Hi,

for those of you in New York, two of our contributors, Bruno Latour and Natalie Jereminjenko are giving talks this week and next week in New York.

- Bruno Latour gives a talk “Globalization: Which Globe? Which Politics?”Thursday, February 5, 2009. Rennert Hall, the Kraft Center, 6:15pmFind out more about the event online here:http://www.heymancenter.org/events.php?id=117

- Tuesday, February 10, 2009, 6:30 – 8:30pm, Natalie Jereminjenko will moderate a discussion on Light Patterns: A Forum on the Design Challenges of Urban Ecology and Biodiversity at Van Alen Institute. More at http://www.vanalen.org/html/02_021009_FlightPatterns.php

If you have any events to share with us - in New York, but not only in New York, please do so.Also if you go to these events, please share your thoughts with us.al

Hi,

Thursday I went to the Van Alen Institute (NY) to attend a workshop for the launch of the OOz project by Natalie Jereminjenko (one of the authors on this blog) http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/ooz/Natalie - who is a scientist, engineer and artist (I hope she’ll share soon her thoughts about the interactions between these different disciplines and about her very interesting projects). The OOz project explores the interactions between human and non-human agents, in this case, animals and ask us to question our mode of interactions with animals, and especially those influenced by the model of the zoo (e.g. animals in cages, “don’t feed the animals”).

The OOz project as well as many other projects by Natalie (such as the Environmental Health Clinic she opened at NYU) are projects that interrogate our interactions with the environment and try to think ways of stopping the mess we made with the climate and the environment.

These are topics dear to my heart, but the OOz project also raises questions related to topics we discussed on BSWW. First of all, I’m sure the concepts of human and non-human agents remind you of our discussion about technology and the notion of non-human agents proposed by Bruno Latour (see the post of November 29). Natalie is also questioning our definition of agency asking to rethink our relationship to animals as a relationship of reciprocity and not of superiority and fear (trying to keep them as far as we can). It’s interesting as Latour also referred animals, and particularly primates, to question the definition of agency. In a 1994 paper, Latour argues that the studies showing how primates develop complex social interactions question our usual definition of social interaction and social structure. He claims that these studies call for a reassessment of the usual distinction between the human agents and the others defined by the ability to enact complex social interactions. In OOz, Natalie introduces two types of non-human agents: animals and robots which look like animals (e.g. goose robots http://www.vestaldesign.com/design/ooz-goose/) with which, through which we can interact with animals. 

At the beginning of her presentation, she showed a small video animation about interactions in a museum. The museum is an institution with quite well-known scripts that, yet, have evolved with the technology. People don’t talk in museums. They go and look at the art silently. At the beginning of the room, there usually is a panel with the curator’s text - her / his discourse about the art work. People go in the room, read the panel and then go and look. Often, several people stand in front of the panel, but they rarely talk (a similar pattern occurs in front of the art works). Lately, the written discourse has been replaced by a sound device which leads to even less interactions  as these sounds device are individualistic. Natalie’s question is how the environment, space, a device, can shape the structure of the interactions? What happen if you change the device, and you make it a sound shared device? Will people start interacting? Will they move differently in the space? This seemed very close to the questions we asked with John Weeks in the context of the workplace: what happens if the copier machine is in a tiny room, with no other resources at the end of a corridor, or if it’s on a central corridor (e.g. nearby the elevator or the staircase) and/ or if it shelters other resources - such as the fax machine, the supplies cabinet, the mailboxes? 

In the context of online forums the question becomes: what happens if the founder or the first participants post very friendly messages, where they always say hi, ask for feedback, and say by or if, on the contrary, they post dry and short messages, with no relationship management? What kind of interactions will emerge in the forum? Can these interactions evolve in a different direction? If yes, what will trigger the change? I remember noting in some forums, the change of style for some participants depending on the style of the message they were replying to. For example, one participant (let’s call her Jeanne) posted a message and got two replies: one quite developed with some relationship management (Hi Jeanne, I found your question really interesting… Here are some thoughts. I hope this helps. Please let me know what you think, Joe) and another much dryer (Hi [no name]. Here is [the answer]. Mark).  What was interesting was how Jeanne’s responses differ depending on the style of the replies: she kept her nice friendly style in her response to Joe and adapted a dry minimalist style in replying to Mark. This was one example among others. More generally, forums develop their “style” (rarely explicitly defined, but implicitly emerging) and if one participant does not follow the “rules” of the forum’s language game, other participants will react - either telling them clearly that this not a suitable way of interacting, or just by ignoring them. These are the examples I am thinking of when I am suggesting that through discourse we are enacting affordances that trigger (or don’t trigger) interactions. 

Last, as I have lately been reflecting on the different disciplines I have been influenced by, I wanted to share with you this anecdote: listening to Natalie’s Thursday talking of bats, Thomas Nagel’s famous article “What is it Like to be a Bat” (1974). I could not helped smiling when Natalie refers to Nagel’s article!

 Have a nice weekend,

al 

In our discussion on Continuous City, Aileen and I discussed the role of technology in the play - how technology was “given” agency. I wanted to follow up on this idea of agency which was highlighted by Bruno Latour (1992, 1996, 2005) . Latour questioned the second-order role given to technology which is seen as passive, a tool used by human beings who are agents. He argues that agency is not a property or a capacity that belongs only to human beings, but that it emerges from the interactions between humans and non-humans, and in that sense, is relational. In a similar vein, Lucy Suchman invites us to redefine our notion of agency based “on foundations quite different from those of a humanist preoccupation with the individual actor living in a world of separate things” (Suchman, 2007).

In organization studies, scholars like Orlikowski (2007) also revisit the notion of practice and suggest that while most organizational scholars focus on social issues, they tend to forget materiality - either disregarding it, downplaying it or taking it for granted. Orlikowski claims that organization studies need to take materiality seriously into account as every aspect of organizing involves some “stuff” - whether visible like bodies, offices, desks, phones, computers, books, papers or invisible like data and voice network, electricity water and sewage infrastructures. She argues that “materiality is not an incidental or intermittent aspect of organizational life; it is integral to it” (Orlikowski, 2007: 1436). Our work with John Weeks on space and informal interactions belongs to a similar approach as we claimed that most organizational scholars ignored space (one aspect of materiality) while it played a key role in understanding interactions in organizations.

I personally became interested in this materiality issue while sitting in Francisco Varela’s class during my MA in Cognitive Science and then two years later when I read Being There: Putting Brain, Body and the World Together Again (Clark, 1996) and Cognition in the Wild by Hutching. Clark (a philosopher) develops a theory of cognition as the interactions between the brain, the body and the world. Cognition is not only the results of the computation of internal representations, but it is shaped by “the social and ecological settings in which we must act” (Clark, 1996: 221). Similarly, Hutchins (a cognitive anthropologist) who argues that in order to understand cognition, one needs to go out of the lab and study it “in the wild”, highlights the importance of social and material context. In Cognition in the Wild he studies cognition in the Navy and shows that navigation is an activity distributed between different individuals and different artifacts. His work greatly influenced me when I started doing an ethnography of air traffic controllers in the Control center for Charles de Gaulle and Orly airports with Wendy Mackay. Our observations showed how air traffic control was a distributed activity involving not only the internal representation of one controller, but the internal representations of different controllers in the team as well as the paper flight strips, the annotations on them, their arrangement on the board, and the Radar. 

The agency of technology has become even more relevant with the development of ubiquitous computing and the increasing role of online communication in human relationships. Turkle’s work which shows how people use computers not merely as tools to do things but how they interact through them - not only to communicate with others, but also exploring different identities - and to a certain extent with them. More than just prostheses, extensions of the self, technology - computers, cell phones, Ipods - have become our companions and they have changed our way of interacting.

I think it is fair to argue that artists also reflect upon the nature of technology and its agency. For example, in plays like Weems’ Continuous City, technology becomes central - not only as a material to support the actors’ interactions but also in some ways it becomes the main actor on the stage (see our discussion on the post of November 23rd). Re-reading Orlikowski’s point about the invisible “stuff” in organizations such as data’s networks I thought of Natalie Jereminjenko’s  Dangling String (see November 3rd).In a similar way, Terrain’s by John Klima is “the culmination of Klima’s explorations into ‘the real world as it exists in data’” (http://www.cityarts.com/terrain/index.html). It is digital interactive display that represents virtual data into physical forms and allows the “human” to interact real time and thus transforms the physical presentation.Hansen and Rubin’s Listening post (see November 3^rd) also explore how technology shapes our interactions and how online communication which can be seen as connecting us, allowing us to build communities, can also become a cacophony where voices talk in the void.Hence, technology becomes the matter with which artists work and play, but also the matter they question and reflect upon. By developing interactive installations like Klima’s Terrain or Train, (http://www.cityarts.com/train/index.html) or Utterback’s (see all the installations at the Act / react exhibition http://www.mam.org/act/index.htm or Design and the Elastic Mind at the MoMa curated by Paula Antonelli http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/) they also in some ways revisit the idea of agency and create networks of human and non-humans from whose interactions’ agency emerges. What Aileen and I want to explore in our current work are the interactions between materiality (technology, space) and social interactions: what are the socio-material practices that we develop in online forums, blogs?In the installation, our aim is to “embody” online interactions by representing them through the structure of the maze and the discourse projected on it. The structure of the maze will represent different potential interactions and people will walk through a maze of words (discourse projected on semi-transparent panels). The public (in the maze or anywhere else) can create the projected discourse by posting on the blog. 

As I am finishing writing this post, I am struck by how the questions we are exploring in BSWW are questions that I have been exploring from different perspectives at different moments of my life. I also find fascinating to note the similarities between the work of people working in so many different disciplines and fields - sociology, philosophy, organizational studies, anthropology, neuroscience and art. This is why I believe taking a multidisciplinary approach is so rich as it allows you to turn around the object of exploration and see if from different perspectives, through different lenses and deepen your understanding. I know this is again a long post but I’d be delighted to hear your thoughts on these issues. The great thing about this blog is that contributors all belong to different fields allowing us to share our various perspectives on issues related to interactions, space, virtual communication, and technology. 

Looking forward to your thoughts, al

Hi, I like this installation by Natalie Jeremijenko, the “Dangling String”. It’s a long plastic spaghetti attached to a small motor on the ceiling and the motor is connected to an ethernet cable. Depending on the business of the network, the motor vibrates more or less. It’s located in a corner of the hallway and people can hear “in the periphery” how busy the network is.  http://interactionthesis.wordpress.com/2007/02/14/dangling-string/ “Dangling strings” aims to make visible, or better to say audible, the virtuality of the network. Sitting in your office, you can hear how busy the network is, i.e. how many bits of information are sent to, transferred to on the network. This attempt to make the virtual  visible and audible is also at the core of  Hansen and Rubin’s work.  In  ”Listening Post” (presented at the Whitney in 2003) they present on a multitude of little screens the content from Internet chat’s rooms. Sounds and voices are also accompanying the presentation of text.  Hansen and Rubin highlight the “cacophony” of the web but also create for the visitor an experience where the individual is surrounded by the multiple voices going on online. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/museo/6/hansen_and_rubin/index.htm  Discourse is more central in their recent piece, ”Moveable type”, an installation in the lobby of the NY Times focuses on discourse - the discourse of the news produced by the NY Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/arts/design/25vide.html  In this interactive installation, Rubin and Hansen present on a multitude of screens the “memory” of the  NY Times as excerpts from articles, letters, blogs, etc. collected from 1851 are displayed on the screen. The material is discourse and this discourse is made visible…”Moveable type” embodies the “organizational memory” of the NY Times and displays it. As for “Dangling Strings”, the aim is also to show the “live” nature as many of the excerpts come from real time comments of readers from around the world. Our project, Building_Space_With_Words, also aims to “make visible” “the virtual” by materializing a virtual space with the maze and by creating “walls of words”. We also aim to make audible as the visitors will be surrounded by a soundtrack composed of sounds from physical and virtual spaces - making us reflect on the “silent and solitary” experience of online interactions. Yet, our purpose is not to show “real time” how much discourse is created and shared (although the discourse projected in the installation are searched “live” from our blog); our project is more “symbolic” as it focuses on the “fabric” of which online interactions are made of - words- and explore the metaphor of the virtual space. We also wonder how language - through the development of discursive practices and language games - can allow us to reenact some of the affordances of physical spaces. Hence, it’s not only about making the virtual visible, audible, but it’s also about exploring the relationships between the material and the virtual.al