Abstracts
KEYNOTE I
Lucy Suchman
Lancaster University
Situational Awareness in a Time of Networked Media
KEYNOTE II
Volker Wulf
University of Siegen
A Practise-based Approach to the Design of Socially Embedded Technologies
Computer applications are getting increasingly interwoven in everyday life. To build these applications, we need to take the distinct practices of their (potential) users into account. I will frame the talk by developing a practise-based perspective on the design of socially embedded technologies. Based on this perspective, I will suggest methodological and epistemological challenges.
To deal with these challenges, I suggest building a collection of well documented design case studies. Conducting a design case study is a high context specific research activity which consists of three steps: (1) it analyzes empirically the given practices in a specific field of application, (2) it comes up with an innovative design for an ICT artifact related to the findings of the first phase, (3) it investigates into the appropriation of the technical artifact over a longer period of time. Based on a growing corpus of design case studies, we identify cross-cutting themes, compare the context-specific findings, build terminology, and try to develop abstractions as elements of a theory of practice-based computing.
To clarify this research framework, I will present two design case studies conducted at the University of Siegen. We are developing innovative applications of ubiquitous computing for two distinct domains: (1) to support the work of fire-brigades in burning building, (2) to help care takers to find dementia patents who suffer from the wandering syndrom.
Research in these particular domains is presented first in its particular context and later on compared with each other and related insights. Finally, I will conclude by discussing further research challenges when taking a practise-based view on computing.
Fieldworkers of our own lives: developing approaches to Citizen Social Science and public anthropology
Alexandra Albert
The aim of this paper is to investigate the potential for citizen social science based methods to renew how people make sense of the world and how they produce data to inform research on intractable social issues. The research examines existing approaches to citizen science and its potential for mobile, inventive methods in social science. It considers how citizens are positioned in the process of making sense of everyday life. It explores the notion that citizen social science embraces description and classification(Bowker and Star, 1999) and critical descriptive sociology (Savage and Burrows, 2007). As people document their everyday lives in ever-greater detail, are they also adding an analytical orientation to their observations and can they use and interpret this data? Are they in effect becoming ‘fieldworkers’ of their own lives? What are the implications for the future of social science research?
‘Citizen social science’ can be perceived as volunteer observers gathering data for use in social science research in a highly structured and systematic way, including using digital technology as they go about their daily activities. The citizen’s role is different to volunteering to participate in a research study, it is about collaborating in social science research and gathering data about the world they observe around them. If citizens voluntarily participate in scientific activities, their engagement can challenge the way scientific research is undertaken, including questioning who the scientist is, who can collect data, what data can be collected, and what purposes such data can be used for. If, as Thrift (2011:9) suggests, people have ‘become human pantographs, measuring out the world and themselves at the same time’, there is a significant impact on social science research that needs to be explored. Thrift and others suggest a thorough hollowing out and commercialisation of data and research, with Savage and Burrows (2007) predicting a crisis for empirical sociology in an age of knowing capitalism. However, the ubiquity of data in everyday life could also create more positive alternatives.
There are many examples of citizen science projects that recruit citizens, for example, to monitor local animal populations, such as the Great Backyard Bird Count by Cornell Lab of Ornithology, or local air quality, as in the Kosovo Science for Change project, or to classify big datasets, as in the Galaxy Zoo project. Interesting definitional issues arise when determining what should be considered a citizen science project, as well as the place of the citizen in citizen science. It is however notable that large numbers of people volunteer to participate in such scientific research. For example, 200,000 people contribute to the Cornell Lab’s citizen-science projects each year (Cornell Lab, 2015).
The idea of citizen social science, in particular, links back to certain aspects of the Mass Observation project in the early 20th Century where volunteers submitted reports of their daily activities or events that they had seen (Madge & Harrisson, 1938; Hubble, 2006). The Mass Observation project highlights the tensions between the observer and those being observed.
This research will draw on the endeavours of the Mass Observation Project and similar emergent citizen social science projects as a form of social science from ‘within’. The research will make use of ethnomethodological approaches to the social sciences, of attempts to promote an understanding of society from within, by the people being studied, for the people being studied. However, citizen social science departs from ethnomethodological analysis in that it does not seek to exhibit or to describe the ‘ethnomethods’ that produce order.
This research explores the notion that people, in doing what they do, account for or describe what they are doing and see around them (Sacks, 1963). If, as Hymes (1996:13) suggests, ‘our ability to learn ethnographically is an extension of what every human being must do, that is learn the meanings, norms, patterns of a way of life’, then in many respects everyone is to some extent a social scientist already, even when not enrolled in formal social science work. In other words, people are already fieldworkers of our own lives, generating descriptive sociological data as they go about our daily lives. This may be contested and the research will explore whether such data can be used to investigate social issues in new ways.
To take the argument further, it could be suggested that citizen social science brings about a new ‘lived objectivity’ where the subjectivity of the observer becomes one of the facts under observation alongside the actual information they collect as part of a study. In this sense, through a new ‘lived objectivity’, what may have become unnoticed through familiarity is raised into consciousness once again (Harrisson & Madge, 1937). This research explores whether citizens can be mobilized to observe, reflect on and analyse, and thereby create, the everyday social order as they go about their daily activities and lives. This is related to but still distinct from other forms of participatory research methods.
The research will be conducted through a series of data-gathering case studies. These case studies will involve the collection and recording of data by citizens in different contexts for use in social science research. One of the case studies may also involve citizens in a more engaged way, such as in the research design and analysis of the data. Citizen social science raises many questions in terms of the form of data collected, as well as how it can be analysed and used to inform policy making. The case studies will be designed to explore the limits of citizen science-based approaches and to explore what constitutes data and what constitutes a comparable unit of analysis.
Citizen social science-based methods could generate new insights into and new ways of tackling intractable social research issues. However, important questions need to be addressed in terms of research ethics, the ownership and interpretation of data, issues of data quality and reliability, and the limits of digital literacy.
Mirroring: Anonymous Videos, Political Mimesis, and the Praxis of Conflict
Adam Fish
Information activists like Wikileaks and the Pirate Bay, and information corporations such as Google and Microsoft each “mirror” files and databases. Mirroring or the duplicating and re-distribution of data is central to the operations of cloud computing, file-sharing, and emergent forms of political action. First, this article describes how Anonymous--made famous by hacks, leaks, and performative politics—secures visibility for their political videos by mirroring them across YouTube. Second, as political mimesis, the content made visible by mirrors solicits viewers to model themselves after politically active bodies. Third, while mirrors represent politicized bodies they cannot be reduced to mere representations. Drawing from poststructuralism and cultural anthropology, I argue that mirrors do not reveal origins but rather located a praxis of conflict. Video activists and information corporations are mutually dependent. Video activists need for-profit video platforms to broadcast content. The user-generated content produced by video activists and others constitutes surplus capital for information corporations. The frictions of mirroring expose the paradoxical entanglements of information activists and information firms. I support these claims with evidence from interviews with Anonymous video producers as well as textual analysis of Anonymous videos and mirrors.
Kinematic productivity: What do pedometers do?
Peter Fuzesi
The following chapter is an exploration of how walking is reconstituted as a healthy activity through the introduction of pedometers. Here 'healthy activity' means the production of social goods, more specifically that walking, as such, has generative effects in managing one's mental and physical health; and can prevent one from developing conditions like obesity, diabetes or respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. As a backdrop, to understand the use of pedometers, one has to look at 'quantified self'. The last decade has seen the emergence of the market of technologies that deploy sensors to monitor movement and other vital signs. Social science scholars were quick to problematise these technologies, that simultaneously rely heavily on imaginaries of the “body itself”, while creating new regimes of visibility and control (Lupton, 2013; Till, 2014; Williamson, 2015).
While the use of self-monitoring technologies is expanding their accuracy and actual medical value is unclear. As the producers of most devices and apps state in their disclaimers: measurements are approximate, and health benefits derive from 'making healthier choices'. This is also recognised within the health promotion, and the benefits of these technologies are primarily identified as deriving from changing one's behaviour (Prendergast et. al, 2008; Thaler, 2008). By making one aware to potential health dangers, the individual can be enrolled into counting calories, exercising more and making healthier lifestyle choices in general.
In the case of pedometers, this means that even though the count is only an approximation, making one aware their daily step count can help the user living a healthier life. Pedometers produce public health goods through multiple operations, these can be grossly simplified into three steps: First, people using them do tend to take readings and observe their own performance. Second, those aware of their performance are motivated to exercise more, and achieve the healthy average, that was stipulated as ten thousand steps a day. Third, walking more, as far as evidence-based medicine is concerned, is associated with health benefits with regards to different health conditions like obesity, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease and depression, to mention only a few.
As long as we look at steps only as ontological givens, waiting to be counted, the only problem with pedometers is their inaccuracy. This, however, seems insufficient both in conceptual and practical terms. Firstly, because pedometers also prescribe and prioritise particular forms of movements and bodies through the particular ways steps are modelled and counted. Secondly, it would tell little about how pedometers work as technologies of behavioural change: people using them not only monitor themselves, but also tend to walk more and achieve a daily average of ten thousand steps. This is done by mobilising steps, that are perceived as a non-problematic gesture and activity: For most normatively functioning people walking or taking steps prescribes a particular type of exercise, that requires neither any specialised tools nor previous training. In public health terms this means the social goods of preventing diseases while saving money for the healthcare budget. Furthermore, for everyday practice the count of ten thousand steps, as the optimal average, defines a type of calculative scale: walking from university to my home is about 4500-4800 steps, going to the supermarket from the office is about 800-900 steps. These approximate numbers are not only measurements or records, but also have the capacity to become tasks to the user. Therefore surveying one's step count both enables and prescribes decisions between going out in the lunch break or not, or taking the bus or walking home.
To take into account the different roles, that steps can take, the problem then becomes multiplicity (Mol, 2002; Law, 2004). Material semiotic approaches demonstrated how bodies can be reconfigured as active agents that generate user behaviour and social goods, among other effects. Can one do the same with gestures? To explore this question, I draw on the concept of responsive media as discussed by Wei, and Myers and Dumit. A responsive media space, as Wei defines, is “augmented by real-time computational processes, enables the improvisation of meaningful gesture in more general modalities” (2002 p.442). These spaces, as Wei argues, call into question the linguistic and informatic models of gestures by opening new ways to “understand gesture and agency as embodied, a-linguistic experience” (p.440). Myers and Dumit, on the other hand, considers how scientists turn their technologies into responsive media “to get entangled kinesthetically and affectively with their data.” (2011 p.240)
I propose to think about pedometers as responsive media, but in this case responsiveness serves a different purpose. While Myers and Dumit presents cases, where responsive media is used by
scientists to maximize their “haptic creativity”, pedometers are used to generate health benefits through walking. One could call this kinematic productivity. Exploring this kinematic mode of production leads to several interesting questions. Here I focus on two of those: How can one think about pedometers as responsive media spaces? And what roles steps, both as gestures and as units of measurements, play in translating and generating this practice?
'Street Art‘ in the Digital Road Network
Katja Glaser
In the course of ongoing globalization processes and mobile, portable and digitally networked media technologies one can definitely detect significant changes in both the perception and production of street art. In a certain sense, one could even assert that it leaves the streets. Somehow.
Instead of languishing its temporary and ephemeral existence in the street, street art gets more and more both located and situated in the internet. What happens is that, nowadays, people can take street art-pictures – let’s say – ‘on the run’, passing by and strolling through the city space. Instantly, they are able to upload their digital photographs, almost in real-time, into the data stream of the internet. Consequently, street art shows its presence on specific photo management sites like Flickr or Instagram, on street art-blogs, -websites, -apps, or gets embedded into digital street maps. Especially its upload, circulation and distribution in or through social networks, in particular Facebook, plays an important role in discussing this phenomenon. Because, online practices definitely (re)shape, re(tro)act and reconfigure offline practices. And vice versa.
My project outlines street art as a result of locative and situational phenomena by applying locative and situational methods. I´m mainly focusing on a media studies point of view, deliberating on categories like (mediated) spaces/places and situations (among others). My research questions are: How do both practices and aesthetics of street art need to be (re)conceptualized in the context of new media technologies? Or stated differently: How do street art and new media technologies reciprocally influence each other in a both practice-theoretical and (media) aesthetical significant way?
On the one hand, I´m interested in current negotiation processes, documentation-/circulation- and presentation forms of street art; on the other hand, I´m interested in artists who use new media technologies explicitly as an aesthetic strategy for their projects.
Practices of Chronic Illness as Mobile Methods
Alex Haagaard
Medical practices are characterized by negotiations of physical, epistemological and ontological mobilities and moorings. Use of mobile methods within healthcare settings may be helpful in elucidating the ways in which particular negotiations support relationships among agents, and the ways in which the material-semiotic infrastructures through which these negotiations are enacted materialize and reinforce existing power structures of the clinic.
Often within STS studies of medical practices, patients’ roles in the construction and enactment of illness trajectories is neglected; they tend to be framed as boundary objects around which practices are coordinated and through which trajectories are passively materialized. This is perhaps unsurprising, since at the clinical level, patients’ voices are commonly regarded as incidental (and often impedimentary) to the conclusive identification (or dismissal) of disease. Similarly, their behaviours are framed as potential barriers to the correct enactment of illness trajectories. However, as evidenced by the medical discourse around patient communication and compliance, patients’ agencies play a vital role in enactments of disease. Moreover, because patients’ experiences with disease are primarily situated outside of purely ‘medical’ contexts, their constructions of disease differ ontologically from those of the clinic and the laboratory.
This paper examines how mobile methods may be used to interrogate the ways in which disease is enacted and constructed outside of explicit healthcare contexts. In particular, it investigates practices of recording and reflection in which patients with chronic illness engage, the ways in which these may be interrogated as documentation of lived experiences of disease, and what they can reveal about ontological constructions of disease across the boundaries of the clinic.
Multimodal Practices of Emotion Display in Situated German and Turkish Storytelling
Ilham Huynh
One of the main characteristics of everyday storytellings is the display of emotionality and creation of social affiliation. By reconstructing past relations and stances, the storyteller reveals her/his emotional attitude towards the narrative; the addressee can then align with her/his stance (Kern 2011). Both practices, the display of emotionality and the sharing of stance, are highly interactive processes, jointly achieved by both participants.
In the last few years, linguistic interest has developed in this particular field and shows that communicative resources are central to a successful establishment of emotion display in interaction. Linguistic techniques the storyteller uses are, for example, direct speech, compression and shifts in tense (Günthner 2007). Research shows that listeners actively take part in the process by posing auxiliary questions, continuers, second stories, response cries and assessments (Heritage 2011). Although nonverbal communicative practices also play a crucial role (Stivers 2008), very little scientific attention has focused on this topic. Therefore, with the help of multimodal conversation analyses, I am examining verbal and nonverbal techniques, which are used to display emotions and establish social relations within situated German and Turkish interactions. For this purpose I collected audiovisual data following the principles of the graduate school ‘Locating Media’ in locative and situational field studies in Germany and Turkey.
Literature:
Günthner, Susanne (2007). Techniken der „Verdichtung“ in der alltäglichen Narration. Kondensierungsverfahren in Beschwerdegeschichten. In J. A. Bär, T. Roelcke, & A. Steinhauer (Hrsg.), Sprachliche Kürze. Konzeptuelle, strukturelle und pragmatische Aspekte (S. 391–411). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Heritage, John (2011). Territories of Knowledge, Territories of Experience: Empathic Moments in Interaction. In T. Stivers, L. Mondada, & J. Steensig (Hrsg.), The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation (S. 159–183). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kern, Friederike (2011). Der Erwerb kommunikativer Praktiken und Formen - Am Beispiel des Erzählens und Erklärens. In S. Habscheid (Hrsg.), Textsorten, Handlungsmuster, Oberflächen. Linguistische Typologien der Kommunikation (S. 231–256). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Stivers, Tanya (2008). Stance, Alignment, and Affiliation During Storytelling: When Nodding is a Token of Affiliation. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 41(1), 31–57.
Tannen, Deborah (2007[1989]). Talking Voices. Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse (2. Aufl.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Infectious Collectivity. Contagion scenarios of biological and computer Viruses
Isis Kardells
The dissertation project with the working title "Infectious Collectivity. Contagion scenarios of biological and computer Viruses.", tries to think viruses in a media ecology context. Based on the media understanding of Marshall McLuhan, Erich Hörl and Mark B. N. Hansen viruses should be understood in their ubiquity. It is assumed that viruses structure, regulate and facilitate interactions and exchanges between entities. During the course of the project the interaction of viruses with their techno-biological environment should be examined more closely.
Viruses, understood as a form of "communication", can be read as a media theoretical model on several levels. They assemble collectives of infected, which can be both humans and machines. Such collectives are based initially on a purely connective, media operation: on the communication of viruses, on transfer and infection.
The media operations of viruses rest on infrastructures. Biological viruses spread mainly through large main hubs such as airports and cities. The same applies to computer viruses that preferably spread across the major hubs of the data networks. To investigate the propagation paths of such contagions, the project looks at computer simulations, which are used in epidemiology (Pias 2011; Opitz). The ensuing contact graphs of contagion while tracing the spread of the epidemic are at the same time descriptions of social conditions.
Bonding: Trans/formations of Urban Collectivity in Street Renewal
Laura Kemmer
PhD Candidate, Graduate School “Loose Couplings. Collectivity at the Intersection of Digital
and Urban Space”, Hamburg University
This PhD project is interested in the interdependencies of street renewal and urban collectives.
My research draws on a specific collective between people and tram (bonde) in the main street of Rio de Janeiro’s neighborhood Santa Teresa. While the city is often presented as showcase for the effects of globally circulating urban renewal strategies, studies on favela “pacification” (Freeman 2014), mega-events (Vainer et al 2013), or waterfront redevelopment (Diniz 2013) rarely consider the everyday dimension of such large-scale infrastructural transformations. The case of the bonde allows for understanding, which collectives, understood as temporary assemblages of human/non-human, material/non-material actors (Färber 2014), emerge throughout long-term processes of street renewal. Instead of departing from pre-set representational categories (Stäheli 2012), such as “the bohème” vs. “the favela”, I ask which actors are bound together through the material and affective infrastructure of the bonde. By following the conflict around re-installation of Latin America’s first electric tram after an accident in 2011, I show how agency and power are distributed across a wide range of local, national, and international actors ranging from late 19th century urban master plans, to a neighborhood association claiming the tram as “historical patrimony”, to the design of new bonde prototypes, to online collections on types of lateral protection, or virtual bonde-biographies to recent UNHabitat toolkits for street renewal. Beyond providing mere spatial connections, the promises inherent in inner-city street renewal and revitalization of public transport (re-)produce collective imaginaries of modernity: I aim at developing an analytical framework to account for the articulations of such imaginaries in the city throughout assemblages, and their potential transformations.
BarCamps: Hybrid MeetingVenues as new ways of collectivity formations
Janine Klemmt
BarCamps are so called Not- or UnConferences. In general, they can be organized by anyone and have an open thematic structure, which presumes a comparatively high participation of the attendees: Not until at the venue the participants determine the topics for the so called sessions, the building blocks of the event.
A further characteristic is posed by the communication structure. BarCamps feature an intensive interweaving of digital and co-present types of communication. Thus, BarCamps take place in (urban) space as communication between attendees. However, they are encased intensively within digital information transfer (such as mailing, social media, etherpads, microblogging, digital videography and photography) before, during and after the actual event.
However, network-based techniques are not only put into practice, they particularly form the topical basis for UnConferences. For instance, the topics at the BarCamp Hamburg, an annual BarCamp since 2007 and one of the biggest in Germany, can be about digital communication and Open Source. But there are also non-digital issues possible, such as Craft Beer. The main goal of BarCamps is (free) circulation of knowledge. Therefore, they can be placed near the sharing economy movement. Now BarCamps focusing on specific industrial sectors, such as the BibCamp (for librarianship), increasingly take place.
The aim of the scientific work is—by investigating the synergy of digital and co-present interaction structures, which can be found at BarCamps—to gain a deeper understanding of connectivities, collectives and social rooms against the backdrop of the change associated with contemporary digital media developments.
"Touring the Fictive“ – A Cultural Study of Literary Tourism Raphaela Knipp
My PhD-thesis aims to explore the practice of literary tourism. Literary tourism can be defined as the practice of visiting places that are associated with literary texts. Although this form of readerly engagement with texts and places has become a recent topic in the academic discourse, the primary focus of these studies addresses historical practices in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century. Little research has been done on contemporary forms and practices of literary tourism. As a consequence of this, little is known about the tourist motivation and perception regarding literary places. Therefore my project looks at present-day forms of literary tourism and it discusses theoretical and methodological approaches to its study. The central research questions are: What aspects of literary texts influence literary tourism? How did local infrastructures of literary tourism come into being and how did they develop over time? How is literary tourism performed? It will be argued that literary tourism can be considered as a specific form of performative engagement with literary texts and place, involving the imagination as well as the body and the senses. The three examples I’m looking at are Ulysses by James Joyce, Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann and the ‘Eifel-Krimi’ (a specific genre of german regional crime fiction). The project combines methods of text analysis with ethnographic fieldwork including participant observation as well as interviews with literary tourists, tourist guides or staff members of literary museums and institutions.
Mediated Weddings: Producing Present Absence Through Mediations in Transnational Social Fields
Simone Pfeifer
New media technologies increasingly shape social relationships between migrants in Europe and their friends and families in the country of origin. Whereas some scholars on transnational social relations and media state that ‘social media’ foster closeness and intimacy over space and time, others argue, that the new reachability and availability leads to more conflicts and eventually distance. With my PhD project on transnational social relationships and media practices of Senegalese in Berlin, Germany and their friends and families in Dakar, Senegal I position myself between these two perspectives. I argue that media related processes and dynamics of closeness and distance have to bee seen as part of conventional social relationships. They have to be analysed in relation to the particular biographical projects and sociocultural relations and contexts.
Through the social practices associated with the production and appropriation of media like for example social networking sites, wedding videos and mobile phones, Senegalese in Dakar and Berlin position themselves at the same time in a local as well in as in a translocal or transnational social field.
During the workshop I want to explore how highly mediated events like weddings help to mediate the situations of translocal and transnationl social relationships. Looking closely at two vignettes from my ethnographic fieldwork in Dakar, Senegal and Berlin, Germany, I aim to show how processes of mediation are not only shaping and configuring transnational social relationships but also thereby producing immediate experiences of relatedness. Absent migrant grooms are made visible through the insertion of their pictures in the wedding album. Absent wedding guests phone in at the wedding ceremony to be present with their voices and thoughts.
In addition they can ‘participate’ in the event at a later stage through the viewing of the wedding video, wedding albums or images on Facebook. Through the circulation of money, images, or DVD’s, these various mediations of events are used to construct, develop and bind social relationships over space and time and also construct narratives that leave out the conflicts and distancing elements within these relationships.
The Embodied and Disembodied Life of a Type 1 Diabetic Cyborg
Jess Phoenix
This paper guides you through situational perspectives of Type 1 Diabetic (T1D) cyborgs whose lives are dependent upon biosensors and technology. Personal and third party experiences endeavour to contribute a new perspective on the relation of embodiment and disembodiment; a binary that is difficult to truly appreciate unless you live with it.
The discipline of cybernetics has developed human and machine relations into an embodiment and disembodiment binary in which a cyborg can only exist if the human and the machine are conjoined in a single body. However, by focusing solely on the ‘complete’ human, I contend that the intra-relations between fragments of the human and fragments of the machine are overlooked. As a result, I argue that the theoretical binary of (dis)embodiment is broken down in the context of the partiality and situatedness of the mind-body-machine intra-relations in technologically dependent T1D cyborgs. Embodiment and disembodiment can occur simultaneously: at one time, in one situation, in one cyborg.
I contend that the cyborg does not destroy the mind-body dualism, but rather the (dis)embodiment binary. Specific examples of T1D cyborgs will deconstruct the (dis)embodiment binary which has been previously unquestioned and widely assumed to exist. In doing so, I reconstruct Harway’s cyborg from human-machine to mind-body-machine, in which all components are of equal importance and come into being through their intra-relations with one another. I demonstrate the paradox of (dis)embodiment in the complex configuration of the diabetic cyborg.
Infrastructures of Intensity - Annika Stähle (Hamburg)
The projectanalyzes touristic transit areas and explores how passages between the everyday and extraordinary are being mediated. Focusing on cruise terminals and embarkation areas within cruise ships, the project examines the role of infrastructures within these passages.
Much more than merely underlying systems of transportation, they are conceptualized as affective technologies producing intensities. In particular, I am interested in their densifications and intersections, e.g. interfaces between terminals, viewpoints, construction software, and the (attributed) ability of these interfaces to transform and structure experiences.
Having been neglected by social and cultural research so far or mainly considered in terms of functionality, my project will analyze transit infrastructures, and their interfaces, in two areas of work: architectures and protocols. By focussing on production and design I will analyze the inscription of intensities and steering mechanisms within these infrastructures and examines the relation between transport and travel, the everyday and the extraordinary and the Intensity of banal infrastructures.
Unfolding spaces of my memory: female migration through audio
Johanna Steindorf
How is it possible to make the subjective experience of walking in the city as a female migrant perceptible through audio? In my PhD project, I examine the artistic strategy of the Audio Walk in its different components and also the way in which it can be used as a method for artistic research.
The insights of this analysis serve as a basis for a series of experiments conducted in public space over a period of 16 months. The collaborating group of participants is formed of women scholars that have recently arrived from another country to live in Cologne, Germany. In this paper I would like to focus on my practical methodology and results, including a draft of the final work I will present within the artistic outcome of my PhD.
Since the beginning of 2014, I have been conducting several exercises/experiments with a group of 15 women that have recently moved to Cologne from another country. Making use of various elements of the Audio walk (headphones, parasocial interaction, site specificity, etc.) and adapting techniques and methods of soundwalking and psychogeography, I walked the city with these women and carried out individual interviews and group discussions to inquire about their own experience and direct perception of the city.
In the last stage of the experiments, I decided to work with the group on the experience of walking at night, noticing that the gender differences in this type of situation are much more extreme. And I also realized that the literature focussing on this subject is very scarce, especially in comparison to the extensive amount that has been written on the male figure of the flâneur and its connotations as coined by Walter Benjamin, André Breton and other male intellectuals. The question posed itself: Why is there no female equivalent to the flâneur and why, in return, are there so many well known artists focussing on the artistic strategy of the audio walk (Teri Rueb, Janet Cardiff, Andra McCartney, Vivienne Corringham etc.)?
One part of this final research entailed expert interviews with some of the artists themselves and the second a series of experiments made in the city of Cologne by night. With the same group, I visited different parts of the city and applied methods and strategies already used in earlier exercises. The analogue and digital recordings of these walks will be used as material and as a starting point for my final work, which also comprises field recordings and the construction of a narrative around the theories and history of walking by night and the gender differences regarding this subject.
Walking at night has become a way to resignify the question posed at the beginning of my PhD, broadening the ideas and the subject addressed within my research: While female migration remains the main topic of my experiments, narrowing down the possibilities and questions to this central point also brings aspects into discussion that concern women in all cultures and classes, while still examining the particularities of these women’s experience.
To me, it will be a great experience to present my work to an interdisciplinary audience and discuss on both the subjects addressed and the artistic experiments conducted during my research. I localize my practice right at the intersection between the areas of the workshop and would find it of great interest to hear feedback from very different perspectives and also to contribute with my own feedback to other presentations, which I am very much looking forward to.
The (Hyper)Connectivity of the City On the Arming of the Socio-Technical Infrastructure by Everywhere-Sensors
Vanessa Weber
Materialized urban spaces and their virtual counterparts seem to be increasingly interwoven. The urban field of action is therefore a platform for the generation of digital data at the interface of human interactions with the built environment and their high-tech objects. Hence the technologisation of urban infrastructure supported by sensor technology will play an increasingly important role in the daily mobility practices of city residents, both for the control of traffic and pedestrian flows as well as for the real time transmission.
Sensors, embedded in complex socio-technical constellations, function as miniaturized stations that collect physical properties such as heat, temperature, brightness, humidity, pressure, sound and acceleration: they feel flows of movement and translate these into electrical signals and large amounts of digital data. They are used in combination with information and communication systems that are increasingly integrated into the different technical infrastructures of the city, in order to optimize traffic control up to (self)control of crowds. The popular image of a seemingly endless number of connections in proliferating, network-like interconnections of people, things, information and knowledge, in short a "24/7 society", in which everything seems to be connected to everything, more than ever determines contemporary ideas of urbanity.
But the question remains whether the interactions are actually interwoven within the emerging urban-virtual spaces such as suggested by the frequently proposed and reproduced concepts of the so-called Smart Cities, which promise a diversity of perspectives. Rather, we may question if the exponentially increasing acquisition of big data and monitoring practices, as well as the modes of (self)control, do not generate a desire for non-detection and disconnectivity. The paradox of the fascination of hyperconnectivity as an endless connection practice, which only has a beginning but no end, and the simultaneous efforts on the part of political governance to transform the multiplicity of the city in a – not least more easily monitored – unit is empirically analysed based on the progressive attempts of implementation projects.
Media practices beyond the laboratory. An (ethnographic) field study on (scientific) field studies
Judith Willkomm
My approach is based on laboratory studies which had a great influence on Science and Technology Studies and the History of Science from the nineteen-eighties until now (cf. Knorr-Cetina 1981; Latour and Woolgar 1979). Yet I want to focus on scientific field research and elaborate how it differs from the work in a laboratory. On the other hand, I will not only look at the mutual influence of researchers, the field of research, and the subject of research, but also at the media equipment that is used to collect data in the field. Drawing on my own ethnographic studies and historical research, I will explore the interplay of human observation and non-human data collection in field work considering the example of bioacoustics. A scientific approach to bioacoustics methods was established in the nineteen-fifties to improve research on the acoustic communication of animals and their auditory sense (cf. Tembrock 1959). The new tape recording technology and instruments that were able to transform sound into spectrographic images made it possible to store, to process, to translate, to compare and to exchange the phenomenon of animal sound in a completely new manner (cf. Bruyninckx 2012). With the digital revolution not only the mobility or the storage capacity of the recording equipment in bioacoustics has changed but also the research questions and approaches. I want to point out that this change sets up new questions about the role of the observer and the media technology in the process of field research.
References
Bruyninckx, Joeri 2012: “Sound Sterile: Making Scientific Field Recordings in Ornithology.” In The Oxford handbook of sounds studies, edited by Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, 127–50. New York: Oxford University Press.
Knorr-Cetina, Karin 1981: The manufacture of knowledge: An essay on the constructivist and contextual nature of science. Oxford, New York: Pergamon Press.
Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar 1979: Laboratory life: The social construction of scientific facts. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications.
Tembrock, Günter: 1959. Tierstimmen: eine Einführung in die Bioakustik. Wittenberg: Ziemsen.
#mobintersections
| References | Registration | Travel and Accommodation | Contact Us |
Tel: +44 (0) 1524 592680 Fax: +44 (0) 1524 594256 E-mail: Pennie Drinkall