technoSpheres: FutureS of Thinking

Nebraska Digital Workshop Call for Proposals

dougseefeldt — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 22:31:49 -0400

The Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) will host the 3rd annual Nebraska Digital Workshop from Oct. 10-11, 2008. We are seeking proposals for digital presentations by pre-tenure faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and advanced graduate students working in digital humanities. Selected early-career scholars will receive travel reimbursement and an honorarium for presenting their work at the Nebraska Digital Workshop.

The goal of the Workshop is to enable the best early career scholars in the field of digital humanities to present their work in a forum where it can be critically evaluated, improved, and showcased. Under the auspices of the Center, the Workshop will bring nationally recognized senior scholars in digital humanities to UNL to participate and work with the selected scholars. In 2008, the two digital humanists who are invited to participate on the faculty of the Workshop are:

Greg Crane, Professor of Classics, Tufts University, and Editor, Perseus Project.
Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Professor of Literature in English and Media Arts, UCLA.

Selection criteria include: significance in primary disciplinary field, technical innovation, theoretical and methodological sophistication, and creativity of approach.

Please send an abstract, curriculum vitae, and a representative sample of digital work via a URL or disk on or before April 25, 2008 to:
Katherine L. Walter, Co-Director, UNL Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, at kwalter1@unl.edu or 319 Love Library, UNL, Lincoln, NE 68588-4100 USA.

http://cdrh.unl.edu/opportunities/neb_digital_workshop/index.php

technoSpheres: FutureS of Thinking

Learning to Love the Questions: A Description of The Rules/The Questions

abalsamo — Wed, 02 May 2007 22:20:52 -0400

For the final wrap-up session of the HASTAC Conference, "The Interface of Everything," I created a game called: "Learning to Love the Questions."

For those of you who know me personally, you know that I'm an avid game player and puzzler. I grew up in a game playing family; in fact, my uncle owns a (board) game company (TDC Games). I use game structures in my classes to stimulate new forms of sociality: to encourage quiet students to speak out, and verbose students to listen more. Although this is the first time I've dared to introduce a game in a professional conference setting, I was thrilled that the panel participants (all 10 of them) were "game" enough to go along with the last-minute change of plans as to how the panel would be structured and moderated. Several people in the audience asked if I would post the instructions for the game. These are listed below.

What I hope might also be of interest is the list of questions that I generated as the stock of questions that the panel participants had to choose from. Remember the panelists couldn't see the questions in advance...so they were really submitting themselves to the fascinating process of "thinking in the moment." I applaud the panelists for their creativity and thoughtfulness in engaging the questions that did come up. I think any of the questions listed below would have made for an interesting panel "discussion." Have fun!

Learning to Love the Questions

Participants:

4 Game Facilitators: Question Maker, Mindmapper, TimeKeeper, Audience Advocate

Two Teams: Even number of players on each side

The teams are assigned roles; they switch roles after 3 rounds.

Team 1: Question Responders

Team 2: Answer Enhancers

Definition of a Round:

A member of Team 1 (Question Responders) picks a question from the question stack. The questions are randomly organized; the team does not see the questions beforehand.

The members of Team 1 (Question Responders) have 5 minutes to deliberate about their responses to the question. They can choose to either 1) select one person to respond for the team, or 2) respond individually to the question. This latter option is a good choice if there are disagreements or differences of opinion among team members. The team then has 5 minutes to respond to the question.

Team 2: Answer Enhancers listen to the responses from team 1 and then respond to ENHANCE the ANSWER in one of three ways: 1) IDENTIFY and AMPLYIFY a GOOD IDEA, 2) IDENTIFY the RESOURCES needed to make the IDEA happen, or 3) SPECIFY the NEXT STEPS in making the idea a reality.

Mindmapping

While the teams are responding and enhancing, the game Mindmapper creates a map of the responses and enhanced answers.

Duration of Play

Team 1 gets to be the Question Responders for 3 rounds. After the first 3 rounds, Team 2 becomes the Question Responders, and Team 1 becomes the Answer Enhancers.

Variations on Play

Questions from the audience could be submitted throughout game play.

A panel of audience members could "judge" the responses/answers to evaluate the quality of the good ideas. (This would the game play a bit competitive...where teams are vying to impress the audience panel of judges.)

Several people suggested that the deliberations among team members, especially when they are Question Responders, be amplified so that the audience could also hear the process-based thinking going on among members.

The Questions used for the HASTAC panel (in no particular order):

How might artists lead the way?

How are you contributing to the paradigm shift?

Give the technologists a piece of advice.

How can we learn to see more complexly?

What is the status of deception in the digital realm?

What are our remembering practices now?

How do we define "a better job?"

What are HASTAC's grand challenges?

How is the mode of critique (common to the humanities and art fields) useful in collaboration with technologists and scientists? How does it hinder collaborations?

Do we share a common discourse?

Why should the public value the humanities now?

What role do objects play in our scholarly work?

Should we pay attention to the aesthetics of our scholarly performances?

Waht are the subfields of the digital humanities?

How can we institutionalize an economy of integrity?

What happens after the criticism?

What is the role of disciplines in a post-disciplinary era?

What are the blindspots of the digital humanities?

Give an example where the "best" becomes the enemy of the "good"?

What are we still worrying about authority?

Are the digital humanities a field, or a fascination?

What defines rigour in the digital humanities?

What is your most provocative theory-object?

Ask someone on the panel a question that intriques you.

What do civil rights mean in digital worlds?

What is the cultural work of "born digital" scholarship?

What is the most provocative idea you've heard in the last two days?

How are you an access node?

What does technological literacy mean to you?

Give a piece of advice to the funders.

Tell us about your project.

How do you learn best?

What is the role of text in a digital age?

What worries you locally, institutionally, professionally?

Give the humanists a piece of advice.

How can we stop reifying the distinction between humanities and technology; or between humanitists and technologists?

Electronic Techtonics

Reply to Scout's Ideas about the Humanities

Cathy Davidson — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 13:56:11 -0400

I'm sorry I didn't respond to this earlier . . . thought I did but it went wandering in the stratosphere. I found this comment incredibly smart and helpful, Scout. For one thing, the whole reason for the deconstructive (talk about 80's theory!) slash between "In" and "Formation" in the In|Formation Year was to disrupt the idea that information is data and add the Web 2.0 sense that information is also about the complex formations of social networks, actors, agencies, identities, political formations, and on and on. I realize from your pointed comments that I was too much assuming we were all on the same page and at the same place about the need to deconstruct the whole agentless/powerless notion of "information" in the same way that we must such ideas as "humanities," "humanism," "canon," "masterpiece," "masculinity," "whiteness," "race," "sexuality," "gender," "technology," etc. I didn't actually tease out and explicate the assumptions or even talk about the point of that mischievous slash mark or our whole point in disrupting the idea that "information" was only about "technology" and that "technology" meant hardware and software. Not. Your comments have made me rethink the presentation, starting with what In|Formation means. In other words, "information" too often comes to us as a given, as if it is data, but the whole point of this massively networked and distributed In|Formation Year is to say that one doesn't know a thing about information or technology unless one understands a host of other relations that support or subordinate. We were playing with "in" and "inter" thematics as a way of injecting the concept of "information" with complexities--injustice is as crucial to in|formation as innovation is. This should not be a surprise to most people but it still is. I can't tell you how many times I've heard the question: "But what does injustice have to do with information?" Etc. The other part I want to return to because of your comments is how much what HASTAC is trying to do and SECT tried to do is disrupt the traditional (i.e. traditional since about 1940) territory of the humanities which, I believe, is so restricted, turf-y, limited, and provincial that it necessitates the tiresome "crisis in the humanities" that people keep blabbing about. I believe if humanists actually took seriously what they do and should do--the political work of understanding what humans do and think, in relation to other individuals and societies and in relation to the environment and non-human inhabitants of this earth--then we would not be in crisis but be key to addressing so many issues of the so-called "information [no Derridean/Barthesian slash] age." (I was so intrigued and so sad that Lisa Cartwright and Brian Goldfarb had to go outside of the humanities to do their incredible work. I don't want to be part of any humanities that excludes that kind of work.) My idea of "Big Humanities" is that we need to aim lots higher, think bigger and more boldly. To me, the humanities should encompass such things as the technologizing of life and death (stem cells, avatars, brain death, immunization, inequitable definitions of "life" and "health" and on and on) to the interrogating (in Haraway's sense) of the masculinist, capitalist biases in "science" and the narratives of science. I loved the last morning's theory/performance with Tara McPherson and Guillermo Gomez-Pena, not only for the experimental play, but for the theoretical invention that racism is encoded in moder technology from the forties on and quite literally at the level of the binary code. My new scholarly project happens to be on mind/brain narratives and the creation of "learning disabled" and "gifted" as categories and, there too, race, gender, sexuality, nationality, citizenshp are operative at the moment of disciplinary formation, precisely at the level of semiosis and lexicon (i.e. "code") of what is normative. These, to me, are humanities questions, and questions of in|formation of the kind that motivate me. Thanks for your great comments, Scout. I'm sorry not to have answered before. I've been thinking about them since you wrote them and would love to hear from you again and from others who have thoughts on this topic.

technoSpheres: FutureS of Thinking

Neal's Blog on Saskia Sassen

Cathy Davidson — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 20:19:55 -0400

Saskia Sassen – August 21, 2006 - The Global City: the political economy of the emergence of global cities, mapping the economics and finance of the global, a sociology of the cultural in relation to the global. Capital / social / human flow between cities. Mapping circulations through cities. The way in which the digital has exacerbated those flows, immigration, capital. - Three propositions: In periods of transition, the formal political system accommodates less and less of the political in its full rich and fuzzy meaning. - Politics doesn’t just disappear, it gets housed, goes into informal mechanisms and codes. Cities are anarchic spaces. Where we are now is not urban. Cities continuously deborder themselves. - Growing importance of the informal: the zone of the city and subjects as actors, allowing formation of subject that other spaces don’t allow. - Formats: Issues of networks, network platforms, orgs. That use tech, that inhabit digital space through the lens of format. The space of the city as a particular kind of format, leakage, overwhelming mess enable certain possibilities. - How do we construct the digital object of study? - Accommodating less of the political: Demos by immigrants legal and unauthorized in LA in March. Interpreted as nice immigrants that want to be citizens. This was a different kind of struggle. A politics of the right to have rights. Citizenship is still one of the vehicles to achieve that. Different politics from ‘I want THAT citizenship’. Unsettlement of the construction of the citizen in the project of the nation state - Not a struggle to be a US citizen, but a struggle for the right to have rights. - Vincente Fox: Comes to visit with illegal immigrants, in Washington they are discussing criminalization of illegality. Fox produced a new type of informal jurisdiction.. I, president of this country, can meet with violators of the law, and they will not be arrested. Unsettles the formal apparatus from the inside. Happening deep inside the national. - Forty global cities that are platforms for the management of the operations of global capital. They are infrastructures, specialized, that make the system work. - Two emergent informal political actors. Both are shaped and enabled by features of digital interactive technologies. First actor: global corporate capital, multi-sited, hits the ground in a complex arrangement – men and women and non-human actors. They project what they get onto urban spaces, and become a politicizing presence. They politicize urban space. - Global corporate capital / the city as a system emerges as a social force in its capacity to alter urban space, displacing people, marginalizing small shops. The capacity is not always there. - The second political actor: the immigrants, the displaced, the homeless, the small shops. They are politicized – consider Max Weber vs. Henri Lefebvre. - Cities are routinized centers. They cannot always make the political, but with the right mix they can emerge politicized. Weber: coincidence of vulnerability. Struggle to keep their property happens in the city. - The excluded have the power to shape history. - Lefebvre. Industrial cities mid-1900s “This is not the city of the burghers.” They do not need the city. The organized working class makes the cities, the syndicale” Public transport / health / housing / order. This is neither the city of the burghers, nor the city of the organized worker. This is a strategic space for another type of actor. - Recovering the space of the city not as generic, but something you need to decode. So how is it made. MAKING is an organizing idea. So many new formations. IMF and WTO have been bridging agents to move us out of format A, into a new type of format. When it is constituted, these institutions will not matter. - Multiplication of micro-structures, assemblages, bits and territory, once lodged in the inter-state and supranational system, they get re-lodged into these novel formations. MAKING is a critical category. - The question of the urban. Today is a very particular time: disassembling the urban and re-assembling it with new alignments. Homogenization of the landscape is in fact an infrastructure. What inhabits that landscape? A standardized, state of the art infrastructure – roads, connectivity, water. Complex multi-layered systems. High gentrified. Dehumanized systemics (not inhuman, the forming of feedback enabled systems, but still complex social ecologies.) - Making platforms, building systemics of a different sort from what we saw even a few decades ago. In the context of the city, you get a whole set of figurations that are novel. Generic, not novel types of spatial segmentation. - Oriented to similar districts all around the world. Very concentrated, little bleeding into the surrounding neighborhoods. It still can be coded as a local condition, it is right there in front of your eyes, but invites a rethinking of the local. It’s a local of a different sort. It is partly deterritorialized and can span the globe. - Two worlds that unsettle each other. Financial districts, financiers are made by a global condition. But they are not cosmopolitan in that condition. Contrast the global activist. Two kinds of globalities, horizontal multi-sited, not grand cosmopolitanism.. Vernacular / rooted cosmopolitanism? (Appiah) Too pretty.. We need something grittier to suggest a working project. - Localized actors are in rooted, grubby worlds that have nonetheless gone global. - Is there the possibility of making something that approaches some version of cosmopolitanism that can occupy this digital space? Using space versus dwelling in digital space. An intermediate unstable zone with unstable meanings productive to a possibility. The space of the city is one dimension of this. - Technology and cities cont’d: The technical consequences can be embedded in urban modes. Standardized systems of transport, etc. Algorithms of the software are theoretical models, they are coming from a very different place, all over. We are surrounded by them. How can we use those algorithms for whole new possibilities? The city is a fantastic platform to translate theoretical algorithmic models into embedded systems. - The digital mile: Take a mile that cuts across Saragosa – cuts across different worlds. How do we insert digital tech? It has to service the grandmothers, mini applications that are people oriented. - Public technologies: like the white bicycles available to the public.. Orienting our talk of digital techs towards this type of possibility. - Global finance has been far more innovative and effective in making a format that allows it to maximize network technologies, civil societies less so. When civil society enters the funding circuit, they are forced into a format with conventional constraints. Finance is a vanguard in developing formats that allow it to develop networked possibilities, orgs are regressive in the face of this. - Indymedia rejected a grant from Ford. Back to the question of making, making new formats for the civil society organizations. - NYSE has made a bid to take over Euro-NEXT – stock exchange in Europe. It’s a new format, not simply mergers and acquisitions. They can create new financial mechanisms, and are in a better position to control regulatory restrictions. Finance is developing a new platform. - The digital object of study: finance is totally dependent on these technologies, and is therefore its vulnerability. Its logic is not the logic of the technology, the logic of the user (a social logic) can thwart the technical capacities of the technical logic. STS has helped us understand the imbrications. Finance has benefited enormously (292 trillion according to the banker’s bank) 11 trillion in global trade is our understanding, 292 is an order of magnitude higher, it is pure transactivity, a benchmark of the network. - The “interface”: the zone that exists between the tech and the user has been collapsed, it is a fine line that separates two differences. The tech culture has absorbed the space of the line – issues of technical competence are the norm.. We need to open up the line, make it more cultural. Eg: new technologies as used by Muslims (John Anderson) comparing westernized Muslims and the specialized readers of the Koran. - You might think it’s westernized youths that are most attuned: the readers of the Koran who went online, they could track their own interpretations, and they could communicate with other small communities of readers. They brought a culture of use that was part of THEIR life, traditions, passions onto the internet, and used it brilliantly. Culture of use, allowing them to be brought into the technical space. - Imbrications of the digital and non-digital, another example: a building. When the building becomes the object of a financial instrument, the building can be bought and sold on the net. The building is still immobile pile of stones, and yet it isn’t. How do we capture that digital moment that has agency? It is totally separate from the building, yet it inscribes it. “The X that is digital, how is it inscribed by the non-digital” Finance is way ahead of civil society orgs. We need to narrate and induct to create tools, to construct the digital object of study. - Let’s talk about immobilities instead of mobilities!

technoSpheres: FutureS of Thinking

lunenfeld day 8 + a.m. Q&A

caitlin — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 20:12:31 -0400

-- sorry this is so long... this is a continuation of the day 8 morning session with cathy davidson (separate entry) ... again, i'll enliven the links when i can) Peter Lunenfeld Peter Lunenfeld is a professor in the graduate Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design. He is the founder of mediawork: The Southern California New Media Working Group, and director of the Institute for Technology & Aesthetics (ITA). http://www.peterlunenfeld.com/ coming in to the SECT discussions ‘in media res -- a good place to come in” will be discussing the mediawork project -- intellectual fetish objects for the new century http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/mediawork/mediawork_about.html [from the website: Mediawork Pamphlets explore art, literature, design, music, and architecture in the context of emergent technologies and rapid economic and social change. Mediawork Pamphlets are "‘zines for grown-ups," commingling word and image, enabling text to thrive in an increasingly visual culture. But the aims of the series extend beyond creating theoretical fetish objects.] - all over the world there is a series of major question: what are the new modes and ways of disseminating knowledge? how do certain kinds of discourses compete in large-scale market places? how do you take what you are interested in and make it seductive enough to make other people interested? so… what you’re seeing with the kinds of things that cathy was showing = new intellectual visuality – making, commenting on culture and in a way that doesn’t always begin with words big question: TO MAKE THE DISSEMINATION OF THINKING BOTH MORE SEDUCTIVE AND MORE RIGOROUS [Caitlin - return of the public intellectual?] aims – new public discourse + cultural intervention to begin – look at images of the future in pop culture - bladerunner – every sci film that’s followed almost always infected by this meme… - windows 95 screen – ‘design degree zero’ – so completely awful – but there you have it… we live here more than we live other places [the haunting:] one of the great moments of cultural coming together – ridley scott infects you… just before gui at the superbowl (with a knock off nod to leni riefenstahl http://www.leni-riefenstahl.de/eng/bio.html ) … 1980 as focal point – what we live now all comes from 1980 [caitlin: ?.. ok, I typed that but I really don’t get it… I’m intrigued that I missed this foundational superbowl moment and maybe can’t recognize the 80s cultural zeitgeist … I can’t find the clip he’s talking about that might make it clear… I confess I spent 1980 skipping grade 9 chemistry and listening to recycled joni mitchell ] -- but the task is to imagine different possible futures -- alan kay – it’s not the technology that’s alive, it’s the dream ‘ -- most of Peter’s work is about breaking out of a sense of ‘permanent present’… -- thanks cathy for actually saying that ‘the death of the book is crap” – new technologies, hypermedia, print on demand are all wonderful, but they don’t represent a fundamental challenge to the book form… will change the book, of course (cf davidson, the work of humanists to complicate//enrich these discussions, rejecting the binary paper/digital etc.) the mediaworks project: - why not rethink ‘serious’ academic publishing – a form famous for its dislike of design itself - ‘traditionally narrow audience… reputation for dry and dusty presentation desire: to take what computers have brought to the design of the magazine form and bring this to academic works - use of the term pamphlet is deliberate (of course) pamphlet = anti-bloat antidote inspiration – mcluhan http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/main.html, fiore – war and peace in the global village http://www.gingkopress.com/_cata/_mclu/warpeac1.htm the medium is the massage showed a few iconic page from war and peace in the global village… – electric circuitry – showed 6 page spread – bold 60s graphics, layout, small fonts… ‘you get to see how the codex book actually works… ‘ -- relates this to scott mcloud http://www.scottmccloud.com/ – ‘you create in the gutter’ [what happens between frames is the space of the imagination] -- asks if electronic text work in the same way? [Caitlin: he seems skeptical… I think he means by this – can a point of connection hypertextually etc. also be a gutter = a deep space of possibility? Or is it an argument? A conjunction? etc.) miller/spooky – combines the role of author, editor, producer etc – “this says more about the conservatism of the history of the word…” Remembering semiotext(e) [at the mention of the series some people sigh noticeably. peter suggest it’s a post-coital moment … selective laughter ;) ] Simulations – really began as an industrial design project [from the website: “In the early 1980s, Sylvère Lotringer founded Semiotext(e) and published Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations, that small black volume which ignited a fury of theoretical activity. Lotringer began with industrial design: Semiotext(e) books were sized to fit directly into the vest pocket of a leather bomber jacket.” -- that jacket was ‘perfect junky wear.. keeping you warm in the summer and cold in the winter…’ < much laughter > peter: this is a genius idea and there WAS an infiltration of this material into people’s heads -- fast forward…. What do we have in common design-wise now?… we’ve lost the jackets where would we carry a new book? What size? -- only one person admits to coming to the seminar today without a bag having an external pocket “it’s hard to be an outlier,” peter says sympathetically – “but that’s what makes a bellcurve” [much laughter] ok, given this wealth of small external pockets… no one is going to throw in a huge ZONE book…the pamphlet form fits also, think then and now – 25 year reign the personal, the memoir, the personal instead of the political [Caitlin – surely more complicated than that] … a culture shaped in large measure by Oprah --- less interested in a disembodied voice… even if it is seductive.. baudrillard? The generation of ‘68 didn’t feel the need to root theory in their own lives? But now? what do we need? What do we do next? Went to Soros foundation … armed with this seed money went to more foundations.. Rockefeller etc. - this made it possible to go out and commission texts – pay people to design develop a space – interested in getting over the notion that designers can be brought in at the end… to be told that the content is so interesting they should design it for free a story: Hollis Framption was offered a retrospective at MoMa – such an honour that you should give your films for free Frampton wrote a 9 page letter ‘the man who sweeps the street in front of moma gets paid…” … etc. - this caused MoMa to change their policy one difference – scientists and engineers typically ask for their rightful wage… humanists and artists often do not… this series wanted to work against that notion -- did not want to be a reactive editor – some examples in the series: [from website -- complete series include Utopian Entrepreneur (2001) by Brenda Laurel, designed by Denise Gonzales Crisp; Writing Machines (2002) by N. Katherine Hayles, designed by Anne Burdick; Rhythm Science (2004) by Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid, designed by COMA; and, Shaping Things (2005) by Bruce Sterling, designed by Lorraine Wild.] rhythm science – dj spooky aka that subliminal kid book designed with a small hole, little red button to attach the cd – this meant the pamphlet needed to be bagged - designed by coma NYC/Amsterdam - has paper that feels different a side/b side visually signals a cd or disk as you go through – 3 or four different ways to read - chronologically - - look at what has been pulled out – mag design always about the drop quote or pull out… how do these point of emphasis make meaning? - each intersecting spread is different .. sample original artwork… you can have a multiplicitous reading/experience - not just the academy world of colleagues and students… if your work doesn’t make it out on some level it may not be a failure but it might well mean that we aren’t trying hard enough - mixing of the subrosa archive http://www.subrosa.arbre.us/SubRosaMusicArchive.html – derrida, ezra pound mash-up…. Wasn’t going to be foolish enough to do a book without acknowledging that the book is in a new universe that revolves around online info retrieval/uploading etc - So how do books relate? - Decided the pamphlet Needs to have a website… and what will the website have on it? Mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/mediaworks - first page of website is a marketing tool - why didn’t you just put the text up? … well, wanted to keep selling them… but more importantly – designed by book designers to be on paper, theoretical fetish projects to be touched and held - luminescent screen requires different design strategies … may consider mounting… but might not -- also IP issues – just a shot of barbie’s neck.. not all of barbi - also -- Material specific analysis (hayles)… you could take out all the text but it’s not the same because the relationship between graphic design, objecthood and ideas is co-constitutive in these works… it’s a part of the way the argument and call of these books unfolds Gold nugget = the discourse around the book? How can you generate conversations? create an object lesson for readers -- website -- a web take… tries to model – read these little fetish objects and then give back, keep the conversation going example -- Scott mcloud – understanding comics [comic book in comic form .. most people in the room signal they have read this] n McCloud response to Brenda Laurel’s pamphlet – utopian entrepreneur . - scott mccloud replies in comic form “I hate repurposing even more than Brenda… and the graphic response is able to SHOW why -- kate hayles’ pamphlet writing machines -- could not get her head around how she was going to talk about N. Kathryn Hayles in a book by by n. Kathryn hayles… created a persona instead [Caitlin: could Oprah be losing her superpowers? :) ] - ‘hollowbound book’ writes this from the perspective of the book’s spine.. something that disappears in the digital context - three braided voices– kay, n. Kathryn .. each gets her own font… eventually braided a third font is a combinatory commingling of the voice [caitlin.. so the design of these books is a derridean ‘mise en abyme’? .. relates nicely to vectors.. I wonder, though, if the book projects might be more successful… not because of the paper fetish, but because of the deeper design history being brought to bear, a richer understanding of the way the mechanics of construction work to advance the ideas] -- battles about the apparatus with en English professor… designed not to have an index or bibliography, many notes…. - Web supplement - coming up with a website where you could have new things happen – index, online database, more interesting – errata.. can trace across multiple volumes - physical spatialized index of where terms appeared… design in the service of ideas…. [Caitlin - cf making visual maps not unlike those mentioned by cathy davidson… the digital enables new ways of accessing and using this map] - can print these out as printer’s flats… and add to your print book also; lots of grad students will want Kathryn hayles’ biblio… just in plain text.. designer’s hate this… - the edge of the physical pamphlet is done with lenticular printing – it says writing one way/machines the other direction another example -- rhythm science - wanted to slow things down - wanted more control… hypnotic peter addresses cathy: “don’t expect to do collaborative work without, yes, going in with humility… but you also need to go in with aggression [cathy davidson apparently feels this can go unsaid…. Riotous laughter from her side of the room ;) see my last entry ] Peter did his own project, too designer = mieke gerritzen http://www.mediamatic.net/article-6190-en.html who really likes media philosophers… ‘collects them like butterflies’ - remix of peter’s work, remix of some of the stuff done on visualculture (appeared in art _ text)… wanted to see how design could work ... working with other authors presented particular challenges... with his own work was freer to take the design/idea interface at its limit reviewer and book arts goddess johanna drucker called it ‘full throttle! Current issue – Sterling’s Shaping Things – about the invention of the future… make spines… objects aware of themselves in both space and time industrial design + historiography … people in humanities won’t be surprised at this combo … massive impact on the design community… assigned in environmental, sustainable design classes USER – trying to model a sensibility – looks at art and video-games, book design and techno-masturbation Critical voice – noise… where is the critical voice anymore if it’s everywhere? (cf Floyd wright’s comments) Solitude enhancement machines … the designer can add to the ideas.. a full partner in constituting the meaning of the text master list – argument with lev manovich… humans can’t actually take in databases.. they present to us as lists – some 20th century thought… knocking it down and rebuilding perfectly -- a year zero ethos…. Is trying to work against this - humanities scholars can offer a lot here… - in a world filled with media paid to be seductive even the notion of the guilty pleasure is now gone… - what happens when we try to make our work more seductive? Showed: the first and only woven book – silk – the firt raster screen – tremendous financial disaster for the publisher ;) - in a show of the holdings of the california library system (at the UCLA hammer – the world from here -- http://www.hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/59/) … showed glass eyes with bibles alongside livres de priere… ebook of hours made on a jacquard loom…. An early programmable device… Peter reads the silk book as -- the book back into a fetish, a beautiful object, using a (then) new technology – stimulates a whole new round of thinking about culture, technology, humanism Q & A [Caitlin -- sorry , missed the first couple of questions .. I was eating plums with Jessica] Q patrick; the way in which the new series combines book arts with the new.. but the questioner is very skeptical with the deployment of even the word new… stuff that doesn’t always historicize.. so what happens to history in age of new media? A Peter: separate the academy from more popular press academy actually does a very good job of historicizing… lev’s book [manovich] begins with vertog… a whole field of media archeology… once you interface with journalism… AI etc… celebrating the new is something they do… understands the concern but if you actually look at what has been published … etc. Q follow up; aggression, sure.. but often when you have humanities and tech together you still seem to have this ‘tehnojoy’… maybe overstated the case, but still… A cathy: two seemingly contradictory narratives so often coexist The story of Massive Change + ‘it’s all the same, version of the old’ thinks ultimately BOTH are true [see comments re ambiguity above] Q alan lui: thanks for the elegant presentations… love the books but they’re not Big humanities… small team designer, author,small line, avant-guard world… can you bounce off each other a bit here? A peter – agrees and disagrees… miller in the hip hop community … getting djs to think and argue about these ideas = A sig cultural intervention… like baudrillard… how simulations traveled - you’re going to have both present at al times.. Big and small.. BIG problems.. like poverty, death…. We can use these kinds of technologies and interventions to think thorough this… if there is time we could talk about how large scale simulations could become a tool to battle it out with ‘corporate masters’[by running ideal outcomes and seeing what else would need to shift]… could even the playing field with the giant players who are running simulations all the time cathy – also agrees and disagress.. loves the fact that the pamphlet is a handcraft… the Big part of this might be web/books, simulations, book art.. if you were trying to design a multimillion dollar site… part of a huge new literacies project David – design of info is an epistemological challenge.. this plays deeply on that notion humanities knows even less about design than it does about science… when in fact this could be a CENTRAL mode/methods of ways of thinking through… new methods Q Peter maybe even a mac is more supercomputing than most humanists need David: design allocated to secondary branch and looked down upon General discussion – are there any real design journalists here in US? If not what does the poverty mean? is the us actually ahead? Even if so, is it still marginal? ellen lupton is mentioned…. Maybe others. why? Question: theory and poststructuralism… told we need to move beyond them, move past them…but the terms keep appearing… maybe in a soft theory way… maybe deconstruction as a method [Peter interjects : derrida protests] … I keep hearing certain poststructuralist conclusions… aren’t we past this? A Cathy: the talk I gave was a rather pragmatic talk… but this work is all enabled by theory… her theory embedded in historical materialism .. on the other hand materializing theory in books is great… also rejects opposition between art and theory … Like dj spooky is a theorist/spinner … spins theory Peter – to follow up on spin… teaches Guy Debord to designers (oh poor Debord)… teaches spectator makers to seduce more effectively … Further -- would hate to think that people here at the start of their careers still feel the need to pay attention to what your teachers teach you… you need to make your own thing…. Became sick to death of hearing how the people teaching him had created total anarchy and taught themselves.. “What you said feels embalmed… don’t take this as religion” [Caitlin – this last exchange and its tone generates a lot of outside discussion later in the day… perhaps the kindest reading is that the answer is humour that missed its mark or a simple misreading/mishearing of the question -- which more likely related to specific discussions held earlier, the re/deployment of Foucault etc. cultural capital in the academy… (sometimes entering in media res is difficult) but many listeners later expressed dismay that the tone seemed unkind and that the answer seemed to be about affirming the speaker’s status as renegade/outsider/black leather jacket -wearing hero as against the passive, imaginatively impoverished graduate student sheep/questioner. As Foucault cautions us, this maneuver of asserting our radical status seldom works the way we would like ;) ] follow up: Anne Balsamo– in part the occasion for this whole seminar was coming out of her own set of theoretical preoccupations namely - language has too much power… - wrestling with ‘how matter comes to matter…. ‘ - in this way couldn’t be more at odds with a poststructuralist urge wrt the focus on matter…. But still tied to meaning… decentering language anne – we went a little too far – now in trouble with science and engineering colleagues… some epistemological and ontological problems that now demand rethinking Q JR: phrase science + technology liked the example that spectacle makers are eager to use theory interested in reasons why theorists aren’t as eager to use the Spectacle liked powerbook vs supercomputer needs etc. BUT… all of those examples could be done on the things we own So why alliances with the supercomputer centre etc.? n interest here also theoretical: why this phrase ‘science + tech’ gets used again and again … how it’s linked with the newest also -- does this emphasis on collaboration with big science actually take away from productive discussions with designers… [rethinking the iconic page etc] cathy – but the projects are already too big when taken together… anne: ex of student work.. we archive everything in portfolios… this is already a huge burden Peter – [motioning to all the laptops] we hold culture machines, dream machines… the realization of the post ww2 dream. Next book: a secret war between downloading and uploading… need to use these machines to escape a cultural diabetes that other media forms have produced… simulations ‡ participation [speaks in aside to Cathy] – I’m like you but ACTUALLY optimistic .. not faking it [cathy points out that this inability ot fake it might just be a gendered deficiency… lots of laughter] question – BIG humanities = grant challenges… how to bump this up?… are humanists articulating this in a way that can fit within the model of grant challenge rather than remaining at a different level of intelligibility? … how to get granting bodies to see a research problem rather than ‘just another global problem’ cathy – hard to frame these… but she has also sat on lots of science boards… notes that often framing very different from implementation frame: study genome vs the actual project; one tiny bit.. literacy – that’s an enormous problem… how do we teach in the context of both digital and high dropout rates? disparity between red+blue states (mentioning this might not be a good grant strategy) these are the kinds of issues that humanists are living in the midst of right now Peter: in my dept --- thinking through and perverting scenario development (this emerged in the 1970s ... netherlands… [everyone looks at Geert Lovink ;) ] royal dutch shell - huge use in business - what if we began with a different relationship with these models – what kind of world do we want? Let the simulation run then… David: what is a human life and how do we live it today? -- the big question in the humanities question: but what then about sustainability when these dream machines produce 40 x their own weight in waste? what are the consequences if these dream/nightmare machines are the only way we begin to access all this? Anne: maybe look to the lit on ubiquitous computing.. these will no longer be the dream machines… the way to access this will be everywhere. Agreed that this doesn’t settle the issue of sustainability… just complicates it. Maybe we can’t/won’t be able to track the wastes the same way anymore peter – past the point of no return. … hopefully invent our way out of these problems. No return to the precomputational era, at least for the people in this room anne: we need to think differently about technology – a context but also about the way we think - new problems emerge + as well as new solutions - create a collective way of thinking more complexly and then find ways to help this thinking be part of how others – engineers etc begin to think thinking WITH tech.. but also THINKING TECHNOLOGY differently… oscillation between catching up and leading the way -- wants to think technologies that do have less of an impact, ethical accountability Cathy – certainly a grand challenge – hold in tension… think these issues simultaneously Peter – bob stein “we can be better ancesters than this” http://www.uwm.edu/~vkuhn/steintalk.html

technoSpheres: FutureS of Thinking

cathy davidson day 8

caitlin — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 12:42:45 -0400

Day 8: August 23, 2006 Morning Session Thinking at the Interface Cathy Davidson [caitlin - These have been really long days… but the room is still packed and everyone looks surprisingly refreshed, engaged etc. It’s great to be here... I'll try to make links active and add some images if i have time ...] ________________________________________ Cathy Davidson http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/English/faculty/cathy.davidson - leader in promoting interdisciplinary exchange - former vice-provost for interdisciplinary programmes, Duke - co-founder HASTAC www.hastac.org - [p.s. but see also: I just found this... why Cathy Davidson is a tremendous force of thinking good at all interfaces… my hero ;) --http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_literature/v076/76.4davidson.html ] intro comments: remix of a talk given around the country about hastac http://www.hastac.org/ purpose of the talk: * to help introduce and set up the afternoon panel on the future of the humanities (with Alan Lui, Judith Jackson Fosset, Marsha Kinder ) * to introduce hastac * to weave in some professional advice, tips, mentoring… help for graduate students “from a diabolical optimist” Advice: at least pretend you are optimistic in order to effect social change… without politicized optimism, why bother? Call to make opportunities. themes - working/surviving at the interface + thriving at the interface -“the humanities needs you more than you need the humanities” -size matters (think terabytes + broad theoretical horizons) 1. thinking/surviving at the interface: - interface = the point at which two different things, or more than two different things come together -- disciplines/people/ideas/structures etc link to Saskia Sassen: taking the border and opening it up to understand its specificities and differentiations - interface is the CULTURE by which things come together… you can open them up and go inside and SEE how things work together example: flickerverse < http://www.krazydad.com/gustavog/poster/finder.html>– GustavoG – chart depicting one moment in flicker (data visualization strategies that help us to make meaning in new ways) - social networking and intellectual networking at the interface Cathy showed a slide with these terms: natural sciences, humanities, arts, social sciences, technology… she put technology in the centre of the constellation of ideas… but acknowledged that this centre is constantly shifting (caitlin: cf thinkmap, dynamic databases, visualization structures that allow us to see and perform this shifting/recentering ) Another mapping: the SECTiverse!– all our various interests and engagements as expressed on the first day are shown in a slide. Could explode this intellectually into a dynamic constellation … ideas for collaborations, grants… not just an intellectual universe but a social universe with material consequences The ? for humanists -- Why even talk about (BIG)technology? An answer by way of examples - A science project: Sloan sky digital survey = single most ambitious attempt to map the sky… over 100 million objects… in terms of data it takes 40 terabytes of information Comparative example – a humanities project Shoah visual history project.. **200** terabytes Huge + consider searching, translation (Caitlin – works against the ideas some of us have about the humanities not needing to access grid etc.) Another example- constance penley’s project – museum of television and radio http://www.mtr.org/ – 1400 programs have been digitized - This is fundamentally the collective project of documenting and writing social and political history… - total archive: 120,000 programs and advertisements = 85 years of television and radio Cathy quotes ken franklin: “that’s a lot of terabytes” back to cathy: “if you don’t think there is a future in this, you’re asleep… enormous demands for what we do” more examples – cites the work of her co-presenter and the projects of afternoon panelists mediawork project http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/mediawork/ voice of the shuttle http://vos.ucsb.edu/ slavery’s ephemera http://vectors.iml.annenberg.edu/issues/03_issue/slaveryephemera/ labyrinth project http://www.annenberg.edu/labyrinth/ what are our scientific and technical needs? – the preservation and articulation of this is central -need to articulate the fundamental meaning to the humanities and what is at stake here… namely to understand what it means to be human ‡ this is the larger mission of the human and social sciences also once you consider terabyte demand, need for archiving etc.– all kinds of things need to come next and further urgent questions arise ? SO WHAT IS THE MISSION OF THE HUMAN AND SOCIAL SCIENCES IN THE DIGITAL AGE in science – a concept of Big science we need to appropriate this and think about BIG HUMANITIES in order to face the challenges and opportunities of the info age requires high tech, multi-site collaborative participation transforms intellectual paradigms (in humanities and social sciences and beyond)… engineers, scientists and designers need our help as semioticians, epistemologists, philosophers, semanticists etc. (Caitlin – sure…if algorithm as well as interface is theory, as we’ve been hearing repeatedly, who better than theorists?) this presents significant conceptual challenges more case studies: INTERNATIONAL -- DUNHUANG PROJECT < http://idp.bl.uk/ > she’s sick of people saying that this is entirely contemporary, nothing to do with history and this project makes clear how rich the historical engagement can be - 100 BC - 20 different languages - ‘loot from the silk road was pilfered and dispersed in the 19th… most of the things remaining are now too fragile to move - what the digital has enabled historians to do: n project brings materials together that have been separated for years… puts them together in the virtual space… makes these fragments intelligible again and gives them context meaning gets made from the loot that is dispersed…. The bit… the tiny shard… that had just been fetished.. becomes meaningful again n also, note the circuit of flow from Africa, asia, europe… the culture flows are everywhere.. this complex cultural mix is important … this project is a tech solution to a colonial problem + can ALSO transform the idea of the place of western culture – soc and pol consequences… n another aspect of the project: they are coming up with – proprietary software that can be sold BACK to volunteers (Caitlin – ah, finally a theory people want to buy :) Jenkins collaboratory, Duke http://www.jhfc.duke.edu/jenkins/research/index.html - complex aggregations of data n you’re not really enabled to do incredibly complex searches/’They’ don’t want you to do incredibly complex searches n – the ‘all patents project’ deal with vast and complicated searches – the whole pol + sos constellation of info about the patents… who what when why … (caitlin – and capacity to visualize the aggregated in a way that makes it meaningful) Policy function – the research team will eventually argue that the patenting of the human genomeis inappropriate and has negative policy implications Specifically – profit motive means breast cancer research is not profitable enough to pursue Compelling argument form the data n consequence: congress likely to overturn the ability to hold patents on genes – will become fair use -- cathy is so sick of humanists dismissing quantitative researchers as positivist … new technologies… led to new paradigms… the next theories may well come from the interesting reworking of the paradigms of research … how information has been researched… examinations of the algorithms in the code… we need to understand what paradigms are embedded, seize the capacity to change them allowed researchers to remix the data in interesting ways ‡ better theories to dismiss this as positivist is shortsighted – need to at least know how to communicate with people involved in quantitative work (Caitlin – agreed.. but I’m not sure what’s even quantitative here given your argument… is this quantitative or highly theoretical work?… building info structures with data is at root about ideas .;.. the quantitative research just emerges (or not) from this foundation structure?) more projects: SAVE (url?) - HOW TO SAVE ALL THSE VR RENDERINGS OF historical sites - -- no one really knows how to save these - “the digital dark ages” – many first generation just gone (Caitlin – a lot of this work wasn’t even well circulated, if at all – caves needed to be recalibrated etc.) conclude – the social sciences and humanities needs terabytes.. and petabytes etc…. (think big!) 2. surviving at the interface n davidson and Goldberg text - “Why we need the humanites now; a manifesto…” http://www.jhfc.duke.edu/resources/manifesto.php (Caitlin – suggest pocket-size version à la lunenfeld) n being widely circulated and studied, generative n tired of being told about the crisis in the humanities by admins… and then having these same people disinterested in hearing about science and technology… n contradictions n how to take up the challenge of this time? Humanists the biggest impediment to the humanities at this time n Humanities are actually NOT in crisis.. rather, = fundamental leaders, potentially …. Can bring informed and historically rich and deep opinion about what is at stake in the digital Why a. Because of critical theory – a high comfort level with ambiguity – we have the theories and predisposition to allow for this… multiple, scattered, contingent and reverberating effects… people who can think with complexity are exactly what the engineers (+ world) need… what if key concepts in a model.. ‘worth’, for ex., is changing? They need our help and work… if we approach with modesty ‡ great conversation b. because of our methodologies skills, tools, theories, affective knowledge, historical knowledge, and comfort level with new technologies, and interdis openness is necessary and important now (ex – humanists know all about the cycles of technofears… how the printing press was going to ruin knowledge… photography going to ruin painting, early film technologies etc. – humanists know that the perception that new tech makes an old practice obsolete never works that simply – that’s the kind of knowledge a humanist can bring) we’re also good at muddying dualism… when you make it a binary – book vs ebook for ex.… you are imagining an impoverished future, forcing an ebook to do something that paper does quite brilliantly … so massive storage requirements are just the beginning ex shoah project discussed earlier – storage + -unintended uses -archival longevity -faith -i-ntolerance -security -privacy -IP -Cultural implications… (list is longer) Major issues of these projects are complex…. We can help in these conversations... we know BETTER how to think about these issues that scientists.. because this is what our training is But no one can do this by themselves – must think about networking… collaboration by difference… rhizotechnics (Sha) These are all methodologies we can do to try to grapple with these issues together Designing multiple research protocols to address problems - complex analyses of conflicting/contingent results (vs the appeal to ‘gold nuggets’ nresearch result … maybe it’s more like the tar sands) - extrapolation from results to theory, interpretation, representation, public advocacy and public issues more rhizotechnics: understanding the environments within which we move n training n expertise n reward system n workplace culture n mutual respect n status of evidence n importance of interpretation vs presentation of data n epistemological humility – be modest about what you know so you can learn what others know… learn to shut up n ambiguity centre for the study of the public domain http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/ kept running into doc film makers who couldn’t make their films because they kept capturing copyright materials ex: eyes on the prize – civil rights movement… can no linger be shown because of copyright issues (caitlin – screening as an act of civil disobedience -http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2005/Eyes-On-The-Prize11feb05.htm ) irony – these same filmmakers would charge others huge amount of money to use footage n ‡ creative commons www.law.duke.edu/cspd produced a comic book for filmmakers : bound by law? a new one proposed for music -- another article -- managing from the middle – davidson with david theo Goldberg premise: middle manager not the most despised but in fact the most powerful… a very practical position… “do what you can” the middle manager’s networked body – plays off the idea of the ing’s two bodies – the “i” + the “we” ‘we speak for the state:” argues: but in fact the king is detached and isolated even while invoking the ‘we; -- power without knowledge middle… junior professors etc. – live with frictions between the top and the bottom… but it’s really productive… relays, re/negotiations, maybe an ideal network position from which to change/understand info flows “middle managers of the world unite!” grad students: chucky as model (cf halberstams’ talk) “every chucky head comes with 3 different bodies 1. floppy 2 positionable 3. stunt “and if you can’t make a post-foucauldian management metaphor from these 3 subject positions….. ;)” PART THREE Digital Humanities Success stories! Hastac -- $50,000 – everything else accomplished by volunteerism (Caitlin – but wait, this seems to be the old humanities model ;), industrious networking.. taking seriously in the most literal and mundane way the rhizomatic possibilities of networked communication to allow us to publish each other’s work… by being in a poster with standford, wayne state etc. gains different levels of credibility – this results in material changes on the ground… new technologies have been made available to these smaller universities You can borrow, transfer, transform (Stanford’s prestige as a force for good!) Macarthur Fondation http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.855229/k.CC2B/Home.htm – on oct 9th will announce a new initiative on digital media and learning – book series 6 volumes – Authorizing… credentialing Questions asked in the series - Do those born after 1982 learn differently? (caitlin – differently from those of us theorized to have been ruined by the hyperspeed and granularity of Sesame Street in the 70?) If so, what are the consequences - to answer requires everyone’s participation AMER COUNCIL OF LEARNED SOCIETIES: http://www.acls.org/ New program in digital humanities (started 2005) - largest number of submissions for nay new program, largest program last year, too… usually new programmes need to be cultivated… in this case 150 proposals for 5 grants national science foundation n dan atkins http://www.si.umich.edu/people/faculty-detail.htm?sid=2 n ,engineer compsci, dean of science at Michigan… fabulous… new head of cyberinfrastructure n -- expanding ‘ cybercommunities’ grant digital promise initiative http://www.digitalpromise.org/newsite/ “digital opportunities investment trust” larry grossman n mixes with capital P Politics in the past -- land sold + proceeds used to create land grant universities saying now that proceeds from bandwidth should be used to create huge endowments for educational initiatives vectors www.theseptemberproject.org -- repurposed by ind communicates -- wayne state – collaborative success partnership – uni, Detroit public school, museums, libraries passing info among the universities interoperable databases big topics like dress and design – pooling resources, writing proposals together CITRIS Berkeley http://www.citris-uc.org/ Dance in cyberspace Collaborative gallery builder Michigan Law in slavery and freedom project + Student projects - to create interoperable databases to be used in teaching and research – global n currently private site, hope to go public more examples at Stanford, duke, uchri, Grad conferences, Hastac Info year Interface – hastac national conference April 19-21st 2007 http://www.hastac.org/node/411 Electronic techntonics Thinking at the interface Hope to end with -- “The future is created in our imaginations before it is created in our labs” – balsamo Why do this? so we can work together to rethink, reimagine, make possible -- lunenfeld presentation - Q&A will be uplaoded this a.m.

technoSpheres: FutureS of Thinking

the humanities is dead (or it soon will be); or, who's your outside?

Scout — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 22:22:32 -0400

The project of the humanities as outlined this morning seems to be about information—especially about the space to store it in. This strikes me as the library science project at its most basic. Indeed, if the word “humanist” was replaced with the word “librarian,” the presentations would have been completely coherent to a library science audience. All the dense knots of power in what gets stored, organized, and how are present in both visions. For example, digitizing already very familiar cultural documents like the JFK assassination footage and the Beatles on Ed Sullivan demonstrates a particular set of cultural values through both presence and absence. Library science shares this problem, though I think it perhaps is a bit unfair to equate digitization with organization and access. Let’s not forget generations of archivists and librarians with their pencils and index cards working with limited funds and less than ideal conditions to catalog and keep this material in the first place, even though it is feminized and not very glamorous labor. So I’m wondering about what kind of truck humanities scholars actually have with information. I think of information as one step up the food chain from data; and I think the work of scholars is somewhere at the level of knowledge and theory—theory being something that can predict and produce knowledge from other knowledge, and from data and information. We can be information rich and still knowledge poor. (I’m prepared to revisit my epistemological hierarchy in conversations that take my contentions seriously.) I am still seeing “big humanities” as a call to scholars outside the funded sciences to use and design technologies but mostly still for commercial agendas, including those that dictate scientific agendas. (Thankfully this afternoon we’ve seen some examples of small humanities that are in critical tension with the technologies they use, and with vocabularies that include the terms “politics,” “power,” “ideologies,” and “master narratives” that are basic to any critical vocabulary but remarkably absent from the seminar’s collective lexicon.) There are many in the humanities who are rightly gun-shy about big, meta projects, partly because humanism as been complicit in the sorts of violence that come under the banner of positivism; the technodeterminism that is all too evident in the mood of the seminar is a subspecies of this positivism. Positivism is a word I’m not afraid to use. I think we can still recall Herman Gray and George Lewis last week reminding us that cultural memory is power laden and that science has a racist history and present. So here we can ask yet again what it is to just put everything in a big storage device, and what will constitute that “everything.” And we can take the insights of very savvy (slow down for the next word) scientist-critics including Donna Haraway (biology) and Karen Barad (theoretical physics) and not see the violence in scientific knowledge production as outside aberrations, but part and parcel of science as a socially situated operation. The point is powerfully made that this is not a call to stop doing science but to see the context of scientific knowledge making as part of science itself. This is what Barad’s insistence on materiality is about. Her intra-action questions in Bohrian fashion where the experimental apparatus stops and starts. Neither Haraway nor Barad have dispensed with objectivity, but they have made it clear that we can no longer have the illusion of a pure, untainted science. Part of this is an optimism that whatever jam humans get into can be gotten out of through the application of scientific method (narrowly defined). And neither Haraway nor Barad would issue the material without the semiotic. They are both in deep conversation with poststructuralism. In one scientifistic mode, the social and the scientific are entirely separate, and the work of social science and the humanities is to supplement the scientific work to keep the scientists from going awry and designing any more Tuskegee experiments and to help some iteration of DARPA figure out how to get high powered execs to use camera phones so they don’t have to be ferried around on jets. This category system, which bifurcates nature/culture, techno/social, underwrites the logic of multiple of our speakers. It keeps matter on one side and language on another, and assumes that the real can be directly represented through science with no translation. (Barad’s intra-activity is precisely about interpretive apparatuses as well.) This bifurcation shields a positivist view of science from cultural critique, isolating it from apparent social concerns while masking relations of power that constitute the science in the first place (as when Kurt Spellmeyer does a body count on communist totalitarianism and claims that capitalism has brought better quality of life to (an unmodified) everyone, and as when someone last week referred to “seamless capitalism”). We saw this in action today when Michael asked the completely relevant question about the role of the environment in the future of digital humanities. First his question was cast as a purity project—as though any of us could be innocent or non-complicit, and therefore we were all off the hook. Finally his question was met with variations on the positivist project: we’ll engineer ourselves out of it; don’t worry about it now—we’ll think of the solution later. This begs the question of the social change gestured to early in the morning’s presentations. Social change for whom, and for what ends? There is no indication that environmental and other social justices concerns will stop being relevant (hopefully it will start being relevant for some). In fact, the problem as posed in the seminar places these outside of the collective conversation we are having. Let’s talk about the material in a very deep way. Marx, Haraway, and Katie King refer to some variation on frozen social substance, congealed labor, or frozen social relations. These all involve looking at a material object and tracing its conditions of possibility back to its raw materials. These conditions include the politico-socio-scientific-economic contexts that make production possible. This is a powerful mode, deeply in conversation with technology and science, deeply in conversation with social justice, and deeply reflexive. This method, Sandra Harding’s strong objectivity, and Barad’s onto-ethico-epistemology are all perfectly available to scientists. We can’t abdicate responsibility for politically grounding science (including technoscience). But science shouldn’t need a native informant from the humanities to do this for them. Haraway reminds us that people who want the world to be a better place need science because it is utopian and visionary. But Eugenics, for one, was a utopian and visionary scientific project.

technoSpheres: FutureS of Thinking

categories--are ours hardened?

Scout — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 15:37:33 -0400

So, I'm trying to figure out why we're ostensibly on the cutting edge, visionary, the future, etc., but some of our categories seem really static and unexamined. Some examples: Technology. This is perhaps the most bandied about term, and I think it would be good to be very clear and explicit about what we mean. In practice, we mean electrically powered silicon based tools that require vast political and economic infrastructures. I think we could benefit from denaturalizing some of our assumptions about these technologies and seing them situated in those contexts. It also could help us see the non-silicon based technologies that are necessary for their operation. Some of the global effects of these technologies are the need to secure energy supplies because our use of energy is quickly outstripping our supply--this is a lot different from finger pointing at SUVs. It also means treating various countries as toxic waste dumps for the heavy metals from both the production and disposal of computer components. The global infrastructure also guarantees the low cost of electronic gadgets because they are made in places with lax environmental and labor protections and weak social infrastructes. This is not, as Larry Smarr says, because of the cultural differences in these countries insofar as they just don't share our values [!], but as Saskia Sassen reminds us, because of the economic infrustructures including usery (20% or better debt servicing) that allows western nations to dictate the terms of those social infrastructures. Our gadgets do not spring like Athena from the heads of our revered engineers as they repeat the mantra "Moore's law, Moore's law, Moore's law." Global. See Technology. Humanist, humanism, humanities. I have a feeling I have something very different in mind when I say posthuman; and humanism gives me the heeby jeebies. And do we all have the same thing in mind for the humanities? OK, enough for now. But let's not take these for granted.

technoSpheres: FutureS of Thinking

Michael Naimark presentation

a_mf — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 13:50:05 -0400

Michael Naimark Presentation/Demonstration August 22, 2006
Biography
Michael Naimark is a media artist and researcher with over 25 years of experience investigating "place representation." He has worked extensively with field cinematography, interactive systems, and immersive projection. He was instrumental in the founding of several world-renown research labs and his art projects exhibit internationally. Naimark was on the original design team for the MIT Media Laboratory in 1980 and was a founding member of the Atari Research Lab (1982), the Apple Multimedia Lab (1987), and Lucasfilm Interactive (now LucasArts, 1989). He joined Interval Research Corporation, a long-term lab funded by Paul Allen, as it opened in 1992, and worked an additional year after it closed in 2000 on his webcam spinoff venture, Kundi.com. Several patents have been granted for his work. Naimark's art projects are in the permanent collections of the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York, the Exploratorium in San Francisco, and the ZKM | Center for Arts and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. His 3D interactive installation "Be Now Here," produced by Interval with the cooperation of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, toured in the ZKM's "Future Cinema" exhibition in 2002 and 2003.
www.naimark.net/bio.html
He is a visiting associate professor at the Interactive Media Division of the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television and a visiting committee member at MIT Media Lab. He is also member of the Society for Visual Anthropology.
Presentation summary:
"What's Wrong with this Picture?: Realness, Artifact and Intention in First-order Global Place Representation"
Naimark began by introducing the question of the distinction between 'realness' and the perception of the senses, or in other words, the distinction between what is psychophysics and what is expression ("How do you know I am not a movie?" was the question broaching this topic he provocatively asked a class of 5th graders). Colleague Rachel Strickland used to argue against his use of the word 'realness,' which she argued would be better termed 'verisimilitude'. Naimark has begun using the term 'realspace imaging,' as a way of representing what happens 'behind the brain'.
Naimark was interested in exploring what is at stake in place representation and in developing and agreeing upon a vocabulary to discuss such things. He discussed some critical terms and concepts: 'artifact'; 'fabric of space and time'; and 'liveness'. 'Artifact' is concerned with the notion of intention – when we make representations, when are artifacts intentional, and when are they glossed over in a technocratic way? 'Fabric of Space and Time' is an feature of place representation, which is like a fabric in that you can tear it, stretch it, warp it, keep it as is, and the sense of representation will be changed accordingly. Finally, 'liveness' affords a sense of simultaneity, of witnessing something special or unique. We felt a sense of simultaneity at particular points in time (e.g. Moonwalk; O.J. Simpson chase; 9/11). Naimark asked us to imagine if most video cameras were live and connected to the grid – what is the effect of everything being 'live'? It will happen. (via Web cams and so on).
Naimark then presented some projects in place representation he has been involved with beginning in the late '70s. Included were several works on Moviemaps and Panoramas (1977-1997). Moviemaps involve place representation through spaces, while panoramas are place representations looking around a particular space (or lateral versus angular representation). The goal of many of these projects was not to simulate an environment but to convey particular sensations.
Naimark came to certain conclusions from his experiences working with these media: often place doesn't matter. But often it does. One cannot represent everything. By claiming that you do, you're abdicating artistic responsibility. The camera always affects the environment [He wondered whether this is still the case with button-sized cameras]. Or in other words, the medium biases what classes of content will go through. Finally, he remarked upon the extent of the power held by whoever controls representation.
Naimark then talked about some of his VR studies, which contrasted with his previous work which was in some sense 'dead media' (his turn of phrase) in that it had all been pre-recorded. In his work with Kundi.com (Interval Research, 1998-), Naimark and his colleagues are working on the following problem for webcams and streaming media: the question of time. Search engines are not equipped to find events as they happen. So Kundi developed a 'hot now' button for users to send an alert when something of interest occurs in a webstream. (Can you herd people to a site on the internet through this mathematics of propagation?)
A series of webcam studies in Japan dealt with the bandwidth problem. Where does the breakdown begin in place representation? When you have the same moment in time and a representation of different places, you are trying to get more with less, perhaps produce a hyper-representation. Michael has also been working with Gigapixel imaging.
Naimark concluded his talk with some considerations of what is at stake in place representations, focusing his comments on the Google Earth phenomenon and alluding to the possibilities of the 'Flickrisation of Google Earth,' i.e. the project of collectively tagging and providing on-the-ground, rich visualizations for the satellite imagery captured by Google Earth (based upon 'Ground Truth Model').
There is a question of representation and control: who is making this model?
In what we might consider an antidote to the surveillance aspects of this technology, Michael discussed his Camera Zapper project (Japan, 2001-02). This was a way of using a laser to obscure the camera's images (the limitation was that one would have to know where the camera was in order to 'zap' it). Q & A
Q. Some are arguing that there's a plateau that's been hit in developing memory. Will it continue to go up or are there barriers that will get in the way?
A. It's a question of use. Will it be full of a newer high-bandwidth media or 60,000 hours of video? The arts community has an opportunity to compete. Re: quantity, a project that someone should do. Source data is owned but metadata is up for grabs. What if a web project began to parse every movie and assign tags to every scene?
Q. Any thoughts on the difference between experience and immersion?
A. Rachel Strickland would quote Merleau-Ponty re: experience vs. immersion. Negroponte: first paper was called 'idiosyncratic systems. Message was that machines of the future would know their users. 'aquaintanceship'= if you know that I know something about you. It seems that meaning is ultimately a series of onion skins beginning with 1st order representation and then with social norms and family norms…
Q. You focus on making technology as close to our lived experience as possible. What if we have so much information that we don't even have normally. That seems like hyper-reality (google jockeying and so on). Having so much of an influx of information.
A. Heard at a conference: "Give me more bandwidth or give me death." (Archetypal engineering/Western approach.) There's a certain seduction. But I see myself as a translator who passes in both communities.
Q. Given the possibilities for surreal panoramas and so on, is anyone getting away from verisimilitude and using them as spatial storytelling machines?
A. A lot of Google mashup activity. Not generally thrilled with most of what I see. Project working on with Perry is to seamlessly Flickrize google. Potential for sophisticated narrative stuff is high. Potential for hacking is really high too.
Q. IMSC project to link webcams together. What are they doing/what is it about?
A. USC campus project. Looking for openly accessible webcams. There are equally mundane webcams available and not copy-protected. www.opentopia.com
More than 1000 or more than 10,000 unlocked webcams: What if every cell phone is a live video camera? What if you have a real-time alert system. Live playing field. All available. Millions of channels. That's the vision of how the Internet's going to end up. Different from youtube.com.
Q. In relation between real and hyperreal, Edgar Popper proposes a different take/ethic. Embeddedness has a certain kind of meaning. What sorts of ethics it produces?
A. Difference between egocentric and exocentric p.o.v. When technology becomes small enough that it's cell phone or wearable. It becomes 'hey, look at what I'm looking at' rather than 'hey look at me'. That's a different form of embeddedness. Proponent of cnn or natl geographic planting webcams. We could get primal, high immersive point of view. Which would be individuals' own point of view.

technoSpheres: FutureS of Thinking

Geert Lovink Keynote

Tanner — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 17:58:32 -0400

Geert Lovink is the speaker for our second keynote address, the following is a summary of his lecture. Geert founded the Institute for Network Cultures (http://www.networkcultures.org/portal/) in 2004. He has a forthcoming book from Routledge called *Zero Comments: Kernels of Critical Internet Culture*. In this book he has a chapter entitled "Blogging the Nihilist Impulse" which is a study of the blogging phenomenon. A second details what he refers to as "the crisis of media arts" called "The Cool Obscure." In "The Substance of Internet Time" Geert details a failed attempt by Swatch to institute its own form of "internet time." The book ends with studies of four concepts rather than critical essays. These four chapters are entitled, "Updatig Tactical Media," "Theory of Free Cooperation," "Distributed Aesthetics," and Organized Networks." Geert returned to Europe from Australia to set up the Institute for Network Cultures. Surprisingly, Geert only entered academia in 2003 and prior to that was a "free floating intellectual." His first conference project for the institute was a history of web design, considering it from the perspective of "work." He sees the internet as having experienced three distinct phases thus far. The first was the introductory phase which ended 1993 and was primarily text and link based. The second speculative and experimental phase ended with the dot com bust. He posits that the current third phase might be coming to an end with Web 2.0. Interestingly, he mentions how web designers often are not entirely aware of each others work which is ironic considering the nature of a networked and hyper-communicative environment. To this end, he organized the conference to organize and bring into conversations some of the best designers. A second element of this conference was aimed at professionalizing digital workers. As he states, questions of economics, standardization, and basic practices of digital professionals are important questions. As an example, he cites that web designers are making less and less money. In November the institute is holding an event called “My Creativity” (http://www.networkcultures.org/mycreativity/) which will bring together researchers to look critically at the creative industry. Of particular interest are how to get creative workers more involved in production processes and studying the “creative underclass” who are used to help build and design cities but then cannot afford live in them. In addition, the conference will examine the increasingly limited roll of the arts in society. Creative work is becoming more focused in places like China and India, both of which he says are not so much sites of outsourcing, as in the past, but now are the central sites of design and production. Another interesting conference held in Amsterdam in 2005 was called “Urban Screens” (http://www.networkcultures.org/urbanscreens/). Conversations and presentations at this conference were focused on how public projections screens could be expanded with artful and culturally interesting content rather than merely advertisements. As he states, the potential of these screens could be broadened significantly to repurpose and draw new attention to them, as well as call attention to advertisements. However, what would it mean to commission an artist to design or produce art that is meant to then advertise for an advertisement? The “Art and Politics of Net Porn” conference (http://www.networkcultures.org/netporn/), which will have a second conference as well as a book, was dedicated to expanding the field of porn studies from film and video to considering the unique impact net culture has had on the production and consumption of pornography. “Incommunicado” examined the increasingly complex nature of networked communications as they relate to global information politics. Geert showed a website that details internet usage worldwide (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stat.htm). One third of the world has or has access to a mobile phone. Only 16% of the world is on the net. As he says the computer market has plateaued and will soon be heading to China and India in force as well as marketing to children to increase sales. Cyberspace was initially seen as a borderless space but blogs and blog software have nationalized the internet and brought many other countries onto the web. Both Japan and France are examples of this. Whereas Japan had many users in the past, their activities were mainly consumptive instead of productive as they are now. Additionally, internet culture is now being produced by individuals. Language and other national barriers create nationalized mini-blogospheres. He states that 76% of bloggers are interested in personal experiences or interests and a small minority are interested in news, this is contrary to the media’s concentration on the function of blogs being citizen reportage. Discussing the largest French blogging service, “SkyBlog,” he says that Africans are also using the service. Thus, the national spaces of these services are not bound geographically but through language and culture. New users of the internet in the past started with building web pages through the complicated process of learning html. Nowadays a new user would most likely start a blog through a far more simplified process. One of the Geert’s theories regards internet cynicism and nihilism. He sees this as a response to the broken promises and utopian rhetoric of the beginning of the net. He asserts that cynicism is not behavioral but a techno-social condition. It is a cultural spinoff from blogging software, hardwired into a specific era (post 9-11) and architecture of the software itself (posting, tagging, commenting, etc.). This cynicism does not see cyberculture as a lifestyle. In Foucaultian terms, bloggers use their computers as confession machines. While not as strong as the early days, blogging still carries a sense of the liberatory fantasies of the net through truth. The creation of this truth is a democratic process and, in that sense, is not news. The creation of blog culture is attempting to undermine the top-down model of broadcast media. However, those that have said this in the past were using this critique of old news media to create space for themselves within the news industry. Geert showed a clip from his great film “Beautiful World.” Q&A Question: How do the language issues within net culture intersect with fan sites and fan communities which tend to have a more international basis? Answer: There is not much crossover of language or national boundaries on the net. Cross-cultural does not imply multi-lingual just yet, but to truly realize it you need to have multi-lingual capability. The questioner was referring to collaborative blogs and this if fairly uncommon and is an area in need of exploration. Response: Traces journal has a commitment to publish in seven languages. Question: Confessional and diaristic nature of blogging is a traditionally “girlish” activity and that should not be written off. Response: Orca was in many ways a language war between Portuguese and English. Response: How would blogosphere be differently understood through Lyotard’s witnessing as opposed to Foucault’s confessional? Answer: This is definitely the case in places like Iran. Geert was frightened by his own proposal of the confessional. Blogging is different from diary keeping in that it is online and public, whereas diaries were and are potential public displays with a delay between the writing and its revelation. Response: Letter writing, diary culture and commentary has always been a part of writing. Blogging is returning to this history. Answer: Letter writing is closer to email since it is specifically addressed. Question: Blogging is also a performative activity. Answer: Geert cites a German theorist who says that this performative aspect pushes bloggers from English to another language for greater breadth of expression. Whereas in chatrooms and email English is more predominant. Question: Why use the term internet culture in a nationally segregated net? Answers: Term has its roots in the early 90s when the net was seen as a tool to create a global culture that transcends physical boundaries. There was an early idea that English was to be the language of the internet and no one considered the possibility of other languages appearing on the internet. Internet Culture Definition: People that gather around applications and platforms and create their own communities and cultures of use. Geert admits he is techno-determinist and sees these cultures bordered by the limitations of software. Question: Relation between confession and political participation, Confession first example of autobiography and secular without mediation of the church or sovereign. Is blogging a new form of political participation that has not been realized yet, free of mediation? Answer: Anyone can blog therefore there is no intrinsic emancipatory element to it. Reached critical mass after 9-11 and the dominating culture of blogs has been conservative. This is also evident in other cultures. Question: Is there a space for “do-it-yourself” in the massification of internet culture? Answer: There is if you look at tactical media, activism, and netporn. However for DIY to become a mass practice you must have a distrust to deconstruct the technology and not take it for granted as it is. Blogging is not part of this because no one criticizes the way blogs work. It creates an instantaneous mindlessness.

technoSpheres: FutureS of Thinking

thinking about games

Scout — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 13:27:13 -0400

Gaming isn't my thing. I really enjoyed Thursday's presentation from Tracy Fullerton, especially the thoughtfulness she gave to game design. I'm wondering about game thinkers in the seminar: can Herbert Marcuse's concept of repressive desublimation, Gregory Bateson's work on play and cybernetics, or Georges Bataille's fascination with excess help us dig into gaming worlds differently and/or more deeply? [And is what you do different or the same as game theory of the cold war period which seemed to be about how to figure out if we were winning the arms race?]

technoSpheres: FutureS of Thinking

Tracy Fullerton, "The Art of Play"

Cathy Davidson — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 20:33:39 -0400

Tracy Fullerton, THE ART OF PLAY Most games,60 mph, and game “The Night Journey” with Bill Viola is 5 mph . . . The rewards are looking deeply, slowly, carefully, and inward. In development now. “Cloud” also a game of contemplation and slow accomplishment.. A game to slow down, relax. What is a game? For TF, game is formal elements. Plus dramatic elements---that make us care about the game, affective relations. All the pieces of the car you go “ooooh” about. Plus dynamic system---doesn’t work unless you play it. Since of emergency is key. In play, predictable and unpredictable events happen. Where is a game? Quote Huizinga: game is an “act apart.” Magic circle: space where you can perform acts apart. Like the frame of a painting, proscenium of a stage, or moment in motion picture screen waiting for the lights to come up. These moments are wonderfully ritualized. In most games, that moment is brusk and exclusive. Not a process. She wants to take back the invitation to play. Inviting someone to play should be a profound moment. Once within the magic circle of the game, rules take on a certain power. Within the rules, we perform actions that we would never otherwise consider—shooting, killing, betraying, lying. But also heroic actions in the face of untenable odds—courage, sacrifice, difficult decision-making. What are the rules----they are awfully fascistic. Yet rules also create possibilities . . . we accept invitation to constrain actions within certain bounds, and amazing potential is created. Paradox of play: release ourselves to play. What is a game designer? “I am going to tell you what you cannot do and you’re going to find something within that that is fun.” Second order problem (game creation): you can’t create the thing, you can only create the circumstance for the thing (the rules within which people play). Designer drafts the documentation to communicate their vision. Designer is the advocate for the player’s experience. Design issues: How is interaction between players organized? Single player v game. Multiple individual players v. game (like slots, bingo, slingo) Player v. player, Unilateral competition.(underused example—Sherlock Holmes is one) Multilateral competition. Cooperative play.(another underused example) Team competition (amazing community-building mechanic) One exercise she does is has her students take one form of a game and change it to another. It forces them to rethink all the problems of the game. Objectives: What goals structure the play? Most games hae goal of destruction. What if game had goal of construction? In The Sims, you can succeed by being very social as well as by amassing money. Monetary way is not only way to scceed. RULES: Guide and limit players’ actions As designer, how do you write your rules and do they express your world view? Do you really believe all people within 30 feet of you are hostile (as is the case in most shooter games). The philosophical rules that underwrite the game system can be changed to express a new philosophical system. Procedures are usually embedded in the control system. One of big fights to come in game design is how to open up control system to have more evocative experiences. Now, most games are about physical movements, jump, kick, xyxyxy (special kick) and low level response (irrrrrrrrrrrrrr). “Interactive grunting” in digital games today. “Guitar Hero”----a great game. It comes with a guitar, a little smaller than real guitar, plus strummer, Classic definition of a liminal object, takes right into fantasy of being a rock and roll star. Digital games are landlocked structures today---but HUGE potential for creating new world experiences. This will come from opening up new procedres. Resources: Anything in the game that is scarce and has utility. Maybe we can make the game so interesting and challenging that kids have to go out and get the information and bring it to the game. Learning games. Resources are one of the most difficult tuning problems in the engine of a game . . . if you don’t have the right balance of resources and challenges, the game is over or frustrating. Balancing resources is tough and crucial. What are the boundaries of experience? Mobile devices. But also prior relationships. “Diplomacy”—game where you make deals, negotiation phase. But you don’t really have to do what you say. No adjudication phase. Like “Survivor.” How will it end? MMOOGs . . . people don’t want to leave. Bride party that goes her whole life . . . no one ever said “they are addicted to bridge.” But not pleasurable if you know the ending. Games are systems: 7 formal elements Players Objectives Rules Procedures Resources Boundaries Outcome Dramatic elements: Premise (one of most powerful tools: chess = medieval war) Character Story Challenge Play Choose a new premise. Not war. Political. Or fantastical. Murder mystery (Clue) How to design for innovation? Set highlevel design foals for the player experience Prototype early, using physical materials or rough digital design Integrate player input from the first days of development Playtest with target audiences Iterate the design based on feedback. CF with “Dungeons and Dragons”: there is much more depth in paper games than digital games because there has to be an AI element. In pen and paper version, you are there, with your friends, and you get a lot out of it because of those social interactions. How do you thik of pleasures of transgression and breaking rules when playing games? Some people are rule followers. But she likes wonderful emergent possibilities of rule breaking. Hatrd, though, because you don’t want to destroy the play for the rule followers. She thinks many people who would cheat and transgress on line would neer do it face-to-face. No sense of presence that stops you from acting out socially. If you are designing for other cultures, you have to take into account very different experiences of play. Play for adults, in Japanese culture for example, is accepted and fetishized for adults than we do here. She has worked in China where you have to give people permission to play. She has to give people permission to design. What is the connection between gaming and the futures of thinking. Instrumental thinking, strategic thinking, deception, tactical thinking. What is relation between an y given game and where it mjight take thinking?? And connect to theme of cultural memory. How cultural memory is always recombinant, recombines other memories, and improvisational nature of what happens in circle of game play. Bill Viola wants to do a game because it is an important, emergent art form. “Fluxx”—card game where rules change. Games are so much about fantasy. Changing objectives. To think about for our Mind Games project!! Jackie Steward is doing one with different objectives, different social and state systems. Pedagogical game to get students in undergraduate students in political science class to see what the costs are. She wants people to physical prototype with cheap materials---literally pens, paperclips, markers, thumb tacks, scotc tape, glue, paper,. She does this so students can work on actual elements and mechanics of game play and allows non-technical members to contribute to the design process early on. She has the group work on a simple children’s game called “Up the River” to get a sense of the ways the resources, design, and so forth operate in gaming and it isn’t simple at all. Sid Meyers, “All games are a series of interesting choices.” Set the goal first and then move from there in modding “Up the River”---maybe remove all chance and make it all strategy; or make it cooperative. And so forth. Now, everyone, go play with scissors and paper and markers and imagine newer games and better!

technoSpheres: FutureS of Thinking

SECT - TechnoSpecies

Sha — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 16:01:22 -0400

TechnoSpecies: Artificial/Human/Animal/Posthuman I've been eagerly awaiting this morning, and have volunteered to blog the event, since my interests in science fiction intersect very well with the themes. First, Anne Balsamo talked about Beatriz de Costa's Pigeon Blog, a pigeon release slated for this afternoon, not this evening as at first suggested since it's easier for homing pigeons to find their way home during the day. Now, for Judith Halberstam and Lynn Hershman. Lynn Hershman has worked for 30 years in photography, interactive video, and interactive installation, won an award alongside Jean Baudrillard and Peter Greenaway (I chuckle out loud and get looks), and just last week got the first ISEA life-long award. Judith Halberstam is a professor at USC in English, and director for Center for Feminist Research. (HistCon would have loved to see her hired at UCSC, but Women's Studies apparently had trouble with her focus on masculinity.) Female Masculinity (1998), In a Queer Time and Place (forthcoming?). First Lynn will present, applause! Lynn wishes she had the time to be here for the whole seminar, says she's jealous. Today we're dealing with the contemporary creation of self-generated technobodies, objects reincarnated into subjects and the obsolescence of the corporeal body through "enhancement". This process involves the creation of "anti-bodies", including AIs and other databodies. There are several people in the U.S. named Lynn Hershman, living all around. She recently hired a P.I. to investigate her data history, to see if a "private eye" actually existed. He quickly gleaned all kinds of statistics including incomes of her neighbors, her divorce record, and a general picture that amounts to a dangerous illusion of presence. There is a symbiotic relationship between simulations of the various bots and our own corporeal forms. Lynn first describes a spectrum of virtual and artificial entities drawn from her own work. In the 1950s, Lynn's first virtual persona: the creation of three virtual art critics to write about her work, write reviews and argue so as to get her first show based on this virtual validation. In the 1970s, Lynn lived as Roberta Breitmore, a fictional person compiled from biographical data and could get credit cards while Lynn could not. She placed ads in the paper, and had a number of adventures meeting up with people with her own (blond) hair, her own stance and her own handwriting. In the last year of her life, she multiplied herself into four and was having many negative experiences until eventually she was exorcised. What is it like as an individual to be ensconced in this datasphere, to be literally created by the datasphere? (Screening of Roberta's comic book.) In 1995, Tillie the Telerobotic Doll with camera eyes could be manipulated through the web, a doll surveillance system becoming a waldo for web-users, transforming them into cyborgs. Synthia Stock Ticker is a virtual creature - based on video of a human woman – who keeps track of the stock market in real time, and reacts emotionally and physically to the rising and falling of the stock market. Synthia and Technolust (afternoon screening) were precursurs to the bot Agent Ruby, who talks to users on the web, has moods and the like. Similarly, there is the AI "Dina", whose slogan is "artificial intelligence is better than no intelligence". While Lynn suggests that these are "bodiless" creatures, brains with no bodies, I find this idea dangerous. This notion plays into the same tradition of "disembodiment" that has dominated digital culture and digital media for too long. Don't believe the hype: embodiment is a word that can only make sense in the context of a pre-existing distinction between information and matter or mind and body. Literally the putting or going into a body, embodiment implies a "container body" into which self, mind, or information is inserted. Oddly enough, embodiment has acquired a utopian aspect in digital media studies and film studies, coming to mean the fusion of two distinct ontological entities. As theory, embodiment gets its potential energy from this duality; as academic work, it surfs the standing wave created around such dualities in U.S. American "culture". I wonder if there's not a better word, some neologism perhaps, which could express what many theorists mean when they say "embodiment" without using this dubious metaphor of a container body? During a pause between speakers, my neighbor Annalisa suggests a "monotasking" revolution, since I'm multitasking wildly this morning, demonstrating Linda Stone's "continuous partial attention", which Scott Fisher mentioned on Monday morning. Judith is talking not on animation (her recent work) but on the representation of reproduction, suggesting two parts: (1) on "transbiology", Sarah Franklin's borrowing from Donna Haraway, and (2) a reading of March of the Penguins First, on transbiology. Sarah Franklin, doing ethnographic work in bio labs, reverses the notion of "trans" as a rogue element, suggesting that transbiology is now the norm, not the exception. Transbiology suggests hybrid states of being that reveal shifts in our notion of bodies – e.g. the female cyborg, tamagotchi, Oncomouse(tm!). All of these shift the boundaries, but, Judith suggests, in a different way from what was first suggested by Haraway. New forms are evolving outside of reproductive dynamics and logics, suggesting interdependence of reproductive and non-reproductive forms. Judith suggests we drop the dichotomy of hetero/homo in favor of the queer. Let us turn to "penguin porn", "March of the Penguins" produced through years in the Antarctic filming reproductive and life cycle of penguins. The voice over insists on a narrative that doesn't, Judith suggests, match what the film is actually showing. The anthropomorphized penguins march 70 miles to the breeding ground and the penguins exchange the eggs while males and females march back and forth to eat. The process is harder on the males, so there are many more females then males, despite the heteronormative gist of VO and the focus on specific monogamous "families". Indeed, Judith jokes that the difficulty of this penguin reproductive process is an argument against intelligent design: no one would design it this way if they wanted it to work, since the slightest error kills at least one of the three entitites in question. The VO melds the reproductive narrative to the story of the "family", and the film has been used by the Christian right to emphasize sacrifice for family and monogamy – neither of which hold true to the reality. Watching the film with the sound off offers a perverse narrative, not the outmoded model it claims: love, loss, family, monogamy. Why are all the other penguins there? This is a question the film never addresses. Judith turns to Joan Roughgarden (author of Evolution's Rainbow), who transes Darwin and critiques the capitalist rhetoric of Origin of Species, suggesting alternatives to Darwin's economic reasoning emphasizing collectivity and cooperation. Citing transex fish, hermaphrodite hyenas, and various queer critters, she suggests that non-reproductive entities are part and parcel of the existence of these species, not, as per heteronormative narratives, just useless appendages. [Parenthetically, Judith points out that Finding Nemo is in fact a trans narrative, since male clownfish transform into female clownfish on the death of their mate.] Looking through a different lens, we see very different animal communities; a focus on collectivity and cooperation which is vital here precisely because capitalism is NOT the relevant mode for animal communities. We must look to penguin logic, not "reproductive knowledge". Judith contrasts the March of the Penguins VO with the film images. The VO imposes the stigma and envy of those who can't reproduce, a protestant work ethic, and a capitalist reproductive family instead of focussing on the necessary collectivity of the larger penguin group. The non-reproductive penguins offer warmth, go get food, and are absolutely necessary to the survival of the eggs. Parents feed their babies but do nothing to protect them from predators; baby penguins luckily have five years of cavorting before they undertake the Long March. The role of the VO is to obscure the unimaginable and unnatural: on that note, Judith turns from this high-cultural penguin text to "Seed of Chucky", tracing transbiology to animated horror. Boundary blurring is now everywhere in our cultures, between humans and other animals, between animals and machines – but, asks Judith, do we understand weird relationship between human and human?? Horror films demonstrate fears and misgivings about posthuman, human, non-human forms, and show us what happens when we blow up these normal narratives, bodies coming undone. Teaser trailer for "Seed of Chucky", a fetal narrative about "making the world a better place... to kill... Deliver us some evil." In this context, Judith cites Lee Edelman's No Future, an argument "against the future", suggesting a queer obligation to be against the child and the metaphor of the child as symbol of hope for a better tomorrow. Indeed, Franklin's work on the legacy and future of transbiology displaces this hope into the contemporary reorganization of living matter, cloning, artificial insemination, regeneration, embryology, IVF, and stem-cell technologies, exploring the biosociality (Paul Rabinow's term) of the laboratory and donors, the movement between "clean" and "dirty" spaces, between "life" and "death". In IVF, for example, donated eggs and sperm are transubstantiated, not just into the hope for donors of being able to have a baby, but also into excess cells for stem-cell research for capital accumulation in private databases. Countering this "hope" in the child, Judith turns instead to the unthinkable, the irresponsible, the inhumane, following Edelman's focus on the death-drive as a counter to this hope, as important to the transbiological imaginary as the supposed "altruism" of IVF technology. Once a hopeful queer entity, the cyborg embryo today merely extends the naturalness of family and reproduction. Chucky, suggests Judith, is today's Frankenstein, thematizing the same concerns with reproduction that Mary Shelley foregrounded almost two years ago. Following on "Bride of Chucky", "Seed of Chucky" presents an intersex doll with a made-in-japan stamp on his wrist. He finds his parents, re-animates them, and they ask if he is a boy or a girl: when they see his smooth crotch, each parent claims their "seed" for their own sex: It's a boy! It's a girl! As Judith concludes, spoofing the Cyborg Manifesto, "I'd rather be a supernaturally-possessed doll: it's less complicated." As a final comment, I'd like to add a reference to Zoe Sofia's "sexo-semiotics of technology", detailed in her 1984 Diacritics piece on "Exterminating Fetuses". An important element of Sofia's argument is that *all* technologies are reproductive technologies: Judith seems to suggest this (e.g. the penguin collective of unattached females as reproductive players in their own right), although she starts with an equivocation about a focus on "non-reproductive" modes. I won't be doing the Q&A, because my interface is wearing away at my hands and wrists – hope you've found this little account interesting! REMAIN IN LIGHT