In association with Stanford Humanities Center

Part of the research workshop Critical studies in new media and associated with The Presence Project.

Presence is a contested aspect of social and cultural experience. Notions of presence hinge on the relationship between the live and mediated, on notions of immediacy, authenticity and originality. Presence prompts questions of the character of self-awareness, of the presentation of self. Interaction is implicated — presence implies being in someone's presence. And agency - one's ability to bring about such representation and relationship. Location too — to be present is to be somewhere. Hence presence also directs us outside the self into the social and spatial. And also, of course, presence directs us into temporality — a fulcrum is tense and the relationship between past and present.

73Easting - the graphics card - archaeological remnant of the largest military simulation ever - an immersive reconstruction of an engagement in the 1992 Gulf War - archive at Stanford University

An aspect of presence is representation - both mimesis and political representation. Hence presence fundamentally implicates the communicative relationship between what or who is represented and how.

At the heart of presence is politics and the polis.

You hear of a terrorist bombing down town on your mobile phone. Think of how making sense of events unfolding around us is affected by more and more remediating streams - eye-witness mobile video, personal blog accounts, TV coverage, written commentary, as well as actual material fragments of the past.

History unfolds on a screen in your home. Think of how the past is therefore no longer located so easily in situ, in places (this happened here) or in discrete sources (they witnessed and wrote this then), but is folded through media that pervade every daily experience.

A local community builds its own story using participatory media - a wiki running on the local library computer. They assemble memories, documents, images, web resources. But there is no overarching narrative, little distinction of hard fact and subjective anecdote, in contrast to the standard regional and national histories. Should they not have solicited expert historiographical help in pulling together a coherent picture?

One part of the local history is a video diary of a visit to a national museum; it is a commentary on some great works. The museum takes legal action against the history project on the grounds of infringement of copyright.

Your avatar is assaulted in its online world and its gestural scripts taken without permission. Who do you turn to for a hearing? Why should anyone take your sense of injustice seriously - it is only a "virtual" world.

Eavesdropping arrived with the first village. Whispers of every kind now surround us. Whose story do we believe? Did it ever make sense?

In summary. The politics of presence - matters of power, agency, and identity in the ways that media experiences generate and manage presence.

Key questions and fields revolve around agency, site/location and the body.

Agency

How do infrastructures (of any kind - social, political, material) shape the ability of the individual to have political presence?

What are we to make of the increasing expression of politics as media experience?

How are media companies, political agencies and/or other organizations using media to shape the experience of presence in culturally or institutionally determined ways?

What's the difference between presence, agency and representation?

What happens when media generate mixed realities that subvert the distinction between real and represented, original and simulated?

These questions raise the topic of "virtual communities" and socio-media, new forms of (political) association.

Site/location

Media and mediation are always located. Media technologies always connect with place. They are mediating forms, between people and structures/institutions.

How are media implicated in politically charged locations?

Surveillance and mutual monitoring are relevant here.

How do we think about immersive environments - fused intermedia as well multiple media ensembles - in relation to presence, identity and agency?

How are media involved in the generation of corporate presence beyond the individual in places like department stores, malls and airports?

Body

How are the truth and knowledge of one's self and being shaped by mediating forms/technologies?

What happens when there isn't an individual to be present anymore, because they are dispersed through multiple media?

What happens when the individual is dispersed through mediating forms such that the absolute distinction between self and representation is less relevant than notions of iterative remediating processes?

What happens when the enviornment within which we're present finds its home inside our bodies, when media and bodies merge? Key issues here are immersive media environments, cyborg bodies and emerging nano technologies.

Change and history

Agency, site/location and body need to be understood in historical perspective.

How should we think about presence in the present in relation to presence in the past?

What about immersive environments and other media management of presence in the past?

Media history - what is new about new media and their relation to presence?

Are these really issues of "new" media?

Or have media always been similarly implicated in the politics of presence?

Anbessa Ch'aka, Ethiopia. Site of a battle between the communist government and guerillas, 1990. Photo: Alfredo Ruibal http://archaeography.com