Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia

Geert Lovink interviews an international group of artists, critics, and theorists on aesthetic, cultural, and political aspects of new media.

For Geert Lovink, interviews are imaginative texts that can help to create global, networked discourses not only among different professions but also among different cultures and social groups. Conducting interviews online, over a period of weeks or months, allows the participants to compose documents of depth and breadth, rather than simply snapshots of timely references.The interviews collected in this book are with artists, critics, and theorists who are intimately involved in building the content, interfaces, and architectures of new media. The topics discussed include digital aesthetics, sound art, navigating deep audio space, European media philosophy, the Internet in Eastern Europe, the mixing of old and new in India, critical media studies in the Asia-Pacific region, Japanese techno tribes, hybrid identities, the storage of social movements, theory of the virtual class, virtual and urban spaces, corporate takeover of the Internet, and the role of cyberspace in the rise of nongovernmental organizations.

Interviewees included Norbert Bolz, Paulina Borsook, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Kuan-Hsing Chen, C㬩n Dan, Mike Davis, Mark Dery, Kodwo Eshun, Susan George, Boris Groys, Frank Hartmann, Michael Heim, Dietmar Kamper, Zina Kaye, Tom Keenan, Arthur Kroker, Bruno Latour, Marita Liulia, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Peter Lunenfeld, Lev Manovich, Mongrel, Edi Muka, Jonathan Peizer, Saskia Sassen, Herbert Schiller, Gayatri Spivak, Jᮯs SugᲬ Ravi Sundaram, Toshiya Ueno, Tjebbe van Tijen, McKenzie Wark, Hartmut Winkler, and Slavoj Zizek.

Geert Lovink is an independent media theorist and net critic. He is the founder of nettime mailing lists, a member of Adilkno, and a cofounder of the online community server Digital City.