Differentiated mathematics and morphogenetic processes
Alan Turing published a paper in 1952, The chemical basis of morphogenesis’ (ref 5). on the spontaneous formation of patterns in systems undergoing reaction and diffusion of their ingredients. Turing devised a mathematical model that explained how random fluctuations can drive the emergence of pattern and structure from initial uniformity.
Turing speculated that among the molecular ingredients of this bundle of cells are components called morphogens (‘shape-formers’), which are somehow responsible for triggering the development of a cell or tissue along a certain pathway. More specifically, a morphogen is a signalling molecule that acts directly on cells to produce specific cellular responses depending on its local concentration.
Turing diffusion equations of 2 chemicals:
The results of running the algorithms are shown below:
My artefact consisted of a implemented interactive diffusion equation algorithm based on the Gray-Scott model (ref. 22). Figure 30. The user is able to dynamically control thealgorithm by clicking to add more “cells” and by dragging the mouse to change the feed parameter (F) and the kill parameter (k).
The Artefact
The software algorithm was run with a Gray-Scott algorithm. The results are shown below. The results show 2d outputs transferred into 3d models and output as prototypes. The idea here is to produce 4 large cylindrical ceramic lights ( approx 90cm height x 30cm diameter).
Frei Otto was the father of ‘form nding’ in architecture: using natural morphogenesis techniques to inspire his own architecture creations. He was one the first people to realize the power of morphogenetic design. The first experiment looks at a natural distance experiment using a defined limited surface area with a set of natural floating points that all use repulsive magnets to set there distance. See Figure below:
He found that that the arrangement of equal distancing method he saw within natural forces ( using the experiment of needles and magnets floating on water) was the method nature used to balance out the formation of cell patterns and skin patterns on animal and natural organisms. This same formula has taken to the name of Voronoi patterns. Named after Georgy Voronoi. In this case each site pk is simply a point, and its corresponding Voronoi cell Rk consists of every point in the Euclidean plane whose distance to pk is less than or equal to its distance to any other pk. If we see the diagram below:
Looking at the diagram above the 4 squares (black) indicate 4 areas of “cell” growth. If we assume for moment each cell can exhibit the same force of growth on each other, then we can correctly assume the midpoint euclidean distance between each growth area presents a balance of opposing forces of growth. If we draw a “normal” line at the mid-point of this line (which are part of the Delaunay Triangulation.) We then see the black polygonal lines surrounding each rectangle growth centre. The pixel (x,y) can be part of one of the polygonal shapes by answering the question: what is the smallest distance to each of the cell objects? The answer will tell you which polygonal shape the pixel belongs too.
How useful is this?
Take a look at all the natural uses of Voronoi type formation:
The Artefact
The results are shown below. The results show 2d outputs transferred into 3d models and output as prototypes. The idea here is to produce 4 large cylindrical ceramic lights ( approx 90cm height x 30cm diameter).
The research will include practical and theory led code and initially below is my research into using physical materials.
My idea is to create a installation that is Morphogenetic in nature with either the use of physical materials or not and incorporates Morphogenetic theory and code
Click on the group of images below to enlarge; 1-13 images
Important features:
Sculpting forms to create something morphogenetic.
Pros: Can be quite beautiful in appearance Cons: Non interactive and difficult to make interactive
Notes
1. Acrylics can be bent but static could use lights
2. Wood + cogs and pulleys and motors can work but messy 3. Glass is beautiful but static unless lights used inside 4. Bamboo is beautiful (the spheres are wicked with light inside) 5. Semi transparent glass is beautiful but difficult to work with 6. The crushed silk is gorgeous and looks amazing and organic: Problem:a new skill
7. Japanese salt: Getting the salt to create certain structures looks wicked Problem: how so make the structures?
8. Floating lights could be promising: investigate further
9. Clay 3d printers
Goldsmiths have a series of clay printers could be feasible to interact with in certain time periods: investigate further. (A fuse deposition modeller a 3D print). Maybe possible to obtain pointcloud? (export to 3d app and then make a model and re-export and print.)
cocofoam: very light weight shell Foldtex: www.foldtex.com wooden pieces on cloth Keraflex: paper thin porcelain. www.keralfex.us. Fossshape: www.wonderflexworld.com Ultrathin edible discs. www.molecularrecipies.com Formetal.
Photochromatic pigment
Technogel.
indoor terrains grass. www.brightgreen.co.uk Foamceramics. www.marjanvanaubel.com
Honeycomb metal .www.plascore.com
A Touch of Code from the Book of Installations
Best Installation ideas:
using TOUCH crystals and salt.SALT IS DIGITAL Replicating a printing process (using a printer of some form)
Release of a smoke
floor panels….
Using Gestures Floating robots
Projections on floors always nice ( imaginary vegetation)
Optical fibres
interactive lanscapeof lights
displays on walls reacting to people….
physical glowing balls
colored glass blocks
taking 3d prints from censored images (kinect 3d)
Dichroitic film
Pendulim drawing with electromagnets
Some form of live drawing process
Physical arrays of objects that can change state.
Create physical grid arrays.
Physical sound sculpture.
“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted” ― Percy Bysshe Shelley
medium: interactive installation
space requirements: 1.5 square metres
This piece focuses on a interactive work that engages a camera that captures images of a spectator and replicates that image as a set of discreet lines or points which can then be manipulated by the person via a mouse. As the person moves the mouse they distort the image by moving the points or lines. They also change the generative sound depending on the position of the mouse.
Creative Motivation
The motivation for the work comes from my background in film and tv in which there is a continue need is to reinvent the video image in terms of producing unique promotional titles for the start of a film or tv programme. The hardest task is to freshly reinvent image so the audience seeing the image become captivated by it. What was nice about this work is the immediacy of the results and the connection of the result to the person. They see a reflection of themselves in the work but complete with the realisation that they can distort this image and how that changes the representation of who they are.
Future Development
Having multiple and varied ways of changing the image representation adds to the experience of the person in playing with the piece so that would be the main goal to expand the different ways the person can activate different aspects of the distortion process.
Why make the work? We only see ourselves in the world through some kind of echo or reflection process either verbal or sound or touch or a visual representation. Its lovely to change that process into something slightly different whereby they can sculpt a video representation of themselves live.
Image distortion is also a big part of the way I see the world. The following images were part of a visual dairy I kept in Tokyo Japan.
The tutorial didn’t work so it was only by playing around with it that I was able to make the initial patch work (due to no initial values for coded parameters). The adaptions to the patch were to code in the capture of images from a camera and take snapshots when they were triggered by a clap or loud sound. Further changes were to add “Depth” to the image by adding depth values based on pixel brightness to the z-depth direction. Also, the addition of taking mouse values from the MAXMSP jit.window and feeding them into the audio patch as values to control the centre frequency of the Drone generated sound.
Another alternative patch used 2 forces on the mouse to bounce the image around. An attractive force and a repulsive force.
The forces at play were a simple Newtonian physics engine whereby:
The force applied to the particles “F“is defined as:
F = Vf /r*r based on a vector Vf = Ptarg-Pparticle r= length of Vf
Pparticle = current particle x and y position Ptarg = current mouse x and y position
a = F/M ( M is the mass of the particles)
arep =arbitrary repulsive force
M = This is arbitrary could be noise values (between 0-1) or a value of 1
Vnew = Vold + a + arep (Calculate the particle velocity)
Pnew = Pold + Vnew (Calculate the particle position)
Having studied this patch it was relatively straight forward to adapt it and simplify it so that the use of making the “line~” parameter inputs was simplified. The patch was further changed by taking inputs from the video mouse position and using them to control the centre frequency of the drone work.
I tried out the use of a different roving filter for the drone sound using a cascade filter but I still preferred the original biquad filter.
The making of the drone sound is quite straight forward. It uses multiple closely singled samples of the original waveform. I tried using different samples based on the normal major harmonic scale:
multiply by “x” to reach an octave :
1 c
1.059 c+
1.122 d
1.189 e
1.260 f
1.335 g
1.414 a
1.498 b
1.587 d
1.682 e
1.782 f
1.888 a
2.0 b
However, the closer the frequencies the better the sound result.
Also the use of freqshift~ was really important. It gave a depth to the drone sound frequencies that were are added all together. Without it the sound was too hollow. I would say having multiples of this freqshift~ would make the sound even richer. freqshift~ was a easy way to add a closely matching duplicating wave form. The same result could be done mathematically.
Instructions for compiling and running your project.
The setup at the pop-up show was as follows. A usb-camera was attached to a mac-mini with a mouse and speakers. The result was good. A small piece of code was added to make the screen full size and to not see the menus when they were not hovered over. As shown shown below. MAXMSP captured the camera with a jit.grab object and the external usb camera was selected from the video device list.
The setup on the laptop is as follows:
Just run the patches and everything should work. Change the mesh jit.gl.mesh drawing selection to points. Make the window partimage2 full screen and move the mouse around.
What software tools were used?
The data inputs: All processed through MAXMSP. Data outputs: all outputs sent via MAXMSP
FILTER INFORMATION (mainly for my own comprehension)
Biquad:
biquad~ implements a two-pole, two-zero filter using the following equation:y[n] = a0 * x[n] + a1 * x[n-1] + a2 * x[n-2] – b1 * y[n-1] – b2 * y[n-2]You can specify the coefficients a0, a1, a2, b1, and b2 as signals or floats (if you make the filter explode by making the b coefficients too high, you can recover (after lowering them) with the clear message, or by turning the audio on and off).In the last tutorial, we discussed how filters could be expressed as equations, e.g.yn = 0.5xn + 0.5yn-1The 0.5 values in the equation above set the respective gains of the different samples used in the filter. If we wanted a more flexible filter, we could generalize this filter so that those numbers are variable, e.g.:yn = Axn + Byn-1By modifying the values of A and B, we could control the frequency response of this filter. While the math behind this operation is beyond the scope of this tutorial, it’s generally true that the more energy given to the delayed output sample (the yn-1 term), the smoother the output and the more the high frequencies are supressed.A fairly standard tactic in digital filter design is to create a filter equation that can perform any kind of standard filtering operation (lowpass, bandpass, etc.) on an input signal. The most common implementation of this is called the biquadratic filter equation (or biquad). It consists of the following equation:yn = Axn + Bxn-1 + Cxn-2 – Dyn-1 – Eyn-2This equation uses the incoming sample (x), the last two incoming samples, and the last two outgoing samples (y) to generate its filter. (Another term for a biquadratic filter is a two-pole, two-zero filter, because it has four delay coefficients to affect its behavior.) By adjusting the five coefficients (A, B, C, D, E), you can generate all manner of filters.
Cascade
Cascaded series of biquad filters
Filtergraph~
The horizontal axis of the filtergraph~ object’s display represents frequency and the vertical axis represents amplitude. The curve displayed reflects the frequency response of the current filter model. The frequency response is the amount that the filter amplifies or attenuates the frequencies present in an audio signal. The biquad~ (or cascade~) objects do the actual filtering based on the coefficients that filtergraph~ provides.The cutoff frequency (or center frequency) is the focal frequency of a given filter’s activity. Its specific meaning is different for each filter type, but it can generally be identified as a transitional point (or center of a peak/trough) in the graph’s amplitude curve. It is marked in the display by a colored rectangle whose width corresponds to the bandwidth of the filter.The bandwidth (the transitional band in Hz) is the principal range of a filter’s effect, centered on the cutoff frequency. The edges of a filter’s bandwidth are located where the frequency response has a 3dB change in amplitude from the cutoff or center frequency. Q (also known as resonance) describes filter “width” as the ratio of the center/cutoff frequency to the bandwidth. Using Q instead of bandwidth lets us move the center/cutoff frequency while keeping a constant bandwidth across octaves. The Q parameter for shelving filters is often called S (or slope), although it is ostensibly the same as Q.The filter’s gain is the linear amplitude at the center or cutoff frequency. The interpretation of the gain parameter depends somewhat on the type of filter. The gain may also affect a shelf or large region of the filter’s response.
Summary in running the installation:
Install MAXMSP on the computer run figireout08B.maxpat make sure all 3 patches are in the same folder:
figireout08B.maxpat – visual image capture and manipulation Drone_Synth_06_single – generated sound changes when mouse moves myWave2.maxpat – different drone wave forms to explore
Optionally attach speakers or external camera. Get the usb camera by opening “p detectaface ” clicking “getvdevlist” and selecting correct camera in p vdev/input.
Or use a laptop with built in camera. Make the draw mode of the jit.gl.mesh partimage2 mesh to points make the floating window “partimage2 ” to full screen.
Or use the <esc> key. Move the trackpad or mouse around.
A reflection how successful your project was in meeting your creative aims.
Creatively the results were perfect. Having the ability to programme the jit.gen code gave me total control over the forces at play and meant the forces could also evolve.
However, it was a bit sluggish. As there were over 400,000 particles being controlled it was not that fast. If I added the sound interaction it would be further slowed down in performance. I could use two computers to alleviate this problem if I had the choice but still annoying.
What works well?
I loved the drone sound and creating a particle system on MAMSP was amazing.
What challenges did you face?
I didn’t know how to create both the drone sound and the gen particles so earthing was challenging at first. However the basic drone creation was quite straight forward and was very educational. The GEN coding is still quite difficult as examples are sparse and the explanation are cryptic. This was the biggest hurdle understanding how to use the different objects of Gen.
What might you change if you had more time?
Developing different drone sounds that change over time would be nice and changing the image representation to be more 3d in the view and exploring more forces.
Understanding algorithms and their impact on public discourse, then, requires thinking not simply about how they work, where they are deployed, or what animates them financially. This is not simply a call to unveil their inner workings and spotlight their implicit criteria. It is a socio- logical inquiry that does not interest the providers of these algorithms, who are not always in the best position to even ask. It requires examining why algorithms are being looked to as a credible knowledge logic, how they fall apart and are repaired when they come in contact with the ebb and flow of public discourse, and where political assumptions might not only be etched into their design, but also constitutive of their widespread use and legitimacy.
I see the emergence of the algorithm as a trusted information tool as the latest response to a fundamental tension of public discourse. The means by which we produce, circulate, and consume information in a complex society must necessarily be handled through the division of labor: some produce and select information, and the rest of us, at least in that moment, can only take it for what it’s worth. Every public medium previous to this has faced this challenge, from town criers to newspapers to broadcasting. In each, when we turn over the provision of knowledge to others, we are left vulnerable to their choices, methods, and subjectivities. Sometimes this is a positive, providing expertise, editorial acumen, refined taste. But we are also wary of the intervention, of human failings and vested interests, and find ourselves with only secondary mechanisms of social trust by which to vouch for what is true and relevant (Shapin 1995). Their procedures are largely unavailable to us. Their procedures are unavoidably selective, emphasizing some information and discarding others, and the choices may be consequential. There is the distinct possibility of error, bias, manipula- tion, laziness, commercial or political influence, or systemic failures. The selection process can always be an opportunity to curate for reasons other than relevance: for propriety, for commercial or institutional self-interest, or for political gain. Together this represents a fundamental vulnerability,
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one that we can never fully resolve; we can merely build assurances as best we can.
From this perspective, we might see algorithms not just as codes with consequences, but as the latest, socially constructed and institutionally managed mechanism for assuring public acumen: a new knowledge logic. We might consider the algorithmic as posed against, and perhaps supplant- ing, the editorial as a competing logic. The editorial logic depends on the subjective choices of experts, who are themselves made and authorized through institutional processes of training and certification, or validated by the public through the mechanisms of the market. The algorithmic logic, by contrast, depends on the proceduralized choices of a machine, designed by human operators to automate some proxy of human judg- ment or unearth patterns across collected social traces. Both struggle with, and claim to resolve, the fundamental problem of human knowledge: how to identify relevant information crucial to the public, through unavoid- ably human means, in such a way as to be free from human error, bias, or manipulation. Both the algorithmic and editorial approaches to knowledge are deeply important and deeply problematic; much of the scholarship on communication, media, technology, and publics grapples with one or both techniques and their pitfalls.
A sociological inquiry into algorithms should aspire to reveal the com- plex workings of this knowledge machine, both the process by which it chooses information for users and the social process by which it is made into a legitimate system. But there may be something, in the end, impenetrable about algorithms. They are designed to work without human intervention, they are deliberately obfuscated, and they work with information on a scale that is hard to comprehend (at least without other algorithmic tools). And perhaps more than that, we want relief from the duty of being skeptical about information we cannot ever assure for certain. These mechanisms by which we settle (if not resolve) this problem, then, are solutions we cannot merely rely on, but must believe in. But this kind of faith (Vaidhyanathan 2011) renders it difficult to soberly recognize their flaws and fragilities.
So in many ways, algorithms remain outside our grasp, and they are designed to be. This is not to say that we should not aspire to illuminate their workings and impact. We should. But we may also need to prepare ourselves for more and more encounters with the unexpected and ineffable associations they will sometimes draw for us, the fundamental uncertainty about who we are speaking to or hearing, and the palpable but opaque undercurrents that move quietly beneath knowledge when it is managed by algorithms.
The image search seems to only show images of white peoples eyes. People of ethnicity are only shown if there eyes are of an unexpected colour. (mostly white 80% 10% asian 5% black). In terms of if Intersectional theory exists , I think i would say yes as even people shown with brown eyes are mostly white as well. Moreover, a fascinating experiment in America was done by Jane Elliott, the American.
Elliott was convinced that the best way to tackle the problem of racism was with the very young, so she divided her all-white children into two groups based on eye colour. She told the blue-eyed children that they were superior to their brown-eyed classmates, and she told the brown-eyed, who had to wear identifying collars, that they were less intelligent and poorly behaved. The result, according to her, was that blue-eyed children began to behave arrogantly and, after a short while, the brown-eyed children began to accept their lower position.
The next day she reversed the experiment, and the results reversed, although this time the brown-eyed children, having already experienced discrimination, were more sensitive to the suffering of their blue-eyed peers. The idea was simple and effective. Something as genetically incidental as eye colour became an analogue for the genetic superficiality of skin colour, and it was shown that when one group was favoured over the other, both groups quickly assumed their designated roles as oppressed and oppressor.
A tv documentary was made about this The Eye of the Storm, showed thatpart of the problem is that the blue-eyed group is exclusively white, while the brown-eyed group is predominantly non-white, so that eye colour is no longer an analogue or metaphor for race but a direct referent. The division is not random but instead largely racial.
2.0 Arthur Jafa: Love Is The Message, The message Is Death at The Store Gallery, 180 The Strand
It’s the matter of black life in the United States. A century of police brutality and political gains, of triumph, tragedy, and resilience has been distilled into seven lyric and searing minutes of rapid-fire clips culled from a passel of sources. A partial list: silent movies, documentary footage of marches and concerts, sports coverage, music videos, news stories, Hollywood blockbusters, police-dash-cam downloads, citizen journalism, the artist’s home movies, and, of course, YouTube.Jafa has spoken of his desire to create a cinema that “replicates the power, beauty, and alienation of black music,”. Its an incredibly powerful piece of work. Showing both the positive and negative use of internet imagery. From hearing president obama sing to police brutality in a black neighbourhoods. From the power of dance to demonstration . In terms of Intersectional theory it seems everywhere; from the lack of respect in which black people are treated historically in America to use of rubber bullets on black demonstrators. Most of the clips were edited from youtube. On the whole a more negative side seems apparent than a positive side of how black lives matter.
Images used to be seen in 1 place at one time. Now images can be seen in many images at any time. The original image relies on its uniqueness and its history and heritage. Now images are juxtaposed with other images mainly used for advertising. What is the real image? And what is a copy? Arguments abound; market value needs images to be genuine. This idea was made more by when cameras were invented to record the image. Its a reproduction of the original. The reproduction had destroyed the original meaning as people have multiplied there own meanings onto the copies they process. Paintings are silent and still. Reproduction changes meaning.
Digital search algorithms can give distorted results: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/10/three-black-teenagers-google-racist-tweet
We have to accept that computers and search engines do not think for themselves. They are a reflection of their creators, and in the case of search engines, a reflection of those who use them – us. Negative images of black teenagers aren’t at the top of the search results because Google is racist, but because society reflects our institutional and subconscious prejudices.If people want to see positive images of black young people they are going to have to start writing, searching, reading and sharing them. This is the only way to change the negative perception of black teenagers, and black people
There is a sense in which the world begins to be reproduced through computational models and algorithmic logic, changing what and how we see, think and even behave. Subjects are produced in relation to what algorithms understand about our intentions, gestures, behaviours, opinions, or desires, through aggregating massive amounts of data (data mining) and machine learning
A Future for Intersectional Black Feminist Technology Studies
by Safiya Umoja Noble
intersectional theory studies the relation between the many different ways that people are kept in a lower social position, controlled, and left out of important parts of society because of their differences
We need more interdisciplinary research and theorizing about how a range of digital technologies are embedded with intersectional and uneven power relations, from the ways in which technologies are structured, through the range of engagements that happen on the web, to the materiality of digital communications infrastructures that include the role of the state and capital in the extraction, manufacture, and disposal of the digital.
Carmody estimates that another three to five million were killed from 1983 to 2003 in wars over minerals and the control of coltan.[23] Coltan, short for columbite-tantalite, is a mineral, more potent than steel which is needed for computers and electronics to release electrical charges in small capacitors.[24] Contemporary global communications infrastructure, including the internet and the billions of devices, appliances, electronics, and “things” connected to it, could not exist without cheap access to coltan.
lectronics companies such as Google, Apple, Dell, Intel, Sony, Nokia, and Ericsson are heavily invested in the computer and electronics hardware manufacturing industries and need raw minerals such as coltan to produce components such as tantalum capacitors for microprocessor chips. But this labor is outsourced, and thus conveniently out of sight and out of mind, going to low-bidders who provide the cheapest labor under favorable neoliberal economic policies.
It is evident in the toxic waste sites on the west coast of Africa, in Ghana, where e-waste is shipped in from the West and dumped, poisoning land, water, people, and environments.
it is imperative that media and cultural studies scholars offer an account of how the 3.7 million gallons of water used per day by Intel in Hillsboro, Oregon, and the millions more used elsewhere, contribute to an ecology hospitable to infectious disease and its natural reservoirs… Knowing that an estimated 632,000 pounds of mercury were disposed of in United States’ landfills between 1997 and 2007, from just discarded personal computers alone, and that about 130 million cellphones are thrown away each year
A Great paper. I learnt a lot about present digital witnessing techniques and was impressed by some of the techniques (forensic architetcure,Humanitarian OpenStreetMap ,MicroMappers). As digital technology becomes more pervasive and ubiquitous digital witnessing will become more important and reliable as a witness. I think for any traumatic event digital witnessing techniques should compliment the normal fields of investigation to arrive at a correct depiction of events and help in quickening relief sponsored efforts. Thank you Nishat a great paper.
Key Words: Digital narratives, distance, forensic approach, spatial analysis, witnessing.
This article explores the fraught issue of how we might have an ethical engagement with places that are at a distance from us.
Distance in this sense is not just about being located far away or being inaccessible, but it speaks of those places that through their material conditions repel us in some way, or from which we are repelled.Whereas in the past, such places would remain out-of-sight and out of our consciousness, increasingly they reveal themselves to us. Often this occurs through the use of digital technologies, from the impulse to map and create a digital globe of the whole world to the various social media platforms that transmit images and videos
More than ever before, we are compelled to act, to somehow feel responsible for and bear witness to what occurs at a distance from us.
Pakistani city of Gwadar As a deep sea port, it is highly prized for the access it provides to the Arabian Sea, and China. Searching for Gwadar on the Internet returns articles on oil pipelines, deep sea ports, and China and India’s competing interests in the region. Not only is it becoming increasingly visible to the outside world due to its geopolitical importance, but physical access to it is also being restricted by the Pakistani military.
It shifts the focus from looking at the spatial reach of different types of actors to the mechanisms that allow them to transcend notions of distance.
Here the role of digital maps, the ability to remote sense places, and the role of social media cannot be overemphasized.
“SEEING” PLACES IN CRISIS THROUGH DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES digital mapping and crowdsourcing,
Digital mapping (also called digital cartography) is the process by which a collection of data is compiled and formatted into a virtual image. The primary function of this technology is to produce maps that give accurate representations of a particular area, detailing major road arteries and other points of interest. The technology also allows the calculation of distances from one place to another.Though digital mapping can be found in a variety of computer applications the main use of these maps is with the Global Positioning System, or GPS satellite network, used in standard automotive navigation systems.
One important arena in which digital technologies are produ- cing visual material of distant places in crisis is in the context of humanitarian action. Platforms such as Ushahidi and groups such as the Standby Task Force, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap, and Crisis Mappers all use digital mapping techniques combined with crowdsourcing via Short Message Service (SMS) or Twitter to respond rapidly to disasters and to assist humanitarian agencies in directing their efforts toward those most at risk.
One key critique has been the distant nature of such endeavors that could be seen to use technology as a proxy through which to administer aid, while keeping Western humani- tarian agents safe and out of harm’s way (Duffield 2013).
One could trace a genealogy of image- making from that single broadcast to the situation as it is today, where techniques of digital storytelling and virtual reality are being used by aid agencies as a way of communicating with the affected populations as well as with potential donors
Clouds over Sidra, made in collaboration with the United Nations, which follows a young Syrian girl around the Za’atri refugee camp in Jordan. The award-winning virtual reality film premièred at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and was credited with increasing the amount of aid pledged to the cause by world leaders (Anderson 2015; Feltham 2015). The film is a good successor to Buerk’s BBC report because both rely on the notion of witnessing to mobilize passions. We are shown the emaciated child crying at the pain of hunger, or the harsh realities of life in a desert refugee camp, to provoke a response from us at an emotional level
ethiopia: In the BBC report, the familiar and trusted face of the presenter gave an authenticity not only to the images, but also to the accompanying analysis, however simplified and unreliable it might have been
In Clouds over Sidra, a completely different dynamic is at play. We are now in the era of the ubiquity of the image, of the hypercomplexity of politics, where black-and-white understandings of right and wrong are simply not possible.
whose witnessing could be trustworthy enough? The simple and rather cynical answer that Clouds over Sidra provides us with is yourself and yourself alone. Virtual reality transports us to the refugee camp, where we can see “firsthand” the traumatic conditions and hear the personal stories of refugees who seem to be addressing us alone.
Virtual reality, funda- mentally, is a technology that removes borders. … Anything can be local to you”
This work places the burden of proof on the refugee, in this case a twelve-year-old girl, who has to show us her destitution and her will in the face of it; she has to perform it.
No longer reliant on the mediation of newsroom editors and professional journalists in the field, today the images we consume of various crises are often sent by members of the public, people who happen to be there at the time. There is an authenticity and immediacy associated with such images,
he project Dronestagram by the artist James Bridle is a good example of how seeing through digital technology can produce a different practice of witnessing (Bridle 2015).As leaked reports and the testimonies of former soldiers has slowly revealed the reality of the U.S. drone warfare program, it has become increasingly apparent that beyond the illegality of such acts, what the U.S. government was claiming in terms of the number of casualties and the accuracy of the bombs was a far cry from the reality on the groundDronestagram is a photo sharing community dedicated to drone photography. The site that has been described as “Instagram for drones”, allows hobbyists to share their geo-referenced aerial photos and videos.[1] The site launched in July 2013 by Eric Dupin and is owned by his company Dronescape.[2][3] The project is based in Lyon, France. There is also an dronestagram iOS app.[4]
Using freely available satellite imagery from Google Earth, Bridle shows the visual reality of areas inaccessible and out of bounds to those in the West and also to most citizens of the countries in which the bombs fell.
He wrote that they are “places most of us will never see. We do not know these landscapes and we cannot visit them”
They are somehow rendered consumable by Bridle, allowing us to see the reality of the places that the United States and its allies might claim were remote outposts, hamlets consisting of a few buildings, but were also places where people lived out their daily lives. Of course, there were other sources of information, other narratives that we could have chosen to listen to had we the appetite
Tribal leaders and ordinary people from the affected areas were telling of the exact toll that the bombings were taking.
Bellingcat Eliot Higgins,Malaysian Airways Flight MH17.what happens to the witness when the claims that are being made do not come from the testimony of individuals but are made through combining multiple narratives?
The starting point for this Bellingcat investigation was the distribution of updated satellite imagery from Google (DigitalGlobe satellite imagery) with a panchromatic resolution of 0.5m from the territory of eastern Ukraine and its border regions with Russia (17 July to 31 August 2014 satellite images). Additionally, the Bellingcat investigation team analyzed videos shared on social media (YouTube and VKontakte) and geolocated the events captured in these videos to key sites involved in the artillery attacks on Ukraine.
analysis focused on the probable angle of a munition thrown across the wall by the Israeli army. Another project focused on what has come to be known as the Left-to-die Boat, a migrant vessel making its way from Libya toward Europe through one of the most heavily watched maritime zones. Here they used surveillance technologies to show the number of different actors who could have rescued the stricken vessel but who used the overlapping jurisdictions at sea to not do so, resulting in the deaths of more than sixty people.
The work of Eyal Weizman and his research agency, Forensic Architecture
The examples of Dronestagram, Bellingcat, and Forensic Architecture give a glimpse of what type of engagement with a place that is caught up in geopolitics is possible through digital means. The three emergent practices combine spatial analysis with investigative journalism to engage with places that are in conflict, where it is difficult to spend time in the field. Although there is much to be learned from this work, it also serves as a warning.
In giving precedence to the stories that images and objects tell, the narratives of political subjects are taken to not be as “true” as those gleaned through scientific techniques.
BECOMING (IN)VISIBLE
For an understanding of how the Pakistani military has come to use drones against its own citizens, some knowledge of the province’s colonial past is useful.
We then see water bubbling up from the ground followed by images of dead fish floating in pools of water. Suddenly matches are being struck near the openings in the ground—the flame goes out immediately!
MicroMappers (Leson, Lucas, and Meier 2016). This is a microtasking app that enables large numbers of people to contribute toward filtering the vast amounts of data generated around an humanitarian event.
What affected efforts to track damage and casualties the most was that people in the area simply did not tweet, or at least this was the conclusion that the article came to, as did the developers of the platform (A simpler explanation for why MicroMappers were not able to find many tweets could be that no one could speak Balochi or Urdu and they did not have translation capabilities.
Exact numbers are difficult to ascertain but it is claimed that thousands of activists, those accused of being insurgents and ordinary people, have disappeared across Balochistan.
THE ETHICS OF WITNESSING THROUGH THE DIGITAl
They show that although there are many advantages to using digital techniques, not least the possibility of a form of engagement with places that are not easily accessed, such techniques come with their own limitations. There is a problematic filtering that occurs through the technological gaze, which is related to the way in which it has transformed the practice of witnessing.
This means that although on the one hand we see everything almost live and unedited, on the other the narratives that emerge are heavily mediated
this distinction (and impasse) between what we see and what we can say about what we’ve seen raises some important questions about just what a witness can say and the consequences of that utterance upon those within metaphorical earshot”
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.
It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.
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.”
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
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?
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