Event overview
Public Lecture: Tung-Hui Hu
Monday 16th November
5-7pm
Professor Stuart Hall Building
Room: LG01
Free, All Welcome
The controversies of digital culture typically involve cases such as data leaks, targeted ads, and online privacy. Yet there is a harder edge to these discussions that is rooted in the very ideology of the cloud, and what this talk argues is we should take seriously the violent undercurrents beneath these seemingly born-digital problems. As I suggest, the cloud has much more in common with practices such as the CIA's extraordinary rendition program, which tortures detainees at third-party locations, than we might think; indeed, the cloud, properly understood, contains within it a necropolitics. To figure out how we got here, and how to decode the structure of power embedded in the cloud, I offer a brief genealogy of both its material infrastructure as well as its cultural rhetoric, showing how everything from sewer lines to railroad tracks to guerrilla television profoundly shaped the digital environment we now live in.
Tung-Hui Hu is assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan, where he teaches in the Digital Studies and creative writing programs. He is the author of A Prehistory of the Cloud (MIT, 2015) as well as three books of poetry, most recently Greenhouses, Lighthouses (Copper Canyon, 2013). A former network engineer, Hu is currently a National Endowment for the Arts fellow in literature.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 16 Nov 2015 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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