OPENING KEYNOTE: AMY GOODMAN
10:00 AM
Tishman Auditorium
The New School
66 West 12th Street
Reception and book signing to follow in Wollman Hall.
CLOSING KEYNOTE: DOMINIC PETTMAN
"After the Beep: Answering Machines and Creaturely Life"
6:00 PM
Wollman Hall
The New School
65 West 11th Street
Enter at 66 W 12th St.
Goodman is the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the 'Alternative Nobel Prize' for "developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media."
Goodman is the co-author with her brother, journalist David Goodman, of three New York Times bestsellers, Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times (2008), Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back (2006) and The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them (2004). She writes a weekly column (also produced as an audio podcast) syndicated by King Features, for which she was recognized in 2007 with the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Reporting.
Goodman is the winner of the 2007 Gracie Award for Individual Achievement for a Public Broadcasting Host, from American Women in Radio and Television, and is a 2007 honoree with the Paley Center/Museum of Television and Radio's She Made It Collection, which "celebrates the achievements and preserves the legacy of great women writers, directors, producers, journalists, sportscasters, and executives." She was the 2006 recipient of the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. Her daily reporting and groundbreaking work from Nigeria and East Timor has won numerous awards, including the George Polk Award, Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting, and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award. She has also received awards from the Associated Press, United Press International, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and Project Censored.
Dominic Pettman is Associate Professor of Culture & Media, Eugene Lang College, New School. He is the author of After the Orgy: Toward a Politics of Exhaustion (SUNY, 2002), Avoiding the Subject: Media, Culture and the Object (with Justin Clemens: AUP, 2004), and Love and Other Technologies: Retrofitting Eros for the Information Age (Fordham, 2006). He is currently working on a new book on "media machines and species being."
Dr. Pettman's address, After the Beep: Answering Machines and Creaturely Life, explores the different ways in which the capacity to "respond" has been figured, and reconfigured, through different technologies over the past century and a half. Beginning with a rather harrowing telephone message, sampled by Glaswegian band Aerogramme, in which an anonymous woman pleas into the receiver for help, the discussion seeks to both locate and complicate the "human element" captured in recordings of the voice. Using Eric Santner's notion of "creaturely life" as a conceptual lens, I argue that the melancholy poetics which often accompanies the sub-field of media hauntology are still too anthropocentric, given the continued investment in human exceptionalism (albeit of an abject kind). Rather, the cybernetic interdependence of humans, animals, and machines should be fully acknowledged and appreciated, in order to avoid the conflation of pathos with the human; thereby perpetuating Descartes' (other) error: the assumption that animals and/or machines can react, but not respond. Finally, I consider the Voyager Golden Record-a collection of images and audio, curated by NASA in 1977 for the edification of would-be curious extra-terrestrials-as the intergalactic equivalent of the phone message which began the piece. That is, as an SOS from a troubled species which has yet to come to terms with the identity crisis provoked by exponential technological mediation.