Mél Hogan
Biographic Data
| ID | 275188 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mél Hogan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mél |
| FAMILY NAME | Hogan |
| SIGNATURE | HOGAN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Calgary |
| ORCID | 0009-0008-7100-0194 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 75 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Rotting empires
Much has been written about the environmental impacts of artificial intelligence, especially the heavy tolls and costs of manufacturing, building, running, and maintaining the industry’s data infrastructure. Data centres are key to the artificial intelligence industry, as are their energy suppliers. This has meant ongoing reliance on fossil fuels and other extractive energy regimes, renewables, and even a reanimation of coal and nuclear sites to …
The making of critical data center studies
In this article, the authors demonstrate how the data center has become a key site, object, and metaphor for interdisciplinary scholarship of the internet. While the data center is a fabrication of engineering, computer science, and cognate fields, it has been the critical gaze of scholars outside of those industries. Together, this scholarship has established the field of Critical Data Center Studies. Critiques of the data center – often thought…
Getting democracy wrong: How lessons from biotechnology can illuminate limits of the Asilomar AI principles
Recent developments in large language models and computer automated systems more generally (colloquially called ‘artificial intelligence’) have given rise to concerns about potential social risks of AI. Of the numerous industry-driven principles put forth over the past decade to address these concerns, the Future of Life Institute’s Asilomar AI principles are particularly noteworthy given the large number of wealthy and powerful signatories. This…
Environmental media” in the cloud: The making of critical data center art
Despite the numerous projects and exhibitions dedicated to technology and Internet infrastructure, “Data Center Studies” has not yet fully grappled with art’s role in the wider intervention critical scholarship is making via the data center—as object, cultural image, sociotechnical imaginary, site, metaphor, and concept. In this article, I weave in artworks and insights from artists to make a theoretical intervention about what constitutes enviro…
A Marked Absence: Pneumatic Abandonment as Desert Hermeneutic
This paper examines the ways in which the Letters of Ammonas, John Cassian's Conference IV, and the corpus of Macarius-Symeon appropriate and develop the motif of divine abandonment found in St. Antony and shifts it into a distinctly pneumatological key through Scriptural exegesis. Correcting a misconception popularized by Vladimir Lossky, this paper argues for a normative experience of divine abandonment in the Eastern Christian tradition via su…
Matters (and metaphors) of life and death: How DNA storage doubles back on its promise to the world
For this special section on “geographies of the digital,” we explore how DNA‐based data storage is touted as an alternative to traditional storage modalities and pitched by the data storage industry as a more efficient, stable, and long‐term archival solution than that offered by current technologies. In analyzing how DNA is soaked in the language of sustainability, life, and longevity by those trumpeting the new technology, we situate emergent d…
Retrofitted data centres: A new world in the shell of the old
This contribution looks specifically at the process of redeveloping data centre infrastructure: how the value of past capital investments in the built environment can be preserved and multiplied through further capitalist development. We argue that, while the majority of data centres are not placed in these retrofitted industrial buildings, the ones that are indicate a specific spatial logic within the neoliberal order. We show that retrofitting …
Data Segregation and Algorithmic Amplification: A Conversation with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication. She has studied both systems design engineering and English literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. She is author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (Chun, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT, 2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual…
Cheating the Network: How Gamers Play the Infrastructure
Background This article looks at how video game players interact directly with the infrastructure and networks that support digital games. To win, players are no longer simply “cheating the game,” as with traditional behaviour considered deceptive or outside of the established rules, but are instead “cheating the network.” Analysis This distinction between these two types of cheating is important, and should be considered separate types of player…
Zap theory & the generic body
When I first wrote about the body in relation to the signals emitted by our electromagnetic gadgets, I was tentative (Mel Hogan 2018). I worried about contributing media scholarship that either exa
Data is airborne; Data is inborn: The labor of the body in technoecologies
This article presents a feminist argument about the evolution of data storage in relation to the body — from our current state of wirelessness that relies on data centers for processing and containment, to future imaginaries about embedded and embodied storage in our DNA — as technologies of ‘soft surveillance’ that function largely due to a denial of the body tracked and perforated. It begins with an examination of the proliferation of largely i…
Scholarship as Cultural Production in the Neoliberal University: Working Within and Against ‘Deliverables’
This article focuses on the idea of scholarly work as cultural production to help understand how the tensions of precarious, early-career academic employment are articulated on a day-to-day basis in the context of pressures to efficiently produce monetizable ‘deliverables.’ Using a political economy of communication framework and an iterative methodological approach, the authors mobilize examples drawn from a collaborative set of activities they …
Information Ownership and Materiality in an Age of Big Data Surveillance
Can private data “havens,” localized servers, and offline infrastructure empower secure and private user control over data? Contrasting Sealand's counter-surveillance policies with the NSA's Utah Data Center mass surveillance apparatus, the authors analyze how control of the physical location of data centers shapes the possibilities of data agency and ownership. They note that to whom data belongs has become regulated asymmetrically through techn…
Data flows and water woes: The Utah Data Center
Using a new materialist line of questioning that looks at the agential potentialities of water and its entanglements with Big Data and surveillance, this article explores how the recent Snowden revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) have reignited media scholars to engage with the infrastructures that enable intercepting, hosting, and processing immeasurable amounts of data. Focusing on the expansive architecture, location, and reso…
Facebook Data Storage Centers as the Archive’s Underbelly
As the quintessential digital archive, Facebook no longer requires an introduction; its user-base is currently estimated at one billion profiles. On the front end, it is the epitome of the postmodern living archive. Its underbelly, however, remains much less explored and theorized. What kinds of servers are required to host such large amounts of “free” information, offering up data so rapidly, across so many platforms? Taken together, these pragm…
Queer Women and the Net Video: Interview with Mary Bryson & Mél Hogan
A short history of an artifact: In the summer of 2005, Mary Bryson made a short video about her Queer Women and the Net research project (http://www.queerville.ca), without ever having met Mél Hogan. There, Mary made illustrative use of Mél's website (http://www.nomorepotlucks.org), where information was posted about various kiss-ins organized in response to homophobic violence in Montreal. Mél got in touch with Mary early in 2006 to request her …
Data flows and water woes: The Utah Data Center
Using a new materialist line of questioning that looks at the agential potentialities of water and its entanglements with Big Data and surveillance, this article explores how the recent Snowden revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) have reignited media scholars to engage with the infrastructures that enable intercepting, hosting, and processing immeasurable amounts of data. Focusing on the expansive architecture, location, and reso…
Facebook Data Storage Centers as the Archive’s Underbelly
As the quintessential digital archive, Facebook no longer requires an introduction; its user-base is currently estimated at one billion profiles. On the front end, it is the epitome of the postmodern living archive. Its underbelly, however, remains much less explored and theorized. What kinds of servers are required to host such large amounts of “free” information, offering up data so rapidly, across so many platforms? Taken together, these pragm…
Scholarship as Cultural Production in the Neoliberal University: Working Within and Against ‘Deliverables’
This article focuses on the idea of scholarly work as cultural production to help understand how the tensions of precarious, early-career academic employment are articulated on a day-to-day basis in the context of pressures to efficiently produce monetizable ‘deliverables.’ Using a political economy of communication framework and an iterative methodological approach, the authors mobilize examples drawn from a collaborative set of activities they …
The making of critical data center studies
In this article, the authors demonstrate how the data center has become a key site, object, and metaphor for interdisciplinary scholarship of the internet. While the data center is a fabrication of engineering, computer science, and cognate fields, it has been the critical gaze of scholars outside of those industries. Together, this scholarship has established the field of Critical Data Center Studies. Critiques of the data center – often thought…
Information Ownership and Materiality in an Age of Big Data Surveillance
Can private data “havens,” localized servers, and offline infrastructure empower secure and private user control over data? Contrasting Sealand's counter-surveillance policies with the NSA's Utah Data Center mass surveillance apparatus, the authors analyze how control of the physical location of data centers shapes the possibilities of data agency and ownership. They note that to whom data belongs has become regulated asymmetrically through techn…
Environmental media” in the cloud: The making of critical data center art
Despite the numerous projects and exhibitions dedicated to technology and Internet infrastructure, “Data Center Studies” has not yet fully grappled with art’s role in the wider intervention critical scholarship is making via the data center—as object, cultural image, sociotechnical imaginary, site, metaphor, and concept. In this article, I weave in artworks and insights from artists to make a theoretical intervention about what constitutes enviro…
Getting democracy wrong: How lessons from biotechnology can illuminate limits of the Asilomar AI principles
Recent developments in large language models and computer automated systems more generally (colloquially called ‘artificial intelligence’) have given rise to concerns about potential social risks of AI. Of the numerous industry-driven principles put forth over the past decade to address these concerns, the Future of Life Institute’s Asilomar AI principles are particularly noteworthy given the large number of wealthy and powerful signatories. This…
Matters (and metaphors) of life and death: How DNA storage doubles back on its promise to the world
For this special section on “geographies of the digital,” we explore how DNA‐based data storage is touted as an alternative to traditional storage modalities and pitched by the data storage industry as a more efficient, stable, and long‐term archival solution than that offered by current technologies. In analyzing how DNA is soaked in the language of sustainability, life, and longevity by those trumpeting the new technology, we situate emergent d…
Queer Women and the Net Video: Interview with Mary Bryson & Mél Hogan
A short history of an artifact: In the summer of 2005, Mary Bryson made a short video about her Queer Women and the Net research project (http://www.queerville.ca), without ever having met Mél Hogan. There, Mary made illustrative use of Mél's website (http://www.nomorepotlucks.org), where information was posted about various kiss-ins organized in response to homophobic violence in Montreal. Mél got in touch with Mary early in 2006 to request her …
Facebook Data Storage Centers as the Archive’s Underbelly
As the quintessential digital archive, Facebook no longer requires an introduction; its user-base is currently estimated at one billion profiles. On the front end, it is the epitome of the postmodern living archive. Its underbelly, however, remains much less explored and theorized. What kinds of servers are required to host such large amounts of “free” information, offering up data so rapidly, across so many platforms? Taken together, these pragm…
Information Ownership and Materiality in an Age of Big Data Surveillance
Can private data “havens,” localized servers, and offline infrastructure empower secure and private user control over data? Contrasting Sealand's counter-surveillance policies with the NSA's Utah Data Center mass surveillance apparatus, the authors analyze how control of the physical location of data centers shapes the possibilities of data agency and ownership. They note that to whom data belongs has become regulated asymmetrically through techn…
Data flows and water woes: The Utah Data Center
Using a new materialist line of questioning that looks at the agential potentialities of water and its entanglements with Big Data and surveillance, this article explores how the recent Snowden revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) have reignited media scholars to engage with the infrastructures that enable intercepting, hosting, and processing immeasurable amounts of data. Focusing on the expansive architecture, location, and reso…
Scholarship as Cultural Production in the Neoliberal University: Working Within and Against ‘Deliverables’
This article focuses on the idea of scholarly work as cultural production to help understand how the tensions of precarious, early-career academic employment are articulated on a day-to-day basis in the context of pressures to efficiently produce monetizable ‘deliverables.’ Using a political economy of communication framework and an iterative methodological approach, the authors mobilize examples drawn from a collaborative set of activities they …
Data is airborne; Data is inborn: The labor of the body in technoecologies
This article presents a feminist argument about the evolution of data storage in relation to the body — from our current state of wirelessness that relies on data centers for processing and containment, to future imaginaries about embedded and embodied storage in our DNA — as technologies of ‘soft surveillance’ that function largely due to a denial of the body tracked and perforated. It begins with an examination of the proliferation of largely i…
Retrofitted data centres: A new world in the shell of the old
This contribution looks specifically at the process of redeveloping data centre infrastructure: how the value of past capital investments in the built environment can be preserved and multiplied through further capitalist development. We argue that, while the majority of data centres are not placed in these retrofitted industrial buildings, the ones that are indicate a specific spatial logic within the neoliberal order. We show that retrofitting …
Data Segregation and Algorithmic Amplification: A Conversation with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication. She has studied both systems design engineering and English literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. She is author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (Chun, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT, 2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual…
Cheating the Network: How Gamers Play the Infrastructure
Background This article looks at how video game players interact directly with the infrastructure and networks that support digital games. To win, players are no longer simply “cheating the game,” as with traditional behaviour considered deceptive or outside of the established rules, but are instead “cheating the network.” Analysis This distinction between these two types of cheating is important, and should be considered separate types of player…
Zap theory & the generic body
When I first wrote about the body in relation to the signals emitted by our electromagnetic gadgets, I was tentative (Mel Hogan 2018). I worried about contributing media scholarship that either exa
Matters (and metaphors) of life and death: How DNA storage doubles back on its promise to the world
For this special section on “geographies of the digital,” we explore how DNA‐based data storage is touted as an alternative to traditional storage modalities and pitched by the data storage industry as a more efficient, stable, and long‐term archival solution than that offered by current technologies. In analyzing how DNA is soaked in the language of sustainability, life, and longevity by those trumpeting the new technology, we situate emergent d…
Environmental media” in the cloud: The making of critical data center art
Despite the numerous projects and exhibitions dedicated to technology and Internet infrastructure, “Data Center Studies” has not yet fully grappled with art’s role in the wider intervention critical scholarship is making via the data center—as object, cultural image, sociotechnical imaginary, site, metaphor, and concept. In this article, I weave in artworks and insights from artists to make a theoretical intervention about what constitutes enviro…
A Marked Absence: Pneumatic Abandonment as Desert Hermeneutic
This paper examines the ways in which the Letters of Ammonas, John Cassian's Conference IV, and the corpus of Macarius-Symeon appropriate and develop the motif of divine abandonment found in St. Antony and shifts it into a distinctly pneumatological key through Scriptural exegesis. Correcting a misconception popularized by Vladimir Lossky, this paper argues for a normative experience of divine abandonment in the Eastern Christian tradition via su…
Getting democracy wrong: How lessons from biotechnology can illuminate limits of the Asilomar AI principles
Recent developments in large language models and computer automated systems more generally (colloquially called ‘artificial intelligence’) have given rise to concerns about potential social risks of AI. Of the numerous industry-driven principles put forth over the past decade to address these concerns, the Future of Life Institute’s Asilomar AI principles are particularly noteworthy given the large number of wealthy and powerful signatories. This…
The making of critical data center studies
In this article, the authors demonstrate how the data center has become a key site, object, and metaphor for interdisciplinary scholarship of the internet. While the data center is a fabrication of engineering, computer science, and cognate fields, it has been the critical gaze of scholars outside of those industries. Together, this scholarship has established the field of Critical Data Center Studies. Critiques of the data center – often thought…
Rotting empires
Much has been written about the environmental impacts of artificial intelligence, especially the heavy tolls and costs of manufacturing, building, running, and maintaining the industry’s data infrastructure. Data centres are key to the artificial intelligence industry, as are their energy suppliers. This has meant ongoing reliance on fossil fuels and other extractive energy regimes, renewables, and even a reanimation of coal and nuclear sites to …
Computer Science (12 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Political science (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Internet privacy (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism (5 works) · Art (4 works) · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI (4 works) · Law (4 works)