Several people have asked me how this installation fits in my research, in my work.

I explain them how it was originally an attempt for me to present my ideas differently, and how it then became a way of “thinking with my hands”, with different media.

Linked to this I’d like to mention Bruno Latour’s work. Bruno has been a pioneer in curating exhibitions bringing together artists, sociologists, philosophers, scientists and historians - the first one was Iconoclash in 2002, the second one was Making Things Public in 2005. http://www.bruno-latour.fr/expositions/index.html

( Ben Rubin had a piece, Dark Source, in Making Things Public. http://www.earstudio.com/projects/darksource.html)

Milena also pointed to me an exhibition at the British library, Taking Liberties. The exhibition was about 900-year struggle for Britain’s freedoms and rights . There’s still an online exhibition: http://www.bl.uk/takingliberties

I found this format particularly powerful to present multidisciplinary perspectives and also to create opportunities (public venues?) for people to learn, experience, reflect and express themselves.

al

Thanks to Anne-Laure, I attended (for the first time) one of Latour’s talks. The talk was everything and more of what I expected and what I was told in advance: informative, thought-provoking, and entertaining. Since I know very little of Latour’s work (which may change after this talk, I hope), I apologize in advance for any misconceptions and overly simplistic conclusions.

At Columbia University, Bruno Latour asked the question of “which globe and politics” are to be conceptualized in today’s globalized world. While in the past there was the “globe” and limited, if any, signs of globalization, today the process of globalization is practically ubiquitous, but the “Globe” has disappeared. Trying to conceptualize the globe beyond what the modernist theories have offered, Latour talked about the discussions he had with few of his colleagues at a meeting in Venice (2004). He brought up the issues of mononaturalism and multiculturalism in the modernist thought, the privileged access of the western cultures to nature, and the “we vs. they” distinction. Latour also challenged the values-facts dichotomy and argued that a different question should be asked (with respect to values and facts) instead. The relevant questions would ask “how many there need to be?” and “how would they cohabitate?” This will allow for multiactor perspectives and contribution. Latour arrived at his understanding of the globe after a discussion regarding his colleagues’ ideas and perspectives, but that is beyond the scope of this post and my personal abilities and understanding. What I think may relate to the BSWW installation and blog is the following.

The last thing I would like to mention from Latour’s talk is the work of Peter Sloterdijk and how it may be useful to this blog. Latour said that Sloterdijk is very interesting to architects because of his understanding of design and space. He even mentioned that some have even equated “Dasein” to “Design” As with Latour’s work, I know even less of Sloterdijk’s, but his notion of humans as “space-creating beings” that are never truly “naked in totality” seems to me very promising in conceptualizing spaces built with words. How do words help explicitate our “self-animated spaces” can be a valid question of design and enactment. Maybe his “spheres” are the material for building or a reflection to Anne-Laure and Aileen’s spaces. 

While reading Yasmine’s post on the situationists and the “psychogeographical” maps (February 2nd), it reminded me of a book by Latour, Paris, Invisible City.

In this book which mixes photos and texts, Latour takes on a journey beyond “Paris, the City of Light”, reminding us how beneath the surface, there are always much more going on and highlighting the complex networks of people, artifacts and socio-material practices that “make” a city. This is a great exercise of “thick description” (Geertz, 1973).  It reminds me also of Becker’s description of art worlds (1982): Artistic work, like all human activities, depends on the joint activity of a number of people. Producing an artwork requires more than just an artist; it requires an idea, a manufacturing/distributing network, time, money, “support” apparatus, an audience, critics, training, and civil order (Becker, 1982).

In some ways, Aileen and I are also aiming to develop a “thick description”, a good understanding of  the relationships between physical spaces, virtual spaces and interactions. (more…)

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

On December 1, Lucy posted an interesting post on her blog http://www.designleadership.blogspot.com/
very relevant to our discussion about socio-material practices:

“Designers wary of social theories - imagining that intuition, or something like it, will produce good design - would benefit from being attentive to the work of sociologist Steve Woolgar. In his recent lecture on the occasion of winning the J. D. Bernal Prize by the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S), Steve produced a thoughtful demonstration of how it’s hard to talk about “the social” without talking about objects and how they are involved in constituting it. Many designers, of course, have the opposite problem - they find it hard to talk about anything but objects and aren’t interested in what “the social” might be.

Outside of social science, Steve is perhaps less well known than his close collaborator Bruno Latour, but he is an important figure. Their Laboratory Life (1979), is one of the most influential books in social studies of science published in the past 30 years. Steve enjoys telling people that his job title when hired at Saïd was professor of marketing. More recently - having along the way run whole events on the perplexing question of what Science and Technology Studies (STS) is doing in a business school - he has worked with Dan Neyland (now at Lancaster) on studying what they call mundane governance: looking in ethnographic detail at the now day-to-day, possibly boring objects that are involved in governance and accountability. Their examples include things like speed cameras, recycling boxes, and bottles of water. The latter, for example, are turned into weapons of terror once you pass from one zone into another in an airport. Key questions for Woolgar are who, which and what, is accountable to what, which and whom? Once governance is not just about the governance of people, but also about the governance of things, then the categories (and practices) that constitute mundane, ordinary life, should be considered.”

Hi,

I’m reading a book edited by Sherry Turkle, entitled “Evocative Objects: Things We Think With”. I found this book as I was exploring the literature on materiality (objects, artifacts) for a paper I’m working on with John Weeks. Yet I think that this book also highlights ideas that make sense to BSWW.

The book is a collection of essays by scientists, humanists, artists and designers about “evocative objects” - objects that matter to them, that had a role in their emotional and / or intellectual development. The point here is to remind us how embodied and situated we are, and the meaning and power of everyday objects. Turkle suggests to consider objects as “companions to our emotional lives or as provocations to thought” (Turkle, 2007, p. 5) and she adds “we think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with”.

Turkle’s assumption (very similar to Orlikowski’s claim that we need to think socio-material practices, or Suchman’s and Latour’s call for giving back some “agency” to objects) is that we “We live our lives in the middle of things” (p.6) and objects, things, stuff matter and influence our way of thinking. In fact, what might claim that abstract reasoning cannot be separated (except theoretically) from concrete reasoning. Science cannot be reduced to abstract hypotheses and theories but it is done in the “dirty”, “messy” lab where scientists “play” with materials and instruments. (see Latour and Woolgar, 1979 ; Barley and Bechky, 1994). Science can be described as “bricolage” (Levi-Strauss, 1966), i.e. a manipulation of a closed set of materials and instruments to develop new ideas.

Reading Turkle’s introduction and conclusion, and some of the essays in this volume, I reflected on the nature of the exercise of building_space_with_words: the installation (not only the physical one that will take place in March, but more broadly the project including the blog) becomes a thing with which I try to think and to combine and recombine my ideas (through the combination of objects - wires, fabrics, blog, etc.) about space and interactions. And in this case, I want to make this object public and share it hoping that it will allow others to reflect on the “object” (the installation) and make them develop their own thoughts and associations.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on this. I guess this is a particularly relevant question to artists and to the issue of art as a research method.

Cheers,

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

Yesterday I went to see a multimedia play Continuous City at the BAM (Brooklyn, NY) (http://www.bam.org/view.aspx?pid=123). I was looking forward to going as it was exploring many of the issues I am interested in, issues that we are exploring in Building_Space_With_Words: the interactions between the physical and the virtual space, connectivity, how technology shape our interactions, online communication, a sense of community, what is home. 

Yet, and despite the great technical ingeniousness (e.g. multitude of screens opening up and closing, several movies projected on different sides of the stage), I was somewhat disappointed coming out. First of all, as soon as I came in the Harvey Theatre and saw the stage with its screens and tables with computers and web cams, I immediately thought of a play I saw in Singapore in 2003 and that I loved: a stage with several tables and computers, screens, video projected interactions highlighting how our interactions in a global and connected world have become multiple and fragmented. The play I saw in Singapore was describing the world of call centers and off-shoring in India presenting to the audience the backstage of call centers in Bangalore and thus questioning the influence of global telecommunication and exploring virtual identities. It showed people in India learning how to speak with an American accent, learning things about popular culture (including TV shows and baseball teams) in order to “sound Americans” to the American calling them. It highlighted the de-doubling of personalities and presented the life of these people who have to hide their real identity and work in the middle of the night because it’s the middle of the day in America. This play involved several interviews, clips and to me this documentary part was extremely interesting. 

As the show unfolded I kept thinking of this previous play and had this feeling of “déjà vu”.  The funny part of it is that when I got home, I went on my computer and searched on google: “multimedia play call centers London based company Singapore”. I added the London based company because I remembered that the play I saw in Singapore was done by a London based company and I eventually found the play: Alladeen (http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/digital/Programs/TechAtTuck/InsideOutsourcing/HopkinsPressRelease.pdf). Two of the co-directors were indeed from Moritori, a London based company, but the director was Marianne Weems, who is also the director of Continuous City! That explained my feeling of ”déjà vu”: I lacked the surprise of the first viewer.I preferred Alladeen to Continuous City. I remember Alladeen more as a documentary - although it was presented as a piece of fiction but the “data” (the videos of interviews) were more central to the play. What I really liked in Continuous City were the short clips presenting people from around the world (often living in Toronto) telling us what was their definition of home. I wish we could have seen more of these clips as well as more clips from the different cities mentioned in the Weems’ note (Nairobi, Mexico City, Delhi and Rio) in the BAM program. It might my ethnographic mind but I wanted more of it. 

I personally thought the plot was weak and it just proved me once more how difficult it is to write a play with “a message”. Theatre, novels are works of fiction and when they are too laden with a message, they lost their artistic value. In that sense, the work of Pico Iyer on similar topics - the global soul, the sense of home - seems to use a genre that might be better suited to the discussion of these themes. Listening to the witnesses on the video I could not help thinking of his various books - The Global Soul, Video Night in Kathmandu, etc. - where Iyer explores what identity and home means in this global and mobile world. 

Jason Zinovan’s critique in the NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/21/theater/reviews/21cont.html?partner=rss&emc=rss) also regrets the absence of a real dramatic dimension. He notes that technology is at the center: “Technology is a vivid character in this play, but you wish it weren’t the only one”. Indeed, the use of technology is key to the play and one could claim that Marianne Weems by putting it at the center highlights the agency of technology as it has been highlighted by Bruno Latour (1992) and Sherry Turkle (1997; 2005). Technology becomes a character in Continuous City as JV, Sam, or Mike.

In fact, I thought many times of Sherry Turkle’s work watching the play. For example, when you see Sam, the little girl telling her nanny that if she wants to tell her something she can just send her a message on her computer and they end up chatting while they are in the same house. Puzzling to our definition of reality was also the last interaction between Sam and her dad Mike who is finally coming back home after weeks of travel when he’s been video- phoning Sam. Mike is very happy and tells Sam that he’s in the taxi and that she’ll see him soon and Sam startled replied “but I see you, you’re on the computer”. 

On the technology used in the play, video was the only medium used apart from 5 or 6 messages between Sam and her nanny. While there are many video tools nowadays, online interactions are still mostly text-based. However, the use of video is due to the constraints of the stage: it would be hard to show mostly text-based interactions on stage. I was struck by all these talking heads on the screen which are often what video ends up being but which is also why I personally very rarely use video on Skype. I chat or call. I use video only when I am calling with my children so that they can see their grandparents or friends, or if I’m interacting with my nephews and my godson. I will then make faces and show them things of my context in a similar way to which Mike, the dad, in Continuous City goes on “virtual shopping” with his daughter for lunch while he’s in Mexico or he plays virtual hide and seek while he’s in a park in China. I really like these two passages, which reminded me some of the experiments I did with my students while teaching a distributed class (using videoconference) between Singapore and France and the related research I did exploring how people modify their communicative practices to build a virtual space to interact on (Fayard, 2006; see also the work of Austin Henderson on this notion of a virtual space for interactions e.g Dourish, Adler, Belloti and Henderson, 1996;  Henderson and Henderson, 2000). Hence, although I was not completely convinced by the narrative of the play, it triggered many questions and reflections which are very relevant to our project and that I wanted to share with you.

I know Aileen saw the play yesterday but I did not have a chance to talk with her. She just left me a message on my cell yesterday saying that she thought it was amazing. I’m looking forward to reading her take on the play. And of course, if any one else has seen the play, please share your impressions with us. al    

I would like to follow up on Aileen’s post on art and research. I’d like to discuss the possible dialogue between art and social sciences with a specific example. I became aware of the possibility of such a dialogue during my discussions with my artist friend, Claudia Conduto. At that time, we were both in Singapore and she was starting doing installation works, more specifically using chairs (for some pictures, see http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/artist_profile/a/34724.html ).

As she was telling me about her work and her aim to question the functionalities of objects, I could not help thinking of Gibson and the concept of affordances. I told Claudia about affordances and lent her Gibson’s Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. She gave it back to me a few weeks later, very excited about the possibility to theorize in a different way about her work.

More recently, as I was visiting Claudia in Brussels, she told me about some of her work on technical objects and their agency. Immediately I thought of actor-network theory and the work of Bruno Latour, and human and non-human agents. What Claudia was telling me specifically reminded me Bruno Latour’s text on the door opener (http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/050.html ). Claudia smiled and went in one of her folders and picked up Bruno’s article! 

These two instances are two lovely proofs of how art and social sciences (in a broad sense) can interact. Yet, in these two examples, it was the social sciences discourse offering a theoretical framework to the arts: putting words around the work; aiming to verbalize and theorize the meaning of the art work.

In this current project with Aileen, the approach is reverse: can art as a language provides social sciences a way to embody, materialize ideas from the social sciences’ realm? An attempt in that direction can be seen in the exhibitions organized by Bruno Latour http://www.bruno-latour.fr/expositions/index.html.

Moreover, can we create an environment where one can scaffold her ideas and then reintroduce them in the social sciences’ discourse - i.e. maybe writing an academic article, at least providing new theoretical insights on the relationship between physical and virtual space and their impact on interactions and discursive practices? 

Any thoughts are welcome. 

al