Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

paper focuses on one aspect of this context: the complex temporal existence of graffiti and street art - their
duration, speed and acceleration – across multiple time zones. It asks: how is the consumption of graffiti and
street art as digital images affecting its production? Has digital culture accelerated the production of graffiti
and street art, driving shorter, faster cycles of repainting, with a greater ephemerality matched by parallel
and potentially infinite lives on digital servers and devices? Using data generated over a period of 500 days
at a single suburban painting site dubbed “the Boneyard”, this paper attempts to track the accelerating
rhythms of graffiti in digital culture. It uses a number of methods to map the duration of pieces on walls and
their digital echoes, including photographic recording, data visualisation and social network analysis.
Ultimately, this research seeks to extend existing methods of longitudinal analysis and to make a broader
argument about the effects of social media on graffiti’s aesthetic features.
Catherine Burwell
Youth, bytes, copyright: Talking to young creators about digital copyright
Young people confront, negotiate, and frequently resist copyright laws on a regular basis, yet we know little
about their relationships with copyright. This presentation reports on qualitative research undertaken to talk
to young Canadian creators about their media practices (including downloading, file-sharing and remixing
commercial content) and their knowledge and thoughts about copyright (including user rights, fair dealing
and infringement). Participants in focus groups and interviews included filmmakers, photographers,
musicians, comic artists and game designers ages 16-26. These young creators demonstrated a strong
interest in issues related to copyright, but little concrete knowledge of copyright law. This lack of knowledge,
however, did not signal a lack of ethical direction. Instead, many of the participants were guided by shared
norms around questions of authorship, ownership and the commons. They made creative decisions in
discussion with peers and online communities, revealing how the negotiation of copyright is woven into the
fabric of the everyday life and relationships.
Briel Holger
VisionBytes – Seeing in the age of intercultural digitality
From Emojis to Manga, from Western adverts to “foreign” brand consciousness, visual products are
continuing their near instantaneous circulation around the globe. Especially their apparent “naturalness”
and freedom from translation is appealing. But here also lies the problem: these materials have been
constructed by social actors with specific agendas in mind; and especially their “foreign” receptions create
challenges, including ethical ones. In order to properly study these fairly new phenomena, a different kind of
terminology is needed, not one that relies on older media concepts, but one that does them justice in terms
of their contextual and technological complexity, multivalence and mobility. In my research presentation, I
will propose to introduce the term “VisionBytes” for these phenomena. These are complex visual arrays,
oftentimes of foreign cultural origin and consist of still or moving images. They circulate within a system of
non-photography as sketched by François Laruelle (2013) and are akin to the “objects” described in Quentin
Meillassoux’ Beyond Finitude (2008). Invariably, they touch on issues of belonging, identity, exclusion,
human rights and globalisation, issues I will foreground in my presentation. Even more recently, they have
also begun participating in the preparations for the imminent gaze of the (technological) Other, of a possible
singularity which for the first time will allow humans to re-view themselves and thus be judged by alien
means.
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