‘Song of the Machine’
On the vanishingly slight possibility that you missed my triumphant/shell-shocked showboating; a nifty short film on optogenetic retinal prostheses, starring my face:
More details and lively behind-the-scenes action over on the Superflux blog.
Built Environment Material/Digital Politics/Economics Science! Speculations Technology [future shock] [key texts]
by Justin
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[key texts / future shock] Cities on the Edge
If you’re reading this, you need to lay your hands on a copy of Transhuman Space: Cities on the Edge. I’ve written previously on my appreciation of the weight and seriousness of the Transhuman Space setting, and this particular supplement, from science writer Waldemar Ingmar and polymath-transhumanist Anders Sandberg, is no exception.
Razor-sharp futurism, sketching the possible shape developments in architecture, infrastructure, and urban culture over the next century, including a plausibly surreal vision of Stockholm, circa 2100.
93 pages. $12.99. Includes the phrases, ‘Beyond advances in life extension, uploading could in principle allow an ageless posthuman monarch’ and ‘The Nuiwhare Heretaunga arcology outside Hastings, New Zealand, was constructed in 2058 as a Maori cultural community.’ High-quality brain food. Recommended.
(That said, I’m slightly concerned to see the best futures work being smuggled into popular culture through RPG supplements — what would Stuart Candy say?)
Design Material/Digital Real Life Science! Technology Writing
by Justin
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Cyborgs, Cascadia, Capitalism, Superstruct, Superflux
It’s been a busy couple of months. In anticipation of a potential September return to London, I’d scheduled a marathon series of pints with interesting people, in the hope of reverse engineering a way to make enough money for rent, food, and a speedy internet connection. It seems to have gone well, and – as a result – I’m feeling a lot less fight-or-flightish about the prospect of a looming adulthood.
Roughly simultaneously, I’ve also been working with post-disciplinary design company Superflux; levering my newfound knowledge of cyborg anthropology to help with a project about (dis)ability and the post/transhuman sensorium. Here’s their enigma-drenched summary:
‘Between that, we are prototyping a series of ideas for our new Lab project titled ‘Song of the Machine‘, a mind-boggling optogenetics/neuroscience project in partnership Dr. Patrick Degenaar, Newcastle University and Dr. Anders Sandberg. This is a long-term project with different design aspects. But for now, our first short piece (to be done in less then 4 weeks!) is commissioned by the Science Gallery, Dublin, for their upcoming exhibition HUMAN+ The Future of our Species. Super exciting!’
It is, at that; and includes a trip to Ireland in mid-April – the perfect opportunity to collect some more material for a personal project on collapsonomics and European electoral politics.
In the meantime, some reading …
By me; hosted elsewhere:
- How should I design a trans-continental leisurely road-trip to maximize “literary potential”? [Quora; the seeds of what I'm tentatively naming 'Operation Cascadia']
- Counterfactual Confessional [Storify]
- Life Map, version 0.1 [Flickr]
By other people:
- “It’s not a war, it’s a rescue mission” [m1k3y, grinding.be]
- Nuclear Counterinsurgency [Nick Mirzoeff, For the Right to Look]
- How Social Movements Happen (and part two) [Seb Paquet, Emergent Cities]
- Revolution from the Edge [John Hagel, Edge Perspectives]
- On Public Objects: Connected Things And Civic Responsibilities In The Networked City [Adam Greenfield, Cognitive Cities]
- Closing Keynote, IXDA 11 [Bruce Sterling]
- The Future is Here Today, and it’s Superdense [Scott Smith, Changeist]
- New Europe: The life of a German family [Stuart Jefferies, The Guardian]
- On the Very Idea of a Super-Swarm [Dr David Roden, enemyindustry]
Academics Epizoic/Epizootic Material/Digital Science! Speculations Technology
by Justin
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Epizo(ot)ic Media
With DARPA threatening to enlist America’s patriotic dogs in the defense of their homeland, and the IEET looking at the rights of non-human persons, this whole interest-nexus seems pretty close to simmering over (note to self: really need to read Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From).
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
Built Environment Cartesian Minefield Politics/Economics Science! Speculations Technology [future shock]
by Justin
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[future shock] ‘a new body-mind relationship’
From anthropologist Michael Taussig, the following paragraph has been lingering; floating on the surface on my consciousness as cognitive duckweed. Once tangled up in the pond pump, it has proved all-but-impossible to remove.
‘For the question arises as to whether a new body will be formed as that other body we call planet earth heats up? Certainly changes are already happening down to the genetic level with insects and plants. As regards us humans equipped with a body whose thermostat will be reset together with other basic adjustments, might we not come to possess a new body-mind relationship such that our body’s understanding of itself shall change? Even more important in changing the old-fashioned mind-body setup will be the cultural changes — that foreboding sense of cliff-hanging insecurity in a world ever more engaged with security in a climate gone terrorist.’
– Michael Taussig, 2009, What Color is the Sacred?, p. 14
Academics Science! Speculations Technology [reading list]
by Justin
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[reading list] A Biological Turn
Since finishing the MA back in September, I seem to have been slipping sideways into the cultures and ethnography of the biological (loosely defined), as the flip side of Haraway’s cyborg theory. Currently chewing my way through any number of articles on synthetic/marine/astro biology, and multispecies ethnography, I’ve thrown together this – partial – reading list as a way of structuring my research.
‘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 …
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
Academics Cartesian Minefield Material/Digital Science! Technology
by Justin
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How I learned to stop worrying and love the hive mind
Having returned from ‘A Billion Gadget Minds’, a day-long workshop at the Swedenborg Hall, I seem to have spent much of this week thinking about computational/cognitive culture(s). Fellow Goldsmiths alumnus El Fortunio gave the workshop a comprehensive write-up (omitting only the intrusion of samovar-wielding theologians), but there were a couple of talks that had sufficient resonance to garner further unpacking and analysis.
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.
Emotions occupy space
‘For example, emotions, with their palpable mingling of physical turmoil and racing thoughts, have become a hot topic, engaging not only philosophy but also psychology and the neurosciences. The increasingly cross-field use of neurological research, such as the data from functional magnetic resonance imaging, has grounded the idea that (in some sense) emotions occupy space, just like physical objects. More important for my point here, emotions bring about physical alterations that we consciously experience. Insofar as they are the means by which we discover certain value-laden aspects of the world we live in, the agitations they occasion give our bodily responses a capacity for knowledge that is sometimes overlooked.’
– Carolyn Korsmeyer, ‘Ideas of the century: The turn to the body‘, TPM
[key texts] Oshii, Haraway, Cunningham, Gibson
Some video fragments for a Wednesday afternoon; loosely indicative of where my brain is at this precise moment.
1. Clip from Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence – a brilliant film, directed by Mamoru Oshii:
The female forensic specialist is named for Donna Haraway, which segues nicely into the second clip.
2. Video montage (mash-up) inspired by Haraway’s landmark feminist essay, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto‘. Created by YouTube user artlessartist, this includes some really nice footage, particularly that of the different examples of cyborg and robot:
3. Music video for Björk’s ‘All Is Full of Love’ – directed by Chris Cunningham:
Supposedly, Cunningham was the inspiration for an minor character in Pattern Recognition (2003) – the (absent) owner of the flat Gibson’s protagonist is house-sitting:
‘Partially disassembled robots are propped against one wall, two of them, torsos and heads, like elfin, decidedly female crash-test dummies. These are effects units from one of Damien’s videos, and she wonders, given her mood, why she finds them so comforting. Probably because they are genuinely beautiful, she decides. Optimistic expressions of the feminine. No sci-fi kitsch for Damien. Dreamlike things in the dawn halflight, their small breasts gleaming, white plastic shining faint as old marble. Personally fetishistic, though; she knows he’d had them molded from a body cast of his last girlfriend, minus two.’
– William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (2003), p. 5
4. Clip from No Maps for These Territories (2000), with Gibson talking about technology:
Wunderkammern: ‘Please do not touch the walrus’
BoingBoing’s David Pescovitz on Wunderkammern:
CABINETS OF CURIOSITY. Taxidermy. The weird, the grotesque, the freakish. Marginalia. Taxonomies of the unorganisable. Sensawunda. Organised properly, maybe even some kind of mathematical sublime, through the sheer volume of heterogeneous artefacts? The entire world in a single collection.
