<nettime-ann> [event] 'the queue project' Public Lecture: Gillian Fuller

["matthew fuller" <fuller@xs4all.nl>]

Public Lecture: Gillian Fuller
(Media, Film and Theatre, UNSW, Australia)
Title:  The rapture of capture: the queue.
Place:  Collegezaal, Overblaak 85, Rotterdam
Time:  18.00hrs
Date:	Wednesday 30th November
Entry:	Gratis, all welcome


How long and for what will people queue?

For Maria Callas at Convent Garden in the early 60s?
For check-in at Heathrow Terminal 4 in July 2004?
For Macdonald's hamburger in Moscow in 1990?
For a fistula operation in Rwanda?
A Dominos Pizza menu to download with a dodgy ADSL connection in 2005?
For a chance at Australian Citizenship in 2001?

Each of these queues form at thresholds where many become, in the 
event of queueing, one. When queues form, the organised traverse from 
one domain to another becomes palpable in the form of a time lag - a 
shift in a temporal rhythm. In the queue one is positioned in 
expectation of access of some kind of threshold encounter - just 
delayed. For those off the network there is not even the 'tyranny of 
hope'.

To think about queues is to think about how the politics of 
distribution move from one body (in the broadest sense of the term) 
to another across multiple thresholds forming a technics of 
connective control. Queue seems so orderly, bringing a sense of 
harmony and justice to regimes of distribution. To stand in a queue 
seems such an obvious and transparent act based on mythical notion 
that first come, first served is socially efficient, even if, 
algorithmically speaking, that may not true.

Queues remain a fundamental architectural principle for networks and 
a form that, despite real-time and alternative networked models like 
BitTorrent, seems to proliferating. Commensurate with the rise in 
excess (and 'personal' service) is scarcity (and the queue). Some 
things stream through thresholds, like commuters on the Singapore 
metro, defty tapping epasses on electronic pillars, others are drip 
fed by bureaucracies and NGOs - each runs to a different rhythm of 
control. In queues, the relationship between intensive and extensive 
time stops being transparent and becomes obvious, systems start 
showing their seams, boundaries start forming in the modes of queues. 
If fluctuations in time present sites of both conflict and routine 
for the shiftworkers, jetsetters and global oligarchies, then queue 
provides a site to ask what are chronopolitics of waiting? That a 
queue is an emergent structure is obvious. But what are the 
conditions, the ecological 'affordances', that enable the queue to 
cohere as a form, which in the process of forming becomes index and 
sign?

BIO:

Gillian Fuller is an academic, writer and lapsed semiotician who 
works in the area of network media and cultural politics. She is 
Senior Lecturer in Media in the School of Media, Film and Theatre, 
UNSW, Australia. She currently publishes in the areas of convergent 
architectures, biopolitics and biometrics, and politics and methods 
of movement. She is co-author of Aviopolis: A book about Airports 
2004, Gillian Fuller & Ross Harley, Blackdog Press: London, and has 
just begun a new project on the politics and methods of distribution 
architectures, called 'the queue project'.


This event is organised by Media Design Research, Piet Zwart 
Institute, Willem de Kooning Academie Hogeschool Rotterdam.
http://www.pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/
http://www.wdka.hro.nl/

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