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The technological assemblage of the Jogger

I’m in the park looking at joggers, they are everywhere and difficult to navigate around, their tense faces alluding to a dystopian near future. Running is releasing endorphins and is meant to make you happy, these joggers look anything but. Most of them are strapped with devices: smart watches and phones tracking their movements, location, speed, heart and pulse rate. 

I remember when I used to be excited about this type of tracking information back in 2013. I had an app called Moves and it tracked steps and location data following me around my daily journeys or on hols in Iceland where the points we visited created a nice data diary. It felt novel and helpful at the time. Then ‘tracking data and doing pretty things with it” was a cool thing and I enjoyed the company of their related quantified self apps. Sometimes I wondered what happened to my data, especially when different apps shared it.  Now heart data is integrated in most apps and users are encouraged to look out for their loved ones. Interestingly insurers are also involved with notably different reasons to analyse our data. Facebook showed us recently the real commercial value of us handing over excessive personal information, often unknowingly by just liking posts. We are now targets and not just for commerce but also for political gains.

We are waking up slowly amidst the Brexit fog. The numbers and stats don’t feel good anymore. But maybe that’s just me and my reality looking at joggers?

What about our emotions? Our daily interaction with apps that are structured around the aggressive metrics of achieving fitness goals. We aren’t born with a natural talent to appreciate nor order the endless numeric distance/location details that are captured within these apps, as pretty as the numbers might be presented to us. What about exploring the personal sensorial emotion scape of a run?

Lucy Suchman asks us to consider what figures of the human are represented in these technologies? (Suchman, 2007. I write about this here) How many friends would you keep that treat you like your app does? The exercise content, the empty meaningless cheering, the cold numerical statistics that despite the often nice visual layout become very boring after repetitive use?

Yet there is a bigger picture to consider. Katherine Hayles calls the entanglements that we have with our devices “cognitive assemblages”. In the prologue of her latest book Unthought she writes:

“For example, when a person turns on her cell phone, she becomes part of a non conscious cognitive assemblage that includes relay towers and network infrastructures, including switches, fiber optic cables, and/or wireless routers, as well as other components. With the cell phone off, the infrastructure is still in place, but the human subject is no longer a part of that particular cognitive assemblage.” (Hayles, Katherine. Unthought. The University of Chicago Press. 2017. Prologue p3)

Could all these factors wether noticeable or unconscious become the dominant feature of our run? Do these apps ever tell us to stop and appreciate the wild life around us? There isn’t any commercial value in making people appreciate what they can have for free for the moment.

References

Hayles, N. Katherine. Unthought. The University of Chicago Press. 2017

Suchman, Lucy. “Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions” (Cambridge University Press, 2007 )

Panja Göbel: Electric dreams of digital assistants 

Posthuman reflections on the Paw

‘Can a cat or a dog be the measure of at least some, if not exactly all things. Can it displace the genomic hierarchy that tacitly supported the humanists’ self-representation?’ (Braidotti. Life beyond the species 2013 )

Speculating about the future of social companion robots I wondered why we so quickly fall out of love with them? In a previous blogpost I explored our conflicted relationships with companion robots. I was curious about what a robot would need to express to create a deeper relationship with us going beyond the initial cute or helpful phase. Would it be possible that the robotic configurations based on servitude are fundamentally wrong? How much would we really fall and stay in love with a servant dedicated to fulfil all our wishes at a whim. I started playing with the servitude relationship and wondered what would happen if we gave robots more rights to make decisions? Would we immediately end up in the dystopian nightmare that sees humans at the hands of robotic monsters? What if there were equal relationships, based on goods exchange, what if humans would need to respect robot rights? What if robots were allowed to be naughty, or even punish us by ordering different food? Playing the music we hate? Creating a mess round the house? 

I started pondering about our dog and why I love him? He’s pretty adorable most of the time but sometimes he’s cheeky, sometimes he rolls around in unidentified faeces or pees on his leg, sometimes he chews our daughter's cuddly toys, sometimes he withdraws his love. Strangely all these acts make us love him even more. Initially I had hopes to create a naughty robot that would be cute but also mean. I thought it might be a good idea to base some of the behaviours on the relationships that we have with our pets. Most of our furry domestic companions probably represent the 70% cute : 30% naughty ratio. Looking for some input I put a call out on Instagram to ask my friends what annoyed them in their pets? To my surprise a lot of them didn’t know how to answer this question. It almost seemed that they couldn’t look at their pets in these terms? I was struck by the discomfort I was creating through this exercise. 

It felt like there was a serious communication problem. Do our furry friends possess a magic power? Something that turns them into gods fenced off from any criticism? Does this say something bigger about the times we are living in? Our human machine entanglements have left us bereft of our inner emotional landscape and the power of non-verbal communication.

Maybe rather then discipling our interactions with naughty robots maybe we need kindness and healing and a wider interconnectedness with the universe? 

In Life beyond species Braidotti talks about the consequences of advanced capitalism, which as a system profits from the commodification of life in itself. We are seeing the effects of this all around us. The cost of propping up an industry that relies on extreme consumerism and keeping up with lifestyles that have a real cost. The effects of this are endless: polarisations of societies, wealth gaps, environmental impact ie. climate change related natural disasters and dangerous levels of pollution (mainly in the countries that are making our goods or recycling our lifestyle), wars, but also addiction and loneliness in the richest countries. A lethal cocktail for the future.

Braidotti talks about something that she labels ‘Zoe’ some kind “dynamic, self-organizing structure of life itself”(Braidotti, 2013). She proposes a ‘zoe-centric’ world view that immediately chimed with me. It basically asks us to look at effects from our actions from different standpoints. This consists of a three phase process that Braidotti names: “becoming-animal, becoming-earth and becoming-machine”. 

Although reading her book only after creating The Paw it retrospectively feels deeply relevant. The Paw is an artificially intelligent object that can collect and mediate our feelings. It harnesses our need for non-verbal communication and delivers relief for emotion blockages. How often did you pet have to full-fill this role, yet how often can your pet offload the emotions it is collecting and convey these to another human being? I honestly think this would be my preferred route. The paw was trying to utilise technology as a mediation to bridge some of the problems that we are having rather than accelerate them faster. 

In truth I’m deeply conflicted about the wider implications of AI and intended The Paw as a conversation starter to provoke a dialogue about the need for a technologically mediated world? 

I don’t have any answers to this - I need the Paw.

References:

Rosi Braidotti.  Posthuman. (Polity Press 2013)

Panja Göbel. The Paw. (2018)

http://www.pranarama.io/thepaw/

Panja Göbel: Electric dreams of digital assistants

Reassembling the mother

I’m reading the prologue to Katherine Hayles’ book My mother was a computer and am thinking about three generations of mothers. My grannies, my own mum and myself. We all had new technologies introducing themselves into our lives but to very varying degrees. My grandmothers were born at the beginning of the 20th century and were mothers throughout the war. The radio was their main communication tool to understand what was happening in the world. Children had to subordinate within an authoritarian family hierarchy set-up. My parents were engaged in the political scene of the late 68 student revolution that defied authoritarian set-ups and decided to do things differently for us. We were raised to ask questions, lived in communes and debated anything that could be discussed from politics, women’s rights to also nits and who was doing the washing up. We made our own worlds and were essentially self motivated, TV was there but rationed and the telephone had also arrived. Non of the mums of that scene were embodying what one would call 'Mother Nature’, they were all trying to find themselves whilst still also being stuck in their previous roles as "objects for male attraction”. As a result of this female awakening children of this scene were largely left to their own devices, except of course there weren’t any devices as such. The effects of this largely hands-off parenting had different outcomes, sometimes some very confused children that later needed therapy and then the ones that did surprisingly well in life. If technology had been as invasive as it is represented in most modern households now I wonder what types of children would have sprung from this scene? But then this is exactly what happens in a lot of house holds now as modern pressures of parents juggling several jobs again leaves children to look after children but there is another major component to these new setups: the personal device with most of the time uncontrolled access to the internet.

In the book I’m reading Katherine Hayles writes:

"In this context, "My mother was a computer" can be understood as alluding to the displacement of Mother Nature by the Universal Computer. Just as Mother Nature was seen in past centuries as the source of both human behavior and physical reality, so now the Universal Computer is envisioned as the Motherboard of us all.” (My Mother was a computer. The Prologue p 4)

We cannot even imagine what this generation of humans will become like? The internet catering to the addiction of the overzealous time traveller down the endless lanes of relevance based content ( I write about this here ). Where are the questions of what a lot of this content means? Where are the questions why you are seeing this content? How do we access difference? In most households there is no time to discuss this around the diner table. 

I’m getting glimpses from the front line, rationing the screen time, hiding devices, saying no to the smart phone that all her mates have. But whilst I’m trying to create an upbringing that is free from the technological entanglements I’m also hoping to teach an understanding of modern technology. With that comes an engagement in some of the good elements. Its a difficult balancing act and it can only be won by engaging in technology and changing the way its constructed at its core. Reassembling the mother. 

References:

Hayles, Katherine. My mother was a computer. University of Chicago Press. (2005)

Speculations on the Speculative

Different points of reflection. It’s ok to change. Its ok to be conflicted. I’m still so entrenched in the mechanisms of the design industry. The clear goals, the qualitative user testing to back up our explorations, the hoop jumping to achieve client satisfaction. All this left years of muscle memory that I now need to carefully entangle and reconfigure in my brain. 

I can now create a world and write myself into it. I can play cat's cradle, Donna Haraway’s string figures analogy that describes the many different possible configurations within one loop. I can be like Saidiya Hartman who introduced us to the concept of 'critical fabulation’, a writing methodology that combines historical and archival research with critical theory and fictional narrative. This approach was expanded on by Daniela Rosner who made a book around the subject matter. In this book Rosner brings to life the analogy of the little old lady method, called after the women building the Apollo missions by weaving the core memory planes. Rosner writes here 

“ I examine, for example, how design methods can help recover the feminized work of weaving that underpinned the Apollo Moon missions. The story complicates the too-easy separation between low-status needlecraft and the high-status work of engineering, repositioning engineering innovation as a form of craftwork. Here, design works as tool with which to “narrate a certain impossibility,” to borrow a phrase from feminist theorist Saidiya Hartman (Hartman and Wilderson 2003, p.184)” (Rosner 2018)

I momentarily reflect on the complicated relationship between my own circuits and my philosophical thinking. My manual electronics work could be shaped by my discoveries and become more malleable. Its a difficult thought when you are not as eloquent in electronics as you like to be. ‘Failure’ becomes the ever looming guest trying to enter my making party. But that's ok. It’s ok to have ‘failure’ as my guest and then to reflect on how it ruined my party or what might have happened if I had dealt with it differently.   

So, here I want to end with the capture of my internal dialogue with myself or my art project. This was done as part of a 8 min writing exercise in Helen’s class.

‘You’ve changed - I don’t recognise you anymore..what are all the multicoloured wires about? You weren’t meant to look like that. I’m confused. I’ve bought some fabric in the hope to contain you, scale you back, confine you. As I’m writing this Evernote brought up 5 reference notes to guide me. This is what it's all about isn’t it? It's about control and the entangled relationship we have with each other. There is you the project, there is me the explorer and then there is the thing I’m attached through and that seems to control me. Yet I want to control you. Posthumanism happening right here on my artwork. The entanglements. Maybe I need to bring this to the foreground: Control | Multicoloured entanglements |  Embodiments | Symbiosis ‘

The rest of the afternoon something strange happened. Basically I lost control or just gave it up as a result of this writing exercise? I basically destroyed my TLC5947 LED driver board and am still trying to work out what this means? This definitely means that the 24 rainbow wires I individually soldered on mean nothing now. But then I’m incredibly privileged to be in this situation as I obviously could also be a little old lady working in an iPhone factory.

References

Rosner, Daniela. Critical fabulations : reworking the methods and margins of design. The MIT Press, 2018

https://medium.com/@danielarosner/critical-fabulations-beyond-design-on-being-informed-by-saidiya-hartman-3509bd6e4f43

The relations of technological mediations

Ten years ago a video did the rounds that explored the spatial qualities of RFID. It was called ‘The Ghost of the Field’ and was made by Timo Arnall and Jack Schulze. With stop frame animation they recorded an RFID reader triggering an LED every time it was reading something and through this process created a collection of green clouds surrounding the RFID object, thereby revealing the radio fields that are not normally visible.

“It is not the radio field produced by the reader itself we are looking at. That is much, much larger. The images show the volume in which the energy in the space surrounding the reader is inducing a current large enough to wake and run the RFID chip at the end of the antenna in the tag. The readable volume can be mapped around a tag or inside the field produced by a reader component, but it only exists between the two.” (Jack Schulze, 2009)

The resulting green point cloud visualisation highlights the otherwise invisible and inaudible interaction between the user and the device. Looking at this video ten years later brings to the surface how many of these green point clouds we would have around us if we could always see them.

The tapping of contactless cards has now become common place. One could even say since their ubiquity we would associate the gesture of ‘tapping’ with ‘payment’ rather than the gesture of ‘fingering through a purse’. It is also worth noting that purses changed shape into card holders to reflect this uptake. Now the mobile phones entered the tapping game too with digital wallet systems extending their core use. What does it mean though when a technological thing changes the relation we have with the world?

Postphenemonologists are analysing the ways in which technology helps shape relations between human beings and the world. When we look at the visualisation in Ghost of the Field we learn to read what is happening when we tap our oyster card. Don Idhe proposed four different forms in which technology mediates our lives. A pair of glasses for example would be described as an embodiment relation. We are not aware of wearing them, they mediate our vision, but unless they steam up or are too heavy on our nose we are not constantly perceiving them. They fade into the background of our awareness. A wristwatch or fitness tracker meanwhile needs us to provide an extra action to interpret the information displayed on such devices. This is called a hermeneutic relation. Rather than experiencing the world through a device as in an embodiment a hermeneutic relation presents a transformed notion of the world. Human robot interactions ie. an interface that mimics the interaction of another human are classified as alterity relations. Alexa, Siri and other personal assistants in applications are the most contemporary examples here but this also relates to ATM machines, GPS systems that read out directions or chatbots. When technology forms the context to human experiences and actions they are called background relations. Notification beeps on phones as well as the sound of an air conditioning systems or fridge would count as one.  They are very rarely experienced on their own but mostly as another layer to a primary event.

These four relations co-shape our experiences with technologies and the effect these have on us in various degrees. We are the products of this technical mediation and changed by it rather than isolated subjects with the relations happening between us. What the Ghost of the Field brought to the surface are the previously invisible interaction mechanisms and relations visualised by the point clouds. Maybe by focusing on these “immaterials” we can understand how far reaching some of these systems have become and how we might want to reconfigure some of them.

References

https://vimeo.com/7022707

http://berglondon.com/blog/2009/10/12/the-ghost-in-the-field/

Rosenberger, Verbeek. Postphenomenological Investigations: Essays on Human–Technology Relations. Lexington Books, 2017

The fraying boundary of the human subject

“Did you know that the majority of the cells in your body are not human? - They are bacteria!! ” explains Katherine Hayles. I’m listening to a 2017 talk entitled Why we are still Posthuman and only just digested the idea that I might be a ‘technological assemblage’.

The technical infrastructures that are surrounding our lives may not immediately seem intrusive as most of the time they pretend to be helpful. The complex traffic systems fed by information from sensors and actuators throughout the city, the intelligent shopping algorithms that learn from our likes and recommend further relevance based purchases, the ebook reader that reads us while we think we just read the book. It knows what we read, how fast we read, what we highlight, when we stop or start. Our smoke alarm or home hub know very intimate details about us and they are increasingly influencing our lives.

“We are now in deep symbiosis with computational media. Symbiosis for any two species conveys benefits but it also entails risks, because if one of the symbians becomes disabled the other symbian may not be able to continue alone.” (Hayles 2017)

We don’t necessarily notice the systems that now run our lives until there is a problem. Wifi outages or unrecognised passwords can illustrate the interconnectedness of these systems as well as our dependency on them. People are increasingly seeking off-grid experiences to cleanse themselves from these entanglements, reality tv shows are broadcast where participants are trying to escape the interwoven tracking systems that are now managing our lives.

A complex tangle of feedback loops between programmers, machines and users reorganise our relations within this framework. Its difficult to view our human actions in terms of free will when a lot of them are automated, happening behind the scenes, decisions we take that we are barely aware ie. what we may be clicking on and what we don’t click on.

I’m starting to ponder about how manipulated I have become over the last 12 - 20 years of device culture? How entangled am I, how long would it take for my brain to free itself from the obsessive compulsive type patterns and rituals device culture encourages?  

“As these devices become smarter, more wired, and more capable of accessing informational portals throughout the web, they bring about neurological changes in the mindbodies of users, forming flexible assemblages that mutate as information is gathered, processed, communicated, stored, and used for additional learning that affects later interactions. As the user’s responses and interactions reveal more and more about her predispositions of which she may not even be aware, the possibility for surveillance grows progressively stronger..” (Hayles 2017)

The interesting dynamic is that we still think that we are in control of our actions, that we are making free choices, but how often do we have the time to engage with stuff that isn’t fed to us but lives on the inconvenience lane ie. the last page of our google search results? How often do we decide to not help an algorithm to learn to differentiate between a robot and a human? How aware are we about what we are interacting with on a daily basis? How much do we enjoy this type of dialogue? If these algorithms were personified would we really enjoy to hang out with this type of person?

References:

Hayles, Katherine. Unthought. University of Chicago Press (2017) 

The conflicted relationship around framing digital art within a gallery context

Computational art needs you! It needs your engagement, it’s trying to tell you something important, but you are walking past it in a gallery situation because you either don’t understand it, it doesn’t grab you or it doesn’t actually work. We are having a guest lecture with writer and curator Rachel Falconer who introduced us to a comprehensive selection of curatorial approaches as well as pioneering exhibitions that challenged the unimaginative workings that many galleries take when dealing with digital art.

How do we create an engaging relationship with digital art? Also often called ‘new media’ art this can cover anything from networked installations, generative art, sensing practises, participatory interactives, virtual or augmented reality, net art, performance art, mobile and locative media, software and haktivism art and the list goes on. All these categories are having distinctively different requirements in terms of tech set-up and framing within an exhibition narrative not forgetting the bridging of different hurdles around visitor understanding and engagement.

Most of the above let many galleries shy away from the perceived difficulties around including the more novel technology embedded art pieces. The upkeep being often a big problem. I remember going to ‘Digital Crystal’ , a Swarovski commissioned exhibition of installations back in 2012, all working with crystals at the Design museum. At the time of my visit one half of the exhibits were not functioning as the technology either had broken down or the exhibition staff didn’t know how to start the pieces up after they had timed out.

Apart from the problems around the upkeep of software based installations there is also the often problematic framing of the non linear pieces that depend on user interaction yet may not have the focal point or glamour of a physical installation. What I mean here are net art pieces, commonly just displayed as an afterthought with a computer and a mouse aka documenta X in 1997. Many curators shy away from the extra work contextualising these pieces and additionally the creators are often barely informed that their pieces are included in a show - not cool!

Les Immateriaux, a pioneering exhibition at the Centre George Pompidou in 1985 tried to take an imaginative approach navigating the issues around telling technology stories by intentionally creating a feeling of ‘unease’ in the viewer. This philosophical concept applied to an exhibition narrative tried to highlight the flows of information technology by presenting an environment of overflowing technology and provoking feelings of disarray. I can’t help but wonder whether the curators of the 2016 Electronic Superhighway at the Whitechapel had similar intentions when they stuffed their whole ground floor with what seemed like 50 diverging technology pieces all fighting for attention within the Post-Internet category.

“So artists have made search engines, new kinds of devices, databases, wreaked havoc on codecs and standards and claimed that the technological is also inherently cultural and aesthetic and can be worked on as such? Let’s not worry our heads with that, save it for the geeks, or the nerds, or the artists – whatevs. If you have to go in that direction keep it a one-liner, and Keep It Kawaii, preferably museum size XL.” 

Matt Fuller couldn’t have summed it up any better for me here. This curatorial approach seemed to me like an unordered charity shop, lazy hangings rather than intentional, leaving the visitors confused about the individual art, not understanding their relevance and probably leaving with as much ignorance accepting the assemblage as an intertwined postmodern graveyard.  

After the lecture we spend some time in small groups discussing new ways to show computational art. I reflected on how The Metaplasm my wearable prosthetic could have incorporated another aspect? Maybe participants that weren’t in the gallery could interact with it remotely by contributing images to the computer vision application that delivered the thought trail augmentation? Likewise maybe the gallery visitor could be captured interacting with the piece and streamed to an online portal where they become the next subject to be acted upon. This approach would give the audience two ways to participate in parallel narratives, bringing the artwork to life with their figure as well as their curation and hopefully loosing the confinement of the gallery walls.

References

Christiane Paul. Challenges for a Ubiquitous Museum: Presenting and Preserving New Media

http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/eleven-pro-tips-art-plus-internet

http://www.ubermorgen.com

https://anthology.rhizome.org/

https://gizmodo.com/remember-the-hilarious-horror-of-geocities-with-this-we-5983574

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8TJx8n9UsA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSwovB28B34

Living in an Ocean of Air: merging with nature on a particle level

The term “Virtual Reality” (VR) has reached peak moment. Its everywhere used  to describe a whole range of experiences involving headsets, 360 Video, Google Cardboard but also states in which the user enters a virtual world such as gaming or social media platforms.

When we went to experience “Living in an Ocean of Air”, Marshmallow Laserfeast’s hallucinogenic VR installation at the Saatchi I knew that it would full-fill VR’s “concept of presence” in it’s most technical sense. Powered by cutting edge technology we were about to experience a £1 per minute merging with nature that also promised restorative effects in a therapeutic sense.

The staging within the Saatchi added to the experience. When we arrived there was the drama of anticipation. We were overlooking two immersive sections almost like two separate fishtanks from the top of the stairs. In front of these immersive screens we saw black figures covered high-tech backpacks and headsets making their way around the installation as though they were navigating the moon. We didn’t have to wait long before being ushered into a small blacked out section where we left our bags and coats. We were then pointed towards a row of hanging backpacks/charging stations, as if we were all about to board a rocket to go to the moon. There we were fitted with backpacks holding small computers, headsets, heart rate monitors on each wrist and headphones. Once dressed and unhooked we were guided into the simulation. And we were in.

An initially milky environment just lit up by tiny red and white coloured particles floating in front of us. These particles symbolised our breath and turned blue responding realtime to our exhalations. This was the entry point for everything else shifting us to a higher acceptance that we were now particles and only differentiated by each other’s voices. I could see my daughter’s smaller hands acting as a marker in this strange space we were all in now. There was a huge tree, the sequoia tree, a massive trunk imposing its presence right next to me. People were calling to get me to walk right through the trunk to join them inside. We were a group of explorers now, the fact that we didn’t know each other at all didn’t seem to matter. The Sequoia tree hugging us explorers a magical space surrounding us with it’s organic tentacles. All of a sudden I looked up and everything looked like spaghetti or giant strands of kelp curling towards me.

When I stepped out of the tree I noticed a small irregularity that broke the simulation temporarily. The ground seemed 20cm too high up, which was definitely an odd sensation breaking the plausibility illusion and thereby also temporarily rocking my place illusion of the experience. Dr Mel Slater describes the concept of presence in VR to be generated by three illusions: Place illusion, Plausibility illusion and the illusion of Body ownership. Place Illusion describes the feeling of being in a virtual space. I know this is not real I’m surrounded by strange particles and spaghetti dangling from the sky. Plausibility illusion is generated by the dynamic aspects of a place mirroring what we know from the real world like the leaves rustling in the wind. The third illusion is that of Body ownership caused by seeing a virtual body substituting your real body. Place illusion: Im here. Plausibility illusion: this is really happening. Body ownership illusion: this is my real body.

My daughter asked me to try crawling around on all fours looking at the spaghetti that seemed to infinitely curl down into a chasm beneath us. At this moment I must have bumped into a stranger but we all felt that this was completely ok there was no intrusion of personal space; we were all particles half merging with nature.

I wonder whether this sensation is what Jaron Lanier describes as “homuncular flexibility”, the process of the user adapting to unaccustomed avatar body representations. He writes:

“It turned out that people could quickly learn to inhabit strange and different bodies and still interact with the virtual world. I became curious how weird the body could get before the mind would become disoriented. I played around with elongated limb segments, and strange limb placement. The most curious experiment involved a virtual lobster (which was lovingly modeled by Ann Lasko.) A lobster has a trio of little midriff arms on each side of its body. If physical human bodies sprouted corresponding limbs, we would have measured them with an appropriate body suit and that would have been that.”

Whilst we didn’t have elongated arms or lobster suits we were just a very abstract representation of ourselves and it was amazing how quick we became used to seeing and accepting our physical representation in the simulation. It must have looked funny for the visitors looking upon us watching us crawling on all fours hugging each other in awe.

The light seemed to change it became night and then dusk and then adopting a milky almost foggy quality mirroring different weather situations. And then it was over slowly fading into a milky fog. We felt nourished and relaxed, saying good bye to our co-explorers dazzled by what we just been through.

Living in an Ocean of Air has been extended to the beginning of May.

References:

http://www.publicseminar.org/2018/05/five-theses-on-virtual-reality-and-sociality/

https://vhil.stanford.edu/mm/2016/11/won-etsbs-homuncular-flexibility.pdf

http://www.melslater.me/

Touching

What is so fascinating about interspecies touching? The skin of a fish, a reptile, rabbit, a moth? How does this differ to the devices we are in constant contact with or the haptics we encounter on our way to work? The different temporalities of touch: The touch we apply when we hold a device, swipe across a screen, the pinching or the squeezing of a device or a wacom pen.  Then there is the passive or continuous embodied touching of a wearable, the fitness tracker hugging your wrist. The investigative touching of reading braille, a more sensitive form of touching that feels like caressing.

Before reading Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s brilliant Touching Visions I created a project around the idea of a mediated emotion device that allows it’s users to offload their feelings by holding a paw.

Why a paw ? As a pet owner I would like to think I’m echoing other animal lover’s fantasies around paws: ie. they can be soft and fascinating to study. My dog’s paw probably represents the ultimate touch sensation to me. I love the pulsating sense of touching a real living creature other than a human. I can feel the lines, the warmth of his blood and often the earth that creates a crust after a muddy walk. This is when they smell really good - a soggy wood land smell that immediately sends me to sleep.  Why is this so fascinating? Is it the sense of a real interspecies connection? Or does it just feel good to use a different language not relying on words whilst at the same time un-peeling the mystery of a personality that we haven’t discovered through the means of words? De La Bellacasa talks about a ‘different sensorial universe’. It feels that this is where the attraction lies: a unique common universe that is not discovered and maybe even polluted by words?

There is also the idea of “reversibility of touch” ie. when we touch things physically we are also being touched by something else. When I put on my trousers in the morning I feel the fabric gliding or scraping over my legs. Touch isn’t a “singular organ localizable to a specific site on the body” writes David Parisi thereby describing the resulting difficulty to confine it’s reach.

Why does it sometimes really affects us when we are being touched? This can happen as a physical sensation, a tingling or after glow, but also as an emotional spiritual touch resulting in a similar feeling. Is this to be equated with the healing powers of the quantum touch? Why is this happening?

Does it depend on our mood state or is there an energy flow between the interconnected objects that we only sometimes pick up on? Afterall there are electrons moving as an algorithm runs on our computer. Touching is also an experience par excellence where boundaries between the self and other are blurred.

“Moreover, to be felt, sensorial and affective inputs that other senses bring to experiencing necessarily pass through material touching of the body. This total influence contributes to a sense of “immersion” (Paterson 2006, 699) and is incarnated in its atypical, allencompassing organ, the skin (Ahmed and Stacey 2001). Touch exhibits as much ascendancy as it exposes vulnerability.” (Puig De La Bellacasa, Touching Visions)

The notion of being touched or touching can also be closed off by the idea of becoming “untouchable”. This can be seen as a protection mechanism against the hurt that others can inflict on us. Yet this shielding yourself from being touched by something hurtful negates life itself argues Thomas Dumm.

“Life is inevitable mortality, partiality, and vulnerability: the troubles and conditions of living. Trust might be the unavoidable condition that allows this openness to relation and corporeal immanent risk.” (Puig De La Bellacasa, Touching Visions)

So maybe we have to ask what kind of touching is produced when we are unaware of the needs and desires of that/what/whom we are reaching for? When trying to combine touch with consciousness and sensation there opens up a huge space that we ought to explore more to find a deeper connection not only with others but ultimately ourselves.

References:

Puig De La Bellacasa, Maria. Touching Visions. University of Minnesota Press, 2017

Fake News Anti-virus!

Fake news is a problem: they are everywhere and they are slowing us down. We are tired and our “fake news immune system” is starting to let us down. We are clicking on too many things and are sharing often unreliable sources. Why? Because we trust our mate who passed it on and we really haven’t got time to proof check a news story right now.

But this is a problem and it’s now spreading like a virus faster than real news across hashtags and platforms. News teams spend significant amounts of money employing news checkers and their workload is likely to increase exponentially.

Additionally we live in a climate of news tribalism where people find it too hard to digest different view points and reporting styles. Some people only want to believe what they want to believe mostly based on emotion rather than facts.

So what can be done about this?

Thinking like a collective

In our first session back from the winter break and in a new class grouping we were presented with the news that the university had decided to change the marking conditions going forward: For the next end of module project, a multimedia report of 1500-2000 words, no-one would pass unless everyone would pass. Our teacher outlined the new proposal and after looking at our caffeine deprived 9.30 am faces asked us to discuss this change in small groups before going round the room for an open discussion.

In all fairness my initial thoughts were mixed. On the one hand I still have warm feelings thinking about last year’s cohort: We were self organised and huddled up like a collective, we reached out and helped each other in crisis, we pulled several successful exhibitions together in short notice, despite all the pressures ie. work load, lack of funding and the strike!

At the same time the university system regularly stuns me with problems arising from the blurred boundaries where academia meets a capitalist framework. Students despite being set up as paying clients are not being refunded in disputes such as teacher strikes. 

In her essay “Reaching the Limit When Art Becomes Science” Beatriz da Costa asks:

“How can the artist function as an activist intellectual situated between the academy and the “general public” in an age in which global capital and political interests have obtained an ever-increasing grip on the educational and public environments where technical, scientific, and artistic knowledge production occur?” (Da Costa, 2008)

The understanding of what it means to be a student has fundamentally changed from when I finished my design undergrads in 1995. And even back then the idea to create a safe place for exploration that is not tainted by commercial interests was an isolated if not slightly privileged luxury. Who wouldn’t want to build a bridge to the world of work? As a designer particularly, the client relationship and how to build a brief to work from is an integral learning step.

When I started my computational arts masters I had a vague expectation to gain a technical overview whilst also coming out with a bunch of cool projects. Having previously met plenty of professionals coming out of the programme in the world of work I was excited to gain these skills and apply them on future work projects. Nothing could have prepared me though for the sheer amount of content that was coming towards me, leaving little space for open exploration let alone reflection. Yet the university is measured by delivering value for money ie. loads of content.

Additionally there are lots of Hackathons and industry commissioned open calls that give the student the opportunity to create future client links. This set-up coupled with the current economic landscape makes it difficult to ignore the lure of the commercial world.

“Artists working between these disciplinary areas now had a choice, if they desired to obtain their piece of the economic pie; a career within the digital and media industries became a lucrative option. This is rather different from the “starving artist” life and the never ending hope to one day turn one’s creations into highly traded commodities within the commercial gallery world.” (Da Costa, 2008)

The combination of a capitalist university system that is paired with an academic marking framework and continuously rising cohort sizes makes for a highly competitive landscape. A competition we are all happy to be part of and ready to jump through lots of hoops for in the hope of that great end goal. The stress is character building creating victims in it’s process - the victims our tutor asked us to safe. For most of us the proposal seemed intangible in that 9.30 morning moment but this is exactly what it takes to create a different world. This is what it takes to start operating as a collective despite the adverse conditions that would hurt everyone of us in that moment.

Later it turned out that the proposal wasn’t actually real and that our teacher just used it as an exercise for us to go through. I must admit it would have been an incredibly dynamic step for Goldsmiths. Yet definitely a step that we all should work towards to.

References:

Feelings and Sensations workshop

This week we had fun exploring our senses which felt like a welcome break after all the theoretical work over the past 9 weeks. Rather amazingly we only did two exercises but they both felt very powerful whilst shifting the concept of time. 

At the border of self and other We were instructed to get into pairs with students that we didn’t know so well, stand opposite each other, close our eyes and touch each other with our fingertips. Then we were spending 1.5 min with our eyes closed and the same amount of time with our eyes open. During this time we were encouraged to deeply listen to our feelings and anything that may float to the surface. It was an interesting experience, my partners fingers felt, pointed, firm and very warm. It felt like holding a connection with an artificially warmed rubber doll. We held this position easily but when we opened our eyes all the tranquil acceptance was shuttered by us not being able to look into each other’s eyes for a prolonged time. 

First of all I felt totally visually overwhelmed by my partners exuberance of colour combinations. Although I had seen her outfit before, my senses felt so much more heightened after the experience. There was her pastel blue grey hair that incidentally had exactly the same colour as her eyes. She didn’t like holding my gaze and I felt I was intruding. Likewise I was conscious about connecting via a gaze trying to protect my soul at the same time. It felt that our eyes were reset as instruments constantly measuring our own boundaries, hovering in some form of defense mode whilst adjusting. On a macro scale it felt we were equally connected with everyone else in the room whilst also closely with each other. 

Contact Zone at a Distance Our next exercise involved our phone cameras, with only one of us being allowed to use it. We were encouraged to explore our partner with our phone camera. My partner immediately decided that she was happy with playing ‘the subject’, meaning that she had to have 1.5 min eyes closed and 1.5 min eyes open, whilst I was able to keep mine open throughout. Despite having been allowed to move around my partner with my camera or use the zoom function these options didn’t actually occur to me. I was completely magnetised by my partner’s character in the context of the confinements of the camera. It felt her spirit was too big to be crushed by the rectangular square of the camera viewfinder grid. I was swaying between her real physical presence and her camera view replication and how these two representations would relate to the environment. I felt I was intruding less as my partner was able to look into my eyes for a prolonged time without averting her gaze. Did the camera put a helpful layer between us or is it because we feel so much more comfortable with the camera as a conversation tool between us? 

Although I practically live my life through my phone camera it did not occur to me to use the zoom functionality. I would have felt equally uncomfortable as well as probably disappointed by breaking the invisible boundary that we set up between us. Based on our mutual trust. The trust we felt we earned with each other during the first exercise. 

Electric dreams of digital assistants

Recently I’ve been dreaming about a PA, someone to make decisions on my behalf, tidy up the trail of mess I seem to leave behind everywhere, do all the jobs that I consider to be too mundane and freeing me up to just do what I really need to get on with. This is starting to sound like an advert for a new tech application.

We are now entangled within the demands from a suite of apps and smart products. Their promise was to make our lives easier but the reality is we are starting to feel enslaved by the machine.

Donna Haraway points out in her 1991 Cyborg Manifesto that our interaction with technology will lead to an embodiment of it’s processes. In that sense we are not separate from our interactions.

“Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment. The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment.” (Haraway, 1991)

Haraway poses that we might think of technologies as ‘materialised figurations’. A ‘cultural imaginary’ that finds it’s expression in a piece of technology. Lucy Suchman elaborates on this argument by posing we might look at technological applications as “assemblages of stuff”, figurations of some sort that we might be able to unpick. By untangling their relations in a socio-political context we might be able to ideate them in new arrangements.

“ One form of intervention into current practices of technology development, then, is through a critical consideration of how humans and machines are currently figured in those practices and how they might be figured – and configured  – differently.” (Suchman, 2007)

Suchman is asking us to consider the relationships between the places in which technological artefacts are created in and the places they are supposed to be implemented, ie. the relation between design and use. 

I’m starting to reflect on the tech applications that form my life: my work and communication tools and their predictive algorithms, designed to make my life simpler and more connected but often pushing me further away from the content I want to see. Would an AI home device like Amazon’s Alexa be able to help me accomplish all my tasks faster by stopping me staring at a screen and possibly utilising my other senses ie. my ears? I have mixed feelings about talking to a tech company through a speaker. Alexa is also lacking a lot of qualities I would expect from a personal assistant. The shape of a speaker is not commanding the same attention I would give to another human. 

Suchman wants us to look at the characteristics of humans that are assembled within these technologies, particularly within the context of AI and robotics.

“ What figures of the human are materialized in these technologies? What are the circumstances through which machines can be claimed, or experienced, as humanlike? And what do those claims and encounters tell us about the particular cultural imaginaries that inform these technoscience initiatives, and how they might be otherwise?” (Suchman, 2007)

Alexa is designed to be a servant and her voice is female. After the amount of sexual harassment she was receiving from her users and the mounting pressure from the #metoo movement there are now signs that she might want to step out of her domestic servant role. This feels like a classic example of an entanglement between a technology application and its users, affected by their role within the cultural imaginary of a servitude arrangement.

Alexa’s writers have now integrated a “disengage” mode. But is this enough?

I’m wondering how Alexa could be different? This brings me back to the dream of my personal assistant. What qualities would it need for me to respect it? How would I create an equal human in the form of an AI? First of all the role figuration needs to be equal, ie. no servitude. But wait how would that be helpful? Could there be a type of skills exchange maybe? Would I need to care for it like a Tamagotchi?

Lucy Suchman describes three attributes through which AI can be experienced as human like. The first is embodiment. The AI needs to communicate some form of cognition to signal embodiment, it needs to formulate a “world” that “.. preexists independent of the body. The body then acts as a kind of receiver for stimuli given by the world.” (Suchman 2007). Secondly it needs to demonstrate emotion. This area is generally referred to as “affective computing”. Suchman writes:

“Assigned an emancipatory role, emotion is positioned here as the missing ingredient for full (if not quite equal) machine participation in the human world. Sliding between imagery of enslavement and social ineptitude, the capacities of logic and calculation formerly taken as the mark of the human are now relegated to the position of oppressive and limiting forms of reasoning.” (Suchman, 2007)

The third and most desired component is sociability. We are reminded of Hal in Kubrik’s “2001” or I’m also thinking of Samatha the operating system in Jonze’s “Her”. Suchman refers to MIT’s Social Machines Project and the developments of one of their celebrity social robots Kismet nearly 20 years ago. Sociability is a learnt feature and Kismet was designed to learn from it’s human caregiver. The software was configured by assembling a series of drives to express  “calmness, happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, disgust, tiredness”. 

Cynthia Breazal the woman behind Kismet also developed Jibo conceived way ahead of and then eclipsed by the release of Amazon Echo’s Alexa. Jibo is now just looked down upon as a “dancing Alexa”. He’s just a companion, explain his creators and not designed to be helpful. The wider critique though seems to be that he can’t connect with us on a deeper level due to his technical limitations. He’s cute, but failing to live up to the breakthrough robotics achievements of Kismet.

“Jibo is agency without purpose, and entity without consequence. But it’s undeniably cute despite that, so I sympathize with it. Talking with this robot made me want to have an actual conversation with a person that was real and alive, with past experiences and the ability to understand what I was saying. Jibo made me consider what it means to be social, or even live, at all.” ( Dave Gershgorn, 2017)

Maybe we are not ready to accept robots in the role of just “companions”, stripped of their former purpose to serve, but if this attribute makes us reflect on what it means to be social then we might be heading in the right direction? It might also mean that we become better humans ie. being responsible of our own mess...which in my case would also mean not needing a PA.

References:

Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991)

Suchman, Lucy. “Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions” (Cambridge University Press, 2007 )

A dip into JAR and Leonardo magazine

This week we were encouraged to check out two publications for our artistic research practise.

JAR is published by the Society for Artistic Research (SAR) and acts as a peer reviewed meeting point between diverse practises and methodologies. A quick look under past issues reveals a huge variety of projects going back to 2011 containing only a few computational themes.

I looked at a recent piece on Pain by trans/poetess Babara Macek where she conducted a thorough research project into the physical and psychological dimension of pain. Macek developed ten different pain categories from research into poetry, philosophy, literature and her own experiences. Each pain category was illustrated by a selection of well chosen artistic photographs alongside quotes from Sylvia Plath, Bukowski, Nietzsche, Lord Byron among many more. Later Macek went into the Casualty departments of 2 Viennese hospitals to conduct her own field research on the differences between seeing and feeling pain in an effort to reconstruct different perspectives on Pain. I enjoyed this piece a lot, seeing the potential/starting points for many computational art projects. 

Jar publishes 3 times a year and invites artists and researchers from all fields for submissions. It actively encourages an unorthodox and ambiguous approach to content and design which definitely comes across in its widely differing content offer and wacky site navigation. It has a deeply conceptual and artistic approach and I can see myself using it as inspiration for future projects.

Leonardo, published by the MIT, focuses on interdisciplinary work within the fields of art/science/technology. The content brings together a calibre of scientists, technologists, researchers and artists in an effort to promote critical interdisciplinary work and innovation. In contrast to its highbrow content the browsing experience of the Leonardo website is a real UX let down, mainly due to being a portal to a forest of pdfs that are difficult to navigate. After a few clicks I found the LEA aka the Leonardo Electronic Almanac, a sister publication and peer reviewed electronic journal dedicated to the convergence of art science and tech. It's latest volume called "Cybernetics revisited" contained a collection of essays that grabbed my eye, particularly the Morten Sondergaard paper that examined prosthetics in relation to experimental art practices.

Sondergaard starts by charting the history of prosthetics right back to Leonardo Da Vinci's 'flying aggregates'. Here he poses lie the beginnings of the prosthetic aesthetic. About 500 years later these ideas are picked up by Brancusi with his golden Prometheus. Then Dali swapped the ear with a nose on a classical Venus, opening up an alternative vision for "synesthetic beauty in which the senses are not pre-assigned to any specific body part." Sondergaard then proceeds on a deep examination of the Australian artist Stelarc’s work who builds on his predecessors work by now using his own body to advance these ideas. He objects to the editors of The Prosthetic Impulse framing Stelarc’s work within techno utopian and even dystopian themes, not acknowledging his drive towards a 'second nature'. Sondergaard calls for an experience-based analysis of Stelarc’s work within a fresh context, claiming that it needed to be understood as a prosthetic aesthetic experience. This is a deep examination of Stelarc’s practise within the context of prosthetics, consciousness and second nature. I will need to sit on some of the content for a little longer to fully understand it, but again I can see the value here to my own practise.

I enjoyed the differences between the two publications and can definitely see myself using either journal for inspiration and research.

Later Atau told us that the print version of the Leonardo is kept in our library. I was delighted when I managed to get my hands on a few hard copies. Looking through the printed versions completely changed my browsing experience of the publication and I was sad to hear that the Goldsmith library is in the process to sell their hard copy collection on, most likely to the British Library. I earmarked a few articles and tried to search these again on the Leonardo website which send me on a hellish loop - don't do this, just google them instead and you'll get straight to the pdfs.

http://jar-online.net/archive/

https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/308804/470238

https://www.leonardo.info/journal-issue/leonardo-electronic-almanac/22/2

https://www.leoalmanac.org/cybernetics-revisited/

As a parent I long wondered about the YouTube rabbit hole and what really goes on when I trust my daughter to police our parenting style within her internet behaviour ie. only watch quality content. The answer is that I played a massive gamble with machine learning algorithms and that I have no idea how many times my trust was broken.

Sure, I'm always glad when I hear that schools educate on internet behaviour and online bullying, but I question this support extends to looking at subverted pirate content, bot created digital tropes and plain fake news swamping the recommendation sidebar in YouTube.

"Algorithms are changing our world" writes Mercedes Bunz "As they become more and more part of our world, algorithms re-organise knowledge and this changes what it is 'to think' as much as the machine shifted in the 19th century 'what it is to work'. (Bunz, 2014)

Bunz talks about the plurality of knowledge on the internet and the increasing difficulty to confirm facts, basically we need a 'choir of voices' to provide trust in information. Most tech platforms now cater for our increasing search exhaustion by reorganising the internet to our likes, slowly interweaving our previously viewed pieces with similarly tagged content.

So, how does YouTube work and particularly its recommendation algorithm that is fighting for our attention by lining up videos in the sidebar to the one we are watching. There are 3 main components to YouTube's business model: viewers, content producers and AdSense, also owned by Google just like YouTube. Most videos that are watched come with adverts and adverts are the monetization model for YouTube. It is not only in the interest of the company to increase the engagement time and reach of it's users but it is also in the interest of the content producers that are being paid by views, 1000s of them at a time. There are two common methods used by content creators to launch their new videos to increased chances of floating up into the recommended queue. One is to pirate other content that is clearly successful and the other is to tag their videos with as many keywords as possible.

This dual approach distributes the video to a wide audience and the more views it achieves the more likely it is to end up in an auto play queue which increases its views even further. There are 1.5 billion YouTube users in the world and the recommendation algorithm is it's main growth engine. Lately the company came under attack as the recommendation algorithm has been found to deliver anything from conspiracy videos to a whole plethora of disturbing kids content infiltrating its autoplay queue. There are now speculations that YouTube had a much bigger impact than Facebook and Twitter spreading fake news in the build up to Brexit and the 2016 presidential election.

Tarleton Gillespie in "Algorithm [draft][# digitalkeyword]." examines the multiple meanings of the term "algorithm" from the standpoint of the different communities using it: the technical communities, the social scientists and the wider public. He describes the often intentional mystification of the term to increase its marketability and likewise also to take away accountability when there is widespread criticism. 

Within the technical community the algorithm is seen as a series of composed programmable steps that follow a model which is a formalisation of a problem. In YouTube's context this problem would be: How do we keep users watching videos for as long as possible? Gillespie describes then how a model is created from this said problem and thresholds are set to measure success of resolving the problem. Following on from this a training data set is compiled to run the proposed algorithm on. Now the designers will play with the parameters and thresholds to achieve their desired results. Very often problems appear when there are discrepancies between the training data and the real data. Unexpected results may arise or previously overlooked problems become more poignant. So the algorithm designers tune thresholds or layer new algorithms on top of the existing ones. Lastly the algorithm will be packaged up into an application which will execute the sequence of steps.

In Gillespie's most poignant paragraph though he highlights that there are people at every point making decisions.

“'Algorithm' may in fact serve as an abbreviation for the sociotechnical assemblage that includes algorithm, model, target goal, data, training data, application, hardware — and connect it all to a broader social endeavor. Beyond the technical assemblage there are people at every point: people debating the models, cleaning the training data, designing the algorithms, tuning the parameters, deciding on which algorithms to depend on in which context.” (Gillespie, 2014)

Gillespie highlights the problems that arise by reducing the term to a "series of computational steps", saying that it "becomes too easy to treat the algorithm as a single artifact" as rarely there is a single algorithm but many layered on top of each other and also with different parameters for multiple user groups. Importantly though he claims this simplification removes the people and their accountability from the problem. Likewise treating it as a synecdoche by combining all the social and technical elements can produce a mystified abstraction which also doesn't help the closer examination. 

Referring to YouTube's recommendation algorithm by personifying it as "YouTube's code” creates an abstraction that doesn't pinpoint the exact decisions that were made in relation to thresholds and parameter's on the cost of users and in favour of market growth. Again it oversimplifies, mystifies and fogs accountability.

Gillespie finishes by hinting on the wider computational system that we are now increasingly connected to. All aspects of our life link in some respects to computation. The connections between these interactions become increasingly complicated, especially when there is a mixture of human and algorithmic input.  

"The system always struggles with the tension between the operationalized aims and the way humanity inevitably undermines, alters, or exceeds those aims. At the same time, it’s not clear how to organize such complex behavior in any other way, and still have it be functional and fair." (Gillespie, 2014)

At the end Gillespie concludes that this computational procedural systemisation is now so integrated within our western society that it will become increasingly impossible to untangle ourselves from it.

I guess as educated parents and guardians of YouTube consumers we still have options to control the culture we allow our children to partake in. But what about the ones that are too busy to moderate because they have 3 jobs and have to leave the parenting to teenage siblings. What about a whole generation of children growing up being fed on disturbing Peppa Pig videos and anything potentially worse the system creates a demand for and it's content providers eagerly feed? A company feeding one of it's biggest and most profitable and youngest user groups the idea to just click on the next best thing.

As James Bridle points out in his terrifying article How Peppa Pig became a video nightmare for children, he met with a few YouTubers to confront them with this problem and felt there was a limit of genuine understanding of the scale and complexity of the problem.

"While most are well-meaning, few seem to have much of a grasp of the wider structural issues in society which their systems both profit from and exacerbate. Like most people who work at big tech companies, they think that these problems can be solved by the application of more technology: by better algorithms, more moderation, heavier engineering." (Bridle, 2018)

This echoes Gillespie's conclusion, that we are so entangled within procedural automation that we feel exceedingly committed to the system proposing more technology to fix it rather than rethinking the system itself by questioning the values that feed it.

References:

Bunz, Mercedes. "When Algorithms Learned How to Write.” In The Silent Revolution, Palgrave Pivot, London, 2014.

Tarleton Gillespie http://culturedigitally.org/2014/06/algorithm-draft-digitalkeyword/

In our first session we read Femke Snelting’s 2006 article “A fish can’t judge the water” and debated her wooden spoon analogy in connection to our experiences with software. Snelting describes the slow and subtle process in which a software can alter our behaviour, just like the mundane stirring with a wooden spoon can all of a sudden bring a sauce together.

Despite the article being written in 2006 I couldn’t help immediately reflecting on my social media life in particular the last 7 years or so on Instagram. Snelting writes "We practice software until we in-corporate it’s choreography. We make it disappear in the background." (Snelting, 2006) This certainly rings true of my previous complete immersion with the app and looking at the past seven years I also couldn’t avoid thinking about the many personality changes I went through as a user of the ever changing app.

There is Panja, the friend that loves being closely connected to her friends across the globe in a then cuddly community roughly around 2010-2012. There is the often obsessive visual archiver of insanely mundane things. There is the regular commentator of social gatherings or cultural/political events. There is the mother who creates subversive posts to shock or amuse overzealous parents. There is the cultural vampire that spoils the show for everyone else by over posting her experiences. There is the longest hashtag inventor just because it felt better to talk in hashtags. Finally the strategiser 2015-now that analyses other users until she felt insane boredom creeping into her instagram life. Most of these personality changes can be traced back to software changes that influenced the way I was able to interact with my friends. 

If we were not only using Open Source Software but also co-creating it Femke Snelting asks, “can we think ourselves outside of it?”

Although social media apps are not at all “Open Source” but deeply commercialised products, the primary ingredient and consequential uptake of any social media platform are the vast amounts of data created by it's users.

Snelting asks us to rethink "user-friendly-ness" and elaborates that usability depends entirely on who the users are and what they are using it for. I reflected on this a lot over the years when I wondered what any of my friends saw in Facebook. But naturally any social media platform can be ok depending on who you are connected to? In fact the big technology platforms strive to present themselves as “politically neutral”. As history shows over the past view years we were all forced to adopt a very different view point since Facebook’s well documented privacy breaches of user data before the US elections and Brexit. 

Our daily interactions not only make us a target for experimentation ie. Facebooks well documented algorithm changes to experiment with user’s feeds and manipulation ie. the personalised political posts ahead of the US presidential elections and in this country Brexit. Now more evidently than ever tech platforms trade user-friendly-ness and often also usability for commercial growth.

Femke Snelting writes  “Our work is, as much as the software we use and produce, 'work in progress' and this means it’s cut-off points are not necessarily concealed.” (Snelting, 2006)

It feels I have experienced too many versions of myself that make me wonder where my ‘work in progress’ self might end up? For now it feels I need to do more reflecting mainly to find back to my former self.

References

The Metaplasm is a mixed reality piece that consists of a computational leather prosthetic to operate an augmented phantom that the wearer can play with. Produced and directed by Panja Göbel

Special thanks to:

Performance with the prosthetic: Freya Berkhout

Music: Aleksi Perälä and Grant Wilson Claridge from Colundi http://colundi.net/