This article focuses on the role of analogy, transgression, and contagion in the workings of the zombie as a cultural form. This study of the zombie-as-analogy also opens a way towards a different understanding of media populism, as more than a mirror of political populism, but as a problem unique to the representation, reproduction, and proliferation of sameness in mass media and culture.
Prevailing approaches to populist media in political theory remain narrowly focused on what populists say and do in the media, as if the media was merely a container of information or an ideology to be debunked. In contrast, this special issue aims to bring media studies into conversation with debates in social and political theory, among other fields, and to explore the centrality of media, meant in a broader sense than just neutral channels for direct and unmediated exchange between demagogues and receptive audiences, for apprehending populism.
PDF Abstract This article investigates the relation of thermal metaphors and thermal materiality in two distinct models of transformation: cooking and fermenting. Against the dominant – and often unreflected –…
PDF Abstract Cloud-based game streaming is an emerging trend within the digital games industry, with multiple companies attempting to replicate the successful implementation of streaming services that has already occured…
PDF Abstract The current migration of global cloud infrastructure towards the Northern hemisphere has social and environmental effects and triggers hopes and expectations. While IT infrastructure providers expect to reduce…
PDF Abstract We are used to assuming that media infrastructures are made to last. This essay argues for taking impermanence as a point of departure in order to understand data…
PDF Abstract A recurring feature in images and imaginations of the data center is the complete absence of human beings. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the data center industry,…
PDF Abstract Microsoft’s transition to being both a cloud company and a carbon neutral company occurred at the same time and with common structuring logics. Cloud computing, carbon offsetting, and…
PDF https://vimeo.com/182594845 Abstract This article considers media infrastructures as an interweaving between geology, space, data and affect through a series of artworks produced by the author using a research methodology…
PDF Abstract This essay meditates on the role of the ephemeral as a source of media power for large and immobile hyperscale data centers. Taking field study notes and online…