Machine Research < ever elusive > Transmediale

Infrastructures / Interfaces

Talk

Sat, 03/04.02.2017

14:00 - 15:30

Studio

(HKW, Berlin)

Machine Research presents the outcomes of a three-day research workshop held in October 2016 in Brussels, organized by Aarhus University, Constant association for Art and Media, and transmediale. During the workshop, participants explored the use of various writing machines and ways in which research has become machine-like. The workshop questioned how research is bound to the reputation economy and profiteering of publishing companies, who charge large amounts of money to release texts under restrictive conditions. Using Free, Libre, and Open Source collaboration tools, Machine Research participants experimented with collective notetaking, transforming their contributions through machine authoring scripts and a publishing tool developed by Sarah Garcin. The print publication launched at transmediale is one result of this process. During two sessions at transmediale, some original participants will further present, discuss, and experiment with their research results.

+ on the sessions: https://2017.transmediale.de/content/machine-research-interfaces 
+ on the festival: https://2017.transmediale.de/

*extra* video of the session, registered by the festival's crew and uploadedon their youtube channel:

UN-GENDERING INTERFACES? // OKF: gender & OSHW

Frederique Muscinesi de Ultra_Lab me invitó a una sesión en el festival de la Open Knowledge Foundation que se celebraba este año en Helsinki: The Role of Gender Within F/LOSS, Hardware & Making Communities: What’s the Difference? Con Catarina Mota, Alison Powell, Frederique Muscinesi y Wendy Van Wynsberghe. ...tuvimos muchos problemas técnicos, y la conversación quedó colgando. Pero la retomaremos. OKF - Gender and OSHW + info: http://okfestival.org/gender-and-diversity/

1m2 - on (off) extitutions

These past weeks we've been lucky to have Femke Snelting in Madrid. >>> I've had the opportunity to have a couple of very very interesting conversations on interfaces with her, and I think we might be re-taking our informal research on interface criticism and politics from now on.

 So... first (clumsy) notes:


/////// On (off) extitutions // Tactical interfaces

>> Looking at interfaces is key to understand sets of relations (->> systems), as they are the assemblage surfaces that facilitate some connections and not others (some performativities and not others).

Interfaces show us the affordances of the agents they connect to (or not).

.. // How can we build interfaces that have space for political affections, that have / sustain critical affordances?

//// performativity → defined through gesture(s) >> Interface → studied from the performativities that are permitted and/or that emerge from it = “zone of affordances”

.. // Hermeneutics of gesture → analysis of the set of gestures that are applied in each set of relations (system) >> Interface is key to understand sets of relations (->>systems), as they are the assemblage surfaces that facilitate some connections and not others (some performativities and not others) → interfaces show us the affordances of the agents they connect to (or not).

.. // The 'if' way of constructing systems is very much based on: Competences: what you can do / affordances: what you might do possible responses.

 .. // So, interfaces are affordance-spaces that we must study, applying what we'll call “the hermeneutics of gesture”: performative interpretation (based on connecting)

>> Hermeneutics of gesture can/could be applied in “interpretation centres” or “hermeneutic spaces”. Interfaces – mediations – extitutions – hermeneutics

 -------------- Italo Svevo Mediating mediation. Layers of interfaces. If everything is an interface, what should we talk about? rendering practice of mediating why did you not make an auto-ethnography Sciences have strategies of rendering. The problem of rendering. mediating gradients models of governance are needed scale, gradient, ... who defines the protocol -- complex cultural eco-systems experimenting mixing generative mediation

 -------------- How to account for the fact that interfaces are often malleable, respond to gestures and not only orient/suggest/direct/shape them? How to go from interpretation to creation? Can we close the loop of hermeneutics – gestures – interfaces?


.. // Can we think of a form of interface that goes deeper than skin, that is compliant rather then surface, that permeates both human and machine (or institution and audience, or …)?

>>> I'm trying to think of mediation as something that is not independent from the medium that it is operated upon, nor from the operation itself.

.. // Would an 'interrogable' interface be more interesting than one that resists interpretation?

>> What would be the performativity of the interface itself, thinking about it as not a separate/separable element but a space that is intimately interlinked with human bodies, thoughts, imagination? …?

Richard Sennett - La arquitectura de la cooperación

Preparando el taller'#greenvia: Transferencias de la innovación social al espacio público', organizado por VIC en Intermediae, he dado con esta conferencia que dio Richard Sennett recientemente en la escuela de diseño Harvard. Sennett lanza una pregunta fundamental: ¿puede el urbanismo entenderse como una herramienta para la cooperación entre extrañxs?. Hace además una interesante diferenciación entre 'borders' (con características compartidas con las de las membranas) y 'boundaries' (más similares a los muros), y ofrece una clara crítica hacia ciertas acepciones del término 'sostenible', que se alejan del trabajo constante y la revisión continua de un sistema -que no puede ya defenderse como cerrado a lo cibernético, por tanto-.