The Networks and Power symposium featured panel discussions, keynote
presentations, and interventions by Altman Fellows and Altman Scholars
alongside invited guests. Together these interrogated interrelationships
between networked environments, both old and new, and varied forms of
power. The symposium raised questions about how established forms of
powers are being contested and reconfigured by democratized uses of
networks, as well as the exploitative dimensions of networks as they are
used for surveillance, security, control, and regulation. It begun to
bring questions about contemporary networks into conversation with
transhistorical examples, to show that their dynamics are not only a
pressing issue for today but have deep and perhaps unexpected roots in
the histories of earlier forms of information production and
circulation.
Featuring the following keynote lectures:
“Drone Media,”Lisa Parks, Professor of Film & Media Studies at UC-Santa Barbara and author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual
“Imagining Networks, Feeling Power,” Wendy Chun, Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University and author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics
