Synthesis Spring 2021

Here’s a summary of rich suite of research-creation projects that have been germinating this past half year (and more).’

Let’s have our Spring research-creation gathering in the coming week or two:
Proposed Hour  9:00 AZ / 12 noon Montreal / 16:00 Cyprus
Proposed Date: Tuesday May 11 | Thursday May 13 | Tuesday May 18

(0) PhD projects (more details from respective folks!)
Garrett: Diagrammatic
Yanjun: Affective, Enactive Experiential design 
Shomit: Sound installation, Living Systems, subjectification, performance and site
Emiddio: Sound, materiality, non-standard computation

(1) Transformation and Ontogenesis (XW)
Recognizing that the world is constantly in a state of change, process, evolution and flux means we have to face the fact that no fixed, finite description can tell the whole story or predict the future.  But can we understand how the world changes?   What are the motors of change, dynamic and transformation?  Life is full of surprises — not only can we not say exactly what’s going to happen, we cannot even say in advance what all the possible futures are.  How can we think about transformation and change in ways that are themselves supple and adaptive?

Ontogenetic Process, Emergence, Individuation research stream, with special volumes in Angelaki (2020), and AI & Society (forthcoming).


(2) Eco-Eco: Ecologies and Economies 
Ecosystems and economies exceed every special interest and discipline, whether cultural or technoscientific.  Blending biological life with social-economic life requires rethinking both economics and ecology.  It requires caring for both non-quantifiable value as well as quantified fact.  How can we develop fresh approaches to making sense of, navigating, and shaping alternate ecologies and economies, under the proposition that we are one species among many?

Alter-Eco Seminars and Studios, some of which have been prototyped at Synthesis / ASU, Building21 / McGill and the European Graduate School.

Spectral (Muindi)

(3) Prototyping Social Forms (XW)
How can we blend both custom-made and well-established methods of sketching and making from media arts, experimental performance, design, engineering, and conceptual studies to build working models of complex biosocial and sociotechnical systems in plausibly thick social settings?    How can we prototype, at lifescale, the lived, whole experience of social forms such as places: home, city, street; events: play, meal, learning; or infrastructures: finance, governance, energy to the degree needed to get a sense of what it would be like to actually live in or live with those social forms?  In collaboration with the School of Arts, Media and Engineering, and Fulton Schools of Engineering.

Process Germ Bank (Muindi)

CAS 547 Sense-making Complexity: Multimodally Presenting Complex Systems 
(proposed, original version: Brandon Mechtley)

(4) Telematic Tangible Embodied Experience  (Garrett)

See 

social science : alternative economies, special issue Macromarketing

Dear Alter-Eco folks and friends,

Here’s an article and a special issue about sociological aspects of alternative economies, a useful thickening from the usual computational reductions (blockchain, AI, IT) Mario Campana, Andreas Chatzidakis, Mikko Laamanen, (2017), Special Issue: A Macromarketing Perspective on Alternative Economies, Journal of Macromarketing.

Forrest Watson, and Ahmet Ekici (2020), Understanding the Dark Sides of Alternative Economies to Maximize Societal Benefit.

Xin Wei

augmented objects as boundary objects as cultural probes

References:


Yanjun Lyu, Brandon Mechtley, Lauren Hayes, Sha Xin Wei. "Tableware: Social Coordination through Computationally Augmented Everyday Objects Using Auditory Feedback.” HCII 2020

Moreover, we choose to augment objects so that they not only intermediate every day or canonicalized social activity in relation to ordinary use, but also to offer potentially extraordinary affordance [32] within a social scenario. For example, in our case, the ordinary glass and the wine within provides the affordance to drink or grab (habitual actions), while simultaneously affording the sonic responses caused by actions performed with the glass, actions that immediately transform it into an extra-ordinary object. Also, an empty glass may offer more possibilities for playful engagement than one containing liquid, where the sound feedback is caused by explorative actions. Boundary objects automatically register the relations between and among people in a social space. The objects we called instruments that regulate the relationship between the people and the sounds that are correlated to specific activities. By contrast, the way in which directly facilitating the participants’ role in the process may not be not as explicit as our observations suggest–this data can be misleading–especially from an affective/emotional perspective. 

We can also regard these boundary objects as “cultural probes” [29] that make tangible the enactment of social relations among a group of people. Cultural probes such as what we have built have been employed in design research since the 1990’s [30].  In our work, by augmenting ordinary tableware with motion sensors and gesturally modulated, computationally synthesized sound, we can precisely calibrate the extraordinariness of the ‘voicing’ of their movement and vary the mapping from movement or people’s relational activity to sound as extra-linguistic sonic field correlated to their activity. Most importantly, computational control allows experimentalists and the participants to repeat the effect in a reproducible way to gain experiential knowledge.  This approach is informed by Satinder Gill’s work on tacit engagement and collective, relational engagement via embodied skilled practices.

p 3-4

Jessica Rajko + John MacCallum + Teoma Naccarato: Provocation Discussion - May 3rd, 1:00-1:30pm EST

Subject: Provocation Discussion - May 3rd, 1:00-1:30pm EST
Date: April 27, 2021 at 1:03:45 PM GMT-4

Greetings!



First, thank you again for carving time out of your schedule to join us in conversation. The following information details how we’ll move through our discussion and how you can prepare. 



Discussion Details and Structure: The plan is to record and share a series of, 30-minute discussions between ‘provocateurs’---those who submitted provocations back in 2018 in response to the question: “What escapes computation in interactive performance?” Meetings will be hosted and recorded on Zoom (link provided in this meeting request). All three of the project facilitators (Teoma, John, and Jessica) will be present during the conversation to host and hold space. Our aim is to keep the discussion low-key, conversational, and open-ended. We are not trying to reach some sort of summary conclusion or solution within 30 minutes. Rather, we see these discussions as another way in which we continue the rich dialogue put forth in the provocations and currently buzzing on our SloMoCo Discord channel. To give you a sense of how we’ll structure the 30 minutes, here is a flexible outline:



Provocation Discussion


  • Brief introduction by facilitators and sharing of provocations by provocateurs - 10 min (2-3 min per provocation)


  • Provocateurs ask each other questions and discuss - 10 minutes 


  • Facilitators join in conversation - 10 minutes



For sharing your provocation, you can read or summarise, and comment on your current thinking about it. A link to your provocation will be posted alongside the video of the discussion.



Please feel free to join us 5 - 10 minutes early if you wish. We won’t start recording until everyone is settled in, but we also want to be respectful of your time and keep the entire session as close to 30 minutes as possible. 



Preparation: All we need you to do in advance is  i) revisit your own provocation, and those of the other two provocateurs; and ii) bring one question for each other person, based on their provocation. The purpose for this discussion is to collectively read your three provocations through one another, exploring connections and generative tension in perspectives.


 


Here are links to the three provocations for your session:


•              Fran & Javier:https://provocations.online/whatescapescomputation/jaimovitch-morand/


•              Fred:https://provocations.online/whatescapescomputation/bevilacqua/


•              Xin Wei: https://provocations.online/whatescapescomputation/xin-wei/

'You Can't Be Alone in a Liquidity Pool': Introduction to The Sphere's cyber-infrastructure for crypto-economic design; + The Curve Labs


Curve Labs is architecting cybernetic solutions for the distributed economy. We build digital souls which disintermediate rent seekers and provide infrastructures for efficient and equitable markets. We engage in the playful, combinational use of different modules to architect institutions that couldn’t exist before: digital cooperatives & artist collectives, distributed energy communities, or market primitives which automate liquidity and provide real time price discovery. Our team has deep experience in distributed and open-source technologies, and together, we believe we can address pressing problems of the anthropocene today. https://www.curvelabs.eu/#About

The Sphere  enabling agents in the performing art ecosystem – artists, cultural professionals, audience, cultural organisations as well as a wide range of sympathisers and other potential stakeholders, to participate directly in the shaping of new organizational, aesthetic and economic forms.

EVENT 22-23 APRIL 2021

'You Can't Be Alone in a Liquidity Pool’
Introduction to the Sphere's Cyber-infrastructure for crypto-economic design
Erik Bordeleau ++

https://www.facebook.com/events/448868849542902

Please join us April 22nd-23rd for the Cryptoeconomics Design Labs, organized in sympoietic partnership with the well-rounded CurveLabs! We have an amazing list of guests to build up our blockchain quadratic alliance with, our para-liquidity pool is wildly speculative and open to all, detailed schedule here:

As a collaborative and emergent web3-based infrastructure, The Sphere is a call to challenge and experiment with the traditional frameworks of cultural production. In the spirit of the open source movement, The Sphere wants to enable every agent in the performing art ecosystem - artists, cultural professionals, audience, cultural organisations as well as a wide range of sympathisers and other potential stakeholders, to participate directly in the shaping of new organizational, aesthetic and economic forms.
This open office session will be an occasion to present the current development of the Sphere’s cyber-infrastructure, as well as opening up a space for collective imagineering around the potential for web3-based derivative art communities. In sympoetic partnership with Curve Labs, The Sphere is catalysing a “quadratic” alliance with 4 key partners - Gnosis, Furtherfield / CultureStake, Black Swan and Spectre - in order to model and implement a radically innovative commons 3.0 for circus and the performing arts.

World Economic Forum and Reuters: Synthesis @ ASU's Navigating Uncertainty alternate reality simulation for United Nations

From World Economic Forum & Reuters: 

March 2021
…
Alternate Reality Simulations use game-like elements and role-playing, with the United Nations' development unit (UNDP), public and private sectors, and the Arizona State University (ASU) testing them last week in six major cities.
…
Alternate reality simulations can include obtaining insights from a range of people - including those often excluded from the decision-making process, said Sha Xin Wei, who directs the Synthesis Center for responsive environments at ASU.
"You can speak to power, or speak as power more easily in this what-if setting," he said, adding that the simulations have roles for a member of the press, and for a member of civil society like a working mother, or a young female activist.
…

'You Can't Be Alone in a Liquidity Pool': Introduction to the Sphere's Cyber-infrastructure


Erik Bordeleau
thesphere.as
Apr 22 at 8:30 AM EDT – Apr 23 at 1 PM EDT


As a collaborative and emergent web3-based infrastructure, The Sphere is a call to challenge and experiment with the traditional frameworks of cultural production. In the spirit of the open source movement, The Sphere wants to enable every agent in the performing art ecosystem - artists, cultural professionals, audience, cultural organisations as well as a wide range of sympathisers and other potential stakeholders, to participate directly in the shaping of new organizational, aesthetic and economic forms.

This open office session will be an occasion to present the current development of the Sphere’s cyber-infrastructure, as well as opening up a space for collective imagineering around the potential for web3-based derivative art communities. In sympoetic partnership with Curve Labs, The Sphere is catalysing a “quadratic” alliance with 4 key partners - Gnosis, Furtherfield/CultureStake, Black Swan and Spectre - in order to model and implement a radically innovative commons 3.0 for circus and the performing arts.

brief, focussed project: a concept video on portals and telematic embodied architecture ?

Some of you know that one of our projects puttering along for awhile has been trying to create some alternatives for portals,

Re portal video:  I’d like to create something that is as polished as these but propose alternatives  (old somewhat tongue in cheeky work Table of Contents ).  Can anyone feel like working with Andrew Robinson on a next version of some “portal” work?   See "Suturing Space: Tabletop Portals for Collaboration” 

https://ca.room.com

At least it takes the design proposition of starting from physical and inter-corporeal engagement rather than dis-embodying VR ;)
so at least it’s not, as Terry Winograd put it, trying to reach the moon by find the right species of tree to climb.

Don’t know whether to laugh or to cry…

Niklas Damiris: The Limits of Sustainability

The Limits of Sustainability

Talk by Dr. Niklas Damiris. 20 November 2010, Montreal.
Co-sponsored by Topological Media Lab, Design and Computation Arts Department, and the David O'Brien Centre for Sustainable Enterprise, Concordia University.   

This wide-ranging lecture outlines a set of core and critical issues:
Sustainability as symptom rather than goal. Desire.  Symbolic mediation + being part of the world.  Nature-society divide.  Materiality.  Quantum entanglement.  Foucault parrhesia and Socrates contra psychology (identity, personality, self).  Limits of sustainability construed under an "economic” frame.  Money as symbolic mediation. Productivity. Excess and generosity. Service, entanglement. Governmentality.  Using materials in a dematerialized way.

For more extensive inquiry, contact: Niklaswild1000@gmail.com, or xinwei.sha@asu.edu

Superflux speculative design

https://superflux.in

Superflux create worlds, stories, and tools that provoke and inspire us to engage with the precarity of our rapidly changing world.

Founded by Anab Jain and Jon Ardern in 2009, the Anglo-Indian studio’s early work brought speculative design approaches to new audiences, working for some of the world’s biggest like Microsoft Research, Sony, Samsung and Nokia, and exhibiting work at MoMA New York, the National Museum of China, and the V&A in London.  

Over the years, the studio has gained critical acclaim for producing work that navigates the entangled wilderness of our technology, politics, culture, and environment to imagine new ways of seeing, being, and acting. The studio’s partners and clients continue to grow, and include Government of UAE, Innovate UK, Cabinet Office UK, UNDP, Future Cities Catapult, and Forum for the Future.