All the Feels, conversation with Simone C. Niquille

ALL THE FEELS
Simone C. Niquille (designer and researcher)
Moderator: Jara Rocha (researcher and cultural mediator)

In an article published at e-flux under the title “Too Much Information”, Simone C. Niquille walks us through a number of operations on capture technology and polygonal remodeling of facial gestures, each providing an extra layer of definition, towards an analysis of emotions.The ambition to recognise emotion by computer vision technology contains an array of challenges and assumptions: By which parameters are happiness, tiredness, anxiety and/or perplexity detected and measured? How are these emotions translated into algorithmic rules?

‘Too Much Information’ discusses the face as an arena of dispute for attentive markets of so-called realist emotional profiling and dives into the history of computer generated imagery (CGI) technology, a space of simulation and speculation. This talk will be an occasion to dive deeper in those layered operations, wondering about the extent to which values of accuracy are valid when studying mediated emotions from an intersectional perspective.

Bio: http://technofle.sh/cv.php

 

+ info: http://done.fotocolectania.org/edicion5/en/discussions/

Station of Commons - Digital Commoning Practices

 The collaborative initiative Station of Commons finds form in the exhibition ”Digital Commoning Practices” in March 2021 hosted in the artist run gallery Oksasenkatu11 in Helsinki.

https://www.stationofcommons.org/events/digital-commoning-practices

The exhibition "Digital Commoning Practices" departs from Station of Commons; a practice of re-appropriation of technology as Commons within public space, which stands for radical alternative strategies to the neo-liberal system in terms of digital means of production, communication and distribution. "Digital Commoning Practices" starts with a question: How to think of a collaborative process embedded in technology that can find form into new knowledge and know-hows within, against and beyond capitalist modes of production?

"Digital commoning practices" intends to both elaborate a critical discourse on the economization process, and to reflect on digital tools development to resist, and rebel, against privatization of technological means. Activist and architect Stavros Stavrides insists that commoning practices must welcome a multitude of knowledges, discourses, practices and know-hows for the emergence of commoning spaces. The dynamic at work operates as a collective and transformative effort always in the making. The exhibition invites artists, activists, urbanists, publishers, designers, programmers, feminists and educators to open, share their work in an Open Source way of doing and thinking.

The exhibition process produces a month long timelime to articulate different temporalities; live audio streams, lectures, discussion and workshops.This format imagines an exhbition as an intersection of eventfull temporalities more than a division of space in the traditional white cube practice. "Digital Commoning Practices" timeline develops over three phases.

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18.03.2021
“How to infrastructure otherwise”
by Femke Snelting, Jara Rocha & Martino Morandi followed by iQ&A with SoC founders Juan Gomez and Gregoire Rousseau.
A hands-on conversation on the ongoing techno-political transformations in (remote) learning environments. How to infrastructure otherwise in more just and solidary ways? On de-schooling, interdependent learning and The bundle theory of the student-user. With Martino Morandi, Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting. 

>>> Recording of the event on BBB: 

https://bbb.constantvzw.org/playback/presentation/2.0/playback.html?meetingId=d2974d2f675c7754ffd3e8a381588e418106f420-1616085569377

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Figurations of timely extraction @ The Material Life of Time

a Temporal Belongings conference, 15th-17th March, 2021:

 

https://www.temporalbelongings.org/the-material-life-of-time.html

 

Much of the time of our lives is given to us by the relationships, properties and movements of worldly materialities. Atmospheric carbon has irrevocably transformed agricultural time (Kassam et al 2018), microplastics are queering reproductive time (Davis 2015), dissolvable sutures have remade the time of health, while rare earth minerals make possible the mobile phones at the heart of debates around acceleration and time squeeze (Wajcman 2008). In all of these ways and more, we see material objects — their uses, cost, manufacture, changing composition and characteristics — at the heart of modern debates about how time should be used, lived and valued.

A deeper recognition of the material lives of time thus attunes us to questions of how times are being made, where its materials are coming from, who or what is being displaced in the process, and what kinds of material practices are being called forth. How does the global race for resources in a time of climate breakdown, including for oil, gas, arable land and fresh water, make new times of migration, colonialism and dispossession? How are new bio- and medical technologies affecting embodied temporalities? How are particular generational, political or bureaucratic times out-of-synch (or not) with geological times, biological times or ecological times, and what are the consequences? What kind of resonance do concepts such as ‘modernity’, ‘post-modernity’, ‘growth’, ‘recession’, ‘crisis’ and ‘acceleration’ take on from this perspective? What kinds of speculative futures are being produced and for whom (Keeling 2019)?

‘Materialising’ time also works back on concepts, approaches and methods for studying time by calling into question the dualistic treatment of ‘social time’ and ‘natural time’ which has structured a significant proportion of work on time (Adam 1994). We are asked to  rethink key temporal concepts by attending more closely to their material basis and the ways these materials remain, morph, wear away and disappear with changing environments and socialities, “not in a relation of linear unfolding, but threaded through one another in a nonlinear enfolding of spacetimemattering” (Barad 2010). Another set of questions thus revolves around how to study time in its complexity, the difficulties that disciplinarity presents, and what to make of the continual rediscovery that time is not unitary and objective, but multiple and situated.

 

Figurations of timely extraction (Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting)

 This piece engages with three figurations of timely extraction: consortium, borehole and amalgam. It makes use of the contaminated and contaminating practice of figuration to plot stories that highlight some of the milestones of deadly collaboration, of optimised acceleration, and of sedimented damage. These stories might provide a way to make present the time-space complexities that emerge from the connections between extractivism, computation and semiotic-material values. Attempting to expose the rocky figures of consortium, borehole and amalgam, implies exposing also some of their interdependent articulations such as transnational alliances, gold mining and geocomputation and how they shape life/non-life temporalities. The dynamic crossings of time and matter that they are embedded in establish a dynamics of repeated damage, via latent regimes which maintain extractive forces, practices and modes. 

 

ìnfo and full programme: https://www.temporalbelongings.org/uploads/6/8/8/9/6889024/mlot_full_programme_210308.pdf 

 

Tecnologías Mundanas

 Taller con docentes, en MACBA

13.03.2021

20.03.2021

atenciones / posiciones / preguntas

A partir de dos experiencias pedagógicas que fueron probadas en el aula hace meses dentro del programa “En residencia”, estas dos sesiones con docentes se proponen desde la práctica artística y la investigación. La experiencia colectiva del juego ofrece una zona de atención a las relaciones con tecnologías mundanas (culturas materiales, técnicas diversas, imaginarios inmediatos, infraestructuras cotidianas). Mediante la experiencia del juego y su proceso de creación se generará un espacio para compartir referencias y preguntas.

En la primera sesión con Jara Rocha, a partir del juego de cartas, haremos un recorrido por el entorno para identificar todas las tecnologías que nos rodean. Con ellas indagaremos en sus múltiples dimensiones a partir del juego.

En la sesión de nyamnyam partiremos de Fluyffy Disk, el resultado del proceso experimental con el alumnado de 2.º de ESO del Instituto Barri Besòs. Durante el curso reflexionamos sobre la soberanía alimentaria y la soberanía tecnológica. Como resultado, surge este juego cooperativo. Una aplicación que nos invita a crear relatos enlazando textos e imágenes, y que nos propone otras formas de relacionarnos con el móvil como dispositivo y con las imágenes que acumulamos vorazmente.

Si tienes alguna duda, puedes contactarnos a través de educacio@macba.cat o por teléfono al 93 412 14 13.

+ info: https://www.macba.cat/es/exposiciones-actividades/actividades/tecnologias-mundanas