PIS – Performing Identities Studies Seminars 2022-2023: "The Return of Matter" (second part)

Andrea Miller (Pennsylvania State University)

Sense-making through Simulation: Architectures and Aes-thetics of the Cyber Ecosystem

March 14, 2023, h. 17:00-19:00.

Teams Virtual Room. In order to partecipate please use this link Teams: https://tinyurl.com/25f8p7yw

Abstract
Spurred by the 2020 relocation of US Army Cyber Command to Fort Gordon, Georgia, the $100 million Georgia Cyber Center is the largest state-sponsored US cybersecurity center to date. An expansive collaboration between government, higher education, and the tech industry, the campus aims to bridge workforce development gaps in cybersecurity and usher in a new period of regional economic prosperity for the surrounding city of Augusta. This presentation draws from ethnographic research surrounding the grand opening of the Georgia Cyber Center’s Shaffer MacCartney Building in January 2019 to analyze how what my interlocutors term the “cyber ecosystem” coheres through architectural and aesthetic simulations that together work through taxonomizing logics of race, threat, and inclusion. Within the Georgia Cyber Center, simulations comprise the performative and imaginative infrastructures for the liberal US security state, where principles of fun, interactivity, inclusivity, and flow simultaneously conceal and animate the military and police applications of the cybersecurity center and its digital wargames. Charting the embedded logics of cybernetic ecology that pervade contemporary cybersecurity practices and forms, I argue that the simulation of a coherent cyber ecosystem tending toward homeostasis belies competing technoscientific and political sensibilities that shape its conditions of emergence.

The cycle of meetings is part of the didactic proposal of the Doctorate in Philosophy and Human Sciences.

The meeting will be held in English.

Participation is strongly recommended to students of the Doctoral School in Philosophy and Human Sciences and to students of the Doctoral School “The Human Mind and its Explanations: Language, Brain, and Reasoning”.

Everyone interested is welcome to attend.