Synthesis

Dehlia — As a tangent from your tangent about the material turn, here’s Jonathan Sterne’s essay, “What Do We Want?” “Materiality!” “When Do We Want It?” “Now!”  ( http://sterneworks.org/Sterne--Materiality.pdf )

Maybe we could use it as a survey in a course on technology someday...

Ed and David — in the same essay as an aside Jonathan makes some comments about forms of writing (e.g. book, journal article), and event (e.g the seminar, or music lesson) :

"Geoff Bowker’s materialist and somewhat scary analysis of our own situation in the production of knowledge is quite telling. As he surveys the every-grow- ing glut of journal articles, each of which has a smaller and smaller audi- ence, he sees: “We are clearly not creating a species of knowledge-power appropriate to the issues that we face. We are producing knowledge that is predicated on and replicates mass production and mass consumption. Our information infrastructure, willy-nilly, is the fold in the Moebius strip that permits the world to seem as society writ large” (chapter 5, this book). The declining relevance of the journal article as the materialization of schol- arly knowledge, and the uncertain struggle to find alternatives, demands a certain patience, since if there is a new form of knowledge coming, it hasn’t yet arrived. Bowker finds some hope in massive collaborations and new database logics. For my part, I retain some confidence in the resiliency of both the essay form and the codex, which have thrived for hundreds of years. Meanwhile, the journal article seems to undergo transformations every two or three decades.

Boczkowski and Siles turn more hopefully to pedagogy as a solution, get- ting students to work across disciplinary categories. If I still believe in the book and the essay, I still believe in the seminar even more. I am experi- menting with disallowing rehearsals of “technological vs. cultural deter- minism” arguments in my classes and exams. It’s harder than it sounds, especially when the rhetoric of techno-utopianism is alive and well in the commercial world and still operates in the truth spaces of journalism and online discussion. It’s also difficult given how much this comes up in cultural analyses of technology of whatever stripe. But if we want to get beyond the argument, our students stand a better chance of succeeding than we do, so it’s up to us to stop trying to reproduce it, even as a historical curiosity. At the graduate level, my seminar on the historiography of new media in winter 2013 takes Boczkowski’s approach to the extreme, though my model is less the social scientific diagram (with its quadrants) than the record collection with its eclecticism. Students will select the topic of their semester’s research at the beginning of the term and each week retrieve a primary source relevant to it. Each week, they will also read a distinc- tive work of media historiography (mostly books, since that is still the core traffic in the field). They will then write about their artifact in the style of the author, which requires them to determine what the important stylistic aspects of the work really are. At the end of the term, the students can then revise these short papers into something longer, synthesized into some- thing approaching their own authorial style. The approach is meant to encourage openness to other ways of writing and thinking, to free students of the pressure to take positions as their own against the positions of oth- ers, and to challenge them to reverse-engineer the work of other scholars so that they get a better sense of what’s actually involved in the interface between writing and thought. The pedagogy imposes some strict limits and demands for imitation (at first) to encourage creativity by freeing students of the demand for creativity in the places we usually look for it (choice of object, originality of voice, etc). It is drawn from how musicians learn their instruments: when I wanted to learn to play a good bass line, my teachers had me learn to imitate what the best bassists did. I either succeeded and incorporated their techniques with my own, or failed and came up with something original-sounding in the process.”

Hey everyone,

bringing the wearable  x-osc biometric prototype that Adrian built in Berkeley. 

When?  I don’t know.  It will be up to the local host here at ASU to determine if and when John and Teoma can come.    Ideally the host could be a combination of Dehlia, Chris Roberts, and Kristi … Or ?

Chris Ziegler will be busy with the lighting workshop — which I think should be scheduled for late October because that’s when Omar is available, and that gives us more time to prep for the ASU-wide event focused on AME and Synthesis, assisted by the Deans and OKED.

Xin Wei

PS Dehlia, Chris, Kristi.  I’m going to start feeding you the research chatter for this OTHER and older stream of research at SYNTHESIS:  movement, improvisation and responsive environments.  This will expose cutting edge work on movement by very accomplished set of collaborators in TML Montreal, CNMAT Berkeley, USC Los Angeles, IRCAM Paris, and AME.   There’s a lot to absorb.  I suggest that you and everyone cc’ing chatter worth re-reading by mates in subsequent years in post@synthesis.posthaven.com 

Dear Chris, Omar,

Let’s start gathering our notes into a Posthaven — for now use 

post@textures.posthaven.com.

Kristi can help summarize once a fortnight  or so...

Dear Chris, Dehlia, Kristi, and Tamara,

(Hi Katie, Omar and JA, who know this well!)

Here are some texts that describe more completely how I envision what Synthesis is about, and how I would like it to be a home for radically empirical, ethico-aesthetic play.  I have developed a progressively more nuanced notion of play over the past decade of institutional experiment, funded thanks to the Canada and Quebec's more generous attitude toward experimental cultural work.

(1) The opening chapter of Poiesis, Enchantment, and Topological Matter (MIT Press 2013): 

gives a sense of how I see philosophical inquiry (which is not the same as philosophy as practiced conventionally in the United States academy) comes out of and feeds back into poetic, speculative practice.

(2) The second part of Chapter 7 gives an analysis of the political economy of the amodern atelier that I established in 2001 at Georgia Tech (in the Graphic Visualization and Usability Center, and the School of Literature Communication and Culture), but then moved to Montreal in 2005 with a Chair in critical studies of media arts and sciences in the Fine Arts and Computer Science.   My key meta-goal for the past 15 years has been to create an alternative ecology of practices based on collective, poetic knowledge practices.   I regard FoAM to be the lovelier sister to the Topological Media Lab.

This predecessor version links to a set of colour plates.

With the Synthesis Center I want to extend both the TML's central research streams and its model for how to go about doing that sort of transdisciplinary work.   To be very clear I came back to the States not to slip back into more conventional interpretations and practices of technology, art or humanities, but to harness Yankee enterprise to the much more radical work of ethico-aesthetic improvisation.   (I use radical both in its political sense and in the sense of William James’  radical empiricism.)

(3) Here are two one-page letters written at the invitation of the President of Concordia University about art practice versus art research.  They are not the same.  Many confusions abound here at Herberger as well.

 

(4)  Here’s the Synthesis Center pitch.   I invite your help to polish it before sending it up to the Provost and Engineering Dean. --- in the coming week

Hi!

We need portals supporting concurrent conversation via common spaces like tabletops + audio… (no video!)

not talking-heads.     It may be useful to have audio muffle as a feature — continuous stream audio, but default is to  “content-filter” the speech.   (Research in 1970’s … showed which spectral filters to apply to speech to remove “semantics” but keep enough affect…)

Maybe we can invite Omar to work with Garrett or Byron or Ozzie to install Evan’s version in the Brickyard and Stauffer and iStage as a side effect of the Animated spaces: Amorphous lighting network workshop with Chris Ziegler and Synthesis researchers.

BUT we should have portals running now ideally on my desk and on a Brickyard surface.  

And that workshop remains to be planned (October ??)

And possibly running also on the two panel displays re-purposed from Il Y A — now moved to Stauffer...

Xin Wei

All great! 

I’ve been talking with Oana and most recently Omar about the vegetal studies research

From Omar it seems that most of the interested folks are away or too busy in September.  And October there are other events (e.g. Listen(n) @ ASU; lighting animation workshop, Einstens Dreams workshop) planned related to Synthesis or TML. 

So our — Oana and my — suggestion is to prep readings and exchange references etc. in vegetal studies stream

now, and do the actual readings  of Marder over seven weeks: November 3 through Dec 19.   

We recommend 

Week 1 Chap 1

Week 2 Chap 2

Week 3-4 Chap 3 & 4

Week 5-6 Chap 4 & 5

Week 7 Papers and Crits (double long session)

It’d be great to aim to deliver some substantial multi-format responses — on the order of a paper, short video, sketches of experiments that really synthesize the insights form the seminar.

Here are two key starting operating rules for this game :

• Avoid allegory — not the depiction of “what plants look like" but how plants grow, and experience dynamical existence.   

• Avoid as radically as possible anthropomorphizing .

Suggestions?

Xin Wei