An interesting article was posted by Jesse Shapins and Brian House (who collaborate on the Yellow Arrow) on the Urban Omnibus entitled Designers and citizens as critical media artists. They discuss their views on maps, cities, technologies and the role of art as a research practice.

Here are few themes and quotes that I found really interesting. I let you read the whole article and I’d be curious to read your thoughts.

On the method (which is a theme that emerged from our discussion on this blog - collaboration between artists and scientists, social scientists), they have several interesting points and a great quote:

“Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.”

- Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” (1917)

Jesse and Brian note: “We wanted to stimulate another mode of urban practice that was based fundamentally in the physical, social spaces of the city. In other words, we wanted to get students out of the classroom and onto the streets. We were inspired by Shklosvky’s concepts of estrangement and “Art as Technique”, we then aimed to use media arts critically as a mode of research to gain new perspectives.”

On language and ” a mutually transformative relationship between language and the city”:

An interesting project they mentioned: ” One of the projects I’ve always found fascinating is ABCDF: A Graphic Dictionary of Mexico City. The general principal of this book is to re-define the city through a new form of dictionary. Thousands of words are defined by images from a wide variety of sources, ranging from the home photographs of ordinary citizens, to historical newsprints, to the work of famous contemporary artists. These images are complimented by short texts in a glossary at the back. What emerges is a highly detailed mosaic of the city that brings to life the everyday life of the metropolis.”

… and a project they develop for their students: “Furthering the language theme, we built on De Certeau’s understanding of walking through the city as an act of reading and writing. After each student defined around 35 words for their territory, the final assignment aimed to synthesize this material and create a series of design interventions in physical and virtual space. Writing in this new language, the core component of the students’ final project was to write a “poem” that linked together multiple words they had defined in their territory. In addition to the longer and visual media, students had to also now define their words in 140 characters as text messages. The poem would be read, then, as an SMS-based walking tour of their territory that poetically connects the words in physical space using the new vocabulary they have defined. We created the interface and the messaging infrastructure, which they could then script for their particular walks. The walks provided an experiential tour of the multiple layers of physical, social, historical and fictional qualities that students identified through their research throughout the summer.”

Go and check Periplurban their research platform

al

How to conserve cultural identity through the recording of disappearing languages?

Language is a crucial symbol of cultural identity as well as one of its crucial elements. Yet, there are hundreds of languages which are disappearing as young people leave their villages.

“Of the world’s 7,000 languages, 40 percent are on their way to extinction, with the last fluent speaker of a language dying once every two weeks.”

Two linguists, K. David Harrison and Greg Anderson,aim to stop this disappearition by documenting all these endangered languages. Their project is the topic of a documentary, The Linguists, which is discussed in a Seed’s article.Not only do they travel around the world recording languages in remote areas but they also provide communities with tools to keep trace of their language. Technology becomes a tool to preserve identity and a sense of community. Indeed, it’s not only about recording - keeping a trace - but it’s also about sharing and building relationship:

” The tech tools of recent decades — like text messaging, web pages, chat rooms, and YouTube — are finding use among speakers of indigenous languages, says Anderson. Margaret Noori, a colleague of Anderson’s and a professor of literature and linguistics at the University of Michigan, is part of a network of Native American Ojibwe speakers who have Facebook networks, a website (Ojibwe.net) with easy-to-download language lessons, and who share Ojibwe words with each other using the Zephyr application for iPhone.”

Harrison and Anderson’s project  reminded me of  an article I read a few months ago in the New York Times on an academy in Western India, where students in their early 20’s are documenting oral languages which are disappearing (in that case by writing them down, making dictionaries of languages which have never been traced before).

“If a community has a strong sense of identity and a sense of pride in that identity, it wants to survive and thrive,” Mr. Devy (the founder of this project) said. “The new economy is important. The old culture is equally important.”

It made me think of Bernadette, the refugee from Rwanda living in Denmark that Yasmine met. She was afraid of loosing her language, and her identity. This reminds us of how language shapes our identity, our sense of home and to a certain extent our personal geography.

al

We’ve been talking a lot about space, but not so much about discourse, about how we can do things with words - even such things as creating a space, a sense of place, where we can meet with others and share ideas and feelings. I “explicitly” learnt that language was performative - i.e. that language does more than describing things - in my courses on the philosophy of language, reading Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1962) or reading Wittgenstein’s and working on my master thesis on the language games of colours.  Austin provides several examples such as the naming of a ship: if you say, “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth” (and the circumstances are appropriate in certain ways), you not only utter a sentence, but you do something-namely, you perform the act of naming the ship. The pragmatist or discursive approach focuses on the use of expressions in speech situations and implies that discourse organizes experience and reality (Austin, 1962; Wittgenstein, 1963). It assumes that language is not only a tool to report and describe reality, but is also a tool to create a context within which we “know” reality and orient our actions.

As I was thinking about my research work on discursive practices on online forums, I re-read the introduction of Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen and what she said about the imaginary experience of people writing in MUDs, it made me think of my own experience as a reader.   Indeed, when one reads a novel, it is about entering in an imaginary world created by the novelists, and I am taking the metaphor seriously. It is really about entering another world - a world that is offered to you by the novel, but that you can also rewrite, reinvent.I remember my parents calling me for lunch or dinner and never getting an answer. I remember this situation in a very lively manner as I see my son doing the same, or when he bursts into tears because something sad happen in the story - that happened to me too; that still happens to me: the tears are real; the impact of words are real. Literature is a proof (if needed) of the performativity of language, and it was my first experience of it.

Literature includes not only novels, but also poetry - following the maze of emotions, perceptions and thoughts created by Mallarme or T.S. Eliot - and theatre. You might say, yes, but novelists, poets, playwrights are gifted individuals, not everyone can create these worlds where one can enter. You might be right, yet it does not take away the fact that words can create such experiences. Moreover, I have been working during the last two years with Anca Metiu on correspondences and our analysis showed the power of writing, its ability to allow people to share ideas, to build and maintain relationships. Our work focuses on correspondences of famous writers such as Descartes, Einstein, Virginia Woolf and Kafka. However, we also read correspondences by anonymous persons and there is this same power of words allowing people to share moments, feelings, thoughts, and maintain a relationship. My argument about the performativity of discursive practices in public online forums is very similar to some of the findings of Sherry Turkle’s of people’s interactions in MUDs. Hence, she mentioned a virtual rape that took place in one MUD and she wrote: “although some made light of the offender’s actions by saying that the episode was just words, in txt based realities such as MUDs words are deeds.” (Turkle, 1995, p. 15).

Most MUDs like online forums are purely text-based and people create a reality, and even a self, a multiple self, Turkle argues. My focus is more on how people co-create this sense of place, of belonging despite the absence of co-location. Hence my question regarding the possibility to enact some of the affordances of space through discursive practices. Of course, there are differences. For example, you can be part of several forums, MUDs, and engaged in many other activities as highlights Turkle (in fact her studies show that dedicated MUD players are often involved in several worlds at the same time thanks to the affordance of the computers - the ability to open several windows on their screen). This possibility to be in at least two places at the same time is illustrated by the possibility to have a virtual coffee break, chatting with a friend on skype (maybe both even drinking coffee). You could in principle have coffee at the same time with different friends - you in NY, another one in London, and a third one in Paris or a few blocks away… al 

Hi, today I’d like to talk about the approach we are using in Building_Space_with_Words, an approach that I would call multidisciplinary and collaborative. 

I’ve always been interested in “combining” different disciplines. I guess even my original interest in philosophy could be related to that multidisciplinary focus as philosophy is essentially a way of asking questions, more than a “content” per se. Indeed, philosophy is always a reflection about a topic. Hence, one does philosophy of science, philosophy of art, moral philosophy, political philosophy, etc. One motivation for my decision to do a master in cognitive science was that I would be studying many different disciplines - psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, etc. My dissertation work was truly multidisciplinary: looking at a debate among psychologists and neuroscientists, the debate on the nature and role of mental images, from a philosophical perspective… I loved working on this question, trying to analyze the different perspectives involved. Yet, I remember that for each members of the jury, it was an interesting and original piece of work, but they thought it did not belong to their field - psychology, neuroscience or philosophy! 

Yet I did not give up on the multidisciplinary approach and on the contrary experienced what it really meant when I worked with designers, engineers, and computer scientists on a participatory design project with air traffic controllers. I still remember this project as one of the most exciting projects I’ve been working on. 

More generally, all my research work can be described as an attempt to look at a problem in organization studies using a lens from another discipline, be it philosophy, psychology, language and culture studies, etc.

Building_Space_With_Words is another attempt to explore multidisciplinary collaboration. Because of my personal interest for installation works, new media art, I originally thought of using art as a language to present and explore my ideas. As I am not an artist, I started talking with Aileen, who is an artist and art education scholar, and it ended up in our decision to collaborate on this installation project. This is a fascinating and exciting adventure for me, particularly as it makes me experience how one can express ideas “materially”. This is particularly meaningful to me as materiality and how it influences organizations, work practices and interactions is another of my research interests.

It is truly exciting to dialogue and share ideas with someone with a totally background, frame of reference and to try to build a common ground. This collaborative experience has become even more truly collaborative as Aileen and I decided to play with technology and got Ardis Kadiu (NYU-Poly involved in the process. We might even have more people involved on the technology side just to add some more fun and more depth to the conversation! I have to say that this collaborative endeavor reminds me a lot of my work with Wendy Mackay on the air traffic controllers, and I truly enjoy it!

This project which started as a collaboration between Aileen and I has become a collaboration between much more than the two of us (I forgot to mention Liz DiNapoli who helped us finding a space and funding to make this project real, Guilhem Tamisier who is working on the sound aspect of the project).

More generally, I believe that an idea never comes from “nowhere” but it emerges from our interactions with others, our discussions, our situated experiences and we might be the one who at one point expresses the idea but it’s always the result of our various experiences and interactions with others. In fact, if you look at my papers, most of them are written with a co-author and these papers are always the result of long and rich interactions between my co-authors and I and that’s what I find exciting about research.

That’s why we also had the idea of this blog with Aileen. We wanted to share our ideas with others and get their feedback, their thoughts and insights. Our aim is not so much to present our perspective on space (physical and virtual), language and interactions, but to create an environment (virtual – the blog, and physical – the installation) to make people reflect on their experiences and share ideas and questions.

To go back to art as a language to present and explore ideas, I was curious to see how one can present her ideas with a different medium and in a different setting, to explore how one can present her research by getting out of the usual frame of the academic paper. More than just presenting my research, I wanted to explore the relationships between two streams of my research and do that in the context of the installation project – use the installation project as a scaffolding space to explore ideas.

Working with Aileen has also started raising a lot of interesting methodological issues that we will discuss later on. I also discovered in my discussions with Aileen the existence of an academic field dedicated to art as a research method. Aileen will tell us more on that very soon.

Thank you.

Have a nice weekend. 

al