Re-reading the introduction of Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientists by Anselm Strauss (1987) for my Ph.D seminar on Qualitative Methods, I noted this quote by Dewey (who did not conceive artistic and scientific activities as radically different):An “expression of the self in and through a medium, constituting the work of art, is itself a prolonged interaction issuing from the self with objective conditions, a process in which both of them acquire a form and order they did not first possess” (Dewey, 1334, p.65)and Strauss adds: “In short, the researcher, if more than merely competent, will be “in the work” - emotionally as well as intellectually - and often will be profoundly affected by experiences engendered by the research process itself.” (p. 10).An interesting analogy between the work of the researcher and the worker of the artist, or maybe of their relationship to their work, their engagement with their practice. Moreover, this is one of these quotes that just say in “better words” the way you feel about a specific experience, in this case my work.   al

Hi, 

I’d like to share with you a question that arose from our early discussions with Aileen. We wanted to project on the walls of the maze the content of the blog, but Aileen was worried that it will “feel dead”. She was worried that most of the time people would not be posting and thus there won’t be a lot of activity on the blog and as a consequence, not much “happening’ on the maze. Although I understood her concern from an aesthetic perspective, my first reply was “well, that’s reality” and I added “In fact, most of the time in many of these online forums and blogs there are not that much posts”. I gave her the example of my study with Gerry DeSanctis on online forums and how very few forums were very active and were really “communities” in that sense. And this example is just one illustration of what the research on online forums shows.

Moreover, I thought it was important to have at least one of the projectors showing the “blog live” even if “live” meant “dead” for Aileen… Yet Aileen insisted on creating an impression of activity on the maze. Of course, Aileen had a good point and this highlighted the interesting nature of this project - based on some data from two studies - but which was aiming to use art as a language to present and explore ideas. Discussing with Aileen, I remembered my literature classes where studying Balzac, perfect example of “realism” in French literature, you would learn to decipher and entangle all the craft, all the work, involved in creating this feeling of realism. Closer to us and more obvious, think of movies that show seemingly realistic dialogues and compare them to videos made during family or friends reunions. If you watch both, usually you will get very quickly bored with the latter. This “real” dialogue will need  a lot of editing before it can create this “realistic” feeling that the first ones (the movies’ dialogues) will create. That’s what our discussion with Aileen was about: she wanted to edit, to craft the discourse of the blog to create a sense of realism while I originally thought in terms of “data”. While I was collecting video data for my project on informal interactions in copier rooms,  I remember a discussion with Austin Henderson with whom I was working on video analysis: I was very frustrated as I had several hours of videotapes with “nothing” - no one used the copier, no one came in the copier room. I even thought of erasing the tapes! Fortunately Austin reminded me that these tapes with an empty copier room were “data”. It was telling me that during these 5 hours I recorded on that day, no one came in that room. That became even more meaningful when compared with other tapes in other settings where there were people going in and out, chatting, and using the copier. 

The question then became for me: what is the nature of this project? Is it another version of an academic article using another medium or is it another “animal”, another practice following different rules and mores?Was the discourse on the maze “data” or “art” (for lack of a better word)?

I think we are getting closer to “art”. This approach made even more sense to me when I though of my teaching practice. Indeed, when I teach, more than passing by knowledge to the students, I aim to create an environment which allow them to reflect and explore the concepts of the course. Similarly  Building_Space_With_Words  aims to create an environment where people who will come will start reflecting of  of what a virtual space means and what interacting online means.

Yet, this is still an open question, a very interesting one indeed as it opens discussions about the nature of the work and the nature of the object of the work of the artist, the sociologist and the scientist - of the architect and the  designer as well. These discussions become even more complex and interesting in multidisciplinary contexts.

Many of you have been involved in these collaborations - from one perspective or the other, and I’d like to know what are your thoughts on how to manage the boundaries and the definition of the objects of practice. Thanks.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

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

Hi, as mentioned earlier, Building_Space_With_Words (BSWW) emerged from my attempt to explore the relationships between two parts of my research. The first one is my work with John Weeks on Space, Informal Interactions and Affordances. I am describing this work more in details below. My interest for space and informal interactions also led me to study interactions of commuters in train (I was myself commuting 2 1/2 hours /3 hours / day - fortunately only 3 days a week! I was lucky many people on the train were commuting on a daily basis). To learn more about this short study, see http://www.bazartropicando.com/thetrain/TCE.htmlThere is an increasing recognition of the importance of informal interactions in organizations, but research examining the effects of the physical environment on them has produced contradictory results, and practical attempts to control the level of informal interaction by design have been marked by unintended consequences. Some of my research with John Weeks (IMD), based on observations of people interacting in the copier rooms of different organizations, lead her to explore the properties, or affordances, of space that trigger informal interactions. These observations were interpreted using the concept of affordances developed by ecological psychologist James Gibson. The affordances of an environment are the possibilities for action called forth by it to a perceiving subject. Thus, to humans, handles afford grasping; paths afford locomotion; slippery slopes afford falling. While research on affordances has typically focused on individual behavior, we extend it to social behaviors, such as informal interactions in organizational settings (Fayard and Weeks, 2007). The affordances of an environment arise from its social meaning, conventional rules regarding use, and its physical properties.We identify the social and physical characteristics that produce the propinquity, privacy, and social designation necessary for an environment to afford informal interactions.  Propinquity refers to the fact that informal interactions can occur only in places where people encounter each other. All else equal, the more traffic that flows through and past a place, the greater the chance of an encounter. The architecture of a space - how accessible it is, how enclosed, how large - influences both the opportunity and the social obligation for interaction.  Privacy, the ability to control the boundaries of interaction, has two dimensions:  spatial and temporal. People must have confidence that they are heard by those to whom they are talking, but not overheard by others. Privacy also implies control over access to oneself: to the extent that being in a place obligates us to interact with those we would rather avoid, or prevents us from exiting an interaction when we desire, it is not a private place. Lastly, some spaces feel like natural, comfortable places for informal interaction, and this depends on a set of imperfectly shared expectations and understandings, social designation, about what is appropriate and normal in these spaces.  Our work aims to show the importance of space, highlighting the need to develop a conception of space as jointly physical and social in its influence. My question in this project is: do these affordances make sense in virtual spaces?Do people reenact them through language, through discursive practices? If they do, how do they do that? How do their practices evolve?al