Invitation: Monday: Delivered the Same Day: The Post Office and Amazon.com, Coventry

*Delivered the Same Day: The Post Office and Amazon.com*
*
*
Seminar Series: Work, Property, Metrics
June 3rd, 2019, 11:00-17:00
Lanchester Library, Teaching Room, 3rd floor

Registration: 
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/delivered-the-same-day-the-post-office-and-amazoncom-tickets-61500213795

Post Office research group, Centre for Postdigital Cultures
Coventry University
http://postoffice.media 
<https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpostoffice.media&data=02%7C01%7Cab5796%40coventry.ac.uk%7C5c992245b986401ec2e908d6dc467131%7C4b18ab9a37654abeac7c0e0d398afd4f%7C0%7C0%7C636938592436162643&sdata=wp7fF2EYaT2YTa5nY1kyKEQqzEEC2Fqk6LiY55JqN0w%3D&reserved=0>

External Speakers: !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Jamie Woodcock
CPC researchers: Janneke Adema, Peter Conlin, Valeria Graziano, Gary 
Hall, Kaja Marczewska, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak.

Historically the postal service has solidified as a national and 
transnational infrastructure owned by the public, for the benefit of the 
public. It has played a central role in organising long-distance 
communication - mail, telegraph, telephony - facilitating, amongst other 
things, the regular delivery of written correspondence, the 
dissemination of printed matter, the expansion of the public sphere, but 
also the surveillance of communication and the coordination of war.

Alongside being political, the postal service was also an intensely 
technological institution. It has laid down the postal paths, network 
topologies, and routing protocols for later communications networks to 
follow. In fact, in the UK, the Post Office has had its own Research 
Station since 1909, helping develop the first transatlantic 
radiotelephone service and the world's first programmable electronic 
digital computer – Colossus.

No less important is the fact that the postal service also created a 
material distribution system. In the very period when the 
communicational infrastructures became deregulated, privatised and 
disinvested, on the back of these services and their delivery networks 
arose the digital platforms - most prominently the 
informational-distributive Behemoth that is the Amazon.com.

This event will explore the contrast between the transformative role the 
postal service as a public institution has had - and continues to have 
in spite of its creeping privatisation and erosion - and the disruptive 
role Amazon.com is now playing by offering cloud computing 
infrastructure, furthering platformisation, automating digital network 
services, and casualising the labour inside and outside of of its own 
operations.


*I. Post Post Office: the Afterlives of Postal Networks*

  * 11:00-10:15  Gary Hall: introducing the Post Office

  * 11:15-12:00 !Mediengruppe Bitnik: Postal Machine Decision (artist talk)

  * 12:00-12:45  Kaja Marczewska: Postal Reforms and the Crisis of
    Grassroots Publishing

  * Janneke Adema & Kaja Marczewska: Post-it. Academic Post Cards



*II. Amazon.com: work, property and metrics in the logistical circuit*

  * 13:30-13:45  Valeria Graziano: Automation as Domestication

  * 13:45-14:15  Marcell Mars & Tomislav Medak: The Anatomy of Amazon.com

  * 14:15-14:45  Jamie Woodcock: Amazon.com, Twitch.tv, and Videogames

  * 14:45-15:15  Peter Conlin: Incontrovertible Landscapes and Vanishing
    Points: Logistic Spaces, Opacity and Obscurity

  * 15:30-16:30  Discussion



*Speakers:*
*Janneke Adema*is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Postdigital 
Cultures at Coventry University. In her research, she explores the 
future of scholarly communications and experimental forms of knowledge 
production, where her work incorporates processual and performative 
publishing, radical open access, scholarly poethics, media studies, book 
history, cultural studies, and critical theory. She explores these 
issues in depth in her various publications, but also by supporting a 
variety of scholar-led, not-for-profit publishing projects, including 
the Radical Open Access Collective, Open Humanities Press, and Post 
Office Press (POP). You can follow her research, as it develops, 
onopenreflections.wordpress.com 
<https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fopenreflections.wordpress.com&data=02%7C01%7Cab5796%40coventry.ac.uk%7C5c992245b986401ec2e908d6dc467131%7C4b18ab9a37654abeac7c0e0d398afd4f%7C0%7C0%7C636938592436172634&sdata=37j9FErWHScm%2BJw6xnAwzkLptlhhiHn%2BR1GEUNgSnJ8%3D&reserved=0>.

*Peter Conlin*is a media lecturer and research associate at the Centre 
for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University. He is currently 
developing a book project entitled/Evitable: The De-obsolescent Future 
of Media and Urban Space/(Routledge Press).

*Valeria Graziano*is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Postdigital 
Cultures, Coventry University. She is co-editor with Kim Trogal of 
‘Repair Matters’, a special issue of the/ephemera: Theory & Politics in 
Organisation/(2019) and convenor of the international project Pirate 
Care (piratecare.net 
<https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpiratecare.net&data=02%7C01%7Cab5796%40coventry.ac.uk%7C5c992245b986401ec2e908d6dc467131%7C4b18ab9a37654abeac7c0e0d398afd4f%7C0%7C0%7C636938592436172634&sdata=J18m6SXnTOXHE0CR7JZADXVqvyfrg%2Fjpuz2DJnxacf0%3D&reserved=0>).
*Gary Hall*is a writer, philosopher and cultural theorist working (and 
making) in the areas of digital media, politics and technology. He is 
Professor of Media in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at Coventry 
University, UK, where he co-directs the Centre for Postdigital Cultures. 
He is the author of a number of books, including/The Inhumanist 
Manifesto/(Techne Lab, 2017),/Pirate Philosophy/(MIT Press, 2016), The 
Uberfication of the University (Minnesota UP, 2016),/Digitize This 
Book!/(Minnesota UP, 2008), and/Culture in Bits/(Continuum, 
2002).http://www.garyhall.info/ 
<https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.garyhall.info%2F&data=02%7C01%7Cab5796%40coventry.ac.uk%7C5c992245b986401ec2e908d6dc467131%7C4b18ab9a37654abeac7c0e0d398afd4f%7C0%7C0%7C636938592436182626&sdata=sru3XqFjJ5GuNMAH2PrcEVRYgMcU%2BybLFiZNO5d8FRs%3D&reserved=0>
*Kaja Marczewska*is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Postdigital 
Cultures, Coventry University, UK. Her research is positioned at the 
intersection of publishing and book cultures, cultural studies, and 
experimental arts and writing. She is the author of/This is not a 
copy/(Bloomsbury Academic 2018),/Book-mobility: cultures of small press 
distribiution/(CUP 2020), and a co-editor of/The Contemporary Small 
Press: Making Publishing Visible/(Palgrave 2020). In 2018, she was a 
Reese Fellow for American Bibliography and the History of the Book in 
the Americas, Terra Foundation fellow, and The Getty Research Institute 
visiting fellow, and will be taking up visiting fellowships at Sallie 
Bingham Centre, Duke University and at Michigan State University later 
this year.
*Marcell Mars*is a research associate at the Centre for Postdigital 
Cultures at Coventry University (UK). Mars is one of the founders of 
Multimedia Institute/MAMA in Zagreb. His research “Ruling Class 
Studies”, started at the Jan van Eyck Academy (2011), examines 
state-of-the-art digital innovation, adaptation, and intelligence 
created by corporations such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and eBay. He 
is a doctoral student at Digital Cultures Research Lab at Leuphana 
University, writing a thesis on “Foreshadowed Libraries”. Together with 
Tomislav Medak he founded Memory of the World/Public Library, for which 
he develops and maintains software infrastructure.
*Tomislav Medak*is a doctoral student at the Centre for Postdigital 
Cultures at Coventry University. Medak is a member of the theory and 
publishing team of the Multimedia Institute/MAMA in Zagreb, as well as 
an amateur librarian for the Memory of the World/Public Library project. 
His research focuses on technologies, capitalist development, and 
postcapitalist transition, particularly on economies of intellectual 
property and unevenness of technoscience. Together with Marcell Mars he 
coedited P/ublic Librar/y and/Guerrilla Open Access/.
*!Mediengruppe Bitnik*are the artists Carmen Weisskopf and Domagoj 
Smoljo. They are contemporary artists working on and with the Internet. 
Their practice expands from the digital to affect physical spaces, often 
intentionally applying loss of control to challenge established 
structures and mechanisms. In early 2013 !Mediengruppe Bitnik sent a 
parcel to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy. 
The parcel contained a camera which broadcast its journey through the 
postal system live on the internet. They describe «Delivery for Mr. 
Assange» as a SYSTEM_TEST and a Live Mail Art Piece. They have also been 
known for sending a bot called «Random Darknet Shopper» on a three-month 
shopping spree in the Darknets where it randomly bought objects like 
Ecstasy and had them sent directly to the gallery space.
*Dr Jamie Woodcock*is a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, 
University of Oxford. He is the author of/Marx at the Arcade/(2019, 
Haymarket) about videogames, and Working The Phones (2017, Pluto), a 
study of a call centre in the UK - both inspired by the workers' 
inquiry. His research focuses on labour, work, the gig economy, 
platforms, resistance, organising, and videogames. He is on the 
editorial board of/Notes from Below/and/Historical 
Materialism/.https://www.jamiewoodcock.net/ 
<https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jamiewoodcock.net%2F&data=02%7C01%7Cab5796%40coventry.ac.uk%7C5c992245b986401ec2e908d6dc467131%7C4b18ab9a37654abeac7c0e0d398afd4f%7C0%7C0%7C636938592436182626&sdata=HSJ4OOov5K3QsuEE9IH5qinF6lY36u0cA%2FvcM57vvgI%3D&reserved=0>

*Work, property, metrics*is a series of seminars, workshops, and talks 
investigating the transformations of work, property relations, and 
mechanisms of social control resulting from the processes of 
digitisation, computerisation, and automation. These transformations are 
reflected in a crisis of institutions responsible for the universal 
access to social goods and services: employment, care, education, 
housing etc. With our research activities we want to investigate, 
support, and develop practices emerging in response to this crisis - 
ranging from alternative organisational models, collective forms of 
work, all the way to refusal. In its first round of events, this series 
is focusing on the institutions responsible for the provision of 
communication, information, and education - the postal service, the 
library, and the university.

*Post Office*is an exercise in imagining counter-institutions in 
response to the crisis of those very institutions. It is an endeavour in 
devising practices that collectively re-configure public infrastructures 
against the onslaught of managerial neoliberalism and technological 
acceleration. As a research collective (connected to the Centre for 
Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University), it is a horizontal 
experiment in knowledge production and action situated between theory 
and technology, politics and poetics, the inside and the outside of the 
university. Post Office follows a methodology of affirmative critique. 
Our projects are both critical and performative: actively changing the 
situations in which they intervene while helping devise 
protagonist-centered approaches to organisation, methodology, and 
technology. We are involved in changing scholarly and creative writing, 
publishing, libraries, open access, universities, cultural production, 
the humanities, technologies, and labour relations, and want to create 
alternatives for a more just, diverse, and equitable future.

-- 

Gary Hall,http://www.garyhall.info
Professor of Media, Coventry University
Director of Open Humanities Press:http://www.openhumanitiespress.org  

LATEST:
'Open Humanities Press – The Inhumanist Manifesto', Journal of Peer Production #13: OPEN, April (2019)
http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-13-open/open-access-bouillabaisse/open-humanities-press-the-inhumanist-manifesto/

‘Pirate Philosophy’, This Is Not A Pipe Podcast (2018)
https://www.tinapp.org/episodes/piratephilosophy

Ãœbercapitalism and What Can Be Done About It (2018)
https://ucubranchsolidaritynetwork.wordpress.com/2018/10/15/branch-activists-handbook-published/






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