Damiris' outline for workshop on alter-economies, June 4, 10:00 - 16:00, Milieux EV 11-705, Concordia, Montreal

Alter-Economies | Alter-Ecologies Workshop 

4 June  2018, 10:00 - 16:00
Morning session led by Erin and Brian, Afternoon led by Niklas

Milieux Resource Center EV 11.705, Concordia University

Niklas Wild-Damiris’ Outline:

In this workshop I plan to discuss and build on Brian Massumi’s forthcoming: “99 Theses; for a revaluation of value”

First, I will reflect on his problematization of value from a Marx-inspired ‘critique of value’ perspective. Next, I will address the theses on derivatives: while agreeing with him and other recent scholarship that the digital incarnation of these financial instruments, could make their repurposing easier and thus free them from their main preoccupation with ‘money-capital accumulation’, there are issues that need to be resolved first, if such ‘creative duplicity’ can be effective. Two important and related ones are: the ontology of algorithms and the problem of formalization rather than of ‘quantification’.

I will make a few remarks on the character of self-reference and reflexivity as they pertain to formalism, and how money itself qua formal structure can be also approached thus.

I will also briefly comment on Blockchain, whose dubious impact will have more to do with changing the rule of law, rather than the dominant economic order.

A lot of Brian Massumi’s arguments are based on an inspired reading and intuitions culled mostly from Deleuze & Guattari and Whitehead. In my presentation I will suggest how they could be further enhanced and operationalized by drawing from Quantum Field Theory. 

I will not get too technical on this point, for I want to move to what I consider the main topic for our discussion: I will dub it the ‘Eco-Eco Nexus’

Briefly, I would like to claim that the core issue climate change is driving home hard, and faster than anticipated, is how we ‘do/practice economy’ under the ‘warming condition’.

I will argue for a generalized sense of economy (which has some affinity with Bataille’s ‘general’ economy’ and also gets inspiration from Klossowski’s ‘Living Currency’ and Henry’s From Communism to Capitalism Theory of a Catastrophe)

However, my largest inspiration and aspiration is to theorize something after the spirit of Schroedinger’s What Is Life?  I want to I ask: What is Economy?   The question cannot be posed, I claim, without factoring the ecological context not as an afterthought, but as the constitutive precondition of human economic activity. Since I want to avoid what I take to be a conceptual mistake to ‘hybridize’ ‘capital’ and ‘nature’, I introduce a methodological innovation based on rethinking the status of theory in quantum physics and how it deploys formalism. This ties back to the concern raised earlier concerning the differences between formalization and quantification.

I conclude the outline of my position by returning to Brian’s powerful call for a ‘revaluation of value’. I will propose emending his analysis with a morphogenetic approach to ‘monetary value’ based on the self-referential status of prices and the ubiquitous and unavoidable presence of uncertainty as leveraged in quantum physics.

My Eco-Eco (Econo-ecological) Nexus is not merely a slogan to displace ‘The Cash-Nexus’, but a re-write of Spinoza’s ‘God sive Natura’: God or nature (a.k.a. ecology) is immanent to economy, which defines human existence. This implies, without getting overly religious or theological, that ‘God or Nature’ is always the other that is never far away. Agency at its most potent and arrogant is only a trigger whose consequences are beyond its control. And yet humans must act! Especially Today!

If so, financial Speculation, like the divination practices of old, could underwrite a common planetary ethos for ‘coping with what is spoiled’.

Given the weighty the topics I try to weave together, I will conclude with few ‘light’ remarks comparing the currently popular Latourian research programme with the Hayekian inspired neoliberalism.


On May 31, 2018, at 12:01 AM, Sha Xin Wei <shaxinwei@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi everyone,

We’re looking forward to a hands-on working session on alter-economies and alter-ecologies
10:00 - 16:00 this Monday at Concordia University EV11-705, in Montreal.

The schedule is deliberately loose.
I’ve taken the liberty of naming Erin, Brian and Niklas as lead discussants.
But I trust everyone attending this intimate workshop should have a chance to jump in.

For those interested but unable to attend, please PM me for follow-ups in Montreal this week,
and at Synthesis this Fall.

Warm thanks to Milieux and our Concordia hosts,
Xin Wei

June 4, 10:00 - 16:00: Workshop on alter-economies (crypto currency, blockchain, …), Milieux EV 11-705, Concordia, Montreal

Hi everyone,

We’re looking forward to a hands-on working session on alter-economies and alter-ecologies
10:00 - 16:00 this Monday at Concordia University EV11-705, in Montreal.

The schedule is deliberately loose.
I’ve taken the liberty of naming Erin, Brian and Niklas as lead discussants.
But I trust everyone attending this intimate workshop should have a chance to jump in.

For those interested but unable to attend, please PM me for follow-ups in Montreal this week,
and at Synthesis this Fall.

Warm thanks to Milieux and our Concordia hosts,
Xin Wei

_________________________________________________
Sha Xin Wei • Professor and Director • School of Arts, Media and Engineering + Synthesis
Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts + Fulton Schools of Engineering • ASU
Fellow: ASU-Santa Fe Center for Biosocial Complex Systems
Affiliate Professor: Future of Innovation in Society; Computer Science; English
Associate Editor: AI & Society Journal
skype: shaxinwei • mobile: +1-650-815-9962
Founding Director, Topological Media Lab
_______________________________________________________
 

gold mine of ideas in Adrian Freed's Stanford talk summarizing of UC Berkeley's CNMAT (1989-2016)

summarizing CNMAT, UC Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies: 1989-2016.

It’s a gold mine of ideas and research methods which I think are fertile and strategic not only for music and technology but for a lot of our work in the study of :

creativity,
dense media and dense sensing,
augmented human activity,
gestural media,
movement-based research,
wearables,
signal processing,
computer engineering, edge computing,
sensorimotor science,
realtime media,
ecology of things,
how to do research and mentor students informed by or in service of experimental performance practice.

Re: SERRA Take Down

Megan, Pete, Connor, Todd, Ben,

My apologies for missing the ops discussion today.  

( Today was crazy since I had to negotiate new faculty hires, potentially half a new building for AME, and funding for the space renovation for Stauffer and MC this summer.  The good news is that we may be getting 2/3 of the funds needed to summer renovation now apparently underway.)

Please post the proposed timetable for Serra so we’re all on the same page.

Thanks,
Xin Wei

On May 10, 2018, at 9:25 AM, Megan Patzem <mpatzem@asu.edu> wrote:

Hi all,

We should meet today for a short ops meeting and finalized the SERRA take down so I can send out an email to the parties included asap.

Thanks

Best wishes,

Megan Patzem
Multimedia Artist & Communications
School of Arts Media & Engineering + Digital Culture
Arizona State University
Mail Code: 5802
p: 480-652-5333  f: 480-965-0961  
email: mpatzem@asu.edu
web: http://meganpatzem.webflow.io/

FW: Dante System Set UP

Dear Core SC team:

 

FYI, to make sure everyone is on the same page, Todd is stepping forward to take charge of setting up the Dante system according to how we need it for research in the sc / iStage.  This includes what Lauren and Todd have in mind.

 

This frees up the rest of the core team to tackle the rest of that TODO list Megan has posted.

 

Thanks!

Xin Wei

 

 

From: Todd Ingalls <TestCase@asu.edu>
Date: Thursday, April 19, 2018 at 4:21 PM
To: Megan Patzem <mpatzem@asu.edu>
Cc: "lauren.s.hayes@asu.edu" <Lauren.S.Hayes@asu.edu>, Xin Wei Sha <Xinwei.Sha@asu.edu>, Connor Rawls <Connor.Rawls@asu.edu>
Subject: Re: Dante System Set UP

 

Hi

I will need to have all the equipment in the stage with power and all cabling needed. I also need licenses and software for virtual soundcards as well as the dante software package. 

todd


On Apr 19, 2018, at 3:50 PM, Megan Patzem <mpatzem@asu.edu> wrote:

Hi  -

 

We realized that Dante still needs to be set up but doing so will interfere with a lot of research so we have tried to figure out a way around it.

 

Can you both  work on Dante during the week of April 30th - May 5th? I say this because we will be using iStage that week to set up the paper sky for Oana so iStage will mostly be unusable during that time. We figure it would also be a good time to allocate time to setting up Dante officially.

 

Will you both let me know if you can work that week?

 

Thanks!


Best wishes,

Megan Patzem

Multimedia Artist & Communications

School of Arts Media & Engineering + Digital Culture

Arizona State University

Mail Code: 5802

p: 480-652-5333  f: 480-965-0961  

email: mpatzem@asu.edu

web: meganpatzem.webflow.io

 

on the importance of researcher's experience in the scientific study of subjective experience

Al Bregman, Keynote on Auditory Scene Analysis, CIRMMT McGill. June 2008
( One of the principal scientists of psychoacoustics comments on the importance of a researcher being guided by his/her own felt experience in the study of subjective experience. )


Subjectivity and objectivity. 

At this point, I want to interject a few words about subjectivity and objectivity in psychological research. The personal experience of the researcher has not fared well as acceptable data for scientific psychology. Since the failure of Titchener’s Introspectionism, a very biased form of report of one’s experience, in the early twentieth century, and the rise of Behaviourism to replace it, scientific psychology has harboured a deep suspicion of the experience of the researcher as an acceptable tool in research.
You would think that the study of perception would be exempt from this suspicion, since the subject matter of the psychology of perception is supposed to be about how a person’s experience is derived from sensory input. Instead, academic psychology, in its behaviouristic zeal, redefined perception as the ability to respond differently to different stimuli – bringing it into the behaviourist framework. We may be doing research nowadays on cognitive processes, but the research methods are, on the whole, still restricted to behaviouristic ones. Since it was a perceptual experience of my own (the rapid sequence of unrelated sounds) that set me off on a 40-year period of study. of perceptual organization, I have always questioned the wisdom of this restriction.

In my many years of research on how and when a mixture of sounds will blend or be heard as separate sounds, my own personal experience and those of my students has played a central role in deciding what to study and how to study it. When I encouraged students to spend a lot of time listening to the stimuli and trying out different patterns of sound to see which ones would show the effect we were interested in, far into the academic year, and nearing the time that they should have been carrying out their experiments, they would get nervous and ask when they would start doing the “real research”. I told them that what they were doing now was the real research, and the formal experiment with subjects and statistics was just to convince other people.

Furthermore the role of subjectivity has often been criticized by journal reviewers: In the reviews of my first published article on auditory stream segregation, which showed that a rapid alternation of high and low sounds segregated into two perceptual streams, one of the skeptical reviewers proposed that there was something wrong with my loudspeakers – perhaps they continued to give out sound after the tone went off – and insisted that I test them.

I was convinced that if the reviewers had merely listened to the sounds, their objections would have evaporated, but in those days you didn't send in audio examples with your manuscript, and I’m not sure it would be acceptable for most journal editors even today.
…
Anyway, I got around the taboos about subjective data by giving many talks accompanied by auditory examples and by eventually publishing my own Compact Disk of auditory demonstrations. However, the CD didn't come until 23 years after the first research paper. Nowadays you could put demonstrations on the web and refer reviewers to the website.

Another thing that reviewers have criticized was the use of a subjective rating scale, asking listeners, for example, to rate on a 1 to 7 scale how clearly they could hear a sound in a mixture. Perception journals on the whole prefer tasks that involve accuracy. This is in keeping with the behaviouristic view of perception as the ability to make different responses to different stimuli. According to this view, you should be able to score the answers of the subjects as either correct or incorrect (For example by asking whether a particular sound was or was not present in a mixture of sounds) rather than simply accepting the listeners’ answers when they rate the clarity with which a target sound can be heard.

Sometimes we have used both types of measures, subjective rating scales and measures of accuracy, either in the same experiment or in a pair of related experiments. The two measures have given similar results, but the subjective rating scales have been more sensitive. I think the reason for their superiority is that they are a more direct measure of the experience, whereas turning one’s experience into the ability to form a discrimination between sounds brings in many other psychological processes that are involved in comparison and decision making.

As a result of my belief in experience as an important part of Psychology, I’m going to try to describe some of my research on auditory perception, but I won't give any data. Instead, I’m going to support my arguments with audio demonstrations to the extent that time permits. 

on the importance of researcher's experience in the scientific study of subjective experience

Al Bregman, Keynote on Auditory Scene Analysis, CIRMMT McGill. June 2008
( One of the principal scientists of psychoacoustics comments on the importance of a researcher being guided by his/her own felt experience in the study of subjective experience. )


Subjectivity and objectivity. 

At this point, I want to interject a few words about subjectivity and objectivity in psychological research. The personal experience of the researcher has not fared well as acceptable data for scientific psychology. Since the failure of Titchener’s Introspectionism, a very biased form of report of one’s experience, in the early twentieth century, and the rise of Behaviourism to replace it, scientific psychology has harboured a deep suspicion of the experience of the researcher as an acceptable tool in research.
You would think that the study of perception would be exempt from this suspicion, since the subject matter of the psychology of perception is supposed to be about how a person’s experience is derived from sensory input. Instead, academic psychology, in its behaviouristic zeal, redefined perception as the ability to respond differently to different stimuli – bringing it into the behaviourist framework. We may be doing research nowadays on cognitive processes, but the research methods are, on the whole, still restricted to behaviouristic ones. Since it was a perceptual experience of my own (the rapid sequence of unrelated sounds) that set me off on a 40-year period of study. of perceptual organization, I have always questioned the wisdom of this restriction.

In my many years of research on how and when a mixture of sounds will blend or be heard as separate sounds, my own personal experience and those of my students has played a central role in deciding what to study and how to study it. When I encouraged students to spend a lot of time listening to the stimuli and trying out different patterns of sound to see which ones would show the effect we were interested in, far into the academic year, and nearing the time that they should have been carrying out their experiments, they would get nervous and ask when they would start doing the “real research”. I told them that what they were doing now was the real research, and the formal experiment with subjects and statistics was just to convince other people.

Furthermore the role of subjectivity has often been criticized by journal reviewers: In the reviews of my first published article on auditory stream segregation, which showed that a rapid alternation of high and low sounds segregated into two perceptual streams, one of the skeptical reviewers proposed that there was something wrong with my loudspeakers – perhaps they continued to give out sound after the tone went off – and insisted that I test them.

I was convinced that if the reviewers had merely listened to the sounds, their objections would have evaporated, but in those days you didn't send in audio examples with your manuscript, and I’m not sure it would be acceptable for most journal editors even today.
…
Anyway, I got around the taboos about subjective data by giving many talks accompanied by auditory examples and by eventually publishing my own Compact Disk of auditory demonstrations. However, the CD didn't come until 23 years after the first research paper. Nowadays you could put demonstrations on the web and refer reviewers to the website.

Another thing that reviewers have criticized was the use of a subjective rating scale, asking listeners, for example, to rate on a 1 to 7 scale how clearly they could hear a sound in a mixture. Perception journals on the whole prefer tasks that involve accuracy. This is in keeping with the behaviouristic view of perception as the ability to make different responses to different stimuli. According to this view, you should be able to score the answers of the subjects as either correct or incorrect (For example by asking whether a particular sound was or was not present in a mixture of sounds) rather than simply accepting the listeners’ answers when they rate the clarity with which a target sound can be heard.

Sometimes we have used both types of measures, subjective rating scales and measures of accuracy, either in the same experiment or in a pair of related experiments. The two measures have given similar results, but the subjective rating scales have been more sensitive. I think the reason for their superiority is that they are a more direct measure of the experience, whereas turning one’s experience into the ability to form a discrimination between sounds brings in many other psychological processes that are involved in comparison and decision making.

As a result of my belief in experience as an important part of Psychology, I’m going to try to describe some of my research on auditory perception, but I won't give any data. Instead, I’m going to support my arguments with audio demonstrations to the extent that time permits.