The objects they create are speculative in the sense that they are produced to raise questions and open a conversation about their implications. Auger said they tried to create objects that look “real” even if they are only prototypes, so that people can desire them and react to them saying “I want it” or “I don’t want it”. He also highlighted (very rightly) that many technology firms kept developing technology for technology sake, excited by the development of new features without thinking of their use, nor their implications in how they shape our communicative practices and our interactions. He also argued that many companies just kept doing incremental changes to the technology - such as a mobile phone, and he suggested that their work aims to suggest radical changes and new ways of thinking.

Yet someone in the audience raised the question of “how do you know you’ve been successful”. I do not think Auger (who in his talk often mentioned that their aim in their projects was to create a meaningful discussion), provided an answer to that question. My take on it is that this important question involves in fact two sets of questions.

First, who is your audience? Is it the “public”? Yet as Auger noted, when you “give” the object to the public, it gets “out of control” and it’s hard to monitor and assess the impact. More profundly, I’m wondering whether the fact that people reacted to the object by saying  “I want it” or “I don’t want it” is enough to say that the object has created a discussion and thus has become a speculative and critical object. The second audience is the technology people - working in technology companies or in research labs like the Media Lab. My intuition is that there a real discussion could be started but Auger did not mention examples of such a discussion. The last audience might be academics - designers as well as social scientists.

The second question is what is the “aim” of the project: is it to do research in the sense that you want to “prove” something, “show” an effect or analyze the reactions of various audiences to the object? Auger used some vocabulary such as validation that might make you think that it’s what he had in mind. However, as highlighted by some participants’ comments, this is difficult to achieve. The best “model” would not be a deductive model seeking validation, but more of an inductive model which would observe the different reactions and analyze the interpretations. Another possibility would be to get closer to the art perspective and see the object as open to interpretations which would not necessarily look for “answers” or validations. (I know when Aileen reads this point she will come and challenge me and clarify the status of such an object from the art perspective… and in fact, I’m hoping she will. :-)…).

This talk led me to think about the nature of building_space_with_words and its relationship to research, which is one we have discussed on this blog since the beginning of the project. We’ve been discussing it again lately with Aileen as we are working on a paper for an audience of organizational scholars. building_space_with_words is a speculative object: it originally was a speculative object for Aileen and I and then it became another type of object as the installation was designed as an attempt to raise awareness and questions from the public. Recently as I reflected on how it could be connected to the organizational literature, I became aware that it became a speculative and critical object questioning the meaning and use of the metaphor of virtual space in organizational studies.

An interesting talk which raised many important questions. A podcast of it can be seen at:  http://www.materialbeliefs.com/stream/dss3.php

The philosopher, Malpas in his book Place and Experience (1999) argues that there is an intimate connection between person and place, and that because were embodied and situated creatures, “all our encounters with persons and things - [are] always “taking place” in place (Malpas, 1999, p. 15) - that we can engage with the world and think about it.

Yet it is noteworthy that he seems to assume that place refers to a single location, place. He does not discuss discuss nomadism. This led me to ask the question: what happens to the self when it’s not one location but multiple locations? It might not be that different than if you stay in one place and love your land like the Australian aborigines who have a conception of human life as inextrically linked with the land (Malpas, 1999, p. 2-3) and it might be that the difference is that it becomes more explicit, that moving, leaving places and discovering others is raising awareness about our relatinship to places and how they color and shape our experiences. Or it might be in fact that with no fixed locale, identity becomes fluid. I have no answer but this is an important question to explore as  175 millions of people live in a more or less voluntary exile, about 10 millions more each year and as place matters and in a non-contingent way, for human beings either nomad or sedentary people.

For the next month, it will repeat every Monday & Wednesday at 2pm & 10pm.

It’s also on their website:

http://www.bricartsmedia.org/community-media/brooklyn-independent-television/caught-in-the-act

Carr also cites a very interesting example of how Nietsche’s style changed when he started using a typewriter instead of a pen:

“Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.””

“iPhones and mobile devices are undoubtedly transforming the way we navigate the city. Apps like Google Maps and Urbanspoon put an unprecedented amount of information about the city at one’s fingertips. Most of these programs, however, are purely functional in purpose: they seek to clarify the city, to demystify and make it more legible. In contrast, we are interested in how mobile media can deepen and intensify urban experience, perhaps even introducing new pleasures and mysteries of the metropolitan condition. We are inspired by the work of artists and urbanists like Janet Cardiff and the Situationists, who strived to make ordinary landscapes appear unfamiliar and strange again. How might mobile media be used to reveal dimensions of the city veiled from everyday experience – to manufacture an augmented reality? ”

Playing with the affordances of the mobile media: using our Iphone to navigate the city, but not only a tool for “simplifying”, making the city manageable, but also for complexifying, adding imaginary layers and opening up questions for us.

I also like the idea of using this application as a “probe” for users and for architects and planners to reflect on the city.

I’m currently not in NY but I’ll try when I’m back. If you’re in NY, I’ll be curious to know about your experience.

–

The Objects of Design and Social Science
Common to both design and (parts of) the social sciences is a shared
pre-occupation with objects. On the one hand, design is concerned with
making and interpreting objects including the finished article (e.g.
consumer products), ‘experimental’ design aids (e.g. prototypes), and
projective representations (e.g. scenarios). Recently, design has also
begun to re-engage with more speculative objects whose ambiguous
functionality contributes to the exploration of the social and the
material, the political and the aesthetic. On the other hand the
social sciences also work with objects, including categorical objects
such as race, gender, and health, empirical objects ranging from the
mundane to the exotic, and conceptual objects such as the notions
social scientists use to understand and theorize the social. Here, the
sociology of science and technology has been especially productive,
introducing notions such as boundary objects (Star & Griesemer, 1989),
epistemic objects (Rheinberger, 1997), immutable mobiles (Latour,
1990), quasi-objects , black boxes (Latour, 1988) to name but a few.
Accordingly, a focus on material, empirical and conceptual objects
brings into sharp relief overlaps and disjuncture between the two
disciplines and a rich space for dialogue.

This seminar series will seek to bring into view and explore existing
objects of both design and social science as well as draw out objects
of novelty for both disciplines. In doing so we will seek to engage
with emerging issues and topics in both disciplines such as the
outputs of speculative and critical design, participation, engagement
and publics as well as addressing notions concerning heterogeneity,
process and event. This series will continue to serve as a platform
for opening up interdisciplinary research futures.

** Please Note: all seminars run from 4:00pm - 6:00pm and are hosted
by the Interaction Research Studio, 6th Floor, Ben Pimlott Building,
Goldsmiths, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW.

Autumn Term 2009
Seminar 1 | Wednesday October 14th
Introducing the Objects of Design and Social Science
With: Bill Gaver, Tobie Kerridge, Mike Michael & Alex Wilkie, Goldsmiths

Seminar 2 | Wednesday November 4th
Buildings as Things
With:  Albena Yaneva. University of Manchester

Seminar 3 | Wednesday November 18th
Speculative Objects
With: James Auger, Royal College of Art & Jimmy Loizeau, Goldsmiths

Spring Term 2009
Seminar 4 | Wednesday January 27th
Objects and Services
With: Chris Downs

Seminar 5 | Wednesday February 17th
From objects to issues?
With: Noortje Marres, Oxford University

Seminar 6 | Wednesday March 10th
Object fair
With: Bill Gaver, Tobie Kerridge, Mike Michael & Alex Wilkie, Goldsmiths

Organised by the Interaction Research Studio, Department of Design and
the Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process, Department
of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Andrew Blum quoted Anthony Townsend, an urban planner and forecaster at Silicon Valley’s Institute for the Future who talks about “blended urban reality”: “neither cyberspace nor an urban landscape blanketed with blinking television screens, but the regular old city, albeit socially fused with real-time electronic interactions”. It evokes for me the move in organizational studies on the importance of materiality in organizations (despite the increasing number of “virtual” organizations, “virtual” teams and “virtual” communities). It also highlights the complexity and subtlety of the phenomenon, where usual interaction patterns, communicative practices are blurred and redefined - something we started exploring in building_space_with_words.

Townsend makes a surprising argument that as cities grow bigger, and mega-cities multiply, technology make them manageable: “Cities maybe be much bigger, but the social graph is the same” (Townsend quoted by Blum).
Yet Blum rightly reminds us that even if technology is a tool that helps coping with the city’s chaos and scale, it does not mean that physical space should be not taken into account, on the contrary I would argue.

“Density increases the need for thoughtful public space. For the cities of the future to work, the physical and the virtual have to stick together” - Stick together to allow people to develop a sense of place…

Constellations is a network music installation by Atau Tanaka connecting the physical space of a gallery to the imaginary space of the internet through sound and image. Visitors in the gallery navigate an onscreen universe of planets, invoking audio to stream into the gallery. The planetary system is the interface to a library of soundfiles existing on servers throughout the internet. Each planet represents a contribution from a different composer. The sounds coming from the network space resonate in the acoustical space of the gallery, connecting these two universes.

When  Aileen visited us in London, we went together - interested by this attempt to inhabit a material space allowing others to interact with it. I was also curious to see how similar and how different it will be. The concept was the same “a sound installation in which the infrastructure, the physical plant of a building is converted into a giant musical instrument” (David Byrne, 2005) and people were invited to interact. Yet, the feeling was very different. The space in New York was an old factory, the infrastructure was visible. The Round House is a beautiful building, also quite “raw”. However, the “infrastructure” seems less visible and thus it did not feel so much like “playing the building” - “building space with sounds”. Moreover, the round shape of the building made the wandering through the space more difficult.

“This festival liberates workers from the traditional offices spaces and invites them to relocate their work in urban public settings, relying on three sets of tools: lightweight infrastructure, social software and facilitators’ guides that will jumpstart collaborations to inspire creative workers, activate street-life and intensify the use of under-performing public spaces.”

More information at http://www.sentientcity.net/exhibit/?p=53

In this work Brigitte is exploring how text disappears behind its shadows. The text (made of copper) is hanging in the air, a floating panel, projected on a white background. One can’t read the copper words; in fact they don’t even really look like words but the projected shadow does look like, “is” text. It reminded me of these old handwritten letters, with a fading ink. Brigitte told me how she was aiming to explore the ephemeral nature of the text which does not “really” exist, while its shadows seems more “real”. I won’t get into a discussion about the notion of reality (it’ll take us too far, and this has been an on-going discussion for centuries) but I was really intrigued by this approach as in my work with Anca Metiu on writing and correspondences, we’ve been looking at writing as a trace and as an objectifying process. Brigitte’s notion of text (close for me to the work of Blanchot) also reminded me some previous posts on literary texts as creating a space for the reader. (Once again we could have a very long discussion on the notion of text, esp. literary text, but it will take us far away from the issues - already broad - discussed in this blog).

It also made a lot of sense for our work with Aileen as while by projecting text on semi-transparent panels we were aiming to create a “physical” space for people to walk through, Brigitte by projecting a “physical” text made of copper made it disappear in front of its shadow. Yet in both cases, we all worked with materials. Brigitte told me about the tenuous work of writing the text with copper and it reminded me of our work with the wires, fabrics, projectors and ladders…

If you’re in Paris, stop by. Verticale Rouge is at the end of the Church, on the right.

As a follow up to my post on visualization, Tufte has explored ways to “embody”, “materialize” his research work presented in an exhibition, Seeing Around, currently at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum:

“Tufte’s monumental sculptures—including Larkin’s Twig, which stands 32 feet tall, and Rocket Science, which weighs 48,000 lbs—are partly a response to his own well–known books on analytical visual displays of data and information. Two–dimensional space—the flatlands of paper and the computer screen—inherently compresses and makes illusory the reality of the three–dimensional world. In contrast, outdoor sculpture provides endless and complex experiences of space, light, color, and airspace in nature’s full reality of three dimensions. Tufte’s outdoor artworks reside in the land, the trees, and the air. His essay on sculpture, Seeing Around, accompanies the exhibition.” (from the introduction to the exhibition on the website).

Interesting attempt to present research ideas in a different medium, using the language of art…

I am also intrigued by the move from a 2-D space (the flat representation of data on the piece of paper or on the computer screen) to the 3-D space as it was an important element in our work with Aileen: going from the flatness of words printed on paper or read on the screen to the maze created by projected text.

She contrasts data visualization with infographics, defining data visualization as “an interpretation, a different way to look at and think about data that often exposes complex patterns or correlations.

Data visualization is a way to make sense of the ever-increasing stream of information with which we’re bombarded and provides a creative antidote to the “analysis paralysis” that can result from the burden of processing such a large volume of information. “It’s not about clarifying data,” says Koblin. “It’s about contextualizing it.”

She interestingly stress the importance of what she calls the “the importance of creative vision along with the technical mastery of software”, i.e. highlighting the contextualizing or story telling process: “Data visualization isn’t about using all the data available, but about deciding which patterns and elements to focus on, building a narrative, and telling the story of the raw data in a different, compelling way.(…) It’s about the most ancient of social rituals: storytelling. It’s about telling the story locked in the data differently, more engagingly, in a way that draws us in, makes our eyes open a little wider and our jaw drop ever so slightly. And as we process it, it can sometimes change our perspective altogether.”

I really like how she links the current practice of data visualization enabled by new technology and the storytelling practice. It’s all about the (re-)enactment of a sociomaterial practice. I also like this idea of trying to think of data as a material to tell stories in a similar way that Aileen and I thought of using words to build a space.

I just think it would have been nice to have a reference to the work of people like Tufte who has explored the role of “envisioning information” as a contextual and narrative process in his numerous books - one of my favorite being Envisioning Information. Indeed it would be interesting to look at the current work (see the spreadsheet in the BW website) in the light of previous works.

“The diary, which Adams maintained until April 1836, is a rarity among the many he kept, in that the description for each day is no more than one line long. Historians believe he used the descriptions as references to longer entries in other journals.

Jeremy B. Dibbell, an assistant reference librarian at the society, said a graduate student at Simmons College here saw the diary a few months ago in the society’s archives and thought it looked like a Twitter feed, though written in Adams’s meticulous script and bound in leather.

Word spread, and the society decided to tweet the entries. They average 110 to 120 characters, below the 140-character limit imposed by Twitter, and there is nary an LOL or BFF among them.

Like most Twitter feeds, Adams’s will chronicle the substantial, including his arrival in St. Petersburg, and the mundane: the diary makes many references to weather, seasickness and card-playing, for example, on the voyage across the Atlantic.”

Why posting this? because I find it interesting to see how technology affordances were re-enacted with different media and technology. It also reminded me another NY Times article (sent to me by Anca, thanks Anca!) on twitter and the telegram (often limited to 150 characters like twitter).

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/us/06adams.html

I could have taken a pay-on-the-go phone, but thought, “better just to wait, I can survive a few days without a cell phone”. I can, this is confirmed but along the way I also realized how my perception of the city changed. When I go and meet people, I always have this worry that I might be late, or they might and they won’t be able to call me. I could go to a public phone but it is as if the phone booths don’t seem efficient anymore.

I went to this meeting in Hampstead and I got lost and was late. There were no public phones around. I had a few seconds of frustration and then I thought, “I’ll get there when I get there”… I was 20 minutes late and apologized. It was OK but I don’t think the person I was meeting could really picture someone without a cell phone.

What does all this tell us? How connected, technology dependent we are. I guess so. It also shows the materiality of these connections - cell phone, public phones, etc. More deeply I realized that I had this mix feeling of being alone, not being able to talk or text anyone, and a sense of freedom. Text messages are often these tags we send to each other, sharing our perceptions, waving at the other. They create a second layer of space. Yet, once this habit is put on hold, there’s a sense of freedom, even maybe adventure to walk in the city “on your own”. From being “disconnected” I became “unconnected”.

al

I just read an interesting article by Elizabeth Cline titled “Building Without Walls” in SEED Magazine, and I wanted to share it with you since I think it is related to our discussions on objects, spaces, design, art and science. I’ve already read similar discussions on this blog, so maybe this is a good opportunity for a second round of opinions.

Cline argues that “a new breed of architectural objects, inspired by theoretical science, is changing how we think about building and what counts as art.” She does that by referring to “Transitory Objects,” an exhibit at Vienna’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary gallery. The exhibit, according to Cline, goes forward in collapsing the boundaries between architectural objects, conceptual art, and theoretical science. Having that in mind, the architects embrace the impermanence of their work and engage in a process of producing structures that follow scientific laws and principles. As such, they are probably never finished, but continuously adapt to their environment and use.

I particularly like the argument of “letting go of determinist ideas of structural planning - suggesting that a city’s infrastructure should always be adapting.” However, I did not find an emphasis on the users or inhabitants of these structures as their co-producers or co-adapters. Cline repeats at the end of her article the idea of fragmentation and incompleteness in architectural design, and quotes Daniela Zyman (the curator of the exhibit) in saying that “the architect has to decide at which point the algorithm stops.” And the point of decision reflects the moment of maturation of the architect. I think the fluidity and openness of the structure actually invites the users to jointly select the algorithm, and thus, the architect is no longer a lone individual, but part of this ecology.

Going back to AL and Aileen’s installation, the question is what were its ‘walls.’ Beyond the physical walls and panels, my guess is that the biggest walls were those which facilitated predictability of the process. Same applies to this blog. Having said that, do we remove these walls and how? Or are we more interested in building temporary walls as reference points and guidance. I don’t think I’m very squared in my thinking, but its hard for me to hang a picture frame without any walls

Best,

Bojan

Today I went to the Science Museum with my kids as we were wandering in London… and I noticed on the museum map: 1st floor, Listening Post. Could it be? There can’t be many Listening Posts, can it? After doing all the interactive spots on the 3rd floor, I dragged my kids to the 1st floor and after a little bit of search found a sign “science art projects”. At the end of a corridor, there it was!

I really liked the piece although I wish it was not stuck behind a glass fence and that one could stand in front, walk around. People sat at there were seats in the middle of the room. I thought it took away some of the experience. People did not walk around. They just sat and “watched and listened”. I also realized that many people were puzzled. The audience was not right in a sense. People did not come to see art installations and they were not expected it, and they did not know how to interpret it, experience it.

Yet I was still very happy to see this work which in many ways is very close to the themes we explored with Aileen:words,online interactions, sounds. In a way Hansen and Rubin’s work highlights more the cacophony and the random aspect of the web, while we looked at the construction of connections, of relationships.

It was just a nice surprise and it made my day!

al

I like the design - the general space, but also the pictures with the red dots that point to the evocative objects of the person thinking space. It reminds us the materiality of thinking.  It is also interesting to see whether people really have spaces (locations), or if their thinking spaces consist mostly of objects (mobile, that they take with them in different places). I also like the collaborative aspect of it: people can build their own thinking space.

Thanks John!

She wrote “It was on a late Monday night and the streets of Paris were very quiet.” and she tried to capture “the sounds from that night in the cab, including the taxi headlights blinking, an ambulance, 2 really great French songs which I heard for the first time” and a conversation between the taxi driver and her friend.

I thought it was interesting how her perception of the city was linked to her experience of the taxi, her emotions while listening this song… It was even more meaningful to me as the first song, “Ma ligne de chance” is a song I love in one of my favorite movies - Pierrot Le Fou from Godard. It was interesting that she sent me the link which is recording of her “perceptions” to which she added a comment to give us some content and describe the emotions associated with the perceptions (in fact perceptions are in some ways never neutral, aren’t they?) and to me it became an evocative object because I knew the song, the sound of the Paris ambulances (so different than the NY or London ones). I’m just wondering how she would have shared it with us if she had had only words — It’s also interesting that she “needed” the title “Sounds of the city” and the commentary to make this clip meaningful… to me, maybe to her.