[url] Seminar: Platform as Method: Strategies for Counter-Cartographic Research in Beijing, Ningbo and Shanghai

[Ned Rossiter]

'Platform as Method: Strategies for Counter-Cartographic Research in  
Beijing, Ningbo and Shanghai'

Seminar: Laboratory on Urban Research, http://urbanresearchlab.net/

Presenter: Ned Rossiter

Date: Sunday 25 April, 2010
Time: 2-4pm
Venue: Xindanwei, 4C, Bld 4 in Shanghai Hub No. 727 Dingxi Lu,  
Changning, http://xindanwei.com

Abstract
Platforms organize. They bring bodies and brains into relation. While  
they require highly distributed formats of digital communication and  
translation, platforms must connect with off-line worlds. Practices  
of collaborative constitution hold a generative capacity that invent  
new institutional forms. When multiplied across time and space,  
platforms connect seemingly disparate events along circuits of  
experience and experimentation. The work of platforms at once tests  
and produces concepts. Platforms address contingency and movements as  
constitutive methods of analysis and organization.

This paper asks how the organization of platforms can serve as a  
research tool and method for transcultural mapping in urban settings.  
Taking examples from urban research projects in Beijing, Ningbo and  
Shanghai, the paper investgiates how the city becomes the site of a  
research platform that combines online and offline methods to gather  
researchers from across the world and bring them into collaborative  
relation with local participants through workshops, site visits,  
symposia, exhibitions, mailing lists, blogs and publishing. The aim  
is to flee the data-mined, self-referential universe of social  
networking sites by building a multilingual environment for  
collaborative invention and the common production of knowledge.

Bio
Ned Rossiter is an Australian media theorist and Associate Professor  
of Network Cultures, University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China and  
Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Cultural Research,  
University of Western Sydney, Australia. He is author of Organized  
Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions (2006) and  
co-editor of numerous volumes, including (with Geert Lovink)  
MyCreativity Reader: A Critique of Creative Industries (2007).
http://orgnets.net / http://nedrossiter.org