videos of PSF workshops and panel, Anticipation; suspending PSF (bi)weekly meetings

Synthesis Alter-Eco / Prototyping Social Forms friends and fellow travelers!

Here are the recordings from the two techniques workshops and the curated panel that we convened at the Anticipations Conference ASU 

18 November 2022




Special thanks to Muindi Muindi for the lucid and inspiring presentations, and for leading these sessions, with key contributions  from Mark Balzart (Austria), Vangelis Lympouridis (California), Desiree Foerster (the Netherlands), and Dulmini Perera (Germany), and with Teoma, John, Satinder as well.

I have to say that our sessions created a buzz at the conference, which had 300 participants from 50+ countries in Asia, Africa, as well as EU, UK and the States.  There are several conversations with old and new friends that we may well carry on.

Anticipations 2022 marks the end of this cycle of meetings of Synthesis' Alter-Eco / Prototyping Social Forms. We decided over the past few months that there will be no more regular weekly meetings after this November conference, at least for now.  Thanks everyone who participated in this precious stream over the past three years.  It’s been an inspiring and comforting incubator for us.

Some of us —  Muindi, Desiree, Teoma, John, Satinder, … — expressed interest in working on publications or some sort of seed-balls to share our work from the past few years in more durable and widely accessible forms.  (This could be some converntional opportunity like a special issue of Leonardo or something more experimental like a diagrammatic polylogue…)

Everyone is invited to join this — do get in touch if you’re interested.  Keep an eye out for this project and other events to come!

Un altro mondo è possibile, workshops and panel, Anticipation 2022 Nov 18

Thanks to Muindi F. Muindi who created this flyer for the workshops + panel that the Synthesis PSF group is presenting at the Anticipation Conference at ASU, tomorrow Friday Nov 18.  The workshops are in-person hands-on experiences, but do get in touch in case you’d like to peek…

Anticipatory governance: building futures scenarios for policy strategy design

Important background for anticipatory (vs follow-our-nose) governance.
Ruhl, T.J., and Robin Kundis Craig. "4º." Minnesota Law Review 106 (2021).

To get to the punchline first, read the last section in Ruhl and Craig’s “4º”:
C. Anticipatory governance: building futures scenarios for policy strategy design

Anticipation 22 Program Nov 18

Dear Alter-Eco PSF folks,

Our three events in the Anticipation Conference at ASU are programmed for Friday Nov 18!

10:00-11:30 Session 26C: Techniques Workshop: Prototyping Social Forms Techniques Workshop 1: ENACTING AND SENSING PROCESS
Muindi F. Muindi, Xin Wei Sha, Desiree Foerster, Nadia Chaney, Teoma Naccarato, John MacCallum, Garrett Laroy Johnson and Dulmini Perera
PRESENTER: Muindi F Muindi

12:30-14:00 Session 27D: Techniques Workshop: Prototyping Social Forms Techniques Workshop 2: ENACTING AND SENSING BODY
Dulmini Perera, Muindi F Muindi, Xin Wei Sha, Desiree Foerster, Teoma Naccarato and John MacCallum

14:30-16:00 Session 28D: Curated Session: Prototyping Social Forms Curated Panel: UN ALTRO MONDO È POSSIBILE
Muindi F Muindi, Xin Wei Sha, Desiree Foerster, Teoma Naccarato, John MacCallum, Garrett Laroy Johnson, Dulmini Perera, Zeynep Aksöz-Balzar, Mark Balzar, Galo Patricio Moncayo Asan, Satinder Gill and Vangelis Lympouridis

Not all the names may appear where they should.  Please either use the link below to correct how you should appear in the program, or tell me so I can relay it.   

It’s shaping up to be a very interesting and more wide-ranging event than anticipated.   Maybe we can think more carefully about how to stage remote and in-person participants in our workshops and panel. (Maybe learning from our telematic experiments a couple years ago!). 

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Anticipation 22" <anticipation22@easychair.org>
Subject: Anticipation 22 | Programs
Date: September 15, 2022 at 8:21:16 PM MST
To: Xin Wei Sha <xinwei.sha@asu.edu>

The virtual edition of the Anticipation Conference is just six weeks away and we are thrilled by the line-up of sessions!

Please find attached the virtual program which you can also access and peruse through your EasyChair account. Please note, because EasyChair is decidedly not easy, the schedule presented in EasyChair uses Arizona (MST) dates/times. However, for the virtual conference, you will see Beijing and London start times in your session title. 

The conference will kick-off virtually on November 4th at 10am [Beijing time] and will run for nearly 24 hours. We hope that you all will attend as much as possible to encourage and learn from your fellow explorers of anticipation.

The Whova conference platform will open around October 1st and you will be able to log in to create a profile, double-check the timing of your session, begin networking to organize side conversations, and plan your conference experience. We will also publish the Book of Abstracts around October 15th so that you can investigate the diverse array of offerings.  If you are leading a Curated Session or Techniques workshop, we will be reaching out with further information about how to best set-up and moderate your virtual session.

We hope that all in-person attendees attend the virtual edition, initiating collective learning and conversation that can be sustained across modalities and times.

The in-person program is also attached and on EasyChair. The November 16-18th event will be held on the Arizona State University campus in Tempe, Arizona. Information about travel, hotels and sight-seeing opportunities can be found on the conference website. For those of you who’ve expressed interest in the tour of Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona on the 15th of November, we will reach out shortly to provide more details and confirm your participation. The Emerge Festival of Futures will take place on November 19th- please attend if you can!  If you have any food allergies or restrictions that we need to accommodate, please let us know on this form 
[https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://forms.gle/qbkKC6c6w7YpHAK39__;!!IKRxdwAv5BmarQ!YKpgcipvQ1rc9gejINeeWfQ5nG88yEQRXG-jvF0cnpiMGlgpQgtl0PKtWYo6XoRxX1r8DJ6faevFH0QaQohkOzF4I4Li6g$  ] by October 16th.  

If there are any inaccuracies in the program agendas, you can make changes to the title or participants names in EasyChair by logging into your account and editing your submission. EasyChair will be closed for further edits to the submissions and abstracts on September 22, 2022. 

Due to the incredible complexities and interconnections built into the schedule, we won't be able to accommodate changes based on personal preferences. However, if you find that you are booked in the wrong virtual program [e.g. in the America’s conference when you should be in the Asia Pacific edition] or if you find yourself double-booked, please let us know on this form
[https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://forms.gle/eatj2q3zwyfLFPmJ8__;!!IKRxdwAv5BmarQ!YKpgcipvQ1rc9gejINeeWfQ5nG88yEQRXG-jvF0cnpiMGlgpQgtl0PKtWYo6XoRxX1r8DJ6faevFH0QaQohkOzHSpBuSuw$  ] by September 22nd. 

We very much look forward to seeing you all! 

All the best,

Cynthia Selin


With and on behalf of the Anticipation Conference Organizing Committee
Dr. Lauren Withycombe Keeler, School for the Future of Innovation in Society, Arizona State University
Dr. Ruth Wylie, Center for Science and the Imagination and the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University
Dr. Alexandina Agloro, School for the Future of Innovation in Society, Arizona State University
Dr. Malka Older, School for the Future of Innovation in Society, Arizona State University

OSC vs Web-RTC reflector in AWS cloud

A couple of things about OSC and Web-RTC.   This may seem like a technical consideration, but the lived experiences of  — communities of  —  creator or researcher or performer weighs in here…

(1)  For realtime responsive media in live event, we work under the assumption that our processes process live gesture & activity with adequately dense streams of data,    We like lowest possible latency, want our stream rates as high as emitted, don’t care about dropped frames, don’t care about irregular timing.  And we let downstream processes, including the human performer deal.  This works well when there’s adequately high density — frames of data / unit time, and live human-in-the-loop action. (… thanks to Joel Ryan using wireless sensor platforms for live performance between Vienna and Brussels.)    (Yes re. Vangelis we can lean on John Maccallum’s experience :)   

Benefit of UDP is the fact that some packets can be dropped/skipped/undelivered, as it is not "mandatory" data, like picture frames or piece of sound, that only results on reduced quality, which is "expected" behaviour in streaming world. WebSockets will ensure that data is delivered, and "price" for it is mechanics that at the end slows down the queue of packets, to ensure ordered and guaranteed delivery of data.

General principle, for live responsive media:  let human deal with variation of streaming media flow as part of the materiality of the medium (in this case network transport dynamics) rather than hide that materiality  under homogeneous behavior at the cost of slowing processing, introducing global latencies, or syntactic complexity.

(2) Syntactic complexity
For backward compatibility with a lot of code and coding practice, it’d be very important not to require application programmers to insert OSC - web socket glue code in legacy frameworks.  Technicalities or extra idioms whose adoption may seem trivial to an expert programmer can be an insurmountable barrier to creative coding in communities of researchers and artists who just want to get on with shaping the event.

(3)
As much as possible, I’d like to  talk to my cloud services independent from the web (httpd).
Our apps should talk via internet without going through any browser.   
OSC was invented for streaming sensor data between apps, and to be transport agnostic.  
And all the work we’ve been doing with responsive media for live event is aimed at 
avoiding the chunky clunky document paradigms introduced by HTML / httpd
(from the era of file-based OS familiar to CERN engineers :).   

One rejoinder may be that contemporary network transport quality renders (1) and (3) moot, but this assumption is false when we work in parts of the world that are farther from tightly managed network infrastructures.

And (2) is vital.

Synthesis Alter-Eco Seminar: Erik Bordeleau, TheSphere: A new organizational form, a research-creation project experimenting with Web 3.0 technology to explore new ecologies of funding for the performing arts

Synthesis Alter-Eco Seminar (5 April 2022)

TheSphere
A new organizational form, a research-creation project experimenting with Web 3.0 technology to explore new ecologies of funding for the performing arts
Erik Bordeleau (Lisbon)

 (Alter-Eco)

The Sphere challenges the traditional frameworks of cultural production. Our goal is to redistribute the risks and opportunities of making art by facilitating the involvement of audiences and other potential stakeholders at different stages of the curation and creative process. The Sphere is about new ways of being creative together, making the success of one performance a catalyst for the whole art community.


How do we undo business as usual? How do we generate new ecologies of funding, in the arts and beyond, enabling new ways of coming together in order to answer the tremendous challenges of the Anthropocene which await us? In order to turn the world into a swarm of living commons rather than self-abstracting, debased corporate entities, we need to engage further into how monetary systems, financial apparatuses and business models actually work. We need to design otherwise types of feedback loops, and imagine other modes of capture that escape the tight grip of reductive economic abstractions and anti-social storing of value. That is: We need to make our economies weird again.

‘

IPCC Climate Change Report: Laudato si' Pope Francis’ encyclical

The 2021 IPCC Climate Change Report is considerably watered down because all governments had to agree line by line. Nonetheless it’s the most definitive world assessment we have.
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/

Worth reading (before and after?), Pope Francis’ encyclical : Laudato si'