Spatial Machinations
Via Tony Sampson. Looks interesting >
This topic has been getting a lot of TV/Press coverage here in the UK.Here’s a video of a symposium discussing artistic resistance, critical theory strategies to ‘internet addiction’ and the book Are We All Addicts Now? Convened at Central St Martins, London on 7th Nov 2017. Introduced by Ruth Catlow with talks by Katriona Beales, Feral Practice, Emily Rosamond and myself…
@KatrionaBeales @FeralPractice @TonyDSpamson @EmilyRosamond & @furtherfield
This superb video and poetry by the excellent Joy Buolamwini calls attention to the ongoing deeply problematic issues of racial biases in automated facial recognition systems. The associated site: http://www.notflawless.ai/ is very much worth visiting (and sharing!) too.
It occurs to me that my reference to Algorave in the last blogpost might not be something people know about… so:
Algorave is made from “sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive conditionals“. These days just about all electronic music is made using software, but with artificial barriers between the people creating the software algorithms and the people making the music.
Here’s the inimitable Alex McLean explaining more:
Just come across this via a colleague. Lots of interesting things on at the Jean Golding Institute as part of their ‘data week‘, including live-coding/algorave!
| Date | Time | Workshop | Venue |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monday 25 June | 10.00 – 13.00 | Beginning Python | 1.07, Merchant Ventures Building, BS8 1UB |
| Tuesday 26 June | 09.00 – 17.00 | Introduction to R in 6 hours | 1.08, Merchant Ventures Building, BS8 1UB |
| Tuesday 26 June | 09.00 – 12.00 | A hands on introduction to 3D digitisation* | LG05, 8-10 Berkeley Square, BS8 1HH |
| Tuesday 26 June | 09.30 – 12.30 | Introduction to Shiny | 1.07, Merchant Ventures Building, BS8 1UB |
| Tuesday 26 June | 13.00 – 16.00 | A hands on introduction to 3D digitisation* | LG05, 8-10 Berkeley Square, BS8 1HH |
| Tuesday 26 June | 13.30 – 16.30 | Introduction to ggplot2 | 1.07, Merchant Ventures Building, BS8 1UB |
| Wednesday 27 June | 09.00 – 17.00 | Introducing modern Generalized Additive Models | 1.08, Merchant Ventures Building, BS8 1UB |
| Wednesday 27 June | 10.00 – 13.00 | Intermediate Python | 1.07, Merchant Ventures Building, BS8 1UB |
| Wednesday 27 June | 14.00 – 15.30 | Colour as data | Hepple Lecture Theatre, Geographical Sciences, BS8 1SS |
| Thursday 28 June | 10.00 – 13.00 | Data analysis in Python | 1.07, Merchant Ventures Building, BS8 1UB |
| Thursday 28 June | 10.00 – 12.00 | An introduction to open research | 1.20, 35 Berkeley Square, BS8 1JA |
| Friday 29 June | 10.00 – 12.00 | Introduction to machine learning | 1.20, 35 Berkeley Square, BS8 1JA |
| Friday 29 June | 14.00 – 16.00 | Live-Coding / Algorave workshop | Bill Brown Design Suite, Queen’s Building, Woodland Road, BS8 1TR |
This keynote from the NIPS 2017 conference by Kate Crawford is excellent – a good resource for anyone interested in thinking and communicating about the issues of bias in AI.
I wrote something new… haven’t done that in a while for lots of reasons.
I was compelled to do it because I accepted the kind invitation of colleagues at the wonderful Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space for their Spring Academy 2018, themed: “virtuality and socio-materiality”.
I gave a talk called “Worrying realities – doing spatial theory for digital geographies”. In the talk I concerned myself, and maybe those listening, with the ways in which forms of spatial theory get ‘done’ in relation to ‘digital’ or ‘virtual’ phenomena, sometimes generalised as proper nouns… ‘the digital’ and so on. I was not interested, and I still am not, with ‘policing’ the correct theory here, instead I pointed out some habits of theorising space in relation to mediation that I think are interesting and that perhaps those of us interested in doing, talking about and writing about ‘digital geographies’ maybe need to reflect upon sometimes. In particular, I think what Theodore Adorno diagnoses as an ‘ontological need’ pertains, and we perhaps need to be a little more reflexive about how that plays out.
So, I’m sharing a PDF of the slides with the notes I’ve written up. [Now the revised PDF.]
In any case, I don’t know what to do with this… I’d like to write it up, not sure where it would go..? Any comments or arguments, or suggestions for venues to which it might be submitted, are gratefully received 🙂
Please take this material in the spirit in which it is shared – as an attempt to open a conversation. Please also give credit where it’s due – this is not (yet) published but these are my current ideas and I’m sharing them in good faith.
Over on the Culture Digitally site Tarleton Gillespie discusses his new book Custodians of the Internet, reflecting on some of the meanings of “custodian” and how they variously relate to the topic of the book – content moderators for social media services. Gillespie is an astute observer and analyst of contemporary ‘digital culture’ (I struggle to think of another noun right now) and the issue of moderation is certainly timely.
I thought I would explain the book’s title, particularly my choice of the word “custodians.” This title came unnervingly late in the writing process, and after many, many conversations with my extremely patient friend and colleague Dylan Mulvin. “Custodians of the Internet” captured, better than many, many alternatives, the aspirations of social media platforms, the position they find themselves in, and my notion for how they should move forward.
This new project at Birkbeck by Scott Rodgers & Joel McKim looks really interesting:
[…]
Data Materiality
The expanded presence and impact of data, and arrival of so-called Big Data, has become an accepted, background feature of contemporary life. But while data clearly matters, the question arising now is: just how does data come to ‘matter’? What are the sometimes unseen material infrastructures that bring data into being, into circulation and into action? What are the social and political structures, policies and institutions through which data comes to have effects? And what might it mean to think about data – as suggested by Sarah Pink and others – as ‘broken’: as always already implicated in ordinary processes of maintenance and repair?
Data Materiality – a three-year collaborative project co-sponsored by the Birkbeck Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture, and the Vasari Centre for Art and Technology – seeks to address these questions. By data ‘materiality’ we mean not only the ways in which data crystallises into physical forms and depends on material technical and social infrastructures, but also the related ways in which data comes to matter, in and through practical action, collective imaginaries, or biological conditions. So we are interested in questioning the proliferating network of data centres, fibre-optic cables and server farms that underpin our data usage, but we also wish to explore perhaps less tangible or apparent infrastructures of data – materialities that might include, for instance, digital objects and artefacts, from network protocols to markup languages, as well as the labour and organizational structures putting data to work.
Our key aim in exploring data materiality is to get beyond the idea of data as a raw or unprocessed and, as Lisa Gitelman has suggested, understand the ordinary material conditions under which data is induced and deduced. We wish to ask, in other words, how does data leave its traces on the world? And how does the world leave its traces on data?
Read more on Scott’s website.
I am a fan of Kate Compton, creator of Tracery, here she is, last year, talking about the poetics of bots.
Kate Compton: Bot Poetics // Interrupt 4 from Digital Language Arts on Vimeo.
Interesting conference from the project led by Chris Speed.
Panel sessions include Session 1: Power, Transparency and Accountability in Blockchain for International Development, Session 2: Peer-to-Peer Economies (A): Natural Resource Governance, Session 3: Peer to Peer Economies (B): Supply Chains and Development, Session 4: Crypto-philanthropy and development: The Future of Giving? along with lunchtime demonstrations of platforms and designs.
Panel submissions are closed but there are limited spaces available to register. For more information please contact k.symons@ed.ac.uk.
Registration essential. Contact c.cooke@ed.ac.uk to register.
Updates to follow on the day!