[SIGCIS-Members] CfP: New Media & Society, Special Issue "Digital Twinning"

[thomas.haigh at gmail.com]

Hello SIGCIS,

 

Please find below a CFP for a special issue co-organized by some of the
colleagues I've been working with at Siegen University with the ubiquitous
Wendy Chun.  Abstracts due by the end of the month. For those of you who
don't keep up with the present, I think "digital twin" is the new name for
computer simulation (with the implication of extreme faithfulness that
permits confident decision making, though that claim was often made for
earlier models too). So although the term itself seems to have come from
NASA jargon to the mainstream with dizzying speed there's potentially a case
to be made for a longer history going back at least to the ENIAC Monte Carlo
simulations of 1948. Any questions to
<mailto:christoph.borbach at uni-siegen.de> christoph.borbach at uni-siegen.de,
not to me.

 

Best wishes,


Tom

 

 

CfP: New Media & Society, Special Issue "Digital Twinning"

ed. Christoph Borbach, Wendy Chun, and Tristan Thielmann

 

Datafication in the analogue era followed a different logic than do today's
media processes, with all their entanglements and interdependencies with and
within the 'real' world. Human bodies, system processes, and their data
traces and virtual models are deeply intertwined in current postdigital-or
rather, more-than-human (Lupton 2019)-media cultures. It is surely not a new
idea that data and the technologies of its collection, storage, circulation,
and evaluation are shaping how societies and individuals see themselves. But
it is a novelty that processes of datafication within the context of
'digital twinning' and their future predictions and simulations of
behavior-mostly systems behavior but also human purchasing and movement
behaviors, with their political implications-are fundamentally changing the
methods of production planning, processes, and products. Technologies of
digital twinning ask once more how data practices affect and mold
decision-making within institutions (Vertesi 2020).

'Digital twins' are currently the most important drivers of the fourth
industrial revolution. These ever-more-complex technical products and
processes are now developed and tested in the virtual sphere as software
models before they emerge in the 'real' world. The paradigm of digital media
technologies is therefore subject to fundamental change through the
prevalence of digital twins in industry and research. The digital is no
longer a real-time virtual representation of a real-world physical object:
it is exactly the opposite and concurrently much more than that, allowing
new forms of "premediation" (Grusin 2010), in the analysis of future
performances of objects without the physical presence of the objects.
Digital twinning therefore promises not only the potential of making futures
predictable through recognition and correlation of digital and analog,
virtual and physical (Chun 2021), but the ability to do so without physical
counterparts. Digital twinning is no longer restricted to single
entities-like objects being studied-but allows for modeling complex chains
of co-operations. What is most striking from a media theory perspective is
that technical objects, models, services, operations, or even entire cities,
metro systems, or logistical architectures can be objects of digital
twinning.

Digital twins make clear that the real world is just one possible
realization of the primarily virtual world. At the same time, digital twins
and other haunting 'data doppelgangers' allow overarching data exchange and
cooperation. They are more than pure data, proving once more that so-called
"raw data" does not exist (Bowker 2005; Gitelman 2013). Digital twins
consist of technical and social models of acting objects, and integrate
various embedded sensors related to vital areas of functionality that make
things and processes 'sense-able' (Gabrys 2019). Digital twins can therefore
also include simulations and services, asking anew if there is anything
worldly which may must remain "uncomputable" (Galloway 2021).

Taking digital twinning as an analytic lens, the special issue will also try
to understand aesthetics, politics, genders, and economies of 'data
doubles.' These new symptoms of postdigital media and data cultures differ
from previous motifs of doubles, e.g. literary doppelgangers as in the work
of E. T. A. Hoffmann, among others. Selfies are emblematic of digital data
cultures and their visual regime (Eckel et al. 2018), as are avatar images
in avatar-based gaming (Klevjer 2022), since they are not mere pictorial
representations but digital images of self-perception and self-modeling.
They stand as digital doubles exemplary for the self in extended realities
(XR), self-embodiment in digital spheres, and the continuum between offline
and online (Coleman 2011). Similar to digital twins, digital 'doubles' even
without a physical 'original' can unfold influence, literally, as virtual
influencers or actors such as Hatsune Miku demonstrates.

Media practices of doubling and storing the self might have predigital
histories (Humphreys 2018). But only digital tracking applications can be
regarded as real-time feedback loops that influence human behavior. This can
be seen positively since it transforms the way humans self-optimize, e.g.
their athletic behavior, as quantified self-movement shows. But it can also
be critically reflected from a political standpoint, since it evokes a shift
from individuals to 'dividuals' and an interpretation of human beings as
conglomerates of sensor technology, flesh, and data doubles within
surveillant assemblages (Haggerty and Richard 2000).

To account for this complex technological situation and its social impacts,
the special issue "Digital Twinning" will bring together researchers from
different fields: engineering and social science, informatics and media
studies. The aim is to understand concepts and practices but also politics
and aesthetics of data doubling and digital twinning that are not restricted
to purposes of system and production monitoring, maintenance, and
simulation-that is, processes of digital engineering. We will also expand
the scope, to include real-time interrelations of digital data acquisition
and simulation, on the one hand, and the physical performance of humans,
things, and systems, on the other.

We are seeking abstracts (500 words) for submissions until December 31, 2023
(to be sent to  <mailto:christoph.borbach at uni-siegen.de>
christoph.borbach at uni-siegen.de, subject: "NM&S Special Issue: Digital
Twinning"), that might address-but are not limited to-one or more of the
following topics:

*         how is data agential (in digital twinning)?

*         interrelations and interdependencies between physical and digital
twins and doubles

*         politics, (data) economies, and technologies of digital twinning
and doubling

*         boundaries in the modeling of twins

*         (de)central places of twinning: where is it to be done, and by
whom?

*         twinning as labor: precarious work, and/or precarious for workers?

*         histories of twinning: from science fiction, to NASA, to the
public?

*         future digital practices of twinning

*         imaginaries and aesthetics of twinning

*         gendering and aesthetics of avatars

*         challenges and difficulties of data governance, data rights, and
data sustainability

*         sensor ecologies and their impact on digital twinning

*         media and social theories of digital twinning

*         digital methods, ethnographic, and ethnomethodological approaches
for further research on digital twinning

*         applications for digital twins in the industrial and consumer
metaverse

 

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