Looking forward to presenting at Porting Media II, happening in Montreal October 12-14. I immediately loved the whole concept for this conference when I saw the call: Porting Media is a conference and workshop that draws on the nuances of the word “port” to investigate the transportation, translation, and reconfiguration of media within particular sites. Porting is a concept and metaphor useful for rethinking discussions of circulation and infrastructure; media transposition (or transmedia); game and cell phone cultures of portability; media archaeological approaches to portable technologies of transmission and telecommunication; and the porting of paradigms of analysis across different geographies and institutions. Thus, porting draws together multiple phenomena that participants will investigate together, in a manner that cuts across these multiple sites of inquiry. My paper is called “Import/Export: Tracking Authenticities in Motion.” I’ll be trying on some new ideas as part of ongoing work on authentication devices.

I recently presented some early work on my authentication devices research, first at SCMS then at CCA. Below a bit of detail from both. Article version in the works. SCMS March 2017 –  “Security Matters and Devices: Towards an Archaeology of Irreproducible Media” This paper uses and questions the rhetoric of security to propose that systems of legitimation and control demand a continuous supply of black box technologies designed to be secretive, opaque, and extremely difficult to copy. Vigilance over amateur access, technical disclosure, and reproducibility become politicized matters of “national security,” requiring an alternate media history that hinges on a notion of irreproducibility. Excerpt: …The ongoing need to complexify security devices to stay ahead of the copy-er has resulted in a particular alterna-tale within the story of media technologies that is driven not by ambitions of mass production or consumption, by ever-expanding accessibilities and usabilities, but rather by the controlled management and administration of legitimacy. Security devices are not just used by states, but by industries for objects of all kinds: credit cards, circuit …