Aims

• To look at ways that public data is used for art, activism and development
• To examine some of the claims that hackathons make and the problems they have
• To learn more about how to get data, what it looks like inside and what we can do with it

Hackathons

Art Hack Day Berlin /// + Going Dark + from LEAP on Vimeo.

Hacking -> Hack / Hackathon

Joeli Brearley of Future Everything has produced a contemporary guide to the hack here. It’s fair to say that hacks/hackathons have become popularised in a way that some people cite as a triumph of inclusion, diversity and heterogeneity while others lament the decline of the radical character of some earlier hacks and discussions of hacking (see Wark’s Hacker manifesto here for an example).

‘The time is past due when hackers must come together with all of the producing classes of the world – to liberate productive and inventive resources from the myth of scarcity.’ McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto 4.0

Meanwhile Jaromil (who you may have seen talk at Transmediale) has this to say

‘Hacking is a way out of consumerism: it values local production and empowers people to adapt and appro- priate objects, rather than taking them as finite products. Hackers emphasize on open access to knowledge and shared development of understanding of systems in use, so that they can be repaired and improved rather than disposing them after usage.’ (workshop description found here).

One aspect of this is the increasing institutionalisation of the hack with universities, companies, the government and others organising, defining and hosting hacks.

Some Hack outputs:

Inkvisible

Visualizar ’09

Interactivos ’14

http://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2010/papers/ridge/ridge.html

What they say about themselves

To get some kind of sense of where we are, lets examine some of the descriptions that various hacks offer about themselves. Read the below place the corresponding label on your version of this grid

Visualizar (Medialab Prado, Madrid)

‘We live in the digital era of big data: smart cities, computation and “cloud” services, the Internet of Things… These are concepts that are more and more present in our daily life. The amount of data produced by scientific research grows exponentially, infrastructures and commerce generate traceable information which can also be represented, online social media have turned millions of citizens into information producers.

This data explosion promises a world of efficiency, innovation and personalization. but at the same time it rises critical questions on security and data control, privacy and people’s intimacy, good governance nof infrastructures and access to information.

In this context, both civil society and public administration, the academic environment and the bussiness world have created movements which promote the access to data and its reutilisation in open innovation ideas or citizen science.

But the idea of Big Data also poses new questions: Who generates the data and how? What social benefit -for the common good-can we obtain from its production and analysis? This way we see emerge -against the idea of accumulating vast quantities of data and analyzing and co-relating them at tremendous speed- ideas like slow data or small data, which highlight the potential of small open connected databases and the care of an artisan (in a similar approach to the slow food movement) in the production, analysis and creation of stories with data.

Also, confronted against large commercial services which extract value and monetize big data groups, in many cases generated by the citizens themselves, many voices highlight the idea of the need for rich “data commons” available to everybody. Understanding data infrastructures as commons means incorporating the users as co-producers and co-responsible of their management. The example of Openstreetmap, a large repository of geographic data which has turned into a useful alternative to commercial services, is an inspiration for many other areas in which we need data without limitations of use and ethically produced.

This perspective emphasizes the growing capacity we have for collaboration in an effective way by sharing a connected database ecosystem, whether they are big, small of medium-sized, which can help us analyze andgive support to the specific and local problems which we face.’

Interactivos

(in particular see video from 2:18)

‘Interactivos? is a research and production platform for the creative and educational uses of technology. Its main goal is to expand on the use of electronic and software tools for artists, designers and educators, thus contributing to the development of local communities of cultural producers in this field.

Interactivos? events are a hybrid between a production workshop, a seminar and a showcase. A space for reflection, research, and collaborative work is created, in which proposals selected by an international open call are developed, completed and displayed. The process is open to the public from beginning to end.’

Hack the City

‘Hack the City is about using open data for a better urban and civic experience.It’s a hands-on event to use public data to test and prototype ideas, apps and products that can reveal something different about your city, or help people find out and engage more easily with the events, incidents and decisions that affects them. There’ll be a room full of smart folk to collaborate on ideas with and plenty of food to keep you going, whether you want to prototype a data-driven startup concept, knock together an urban or civic hack or simply experiment with the data.’

Future Makers

‘Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums has teamed up with FutureEverything to deliver an exciting new programme of creative technology workshops at museums and galleries across Tyneside. The Future Makers programme is a series of exciting events that will enable children – and adults – to use new technologies for design and making. From Minecraft sessions at Arbeia Roman Fort to a coders’ ‘hackathon’ at Stephenson Railway Museum, Future Makers seeks to inspire a new breed of creatives whilst challenging preconceptions of what museums and their collections mean in the digital age.’

Culture Shift
see video at 3:00 ish!

‘One of the key elements of FutureEverything’s work is to apply bespoke design methodologies and practices to cross sector creativity, interfacing with science, technology and research, i.e the grey areas in between. We believe the fringes are where innovation happens, and that the UK’s creative sector is extremely well placed to play a leading role going forward in the modern, digital economy.’

Inhabiting the Hack including Rewriting the Hack

‘Rewriting the Hack (RTH) is a Women Only Hackathon exploring the theme, Industrial and Post Industrial North East. The two day event will; examine the Hackathon format as a site for producing collaborative, interdisciplinary art strategies and explore issues surrounding diversity an increasingly popular model of creative production.

Participants will gather to access and create with archival materials relating to the NE regions industrial heritage and current, open data sets, which represent our post industrial present. Challenging perceptions that Hackaton events as well as histories of our industrial past and our scientific and technological present are male dominated.’

HackMIT
(scroll to sponsors!)

‘HackMIT is MIT’s largest hackathon. Over a 24-hour period in early fall, 1,000 hackers from around the world gather on MIT’s campus to experiment and innovate on software and hardware projects. This is your weekend to dust off old ideas or try something completely new. Imagine the craziest projects possible, and work on the hack of your dreams!’

Working with Data

In the practical part of this session we’re going to work with the Twitter API using Python and a library called Tweepy. We’re going to build on a basic example available on the github source repo for Tweepy here.

Pre task

Before the class there are a few things you need to do.

• First, if you don’t have a Twitter account make one. (let me know if you object to this well before the class and we’ll work around it).
• Create an application on Twitter in order to generate your authentication credentials (This has 4 parts, consumer key and secret; access token and secret).
• Copy the basic example here, save it as ‘twitter_stream_example.py’ and run it either from the Terminal (using the command ‘python twitter_stream_example.py’ ) or using the IDLE editor that comes with Python. You should see a bunch of raw tweet data stream in the terminal.

If you can’t get even a single little bit of the above working you need to come and see me as soon as possible – I don’t want to spend the whole class time fixing people’s Python install! I want to hack!

And also

Please read Wark’s Hacker manifesto here.

 

Aims

• To thinking about what makes interaction successful or otherwise
• To develop a critical position towards interaction as a cultural entity
• To familiarise ourselves with some tools, techniques and considerations for building interactives

Overview

This session is not intended to teach you how to make good interaction (though it will certainly help). Instead I want to provide something of an overview of some different approaches to interaction from the field of Interaction Design itself, HCI, software studies and STS. We’ll look at the following:

• Affordance (and affordance ecologies)
• Fictionality and Prototyping
• Embodiment
• Public Interaction

Perhaps the most important point I want to make today is that interaction involves our bodies, and the way that this is framed is vastly important for the way that we encounter the world and the way that that is imagined in the future.

Affordance

‘Affordances are properties of the world that are compatible with and relevant for people’s interactions. When affordances are perceptible, they offer a direct link between perception and action; hidden and false affordances lead to mistakes. […] The notion of affordances is in many ways the epitome of the ecological approach, encapsulating ideas about ecological physics, perceptual information, and the links between perception and action. In this account, affordances are the fundamental objects of perception. People perceive the environment directly in terms of its potentials for action, without significant intermediate stages involving memory or inferences. For instance, we perceive stairways in terms of their “climbability,” a measurable property of the relationship between people and stairs.’  Gaver, W. W. (1991). Technology affordances. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems Reaching through technology – CHI ’91 (pp. 79–84). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. http://doi.org/10.1145/108844.108856

Gaver (and others) make a distinction between affordance proper and ‘perceived affordance’. An affordance is a relational property of the world. A perceived affordance is just what it sounds like – the sensory + cognitive combination in an animal that allows it to act on an affordance. He also notes how artefacts may cluster so that the affordance of one item supports another.

‘nested affordances describe affordances that are grouped in space. For instance, a handle alone only appears to afford pulling. A door alone may suggest an affordance for manipulation due to its partial separation from the wall, but not what sort of manipulation will be effective. Only by seeing the affordance of pulling the handle as nested within an affordance of pulling the door can opening the door be a perceptible affordance.’ Gaver, W. W. (1991). Technology affordances. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems Reaching through technology – CHI ’91 (pp. 79–84). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. http://doi.org/10.1145/108844.108856

Fictionality and Prototyping

The discussion above is very much centred in HCI/Interaction Design literature and framed by references to areas like cognitive psychology. It’s very much involved with the interplay between the real world and technological simulations of it (think of onscreen buttons mimicking ‘real’ buttons). IT’s all the more interesting then that recently in Interaction Design questions around the value of fiction and speculation for proposing, developing or presenting prototypes have emerged. This discussion could become very broad indeed but lets examine a couple of example prototype interactions.

Propositional Prototypes

More from MIT Tangible Media Group

Kinetic Blocks is a prototype of a new kind of tangible interaction. One of the things that’s interesting (and problematic) about this kind of interaction is that it is so ‘pure’. It is a product of a bunch of researchers sitting around and saying ‘wouldn’t it be neat if…’ Applications come afterwards – effectively post interaction design. I tend to think of this kind of interaction design prototypes as ‘propositional’. They propose a kind of interaction with the expectation that something/someone will come along and partake in the conversation.

You can find a fascinating historical critique of the MIT Media Lab (which is distinct from the Tangible Media Group) here.

‘ …this particular brand of humanism has always been tied to an imaginary future, it was a particular kind of inhuman humanism that began in the Architecture Machine Group and went on to flourish in the Media Lab. This philosoophy constantly invokes an imagined future human who never really comes into existence, partly because the future is ever-receding, but also because this imagined future human is only ever a privileged, highly individualized, boundary-policing, disembodied, white, western, male human.’  Lori Emerson, 2016

Diegetic Prototypes

A stage further from this is the so-called ‘diegetic prototype’. The most famous example being the ‘Minority Report’ gestural interface. Diegetic prototypes are embedded in the ‘diegesis’, the fictional context of a film. Some commenters have noted that this is a convenient backdoor to getting your prototype / proposition accepted as normal, natural maybe even inevitable.

‘

 

‘If scholarship in the history and sociology of technology has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that technological development is not inevitable, pre-destined or linear. Any number of obstacles can impede or alter the development of a potential technology including a lack of funding, public apathy over the need for the technology, public concerns about potential applications, or a fundamental belief that the technology will not work (Williams & Edge, 1996). For scientists and engineers, the best way to jump-start technical development is to produce a working physical pro- totype. Working physical prototypes, however, are time consuming, expen- sive and require initial funds. […] technological advocates who construct diegetic prototypes have a vested interest in conveying to audiences that these fictional technologies can and should exist in the real world. In essence, they are creating ‘pre-product placements’ for technologies that do not yet exist.’ Kirby, D. (2009). The Future is Now: Diegetic Prototypes and the Role of Popular Films in Generating Real-world Technological Development. Social Studies of Science, 40(1), 41–70. http://doi.org/10.1177/0306312709338325 p6

A concrete example of this is Underkoffler and the his ‘g-speak’ (seriously) interface. The film apparently allowed him to sell it on to the military so in that sense I suppose we should be glad it’s so ridiculous.

‘These approaches [from potential funders] led to the funds he needed to start the company Oblong Industries and to turn his diegetic prototype into a physical prototype. This real world prototype in turn led to a development contract with defence giant Raytheon to produce gestural interface technology for the US military.7 From Underkoffler’s perspective, his work as science consultant on Minority Report was not simply a minor component in this story; his well-worked out diegetic prototype was the crucial element in the development process.’ Kirby, D. (2009). The Future is Now: Diegetic Prototypes and the Role of Popular Films in Generating Real-world Technological Development. Social Studies of Science, 40(1), 41–70. http://doi.org/10.1177/0306312709338325 p11

The reason that diegetic prototyping as well as Design Fictions are so interesting in the context of Interaction Design is that they get a “get out of jail free” card for issues of embodiment.

Embodiment

Terrible interaction (such as the minority report interface) treats the body as mechanical. Not as a body, but as an animated corpse. It ignores affordance and the situated character of embodied interaction. To

demonstrate this there are always a couple of great (by which I mean terrible) kinect examples. As you watch ask yourself

1. Whose body language is this? What culture (political, social, ethnic, professional) does it come from
2. Who is the audience? Who is NOT the audience?

The V Motion Project from Assembly on Vimeo.

Live Looping with Ableton and Xbox Kinect from Chris Vik on Vimeo.

 

The Gestural Excess

contrast this:

with this

And to really bring it home lets play ‘KINECT PONG‘.  As we do so, let’s think about the ‘gestural excess’.

‘the style produced through gestural excess is a part of the social and embodied experience of digital game play, which exists in relation to — but is not indexed, measured or evaluated by — gaming technologies.’ Apperley, T. H. (2013). The body of the gamer: game art and gestural excess. Digital Creativity, 24(2), 145–156. http://doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2013.808967 p152

See also:
Freeman, D., Hilliges, O., Sellen, A., O’Hara, K., Izadi, S., & Wood, K. (2012). The role of physical controllers in motion video gaming. In Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference on – DIS ’12 (p. 701). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. http://doi.org/10.1145/2317956.2318063
Simon, Bart, Wii are Out of Control: Bodies, Game Screens and the Production of Gestural Excess (March 5, 2009). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1354043 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1354043

Public Interaction

Terrible interaction has no environmental awareness. Reeves et al note the many fine nuances involved in public interaction (particularly in explicitly public scenarios like interactive art).

‘Our taxonomy uncovers four broad design strategies: ‘secretive,’ where manipulations and effects are largely hidden; ‘expressive,’ where they tend to be revealed enabling the spectator to fully appreciate the performer’s interaction; ‘magical,’ where effects are revealed but the manipulations that caused them are hidden; and finally ‘suspenseful,’ where manipulations are apparent but effects are only revealed as the spectator takes their turn.’ Reeves, S., Benford, S., & Malley, C. O. (2005). Designing the Spectator Experience. In Proc. CHI 2005 (pp. 741–750). Portland, Oregon: ACM Press.

One of the things that the gestural excess teaches us is that gaming cultures have an aesthetic and social character which exists effectively around the game without being recognised by it. It’s kind of a paratextual element to the game(s).

Experimenting with Interactivity

Download the live face detection example here (you’ll need to install both processing video and OpenCV using Tools->add Tool and choosing the libraries tab).

We’re going to use this example to think about what makes a good or and interaction. One of the really tricky things about computer vision is getting the lighting setup right. So lets experiment.

factors to try are:

• camera resolution
• framerate
• camera positioning
• lighting -experiment with contrast, direction, intensity, diffusion

Then some straightforward ideas to try are:

• make something happen when faces are detected (e.g. add a background)
• work with the face pixels themselves
• link some action or level of activity to the number of faces detected or their proximity

Terrible interactivity

As you’re doing the above – some of the things to think about (and be prepared to talk about later) are:

• what does face detection afford?
• what is the difference between doing this activity by yourself or in a group?
• what are the people watching doing?
• where are participants looking?
• what do the participants think they’re doing?
• how do the participants feel about what they’re doing
• how are participants’ bodies used?
• what is the fiction being proposed?

 

Pretask

Read Kirby, D. ‘The Future is Now. Diegetic Prototypes and the Role of Popular Films in Generating Real-world Technological Development’

Download and install the OpenCV library for processing (go to tools-> add tool -> Libraries and search for OpenCV). Look through the examples and have a play seeing if you can adapt them.

Aims:

• To look at some tools and technologies for drawing, animating and making in 3D
• To learn about how computers ‘see’ 3D space
• To think about the politics of making artefacts with computers

Tools and Technologies

We are taking on (or possibly conflating) a lot in one session here. We might break down some of the tools to include:

• Generative 3D (graphics and modelling). Software includes; Processing, Grasshopper/Rhino, Openframeworks, Cinder
• Building software for CNC (computer numerical control) such as; Solidworks, Sketchup,
• 3D animation/modelling/gaming e.g. Maya, 3D Studio Max, Cinema 4D, Unity

Despite this (arguable) conflation, there are a lot of things we can think about in common between (some of) them such as:

• use of coordinate space x,y,z
• terminology and concepts including; textures, normals, uv mapping, vertices, edges, faces
• OPENGL (and DirectX); matrix transformation, graphics buffers, renders, lighting, cameras

Seeing 3D space

In high performance applications 3D graphics are processed on the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) rather than the CPU (Central Processing Unit). The GPU has a frame buffer(s) – a chunk of memory for storing pixel data and a processor setup that’s good for doing a lot of things in parallel (like transforming matrix data).

The matrix

Drawing things in 3D is complicated. A lot of the more difficult things are wrapped up for us in environments like Processing or Openframeworks but sometimes it helps to have an idea what’s going on underneath. To take an example of this let’s have a look at ‘vertex winding’ (see the openframeworks docs for more).

 

Another example is in so-called ‘matrix transformations’.

There’s an excellent introduction into matrix translations here. If you like that kind of thing, you can also find the maths here.

Mimesis

“a realist guarantee for the unreal”

The industry has expended huge amounts of time and money trying to mimic the way objects behave in real life or in early art forms (such as Renaissance painting). For instance see this article about cameras, this one about lights and this about physics (specifically it’s about Box2D an ‘engine’ for recreating collisions, gravity etc behind the hit game ‘Angry Birds’).

The ‘Maker Movement’

So far we’ve mostly discussed 3D on screens but of course the development of 3D modelling tools is connected to a hugely important phenomenon – that of the modern 3D prototyping ‘fab’ lab and more broadly the ‘Maker Movement’.

Makers’ Bill of Rights http://cdn.makezine.com/make/MAKERS_RIGHTS.pdf

Politics and Prosumerism

One perspective on the Maker Movement is that is a manifestation of political action in the form of prosumerism. It is a reaction to the blandness and homogeneity of industrial capitalism. If we can modify, hack and create for ourselves, this is ostensibly a form of political protest. Many commenters point out though that this aspect of maker culture has been effectively co-opted by industry – in particular O’Reilly, Maker Faire and Make magazine.

‘What is called ‘making’ in North America and Europe is. frankly, a luxurious pastime of wealthy people who rightly recognise that their lives are less full because they are alienated from material culture, almost all of which is products produced by corporate interests. Sadly, rather than address the problem. makers develop a hobby that solves the symptom for them, but if anything slightly strengthens the disease.’ Chris Csikszentmihalyi, 16 Reflective Bits about the Maker Movement.

‘Socially engaged making, of necessity. is engaged in a dialectic with its alternatives: commercial and corporate mass production on the one hand, and craft on the other Even when making is about self-expression. practitioners choose this form because they are attracted to the technological product as a genre. […] Making is always a political act. even if the denotative utility of the thing made is not political.’ Chris Csikszentmihalyi, 16 Reflective Bits about the Maker Movement.

Other Material Cultures

The point about material culture though is an interesting one, for artists specifically. For some the connection between non-linear computer technologies and the capacity to create things in the physical world is a way of re-evaluating craft practice. It’s also worth noting that the intersection of traditional crafts (such as knitting) and contemporary technologies (like arduino) has proved an in-point for people who don’t necessarily identify with common tropes of computing aesthetics – e.g. chip tunes, glitch, computer vision generated imagery, projection mapping etc.

Image Varvara and Mar http://www.varvarag.info/circular-knitic/

…and ‘Other’ Communities

As I hinted above, one kind of value, perhaps, for the Maker Movement (or better movements) is in fostering particular kinds of community, often but not always around a particular maker space or project. For instance Kaiton Williams on Jamaican DIY describes how his father’s propensity to tinker inflected the son’s future engagement with the material world. A perceived value for the made outputs of many communities is in expressing a vision for the material world which is not produced by a narrow band of society and is consequently reflective of other kinds of value and priority. None of this is necessarily contingent on access to CNC-type tools but there is a sense in which assuming contemporary forms of production proposes a different kind of ‘answer’ to the dominance of mass produced products. A nice example to finish on is here. In this project, Kuznetsov and her co-authors build arduino based soil quality sensors with members of a community garden. Cheap and accurate commercial sensors are available but the authors describe the value of the building process in learning about the specifics of the local soil chemistry, interacting with their environment and perceiving time differently.

Further Reading

A truly excellent resource for reading about Critical Making can be found here.

Pre Task

Read the article here on matrix translations and code the accompanying examples.

Read Geert Lovink and Michael Dieter on Making in the Digital Age here. Come prepared to explain one of the theses and explain why you agree or disagree.

And also look at processing examples in the following sections:

Basics->camera
Basics->lights
Topics->textures

Aims

• To experience and discuss aspects of the history of communications technology
• To think about what we mean by communication
• To understand (a little) more about how networks work

Communicating Information vs How to do Things with Words (a contrast)

Lets consider the history of optical communication 

Beacons and Smoke Signals

Precursors to The Chappe Optical Telegraph

 

 

How wonderful it was that these various signs should be made to cleave the air with such precision as to convey to the distance of three hundred leagues the ideas and wishes of a man sitting at a table at one end of the line to another man similarly placed at the opposite extremity, and all this affected by a simple act of volition. Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas

Early Experiments of the Chappe Brothers

Lets recreate one of these experiments using this online clock, and a small bell.

 

Claude (Elwood!) Shannon

Information Theory. Signal vs Noise. The abstraction that Shannon brought to the notion of information was exactly that which made it computable. His work with boolean logic and encryption was made possible by a particular (and instrumental) vision of information. It is not Shannon’s fault that the specialised use of the word ‘communication’ described in his work has unproblematically expanded out of its home in (the foundations) of computer science.

So far we’ve talked about the history of optical ‘communication’. To what degree do you think we are actually talking about ‘communication’. To what degree are talking about transmission / reception? What is/could be the difference?

 

Performativity and doing things with words (and media)

If we wish to think seriously about the media of communication, particularly in the age of computational media we need to think about what we mean when we say ‘communication’.

‘Performative utterances:
a. do not ‘describe’ or ‘report’ or constate anything at all, are not ‘true or false’
b. the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action, which again would not normally be described as ‘just’ saying something.’(adapted from) 1962 Austin, John L. “How to Do Things with Words.” Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. p6

 

‘…if gender is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous, then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief. If the ground of gender identity is the stylised repetition of acts through time, and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking of subversive repetition of that style.’ Butler, Judith. “Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist theory.” Theatre journal 40.4 (1988): 519-531. p520

Task: Re-read the quote above –
1. what are examples of the way that gender is constituted and re-consituted through speech acts?
2. what does Butler mean when she says that ‘gender is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous’?
3. what kind of acts might produce the possibility of a different sort of repeating?

If language is performative may not other forms of communication be so? In answer, we might also look to some recent DH work

‘In a model of materiality as fundamentally performative, we can show how forensic, evidentiary materiality and formal organization serve as a provocation for the creation of a reading as a constitutive interpretative act. The specific structures and forms, substrates and organizational features, are probability conditions for production of an interpretation. Knowledge creates the objects of its discourses, it does not “discover” them. Constructivist epistemology shifts our attention from knowledge to knowing, from objects that are observer-independent to the recognition of observer-dependent process, or events.’ Drucker, J. “Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface”, Digital Humanities Quarterly 7.1, 2013. (emphasis added)

 

Doing Communication

Optional Pre-task:

Download the Processing library ‘OscP5‘. Follow the installation instructions and have a play with the examples.

For extra brownie points you may want to have a look at this. An overview of how the internet is structure in terms of its backbone, ISP etc.

If you have an android mobile phone, download this free app or for iPhone this one. We are going to play with it in class.

All sketches for today’s class are here 3.

Aims:

In this session we will:

• Examine some ways that different societies at different periods in history have described the role, function or nature of the public
• Think about some of our preconceptions about what does and does not constitute a public
• Look at some contemporary theories about publics have been influential in research practice
• Reflect on the above as it relates to our role of putting creative work in to the world

Key vocabulary

All the definitions below are from the OED (which btw you have full access to as an ncl student here) unless otherwise stated.

Dialectics, ‘Logic, reasoning; critical investigation of truth through reasoned argument, often spec. by means of dialogue or discussion.’

Sophistry, ‘Specious but fallacious reasoning; employment of arguments which are intentionally deceptive.’

Publicity, ‘The quality of being public; the condition or fact of being open to public observation or knowledge’

The Public Sphere. There are many definitions but broadly we mean a discursive space where political concerns are developed. Habermas used the term ‘Öffentlichkeit’

Conjoint action, ‘..the agency behind the emergence of a public.’ Bennett, Jane. Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press, 2009. p100. The forces or factors that make people and things come and act together (my addition)

Agency and actants/actors, Agency is the capacity of someone, something or some other phenomenon to effect change. Actors/actants are those who have agency (my notes)

Interessement, In Actor Network Theory, Interessement is the process by which actors become enrolled in a network. (my notes)

 

Philosophy of the public in 8 images

Classical Publics and later

Plato and the role of dialectic in articulating and creating public knowledge, justice, politics and philosophy.

The Body Politic

Hobbes in Leviathan (first published 1651) dismisses the use of such arguments (and strategies, techniques etc derived from Socrates) as sophistry. Coming from experience of the civil war Hobbes wanted public life to be founded in certainties which he rooted in the monarchy. Influenced by Galileo he attempted to apply deductive reasoning to a political philosophy. The role of a governing body with whom we form part of a social contract is to decide upon first principles from which we can derive everything else. Those include the fact that we are cast into a material world of chaos, violence and fear and it is the task of humans to achieve peace through social contact. He establishes first principles of mind and matter and deductively infers from them what a just and proper society should be. Because humans’ experience of nature varies from person to person an objective account fo nature is impossible. In his words, there is no “right Reason constituted by Nature,” His response is to setup an arbiter of truth in response.

 

The Public Sphere

It is no exaggeration to say that much of what we take for granted as to the basis of our rights and participation in publics derives from Jürgen Habermas’ work on the public sphere. Habermas was influenced by Kant, Hegel and the Frankfurt school (marxist literary theory). Interestingly what Habermas shared with the Frankfurt school (and Adorno in particular) was the idea that the masses had become corrupted and were no longer capable of revolutionary thought or action. What’s particular to Habermas is his framing of that corruption as an impoverishment of the public sphere.

In ‘The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere’ Habermas makes a distinction between early forms of publicity (p7) in feudal societies (for instance through courtly displays, etiquette and practices) and those which arose post-enlightenment. In feudal societies on the King or Queen was a public person, and indeed the public and private realms were not separated.

‘The bourgeois is distinguished from the courtly mentality by the fact that in the bourgeois home even the ballroom is still homey, whereas in the palace even the living quarters are still festive. And actually, beginning with Versailles, the royal bedroom develops into the palace’s second center. If one finds here the bed set up like a stage, placed on a platform, a throne for lying down, separated by a barrier from the area for the spectator, this is so because in fact this room is the scene of the daily ceremonies of lever and voucher, where what is most intimate is raised to public importance.’ Habermas, J. (1991 [1962]). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. (T. (trans) Burger, Ed.). Cambridge MA: MIT Press. p10

Meanwhile with the rise of commercialism and the mercantile class forums arose in which particular kinds of public discourse came to be.

‘The “town” was the life center of civil society not only economically; in cultural-political contrast to the court, it designated especially an early public sphere in the world of letters whose institutions were the coffee houses, the salons, and the Tisclgesellschaften (table societies). The heirs of the humanistic- aristocratic society, in their encounter with the bourgeois intellectuals (through sociable discussions that quickly developed into public criticism), built a bridge between the remains of a collapsing form of publicity (the courtly one) and the precursor of a new one: the bourgeois public sphere…’ ibid p30

From the end of the 17th and through the 18th Centuries, the rise of coffee houses or public salons centralised the public sphere in towns (rather than palaces) and brought about a special place for the artist and writer in public life. Here the middle classes could be exposed to new literary, philosophical or artistic ideas. Aristocrats, bourgeois and intellectuals would meet if not on the same terms than at least in the same places. For our purposes it would be as if Slavoj Zizek, Kate Middleton and Tim Martin (owner of the Weatherspoon pub chain) would regularly hangout in our local branch of Costa.

The final stage for Habermas (and here is where his work has the strongest connections to Adorno) is in what he sees as an impoverishment of the public sphere through the press and later, mass media. Habermas contends that the function of the press shifted from being a transmitter of public opinion (which was created elsewhere by intellectuals) to being a creator of it. The influence of money, through advertising, shifted the role of wealth holders (particularly property owners) to being the dominant directors of public opinion. Habermas concludes by saying that the manipulation of the public through a kind of uncommitted friendly engagement comes to be mimicked by the state, precluding the possibility for real political action.

‘As soon as the press developed from a business in pure news reporting to one involving ideologies and viewpoints, however, and the com- piling of items of information encountered the competition of literary journalism, a new element-political in the broader sense-was joined to the economic one. Biicher captures the trend succinctly: “From mere institutions for the publication of news, the papers became also carriers and leaders of public opinion, and instruments in the arsenal of party politics. For the internal organization of the newspaper enterprise this had the consequence that a new function was inserted between the gathering and the publication of news: the editorial function. For the newspaper’s publisher, however, this meant that he changed from being a merchant of news to being a dealer in public opinion.”‘ ibid p182

Pragmatist Publics

See this discussed by Bruno Latour 96-MTP-DING
.

Non-Human Publics

Jane Bennett

Here we will look at some more contemporary theorisations of publicity.

Jane Bennett’s work Vibrant Matter (2009) fits, broadly, into a canon of contemporary scholarship that emphasises a ‘flatter’ ontological perspective on agency in the world. Her work is of particular interest to us here though because of her re-application of ideas from John Dewey’s work which she extends significantly to reconsider publics which might include non-human actors in the form of, for instance, animal and plant life, infrastructure, machines and software or other factors. Her main contribution in this space is to observe that Dewey’s idea of ‘conjoint action’ is not dependent on acts of independent will, as perpetrated by solely humans.

What is conjoint action?

making things public exhibition – parliament of things

Michel Callon and Bruno Latour

‘Interessement is the group of actions by which an entity (here the three researchers) attempts to impose and stabilize the other actors it defines through its problematization. Different devices are used to implement these actions. Why talk of interessement? The etymology of this word justifies its choice. To be interested is to be in between (inter-esse), to be interposed. But between what? Let us return to the three researchers. During their problematization they join forces with the scallops the fishermen, and their colleagues in order to attain a certain goal. In so doing they carefully define the identity, the goals or the inclinations of their allies. But these allies are tentatively implicated in the problematizations of the actors. Their identities are consequently defined in other competitive ways. It is in this sense that one should understand interessement.’ Callon, Michel. “Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay.” The Sociological Review 32.1_suppl (1984): 196-233. pp62-63

 Publics in Practice

In Critical Heritage (e.g. Sharon MacDonald and Rodney Harrison)

‘What would it mean for us to consider the futures which are arranged or assembled across a series of different fields of practice—in the decision making processes involved in nuclear waste disposal, in the processes of conserving endangered languages, in global seed banks, in the care and management of local parks, and in household practices of curating heirlooms collectively? How could this new comparative perspective, which considers not only formal heritage prac- tices but also a range of alternative forms of caring for the future, help us remap the field of heritage?’ Rodney Harrison (2015) Beyond “Natural” and “Cultural” Heritage: Toward an Ontological Politics of Heritage in the Age of Anthropocene, Heritage & Society, 8:1, 24-42, DOI: 10.1179/2159032X15Z.00000000036 p35

‘The aim of the collaborative research program Assembling Alternative Futures for Heritage is to understand the practices by which futures are assembled in a range of different domains, and to consider how those practices, and the forms of value that they produce, might be creatively redeployed to produce innovation within new con- texts. Accordingly, this research program will explore the processes and material and discursive practices by which heritage is “assembled” within a broad range of domains, which have typically not been considering comparatively, to consider the ways in which the forms of value and alternative practices and processes of future-making involved in each might inform one another.’ ibid p36

In Design (Infrastructuring)

SessionPlan

Session 1: Audio playback in PureData

Session 2: Granular Synth, Addictive Synth, Scrubber with Control from Teensy and Sequences session2

Notes from todays session

MRES_lowRes

and the sound file from our in class performance

Slides from Gabi Arrigoni’s introductory lecture on public art

Public Art for CAP