Meaning and livestreaming: On technical encounter’s aesthetics and ethics.

EL Putnam’s new book Livestreaming: An Aesthetics and Ethics of Technical Encounter considers how livestreaming constitutes new patterns of being together that are complex, ambivalent, and transformative. Digging into how humans and technology co-evolve, Putnam and Noel Fitzpatrick engage in conversation about relation and hyper-individualism, glitch and switchtasking, activism and hidden labor and performance and more.

EL Putnam is an artist-philosopher and assistant professor of digital media at Maynooth University, Ireland. Putnam is author of Livestreaming: An Aesthetics and Ethics of Technical Encounter in the University of Minnesota Press Forerunners series and The Maternal, Digital Subjectivity, and the Aesthetics of Interruption.

Noel Fitzpatrick is Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics and the Academic Lead of the European Culture and Technology Laboratory at the Technological University Dublin.

Episode references:

Gilbert Simondon

Bernard Stiegler

Yuk Hui 

Hegel

Kant

Jackson Pollock

Heidegger

Paul Ricoeur

Ayana Evans

Ana Voog

N. Katherine Hayles

Miriam Wolf

Diamond Reynolds and the livestream of Philando Castile’s murder

Safiya Umoja Noble

Christina Sharpe

Saidiya Hartman

Tonia Sutherland

Jacques Rancière

Simone Browne

Èdouard Glissant

Susan Sontag

Sara Ahmed

H. P. Grice

Related works:

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects / Simondon

On the Existence of Digital Objects / Hui

Art and Cosmotechnics / Hui

Oneself as Another / Ricoeur

Memory, History, Forgetting / Ricoeur

Resurrecting the Black Body / Sutherland

Dark Matters / Browne

Regarding the Pain of Others / Sontag

Livestreaming: An Aesthetics and Ethics of Technical Encounter is available from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition is available to read free online at manifold.umn.edu.