Luke Heemsbergen
Biographic Data
| ID | 3079985 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Luke Heemsbergen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Luke |
| FAMILY NAME | Heemsbergen |
| SIGNATURE | HEEMSBERGEN L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Deakin University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8600-5280 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 23 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
There’s (not) an App for that: Situating smartphones, Excel and the techno-political interfaces and infrastructures of digital solutions for Covid-19
This paper focuses on the operational-infrastructural puzzles of mHealth via COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps (CTA). Significant literature exists on user adoption of the platformisation of public health during the pandemic, but there has been limited consideration of how those responsible for implementing CTA design, deployment, and use of public health infrastructures did so. We redress this imbalance by exploring some of the politics and practica…
Industries of Infrastructural Futures, Automated Cultures, and Algorithmic Dynamics
We approach the conference topic of industry through four studies that explore a new media landscape where value and power are increasingly produced through the operalisation of machinic and affective relations and subjectivities. We explore technologies of automation, artificial intelligence and algorithmic regimes and the new possibilities for enacting and imagining political futures that they afford. The papers focus on four case studies: WeCh…
Dying and Being Dead in Xr: Immersive Rehearsals of Death; Affective Artefacts Post-Life
We offer in-depth theorisation of two multi-site case studies of dying and being dead in Extended Reality (XR) to investigate immersive death experiences facilitated by these media. Our observations, discussion and critique underscore an emergent and nuanced interplay between spatial technologies and death encounters, their linked phenomenological cultural constructions, and the emerging industry that channels these phenomenon. XR are media techn…
Algorithmic Performance Management in Higher Education: Viva! 365 Ways of Surveillance
This paper maps the emergence and consequences of automated Algorithmic Performance Management (APM) in the context of higher education. After reviewing the evolution of productivity management in academia, it argues that surveillance via APM shifts expectations not just about effectiveness at work but also about how work, and the good worker, come to be defined. In our paradigmatic case study of Office 365, we specify how the automated surveilla…
Techno-Political Promises of Pandemic Management: A Situation of Apps and Excel in Public Health
This article considers the politics and practicalities of responding to the COVID crisis with ‘an app for that’. It shows how seductive solutionism in times of crisis created political impetus to direct the public health response to contact tracing through Contact Tracing Apps (CTA). Rather than focus on user-based concerns (uptake, privacy, etc.), we’ve investigated how apps interface with complex systems and infrastructures of public health. Ou…
Vernacular Pedagogies for the Synthetic Media Age
This paper draws on our research into the cultures of production surrounding the development of deepfakes and use of other forms of generative AI across public sites such as GitHub and YouTube, and subsequent reflective classroom experimentation and learning. Expanding on the notion of ‘vernacular pedagogies’ – informal and in situ education and relational literacy work – we propose a set of approaches for widening participation and involvement i…
Making Climate Change Tangible in Augmented Reality Media: Hello My Black Balloon
This research insight paper considers how augmented reality (AR) can be used in climate change communication from an organizational perspective. Its reported case study finds AR media helped configure a novel advocacy position for the commissioning organization in situ, as well as providing opportunity to make data meaningful and tangible for audiences. It reflects on how AR localizes and spatializes data in new ways by drawing on current literat…
Studying WeChat Official Accounts with novel 'backend-in' and 'traceback' methods: Walking through platforms back-to-front and past-to-present
The paper presents a methodology to understand WeChat Official Accounts (WOAs) from their backend to their frontend, and from tracing the platform's history to its present. Our 'Backend-in method' proposes to study platform governance in the meso - between macro political economic concerns and the micro (and usually mobile) user-interface mediation. It shows how including backend platform media practices deepen ethnographic understandings of plat…
Introduction to algorithmic antagonisms: Resistance, reconfiguration, and renaissance for computational life
Introduction to algorithmic antagonisms: Resistance, reconfiguration, and renaissance for computational life
Commercial and Research Clustering of Augmented Reality: Discourses and Divides Between Ar Apps and Applications
Although the majority of Augmented Reality (AR) scholarship is based in Computer Science disciplines, it is nevertheless important to consider emergent trends in AR discourses as research and development shifts from technology labs to media markets. While technical understandings of AR are necessary, they are insufficient to understand how networked spatial computing is augmenting everyday life. In response, this paper maps and compares two speci…
Dark
This issue of M/C Journal rejects the association of darkness with immorality. In digital communication, the possibilities of darkness are greater than simple fears of what is hidden in online networks. Instead, new work in an emerging field of “dark social” studies’ consider “dark” as holding the potential for autonomy away from the digital visibilities that pervade economic, political, and surveillance logics of the present age. We shall not be…
Digging in Crypto-Communities’ Future-Making: From Dark to Doge
Introduction This article situates the dark as a liminal and creative space of experimentation where tensions are generative and people tinker with emerging technologies to create alternative futures. Darkness need not mean chaos and fear of violence – it can mean privacy and protection. We define dark as an experimental space based upon uncertainties rather than computational knowns (Bridle) and then demonstrate via a case study of cryptocurrenc…
Conceptualising Augmented Reality: From virtual divides to mediated dynamics
Although Augmented Reality (AR) scholarship is largely defined through technocentric boundary work that delineates the virtual from the real, it is nevertheless vital to consider experiential conceptualisations of AR as mediating the human–physical environment, as this makes visible for analysis specific properties that afford specific dynamics of augmented publics. We consider how AR mediates the environment in ways previous media could not, ide…
The electrified social and its dark alternatives: Policing and politics in the computational age
This article contrasts the dark with the electrified light of datafied life to bring into relief the impact of data surveillance upon social transformation. Our argument is that darkness remains fundamental to creative social experimentation and thus to a society’s capacity for change and sustained transformation. This argument might seem antithetical to the age of information. Yet, we find darkness encourages exploratory forms of engagement, int…
Comparative analysis of China's Health Code, Australia's Covidsafe and New Zealand's Covid Tracer Surveillance Apps: A New Corona of Public Health Governmentality
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown of cities worldwide generated a dramatic increase in the use of public health trac(k)ing technologies. This article presents an empirical analysis of China's Health Code on WeChat and Alipay, Australia's COVIDSafe and New Zealand's COVID Tracer. We ask: how does app-based public health monitoring differ from prior forms of state tracking and corporate surveillance, and interface with …
VPNs as boundary objects of the internet: (Mis)trust in the Translation(s)
Through empirical methods that walkthrough a typical user experience for acquiring virtual private network (VPN) services, this paper attempts to answer the question of how we come to trust, use and govern VPNs
Secret Killers “After Wikileaks”: Mapping, Evolutions, and Taxonomy of Radical Leaking
This paper is concerned with mapping the socio-material ecosystems of online leaks projects that followed WikiLeaks. The period of initial popularisation/infamy of WikiLeaks (2006-2015) correlates with an emergence of over 90 less-known radical online disclosure projects designed to ""Kill Secrets"" (Greenberg 2012). We offer the first systematic study of the decentralised and widely disparate ecosystem of leaks projects to build a taxonomy of le…
Digital swadeshi and 3D printing intellectual property in India: The multi-level perspective, causal layered analysis and backcasting
D-printed Futures of Manufacturing, Social Change and Technological Innovation in China and Singapore: The Ghost of a Massless Future
This article outlines preliminary findings from a futures forecasting exercise where participants in Shenzhen and Singapore considered the socio-technological construction of 3D printing in terms of work and social change. We offered participants ideal political-economic futures across local–global knowledge and capital–commons dimensions, and then had them backcast the contextual waypoints across markets, culture, policy, law and technology dime…
Digital Transactions in Asia: Economic, Informational, and Social Exchanges
Killing secrets from Panama to Paradise: Understanding the Icij through bifurcating communicative and political affordances
This Machine Kills Secrets is how Greenberg explains the widespread adoption of digital encryption and anonymity tools in practices of disclosure. We consider how that machine works, to the extent that new and sustained political practices in society have emerged through digital disclosures. We offer the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) as a paradigmatic case to inform new metaphors of what disclosure is and what it do…
Leaking Boats and Borders: The virtu of surveilling Australia’s refugee population
When refugees displaced to Australia’s offshore detention do speak, it is through surveillance upended through publicity and violations of privacy. Weak legal rights to privacy in Australia juxtapose the increasing secrecy under which the Australian state operates its own offshore detention centres (Manus Island and Nauru) while increasing the mandate of data retention at home. Australia’s institutional context offers visibility to these concerns…
Designing hues of transparency and democracy after WikiLeaks: Vigilance to vigilantes and back again
This article offers an interpretive critique of the political affordances created through iterations of the WikiLeaks project. The research shows that delineated phases of the WikiLeaks transparency project often correlate with specific paradigms of digital democracy that were previously enunciated in this journal by Lincoln Dahlberg. The research builds upon and extends Dahlberg’s democratic paradigms by comparing new objects against the typolog…
The power of precision air strikes and social media feeds in the 2012 Israel–Hamas conflict: ‘Targeting Transparency’
This article analyses the evolving uses of social media during wartime through the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) Spokesperson Facebook and Twitter accounts. The conflict between Israel and Hamas-affiliated groups in November 2012 has generated interesting data about social media use by a sovereign power in wartime and the resultant networked discourse. Facebook data is examined for effective patterns of dissemination through both content analysis a…
New routes to power: Towards a typology of power mediation
This article is concerned with a particular debate in mediation literature, revolving around the merit and necessity of power as a strategy employed by third parties in their efforts to negotiate a successful resolution to conflict. We argue that by subscribing to a one-dimensional spectrum of pure-to-power mediation, students of mediation have neglected the development of how power is conceptualised and operates within the changing dynamics of c…
Killing secrets from Panama to Paradise: Understanding the Icij through bifurcating communicative and political affordances
This Machine Kills Secrets is how Greenberg explains the widespread adoption of digital encryption and anonymity tools in practices of disclosure. We consider how that machine works, to the extent that new and sustained political practices in society have emerged through digital disclosures. We offer the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) as a paradigmatic case to inform new metaphors of what disclosure is and what it do…
The power of precision air strikes and social media feeds in the 2012 Israel–Hamas conflict: ‘Targeting Transparency’
This article analyses the evolving uses of social media during wartime through the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) Spokesperson Facebook and Twitter accounts. The conflict between Israel and Hamas-affiliated groups in November 2012 has generated interesting data about social media use by a sovereign power in wartime and the resultant networked discourse. Facebook data is examined for effective patterns of dissemination through both content analysis a…
Introduction to algorithmic antagonisms: Resistance, reconfiguration, and renaissance for computational life
Introduction to algorithmic antagonisms: Resistance, reconfiguration, and renaissance for computational life
Comparative analysis of China's Health Code, Australia's Covidsafe and New Zealand's Covid Tracer Surveillance Apps: A New Corona of Public Health Governmentality
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown of cities worldwide generated a dramatic increase in the use of public health trac(k)ing technologies. This article presents an empirical analysis of China's Health Code on WeChat and Alipay, Australia's COVIDSafe and New Zealand's COVID Tracer. We ask: how does app-based public health monitoring differ from prior forms of state tracking and corporate surveillance, and interface with …
Designing hues of transparency and democracy after WikiLeaks: Vigilance to vigilantes and back again
This article offers an interpretive critique of the political affordances created through iterations of the WikiLeaks project. The research shows that delineated phases of the WikiLeaks transparency project often correlate with specific paradigms of digital democracy that were previously enunciated in this journal by Lincoln Dahlberg. The research builds upon and extends Dahlberg’s democratic paradigms by comparing new objects against the typolog…
Studying WeChat Official Accounts with novel 'backend-in' and 'traceback' methods: Walking through platforms back-to-front and past-to-present
The paper presents a methodology to understand WeChat Official Accounts (WOAs) from their backend to their frontend, and from tracing the platform's history to its present. Our 'Backend-in method' proposes to study platform governance in the meso - between macro political economic concerns and the micro (and usually mobile) user-interface mediation. It shows how including backend platform media practices deepen ethnographic understandings of plat…
Leaking Boats and Borders: The virtu of surveilling Australia’s refugee population
When refugees displaced to Australia’s offshore detention do speak, it is through surveillance upended through publicity and violations of privacy. Weak legal rights to privacy in Australia juxtapose the increasing secrecy under which the Australian state operates its own offshore detention centres (Manus Island and Nauru) while increasing the mandate of data retention at home. Australia’s institutional context offers visibility to these concerns…
Digital swadeshi and 3D printing intellectual property in India: The multi-level perspective, causal layered analysis and backcasting
New routes to power: Towards a typology of power mediation
This article is concerned with a particular debate in mediation literature, revolving around the merit and necessity of power as a strategy employed by third parties in their efforts to negotiate a successful resolution to conflict. We argue that by subscribing to a one-dimensional spectrum of pure-to-power mediation, students of mediation have neglected the development of how power is conceptualised and operates within the changing dynamics of c…
New routes to power: Towards a typology of power mediation
This article is concerned with a particular debate in mediation literature, revolving around the merit and necessity of power as a strategy employed by third parties in their efforts to negotiate a successful resolution to conflict. We argue that by subscribing to a one-dimensional spectrum of pure-to-power mediation, students of mediation have neglected the development of how power is conceptualised and operates within the changing dynamics of c…
Designing hues of transparency and democracy after WikiLeaks: Vigilance to vigilantes and back again
This article offers an interpretive critique of the political affordances created through iterations of the WikiLeaks project. The research shows that delineated phases of the WikiLeaks transparency project often correlate with specific paradigms of digital democracy that were previously enunciated in this journal by Lincoln Dahlberg. The research builds upon and extends Dahlberg’s democratic paradigms by comparing new objects against the typolog…
The power of precision air strikes and social media feeds in the 2012 Israel–Hamas conflict: ‘Targeting Transparency’
This article analyses the evolving uses of social media during wartime through the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) Spokesperson Facebook and Twitter accounts. The conflict between Israel and Hamas-affiliated groups in November 2012 has generated interesting data about social media use by a sovereign power in wartime and the resultant networked discourse. Facebook data is examined for effective patterns of dissemination through both content analysis a…
Leaking Boats and Borders: The virtu of surveilling Australia’s refugee population
When refugees displaced to Australia’s offshore detention do speak, it is through surveillance upended through publicity and violations of privacy. Weak legal rights to privacy in Australia juxtapose the increasing secrecy under which the Australian state operates its own offshore detention centres (Manus Island and Nauru) while increasing the mandate of data retention at home. Australia’s institutional context offers visibility to these concerns…
Killing secrets from Panama to Paradise: Understanding the Icij through bifurcating communicative and political affordances
This Machine Kills Secrets is how Greenberg explains the widespread adoption of digital encryption and anonymity tools in practices of disclosure. We consider how that machine works, to the extent that new and sustained political practices in society have emerged through digital disclosures. We offer the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) as a paradigmatic case to inform new metaphors of what disclosure is and what it do…
D-printed Futures of Manufacturing, Social Change and Technological Innovation in China and Singapore: The Ghost of a Massless Future
This article outlines preliminary findings from a futures forecasting exercise where participants in Shenzhen and Singapore considered the socio-technological construction of 3D printing in terms of work and social change. We offered participants ideal political-economic futures across local–global knowledge and capital–commons dimensions, and then had them backcast the contextual waypoints across markets, culture, policy, law and technology dime…
Digital Transactions in Asia: Economic, Informational, and Social Exchanges
VPNs as boundary objects of the internet: (Mis)trust in the Translation(s)
Through empirical methods that walkthrough a typical user experience for acquiring virtual private network (VPN) services, this paper attempts to answer the question of how we come to trust, use and govern VPNs
Secret Killers “After Wikileaks”: Mapping, Evolutions, and Taxonomy of Radical Leaking
This paper is concerned with mapping the socio-material ecosystems of online leaks projects that followed WikiLeaks. The period of initial popularisation/infamy of WikiLeaks (2006-2015) correlates with an emergence of over 90 less-known radical online disclosure projects designed to ""Kill Secrets"" (Greenberg 2012). We offer the first systematic study of the decentralised and widely disparate ecosystem of leaks projects to build a taxonomy of le…
Digital swadeshi and 3D printing intellectual property in India: The multi-level perspective, causal layered analysis and backcasting
Commercial and Research Clustering of Augmented Reality: Discourses and Divides Between Ar Apps and Applications
Although the majority of Augmented Reality (AR) scholarship is based in Computer Science disciplines, it is nevertheless important to consider emergent trends in AR discourses as research and development shifts from technology labs to media markets. While technical understandings of AR are necessary, they are insufficient to understand how networked spatial computing is augmenting everyday life. In response, this paper maps and compares two speci…
Dark
This issue of M/C Journal rejects the association of darkness with immorality. In digital communication, the possibilities of darkness are greater than simple fears of what is hidden in online networks. Instead, new work in an emerging field of “dark social” studies’ consider “dark” as holding the potential for autonomy away from the digital visibilities that pervade economic, political, and surveillance logics of the present age. We shall not be…
Digging in Crypto-Communities’ Future-Making: From Dark to Doge
Introduction This article situates the dark as a liminal and creative space of experimentation where tensions are generative and people tinker with emerging technologies to create alternative futures. Darkness need not mean chaos and fear of violence – it can mean privacy and protection. We define dark as an experimental space based upon uncertainties rather than computational knowns (Bridle) and then demonstrate via a case study of cryptocurrenc…
Conceptualising Augmented Reality: From virtual divides to mediated dynamics
Although Augmented Reality (AR) scholarship is largely defined through technocentric boundary work that delineates the virtual from the real, it is nevertheless vital to consider experiential conceptualisations of AR as mediating the human–physical environment, as this makes visible for analysis specific properties that afford specific dynamics of augmented publics. We consider how AR mediates the environment in ways previous media could not, ide…
The electrified social and its dark alternatives: Policing and politics in the computational age
This article contrasts the dark with the electrified light of datafied life to bring into relief the impact of data surveillance upon social transformation. Our argument is that darkness remains fundamental to creative social experimentation and thus to a society’s capacity for change and sustained transformation. This argument might seem antithetical to the age of information. Yet, we find darkness encourages exploratory forms of engagement, int…
Comparative analysis of China's Health Code, Australia's Covidsafe and New Zealand's Covid Tracer Surveillance Apps: A New Corona of Public Health Governmentality
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown of cities worldwide generated a dramatic increase in the use of public health trac(k)ing technologies. This article presents an empirical analysis of China's Health Code on WeChat and Alipay, Australia's COVIDSafe and New Zealand's COVID Tracer. We ask: how does app-based public health monitoring differ from prior forms of state tracking and corporate surveillance, and interface with …
Making Climate Change Tangible in Augmented Reality Media: Hello My Black Balloon
This research insight paper considers how augmented reality (AR) can be used in climate change communication from an organizational perspective. Its reported case study finds AR media helped configure a novel advocacy position for the commissioning organization in situ, as well as providing opportunity to make data meaningful and tangible for audiences. It reflects on how AR localizes and spatializes data in new ways by drawing on current literat…
Studying WeChat Official Accounts with novel 'backend-in' and 'traceback' methods: Walking through platforms back-to-front and past-to-present
The paper presents a methodology to understand WeChat Official Accounts (WOAs) from their backend to their frontend, and from tracing the platform's history to its present. Our 'Backend-in method' proposes to study platform governance in the meso - between macro political economic concerns and the micro (and usually mobile) user-interface mediation. It shows how including backend platform media practices deepen ethnographic understandings of plat…
Introduction to algorithmic antagonisms: Resistance, reconfiguration, and renaissance for computational life
Introduction to algorithmic antagonisms: Resistance, reconfiguration, and renaissance for computational life
Techno-Political Promises of Pandemic Management: A Situation of Apps and Excel in Public Health
This article considers the politics and practicalities of responding to the COVID crisis with ‘an app for that’. It shows how seductive solutionism in times of crisis created political impetus to direct the public health response to contact tracing through Contact Tracing Apps (CTA). Rather than focus on user-based concerns (uptake, privacy, etc.), we’ve investigated how apps interface with complex systems and infrastructures of public health. Ou…
Vernacular Pedagogies for the Synthetic Media Age
This paper draws on our research into the cultures of production surrounding the development of deepfakes and use of other forms of generative AI across public sites such as GitHub and YouTube, and subsequent reflective classroom experimentation and learning. Expanding on the notion of ‘vernacular pedagogies’ – informal and in situ education and relational literacy work – we propose a set of approaches for widening participation and involvement i…
Algorithmic Performance Management in Higher Education: Viva! 365 Ways of Surveillance
This paper maps the emergence and consequences of automated Algorithmic Performance Management (APM) in the context of higher education. After reviewing the evolution of productivity management in academia, it argues that surveillance via APM shifts expectations not just about effectiveness at work but also about how work, and the good worker, come to be defined. In our paradigmatic case study of Office 365, we specify how the automated surveilla…
There’s (not) an App for that: Situating smartphones, Excel and the techno-political interfaces and infrastructures of digital solutions for Covid-19
This paper focuses on the operational-infrastructural puzzles of mHealth via COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps (CTA). Significant literature exists on user adoption of the platformisation of public health during the pandemic, but there has been limited consideration of how those responsible for implementing CTA design, deployment, and use of public health infrastructures did so. We redress this imbalance by exploring some of the politics and practica…
Industries of Infrastructural Futures, Automated Cultures, and Algorithmic Dynamics
We approach the conference topic of industry through four studies that explore a new media landscape where value and power are increasingly produced through the operalisation of machinic and affective relations and subjectivities. We explore technologies of automation, artificial intelligence and algorithmic regimes and the new possibilities for enacting and imagining political futures that they afford. The papers focus on four case studies: WeCh…
Dying and Being Dead in Xr: Immersive Rehearsals of Death; Affective Artefacts Post-Life
We offer in-depth theorisation of two multi-site case studies of dying and being dead in Extended Reality (XR) to investigate immersive death experiences facilitated by these media. Our observations, discussion and critique underscore an emergent and nuanced interplay between spatial technologies and death encounters, their linked phenomenological cultural constructions, and the emerging industry that channels these phenomenon. XR are media techn…
Computer Science (18 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Political science (16 works) · Law (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Human–computer interaction (7 works) · Economics (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Affordance (5 works)