Actor–network theory (ANT) is a theoretical and methodological approach to social theory where everything in the social and natural worlds exists in constantly shifting networks of relationship. It posits that nothing exists outside those relationships. All the factors involved in a social situation are on the same level, and thus there are no external social forces beyond what and how the network participants interact at present. Thus, objects, ideas, processes, and any other relevant factors are seen as just as important in creating social situations as humans. ANT holds that social forces do not exist in themselves, and therefore cannot be used to explain social phenomena. Instead, strictly empirical analysis should be undertaken to “describe” rather than “explain” social activity. Only after this can one introduce the concept of social forces, and only as an abstract theoretical concept, not something which genuinely exists in the world. The fundamental aim of ANT is to explore how networks are built or assembled and maintained to achieve a specific objective.Although it is best known for its controversial insistence on the capacity of nonhumans to act or participate in systems or networks or both, ANT is also associated with forceful critiques of conventional and critical sociology. Developed by science and technology studies (STS) scholars Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, the sociologist John Law, and others, it can more technically be described as a “material-semiotic” method. This means that it maps relations that are simultaneously material (between things) and semiotic (between concepts). It assumes that many relations are both material and semiotic. (Correlates with the walkthrough method in the treatment of all agent within the network.)  

A computer can have the same amount of agency in a social network as the people  whose communication the computer supports. All assemblages are comprised of actants and all actants are assemblages within themselves. Example a assemblage of a birthday cake (actants: ingredients, cook,the bowl, the oven, the wooden spoon and we can breakdown these actants into their respective actants as well. The birthday cake can be looked at within another assemblage ( a birthday party). does include gender , race or religion.

Complex Ubiquity-Effects Ulrik Ekman

ubicomp = ubiquitous computing is a paradigm for peoples relationship to computers :scale ; invisibility and what results from those changes.

Networks around us at sleep, at wake, multiple machines,mobile apps interweaving with home networks from one to the next, Pervasive internet; online all the time. Networked all around you.Information about you and your likes can be picked up by local networks

The computing of everywhere. They fade into the background we don’t think about whats going on in the background.

AUGEMENTED REALITY: ADDING INFORMATION WITHIN YOUR VIEW POINT.

More and more people relate via mobile phones or computational entities which house intelligent assistants such as Siri, Cortana, Braina, Echo, Hidi, Vlingo, S Voice, or Voice Mate. Figure out how one is to analyze, evaluate, and perhaps contribute actively to the mutual development of human and technical context- awareness, temporal anticipation, and autonomous agency

technologies may appear ‘ubiquitous,’ ‘pervasive,’ or ‘ambient’ but most often do so inconspicuously and invisibly

1 user interacts with many networks.

future: sensors sending messages to us (from home). security (privacy)

Ubiquitous computing names the third wave in computing, just now beginning. First were mainframes, each shared by lots of people. Now we are in the personal computing era, person and machine staring uneasily at each other across the desktop. Next comes ubiquitous computing, or the age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives. Alan Kay of Apple calls this “Third Paradigm” computing

Ubiquitous Computing  refers to the trend that we as humans interact no longer with one computer at a time, but rather with a dynamic set of small networked computers, often invisible and embodied in everyday objects in the environment. Alan Kay of Apple calls it ‘Third Paradigm’ computing. Mark Weiser, the father of ubiquitous computing , describes it as a, “difficult integration of human factors, computer science, engineering and social sciences”. He states, “Over the next twenty years computers will inhabit the most trivial things: clothes labels (to track washing), coffee cups (to alert cleaning staff to mouldy cups), light switches (to save energy if no one is in the room), and pencils (to digitize everything we draw). In such a world, we must dwell with computers, not just interact with them” and, “We will dwell with these computers, whose presence we will ignore most of the time, and they will provide us with constant clues about our environment, our loved ones, our own past, the objects around us and the world beyond our home.”

When Art Becomes Science Beatriz da Costa

Interesting review of some of the activities and interests of Beatriz da Costa

Engaging in generative art practises

The Bureau of Inverse Technology (BIT)14 was one of the early groups to explore the powers a functional tool could hold when being developed for the purpose of raising awareness around social injustice, rather than for commercial exploitation

https://youtu.be/bTJK0hilOFs?list=PLf1aigmUv-961Pbe2ZPioaf-rwpii7yHd

The BIT Suicide Box15 consisted of a motion detection video system designed to capture vertical activity. Once it had detected an object falling in front of its lens, it would trigger record- ing of the motion.

The Suicide Box was installed on the Golden Gate Bridge in 1996, one of the most prominent suicide locations in the United States.

Another example was the BIT rocket. It was designed to provide a clear video stream at six hundred feet altitude to a ground receiver. Launched from the ground, BIT rocket was used to document crowd attendance during demonstrations at a time when sanctioned news and media outlets appeared to have “accidentally” forgotten to undertake these estimates themselves.

The Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA)16 is another group invested in developing artist/activist inspired tools. GraffitiWriter,17 the project that launched the group’s public visibility, was a first instance of exploring the notion of a “contestational robotics.” It consisted of an enhanced remote-controlled car equipped with spray cans, a microcon- troller, and a type pad. Any message up to sixty-four characters could be typed in, and would be sprayed onto the street at a desired location, without its human controllers being present at the locale.

One example is the SymbioticA research lab at the University of Western Australia. Here, a team of artists (Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr) and scientists has convinced officials and administrators within the School of Anatomy and Human Biology to house a collaboratively run research lab dedicated to the development of artistic science projects. Rather than using the facility just for their own research, Zurr and Catts have opened the doors to other interested artists, ready to invest the necessary time and training in order to conduct projects in this arena. Interested individuals can apply for extended residencies in order to achieve their goals

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PigeonBlog45 was a collaborative endeavor between homing pigeons, artist, engineers, and pigeon fanciers engaged in a grass-roots scientific data-gathering initiative designed to collect and distribute information about air quality conditions to the general public. Pigeons carried custom-built miniature air pollution sensing devices enabled to send the collected localized information to an on-line server without delay (Figure 21.1). Pollution levels were visualized and plotted in real time over Google’s mapping environment, thus allowing immediate access to the collected information to anyone with connection to the Internet.

PigeonBlog was an attempt to combine DIY electronics development with a grass-roots scientific data-gathering initiative, while simultaneously investigating the potentials of interspecies co-production in the pursuit of resistant action.46 How could animals help us in raising awareness of social injustice? Could their ability to performing tasks and activi- ties that humans simply can’t, be exploited in this manner while maintaining a respectful relationship with the animals?

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. “Crisis, crisis, crisis; or, the temporality of networks.” The nonhuman turn (2015): 139-166.

Wendy argues that crises are new media’s critical difference: its exception and its norm. Crises are central to making information valuable and to constructions of new media as empowering. This logic of crisis also links computers–understood as software and hardware machines. Software codes have not only reduced crises, they have also proliferated them. From Financial crises linked to complex software programs to supercomputer-dependent diagnoses and predictions of global climate change, from undetected computer viruses to bombings at securitized airports, we are increasingly called on both to trust coded systems and to be weary of them.

Crises and codes are complementary because they are both central to the emergence of what appears to be the antithesis of both automation and codes: user agency. (Notions that the internet places our freedom and security at risk are at the side of people saying it spawned new found democracy’s in that equals the political weight of people having their voices heard.)

“In new media, crisis has found its medium, and in crisis, new media has found its value”

Crises have been central to making the Internet a mass medium to end mass media: a mass personalized device. It does excel at the spreading of the good and the bad, its changed habits of enquiry and discussion to be online. It has both the good, the bad and the ugly all present with it. It offers participation, immediacy, sometimes the disgusting, uncensorship, bullying, humanitarian relief. It contains both the merits and demerits of us.

Executing Practices This collection brings together artists, curators, programmers, theorists and heavy internet browsers whose practices make critical intervention into the broad concept of execution.

Some of the ideas and thoughts were very interesting and I found other not to be. Different views on what happens when we execute code or a program and all the different ways the code can and has been used in practise and in art. Some of favourite arts of the paper were Radiokomputer that broadcast different programs over radio and what happened as a result of that. Also In Diff in June (2013), artist Martin Howse published his day in the life of his computer. Over a 1000 page book about all the commands processed by the computer in a day. Unsual look at the meaning of the word executuion. A multiplicity of relations are highlighted in such executions, which, as well as including hardware and software, are also dependent on laws, cables, the electromagnetic spectrum, minerals, histories, gender relations, economies and so on.

It seemed to connect with Lucy Suchman’s Plans and Situated Actions. Where she was highlighting the fact that we have embedded details within our thought processes but that we hide or suppress those details in order not to be overloaded. It seems the same on computer whereby the system hides the machine code day to day line executions from us and we get left with only the “top level” information. Quite interesting.

Lucy’s book Plans and Situated Actions.  “A critique of the dominant assumptions regarding human action and communication which underlie recent research in machine intelligence.”

Also  referred to as  “The problem of human-machine communication”, this book debunked the prevailing philosophy in artificial intelligence at the time it was written in 1987, which was the belief that people worked by making a plan, and then executing it. Humans don’t make plans as a computer; giving every intricate detail in order to carry out a process (like making a journey to work) instead we have that detail built within us. Suchman pointed out several of the flawed assumptions associated with it. In particular, she notes that we never fully specify a plan, because to do so would involve an excruciating level of detail. 

Suchman contrasts this sense of embedded detail with how people were trying to program robots at the time. 

She uses the example of a robot designed to “navigate autonomously through a series of rooms”, where the robot would first observe the rooms, plot a course through them, and then follow that course. Of course, if obstacles were moved after it had plotted its course, it didn’t take that into account. 

As humans, we take for granted our ability to continually evolve our plans in response to our situation, but computers illustrate how difficult such situation awareness is to describe. 

She points out that plans, rather than being a blueprint of action, make more sense as a resource for action. The idea is that we make plans before entering a situation, and we draw upon those plans while in the situation, but if circumstances change, we obviously do not continue blindly following the plan.

Instructions serve as a resource for describing what was done not only because they guide the course of action, but also because they filter out of the retrospective account of the action, or treat as “noise,” everything that was actually done that the instructions fail to mention. (p. 102)

She also discussed the difficulty in understanding a conversation between 2 people. What is said is only the smallest part of the conversation. The listener must actively try to construct meaning from what the speaker is saying. The listener constructs a model in their head, using cues from the conversation to build that model. Computers do not have the same capability for mental model repair,

Great ideas and constructs something I take for granted and never really considered. I often listen to someone talking and think to myself  ” what are they talking about”. Good conversation experiences I think are quite rare. We don’t engage at that level. We just want a “alright” response and not much else. Very hard to find people we can properly speak with. Clever work.

Computational Aesthetics in The Practices of Art as Politics 

The practices of art as politics are perhaps most challenged today by the interrelated expansion of digital technologies and the intensified commodification of human processes. In what follows I want to address this challenge by focusing on the recent turn to ontology by philosophers who are reevaluating the potentiality of objects.  I want to propose that the ontological turn—whether it be elaborated in object-oriented ontologies or in process-oriented ontologies, is registering the trauma of the development of the capacities of digital technology and the ongoing commodification of human processes: that is, the trauma of realizing that potentiality is not, or not only, a matter of human consciousness, human cognition or human agency. The philosophical assumption that there is a primordial rapport between human and world, or that there is a correlation between knowing and being, has been unsettled with traumatic effects. Patricia Clough

So the undercurrent is that digital technologies, the internet, tweets, and an increasing use of non-human interrelated technologies that we are educated into using are changing both the traditional aspect of art in politics and introducing new ways to express oneself politically in using these technologies in art. 

Awareness of affect as a technical artifact, commodities now are designed as objects that can stir affect; as most social media fits into this area. The world is changing where by non-human agencies have just a big political effect on us as human agencies do. There is both a registering of this in contemporary generative art that is political using data mining from social media and websites and in our own experiences of everyday life activities becoming more digital in nature (from health, love, shopping etc). The world we traverse is becoming so intertwined and interwoven with the digital so much now that we sometimes place more political weight on the digital than in the physical world.