article
FCJ-206 From Braitenberg’s Vehicles to Jansen’s Beach Animals: Towards an Ecological Approach to the Design of Non-Organic Intelligence
Maaike BleekerUtrecht University [Abstract] For more than twenty years now, Dutch artist and engineer Theo Jansen has been invested in the development of new, non-organic species that he refers to as Strandbeesten, which in English translates to “beach animals”. His beach animals are creatures constructed from plastic conduit normally used to house electric cables, ropes, plastic bottles and pieces of sailcloth. He describes them as ‘skeletons that are able to walk on the wind’. They are called ‘animals’, yet they are completely inorganic. They use the wind to propel themselves and require no other fuel or food. Over time, Jansen has managed to develop creatures that are increasingly capable of ‘surviving’ on their own. His ideal plan is to put the beach animals out in herds on the beaches and have them live their own ‘life’. [1] The intricate complexity and transparency of the beach animals, and the precision of…
FCJ-205 Life and Labour of Rovers on Mars: Toward Post-Terrestrial Futures of Creative Robotics
Katarina DamjanovUniversity of Western Australia [Abstract] Curiosity rises early; it is bitterly cold on Mars at around 5am when NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) wakes up the rover with a different popular tune each day (from Hit the Road Jack and Walking on Sunshine to the Beastie Boys’ Intergalactic and the Star Wars theme), and delivers it a list of its daily tasks. Curiosity then sets out through the dust haze enfolding the rusty terrain scorched by solar winds and galactic cosmic rays on its busy schedule to explore the red planet. Rolling on its six wheels across the uneven floor of the Gale Crater, the 2.2 metre tall, 2.3 metre wide and 2.9 metre long rover searches for clues about Mars’ habitability. It uses instruments such as hazard avoidance cameras, an Alpha particle X-ray spectrometer and a radiation detector to navigate its Martian environment, sense it, measure its various properties…
FCJ-204 Degrees of Freedom
Elena Knox Waseda University. [Abstract] This paper critiques a choreographed performance of embodied agency by a ‘very humanlike’ (Ishiguro, 2006) gynoid robot. It draws on my experience at the Creative Robotics Lab, UNSW Australia, in 2013, with Actroid-F (or Geminoid-F), designed by ATR Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories [1], when I created six artworks making up Actroid Series I (2015). My analysis here proceeds from and through the part-programmed, part-puppeteered actions and vocalisations of Actroid-F in my six-minute video Radical Hospitality, in which the robotic gynoid actor performs compound negotiations of embodied authority, docility, and compliance. All six artworks in the series seek to induce moments of feminist hyper-awareness, or cognitive lysis (Randolph, 2001), that work against the normalisation of instilling gendered societal restrictions into humanoid robots via their embodiments and functionalities. I contend that the forthcoming devolution to ‘very humanlike’ androids of work in the domain of hospitality will draw upon,…
FCJ-202 Simulated Wars, Virtual Engagements
Seimeng Lai University of New South Wales at Canberra Scott Sharpe University of New South Wales at Canberra [Abstract] Pixelated Camouflage The television personality, Richard Hammond, was offered a rare glimpse into the life of a tank operator in an episode of Richard Hammonds’ Crash Course, which featured him training on the U.S. Military’s Abrams Tank. Immediately after his first few simulation training sessions as a tank gunner, Hammond exits the tank simulator and exasperatedly remarks, ‘I… see why you practice it in here …that was really hard!’. In reply, the gunnery sergeant quips ‘Yes, if we would have done that on the [gunnery] range …somebody would have gotten fired… That is why we spend a lot of hours in here’ (Mesirow, 2013). We have here an environment in which habits are learned and relearned. With so-called military precision, simulators enable the learning of occupations to become second nature. Such…
FCJ-200 When Memes Go to War: Viral Propaganda in the 2014 Gaza-Israel Conflict
Chris Rodley University of Sydney [Abstract] You won’t believe what #Hamas was hiding in a mosque! Retweet if you are outraged! #IsraelUnderFire #HamasWarCrimes (@IsraelUnderFire, 2014, August 1) In one of his best-known provocations, Jean Baudrillard (1995) declared that the Gulf War of 1991 did not take place. For Baudrillard, the idea of the war broadcast to Western audiences by media organisations such as CNN was merely a ‘masquerade of information’, and what actually took place on the ground in Iraq was not a war at all but a horrifying ‘disfiguration of the world’ (40). In other words, the semiotic rendering of the conflict by the mass media was a simulacrum with no relationship to its supposed referent. Much has changed in the 24 years since Baudrillard’s essay series was first published. The discourse network which mediates our understanding of war – that array of technologies and institutions enabling information to be…
FCJ-199 Modelling Systemic Racism: Mobilising the Dynamics of Race and Games in Everyday Racism
Robbie Fordyce University of Melbourne Timothy Neale University of Western Sydney Tom Apperley University of New South Wales [Abstract] Preface On the 15th of April, 1914, one Mr. Francis James Shaw, of 23 White Street, Melbourne, applied for, and was granted, a copyright for the White Australia Game. This boardgame was to be played by two players, one person playing ‘the White Men,’ the other playing ‘the Coloured Men.’ These names did not, of course, simply refer to the colour of the pieces, but represented the ethnic identity of either colonists or the Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders targeted by the ‘White Australia Policy’ after 1901 (Lake and Reynolds 2008). Players had four tokens on each side, and points were given depending on how far one moved their pieces. While today the National Archives of Australia holds gameplay instructions, a board for gameplay, and copyright information, there is little known…
FCJ-199 Modelling Systemic Racism: Mobilising the Dynamics of Race and Games in Everyday Racism
Robbie FordyceUniversity of MelbourneTimothy NealeUniversity of Western SydneyTom ApperleyUniversity of New South Wales [Abstract] Preface On the 15th of April, 1914, one Mr. Francis James Shaw, of 23 White Street, Melbourne, applied for, and was granted, a copyright for the White Australia Game. This boardgame was to be played by two players, one person playing ‘the White Men,’ the other playing ‘the Coloured Men.’ These names did not, of course, simply refer to the colour of the pieces, but represented the ethnic identity of either colonists or the Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders targeted by the ‘White Australia Policy’ after 1901 (Lake and Reynolds 2008). Players had four tokens on each side, and points were given depending on how far one moved their pieces. While today the National Archives of Australia holds gameplay instructions, a board for gameplay, and copyright information, there is little known about the commercial fate of…
FCJ-199 Modelling Systemic Racism: Mobilising the Dynamics of Race and Games in Everyday Racism
Robbie Fordyce University of Melbourne Timothy Neale University of Western Sydney Tom Apperley University of New South Wales [Abstract] Preface On the 15th of April, 1914, one Mr. Francis James Shaw, of 23 White Street, Melbourne, applied for, and was granted, a copyright for the White Australia Game. This boardgame was to be played by two players, one person playing ‘the White Men,’ the other playing ‘the Coloured Men.’ These names did not, of course, simply refer to the colour of the pieces, but represented the ethnic identity of either colonists or the Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders targeted by the ‘White Australia Policy’ after 1901 (Lake and Reynolds 2008). Players had four tokens on each side, and points were given depending on how far one moved their pieces. While today the National Archives of Australia holds gameplay instructions, a board for gameplay, and copyright information, there is little known…
FCJ-198 New International Information Order (NIIO) Revisited: Global Algorithmic Governance and Neocolonialism
Danny ButtUniversity of Melbourne [Abstract] At the beginning of the 20th century, competing global telegraph networks struggled to monopolise the international circulation of information. Governments did not nationalise the cable industry (as they had telephony and the postal system) and even at the peak of “new imperialism” in 1910 only 20% of the world’s cable networks were state-owned (Winseck and Pike, 2009: 33). European governments instead used infrastructural subsidies to promote their telecommunication aims. Yet during this period of technological expansion and militarisation — perhaps relevant to our own — the nation state was far from hands off, as the market leading Marconi company discovered. Their resistance to wartime government control of their infrastructure led to the expropriation of their US assets. While the US Navy patriotically painted Marconi British puppets, Marconi’s bid for the troubled Reuters agency in England also failed due to political interference: the British Government secretly…
FCJ-197 Entanglements with Media and Technologies in the Occupy Movement
Megan Boler OISE/University of Toronto Jennie Phillips OISE/University of Toronto [Abstract] Introduction: Fighting Fire with Fire: Entanglements between Corporate-Owned Platforms and Activist Social Media Practices The digital era has seen activists around the world use social media platforms and information and communication technologies (ICTs) for social movement organising. Activist uses of corporate-owned social media platforms (from Facebook and Twitter to YouTube) and digital tools (including smart phones and digital cameras) support unprecedented coordination of local and global movements. However, these hybrid (online and offline) social movements [1] produce frictions that reveal discrepancies between the risks and promises of corporate-owned networks. This is certainly the case with social movements concerned with economic inequality, such as the Occupy movement, where such uses can benefit the very corporations the movement seeks to dethrone. Regardless of how one measures the roles and successes of social media in the context of activism, the uses of…
Future Issues and Archives
Connections
- ARCDigital
- C-Theory
- Cntr History & New Media
- CoDE
- Computational Culture
- Cosmos and History
- Ctrl-Z
- Culture Machine
- Digital Culture and Ed…
- Digital Humanities Alliance
- Digital Studies
- Eludamos
- Film-Philosophy
- First Monday
- Future of the Book
- Hyperrhiz
- Inflexions
- Institute of Net Cultures
- Jrnal Digital Information
- Junctures
- nmediac
- Noema
- Open Humanities Alliance
- Open Humanities Press
- Parrhesia
- Public Library of Science
- Sarai
- Transformations
- Vague Terrain
