NESTA prototyping social forms

Dear PSF folks, 

I met Geoff Mulgan @ NESTA (UK) at a  UNESCO event modestly titled “Learning Planet”.
Mulgan has done 20 years of prototyping social forms.  It’d be interesting to compare:

NESTA
:
We bring bold ideas to life to change the world for good.

Nesta is an innovation foundation. For us, innovation means turning bold ideas into reality. It also means changing lives for the better. This is what keeps us awake at night and gets us out of bed in the morning.

https://www.nesta.org.uk/toolkit/prototyping-framework/

Prototyping is an approach to developing, testing and improving an idea at an early stage before you commit a lot of resources to it.

It is a way of working that allows you to experiment with an idea so you can learn and refine it into something even better.

The prototyping process outlined in this toolkit was developed by Nesta and thinkpublic. Depending on what you are prototyping you may find stages of this process are more relevant than others, but the diagram provides a framework which will allow you structure your approach.

XinWei

Re: From democracy at others’ expense to externalization at democracy’s expense: Property-based personhood and citizenship struggles in organized and flexible capitalism

Full article:
January 20, 2021


On Jan 25, 2021, at 10:55 AM, Xin Wei Sha <Xinwei.Sha@asu.edu> wrote:

Friends from PSF and anti-)Social (anti-)Bodies groups,

Here’s a nice updated critique of "democracy at others’ expense" by Dennis Eversberg in Anthropological Theory 2021, informed by recent work on "property-based personhood and citizenship struggles in organized and flexible capitalism."

Of course, the “what is to be done” is much less well developed, but.  Here’s how the author ends:

…what alternative principles a non-appropriative, non- externalizing democracy could be built on, or what alternative, emancipatory principles of societalization we can imagine. Societalization—the establishment of insti- tutions and sets of rules that are different from community in assigning rights and obligations on a universal basis, regardless of concrete personal attributes—need not necessarily imply expansionism and externalization. Why shouldn’t egalitarian forms of societalization be possible that build on relations of care rather than exchange, improving the welfare and participatory opportunities of most people without having to expanding the rate of metabolic throughput? A truly universal and ecologically sustainable form of democratic societalization would need a conception of citizenship not defined by property, exchange and the inequalities and exclusions associated with them. And this requires challenging the hierarchical separation of the public and private that has been a defining feature of European democracy, which enables the abstract economic personhood of the public citizen proffered by private appropria- tion of others’ labour as property. It is that separation, and the systematic denial by abstract personhood of the ineluctably concrete acts of care and the gifts of nature that all humans depend on, that any genuinely egalitarian type of social organization would have to learn to do without.

Rather than trying to model non-hierarchical social relations on the symbolic counterpoints of joking and the carnivalesque, as Graeber himself (2007a) seems to suggest, it seems to me that struggles for substantial and sustained emancipation ought to be based on what constitutes both the real inversion and negated foundation of hierarchy: namely, efforts to constitute relations—both among humans and with extra-human nature—based on the principle of care and the consciousness of mutual dependency. By highlighting the great variability of how human societies have orga- nized these relations, and exposing the doxic anthropologies of capitalist modernity in their historical specificity, anthropological research offers valuable contributions to thinking about what future transformations of, or beyond, capitalism may await us, and about the possibilities and problems these transformations may hold for such ‘caring democratization’. A key part in this is of course challenging grandiose, grossly simplifying structural accounts like the one given here. Anthropologists, like sociol- ogists, are particularly well equipped for exposing the inconsistencies and ruptures in how the doxic anthropologies sketched out here play out in people’s actual socially specific experience (Eversberg, 2014b; Ortner, 2005; Skeggs, 2011). Understanding people’s multifarious ways of dealing and struggling with the pressures of exploita- tion and internalization as manifestations of non-identity points to paths toward human conditions liberated from the growth imperative that are already present as subordinate elements in human practice.

For envisioning possibilities of such transformations, the heterogeneous move- ments and actors of the ‘degrowth spectrum’ (Eversberg and Schmelzer, 2018) are obvious allies. Anthropologists’ insights resonate with their understanding that what is at stake is not further ‘liberation’ of the individual, but forms of autonomy built on different, relational and caring concepts of personhood (Eversberg and Schmelzer, 2017). Conversely, degrowth movements’ calls to engage in a pluriver- sal dialogue about ‘a world where many worlds fit’ (Kothari et al., 2019) and for a ‘decolonization of the imaginary’ (Latouche, 2005), as well as the manifold pre- figurative practices movement actors experiment with to explore the practical implications (Treu et al., 2020), are promising points of departure for inquiry into what democratic anthropologies of degrowth might look like, and what societal changes will be required to bring about conditions under which their generalization may become possible.

Calling for insights from vegetal life,
Xin Wei

From democracy at others’ expense to externalization at democracy’s expense: Property-based personhood and citizenship struggles in organized and flexible capitalism

Friends from PSF and anti-)Social (anti-)Bodies groups,

Here’s a nice updated critique of "democracy at others’ expense" by Dennis Eversberg in Anthropological Theory 2021, informed by recent work on "property-based personhood and citizenship struggles in organized and flexible capitalism."


Of course, the “what is to be done” is much less well developed, but.  Here’s how the author ends:

…what alternative principles a non-appropriative, non- externalizing democracy could be built on, or what alternative, emancipatory principles of societalization we can imagine. Societalization—the establishment of insti- tutions and sets of rules that are different from community in assigning rights and obligations on a universal basis, regardless of concrete personal attributes—need not necessarily imply expansionism and externalization. Why shouldn’t egalitarian forms of societalization be possible that build on relations of care rather than exchange, improving the welfare and participatory opportunities of most people without having to expanding the rate of metabolic throughput? A truly universal and ecologically sustainable form of democratic societalization would need a conception of citizenship not defined by property, exchange and the inequalities and exclusions associated with them. And this requires challenging the hierarchical separation of the public and private that has been a defining feature of European democracy, which enables the abstract economic personhood of the public citizen proffered by private appropria- tion of others’ labour as property. It is that separation, and the systematic denial by abstract personhood of the ineluctably concrete acts of care and the gifts of nature that all humans depend on, that any genuinely egalitarian type of social organization would have to learn to do without.

Rather than trying to model non-hierarchical social relations on the symbolic counterpoints of joking and the carnivalesque, as Graeber himself (2007a) seems to suggest, it seems to me that struggles for substantial and sustained emancipation ought to be based on what constitutes both the real inversion and negated foundation of hierarchy: namely, efforts to constitute relations—both among humans and with extra-human nature—based on the principle of care and the consciousness of mutual dependency. By highlighting the great variability of how human societies have orga- nized these relations, and exposing the doxic anthropologies of capitalist modernity in their historical specificity, anthropological research offers valuable contributions to thinking about what future transformations of, or beyond, capitalism may await us, and about the possibilities and problems these transformations may hold for such ‘caring democratization’. A key part in this is of course challenging grandiose, grossly simplifying structural accounts like the one given here. Anthropologists, like sociol- ogists, are particularly well equipped for exposing the inconsistencies and ruptures in how the doxic anthropologies sketched out here play out in people’s actual socially specific experience (Eversberg, 2014b; Ortner, 2005; Skeggs, 2011). Understanding people’s multifarious ways of dealing and struggling with the pressures of exploita- tion and internalization as manifestations of non-identity points to paths toward human conditions liberated from the growth imperative that are already present as subordinate elements in human practice.

For envisioning possibilities of such transformations, the heterogeneous move- ments and actors of the ‘degrowth spectrum’ (Eversberg and Schmelzer, 2018) are obvious allies. Anthropologists’ insights resonate with their understanding that what is at stake is not further ‘liberation’ of the individual, but forms of autonomy built on different, relational and caring concepts of personhood (Eversberg and Schmelzer, 2017). Conversely, degrowth movements’ calls to engage in a pluriver- sal dialogue about ‘a world where many worlds fit’ (Kothari et al., 2019) and for a ‘decolonization of the imaginary’ (Latouche, 2005), as well as the manifold pre- figurative practices movement actors experiment with to explore the practical implications (Treu et al., 2020), are promising points of departure for inquiry into what democratic anthropologies of degrowth might look like, and what societal changes will be required to bring about conditions under which their generalization may become possible.

Calling for insights from vegetal life,
Xin Wei

UNESCO Learning Planet Festival, Art, Science and Tech in Education (24-25 January 2021)

UNESCO Roundtable: Art, Science and Tech in Education



Description:

We live in a time of unprecedented global challenges. Our education systems are divided into disciplinary silos that work against joined-up approaches and solutions. Much research suggests we need learning to focus on creative collaboration and empathy. Rapid tech advances, as well as innovative pedagogies informed by scientific research and/or artistic approaches, offer opportunities to make innovation in learning widely accessible with the potential to accelerate innovation and support a much needed, and in-depth, change of mindset . This panel will discuss how we can re-imagine learning to deliver the UN SDGs and to more fully realise individual and collective human potential.

  • When research reveals the limitations of STEM, why do we persist with this pedagogic model?

  • In a time of climate crisis, mass biodiversity loss and obscene levels of inequality and inequity, what might transdisciplinary forms of knowing and education look like that are more suited to engage with the complexities of our world and current challenges?

    Chair: Alan Boldon, Managing Director, Dartington Hall Trust, Founder and Director, Weave, UK

    Speakers: Ange Ansour (Co-founder & Director, Les Savanturiers, France), Meagan Fallone (Director, Barefoot College International, India), Csaba Manyai (Co-founder, Community Arts Network (CAN), Hungary), Geoff Mulgan (Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation, UCL, UK),  Gediminas and Nomeda Urbonas (Co-founders, Swamp School, MIT, USA), Sha Xin Wei (Professor School of Arts, Media + Engineering; Director of Synthesis, Arizona State University, USA)


Politics of Affect, Brian Massumi, Zournazi, McKim, Aryal, Manning, Fritsch, …

Politics of Affect
Brian Massumi

'The capacity to affect and to be affected'. This simple definition opens a world of questions - by indicating an openness to the world. To affect and to be affected is to be in encounter, and to be in encounter is to have already ventured forth. Adventure: far from being enclosed in the interiority of a subject, affect concerns an immediate participation in the events of the world. It is about intensities of experience. What is politics made of, if not adventures of encounter? What are encounters, if not adventures of relation? The moment we begin to speak of affect, we are already venturing into the political dimension of relational encounter. This is the dimension of experience in-the-making. This is the level at which politics is emergent.

In these wide-ranging interviews, Brian Massumi explores this emergent politics of affect, weaving between philosophy, political theory and everyday life. The discussions wend their way 'transversally': passing between the tired oppositions which too often encumber thought, such as subject/object, body/mind and nature/culture. New concepts are gradually introduced to remap the complexity of relation and encounter for a politics of emergence: 'differential affective attunement', 'collective individuation', 'micropolitics', 'thinking-feeling', 'ontopower', 'immanent critique'. These concepts are not offered as definitive solutions. Rather, they are designed to move the inquiry still further, for an ongoing exploration of the political problems posed by affect.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

1. Navigating Movements
Mary Zournazi

2. Of Microperception and Micropolitics
Joel McKim

3. Ideology and Escape
Yubraj Aryal

4. Affective Attunement in the Field Of Catastrophe
Erin Manning, Jonas Fritsch and Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen

5. Immediation
Erin Manning, Christoph Brunner

6. What a Body Can Do
Arno Boehler

In Lieu of a Conclusion

5th Istanbul Design Biennial, Crtitical Cooking Show

Hi Yanjun, Shomit, Christy,

The 2020 5th Istanbul Design Biennial already passed.  But I wanted to draw attention to its theme: Empathy Revisited: designs for more than one, and the Kitchen:

"The Kitchen will be a place of action and experimentation, where a range of guests will be hosting on rotation transforming the space, the menu and the conversations. Through food we will access the pluriverses that our post-human existence touches upon and constructs.”

It may be interesting to see their documentation and what was exhibited.

Cooking shows are a popular television format featuring food preparation, often involving celebrity chefs and personalities, usually highly produced. During the 2020 quarantine, people turned to social media as a space to share recipes and ideas more informally, from the intimacy of their own kitchens. Inspired by the richness of this evolving genre, the Critical Cooking Show offers a diverse range of styles and tones, from food demonstrations to fictional stories or home-made documentaries. 


Begin forwarded message:
 
December 11, 2019
Istanbul Design Biennial Share

(1) Interior of Diyarbakır Deva Hammam. SALT Research, Ali Saim Ülgen Archive. (2) Open-Air Theater in Kültürpark, İzmir International Fair. SALT Research, Photograph and Postcard Archive. (3) Atatürk Cultural Center (AKM) restaurant kitchen. SALT Research, Hayati Tabanlıoğlu Archive. (4) Ceramic pots. SALT Research, Sadi Diren Archive.

5th Istanbul Design Biennial
Empathy Revisited: designs for more than one
September 26–November 8, 2020 

Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) 
Sadi Konuralp Caddesi No: 5 
Nejat Eczacıbaşı Binası 
34433 Şişhane İstanbul
Turkey 

tasarimbienali.iksv.org 
Instagram / Facebook / Twitter

Organised by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV), the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial, titled Empathy Revisited: designs for more than one, will be curated by Mariana Pestana and take place on September 26–November 8, 2020.

Starting off from the idea that design comprises the devices, platforms and interfaces through which we relate to one another, the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial will revise the notion of empathy, to reimagine a role for design concerned with feelings, affects and relations.

Invented in the 1910s, the word empathy is nowadays used to describe the capacity to perceive other people’s expressions and feelings, but in the beginning of the 20th century it was much more generous in that it encompassed the relations between bodies other than the human. Now, 100 years after its inception, it seems like the right time to revisit the original sentiment of the term. The ecological crisis we live in can be directly linked with notions of progress and development based on practices of extraction and exploration. The post-human paradigm posits that all things have their own relations with the world, that there is no human/non-human divide but a multinatural continuum across all living and non-living entities.

In a time marked by technological speed and environmental crisis, the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial is attentive to practices of care, rituals of connection, and things we can feel with. Curious about new-animism or indigenous perspectivism, it absorbs southern and eastern influences in the way it thinks about the relations between things, between people, and both. The 2020 edition privileges local knowledges and territorial practices in face of the increasing homogeny of a globalizing world.

Some of the fundamental questions that this edition raises are, what structures of collective feeling does design put forward, and how may we design for, and from, more than one perspective, more than one dimension, more than one body? Under the contemporary post-human philosophical gaze, and in face of the current technological horizon, these gestures gain a whole new potential.

Empathy Revisited: designs for more than one celebrates commensality and other protocols for sharing. Interested in tables, pots and dinner sets but also virtual reality headsets, digital currencies and online chat rooms, the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial will welcome myth and ceremony. It will be about how design brings us together.

The biennial will comprise an Observatory and a Kitchen, which will manifest in two separate venues. The Observatory will be an exhibition from which to watch, record and perform practices of empathy in the contemporary world. The Kitchen will be a place of action and experimentation, where a range of guests will be hosting on rotation transforming the space, the menu and the conversations. Through food we will access the pluriverses that our post-human existence touches upon and constructs. An open call will be announced in January for projects and events that revolve around the Kitchen.

The biennial will also for the first time form a Young Curators Group, made up of curators based in Istanbul, working as part of the curatorial team of the biennial. This group will be responsible for contextualizing the theme of the biennial locally by connecting to practitioners, thinkers and makers in the city, and establishing links between the programme and historical approaches in Turkey.

Joining Mariana Pestana for the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial’s curatorial team will be Billie Muraben (Assistant Curator & Deputy Editor) and Sumitra Upham (Curator of Programmes).

The Istanbul-based group Future Anecdotes will undertake the exhibition design of the biennial, while Studio Maria João Macedo will do the graphic design.

The details of the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial programme will be announced in 2020. The media and professional preview will be on September 24 and 25, 2020.

For further information about the theme and the curatorial team: tasarimbienali.iksv.org/en

For media inquiries: media@iksv.org

For high-resolution images: http://www.iksvphoto.com/#/folder/29acct
e-flux
311 East Broadway
New York, NY 10002, USA
Contact     Conversations     Facebook     Twitter     Instagram

vegetal intelligence and new new materialism, supplementing our AI curriculum

Dear Colleagues, 

Nonstandard computation and materials science are beginning to meet in work that is both techno-scientifically and philosophically fresh, provocative!

For our bibliography for AME's AI curriculum:


Susan Stepney, "The neglected pillar of material computation”, Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena 237.9, 2008, 1157-1164.


Susan Stepney, Professor Computer Science, York UK

Michaela Eder, Wolfgang Schäffner, Ingo Burgert, and Peter Fratzl, "Wood and the activity of dead tissue”, Adv. Mater. 2020, 2001412. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/adma.202001412


Thanks to Adrian Freed for drawing attention to Stepney et al in that Phys. D volume years ago.

Related references would be most welcome!

Reimagining Art & Value Flows: The Sphere as Digital Commons, 3-5 November 2020

Reimagining Art & Value Flows: 

The Sphere as Digital Commons


When: Nov. 3rd to 5th 2020
Where: Stockholm: STIM-Huset, Södra Teatern, Hagströmer Biblioteket.

Why: This 3 days initial working session will kickstart The Sphere multi-dimensional R&D process around art & value flows and contributive accounting.

RSVP: info@salorantadevylder.com

“An idea always exists as engaged in a matter – that is, as ‘mattering’. A problem is always a practical problem, never a universal problem mattering for everybody. Learning is always local.”

Isabelle Stengers


WE ARE NOW OPENING UP FOR MORE DIGITAL PARTICIPATION. LINKS TO EACH EVENT WILL BE POSTED THE SAME DAY IN THE SCHEDULE BELOW. WE WILL USE ZOOM.
LINKS FOR TUESDAY ARE UP NOW | LINKS FOR WEDNESDAY ARE UP NOW!