A beautiful motivation for portals and sutured spaces, telematically mated objects I’ll say more in my next email, but let me offer you the chance to enjoy Coccia’s graceful and thoughtful essay…
Emanuele Coccia / Reversing The New Global Monasticism … https://fallsemester.org/2020-1/2020/4/17/emanuele-coccia-escaping-the-global-monasticism?fbclid=IwAR3y3dUGCXxy9mHutgEGGmatLLho4D4NT7fmfgQCjvlsIHxNWM5qKuvJ_dE
See Zimin Proposal (augmented learning environment) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vLwEIvjrWbPanZ2ZLKFOBzEvIzyrkTwmkfkARBTyOgQ/edit
Diagrammatic Master Doc https://docs.google.com/document/d/1k0Up-3Q0YvZbbBJwmaeqRN0RfsAJeDwGQzaoAmbn7CM/edit
Possible courses and workshops:
• Digital Culture / Media studies / Computational thinking; Media choreography for non-coders (Leonardo?) • Augmented sutured learning environments + diagrammatic + ecology of things • Place-labs (Dartington, Leonardo) • Alter-Economics: alter-finance (EGS, UNDP) • Emergence, Individuation, Ontogenesis, complex systems (EGS, UNDP)
• Trans-course portfolio
Collective intentionality and the further challenge of collective free improvisation
Continental Philosophy Review volume 53, pages49–65(2020)
Abstract
The kind of collective improvisation attained by free jazz at the beginning of the sixties appears interesting from the perspective of contemporary debates on collective intentionality for several reasons. The most notable of these, is that it holds a mirror up to what analytical philosophers of action identify as “the complexly interwoven sets of collective intentions” that make a group more than the sum of its parts. But at the same time, free jazz poses a challenge to these philosophical theories of collective intentionality, because what happens is not planned in advance but arises from spontaneous interactions in the group. The second and no less decisive reason is that jazz musicians act together in a very distinctive way, which casts into clear relief the interplay between togetherness and agonism, individual freedom and group commitment, which is contained in every human interaction. In other words, in free jazz we find what Hannah Arendt calls the “paradoxical” or “twofold” character of “human plurality.” Starting with the analysis of two paradigmatic case studies—Charles Mingus’s Folk Forms No. 1 and Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation—my main concern in this paper is to provide a phenomenological account of the individual-yet-plural intentionality that emerges and runs through the improvisatory process in the free jazz case. After having made the negative point that this phenomenon represents a challenge to the analytical theories of collective intentionality, I shall argue that it can be accounted for from a phenomenological perspective. My basic thesis is that the overall cohesiveness of the improvisatory process must be regarded as a meaningful realization of an overall feeling, shared and shaped together by musicians over time—and not as the execution of an advanced plan.
Technological solutions such as machine learning statistical modeling are limited by the quality of the data in which they are based (a scientific methodological point typically overlooked by programmers and armchair epidemiologists :):) ). and in this case the tables of coronavirus statistics are practically useless without understanding how they were derived.
Numerology : Mistaking a numeral — a squiggle on a screen or a piece of paper — for a fact of the world.
APR. 4, 2020, AT 1:11 PM
Coronavirus Case Counts Are Meaningless*
*Unless you know something about testing. And even then, it gets complicated.
If you’re a regular reader of FiveThirtyEight, you’re probably used to looking at data in sports — where basically everything that happens on a basketball court or a baseball diamond is recorded — or in electoral politics, when polls (in theory, anyway) survey a random sample of the population. COVID-19 statistics, especially the number of reported cases, are not at all like that. The data, at best, is highly incomplete, and often the tip of the iceberg for much larger problems. And data on tests and the number of reported cases is highly nonrandom. In many parts of the world today, health authorities are still trying to triage the situation with a limited number of tests available. Their goal in testing is often to allocate scarce medical care to the patients who most need it — rather than to create a comprehensive dataset for epidemiologists and statisticians to study.
Lithopia: Prototyping Blockchain Futures
EDITOR’S NOTE: Lithopy, curated by Denisa Kera and Petr Šourek along with a second project entitled Out of Power Tower, represents the Czech participation in the XXII Triennale di Milano, Broken Nature. The projects arise from a survey centered on the significant mineral resources of the Czech territory––in particular, lithium. Lithopy questions the practice of this mineral’s extraction and its use. The Czech pavilion was commissioned by the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague with the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.
Lithopia Design Fiction movie scene.
The Lithopia Project1 offers a design method for anticipatory governance7 of emerging blockchain and DLTs that goes against the current hype of anticipatory and frictionless design promises of full control over user decisions2,11. Instead of predicting user needs that ultimately serve one version of the (industry defined) future, anticipatory prototyping involves the users as stakeholders in the adoption of the emerging technology. It offers templates of blockchain services that present the future scenarios and dilemmas, which can be modified and iterated to support inclusive and democratic “future-making”14,15 that combines prototyping with deliberation.
The Lithopia prototyping templates consist of a dashboard featured on Figure 1 and a design fiction scenario (Figure 2 and 3). While the dashboard integrates the existing social and technical infrastructures (social institutions of marriage and property ownership on the ledger with data from satellites, Hyperledger Fabric REST API, and various open APIs), the design fiction presents exaggerated and artistically rendered use cases that hint at the potential (mis)uses. In this fictional village, some common gestures have unexpected meaning if caught by satellites, and the Lithopians are forced to invent bizarre strategies of hiding under umbrellas to escape their satellites and the blockchain. They also indulge in various techno-superstitions, such as horoscopes of satellite locations, which they use to interpret geopolitical events.
The scenarios are intentionally ambiguous and exaggerated to provoke creative uses of the Lithopia templates on the Github. In the Lithopia context “Sunny days are made for transactions. No clouds prevent satellites from keeping an eye on contracts being made and assets changing hands. People exchange goods, make payments, marry and divorce. All the hustle and bustle of sunny days is recorded by the decentralized digital ledger of the blockchain. Hugs are big and kisses are many to make sure satellites recognize and the blockchain records affection, love, and friendship. In Lithopia, all social contact is a smart contract.”8
Anticipatory prototyping
The Lithopia project serves as an educational tool, but also a participatory probe to critically evaluate the promises of DLTs’ future, in which governance will merge with automation over smart contracts, and we will have a tool to control data tempering, fake news, or even AI simulations. The anticipatory prototypes explicitly connect design with ethical deliberation and policy negotiations by engaging the public directly in the design process rather than predicting user behavior and promising “anticipatory” design.
The prototypes utilize existing open source tools (Hyperledger Fabric and Composer for the blockchain contracts; Node-RED and various open APIs for the dashboard) to create templates on GitHub that support creative and exploratory uses of such technologies. The goal is to help the general public and various stakeholders to understand, experience, experiment with, and deliberate upon the future of blockchain and its integration with other existing technologies.
Blockchain governance and design
While the first decade of blockchain and DLTs was mainly on transactions between humans (Bitcoin blockchain and numerous crypto-alt-currency projects), we are entering a phase that emphasizes integration of these emerging technologies with existing infrastructures and corporate and institutional actors (Ethereum, Ripple, and Corda platforms and protocols) along increasing machine-to-machine transactions, including AI and IoT scenarios (IOTA). The original, libertarian, and crypto-anarchist emphasis on privacy and anonymity of the individuals is transforming into a pragmatic search for convergences of the DLTs with existing social, but also technological, infrastructures (satellites, IoT, banks, and supply chains)4,13 .
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