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FCJ-216 ‘Know Your Place’: headmap manifesto and the Vision of Locative Media
Dale Leorke Melbourne School of Design, The University of Melbourne [Abstract] What is the point of all the extraordinary technical inventions the world now has at its disposal if the conditions are lacking to derive any benefit from them, if they contribute nothing to leisure, if imagination is absent? Constant Nieuwenhuys, ‘Another City for Another Life’ (2006/1960: 71) Introduction When the headmap manifesto first appeared in 1999, Google was barely a year old, the U.S. government had not yet removed the GPS signal degradation that prevented its widespread commercial use, and Apple’s iPhone was still almost a decade away. Predominantly written by computer engineer Ben Russell, headmap (always spelt in lower case, although I capitalise it here when beginning a sentence) envisioned a world not entirely unlike the one we inhabit today, in which location-aware devices have radically transformed everyday life. It foreshadows recent developments from the emergence of location-based…
FCJ-213 Babylonian Dreams: From Info-Cities to Smart Cities to Experimental Collectivism
Clemens Apprich Leuphana University, Lüneburg. [Abstract] Welcome to post-liberal Los Angeles, where the defense of luxury lifestyles is translated into proliferation of new repressions in space and movement, undergirded by the ubiquitous “armed response”. This obsession with physical security systems, and, collaterally, with the architectural policing of social boundaries, has become a zeitgeist of urban restructuring, a master narrative in the emerging built environment of the 1990s. […] Images of carceral inner cities (Escape from New York, Running Man), high-tech police death squads (Blade Runner), sentient buildings (Die Hard), urban bantustans (They live!), Vietnam-like street wars (Colors), and so on, only extrapolate from actually existing trends. (Davis, 1990: 223) In his bestselling book City of Quartz, Mike Davis, urban sociologist and rigorous chronicler of his Southern California home, described the imminent end of the ‘California Dream’ in the early 1990s (cf. Davis, 1990). By ‘excavating the future in Los Angeles’…
FCJ-215 Demoing unto Death: Smart Cities, Environment, and Preemptive Hope
Orit HalpernDepartment of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University Gökçe GünelSchool of Middle Eastern and North African Studies, University of Arizona [Abstract] Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living.(Nicholas Negroponte, 1995: 6) Today, growing concerns with climate change, energy scarcity, security, and economic collapse have turned the focus of urban planners, investors, and governments towards infrastructure as a site of value production and potential salvation from a world consistently defined by catastrophes and crisis. From discussions about ‘disaster capitalism’ to the embrace of a world after humans, the idea that some environmental, economic, or security catastrophe has arrived, or will arrive, is almost unquestioned. In response, there has emerged a new paradigm of high technology infrastructure development obsessed with ‘smart’, ‘ubiquitous’, or ‘resilient’ infrastructures. Such smartness and resilience must be understood as quite specific as it directly refers to computationally and digitally-managed systems – from electrical grids…
FCJ-217 Socio-Technical Imaginaries of a Data-Driven City: Ethnographic Vignettes from Delhi
Sandeep MertiaThe Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi [Abstract] Several decades from now cities will have countless autonomous, intelligently functioning IT systems that will have perfect knowledge of users’ habits and energy consumption, and provide optimum service … The goal of such a city is to optimally regulate and control resources by means of autonomous IT systems. (Siemens Corporation cited in Greenfield, 2013: 12) Do you, as a city, objectify the most sophisticated knowledge in a physical landscape of extraordinary complexity, power and splendour at the same time as you bring together social forces capable of the most amazing socio-technical and political innovation? (Matthew Fuller, 2012) ‘Smarter Solutions for a Better Tomorrow’ was the tagline for the 1st Smart City India Expo organised in Delhi, 20-22 May 2015. Ravish Kumar, a veteran Hindi journalist, covered the expo in his popular television news show. During a ‘City…
FCJ-221 Collecting Elements of a Minor Future: Commoning in Alphabet City
Soenke Zehle xm:lab – Experimental Media Lab, Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar, Germany [Abstract] Much more than an exercise in urban development, the smart city is the harbinger of a providential processuality, announcing yet another machine age of algorithmic architectures. Marked by the missionary rhetoric and sense of manifest destiny immanent in the infrastructural informatisation of vast cartographies of communication, it is the cloud-based ‘city upon a hill’ of an imperial imagination, coupling the terraforming of the topographies of life and labor with visions of technological transcendence. In this Alphabet City, there is a multitude of folds to map, but no strategic hill to scale – and only non-places to plant the flags of a new regime. The didactic fictions that organise the semiotics and socialities of ‘smart citizenship’ are epic in scope, confronting us with the open worlds of a distribution beyond reaggregation. As ambient media changes and challenges…
FCJ-211 Embodying a Future for the Future: Creative Robotics and Ecosophical Praxis
Keith Armstrong Queensland University of Technology [Abstract] Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss (1995) defined ecosophy as a form of personal, relational and intersubjective philosophy, or a guiding series of principles, which he contrasted with the discipline(s) of ecophilosophy. Ecosophy was subsequently developed by a number of commentators, notably Félix Guattari (1995) who categorised it as a relational process that draws upon interconnected networks of mind, society and environment. My own synthesis, or ecosophical undertaking, is contexualised within the aegis of experimental arts practices, comingled over the past 22 years with diverse historical tendencies in new media arts and net art. In response to societal and environmental imperatives, I have evolved an approach to thinking and working that I call ecosophical, and that involves scoping out a relational, interactive, embodied and interdisciplinary series of interventions that interrogate cultural conditions. This process has involved a broad swathe of media and approaches, and in…
FCJ-210 Falling Robots.
Lian Loke The University of Sydney [Abstract] Falling is not usually viewed as a desirable act for humanoid robots, as it can lead to damage and injury of people, things and the robot itself. This article explores how falling can be viewed as an aesthetic, creative, and indeed desirable act, through positioning it within the disciplines of dance and choreography. Strategies for falling safely in dance are compared with engineering approaches to controlling falling for bipedal robots. By this comparison, the article identifies two main areas in which an aesthetic approach to movement might be used to extend falling strategies for humanoid robots. Studying and categorising reflexes used by dancers and humanoid robots in falling, the article proposes that particular reflexes be used as common ground in developing a more communicative language for moving, falling and performing robots. Then, by playing with parameters of movement as dancers and choreographers do,…
FCJ-209 Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Pattern Thinking: An Expanded Analysis of the First Indigenous Robotics Prototype Workshop
Angie Abdilla Robert Fitch The University of Sydney [Abstract] https://fibreculturejournal.org/AbdillaFitch.mp4 Introduction It could seem to some that Indigenous Knowledge is fundamentally at odds with the contemporary digital age, and with Western society’s thirst and demand for new knowledge to be constantly generated. Furthermore, it would also seem diametrically opposed to science-led ventures into the Brave New World of technological advancement in the field of robotics. Yet, precisely at this juxtaposition a commonality can be drawn. How might we create a space for Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Pattern Thinking to impact and influence future developments in, for example, autonomous systems in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI)? Creating a physical and pedagogical space for an initial foray into these ideas, the Indigenous Robotics Prototype Workshop embarked on practical and creative experimentation along new Indigenous Digital Songlines. This paper is formatted as a dialogue between the lead author, an Indigenous consultant in innovation,…
FCJ-208 This Machine Could Bite: On the Role of Non-Benign Art Robots
Paul GranjonCardiff School of Art and Design, Cardiff Metropolitan University [Abstract] This paper explores the phenomenon of social robots from the perspective of an electronic artist, a practitioner making robots and other machines within an artistic context. My art objects are vehicles for reflecting on the co-evolution of humans and machines, a reflection informed by observation and experience. Intelligent robots are of particular interest to my practice as they combine mobility, service, social interaction and adaptive skills so as to integrate with the fabric of human society as embodied semi-autonomous agents. They also have captured the imagination of a wide public through works of fiction, wherein advanced robot characters have been commonplace for many decades. People, it appears, are curious about the capabilities of intelligent robots. Buoyed by techno-scientific progress and financial interest, the field of robotics is fast gaining visibility and maturity, undergoing a tremendous development effort for research,…
FCJ-207 Game On: A Creative Enquiry into Agency and the Nature of Cognition in Distributed Systems
Michaela Davies [Abstract] Introduction The focus of this paper is a participatory artwork, Game On, which is a boxing “game” where one participant can control the actions of another via electric muscle stimulation. [1] The paper explores Game On as a creative enquiry into agency and the nature of cognition in distributed systems. Game On explores what happens to agency in a system where embodied experience is disrupted or extended, based on the understanding that a sense of personal agency is created through actions, and that the actions of others influence our understanding of ourselves as separate from them. Participatory artworks like Game On can be viewed as a form of performative research, creating a system which is analogous in some ways to states of affairs outside that system. [2] In this way, Game On does more than represent possibility: it enables an exploration, in real time and space, of…
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