Weekly INCITE

New Weekly INCITE blog

noreply@blogger.com (INCITE) — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 19:10:00 +0000

Hi everyone

We have moved.

Weekly INCITE has switched to Word Press.

Our new address is http://studioincite.com/blog/

We hope to see you there.

Self-Portrait 1995, Chuck Close

noreply@blogger.com (INCITE) — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 18:37:00 +0000

Self-Portrait 1995, Chuck Close
Originally uploaded by Kris Cohen.

The aforementioned Chuck Close. Reproduction does this piece NO favo(u)rs, as it is composed of hundreds of small pixels, each of which is itself an abstract painting.

Happy Birthday Kat! (Nov. 9th, 2005)

noreply@blogger.com (INCITE) — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 06:33:00 +0000

Happy Birthday Kat!
Originally uploaded by Kris Cohen.

November 9th, 2005

"What is Science Studies" at Franke Institute, Univ of Chicago

noreply@blogger.com (INCITE) — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 16:16:00 +0000

[And can I say? The Franke Institute puts on some great shows, but can we have some web presence please? A few links? A modest website mayhaps?]

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 11

11:45 a.m. - 5:15 p.m.
Franke Institute for the Humanities, 1100 East 57th Street, JRL S-118

Conference: What is Science Studies?
E-mail enquiries to: johns@uchicago.edu or jtresch@uchicago.edu

11:45-12:30
Buffet lunch

12:30-2:00
THE EMERGENCE OF SCIENCE STUDIES AS A DISCIPLINE:
historical formation/ internal institutional histories/ STS's emergence from other fields

Karin Knorr Cetina, University of Chicago
Robert Brain, University of British Columbia
Emily Martin, New York University

2:15-3:45
SCIENCE STUDIES AND ITS BOUNDARIES:
border relations with neighboring disciplines/ STS seen from the outside

Ken Alder, Northwestern University
Katherine Hayles, University of California at Los Angeles
John Carson, University of Michigan

4:00-5:15
Round table
TELEOLOGIES OF SCIENCE STUDIES:
what's at stake?/ political and ethical responsibilities/ relation to the public and to science/ consequences of institutionalization

Trevor Pinch, Cornell University
Thomas Gieryn, Indiana University
Adrian Johns, University of Chicago
Joseph Rouse, Wesleyan University

Foucault on Wireless Networks (for Kat)

noreply@blogger.com (INCITE) — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 14:11:00 +0000

To Kat, who is thinking about wireless networks, a thought, to be treated carelessly:

I don't know your feelings about Foucault—I'm thinking here mainly of the Foucault of the Disciplines, esp. Discipline and Punish. Here, he's describing a historical mode of power, carried within and propagated by particular disciplines (e.g. psychiatry, psychology, criminology, pedagogy, etc.) and directed at the individual and the individual's body as the mobile point of contact between power and society. This target of disciplinarity, the individual, is key, and is what got me thinking about wireless networks, which also seem to focus on the individual (I'm not sure what modes of generality, or grouping, wireless networks engender. Are they networks or societies or communities or populations?).

So, a facet of disciplinary power is that it is very careful about the way it distributes and organises bodies in space. The classroom, with its ordered grid, is one of F's favorite examples. But also: the prison, the military march, the hospital, the factory—and I'd add, now: the office cubicle and (my point here) wired and wireless networks, all seem to me to be methods—architectural or social or institutional or technological—for arranging and administering (disciplining) bodies in space (there are different methods for ordering bodies in time, e.g. course schedules).

And so I'm thinking about computer networks as spatially-ordering disciplinary tactics in this way (although maybe not always only disciplinary). And once you start thinking in that direction, then the shift from wired to wireless networks starts to look interesting for the ways in which it re-orders bodies. Perhaps still governed by disciplinarity, perhaps not. That would be something to be investigated: but the question/method remains: how do re-configured networks re-configure bodies in space, in relation to other bodies and to buildings and to things and etc., and what are the effects of this re-configuration, what consequences does it have for the operations of (what Foucault always calls, vaguely, but importantly) power? Put that way, it will probably sound a lot like questions you're already asking. To which I'd say (if you're at all captured by this approach), if you're not familiar with it, take a look at some Foucault. Maybe start with Disc and Punish, and then move to the stuff on biopower, which he formulated as a new mode of power, differently organized than disciplinarity, organized around populations rather than bodies/individuals, concerned with regulation rather than discipline, but often collusive and co-extensive with disciplinarity. Both modes seem to operate in our current world, and perhaps both are relevant to wireless networks. Or maybe wireless networks are a kind of pivot. This would be the question.

There must be someone who has written on this. I don't know who.

kris

Martin Sønderlev Christensen checking in, check it out!

noreply@blogger.com (INCITE) — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 09:23:00 +0000

Hi INCITE aassociates and casual blogreaders. Encouraged by kat I thought I might shortly introduce myself as I have the privilege, not only to have access to this blog, but also currently to be associated with the INCITE group for a couple of months - October and November that is.

I normally reside in Copenhagen, where I’m currently doing the final stages of my PhD at the IT University of Copenhagen, so my visit at Surrey and INCITE is mainly one of getting away on my own for writing, and to see how research is done outside the configuration of my “normal” environment, which on a private note includes wife and two kids.

I should note here that I’m not a sociologist by training or by heart, my background is in Nordic literature and film/media studies – though I have while doing my master degree and within my PhD mainly concerned myself with what “goes on” between people and technology within late modernity from a cultural critic perspective. Including here the macro sociological thinking of Giddens, Beck, Lash and the lot of them. So while I haven’t had the micro-level empirical encounters as I find so prominent within INCITE, and that I have come to acknowledge that I would have liked to do, I do share the critical approach to technology positioned largely in Philosophy of Technology - mainly Andrew Feenbeerg, Don Ihde which in its (post)phenomenological outset has many threads to the works of Latour and Harraway – so the link is there I sense to core INCITE curriculum.

As for my project, it revolves around the concept of affect, which I approach as a central notion that has come to define what people do with and through technology and to some extend also what technology it self has become, an augmentation of our affect, our “outer” body rather than our effective rational one.

Affect is here understood not as a merely emotion, though it does point to the fact that people (formerly known as users) increasingly create, share and coordinate their experiences of everyday life through mobile and social computing. I therefore look at the ubiquitous mobile phones, digital photography sharing, blogs and subtract a number of characteristics from the use of these technologies allowing me to form a “genre” depiction denoted “Personal Affective Media Technologies” and I subdivide my study into three main parts of enquiry:

Firstly, what I call “Affective mediation”, how people connect to other people through technology? Covering mediated communication within social and cultural realm. Secondly "affective attachment", how do people connect to technology? Concerning the design of theses technologies - the interaction and the aesthetics of the genre. And Thirdly “affective augmentation” how do technology connect to people? Enabling me to reform a framework for seeing human technology relations as affect.

Affect here is rather a social and cultural phenomenon that allows us to critically talk about ways that people are enabled or imposed towards new ways of using technology – and to discuss the cultural implications as well as the aesthetical forms that follows from affective technological forms of life, to refrain Scott Lash. As it might be apparent from this the project is way to broad (and someway in between too ambitious and too naïve). Yet I feel it only covers half of the interesting and problematic issues I find in that critically important field where people and technology relations emerge and evolve.

Well that’s pretty much it. Only a few acknowledgement and your free to continue into the blogosphere. I would like to use the opportunity to thank all of INCITE particularly Nina and Katrina for being so open minded and helpful to bring me to UK and into the group, providing me ample space to work, knowing that I might be working from a different tradition and in different ways – it speaks highly for their academic openness and personal kindness. Also to Kris, Gerard, Steve and not least Sandeep for pleasant meetings. Now, it seems like I’m saying goodbye when this was suppose to be hallo.
Well, I’ll be around for another month before head home, so there are still time for more interaction, and if you, dear blogreader, have caught interest in my work OR find it deeply disturbing, you are most welcome to contact me on mach_at_itu.dk.

all the best,

Martin

Via Chicago

noreply@blogger.com (INCITE) — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 15:36:00 +0000

Hello INCITE and Friends of....

Chicago is great. Wish you were here. Autumn turns to Winter.

I carry your sociological sophistication with me, which I embrace and do not renounce, but find myself slightly...what?...relieved to be working with novels and films again—the sort of texts in comparison to which interview transcripts feel very stern to me (I always fear that I won't live up; that I didn't have the capacity to fully honour an interviewee's input). These kinds of texts, in contrast, feel permissive, somehow more promiscuous; which is to say, I feel more promiscuous around them, and promiscuity is good. My first paper is due next week, however, and I wonder if I'll remember how to do it (I'm working with a 19th c. American suffragist "composite" novel called The Sturdy Oak, placed in conversation with a book which I recommend to you all, Jodi Dean's Publicity's Secret).

yours faithfully,
kris

hello from sandeep

noreply@blogger.com (INCITE) — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 14:44:00 +0000

Hello everyone. I am blogging for the very first time. Kat has already mentioned that i have joined as a PhD student in sociology this october and am all bits and bones in these first few weeks. I have a background in film, specializing in animation. I have previously researched two different story-telling traditions in India. In this PhD i will be doing a sociological investigation of story-telling in India, looking at translation of concepts between traditions, rural and urban and focus my concerns on the youth in urban India. Or that is vaguely what it sounds like in my head now. A few sociology books have landed on my desk, the wind has picked up the sails and i might be slowly moving. Sandeep.

October update

noreply@blogger.com (INCITE) — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 14:15:00 +0000

A new school year brings new faces to INCITE. Sandeep joins us as a PhD student from the RCA. He brings oodles of fascinating skills from his background in animation, both in terms of time intensive model and film work and hand drawn computer experience. I will leave it to him to introduce his proposed study into story telling in India soon on the blog. We also have Martin Sønderlev Christensen who is visiting us for two months from Cophenhagen. I hope he too will use the blog to share his current studies and plans for his time in London.

- kat

AoIR 2005 - Internet generations conference

noreply@blogger.com (INCITE) — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 22:37:00 +0000

the bean, originally uploaded by INCITE.

I have just returned from a week in Chicago, where I attended and presented a paper at AoIR 6.0 [the Association of Internet researchers]. Its theme this year was Internet Generations, which like most conference themes was deliberately broad and encouraging of all manner of papers. There were, as usual, an abundance of quantitative researchers who embrace the challenge of documenting who, how many, where and how often people use the internet, blogs and technological tools in numeric form. Whilst I find some of their theories, debates and kaleidoscopic diagrams interesting there is still a significant gulf between their concerns and mine. As Kris noted in his thoughts on AoIR 2004, there is sometimes surprisingly little common ground between papers of similar topics, such as blogging. This is not a complaint. It is actually very useful in contextualising my own work. For instance I was placed in a session called Visuals: Photoblogs and Visual Communication, in which the papers could not have contrasted more. They were not at all what I expected to enage with. One explored photoblogging as a new computerization movement whilst the other looked at socio-communicative orientation of student use of blogs. Both talked in terms of text and numbers and presented ideas in large scale graphs whilst I told stories and used images to describe my work. I am still chewing over how to make sense of these differences in terms of how I see my work and how to frame it in similar circumstances in the future.

I gave a paper about my bus research in which I looked at ways of seeing and researching with and through a blog; how the blog influences the research process and how my research influences the development of the blog. I talked about my experience of using a blog to gather, analyse and present data, about story telling (mine and other peoples via the 73 story blog), about managing multi-facted roles (how to cope with simultaneously being technical, a designer, blogger and researcher) and dealing with the transparency of an online process (how the act of blogging reveals the messy, awkward and ill-fitting fragments of research that are often cleaned and smoothed out in more formal research accounts).

It was an exhausting three and a half days, but I found the conference very useful in terms of how my area of research is being framed by different disciplines. It provided a supportive environment for networking and I found myself in much discussion after and around talks which was as valuable as the talks themselves (and sometimes more due to their brevity). Of particular interest to me was Lilia Efimova's paper on Not Documenting, Doing: Blogging as Research, Sonia Livingstone's keynote Youthful Experts? A Critical Appraisal of Children and Young People's Emerging Internet Literacy, and in terms of my Phd research, Alison Powell's The Politics of Visibilty; Wireless Internet Signals and Control of Urban Space.

Oh, and chicago was incredible. I was there just long enough to start planning ways and means to return.

- kat

Photos Leave Home podcast

noreply@blogger.com (INCITE) — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 18:14:00 +0000

A recording of Kris's excellent seminar Photos Leave Home is now available on the INCITE podcast. The seminar is divided into 2 files, so be sure to download both parts. Copy and paste the following link into your RSS reader or podcatching software:

http://profiles.blipmedia.org/INCITE/podcast.xml

Enjoy!

- Gerard

Nina + One Well Dressed Rum

noreply@blogger.com (INCITE) — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 16:47:00 +0000

Ridiculous
Originally uploaded by Kris Cohen.

Don't be fooled by the perspective. It's neither a pocket-sized Nina nor a Nina-sized rum.

Thanks to Kate Orton-Johnson for the absurdity.

Ethnography and Video

noreply@blogger.com (INCITE) — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 10:45:00 +0000

Hi! This is my first ever blog!

Thanks for having me down to the afternoon at Incite. The discussion with the BBC about the role of ethnography as a tool for business and also its use in education engaged me. Its advantage over market research in business must be an issue that has been debated often and obviously us 'researchers' see the clear benefits. I want to mention more about the use of video when carrying out field work for clients. Having currently spent four months at PDD I’ve been heavily involved in camera work, logging, editing and clip making of field work footage. The qualitative research done here is often contextual interviews and observational research and less 'true' academic style ethnography due to time restrictions and budgets. Filming field work and just handing over the footage to a client is no use at all. At PDD a structure is put in place around video work. After filiming the tapes are then captured into a software called Convera. This software allows you to make notes alongside relevant frames of the footage. Once a whole film has been logged with supporting text it’s easy to find themes and interesting points to refer back to. The technique supports field notes effectively and can make analysis easier as all footage has been covered. Convera is also a good archiving system, storing all video data and allowing a designer or engineer for example to do a word search and find relevant video, even footage taken two years ago.

Once an analysis has been formed key areas in the video footage can be quickly allocated due to previous logging then extracted and edited to make data rich clips. Several clips can help to build up a case nicely. Showing these clips in a client presentation not only supports the analysis but also allows the client to enter into the context in a more sensory way. It’s a type of visual proof of the work done. Using selective film adds a more ‘real life’ presence to a presentation and captivates the audience. It certainly brings alive a dull PowerPoint!

Although time consuming and quite costly I do believe video can be an important tool in qualitative field work especially when you are trying to present certain points and themes in your fieldwork in an engaging manner.

Tamsin Smith
tamsin@ukcreative.co.uk

an INCITE afternoon

noreply@blogger.com (INCITE) — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 07:22:00 +0000

INCITE is hosting an afternoon of talks, discussion, food and farewells tomorrow. Starting with Kris's seminar about his ESRC study - Photo's Leave Home - departmental staff, special guests from PDD, BBC and the RCA, INCITE researchers and other students will then descend upon the INCITE room to talk projects, ideas and other nerdy technological things over nibbles.

This is Kris's last official task prior to leaving the UK to start his PhD in the Art History Department at the University of Chicago. He has been with INCITE for over three years as a Research Fellow, teaching, researching and generally particpating in the Department, and for the last year he has run his own ESRC research grant. So the afternoon will wrap up with farewell drinks, presents and general emotional outpourings. His enthusiasm for ideas, responsiveness to other people's projects, supportive presence and more (including his uncanny ability to talk theory whilst running up hills) - will be widely missed. We are all very sad to see him go.

Here is an overview of his seminar.

"Photos Leave Home"
I'm at the end of a one-year ESRC study of personal (aka snapshot, aka amateur) photography and its newly massive presence on the internet. The questions I was asking were less about why anyone would want to put their personal photographs online in the first place (although I have a little bit to say about the popularity and prevalence‹the apparent irresistability‹of that particular question) and more about the effects that this efflorescence of (a certain kind of) photography might be having on our ideas about what photography is and does. I'm in the process of writing a series of three papers, one of which addresses popular reactions to this ourpouring of heretofore sequestered (or privatised) photography, one of which addresses itself to the previous sociological literature on photography, and the last of which discusses these phenomena within a history and theory of images. Here, I'll be primarily focused on the second of these papers, which considers photographs as *public* rather than social entities.

More about his project can be found on his blog.

- kat

Colour After Klein

noreply@blogger.com (INCITE) — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 16:02:00 +0000

INCITE and friends of INCITE: I'd like to draw your attention to the Barbican Gallery's Colour After Klein show, and especially to the pieces by Sophie Calle and (most especially) Anri Sala, both of which usefully and thoughtfully employ interviews in the creation and presentation of the work.

I'll say more...tomorrow...or sometime.

Anri Sala: I'd never heard of her, but, wow. Her piece Lakkat is as sublimely non-representational (anti- and un-familiar) as a Luc Ferrari composition, while every bit as richly expository as a Susan Sontag essay.

-kris

Low-fi: new works by international artists using networked media

noreply@blogger.com (INCITE) — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 09:02:00 +0000

We over at low-fi, in collaboration with Stills (Edinburgh) and the 6 commissioned artists, have launched our show: Low-fi: new works by international artists using networked media. Not one for entirely gratuitous self-aggrandisement, I'd (Kris would) think the works in the show would be interesting, relevant or useful to INCITE simpaticos. Dealing as they do with networks and addressing questions like: how to materialise them and to what ends, what are they, how are they tendentiously revealed and/or dissembled, what are our options for interacting with them, in what ways do we value them and what ways do we lack for doing so (anew). Have a wee look:

6 August – 02 October 2005
Open daily 11am – 6pm

Stills, 23 Cockburn St, Edinburgh, EH1 1BP

Mauricio Arango (Colombia/US) www.low-fi.org.uk/vanishingpoint
Cavan Convery (UK) www.low-fi.org.uk/verticalscroll
James Coupe (UK) www.difference-engine.net
Radarboy (South Africa/Japan) www.radarboy.com/zoo
Kate Rich (UK) www.feraltrade.org/courier/
UK Museum of Ordure (UK) www.museum-ordure.org.uk/Audio_Library

Low-fi commissions exist to support the production of new artworks that use networked technologies. Although these artworks thrive on the internet, in this exhibition the artists use sound, projection and other methods to inhabit the physical space of the gallery. They work in tangible, engaging and sensory ways to convey ideas about our relationships with the media, technology and digital and commercial networks.

Among the works, Kate Rich forges new routes of import while Mauricio Arango's map of the world reveals how international news media is creating new cartography. James Coupe's sound installation dispenses wisdom gathered from metaphysical travels on the net, while the UK Museum of Ordure invite you to add to their gradually degrading sound files.
Throughout the exhibition, the works react and grow in response to visitors' input - unroll familiar contemporary technologies as one would ancient scrolls in Cavan Convery's Vertical Scroll and take responsibility for the maintenance of radarboy's Big Five Digital Zoo.

Low-fi is an artist collective focused on net art, mediation and distribution systems. www.low-fi.org.uk

IVSA conference, dublin

noreply@blogger.com (INCITE) — Sat, 06 Aug 2005 08:49:00 +0000

park-bench, originally uploaded by INCITE.

I have just spent two days at the IVSA - International Visual Sociology Association - conference held at Trinity College in Dublin. The theme this year - Re-viewing Bodies: Embodiment, Process and Change. It was a smallish conference, contained in three rooms in the Arts building in the College, which meant there was a good chance to meet, talk to and regularly run into people whose projects, writings and images provide much inspiration for my current wrangling with concepts of visual representation in the context of sociological methods, analysis and presentation. Highlights for me included;

- meeting, talking and eating with David Gauntlett- known for his many web projects via Theory.org.uk - Theory Action figures, Trading Cards, A drawing a day, Lego theorists. Unfortunately his paper (about work that encourages people to make their own visuals) and my flight coincided on Thursday afternoon. But we found other time to talk about, amongst other things, the making of sociological objects and I discovered that even though I often slip a little origami into my bus work, he somehow gets to play ‘seriously’ with lego. very cool.

-Elizabeth Chaplin’s paper posed a challenge to the ways in which images are embedded in sociological theory. She introduced, through the books of W.G Sebald, the idea of the caption-less image, and argued that the released image derives new meaning from surrounding text, engaging in different forms of dialogue when it is unrestrained. Discussion about this idea emerged in other panels during the conference, some people openly challenged by it, others interested in pushing it further still. I interpreted it in the context of electronic rather than traditional publishing. In calling for the embedding of the image in text, the layout and design become much more important – something I became acutely aware of when working on my site and blog.

- Dona Schwarz presented her In the Kitchen photo project, now in its third year, which documents the mundane, everyday and wonderfully ordinary activities that occur in her kitchen.

Caroline Knowles and Doug Harper presented in tandem, words and images, voices and interpretations, delicately interwoven in the presentation and in the research about how we 'do' race and ethnicity in post colonial landscapes.

- Beckie Coleman and Monica Moreno of Goldsmiths (who were part of the recent INCITE design/sociology collaboration experiment) also gave papers. Beckie presented images assembled by girls in her studies about bodies and media images. And Monica powerfully argued against showing images of bodies of Mexican women in her analysis of practices of racism.

I presented a paper -Visible bodies, Invisible technology: the making and shaping wifi in the city - which explored how the body, physical place and digital space are configured in visual representations of wifi zones. It is the first paper I have given that relates to my new studies - the first to move away from more familiar bus territory - so it involved a reasonably anxious build up (thank you to both Kris and Nina for listening to me drivel on about it up till the day before) and an adrenalin/relief high to finally give it and receive supportive feedback from the audience.

-kat

on kris and day to day data

noreply@blogger.com (INCITE) — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 18:15:00 +0000

Last Thursday Nina and I had the opportunity to see the exhibition that Kris has been involved with - Day to Day Data. You can read his specially commissioned essay here which cleverly entangles the individual works, considering their processes, interpretations and concerns, with his current research into publics, everyday data and representation.

The show presents and dicusses the imaginative, intriguing and compelling compulsion to catalogue, classify and map in all manner of forms everyday data so often disregarded or overseen in our daily lives. The very unique and often humorous taxonomy reminds me of Jorge Luis Borges's description of an encyclopedia in which animals are divided into: (1) those that belong to the Emperor, (2) embalmed ones, (3) those that are trained, (4) suckling pigs, (5) mermaids, (6) fabulous ones, (7) stray dogs, (8) those included in the present classification, (9) those that tremble as if they were mad, (10) innumerable ones, (11) those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (12) others, (13) those that have just broken a flower vase, (14) those that from a long way off look like flies.

The exhibition features the work of twenty artists – some specially commissioned for the gallery, some for the stunning publication and others only available online. If you can’t get to Nottingham to see the show before July 20th, then be sure to catch it in September in Portsmouth or when it comes to London in March 2006.

-kat

On Sound

noreply@blogger.com (INCITE) — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 05:28:00 +0000

link for Gerard

The Nina Dispatches

noreply@blogger.com (INCITE) — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 15:41:00 +0000

posted by purse lip square jaw

silent reflections

noreply@blogger.com (INCITE) — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 13:12:00 +0000

I’ve been reading Haunted Weather: Music, Silence and Memory by David Toop these last couple of days (thanks for the tip off Kris!). It’s really got me thinking about silence not as the absence as noise, but as something altogether different. It’s not an absence at all, since true silence is impossible, at least within our atmosphere. In seeking to achieve silence we only succeed in revealing more and more levels of noise, uncovering the sounds which underlie our everyday. The hum of a refrigerator, the far off bark of a dog, those sounds which go unperceived, or a least remain unnoticed. Any soundscape can therefore be seen as a complexly layered palimpsest. Peel away one of these layers and it reveals another layer of sound, our perception like a pyramid, focusing only on the point of forgrounded sounds, whilst less and less attention is paid the closer to the base (bass) of that pyramid we go.

Social silence, noisy silence, deafening silence. Whilst music fills the air (and the ear) with noise, in doing so it often reduces the listener to silence. Does music cover silence or does it uncover silence?

The opposite of noise isn’t silence, the opposite of noise is listening.

- Gerard

herzog & de meuron models

noreply@blogger.com (INCITE) — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 13:14:00 +0000

Mobile(72a), originally uploaded by INCITE.

inscriptions, maps, models and mess

noreply@blogger.com (INCITE) — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 12:28:00 +0000

In my study of wifi networks (in particular how wifi is made political, public, social and a site of resistance and power) I have been undertaking a critique of how representations and in particular inscriptions are used in sociological research. The concept of inscriptions, the devices that produce them and the practices in which they are embedded form a framework for much sociological analysis of representations in science and technology and I have been keen to see how I might learn from these approaches. From early ethnographic studies in the scientific laboratory (Latour and Woolgar 1979) to later research focused on scientists and the entire laboratory itself (Latour 1983, Lynch 1985, Law 1986, Knorr Cetina 1999) to technological design and innovation studies (Callon 1986, Cockburn and Ormrod 1993, Bijker 1997) and even the visual culture of engineers (Henderson 1999), despite their methodological differences, all share an interest in how scientific fact or technological artefacts are socially constructed. In general they deal with the various ways machines or the configuration of artefacts produce an inscription, how it travels along a defined process, enrols actors along the way and is ultimately used to persuade others within and beyond the walls of the laboratory or office. People do ‘jobs’ with inscriptions so irrespective of their content they present a juncture for the study of the complex network of actions, practices and interactions.

Ok. But how does this relate to my work? Well I have been looking at the wifi node maps created by volunteer wifi community groups – in particular Consume.net - and considering the ways in which these representations make wifi political. One aspect (amongst many) that I find interesting is the way in which inscriptions clean up and are cleaned of the messy, complex and largely repetitive design/experiment/information process. For example once Latour and Woolgar (1979) understood the inscription process they saw the laboratory more clearly. No longer was it a messy, complex and complicated site. They started to see individual actions, objects and activities as processes from which inscriptions in the form of texts, charts, graphs and more were created. ‘Thus the observer could even make sense of such obscure activities as a technician grinding the brains of rats, by realising that the eventual end product of such activity might be a highly valued diagram’ (1979: 52). Nice, huh! These inscriptions were then cleaned of the residue of everyday experiments, removed from repetitive painstaking procedures and used as objects of power to influence and persuade others.

This brings me to the actual point of my post - the current Tate Modern exhibition featuring the many sketches and models of architects Herzog & de Meuron. Situated in the Turbine Hall the exhibition reveals ‘the by-products or ‘waste’ produced during the course of the architect’s work’. Whilst many things are still cleaned and thus concealed, such as gender relations and the everyday rhythms of the process, much more of the everyday mess of 'doing architecture' is on show. The exhibition blurb says:

‘Made of an astonishing range of materials, these artefacts tell the story of how ideas take shape and form, through a complex process of experimentation and detour, to evolve a new architectural language for building.’

An abundance of architectural models, design sketches, castings, die cuts, shapes and textures cover a series of tabletops. All sorts of materials are represented; glass, paper, cardboard, fibreglass, plastic, foam, wood in all sorts of configurations from the abstracted idea right through to the scaled model (but not necessarily in a linear fashion). Materials on each table, with a little imagination describe a path through which ideas were formed but there are no climax shots, no images of finished objects. The sheer amount of material (over 1000 models) illustrates how important modelling is in the process of design to architects. And these are only the ones that were deemed of value to keep, unlike these ones spotted by Dan in bins outside the AA, which leads into a whole other post .... but it's an exhibition well worth seeing. It's on till 29th August.

- kat

ZKM exhibition: Making Things Public II

noreply@blogger.com (INCITE) — Sun, 12 Jun 2005 11:32:00 +0000

Here's my brief response to the exhibition we all went to see last month at ZKM in Karlsruhe - Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy.

First of all it was a pleasure to be introduced to the exhibition by Bruno Latour who briefly explained the flow of ideas, overall structural intent and the ‘phantom public’ piece which I will talk more on later. The exhibition is a gargantuan undertaking; 100 pieces of work from artists, scientists, sociologists, philosophers and historians all tasked with rejuvenating ‘the political in the name of arts and sciences’. Many pieces are collaborative experiments and thus timely to view given our recent collaboration with RCA design students. In fact we had been introduced to one of the pieces on display - Pindices; Demonstrating Matters of Public Concern by Lucy Kimbell (in collaboration with Andrew Barry) - only a week before and I was eager to see this work in context of other representations. I am also currently reading and thinking on how wifi is made political by different groups so was interested in the curators notions of ‘assemblies that are not political in the customary sense and yet assemble a public around things that are controversial and therefore political’. I definitely recommend a viewing of it – it is open till August – and try to allocate at least one full day if not two starting both with a good solid German breakfast.

In my brief review of the exhibition I agree and also don't agree with kris’ call for 'more disputation' (see below).

I too found the show interesting in terms of structure as well as content. The division of four zones and a further 13 sections provides a strong narrative for the many works and a foundation for curatorial decisions. It is a structure that neither leads the viewer in a linear path nor frees them to explore unencumbered. The viewer is caught in a web of simultaneously wanting to experience the exhibition as a whole, engage with the thematic introductory essays and the pieces together as well as appreciate them individually whilst bringing to bear personal interests. And as mentioned there is an awful lot of it to work around and through. Thus the experience can at times feel overwhelming and exhausting. On these accounts and others I agree with the desire for more disputation within and between individual pieces for the purpose of drawing out individual voices.

However is not the concept of democracy a collage of many voices - the good and the bad, the weak and the strong, the interesting and the dull, the confident and the misguided - each having an opportunity to speak in some form at some time? As the curators remind us the exhibition is an 'assembly of assemblies’ and thus a space for representation of many things that may or may not interest us and do not necessarily complete a smooth and neat and always easy to interpret picture of society. Politics resides in a lot of places, not always where you expect to find it.

So perhaps in this way the melee of voices, blurred and occasionally complicated navigation and multi-layers of information works to establish the context for our accepted ruling systems. Perhaps the structure of the exhibition (as well as its contents) presents us with an ‘atmosphere of a democracy’ to make us question a number of things like; Is this how it should be? What is our role as viewers, as participants and as citizens? And how do we decipher, act upon and dispute this kind of information in this context?

It's how I now see (on reflection) the idea of the 'phantom public' piece. Though a little nebulous at first when you are actually in the space, upon gaining time and distance on the experience I have come to see it more clearly. The ‘phantom public’ is a digital artwork that captures a sense of an individual visitors presence via their RFID entrance tag and collates and translates this information into a constantly changing rhythmic collage of light and sound throughout the space.

‘You will leave countless traces during your time in the exhibition; these activate the “phantom public” and this phantom in turn leaves it’s mark in the visitor’s mind. Without ever being completely clear about this, visitors will be both actors in an invisible artwork and a screen for its projections; it is an artwork that aspires to realize a new community.’

It is this idea of influencing the conditions of democracy on a personal individual level inadvertently by unconscious or habitual actions that I find potent and tangible - because so often (especially in this country of non-compulsory voting) there is the assumption that one person alone cannot make a difference.

- kat

A work in progress

noreply@blogger.com (INCITE) — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 18:48:00 +0000

We are in the process of a design spring clean of the blog - so please bear with us as we lose and try to re-find things that fall off. thanks

- kat