Charming short film from the AHRC, showcasing the value of arts and humanities research in understanding environmental change.

(via Bradley Garrett)

‘To both design and politics, futures affords some tools to crack open times-to-come as a far richer domain for discussion. It also offers the holistic systems-thinking and temporal reach that are necessary to move beyond ideology-driven argumentation about ‘the (singular) future’ into more systematic and multi-dimensional exploration. Politics, in its theoretical aspect, gives futurists and designers a sensitivity to power relations and a range of conceptions of the good and the just at the social level, and in its activist aspect, represents a tradition of exploring and concretely operationalising these ethics in the world. Designers give to futures and politics practitioners a much-needed dose of communications acumen and facility with media, along with a fusion of aesthetic (used here in the narrow sense) with the pragmatic; a necessary equilibrium between form and function.’

— Stuart Candy, ‘The Futures of Everyday Life‘ (2010)

photo credit: justinpickard

Following last week’s introduction to Project Cascadia (and accompanying reading list), I thought I’d share a couple of passages that have been firmly lodged in my brain this week.

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First, the very beginning of Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty, an extraordinary novel-slash-history of Soviet cybernetics. In this extract, the author grapples with some of the peculiarities and nuance of his writing:

‘This is not a novel. It has too much to explain, to be one of those. But it is not a history either, for it does its explaining in the form of a story; only the story is the story of an idea, first of all, and only afterwards, glimpsed through the chinks of the idea’s fate, the story of the people involved. The idea is the hero. It is the idea that sets forth, into a world of hazards and illusions, monsters and transformations, helped by some of those it meets along the way and hindred by others.’

– Francis Spufford, Red Plenty (2010), p. 3.

(‘The idea is the hero.‘ How do you approach a biography of an idea? An idea of a region; a utopia; shared – at some vague, subconscious level – by millions of people? Approached obliquely … glimpsed through gaps, and attacked from strange angles? Ambushed with some strange hybrid of fact and fiction? Hmm.)

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Secondly, a couple of lines from Wild Bill Gibson’s ‘The Gernsback Continuum‘; a meditation on legacy futures in the form of a short story:

‘She was talking about those odds and ends of ‘futuristic’ Thirties and Forties architecture you pass daily in American cities without noticing: the movie marquees ribbed to radiate some mysterious energy, the dime stores faced with fluted aluminum, the chrome-tube chairs gathering dust in the lobbies of transient hotels. She saw these things as segments of a dreamworld, abandoned in the uncaring present; she wanted me to photograph them for her.’

– William Gibson, ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, Burning Chrome (1988), pp. 38-39.

(‘Segments of a dreamworld.’ Hunting traces … gathering evidence … detective work, pinning down the imaginary and the nebulous in something tangible. The process of documenting the imaginary drives Gibson’s photojournalist protagonist to the brink of madness, as he begins to slip sideways into the obsolete retro-future he’s been sent to document. It’s an excellent short story, and a key insipiration for some of my earliest work on this project.)

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photo credit: justinpickard

And, finally, the opening lines from Mike Davis’ City of Quartz, a strange, tangential, and exhaustively-referenced biography of Los Angeles:

‘The best place to view Los Angeles of the next millennium is from the ruins of its alternative future. Standing on the sturdy cobblestone foundations of the General Assembly Hall of the Socialist city of Llana del Rio – Open Shop Los Angeles’s utopian antipode – you can sometimes watch the Space Shuttle in its elegant final descent towards Rogers Dry Lake.’

– Mike Davis, City of Quartz (1990), p. 3.

(‘From the ruins of its alternative future.‘ If you want to understand the ways things will turn out, you have to understand what’s already failed, and why? These are words that echo (rhyme with?) Sterling’s oft-repeated aphorism: ‘The ruins of the unsustainable are the twenty-first century’s frontier.’ The mission, then, is to locate sites where the past and future collide with an unexpected ferocity, bringing long-buried cultural detritus to the surface. Atemporality, located in space.)

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More to follow, in time.

photo credit: justinpickard

Venture ethnography | Speculative travel writing | Territorial futures

Introducing Project Cascadia: my attempt to bootstrap a new(ish) mode of writing into existence.

3–6 weeks in North America’s Pacific Northwest, in search of traces of Cascadia. Fodder for a series of essays and investigations. Presented in a book. Crowdfunded by you; the proud and attractive people of the internet.

For the tl;dr among you, there’s a an easy blurb and video here –  enough to you give you a sense of the shape of the thing. Go, chuckle at my unkempt appearance and poor grasp of audio syncing!

Then, for more in the way of detail (a lot more), join me below…

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Project Cascadia is the test-case for a cluster of ideas I’ve been playing with for the best part of five years. A chance to break out my signature obsessions …

Hauntings, world expos, gonzo journalism, science fiction, systems, geopolitics, utopianism, virtuality, globalisation, the sublime, resilience, collapsonomics, aesthetics, architecture, environmentalism, infrastructure, design, futures studies, sovereignty, atemporality, risk, the nation-state, the uncanny, Americana, technoscience, cyberpunk, multispecies ethnography, fiction, capitalism, the human senses, counterfactual history, media and cyborgs (and media cyborgs)

… and nail them to the mast of a weird and interstitial sort of boat; a soupy, hybrid writing practice that would combine the best of ethnography, journalism and science fiction.

Trips to San Francisco (2009), Iceland (2010), and Dublin (2011) demonstrated my incapability of approach travel in any kind of ‘normal’ way. A born infovore, I kept getting caught up in the minutae, symbolism, and historical specificity of the place, and ended up ambushing tour guides with questions about medieval property law and taking lots of photos of construction hoardings.

Part of this is down to a strange education, with a joint honours degree in Anthropology and International Relations (blending the local and the global), and a masters in Digital Media.

Both of these programmes allowed me the freedom to shoehorn in all kinds of stuff, adding science fiction to offshore finance; american literature to biotechnology; and penning essays on the aesthetics of Guantanamo Bay, the Principality of Sealand, airports, post-colonial Mumbai, and Richard Kelly’s cult masterpiece/traversty Southland Tales (2007).

In lieu of a biography, then, I’m offering a bibliography. Five years of my brain, in books, articles, essays, and blog posts. I fully expect this to be a forest of broken links by this time next week, but, in the meantime, it should begin to give you an idea of where I stand … and, yes, why I might be doing this.

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Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983)

Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996)

‘Spectral housing and urban cleansing: notes on millennial Mumbai‘, Public Culture 12:3 (2000)

Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1992)

J. G. Ballard, Vermillion Sands (1971)

‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island‘ (Guardian podcast)

Richard Barbrook, Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village (2007)

Nigel Barley, The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes From a Mud Hut (1983)

Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991)

America (1986)

Lauren Beukes, Zoo City (2010)

Moxyland (2008)

Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (1991)

Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (2006)

John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

Jamais Cascio, ‘Legacy Futures‘, Open the Future (2008)

‘Three Possible Economic Models‘, Fast Company (2009)

‘Three Possible Economic Models, Part 2‘, Fast Company (2009)

Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston (1975)

Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends (2008)

Jean and John Comaroff, ‘Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants and Millennial Capitalism’, South Atlantic Quarterly 101:4 (2002)

‘Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming‘, Public Culture 12:2 (2000)

‘Occult economies and the violence of abstraction: notes from the South African postcolony’, American Ethnologist 26:2 (1999)

Douglas Coupland, ‘A radical pessimist’s guide to the next 10 years‘, Globe and Mail (2010)

Generation A (2009)

JPod (2006)

Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information (2004)

Mike Davis, City of Quartz (1990)

Cory Doctorow, Makers (2009)

Keller Easterling, Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades (2005)

Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010)

Warren Ellis, Shivering Sands (2009)

Matthew Gandy, ‘Cyborg Urbanization: Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City‘, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29:1 (2005)

Bradley L. Garrett, ‘Urban explorers: quests for myth, mystery and meaning’, Geography Compass (2010) [video]

Place Hacking (2008-present)

William Gibson, ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, Burning Chrome (1986)

Zero History (2010)

Spook Country (2007)

Pattern Recognition (2003)

David Graeber, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire (2007)

Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004)

Adam Greenfield, ‘Thoughts for an eleventh September: Alvin Toffler, Hirohito, Sarah Palin‘, Speedbird (2008)

Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (2010)

Charlie Hailey, Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space (2009)

Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (2007)

Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©Meets_OncoMouse™ (1997)

Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1990)

Stefan Helmreich, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (2009)

Dan Hill, ‘The Street as Platform‘, City of Sound (2008)

Drew Jacob, ‘How to be ExPoMod‘, Most Interesting People in the Room

Sarah Kember, ‘Media, Mars and Metamorphosis‘, Culture Machine (2010)

Naomi Klein, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (2002)

Alan Klima, ‘Spirits of ‘Dark Finance’: A Local Hazard for the International Moral Fund’, Cultural Dynamics (2006)

‘Thai Love Thai: Financing Emotion in Post-crash Thailand‘, Ethnos (2004)

Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (1991)

Ursula Le Guin, Changing Planes (2003)

The Disposessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974)

Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)

Geoff Manaugh, The BLDGBLOG Book (2009)

Ian McDonald, The Dervish House (2010)

Brasyl (2007)

River of Gods (2004)

Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004)

China Mieville, The City & the City (2009)

‘Covehithe‘, The Guardian (2011)

‘M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire – Weird; Hauntological: Versus and/or and and/or or?‘, Collapse IV (2008)

‘Floating Utopias‘, In These Times (2007)

Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (2002)

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

Keith Roberts, Pavane (1968)

Jim Rossignol, This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities (2008)

Geoff Ryman, Air (2005)

Stephen Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect (2010)

Gary Shtenyngart, Super Sad True Love Story (2010)

Francis Spufford, Red Plenty (2010)

Bruce Sterling, The Caryatids (2009)

‘Designer Futurescape‘, Make 18 (2009)

‘Dispatches from the Hyperlocal Future‘, Wired (2007)

Holy Fire (1996)

Islands in the Net (1988)

‘State of the World, 20––‘, The Well (2001-present)

Michael Taussig, What Color is the Sacred? (2009)

‘Zoology, Magic, and Surrealism in the War on Terror‘, Critical Inquiry 34:S2 (2008)

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (1973)

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)

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There you go; everything interesting and/or relevant I’ve read in the last half-decade. *jazz hands*

In the second part of this cynically self-promotional series, to follow sometime in the next week, I’ll start to weave some of the items from this list into something more useful and cohesive, and begin looking at what this hybrid form of writing might actually look like. Join me then.

‘Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes. Brian Eno suggested the word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or “scenes” can occasionally generate. His actual definition is: “Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.”‘

– Kevin Kelly, ‘Scenius, or Communal Genius‘, The Technium, 10/06/2008

Engineering:

‘Scientists try to understand nature. Engineers try to make things that do not exist in nature. Engineers stress invention. To embody an invention the engineer must put his idea in concrete terms, and design something that people can use. That something can be a device, a gadget, a material, a method, a computing program, an innovative experiment, a new solution to a problem, or an improvement on what is existing. Since a design has to be concrete, it must have its geometry, dimensions, and characteristic numbers.’

– YC Fung and P. Tong, 2001, Classical and Computational Solid Mechanics

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Key texts include the work of Steven Johnson, Joseph Schumpeter, Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty, the ‘soft’ architecture of Cedric Price and Archigram, the as-of-yet-unwritten obituary of East London Tech City, and any amount of behavioural economics. Organisational acupuncture. An architecture of micropolitics.

It might even be a career.

Definitions:

• epizoic adj 1 describes a nonparasitic animal or plant that lives on the external surface of a living animal, 2 describes plants whose seeds or spores are dispersed by being attached to the coats of animals

• epizootic adj describes an outbreak of disease that rapidly affects many animals in a given area at the same time

This, then, is the other side of the cyborg/robot coin — machines and animals/plants as ways of interrogating the boundaries and agency of ‘the human’, as we move forward. Adding biology to technology (esp. media), rather than the other way round.

Theun Karelse, writing at the Institute for Augmented Ecology:

Non-humans are fitted with wearable technology, in past decades it has predominantly been GPS, but what happens when they start carrying rich mobile media like we do?

In its original set-up groWorld at FoAM set out to investigate interactions between plants and humans from multiple perspectives. This includes work on minimising borders and maximising edges between man-made and vegetal, by entangling culture & cultivation {sym}, building & growing {bio} and nature & technology {sys}. Some HPI-s (human plant interaction) prototyped at FoAM are human-plant gaming, plantbased solarcells and a foraging application for smartphone. Later Angelo Vermeulen has been working with cockroaches for his Entomograph see insects. IforAE, a temporary research within FoAM is currently investigating epizoic (epizootic) media to look at trans-species social networks.

Check out his list of projects — an set of items that should help you start to bend your brain around the (still permeable) boundaries of the field.

Further reading:

• Anab on wifi-enabled dogs (amazing)
• Timothy Mitchell on the agency of mosquitos in wartime Egypt
• Jussi Parrika’s Insect Media (to read)
• Paskian systems!
• El Fortunio’s ‘I, Bacteria‘
• Everything from here

photo credit: Walraven

I like Donna Haraway, Ghost in the Shell, and talking at length about technological prostheses.

And here we are, doing just that.

This round of discussion has its roots tangled messily round Tim Maly‘s 50 cyborgs, a month of posts celebrating the term’s fiftieth anniversary, back in September. This was something Chairman Bruce described as:

‘a large clique of obviously intelligent and creative people who all more or less know each other through the Internet, and are all loosely riffing about cyborgs, and what-cyborg-means-to-them.’

Then, more recently, we had Amber Case at TED and Lepht Anonym talking about self-bootstrapping with implants. In reaction, Matthew Battles wrote a piece for Gearfuse, which M1k3y read and tweeted. Based on that piece, I had a late night discussion with Matthew about who gets to be a cyborg, which Tim Maly later compiled and annotated on Storify.

With me thus far? Good.

Next, we took it into a Google Document and – 13,000 words and two days later – found ourselves with a mammoth discussion/exploration of all kinds of nuances and discontinuities in our use of the term ‘cyborg’, with contributions from Tim Maly, Amber Case, Matthew Battles, Tim Carmody, Ella Saitta, Deb Chachra, Hilary Dixon, Adam Rothstein, and others. None of whom I have met in the flesh — something worth highlighting.

Strange and all kinds of epic.

Now, there’s a lot of these 13,000 words to leak out over the coming weeks and months, but this is something that stuck with me. Originally authored by Tim Carmody, but edited by committee — to the point where we felt we could agree.

Thus: 8 theses on cyborgism. Martin Luther by way of Steve Mann, though, if that’s the case, I’m not sure what we’re supposed to nail it to. The TED website? Donna Haraway’s office at UC Santa Cruz?

Either way, here’s what we came up with:

1. Pointing to something like cell-phone use and saying “we’re all cyborgs” is not substantially different from pointing to cooking or writing and saying “we’re all cyborgs.”
2. Cooking and writing are nothing to sneeze at! They’re important technologies that we’ve incorporated nearly seamlessly into our psychological lives and (in the case of cooking) our biological evolution.
3. Despite our long-running species enmeshment in technology, we’re witnessing the emergence of something closer to the popular techno-organic image of the cyborg, if not necessarily the original idea of either the cyborg or the broader field of cybernetics.
4. That new thing (whatever form it takes) is bigger than computers or phones or consumer communication technologies. It points to the incorporation of technological components that violate or transform the bodily/agential integrity of human beings.
5. This is happening in a way that’s partially invisible, as part of the medical/industrial/networked aspects of our societies (tooth fillings, drugs, Google Instant, etc.), and in a way that’s much more visible, more closely related to our ideas of disability, transgenderism, etc.
6. This presents a weird synthesis of the classic idea of the cyborg, the development of medical technology, the evolution of consumer technology, and identity politics.
7. Cyborgs have a troubling dual origin, which includes both mega-reliance on techno infrastructure and homesteading DIY self-emancipation. This tension will not go away.
8. Equally, this tension is nothing new. This is a tension that began in earnest during the Macy conferences in the 1940s, when cyberneticists, technologists and anthropologists began to meet to discuss this very subject.

I have a great deal of fondness for this list, even as it dodges controversy by charting a safer path. How about you? Partially-formed thoughts? Observations? Strident cries of diagreement?

Let us know.

‘There are certainly new and opposite cognitive, social, and political forms taking shape before us: artificial intelligences, cyborgs, posthuman subjectivity, a breakdown of mind along with the destruction of the planet, a technoprogressive democracy, a society of control networked from synapse to street, and on and on. This paper was an attempt to look out the window at our minds as they reach the “sound barrier,” and what possibilities, if any, might lie just beyond the sonic boom. We’re almost there; meet you on the other side.’

– Jake Dunagan, 2010, ‘Politics for the Neurocentric Age’, Journal of Futures Studies 15 (2), p. 67.

‘I am a creature of the mud, not the sky. I am a biologist who has always found edification in the amazing abilities of slime to hold things in touch and to lubricate passages for living beings and their parts. I love the fact that human genomes can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 percent of the cells are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such, some of which play in a symphony necessary to my being alive at all, and some of which are hitching a ride and doing the rest of me, of us, no harm. I am vastly outnumbered by my tiny companions; better put, I become an adult human being in company with these tiny messmates. To be one is always to become with many.’

– Donna Haraway (2008), When Species Meet (University of Minnesota Press) , pp. 3-4.

‘So far, microbes have been described as bearers of important messages, as in need of protection from contamination, as versatile, as possibly chimerical, as invasive, as smelly, and as shit bugs. If not strictly taboo, microbes are certainly objects of interest and anxiety; their relations to humans matter to these scientists. And they come to matter precisely through their manifestation as media—as symbolic intermediaries between human selves and an oceanic other, as material things whose functions can be investigated as biomedia.’

– Stefan Helmreich (2009), Alien Ocean (University of California Press), p. 58.

‘Any search for a shadow biosphere must consider the role of ecological niches and address the issue of why standard life could not/did not invade and conquer the locales harboring weird life.’

– P.C.W. Davies et. al. (2009), ‘Signatures of a Shadow Biosphere’, Astrobiology, Vol. 9 (2), p. 242.

… weird life, culture(s) beyond the human, xenobiologies (artificial or extraterrestrial), cross-species politics, geoengineering, FOXP2, protocells, biofilm, bios/zoe, Cetacean personhood, ‘Blue-Green capitalism’, the bureaucracy of the hive, Lovelock/Lovecraft, the possibilities of uplift …

photo credit: adonofrio

Reading List

• Thrilling Wonder Stories II — Rachel Armstrong; Geoff Manaugh & Nicola Twilley; Dunne & Raby
  • ‘Stratagraphies of Infestation‘, BLDGBLOG
  • ‘Concrete Honey and the Printing Room‘, BLDGBLOG
  • ‘Future Foragers’, Icon Magazine 090

• ‘Signatures of a Shadow Biosphere‘ (2009), Astrobiology 9(2), P.C.W. Davies et. al.

• Alien Ocean (2009), Stefan Helmreich <Chapter 1>

• ‘Mars, Media, and Metamorphosis‘ (2010), Culture Machine 11, Sarah Kember

• Cultural Anthropology 25:4 (2010), various
  • ‘The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography’, S. Eben Kirksey & Stefan Helmreich
  • ‘Fingeryeyes: Impressions of Cup Corals’, Eva Hayward
  • ‘Viral Clouds: Becoming H5N1 in Indonesia’, Celia Lowe
  • ‘Ecologies of Empire: On the New Uses of the Honeybee’, Jake Kosek

• When Species Meet (2008), Donna Haraway

• ‘Staying with the Trouble: Becoming Worldly with Companion Species‘, Donna Haraway

• ‘The Human after the Post-humanist Critique or, the Fantasy of Interspecies Ethics‘, Joanna Zylinska

To begin, here’s the workshop’s official blurb:

‘A growing body of research, including literature on cognitive anthropology, software studies and cognitive capital suggests that whatever is called ‘thinking’ occurs amidst mechanisms, habits, codelike systems, devices and other formally structured means. If intelligence, far from being a property of ‘the human’, is an informal and provisional function of the ensemble of mechanisms and relations that comprise a social field, then we need to explore the co-relation of cultural and experiental practices, thought and intelligent devices.’

– A Billion Gadget Minds, 21/10/2010

In other words, how can we open a space in which speak of the radical heterogeneity of intelligence; a distributed, plural intelligence, (sometimes) existing outside of the brain’s biophysical substrates? We’re talking human-computer interaction, Napier’s bones, smart homes, and iPhones.

First up was Australian media artist Anna Munster, with ‘Nerves of Data: the neurological turn in/against networked media.’

In less than a minute, Munster had single-handedly resurrected my long-presumed-exhausted personal vendetta against Baroness Susan Greenfield – that chortling, shoe-loving embodiment of the worst possible collision of scientific authority, media hysteria, and New Labourite post-feminism; whom – shortly before crashing the Royal Institution into an iceberg – somehow found time to blame the financial crisis on computer games.

Here she is at the Web at 20, blithely ignoring cultural factors: “Twitter is banal! Won’t somebody please think of the children?“ And so on, ad vomitum.

Munster skewered Greenfield, Carr and their ilk, highlighting the rhetorical wooliness implied by their deployal of terms like ‘the young brain’, ‘hyperattention’, ‘generations’ and ‘dumbing down’ – and interrogating the tacit assumptions of their particular sacred cow: functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI).

As the iconic technology/medium of said neurological turn, the fMRI scan represents the penetrative instrumentality of the field of neuro-perception. As my colleague Mihaela pointed out, there is – after all – no such thing as dysfunctional MRI. When we look at an fMRI scan, what are we seeing? Most of the time, the image manifests as a before & after comparison; a spot-the-difference format familiar from umpteen high-gloss magazines. This is a question of process; of haemodynamic movements, shuttling oxygen to firing neurons … or neurotransmitters … depending on the theories to which you, as a scientist, subscribe.

MRI brain scan from JonO on Vimeo.

When we see the scan, we are privy to a ratio change – a movement of blood implied from stills captured at 5-second intervals, colour-coded in post-production. Here, the fMRI is a diagram for the brain, but not of it. A mapping rather than a text. Here, Munster’s reference to US legal outfit No Lie MRI invokes memories of Angela Saini’s 2009 feature on neuro-imaging in India’s legal system; which was filtering through editorial when I was interning at Wired UK. Key quote:

‘So what does [Professor] Mukundan feel about the woman whose life hangs in the balance because of his invention?

Sitting in the empty forensics lab in Gandhinagar, his BEOS machine on the floor beside him, he is philosophical. “Man is not destined to be controlled by nature. Man is destined to control nature,” he says. “This is the big departure between man and the animals. Human beings are destined to create a nature and then live in that nature.”’

– Angela Saini, ‘The brain police: judging murder with an MRI‘, Wired UK, 27/05/2009

Incomplete – certainly – and verging on the sinister, but basically correct. We shape our environment, and our environment shapes us. Munster urges us to consider Google Instant; an instrumental pre-empting of our intentionality – based on our prior searches, as well as those of the crowd. She reads from William Gibson’s editorial for the NYT, in which he asserts:

‘Google is not ours. Which feels confusing, because we are its unpaid content-providers, in one way or another. We generate product for Google, our every search a minuscule contribution. Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products.’

– William Gibson, ‘Google’s Earth‘, The New York Times, 31/08/2010 (emphases mine)

As a case in point, it is here that I begin to feel the absence of Twitter, lobbing intermittant updates into the darkness from my Nokia 6500c. With no feedback loops, I feel the faint stirrings of some uncertain discomfort – an early glimpse of hive mind separation anxiety, perhaps?

(For more from Munster, check her interview in Episode 9 of Jussi & Julio’s Creative Technology Review, from roughly 19 min in – where she discusses attentional capture, network subjectivity/ies, and the increasingly gothic texture of digital culture.)

photo credit: CarbonNYC

The second session that really resonated was from University of Stirling philosopher Mike Wheeler. His paper was titled ‘Thinking Beyond the Brain: Arguments and Implications’, and here’s a chunk of the abstract:

‘In recent years, cognitive science and scientifically oriented philosophy of mind have witnessed a surge of interest in accounts of mind and cognition that identify themselves using labels such as ‘embodied’, ‘embedded’ and/or ‘extended’. There is a shared vision here which depicts the human brain as a system designed by evolution to make extensive and transformative use of various kinds of external (beyond-the-skin) cognitive scaffolding (e.g. technologies, other agents).’

– Mike Wheeler, ‘Thinking Beyond the Brain: Arguments and Implications’

So far, so #50cyborgs. My standards were high, and Wheeler got a bucketload of bonus points for opening with a brace of Harry Potter references. After all, Dumbledore’s Pensieve is the perfect figuration of an artifact-as-cognitive-scaffold. Through Potter fandom, we are gently introduced to the hypothesis of Extended Cognition (ExC), as expertly summarised by Toronto philosopher Karina Vold.

Approaching the issue from a weakly bioconservative (?) standpoint, Adams and Aizawa comment that:

‘To ask about the bounds of cognition is to ask what portions of spacetime contain cognitive processing. It is to ask about what physical, chemical, or biological processes realize, constitute, or embody cognitive processes (…) It is to ask about the physical substrate of cognition.’

– Frederick Adams & Kenneth Aizawa (2010), The Bounds of Cognition, p. 16.

Certainly, ExC depends on the multiple realizability of the mental. Wheeler is a functionalist – subscribing to a body of philosophical thought in which what something is made of is far less important than what it actually does; it’s function, if you will. For him, cognition is not the sole preserve of squishy neurons, but any other alternative combination of biology, gas, technological artifice, neurology, learned technique, or computation.

Presuming their concealment, would there be any functional or measurable difference in the recall abilities reported by (1) a subject with eidetic memory and (2) a subject who had kept a journal since childhood? If not, to what extent can that journal be interpreted as a constitutent part of subject 2′s cognitive processes?

Contrasting to the arguments of Adams & Aizawa, a liberal/extended functionalism allows that the borders of the cognitive system may fall beyond the sensory-motor interface of the organic body. So, in this reading, what seperates cognition from computation? Hell, what is cognition? Something studied by cognitive scientists, yes, but what does that mean? Cognitive science is human-oriented and inner-oriented, but why? Is the cultural-institutional substrate underpinning an academic discipline enough to make its subject ‘real’?

When cornered, Wheeler was willing to concede that ‘cognition’ might be a weasel-word; a culturally and socially-specific scientific imaginary. Moving away from the chauvanism of actually-existing cognitive science, he suggested Paskian systems (as deployed by architect Usman Haque) as a potentially productive escape route from Munster’s anticipatory Google Instant dystopia. Here, Pask’s work offers a:

‘model of interaction in which “machine” and “human” are peers in a conversation and where information is genuinely created through their interactions.’

And here, things begin to break up. My sense is that ExC =!Cyborg, but I think it’s too soon to sketch out why. Still, it’s all about the fuzzy boundaries. For this purpose, following in the wake of #50cyborgs – a couple of case studies.

(1) Memento. In a notion lifted from this essay by Andy Clark, we get Guy Pierce as a cyborg feminist – his tattoos and polaroids as prostheses; distributed cognition:

(2) A demo of Jerry Michalski‘s Brain, with software as its substrate:

ExC to the max, although it does raise some interesting questions on cognition and ownership.

COGNITION <—–> OWNERSHIP

Consider a situation in which multiple individuals are able to acccess the same ExC cognitive scaffolds in near-real time. With overlapping extended minds, the integrity of the system as prostheses of a single human brain is broken. Whose cognition is it?

Wheeler wonders whether we might reach a point – speaking technologically – where aspects of my cognition can happen in your brain.With reference the relational models of selfhood found in societies already extant outside the West, I suggest that, under such circumstances, the my/your distinction may no longer be relevant …

And from here, we’re back to the hive mind – a model of collective cognition that I am rapidly learning to love. Seperation anxiety or no, at least Twitter isn’t trying to anticipate my actions.