Yesterday, I was mentioning Turkle’s work and a July article in Seed Magazine. Today, I’d like to refer to an article by Turkle on the Romance of Objects in the January edition of Seed Magazine: http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2009/01/sherry_turkle_on_the_romance_o.phpTurkle highlights the importance of objects in scientific creativity as well as the emergence of “new objects” that seems less tangible but that still plays a key role in the creative process.  Cheers, al 

This is an interesting article and an online interactive map published by Seed Magazine last summer (July 2008).It reminds us that science is a situated practice, even though global collaboration and e-science are often used to describe nowadays scientific practice. It also reminds that thinking is also a situated and embodied practice that can have preferred locations (you might remember my post Turkle’s book on evocative objects).http://seedmagazine.com/place/ Cheers,al 

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

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

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