Owen G. Parry is one of several researchers who was successful in applying for a training bursary in the 2018-2019 academic year. Owen's bursary award funded his trip to New York City in July 2019 for the Saas Fee Summer Institute of Art programme.

For two weeks in June, I attended the Saas Fee Summer Institute of Art 2019 at the historic Performance Space in New York City, an intensive programme which enabled a rigorous, focused and collaborative environment to develop my research and foster new collaborations and networks. This one-off opportunity would not have been possible without the generous support of a training bursary from the Edinburgh Centre for Data, Culture & Society.

The intensive programme, themed around ‘States of Consciousness in Cognitive Capitalism’, included a specially curated reader accompanying a series of workshops, seminars, demonstration and public lectures with some of the leading experts, artists and theorists in my field. This unparalleled opportunity enabled me to ask important questions related to my research, particularly around “economies of attention and dis-attentions” in digital networks. It offered a critical context through which to discuss “the political potential stored in the complex networked analytics of information and their neural analogue, which are now being fully engaged as apparatuses of control”, as witnessed firsthand in the 2016 U.S. election; as well as exploring how “click bait, cloud analytics, memes, social media and fake news”, have now taken center stage in the process of subjectivation and the interiorization of domination.

This timely opportunity fed directly into my practice based research, and the staging of A Performance Hangout (off offline), a hybrid social and theatrical concept, which explores ‘hanging out’ as an immersive and ambient mode of attentions/dis-attention for these digitally networked times, developed as part of my fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH).

 - Owen G. Parry, IASH Post-doctoral fellow (Digital Scholarship) at IASH, University of Edinburgh, 2018-19.