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Speculative Fiction within a Computational Art Practice: Process and Interpretation

   “What will become of the human being in a million years?” (Hottois).

This essay is loosely divided into two parts. In the first section of this essay I analyse my process within a theoretical framework and in the second section I go into greater detail regarding the artefact and its contribution to the theoretical debate and social context of a computational art practice.

My artefact on speculative fiction leads from the work I did previously on emergence and the scaling of the internet. Increasingly, I feel that we are racing towards a future that is uncertain and fraught with dangers: that we are like children playing with gaudy bubbles, discarding them, taking what we want and moving on to the next, our attention span growing fragile as soap bubbles, not looking back at the trail of destruction, the increasing pollution, not even envisioning the future but seeing things as if in a tunnel vision reaching out to the next ephemeral discovery.

The fictional work imagines a future where the non-human and human boundaries are blurred where humans are fitted with interfaces that allows them to work more efficiently for the production line in a world which is exponentially changed by technology. Innovative technology is the norm, technology which come into being, and then are superseded in short time by other discoveries. Deep learning, neural networks, deep dream, nanotechnology etc are terms which are commonplace or outdated.  

I wanted to create an artifact that was complex and dynamic but I felt I needed to think about the readers from their perspective and examine how that might influence my process. Historically, stories and narratives were verbose. The length of the narrative was not curtailed drastically as the content drove the shape and form of the writing.  With the rise of virtual interfaces, the attention span of readers appeared to be changing: Twitter users are allowed only 150 characters. Facebook posts appear to be on a text ‘treadmill’. Instagram advises its readers that the photos and videos that are shared to the story disappear after the feed and profile unless added as a highlight(Instagram). The world’s largest independent news organisation, the Associated Press, has advised its journalists to keep their stories between 300 and 500 words as readers especially on mobile devices can get turned off by longer stories(Farhi).

In light of this turn to brevity in writing, I felt it would be worthwhile to look closely at how words and their meanings are articulated and that I needed to address the question of what they are and what they do. Michel Foucault has some interesting concepts.

In talking about language, Foucault says one of the most important questions confronting us is shining a spotlight on language itself.

'The whole curiosity of thought now resides in the question, what is language and how can we find a way around it, in order to make it appear in itself, in all its plenitude.’ (qtd. in Oksala}.

This statement by Foucault appears to be in contraction with the pared down guidelines of the newspapers editors. One on hand, Foucault advises that language should appear in ‘all its plenitude’ and on the other hand, we have readers and editors who want pared down writing.  However, Foucault does not leave us stranded. He also raises the question of what is language and how we find ways around it to increase its value.

In the Archeology of Knowledge, he presents a method for studying discourse( a rule governed practice of making scientific statements).

“The task consists of not treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak. Of course discourses are composed of signs, but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things. It is this more that renders them irreducible to language and to speech. It is this ‘more’ that we must reveal and describe” (Foucault, 49).

At the first reading, he seems to be talking about something ephemeral, not easily understandable and then I thought it might relate to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle who said.

  “ The whole is more than the sum of its parts”. (Wiki)

This is another cryptic saying that needs unpacking. An online search clarifies the statement.  In Quora,  a respected online site, where questions are answered by readers, one  response resonates:

“It means that there is such a connection among the individual items that it is better than what each one would be individually. This is known as synergy. (the interaction of elements that when combined produce a total effect that is greater than the sum of the individual elements, contributions, etc.; synergism.)” (Quora)

This led to the idea that the ‘more’  might also relate to the notion of emergence where complex systems might arise from simple systems. By deconstructing Foucault’s idea of the more in language, I had come back to the idea of emergence on which I had worked on previously.  

I felt that I was beginning to understand my process of working, to lay the bare bones in plain sight but it appeared to be a convoluted process that folded and refolded onto itself.  In the beginning, my writing process was organic and unconfined in the sense that I begin by free-writing, letting my mind roam to discover what I might be thinking and what imaginative threads might feed into the work. However at one point I felt that I needed a compass, a guidance or at least a confirmation of my  seeming erratic process. I felt that it might lead to circles without a coherent structure.

Donna Haraway’s attention to complexity and boundary blurring gave room to the imaginative expansion of writing:

“Any interesting being in techno science, like a textbook, molecule, equation, mouse, pipette, bomb, fungus, technician, agitator, or scientist can—and often should—be teased open to show the sticky economic, technical, political, organic, historical, mythic, and textual threads that make up its tissues.” (Haraway,)  

Her idea of teasing open to show the sticky threads that make up its tissue was analogous to a dissection of a body part. That a thing consists of many parts, different perspectives and it might be productive to investigate a thing from different perspectives. She illustrates this method in one of the exercises used in her classes.

“To get to the lecture hall we all passed this little shop that sold good coffee and chocolate croissants. … And just as a way of waking up in the morning, I would ask people to unpack objects, to take a chocolate croissant and lead me through flour and chocolate and butter and sugar and coffee and connect us to world histories that way”(qtd in Culanth.org).

Unpacking a thing, looking at its details and in relating it back to its connections and histories is a way of understanding and perhaps getting at the ‘more’ that Foucault discusses above.

In an interview, in which Gilles Deleuze discusses about his unique understanding of the cinema, he approaches the idea of unpacking from a different perspective by talking about classifications. He said that they are like the outline of a book, its vocabulary, its glossary.

“ It’s not the essential thing, which comes next but it’s an indispensable work of preparation”.(qtd in Monoskop.org )

He goes on to give an example of Foucault who was thrilled by Jorge Luis Borges’s Chinese classification of animals belonging to the emperor as being embalmed, domesticated, edible and mermaids. He then clarifies this statement by saying that all classifications belong to this style: they are mobile, modifiable, retroactive, boundless and their criteria vary from style to style but also they involve bringing together things with very different appearance and separating those are very similar. (qtd in Monoskop)

Deleuze addresses the concerns discussed by both Haraway and Foucault. He agrees with the listing and ordering of details as a prerequisite to ‘essentialness’ that Foucault talks about. That in order to get to the ‘more’, one needs to pay attention to connections of a thing especially where they might seem to be dissimilar in the first place.

Claire Colebrook,  in  “Understanding Deleuze,” says that more than any other thinker of this time, Deleuze’s work is not so much a series of self-contained arguments as it is the formation of a whole new way of thinking and writing.

She says:

“A philosophy or form of writing that aims to affirm the mobility of life must itself be mobile, creating all sorts of connections and following new pathways. For this reason there is an almost circular quality to Deleuze’s work: once you understand one term you can understand them all; but you also seem to need to understand all the terms to even begin to understand one “(Colebrook, xviii)

And that :

“Deleuze argued that concepts were complicated in this way: creating ‘new connections for thinking’, opening up whole new ‘planes of thought”(Colebrook, ).

I began to understand  that writing was not about restraint, not about the twitter’s limitation to one hundred and fifty characters or the newspapers advice about the brevity of the its articles. It was about ‘new connections’ and ‘new planes’. It was about taking the reader through a door and setting the space for the creation of new connections by unpicking a thing and relating it back to the various contexts that it might inhabit or by classifying a thing by its dissimilarities as Deleuze suggested.

Deleuze and Felix Guattari also argued for ‘rhizomatic’ styles of thinking:

“ Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any part of the rhizome can be connected to anything and must be. This is very different from the tree of root, which plots a point” (Deleuze and Guttari)

They state that there would be not a fixed centre or order so much as a multiplicity of expanding and overlapping connections. They suggested instead of a fixed hierarchical way of thinking as might be illustrated by a tree which grows from a root, which supports the trunk which in turn supports the branches and leaves, thinking might benefit from a rootless structure that allows connections with its various parts and allows for a multiplicity of overlapping ideas.

Foucault, Deleuze and Guttari, and Haraway all talk about something that lies beyond the words themselves, connections to things which at first appearance might appear not to have anything in common but they suggest that the process of teasing apart strands, of unfolding and connecting without a fixed centre might lead to the insights that are not apparent at first sight.

I began to understand that my organic process of writing and allowing connections arise instead of submitting to an overly logical process in the beginning of the writing process might return unexpected access to knowledge about things,  I began to realise that Deleuze idea of the fold was relevant to my process of thinking and working, that my process was series of unfolding and refolding on itself. I felt that I didn’t know the shape and form that the writing was going to take when I first began. It was a nebulous feeling as though I was entering a liminal zone where things all things was possible, but where the perspectives of things might be easily skewed if I didn’t pay attention. The process of  free writing, research on the internet on the anxieties of today’s technological space and where it might lead us and possible reinterpretation those concerns within a fictional framework became a workable method, a compass of where I was heading to: an unknown, uncharted region.

I also kept a fictional journal when I wrote periodically of some of my concerns and ideas and these journal writings helped me to articulate the shape and form of the final work. The following excepts give an insight into the procedure.

Saturday 3rd March

My writing process has changed. After a mini tutorial during the class break, Helen suggested that I might to think about presenting the artefact in an alternative way, maybe a text to speech or a dramatisation or performance which I could then post to Vimeo or YouTube. While an interesting idea, I have to change my writing process, Reading out  a piece of work, a performance action changes the way I need to look at the words. I can no longer be rambling with the words nor can I let the thoughts be diffuse. I have to pay attention to how the words interact with each other, in terms of sound and meaning. I have to think  also in terms of a sculptural narrative as well as a fictional narrative.

Saturday 10th March.

I presented my idea to the group tutorial. Isaac suggested that I might use LyreBird site to recreate my voice. After spending an hour recording and recording a number of sentences, the recreated voice sounded artificial. Maybe text to voice is not a good idea but the suggestion made me pay more attention to the words and their shapes and how they interacted with each other. Luke also made a suggestion that maybe I could show the words on the screen in a way which was illegible at first and then becoming legible. A few days later as I was experimenting with data representation for another class and imported a line of text that I could transform, I thought, why not import 2000 words instead of six but I felt that I needed to think articulating a different way of reading that related back to the form of the work instead of just reading it like on e-reader. Then I thought that  maybe I can read each word separately that each word had the stage for itself for a moment. Would it be readable? It was, and I found that I did not need to know all the words. I then adjusted the random size of the words between 10 and 150 pixels so the words appeared on the screen in a fixed order but had a random size. At first, it was 0 to 100 and then I thought that I didn’t want words to disappear completely. I also experimented with colour and transparency setting but found they distracted from  the meaning of the words. Some of the words were large enough to fill the screen and their edges characters disappeared but it gave an emphasis and  created a passage of time which was interesting.  Also I found that new meanings could be created and the text  could be read like a sculptural poem in the sense that a different , more careful attention was paid to the words which was larger but at the  same time this attention from the top layer of the screen representing the larger letters and the bottom of the screen( the smaller letters) allowed for a different user interaction.  

Sam Han, in “Navigating Technomedia”, says that in reference to Deleuze’s idea of the fold, he would like to rethink the context of the internet and techno media as spatial modulations and he suggests that modulations are opening and closing of spaces but they are not fully at an open or closed state.

“Therefore the Internet distinctly challenges the ideal of enclosures, characteristic of the spatial logic that was necessary in the industrial capitalism. The Internet marks not only an era of capitalism but also the beginnings of fixity and centerness of space ” (Han, 75).

Therefore one approach of representing techno media or speculative fiction might lie in consideration paid to the transmission of the media in the sense that the work is considered a sculptural form that is portrayed in a way that brings attention in a specific ways to the individual words instead of the words lying on page, each one of them static and confined. In a different format such as the one presented in this artifact, the reading may become less passive and more interactive. The movement, sculptural effect and new meanings might engage readers in alternative reading experiences. However, it is important to point out that this might not be appropriate for longer texts as but in shorter more poetic frameworks and I envisage it presented in a gallery perhaps with other contemporary works.  

A blog post on art form and social practice suggests that because speculative fiction tests elements not current in  the normal realm, speculative fiction should be read differently than other forms of literature. In the article, the writer cites Darko Suvin, an academic and critic who suggests as science fiction (a subgenera of speculative fiction) discovers elements in the modern world that need refinement and then exposes them as problems and explores where they lead, they serve as a warning or a call to action.(Suvin,hhum )

Patricia Clough states that practices are forms of play with objects in which incomputable probabilities exist within the internal complexity of all objects and that it must be interdisciplinary, speculating with the real in practice and performance. That it will require those that assist in realising ‘unactualised’ but real possibilities. ().

Speculative fiction in terms of computational art practice can serve to articulate concerns of the interaction and effects of technology and artificial intelligence in future. It can serve as a warning or as a call to action by exposing these concerns to the general public by sensitising them to the possible effects. It may envisage a possible unsustainable future and encourages research and social commentary to investigate and articulate these concerns as the work is not entirely based on the imagination but driven by real world facts and events. For instance, recently in the news, Cambridge Analytica, the company ‘that uses data to change audience behaviour’  has come again under scrutiny as Facebook is being investigated in the claim that it might have collected and supplied data information of 50 million users without their knowledge or permission to them (Guardian News).  Cambridge Analytica is also implicated in the outcome of the elections of the current president of the United States. Speculative fiction can be a space to imagine and articulate possible future outcomes of these interactions. Within a context such as a computation art practice, one is might able to socially comment and possible create an artistic intervention within the broader and frankly scary world scenarios of manipulation and transformation of  humans and their environment without their knowledge. Speculative fiction within the realm of computational arts can be an instance of realising ‘unactualised’ but real possibilities.  

WC: 3105

References:

Hottois, Gilbert(translated by James A. Lynch)  https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/technoscience

Instagram, https://help.instagram.com/1729008150678239

Farhi Paul, May 12 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/new-ap-guidelines-keep-it-brief/2014/05/12/f220f902-d9ff-11e3-bda1-9b46b2066796_story.html?utm_term=.1a19e573c7d7

Foucault, Michel quoted in  Foucault on Freedom, Johanna Oksala, Cambridge University Press,

2005

Foucault, Michel, Archeology of Knowledge, pg, 49, Pantheon Books, NY, 1972

Aristotle, Wiki https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Aristotle

Quora, https://www.quora.com/What-does-the-phrase-The-whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts-mean

Haraway, Donna quoted by Aylish Wood Technoscience in Contemporary Film: Beyond Science Fiction, pg 4, Manchester University Press, 2002

Haraway, Donna quoted in https://culanth.org/articles/741-writing-the-implosion-teaching-the-world-one

Deleuze, Gilles, quoted in The Brain is the Screen  Deleuze and the Philosophy of the Cinema, ed. Gregory Flaxman, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2000, https://monoskop.org/images/4/4d/0816634467BrainB.pdf pg 368

Deleuze, Gilles, quoted in Understanding Deleuze, Claire Colebrook, pg xviii, https://seminario2012.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/colebrook-claire-understanding-deleuze.pdf

Deleuze, G and Guttari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Introduction, University of Minnesota Press, 1987 http://composingdigitalmedia.org/digitaliteracy/docs/Deleuze_guat_Rhizome.PDF

Han, Sam Navigating Technomedia: Caught in the Web, pg. 75, https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=snLybjta_UgC&pg=PA73&lpg=PA73&dq=deleuze+fold+internet+of+things&source=bl&ots=BWoVs5JTQJ&sig=_1gWePLassTc5XIPq5eG4_t1p6U&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjD98aOgqTZAhXTasAKHdUKBQQQ6AEIhwEwCQ#v=onepage&q=deleuze%20fold%20internet%20of%20things&f=false

Suvin Darko http://hhumthinkinginpublic.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/speculative-fiction-art-form-and-social_26.html

Clough, Patricia Ticiento, Computational Aesthetics in The Practices of Art as Politics,  Queens College and The Graduate Center CUNY

Guardian News, Cambridge Analytica, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/26/the-cambridge-analytica-files-the-story-so-far#img-1

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           Blurred  -  A piece of speculative fiction(Artifact for Theory) 

Unless we wake up to the damage that the gadget-filled, pharmaceutically-enhanced 21st century is doing to our brains, we could be sleepwalking towards a future in which neuro-chip technology blurs the line between living and non-living machines, and between our bodies and the outside world.

Susan Greenburg

2018A.D.

Under the dark waters there is silence. A fish or sometimes a large shadow-like creature drifts by. A few centimetres under the surface of the water, bits of plastic, catch the rays of a fading sun and glows with colour, shades of blue and green. This is the edge of the ‘floating’ island. Towards the centre, the mass heaves as if inhabited by multi-hued living things. A scent of rotten fish emanates from it. Any creature within it is doomed. Small fish even a short distance away turn belly up fast, a last twitch,  and they begin the natural progression of flesh decomposing.

Chemicals drift out of the floating mass. Unseen and deadly, they give no warning. Coloured flip-flops, transparent water bottles, pieces of wood, corrugated metal sheets, all the debris of mankind float with the mass. They converge on five masses spread across the oceans.  

2150 A.D.

In the distance  jagged cliffs run along the seashore. The land is covered with brown rush-like grasses, the tips grey and torn.  For miles around, the landscape is the same, dry and sparse. The sky is empty. No clouds. In the distance, small pockets of vegetation line the crevices of mountains. Green tips of trees peer out, sometimes a flash of orange where a fruit catches the light but no one notices. No human beings are around and animals, if present, hide in cool burrows underground.  

Two hundred kilometres away a translucent dome sits on a large expanse of earth. It is covered with hexagonal plates of toughened glass.  No better material has been found to replace glass. No doors are seen, no escape route. It seems that the inhabitants there or whoever live there, has turned their back on the earth.

Ba 631 stirs. No dream-catchers for her. No permanent chips in her brain. Her sleep patterns were of no use to anyone. Her mind had been wiped and refreshed many times after they took her away. It was fresh as a daisy they had told her, one image they couldn’t erase, and they left it alone, a  remnant  of  the quirky imagination of a young girl. She looks at small screen above her head. 5.30 am. The sleep period has been further reduced in the last month but she doesn’t mind. Recently she had begun to have dreams again after twenty years.

The mattress she is lying on begins a gentle massage. Time to tap into the library of Remembrance. Fifteen minutes of memory, uncensored. Time to travel back in time, visit a world of sound and images. She relaxes but doesn’t take the VR specs. She prefers to watch from the outside as she is not sure how much data it collects. But it is good this way too. It is not difficult. Always waiting. The blue skies,  the big fat clouds. She looks lower. The sun scintillating across the blue water. To the left, a pod of dolphins frolicking in the cool waters. She pauses, looking at them for a moment, taking in the curve of their bodies, the glistening skin of their bodies and then scanned the water for what she has been looking for. A short distance away from the group, a mother dolphin is swimming slowly with a baby at her dorsal fin. The mother swoops suddenly up in the air and after a moment the baby tries and makes a perfect arc.

 These are the images she is allowed, the collective knowledge that belongs to all humanity, machines and the in-betweens. All pixels washed and cleaned. Pixels that catch the light, show the animals in the best light, the water blue and clean. She waits for a moment and then goes deeper in her mind. A memory pushes forward and she lets out a hiss of air. She tries to see more each time but it seems that she sees through a fixed peephole, only that and no more. A girl with a dog walk along a path on the cliffs until they come to a cove. Dolphins are waiting, swimming lazily in the water. She stops and the dog squats besides her. She reaches into her pocket and breaks off hunks of bread and throws them in the water. The dolphins swoop at the bread and devour them. Then they raise their head and smile at her. So intent she is on the animals, that she doesn’t hear the sound of the helicopters in the distance. Then it’s too late. She looks up and sees a woman on the verandah of the house nearby, gesticulating wildly, her mouth open in a scream. It was the only day of her life she would remember, the moments of the dolphins smiling and a woman screaming, whose face she tries and tries but cannot not remember.

She is careful with this memory. She lets it sink back deep beneath the layers, hidden well from the collectors. She doesn’t know how she does it but it feels natural. She turns her mind to the pod of dolphins in the sea, letting the images flood her mind, wiping any traces, preparing herself for the day ahead, for the time she and her mind belongs to the collective.

A light flashes. She gets up and goes to the bathroom pod. She catches a glimpse of sturdy square buttocks before a towel is wrapped around the pink body.

Hemmel. He is always late. He stumbles past her without seeing her. She doesn’t mind. He probably was reprimanded. The pod is quite disciplined in that way. It hates being behind in its schedule.

She waits a moment until the pod is clean and disinfected but when she gets in, she imagines that she could smell a whiff of Hemmel’s soap. Lemongrass and a synthetic chemical she can’t identify, a musky smell some of her clients had used in the job before this one.

She opens her mouth and a brush appear and delve between her teeth,  brushes her gums and tongue and sprays gel. She gargles and spits out.

Here she can think. Sensors check her teeth, gums and even the elasticity of her skin but her mind left untouched. She searches for the image .The mother  dolphin is lying and the water and suddenly the baby jumps three times in the air, one after the other. Ripples spreads in all directions, intersect and  create new patterns.  The baby dolphin swims back to his mother and lies in the water near her back fin.

The brushes have finished their job of brushing rotating, brushing, scraping and squirting gel in her mouth. It finishes off with minty spray and more brushing. She dutifully spits and another liquid is sprayed into her mouth. All in a matter of seconds. Her teeth feel clean and dry. There is a pause before her bath as the pod checks her requirements. Water is too precious to be used for bathing so cleaning rituals have been automated. She doesn’t mind. A few extra minutes when her thoughts are not mined, categorised and recycled.

A cool jet of heavy air strikes her body from all sides. She spreads her arms and legs. More aerosol leaden with cleaning agents, mild disinfectants strike bar body followed by a jet of air, labelled forest fern with wild daisies. It was the only scent that she remembers of that summer day on the cliff long ago. She searches for a particular smell she can’t describe but it is always elusive, always tantalising out of reach. Glitches in the algorithm. Not all thoughts can be read clearly. Most things are standardised. Her hair undergoes the same treatment and then she is wrapped in a fluffy synthetic towel . She steps out the cubicle and goes back in her cubicle.

Her body scanned and measured. She will ovulate in five days. It’s her turn to be harvested. A short procedure for which she gets bonus points. She has a few more years until even this function of hers will stop working but she is stubborn. She wants children.  She wonders if there are young children looking like her, never once questioning where they came from. A new breed of trans human without parents, a combination of best fitted features so they exhibit  a wide variety of the skill sets needed.

She had this peculiar desire even since she was young. That she needed to have children, even if she would never see them. Never know what they looked like who their fathers were and what they were doing, whether they were happy or not, how human they were. But it was a need pushing her on and on through out the years. Sometimes she wondered if the algorithm made her do that, whether it was that erasing and remaking of her mind that drove her but this felt more primal, as if having eggs, getting them fertilised and creating children was a way of making herself visible, of leaving her mark on the world.

She clears her mind. Make a blank sheet. It was one of the first things she learned. Vague shapes hover over her. The stripping and cleansing of her mind had not fully done and they shadowy figures remained. It was something she never mentioned and the machines looking into her mind dismissed it as a glitch, a result of her being with humans at an early age, not undergoing cleansing mind process until she was twelve. She was an irregularity, saved when her parents were condemned because they believed in free thought. But she was saved mainly because they thought her beauty was rare and could be made use of.    

She waits, a blinding flash in her head, Software updates. Glitches fixed. As always the latest news , breakthroughs and progress in all areas. The outer environment is never mentioned but  the space mission almost at the end of the milky way in search for a habitable planet is the main topic of the morning. A planet has been detected that might a mirror image of earth. Water is detected. Hydrogen and oxygen that is. Another twenty years to reach it. Nanoparticle delivery of cancer medication became the standard norm. It was only a matter of time that cancer would be eliminated. Life would be cheaper. Batch processing and production entered a new stage with neural networks made from biological materials. Machines will began to think more organically, intuitively.

Yet they haven’t solved the problem of dying. It seems that even most healthy humans once they have past the age of ninety to one hundred and ten, they passed away in their sleep. There are a few of them who are passed one hundred and twenty years but they are mostly relics, living in research centres, their body scanned and examined to reveal hidden secrets.  

Everything is recycled. Back to the back elements carbon, hydrogen, …used in nanotechnology to create new products. No one objected. It was a more efficient way of living.  

In the early 21st century, 8 million metric tons of plastics enters the oceans from the land each year. There are 8 billion tons of plastics in the world.

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Reflective piece for A2: Bits and pieces about the essay, the process and other things...

“What will become of the human being in a million years?” (Gilbert Hottois)

Steven Shaviro in talking about the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead says that Whitehead believed that the question of how we know cannot come first, for our way of knowing is itself a consequence or a product of how things are actually are and what they do. Whitehead says:

“I feel that I myself, together with things that beyond my knowledge of them, are all alike inhabitants of a ‘common world.’(Shaviro, p3) In Creative Practice as Research: Discourse on Methodology, Lyle Skains states:

Art, literary, music, and film analysts examine, dissect, and even deconstruct the art that we create in order to study culture and humanity, pulling the techniques and references and motivations apart to develop knowledge of how works of art relate to the culture and society in which they are produced, as well as to the development of particular art forms over time. Practice-based

researchers push this examination into a more direct and intimate sphere, observing and analysing themselves as they engage in the act of creation rather than solely on the dissection of the art after the fact. (Skains)

A distinctive aspect of practice-based research is the interplay between making and reflecting and generating questions that are addresses, in turn, by further making, reflecting and evaluating, including systemic studies. (Lindy Candy)

A clear description of the meaning of speculative fiction is difficult to establish. The Oxford Research Encyclopaedia states that when it comes to  speculative fiction, there are more questions than answers. However it defines it as a mode of thought-experimenting that includes narratives and operates in a variety of formats.

“The field of speculative fiction groups together extremely diverse forms of non-mimetic fiction operating across different media for the purpose of reflecting on their cultural role, especially as opposed to the work performed by mimetic, or realist narratives. (Oxford Dictionary)”

Wikipedia takes a more general approach. It suggests that speculative fiction is an umbrella genre encompassing narrative fiction with supernatural of futuristic elements . It states that it includes but not limited to, the genres science fiction, fantasy, superhero fiction, science fantasy, horror, utopian and dystopian fiction, supernatural fiction, as well as their combinations.

Donna Haraway provides the key to decoding her use of science fiction ( a sub-genre of speculative fiction}. In “The Promises of Monsters, Haraway states that her purpose is “to writer theory: i.e. to produce a patterned vision of how to move and what to fear in the topology of an impossible but all-too-real peseta in order to find out about an absent but perhaps, possible, other present.’

I wanted to investigate speculative fiction in the light of the scaling of technology and wanted to imaginatively construct a world that might exist in the future. One aspect of my concerns was the pollution of the oceans and the effects that might have on the ecology of the world. I imagined a world which was barren, radioactive, where pockets of humans survive in large pods and where these safe areas are  regulated by AI machines.  Humans are on the verge between human as we know it and trans human. I wanted to think about the effects of trans-humanism, and whether it might have adverse effects on the society in which we live. In the recent spate of child molestation and impropriate behaviour, a large emphasis has been place on the non- touching of children in schools an other public places by those in care, one on hand this prevents inappropriate behaviour but on the other it causes a schoolteacher give a Bandaid to the child to be placed by the for fear of  actually touching the child. The article raised concerns about. Society being changed by non-touching(Guardian newspaper).

Speculative fiction, a story set in the future where data is controlled even in the thoughts of people. What are people needed for? To turn on the switches in the system? What is the idea of the non human and the human?What are the connections between them? Small children are incredibly curious. They are driven by a force that make them investigate everything in a robust scientific manner. They hold, taste, turn over, stare at a thing again and again. As a child gets older, learning to live in this world gets in his way of investigating things or even about being interested in things and he begins to limit himself to the bare essentials of getting through the day and accomplishing his tasks.

A grown up person is even worse. Most of us never look up at the sky during the day and look at the patterns of cloud formation and relate it to something else.  Or look at the little plant growing by the roadside. We are in hurry to get from point A to point B. I know that I am like that most days even though I also know that it takes a couple seconds to look up at the sky and make another connection or just to appreciate the beauty of it.

Process of writing?  In sculpture class, we had several ways of working that fed into the our process. We worked in clay from the model in front of us. In our studio, we had three models. There was a young man who was muscular and he posed in the nude, poses which went for two months or more. He had a firm muscular body that showed his muscles clearly. By a strange chance, our studio also had two older women who never posed in the nude. One was a professional model who used to pose in the nude but no longer did so or posed in her underwear when pressed to do so. We mostly made head studies of her and we had a third model who appeared out of nowhere. She was quite old and sat quietly with her hands in her lap. Most of the time the students ignored her,  preferring  the nude. My professor posed her with gypsum casts of horses or broken statues of ancients casts … The stillness of them was echoed in her. I wished I had made more works of her but I too, was giddy with the nude. One day we heard that she was sick. We visited her in hospital and she was happy to see us. Her body was swollen. Then she passed away. It was a shock for us, her passing away in term time. We went to her funeral, strangers among her family. There was a daughter.

Thinking of it we had three modes of working. First the nude where we had studies leading to a more developed representation where we made careful measurements as a group, measuring the plan of the model at various points. We were led by the teaching assistant. It was something that took at least two or three weeks accomplish as there was a lot of measuring everyday, first to make sure the model was in the right position, not even having moved a fraction. We made lots of  cross measurements that was checked and rechecked. After the measuring was done and the points plotted ,we started to work individually, deciding on a particular size which was  n proportion to the actual figure of the mode. One could do 0.6, or 0.4 of the figure so it is easy to get the proportions right when setting up the internal structure of the work, Another week of measuring and getting the internal metal support in proportion than covering it with gypsum and placing the points onto the figure so we had points for reference. Each point was not on its own but was referenced and checked by other points , at least three, a sort of triangulation, a building of the figure according to preset rules while setting it up. The later stage was a mixture of working to make sure the  big measurements were accurate and then interpreting them in an expressive way, essentially it was the way you found enjoyable while working. Some people made abstract representation and others works in a more classic way, trying for a close representation. This was the nicest part of the process.

We also worked with bits of clay, measuring intuitively. Small lumps of clamp expressively searching for the form and internal stance of the model. We made a lot of these models.

A third way of working was that of the imagination. We were given a brief line of poem, a reading or some small introduction which none of really understood. Then we had to go off and investigate it in a some way and come back in about a month or six weeks with a sculptural artefact. It could be in any form except painting, form meaning sculpturally related, video, photographs, 3D objects. Think about building an internal framework.

Instead practices are forms of play with objects, that is, with the mediatic spaces or the indeterminate, internal complexity of all objects or entities where incomputable probabilities are still real and present. The practices of art as politics are play that realizes other possibilities, all those other possibilities that are bundled with incomputable probabilities. (Patricia Clough)

Diffraction: spreading of the light rays.

Definition: The process by which a beam of light or other system of waves is spread out as a result of passing through a narrow aperture or across an edge, typically accompanied by interference between the wave forms produced.    

Interference is an interesting word and also the idea of something spreading out so one is able to see the unit structure of a thing. It can be a whole new structure that is different from the whole which gives new information about the thing. It reminds me two circles moving together on the screen, one in top of the other but you only see one circle but when you set the radius at different values, you are able to see the whole picture. How can this relate tot what we are doing in Computational Arts? How can I separate it into unit structures so I can see the piece that make the thing up and also get an idea of how they might combine together?

Fei-Fei Li and her team at Stanford university has implemented  research that takes millions of images from the internet and sorts them in 22,000 classes and then taught that model to the computer with a great number of training examples. The computer was able to respond and interpret the basic shapes in an image. It’s a great breakthrough machine learning although computer vision is still in its infancy. It cannot make complicated connections that humans do. We don’t even know how these connections are made, what makes one person more intelligent than another, more creative than another. Is it because these people make more connections that the rest of us and come up with something that is creative? Is it because we are lax about noticing things and creating the connections like a child does?

Research on how we process things: the brain works in both  parallel and serial ways. That there are serial and parallel processing involved can be easily seen from the time needed to perform tasks. For example a human can recognise the picture of another person in about 100 mille seconds. Given the processing time of 1 mille second for an individual neuron, this implies that a certain number of neurons, but less than 100, are involved in serial; whereas the complexity of the task is evidence for a parallel processing, because a difficult recognition task cannot be performed by such a small number of neurons. This phenomenon is known as the 100-step-rule.

What are the things that come into my thinking in the act of thinking? I start to think of a thing and then something, an image or an idea pushes the original idea to one side. It doesn’t get pushed away entirely but the new the idea which might be related or not to the first idea takes centre stage in my mind for this moment. I can choose to go with this idea or push it away if it does relate to my first idea or if I am not focused, the second thought could take me away and I will forget about the first idea, although most times I believe that there is a  trail of the first idea, that it is not entirely forgotten. The thinking mind is like a flexible net. It allows things to bounce off it, subside into it or bounce out of sight.

In my writing, I am wandering, taking the thoughts as they come. It can be a good thing as I get to explore little paths that I could not be able to consciously think of but on the other hand it can seemed like a slightly unfocused mind. Another thought just came in my mind. Yesterday I attended a writers talk by two writers. One of the authors wrote non fiction, mostly ‘soft’ historical fiction where he conducts a lot of interviews and then try to connect the things together. He tries to find an interesting story among the ones he has heard and then make that the central theme and fit the snippets of the other stories to make it a readable whole.

He said one odd thing: that he doesn’t like writing, the  act of writing but he likes the research or the talking about the book after. The other author also writes based on a historical perspective but writes fiction. She didn’t comment on the other person saying that he didn’t like writing but she did say that she had a writer’s block for about seven years where although she wrote, it was shit (her words) but she read a lot and that fed into her next book.

I began to understand what Foucault was saying: that a piece of writing should contain something more than the words or elements it contains. I also began to understand the boundaries between my written artefact, a work of creative fiction, which engages in the liminal zone between human and trans human and this writing, a work of creative non-fiction, which involves an analysis of my process within a theoretical framework. It was an important distinction for me to understand that the artefact lay within a subset of my art process and the discoveries I made here would relate to my whole process of working instead of only to the artefact.

Find a word and write about it; word for today taken at random from the book, by Rachel Seiffert ‘A Boy in Winter’

Outside-what is the meaning of outside? Immediately the word inside comes to my mind. I  am more interested in the inside rather than the outside of things but both are important. Things need an inside and an outside to contain it, to protect it. toTo give it form. Think about the form of things.

“The most radical questions raised by technosciences concern their application to the natural (as a living organisms formed by the evolutionary process) and manipulated (as a contingent creation of human culture). Such questions acquire their greatest importance when one takes into account the past and future (unknowable) immensity of biological, geological, and cosmological temporality, in asking, for example: What will become of the human being in a million years? From this perspective the investigation of human beings appears open not only to symbolic invention (definitions, images, interpretations, values), but also to techno-physical invention (experimentation, mutations, prosthetics, cyborgs). A related examination places the technosciences themselves within the scope of an evolution that is more and more affected by conscious human intervention. Both approaches raise questions and responsibilities that are not foreign to ethics and politics but that invite us at the same time to consider with a critical eye all specific ethics and politics because the issues exceed all conceivable societal projects”(Gilbert Hottois).

Gilbert Hottois (born 29 March 1946, Brussels) is a Belgian professor of Philosophy at the Université Libre de Bruxelles who specialises in Bioethics.

Bioethics is the study of the ethical issues emerging from advances in biology and medicine. It is also moral discernment as it relates to medical policy and practice. Bioethicists are concerned with the ethical questions that arise in the relationships among life sciences, biotechnology, medicine, politics, law, and philosophy. It includes the study of values ("the ethics of the ordinary") relating to primary care and other branches of medicine. (Wikipedia)

The Universe of Things on Speculative Realism by Steven Shaviro., University of Minnesota Press, 2014

Gilbert Hottois, translated by James A. Lynch  https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/technoscience)

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Proposal

Where is the internet going? Where is it heading to? Where is the data going? Why is it important?

Key questions :

The association between human and nonhuman. The state of the human condition. What it means to be human? Are we evolving into a state between human and nonhuman?

Motivation: The feeling that we are speeding towards the unknown to places we unable to map, all in the name of ‘progress’. The future seems uncertain and insecure, full of hidden hazards.

Theoretical frameworks:

1.Donna Haraway’s attention to complexity and  boundary blurring.

“Stories and facts do not naturally keep a respectable distance; indeed, they promiscuously cohabit the same very material places.” (Haraway)

2.Unpacking things and looking at the connections between them.

“Any interesting being in technoscience, like a textbook, molecule, equation, mouse, pipette, bomb, fungus, technician, agitator, or scientist can—and often should—be teased open to show the sticky economic, technical, political, organic, historical, mythic, and textual threads that make up its tissues” (Haraway)

3.Deleuze and Guattari argued for ‘rhizomatic’ styles of thinking in which there would be not a fixed centre or order so much as a multiplicity of expanding and overlapping connections.

Deleuze’s idea of the fold- relate it to the internet and data  

Theoretical frameworks in the analysis:

The task consists of not “treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak. Of course discourses are composed of signs, but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things. It is this more that renders them irreducible to language and to speech. It is this ‘more’ that we must reveal and describe” (Foucault).

2. Deleuze’s argument that concepts were complicated in this way: creating ‘new connections for thinking’, opening up whole new ‘planes of thought’.

Documentation:

Process in art making and writing as an artefact.

Timeline:

This is an intertwined process that go together. Reading and understanding Deleuze. Working on the artefact. Reading some of the set texts form the course again. Research on the internet.  Looking at Haraway’s process …agreeing with some aspects and finding other things fuzzy. Leaning towards Deleuze as he is more lucid. Finding the process. Documenting the process in the context of the theory.  Analysing my process and artefact.

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Machine Seeing

I looked at the following things on Google:

Indian Women in Science Lots of personable women in lab coats and in labs practicing their vocation

Black women in Science. Mostly historical black and white photos

Women in Science In the beginning a lot of cartoonish figures there is a magazine called women in science and then a few women. Not a lot of scientific looking photos. Some were of seminars.

Finally I looked at Trinidadian women of Science as I am Trinidadian and used to be in Science. This was even worse. Lots of semi-naked women in carnival outfits.

Images can be take out of context and given new meanings. I liked at these images two months ago but when I looked at them recently, the demographics had changed. There were more black women in lab coats as opposed to before. Images of white women remained the same more or less but the in the Trinidadian images, there were less half dressed women now. I remember being shocked when I first saw the images. Now I am wondering how much machine learning takes place behind the scenes whether there is information gathering on sensitive issues and whether this is addressed in the images that come up. I always thought that the images on google were unbiased but I am not sure now. I am also concerned about the things that people research on the internet about the amount of information that are gathered and ways in which this information might be processed. On the news recently, there were reports of the huge amount of information Facebook kept of people’s phone calls and contacts. It makes me more aware of  the information spiral as I use these forms of communication.

I felt that Noble’s arguments about the way that black women were being depicted on the internet were very valid and that there is a lot of misrepresentation that is happening now. Cox also made me awarer of the way we see images on the internet and how they shape our concepts and behaviours about things, And although Few Fei Li insists computers only see in binary numbers and are neutral, she is right about human seeing thing in a very emotional way and being influenced by them.

A Future for Intersectional Black Feminist Technology Studies

by Safiya Umoja Noble

Noble begins by saying that neoliberal narratives of digital technologies and the Internet have suggested that the web is a site of social liberation and empowerment and says although such ideas have been opposed with a lot of evidence by critical theorists in the field , much is needed to be done in shifting the complex global pattens of the information revolution at the expense of Black life.

She says though the term, “ intersectionality” is pertinent to the field of information, little work has been done on Black feminist intervention.

She says ;

Intersectionality was developed by many feminist, antiracist scholars and activists of color as a framework for deepening an analysis of power and oppression across multiple axes. Intersectionality, however, has been woefully under-engaged as a way of thinking about the political economy of the internet and has, in fact, been separated from its Black feminist roots.”

And that more interdisciplinary research and theorising is needed about how range of digital technologies are embedded with intersectional and uneven power relations in the ways that technologies are structured to the materiality of digital communications infrastructures that include the role of state and capital in the extraction, manufacture and disposal of the digital.

She cites the social dynamics online the  mirror offline patterns of racial interaction by marginalising women and people of colour.

She gives examples of black women being ostracised in the media;

“The prevalence of derogatory images of Black women in the media is meaningfully tied to the real-world circumstances that demean the value of Black women’s lives, and these images serve as justification for systemic exclusion and oppression.”

Geoff Cox: Ways of Machine Seeing

Cox says that we should not ask the question whether machines can see or not, rather we should ask the question of how machines have changed the nature of seeing and hence our knowledge of the world. He cites the well publicised cases that “ exemplify a contemporary politics (and crisis) of representation “ in the way that a google search for “three black teenagers” and “three whiter teenagers’ show “mug shots” and “happy teens at play” respectively.

He says:

“ in its widest sense, and “machine learning” techniques are employed on data to produce forms of knowledge that are inextricably bound to hegemonic systems of power and prejudice.”

He suggests that the world begins to be reproduced through computational models and algorithmic logic changing how we see think and even behave. And that subjects and themes are produces by extensive data mining and machine learning as regards our intentions, gestures and behaviours.  

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Machine Seeing

Fei Fei Li : How we are teaching computers to understand pictures

Fei Fei Li  is a researcher on computer vision and training the computer to recognise images by exposing it to a gigantic number of images on a particular subject.

She says :

“Just like the brain consists of billions of highly connected neurons, a basic operating unit in a neural network is a neuron-like node. It takes input from other nodes and sends output to others. Moreover, these hundreds of thousands or even millions of nodes are organized in hierarchical layers, also similar to the brain. In a typical neural network we use to train our object recognition model, it has 24 million nodes, 140 million parameters, and 15 billion connections. That's an enormous model. Powered by the massive data from ImageNet and the modern CPUs and GPUs to train such a humongous model, the convolutional neural network blossomed in a way that no one expected. It became the winning architecture to generate exciting new results in object recognition.“

The computer is shown images  from every conceivable angle and in every shape and form and in this way it is able to recognise most things. She compares the way that a computer learn to a small child by saying a child spends most of the time learning about his world and because the human perception works by association and emotional reaction, it is impossible for the computer to learn like a human because the computer sees in binary numbers, in an on and off mode,  Also children have a drive to see things and analyse them from different perspectives something that a  computer cannot do.

She says that the ability to experience something lies at the heart of the unbridgeable gap between humans and AI and this is because of the way humans and Ai process information; AI does it algorithmically and humans does it associatively (conceptually connecting whole ideas, images, etc).

However she says that teaching computers have applications beyond identifying things. Better machine vision could reveal things about ourselves that we don’t even know. Every day the internet generates trillions of images and videos and other scraps of digital minutiae and it is a mess. Only with the help of machine learning we can make sense of these things. Machine learning also have other applications in healthcare. I could revolutionise the way we treat diseases in the future, Machine learning can also help with the big problems facing humankind like climate change or pollution by gathering and analysing data, by forming meaning connections within a a-short space of time.

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Exercise 1: At the Border of Self and other

We closed our eyes and touched our hands together for a period of time and then opened them and looked at the other person. I felt the fingers of my partner against my own, Not all the finger pads were touching, the little finger of was not touching. It was strange in the beginning and then I felt only the hands as though we were disembodied , as though our minds and bodies had dissolved and the only point of contact between ourselves with hands. I could hear the sounds from afar, not recognisable and I tried to  pull away from that and concentrate on the hands touching.

At one point I wondered if he was uncomfortable and I tried to pull my mind away and into myself so my hands were neutral. I also wondered if my hands were sweaty and I didn’t like this thought. Then we opened our eyes and stared at each other for a while. It was not uncomfortable in the beginning but after a while we both looked away.

With this exercise I became aware of the spaces that we inhabit, the boundaries that we keep. I also thought about the contact zone between people, that it is an area of neutrality each person maintains. I thought that the contact zone could also be a place of giving and receiving information or even of healing.

Exercise 2: Contact Zone at a Distance

In this exercise we closed our eyes for a while without touching and then opened them after a given interval and without speaking one of us looked at the person at a distance, through the lens of our camera.

In this exercise when I closed my eyes, I felt without the contact of the fingers, the outer sounds intruded more and I less able to focus.  After a while I tried to concentrate and not hear the noise coming from beyond.

When I opened my eyes and turned on the phone, it felt mechanical. I had to slide my finger across my phone, find the correct buttons and push them. Then I looked at my partner through the lens of the camera. It felt awkward as though I was a voyeur looking at a person. I could not see his eyes as his head was in front of the light coming from the window. There was no contact zone and I felt that I was taking advantage of him. It felt completely different form the first exercise and I was glad when it was over.  

3. Digital Witnessing

1.Dronestagram by James Bridle

“Through his investigation of military drones, writer, artist, publisher and technologist James Bridle analyses the visual, technological, ethical and political impact on modern warfare - and how anonymous, automated machines can remove any trace of the human hand in committing acts of war. “ (1)

Bridle calls drones flying death robots and says that he has been struck by the lack of images  in reports of killings by drone in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. These reports were gathered  from eyewitness accounts and local media by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

He decided to post images on Instagram, Twitter and Tumblr as the drone attacks take place.

These images are far removed from us, taken at a distance where details are lacking and can be taken as ordinary topological terrains if explanations were not given at the side of the image. We can understand this topologically from the cluster of buildings and the roads that crisscross the village. Computation plays an important role in this artwork as one is able to get the exact location of the sites that were bombed, something which was not possible a few years ago.  

http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/art-of-instagram-dronestagram

2. Bellingcat

This is an online investigation site that carries news reports with vivid images of attacks and other atrocities which are taking place across the globe. Although it is witnessing at a distance most of the images are taken at ground level and thus are more real in one sense than the Dronestagram art project although what the project loses by distance, it gains through the sheer amount of images that Bridle posts on Instagram.

The Bellingcat images are easy to understand topographically as there is no scaling and more often than not there are human figures present which gives an understanding of size whereas it is a bit more difficult in the Bridle project.

Computation plays an important role in these images as it is distributed through the internet. However the question that needs to be addressed is how trustworthy are these images as with the progress in computer vision, anything is possible with images. I recently saw an example of Machine Learning  online where someone made a video of Obama making a speech that he never did but was cobbled from various speeches that he did before.

3. Clouds over Sidra

This video follows a twelve year old Syrian girl living in a camp in Jordan for the past year and half. It shows us the girl in her house, with her family and with her baby brother, going to school and in class. Everything appears normal at first until we notice the barb wires surrounding the camp and her words takes on a new significance. She talks about like cloudy weather because the cloud make her feel as though she is under a blanket and our hearts go out to this little girl. Compared to the previously works, this video is not at a distance even though it is seen digitally because we follow in the footsteps of a young girl trying to live a normal life in place where she with her family and the rest of the Syrians are prisoners.

I felt that I engaged with this work more than the others.

Computation and VR played a role in this video.  Clouds over Sidra  was shown in VR  to delegates at the World  Economic Forum in Switzerland in 2015 and they were persuaded to give generously.  

4.The Left To Die Boat, 2014,

‘Operation Mare Nostrum’ was a year-long naval and air operation organised by the Italian government. It focused on search and rescue and is credited with enabling at least 150,000 migrants to cross the Mediterranean Sea safely. Costly and politically unpopular, the operation ended in October 2014 and was replaced by the EU’s ‘Operation Triton’. With less budget, and fewer sea and air resources, Triton operates closer to Europe’s coast and focuses on patrolling borders. Forensic Architecture’s Liquid Traces – The Left To Die Boat, 2014, is particularly concerned with this wider responsibility that government and coalition organisations have for rescue. Directed by artists Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani Liquid Traces offers a reconstruction of the events concerning what is now known as the “left-to-die boat” case. In March 2011, 72 passengers left the Libyan coast aboard a small rubber dinghy heading towards the island of Lampedusa. They were left to drift for 14 days in NATO’s maritime surveillance area, despite several distress signals relaying their location and repeated interactions with government agencies; including at least one military helicopter and an encounter with a military ship. As a result, only 9 people survived. “In producing this reconstruction, our research has used... remote sensing devices used to record and read the sea’s depth and surface. Contrary to the vision of the sea as a non-signifying space in which any event immediately dissolves into moving currents, with our investigation we demonstrated that traces are indeed left in water, and that by reading them carefully the sea itself can be turned into a witness for interrogation.”

http://baltic.art/uploads/BALTIC_Disappearance_at_Sea_Learning_Resource.pdf

Although this work deals with digital witnessing from afar, it is quite harrowing to follow the naval vessels and ships which pass very close to the boat in distress. One of the passengers who survived told of his experience after 6 days of drifting. A  naval vessel came within close distance of the distressed boat, took photos but offered no help while people and children were dying. This work also brings to attention that EU policies as regarding people in distress which translates to no action. It gives a good  topological imagery of the Mediterranean and the surrounding areas. Works like this would be impossible without computing as this is a labor intensive Forensic computation project where data were collected and graphed to be made meaningful.

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Digital Narratives and Witnessing: The Ethics of Engaging with Places at a Distance by Nishat Awan

This article explores some of the geographies  of crisis and conflict made visible through the use of digital technologies. It pays attention to the visual politics within the images, whether these are photographs and videos shared through social media or maps produced by platforms such as Google Earth. It looks at recent practices that involve forensic approaches. Her aim is to reveal a complex layered narrative that might emerge through visualisation. She also explores the type of ethical engagement that might be constructed as out-of-bounds and non state actors.

Distance here  is considered in a topological way, as resulting from a lack of relational connections that stretch topographical notions of nearness. In the past a place might remain out of sight, but no longer through digital technologies, from the impulse of people to map and create a digital globe of the world to various social media that transmit images and videos. This situation is very different from the past when such places could only be seen in a few select images that were often heavily mediated in reports by journalists and through the narrative of  non governmental agencies.

She starts by discussing a series of examples that show how the practice of witnessing has transformed in relation to  the use of digital technologies and then explore these issues by looking at examples related to the Pakistani city of Gwadar which is situated on the Arabian Sea.  

She begins by talking about the politics of visualisation embedded within digital technologies and the  exponential rise of technologies to ‘see’ at a distance, and argues that there is little critical engagement  in the ways we interact with place.  However, she says that in works such as ‘Clouds over Sidra’, a completely different dynamic is at play. Because it uses virtual reality to transport the viewer to the place, the onlooker experience is different. As one of the filmmakers, Chris Milk, claimed, “Virtual reality, fundamentally, is a technology that removes borders. ... Anything can be local to you” Another example by Niswat cites the work, Dronestagram, done by the artist James Bridle. Seeing in it through digital technology produces a different practice of witnessing.  Bridle used leaked information and freely available satellite imagery from Google Earth to articulate the news reports of deadly drone attacks in places which were inaccessible to most people or news agencies.

Niswat then goes on to discus the city of Gwadar, a city unknown to most of the world . However to those in the world of commercialism and those interested in oil the port is an important node. She states that the most prevalent digital account in relation to Gwadar comes from those in power. It discusses various proposed pipelines, China and India’s interest in the region and set in action a series of speculative investment in the land and property.  This speculative investments eventually collapsed.

Niswat states that the act of witnessing has become problematic because on one hand we see everything almost live and unedited and on the other, narratives emerge which are heavily mediated. She says this tension between witnessing and testimony, between what we see and what we can say about what we’ve seen raises some important questions about just what a witness can say in consequence of that utterance. She concludes by saying that the digital realm does offer a space but that comes with limitations. Forensic investigations bring potential but its relation to an economy of effect is restricted.  She says how these technological mediated practices can bring with them the affective force of bodily testimonies, claim an authenticity not only through recourse to objective scientific fact but also through bodily experience remains an open question

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Donna Haraway Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene

Haraway starts by asking a number of questions about the relations of humans with the world in which they live and questions the use of the term Anthropocene to describe this period. She says she would like to discuss this nomenclature, to stay ‘with the trouble’ and her ‘demon’ would be the spider, Pimoa Cthulthu. The spider she says will help her with returns, and with roots and routes.  The spider gets its generic name from the Goshute people of Utah and its specific name from an elemental entity called chthonic.

She goes on to describe the tentacles of the spider from different perspectives and relates it to the idea of lines, of strings:

“The tentacular are not disembodied figures; they are cnidarians, spiders, fingery beings like humans and raccoons, squid, jellyfish, neural extravaganzas, fibrous entities, flagellated beings, myofibril braids, matted and felted microbial and fungal tangles, probing creepers, swelling roots, reaching and climbing tendrilled ones. The tentacular are also nets and networks, it critters, in and out of clouds. Tentacularity is about life lived along lines — and such a wealth of lines — not at points, not in spheres. “The inhabitants of the world, creatures of all kinds, human and non-human, are wayfarers”; generations are like “a series of interlaced trails.”

She points that tentacularity is about lives lived along lines, that they are interconnected, that generations are a series of interlaced trails. She is also talks about the idea of journeys and passages. Her writing which might be described as baroque at times have sections of intense clarity which surprises the reader, creating connections between diverse concepts and things.

She cites Isabel Stengners idea of  “the Earth/Gaia is maker and destroyer, not  a resource to be exploited or ward to be protected or nursing mother promising nourishment. Gaia is not a person but complex systemic phenomena that compose a living planet”

Haraway goes on to say:

“In this hypothesis, Gaia is autopoietic — self-forming, boundary maintaining, contingent, dynamic, and stable under some conditions but not others. Gaia is not reducible to the sum of its parts, but achieves finite systemic coherence in the face of perturbations within parameters that are themselves responsive to dynamic systemic processes. “

She talks about the exploitation of the earth resources, global warming, the frantic need of mankind to discover renewables for fuel.

Haraway suggests that we call this age Capitalocene

“Still, if we could only have one word for these SF times, surely it must be the Capitalocene.”

She talks in depth about the globalisation of process and the emphasis on growth and economics.

“that we can remain Euro-centered in thinking about “globalizing” transformations shaping the Capitalocene. One must surely tell of the networks of sugar, precious metals, plantations, indigenous genocides, and slavery, with their labor innovations and relocations and recompositions of critters and things sweeping up both human and nonhuman workers of all kinds.”

Haraway then gives a number of examples why Anthropocene is not a meaningful word for this age  because it operates within a narrow egoistic framework.

For example she says:

“ Anthropocene is a term most easily meaningful and usable by intellectuals in wealthy classes and regions; it is not an idiomatic term for climate, weather, land, care of country, or much else in great swathes of the world, especially but not only among indigenous peoples .”

She then goes on to say that Gaia is best sited in the Chthulucene, ‘an ongoing temporality that resists figuration and dating and demands myriad names.’

She uses a number of descriptions in order to define the Chthulucene, Starting with the spider, Pimoa chthulhu, and then moving on to the Medusa,  and to the terra-cotta figure of Potnia Theron, the Mistress of the Animals, and links the latter to Crete and India. She weaves diverse threads to elemental entities and also to coral reefs which are in danger from mankind. She talks about the living organisms that belong to this earth and to which no significance is given and yet ‘that at least 250 million human beings today depend directly on the ongoing integrity of these holobiomes for their own ongoing living and dying well.”

She ends by saying that we must think. And that :

“ The unfinished Chthulucene must collect up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitalocene, and chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures.”  

What she is saying that we need to go back to the root of thing, to the building blocks of the earth and look at them in a new light not in the egocentric way that humans has been accustomed to doing as it is these things, not mankind, that the earth uses to regenerate itself.

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Computational Aesthetics in The Practices of Art as Politics Patricia Ticiento Clough

In considering the potentiality of objects, Patricia Clough proposes that the recent turn to ontology by philosophers is undergoing a traumatic reevaluation by the realisation that potentiality is not only a characteristic of human consciousness, human cognition or human agency but that the development of digital technology  has raised unsettling questions about the assumption of a primordial  relationship between  human and world and  the correlation between knowing and being.  

She cites ongoing debates that articulates whether potentiality is effected through relations or processes between objects or whether potentiality are inherent within the object itself and thereby not subject to relations or other objects, including humans.  

However on both sides of the debate, the object is referred to itself rather than in relations to humans and this ontological turn is described within an aesthetic context as a way to acknowledge the object’s potentiality, its agency or affective capacity rather than being subjugated to a human cognition or agency.

She quotes:

“Rather it is about objects having the capacity to affect and to be affected by each other such that through their affective interchange, objects can be  'slightly or massively changed, caused to become different things” (Shaviro, 2010:10)”.

She suggests that philosophers are presently concerned with an aesthetic causality rather than from those forms of causality that has shaped the practices of art as politics.

She suggests the practices of art as politics are challenged by “the interrelated expansion of the capacities of digital technology and the commodification of human processes as these undermine art’s autonomy from the market and its singular claim to aesthetics”.

She cites various researchers in this field and in particular Mark Hansen’s approach in rethinking the body as a society of “ microsensibilities themselves atomically susceptible to technical capture” and Luciana Parisi who argues that the algorithmic capacity to synthetically design bodies and thoughts are a data manipulation of what biology or matter has been doing all the time. She posits that although they are both working form different perspectives, they are both drawn to critically engage with “algorithmic architectures that are parsing—collecting and distributing—big data. Both also are seeking insight in current philosophical discussions about ontology and aesthetics.”

However she states that for the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, “ aesthetic causality is not only a matter of the qualities of object.  For Whitehead, aesthetic causality refers to all entities in that they are sentient or experiential through and through. All entities or objects –not just humans--have purpose; as Whitehead sees it: they are drawn to novelty by a ‘final causality.’ “  

Clough concludes by suggesting that art as politics must engage in philosophy, mathematics, science media and technology; art as politics must be profoundly interdisciplinary, and beyond the disciplinary, in speculating with the real in practice and performance. That it will require those that assist with  realising unactualised but real possibilities.

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Here I got  a bit upset. it could tell when I took a screen shot. That means it could access every movement on my computer. Of course I said yes to the accessibility in oder to get the service but as soon as I saw this message I felt manipulated and taken advantage of . Why should they even ask? I may not want to save every scene shot or let people know which screen shot I am taking. At this point I shut the application down and although at some point I will start using it because I have no choice, at the moment I couldn’t bear to look at it. 

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I didn’t like this at all! I felt that I was handing over my computer contents to someone I didn’t know, someone I couldn't see and even I I said yes, it left a sour taste in my mouth, even now, looking back.  

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Again I don’t feel attracted by the images. It seems like a bottomless hidden hole that opened up a the feet of the creature. A bit scary.

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I am not sure who this image is directed towards. The amorphous baggy shapes again with the big smile as though it was an ad for a holiday in the sun for creatures that are permanently cold and hence the shaggy looking shape. It does not inspire any confidence in me. Maybe it is for teenagers? 

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First photo after downloading . I feel as though it is talking down to me. It works like you Documents or Photos folder but it also does lot more. The trippy smiley  elongated face is slightly annoying. 

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Dropbox App

DropBox App

Dropbox is a personal cloud storage service that is frequently used for file sharing and collaboration. The Dropbox application is available for Windows, Macintosh and Linux desktop operating system. There are also apps for IPhone, IPad, and Android devices. It provides The service provides 2 gigabytes (GB) of storage for free and up to 100 GB on various for-fee plans. Another option, Dropbox for Teams, provides 350 GB storage. The user data is stored on Amazon Simple Storage Service and protected with a Secure Sockets Layer(SSL)  and Advanced Encryption System (AES) 256-bit encryption. After installation of the associated application, a Dropbox folder appears with the user’s other folders. Users can save files to the folder, add new folders, and drag and drop files among folders just as if they were all local. Files in the Dropbox folder can be accessed from anywhere with an Internet connection . The user just has to log in to his account to upload, download and share files. To share a file, the user can generate a URL for it from the Dropbox website and send it out so that others can view it. Folders can be shared by sending an invitation from the Dropbox website. Recipients that don’t have Dropbox accounts will have to sign up to access the folder. Once a folder is shared, it will appear in the folder system for everyone who has access to it and all members will be able to make changes to files. All versions of files are saved.

Recently a number of security analysts have queried how cloud storage providers such as Dropbox store data and who has access to that storage. While transfers from a user desktop may be encrypted via SSL, some confusion has arisen around how the encryption keys are generated and stored, what kind of encryption was used once the data was ‘at rest’ and what meta data Dropbox administrators have access to.

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The Walkthrough Method

The Walkthrough Method. Ben Light. Jean Burgess, Stefanie Duguay

What is the walkthrough method?

The walkthrough method is a method based on a combination of science and technology studies with cultural studies through which researchers can critically analyse  a given app. The method involves investigating the app’s environment by identifying and analysing its vision, operating model and models of governance.

What is the methodology of the walkthrough method? It uses a walkthrough technique to systematically investigate the various stages of app registration and entry, everyday use and discontinuation of use. It collects data which can be further used to apply a detailed analysis of the app’s intended purpose, its embedded cultural meanings and the implied users and uses. It also looks at how users resist these application and subvert them for their own use. The core of this method involves the step-by-step observation and documentation of an app’s screens, features and flows of activity, slowing down the mundane actions and interactions that form part of normal app use in order to make them salient and therefore available for critical analysis. The researcher registers and logs into the app, mimics everyday use where possible and dis- continues or logs out while attending to technical aspects, such as the placement or number of icons, as well as symbolic elements, like pictures and text. This process is contextualised within a review of the app’s vision, operating model and governance. The walkthrough method builds on scholarship in cultural studies, and attends to how technology shape culture while simultaneously being a product of it by considering also the symbolic or representational elements of cultural objects in combination with technological or material ones. By examining  the app’s vision, operating model and governance, researchers understand how an app’s designers, developers, publishers and owners expect users to receive and integrate the app into their technology usage practices.  An app’s vision involves its purpose, target user base and scenarios of use which are often shown through the app’s provider organisational materials. The app’s operating model involves its business strategy and revenue sources which may indicate underlying political and economic interests. Since many apps allow users access to services in exchange personal data that can be sold to advertisers and data miners, revenue generation may not involve monetary exchange. Apps may cultivate multi-sided markets, garnering revenue from in-app advertising and purchases as well as partnerships with other platforms.   App generated materials, technology industry sources and public market information are all useful sources for determining an app’s operating model. The app’s price in app stores, in-app purchase menus, employee recruitment materials press kits and other documents about the app provider all provide information about the app’s profit or generating mechanisms and about the app provider itself.   An app’s governance involves how the app provider seeks to manage and regulate user activity to sustain their operating model and fulfil their vision. Governance is reflected in the app’s rules and guidelines which place boundaries around the types of activity that users are able to conduct and even the types of users allowed on the app. Governance may expand form simply managing users activity to enforcing normal and values. Apps may enlist users in enforcing governance though mutual surveillance facilitated by reporting systems.

Methodology of the walkthrough: The technical walk through is the method’s central data-gathering procedure. The research engages with eh app’s interface, working through screens, tapping buttons and exploring buttons. The researcher assumes a user’s position while applying an analytical eye to the process of acquiring the app, registering, accessing features and functionalities and discontinuing use. The researcher systematically trace key actors, such as icons and purchase buttons, and produces data by generating detailed field notes and recordings, such as though screens shots, video recordings an audio recording of one thoughts while conducting the walkthrough. This involves attention to the app’s materiality including the actions it requires and guides users to conduct and imagining how users would perceive these affordance or constraints. It also involves drawing on cultural research skills in textual and semiotic analysis, recognising indicators of embedded cultural discourses, such as how the app constructs conceptions of gender, ethnicity, ability, sexuality and class.    

An app’s technical and cultural influences are shown through mediator characteristics which provide indications of how an app seeks to reconfigure relations among actors such as howe it guides the users to interact (or not) and how these actors construct or transfer meaning. Mediator characteristics may include the following: User interface arrangement- how the app guides users through activities throughout the placement of button and menus . Functions and features - Groups of arrangements that mandate or enable an activity including pop windows, compulsory fields and requests made but the app to link with other user accounts. Textual content and tone. This includes text embedded in user interfaces such as drop down menu options or the categories available and their discursive power to shape use. Symbolic representation. A semiotic approach to examining the feel and look of the app and its likely connotations and cultural associations with respect to the imagined user and ideal scenarios of use. This may involve considerations regarding branding, colour and font choices.   Three common stages for data generation through documentation and analysis during the walkthrough. The stages include registration and entry, everyday use, and suspension, closure and leaving. Registration is the staring point of the walkthrough and it involves description and analysis of how a user sets up an account for a particular app. Some require registration through a desktop computer while others may be only available through a tablet or a phone.Registration can also occur  through other mechanisms such s automatic functions by which an app calls out to partner services or retrieves existing user content. Everyday use refers to the activities that registered users regularly engage in. It focuses on recording the functionality, options and affordances that the app provides to users. Not all the functions may be easily accessible to the researcher who does not wish or is not able to interact with other users, pay money or execute certain activities such as pending a lot of time to unlock a game for instance. However one walking through the app’s basic functionalities gives valuable data and paying attention not only to the app’s features but also the flow of activity  can be productive for the researcher. The third stage is app suspension, closure and leaving. This is sometimes complicated for users and has implications for developers. Non use can range from logging out to hiding profiles and removal of user data. Different apps attempt to retain user engagement in multiple ways. For example Facebook seeks to keep users engaged by offering opportunities to maintain one’s data in the space  rather than have it removed. Although one might delete a Facebook account for an iPhone the content remains on the website and a user has to log onto Facebook and manually dentate it during which time Facebook sends appeals for the user to reconsider.   The walkthrough method enables researchers to identify the app’s context, highlighting the vision, operating model and governance that form a set of expectations for ideal use. The method is versatile and provides a foundational analysis of an app, which can be combined with content analysis or interviews  to gain further insights into users applications.