New paper by Michael Dieter and Nathaniel Tkacz published in the journal Computational Culture, “The Patterning of Finance/Security: A Designerly Walkthrough of Challenger Banking Apps.”

Abstract: Culture is being ‘appified’. Diverse, pre-existing everyday activities are being redesigned so they happen with and through apps. While apps are often encountered as equivalent icons in apps stores or digital devices, the processes of appification – that is, the actions required to turn something into an app – vary significantly. In this article, we offer a comparative analysis of a number of ‘challenger’ banking apps in the United Kingdom. As a retail service, banking is highly regulated and banks must take steps to identify and verify their customers before entering a retail relationship. Once established, this ‘secured’ financial identity underpins a lot of everyday economic activity. Adopting the method of the walkthrough analysis, we study the specific ways these processes of identifying and verifying the identity of the customer (now the user) occur through user onboarding. We argue that banking apps provide a unique way of binding the user to an identity, one that combines the affordances of smart phones with the techniques, knowledge and patterns of user experience design. With the appification of banking, we see new processes of security folded into the everyday experience of apps. Our analysis shows how these binding identities are achieved through what we refer to as the patterning of finance/security. This patterning is significant, moreover, given its availability for wider circulation beyond the context of retail banking apps.

Link to the paper: http://computationalculture.net/the-patterning-of-finance-security/

Citation: Michael Dieter and Nathaniel Tkacz. “The Patterning of Finance/Security: A Designerly Walkthrough of Challenger Banking Apps.” Computational Culture 7 (20th January 2020). http://computationalculture.net/the-patterning-of-finance-security/.

In the field of media art, mailinglists such as nettime, -empyre-, SPECTRE and CRUMB have functioned as important para-institutional formations that have influentially played host to a diverse community of artists, critics, curators, activists and academics since the 1990s. These lists, we suggest, are of particular epistemological and methodological interest for the field of internet history due to their critical and experimental nature. This stems mainly from the cultivation of highly reflexive, at times ambivalent, stance towards the technical, social and aesthetic limits of such networking activity itself. In this sense, they present unique objects of study for exploring what difference computational methods might make for understanding mailinglist cultures over time; what we refer to in this article, drawing on Wolfgang Ernst, as counting and recounting the past. Our aim in this paper is, therefore, to both introduce these lists to the emerging field of internet history and scope out medium-specific methods that take the measure of concepts, discourses, cohorts, and events that have taken place through them over time.

Naomi Waltham-Smith discusses her field-recording praxis examining the opposition to the resurgence of the far right and, via the thought of Jacques Derrida, analyses the intimate yet transforming relationship between listening and democracy.

Weblink: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/704269

We spoke to Edvin Dudinskij about his CIM MSc dissertation in which he investigates the use of visualisation in Science Fiction movies.