question of agency and driving when
it comes to data.
Professor Jenny Reardon at UCSC has been influential in shaping
some of my thinking through discussions about this material, especially
genomics, but also about storytelling and meaning making. Her support
over the years and recent inspirations from bandit biking in the last
months of writing this draft have also helped me immeasurably.
Finally, much thanks and appreciation go to my family and friends
who have put up with book angst for so long.
Series Preface
Crisis and conflict open up opportunities for liberation. In the early
twenty-first century, these moments are marked by struggles enacted
over and across the boundaries of the virtual, the digital, the actual
and the real. Digital cultures and politics connect people even as they
simultaneously place them under surveillance and allow their lives to
be mined for advertising. This series aims to intervene in such cultural
and political conjunctures. It will feature critical explorations of the new
terrains and practices of resistance, producing critical and informed
explorations of the possibilities for revolt and liberation.
Emerging research on digital cultures and politics investigates the
effects of the widespread digitization of increasing numbers of cultural
objects, the new channels of communication swirling around us and
the changing means of producing, remixing and distributing digital
objects. This research tends to oscillate between agendas of hope, that
make remarkable claims for increased participation, and agendas of
fear, that assume expanded repression and commodification. To avoid
the opposites of hope and fear, the books in this series aggregate around
the idea of the barricade. As sources of enclosure as well as defences for
liberated space, barricades are erected where struggles are fierce and the
stakes are high. They are necessarily partisan divides, different politici-
zations and deployments of a common surface. In this sense, new media
objects, their networked circuits and settings, as well as their material,
informational and biological carriers all act as digital barricades.
Jodi Dean, Joss Hands and Tim Jordan
