What can new media theory learn from the history of the body-as-medium in revolutionary times? What insights can the Arab world contribute to media theory? In this paper I argue that a theoretical expansion of the metaphor of virality from the biological and digital to the biopolitical sphere is a promising contribution of to new media theory at large. To reach that conclusion, this paper grapples with these questions through an analysis of communication in three revolutionary periods: the Egyptian Revolution (1919) and the Arab Uprisings (2010-), and as a historical and geographical counterpoint, the French revolution (1789). The paper develops a comparative approach to media theory that considers the history of revolutionary communication across historical periods, geographical areas, and media platforms. Based on an extensive theoretical and historical review, and one year of field research in the Middle East about the Arab uprisings, I will pursue the argument that though in all three periods and sites, revolutionaries used vastly different media against various kinds of oppressive power, the communicative role the body played in all three revolutionary periods remained largely constant. Theoretically, I pair works (Bakhtin, Boas, Butler, Chebel, Elias, Foucault, Haraway) that theorizes the historical evolution of the body and its cultural and political ramifications, with art history work on the nude (Berger, Clark, Knead, Outram), with literature on the body as a symbolic-communication space in political doctrine, revolutionary times and cultural transformations (Belting, De Baecque, Kantorowicz, Kittler, Outram). At once central and alternative to the media that humans have developed throughout history, the body enables a new approach to the history of communication because as a medium, I will argue, it has remained relatively constant since at least the French Revolution, while other communication media have undergone radical transformations. A focus on revolutionary periods is useful because in such times the human body is under pressure to utilize the widest possible range of its capacities, including communicative capacities. Focusing on the history of the communicative body, I conclude, enables a new media theory grounded in a multidisciplinary exploration of the longue durée, eschewing the twin ontological and epistemological traps of technological determinism and historical presentism. A reconceptualization of virality, as manifested during revolution, along biopolitical lines, enables a critical engagement with the data turn.

This critical theory/production presentation will investigate revolutionary and innovative software developments and open source movement in Arabic. Since 2004 there has been a growing number of posts in Arabic by bloggers in the Arab world using the space as a site of information distribution and organizing, and the emergence of social media personas throughout the Arabic speaking world. In Gaza, activists like @Gazamom rose into the public eye through her tweets on the 2008 war. At the same time there were prestigious academic institutions already beginning to analyze this blogosphere. In 2009, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Information and Society published this groundbreaking, article: “Mapping the Arab Blogosphere: Politics, Culture, and Dissent” where they published attractive data visualizations, however, nowhere in the article do they reference the blogs themselves. Unfortunately, these two trends—one organized by activists and one by academics—seemed to run parallel to each other rather than converging. By providing analysis through archival and media analytics, this presentation works to fill this critical gap between academics and activists. This paper will examine the various institutional contexts for “knowledge production” within the field of Arab media studies and methods for producing arguments in both written and visual/aural texts.The production and consumption of digital and social media reveal and challenge the boundaries and frictions between art, technology, and scholarship. Addressing both the potential and limitations of these archival and media practices provides a unique opportunity to reflect on mutlidisciplinarity and the digital humanities for critical and creative research and production, to engender interchange between approaches and modes, and to set standards for critical and creative engagement and production.

Algorithmic artworks make systems of information perceptible. Code crystallizes into images, but code is itself produced by humans in historical circumstances. Only a few contemporary Arab media artists make the algorithmic structure of their media the subject of their art. I attribute this to an ingrained skepticism about top-down structures, systems, surveillance, control. Those Arab artists who do examine algorithmic structures emphasize the delicacy of computer and other networks and their reliance on human agents to build and maintain them. These works get their strength from laboriously human-built databases and visible human tinkering. Their practices discredit or deconstruct corporate and state archives, networks, and surveillance systems. Instead they draw attention to the agency of individuals, self-organized collectives, and archival materials. In this way they make visible the processes whereby material life is distilled into information, which in turn is sculpted like plastic form. For example, Saudi artist Ahmed Mater studies the infrastructure of Mecca’s algorithmic patterns in Artificial Light (2012). Moroccan artist Mounir Fatmi’s video installations, including Les Temps Modernes, une Histoire de la Machine (2010) and Speed City (2010) investigate the performative function of holy algorithms, pious sayings in decorative kufic, naskhi, and thuluth script by building them into slightly menacing machine- and cityscapes. The fragility of human algorithms reveals itself in Egyptian artist Magdi Mustafa’s The Surface of Spectral Shattering (2014), a 600-square-meter installation that evokes Cairo's electrical grid. Video works and live performances by other artists use analytic software to extract patterns from social media, making perceptible the emergent agency of enormous numbers of individual humans. Selected references Galison, Peter. “Images Scatter into Data, Data Gather into Images,” in Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art, ed. Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour (Karlsruhe: ZKM, 2002), 300-322. Goriunova, Olga, and Alexei Shulgin, "Glitch," in Software Studies: A Lexicon, ed. Matthew Fuller (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). Ladwig, Patrice, Rocardo Roque, Oliver Tappe, Christoph Kohl, and Cristiana Bastos. "Fieldwork Between Folders: Fragments, Traces, and the Ruins of the Colonial Archive," Max Planck Institute Working Papers, no. 141 (2012), 4.

This paper entangles the often hyperbolic debates surrounding the exceptionalism of virtuality and how they inform new modes of communication and embodiment. By examining memes as both sites and products of "co-creational semiosis," I argue that temporality and spatiality speak not to the uniqueness of new media utterances but rather to the expanded scope of mundane practice. That said, mundaneness is not meant to suggest replicability, repetition, and a lack of idiosyncrasy. Rather it is a function of the totality of individuated and collective self-expression that occurs in the most experientially situated way. By looking at memes generated in and about Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi, Lebanese, and Palestinian social and political milieus, the paper emphasizes the extent to which the study of memes informs our understanding of positionality and agency, particularly in relation to authority. Meaning constructed, comprehended, and learned through the contested realm of memes in the Arab world should be seen not as a function of the marketability of ideas through virality, but rather as fundamental reconfiguration of the political economy of communication in the social media and an irreverent dismissal of discursive monopolies. While the political narrativity embedded in memes may reflect status quo, counterrevolutionary, pro-establishment, or neoliberal tendencies (in some cases even the co-option of their critical perspectives), it is imperative to not overlook their disaggregated multi-sited authorship and transmutability as a theoretical premise for a practiced, albeit utopian, critical imaginary.

The elapsed time between the occurrence of an event and a critical mass of reporting on it has decreased considerably, setting off social media and a variety of other dissemination conduits in an exponentially more powerful manner and within hours, sometimes minutes after the event. If you can get your voice heard or across within this storm, you have already influenced the manner in which a story circulates, even if the analysis or reporting is sub-standard or inadequate. If, however, even with a bit of a delay, you are able to provide substantive and sustained analysis, you not only can influence the life-cycle of a story or an event, or influence the initial perception of a greater number of people’s, but you can indeed set a references point against which further reporting is measured within particular circles. This is what we were able to do at Jadaliyya with respect to several important events, from Egypt to Bahrain to Turkey—admittedly, in reference to certain audiences, primarily the academic audiences. The story of creating the Jadaliyya Turkey Page, and the aftermath, right around June 2013, is instructive, as we were able not only to beat other more powerful venues in reporting the events, but also provide the analytical context within which events took place, thereby capturing the attention and interest of the more informed observers, and much of academia. The important takeaway here is that these new forms of knowledge production are not just filling a gap between academia and the general public: they are also slowly redefining what constitutes standards in both realms (journalism and academia) by not only producing better knowledge, but also by scrutinizing the process of knowledge production.