[...]cation of these procedures (---> go to Serres's origin of geometry and greek empire)
***synchronization brings material forms (commodity flow, train travel) together and when geological and historical time are mapped into the same time --> metaphorical & ideological & material interact (==> emerging powerful possibilities) [--> in art we also do a lot of syncing and synchronization (<-- this is perhaps what Pierre meant by saying that researchers are creating their own science)]


time management, a central issue in industrialization
Babbage: clock = regulator of time

industrial world-knowledge ==> importance of the division of the history of the earth into equal periods of time

information drive (a drive *to save as little information as possible about something*)

(Latour's) oligopticon: special places where the micro-structures of macro-phenomena are crafted, local activities become a “bigger” issue (such as parliaments, courtrooms, offices), where different strands of “macro-social” phenomena are weaved
-they see much too little, but what they see, they see it well (=/= total surveillance of panopticon)


watch (from 1800 to 1820 at least 100000 clocks and watches were produced every year)

“clockwork ocean” with waves and cycles of salinity as “balance wheels”
(Bowker > Graham Burnett > Fontaine Maury)

}==> imposing a **temporally mediated qualitative difference between the creator and created** (instantiated on the factory floor and in nature) --> creators stood outside regular space and time (=/= situated knowledges)

(19th century) scientific work = imposition of a representative framework of regular space and time on social and natural time
(science was and still is) making society confirm to the same spatiotemporal representational framework it was/is “discovering” in nature (---> go to the #scientification of christian genesis in Nolan's Noah film)
*imposition of a regular spatiotemporal representational framework* = (Bowker's) [*]convergence (a key aspect of synchronization): a cosmology (inspired by factory production) of nature and humanity--to make science, art and politics converge more and more towards the same goal, to introduce to them the notion of change, progress, succession, continuity, life, submit them to the same law (of constancy and uniformity)
•in astronomy: (1836) “the return of the comet of Halley at its predicted time has been remarked with intense curiosity and satisfaction by astronomers, and by the public. this has now become a regular and well ordered member of our system” (=/= ajayeb)

*representational framework of temporal regularity* ==> one can read backward into the past and forward into the future (--> # sequential palindromic time)
--> tale of the real archive : tale of stasis [==> “violent care”: preservation of current species and the imposition of stasis] : single law : (the fable of:) “perturbations and oscillations providing noise that true understanding would filter out”


fable of industry:
•how humanity had gone from being initially weak to currently king of nature : “industry = second nature”

•art submits to science
•industry recognizes science for its regulator


chaotic spacelike, lacking direction and granularity

working of childhood marked by staccato syncopation (=/= regular rhythms)

machine regularizes “man”: processes synchronizing him to industrial time
mechanical uniformity became the “natural” state of affairs


Facebook within the spirit of industry --> “under the [spirit of industry's] influence, people will begin by grouping themselves more naturally [...] people will come closer together, mass according to their real analogies and according to their real interests [...] the same ideas will circulate in all countries [...] uniformity of costumes [...] the same needs, a similar civilization, will develope everywhere [...] without confusion or violence, relations both as complex and as easy, as peaceful and as profitable as may be” -Charles Dunoyer


ufs (unidentified flying subject)
ufo


arguments about rates of change = about facts of change

eternal, unchanging present


train traveler looking out the window
a Newtonian world of abstract qualities size, shape, quanity, motion
==> space out of the window of a moving train: a new kind of geographical representation, abstract and regular


(a problem in management:) “time had conspired with capital to annihilate space
@Sana

[a ‘second nature’ being created] railway (+ telegraph) ==> commodification + communication

in our trip to Rivage with Marialena we were in terested in signs in the built landscape, the “second nature” in the nature of Rivage, which were “concrete embodiments of the environmental partitioning that made farming possible”

a heterogeneous collection of lived spaces and histories
a heterogeneous collection of lives and spaces

why translation must be a monopoly (according to railway):
you need centralized bureaucracy and effective monopoly in order to operate with efficiency [...] you could not have every train running on its own (loca) time ==> (Bahn railway map =) a representation that permit efficient operation --> *an absolute time and annihilated space*

(industrialization -->) railway/railroads --> basic accounting techniques used by American business enterprise (into the 20th century)
==> infrastructural technology: organizational form (accounting techniques, reports, etc.) synchronized with its own impact on the world (regularizing it) providing both a ***material and metaphorical implusion*** (to order its forms of inquiry/activity)


@apass monday reading
means of new infrastructural technobody ==> technoscientific representations ==> (dual process of) commodification (railway) + representation (abstract space-time)
--> “you need to be able to represent the world in a *coherent and standard* form [~ databases] in order to run railways [or program language operation] and deal in commodities

increasingly less well-defined boundaries --Serres--> we need analytic categories that allow us to account for the unified representational time and space applied to both bureaucratic and scientific work --(Sohn-Rethel)--> (relationship between) **commodity form and the process of intellectual abstraction** [-abstractness governs the whole orbit of commodity form]. when commodity is up for sale, it is by definition not to be used; it exists in a kind of “frozen time” outside the normal flow of time. it moves in an abstract spatiotemporal world (~= “second nature"[==> cognitive faculty of conceptual things] =/= concrete world of “first nature”)
*import* the ideal abstraction basic to greek philosophy and to modern science


systematizers

nested series of regions

synchronic extension --> “trace” back records in past: indian empire preceded edgyptian preceded persian preceded western. a second world, Europe, is contained within larger world (~= european union) --> (fable of the “step by step”:) man has step by step, broken with this natural asian world, and constructed, through industry and trial a world informated by liberty [--> my german orientation course, “that is why refugees are coming here"]


fable: history as the tale of struggle (~ liberty against fatality)

(glorious) race into the future


temps
•time
•weather


(i have been working against:) “the irrelevance of the past for a purified real present (which Bowker underlines in Lyell's work)

syllogism صغرى کبرى
soghra kobra

senility kohulat


**database
(replacing syllogism) principle of the *division of labor* --> simultaneity of groups (of people) --> “the succession of acts of which a single act is composed, is the same thing as the succession of diverse works necessary to arrive at a result which is nevertheless single.” (this) succession ==> division of labor


“there is not context only text” --> when you get to Paris, upbringing and race are irrelevant to a person's actions. contemporary humanity would move completely outside the flow of narrative time


1830s geology
history: a science of singularity and secular change
earth: records of catastrophic events that affected the body terrestrial (much as political events affected the body politic)
(Lyell + Buchez + Michelet ==>) (reconfigured the world from) a *tapestry of tales*[~= ajayeb] --to--> random access memory/archive [RAM]****

isotropic spatiotemporal analysis

glitterati
glitter + literati
(framed people: made fashionable and beautiful)


Lyell's time:
1- time: passive container --> attempt to give a chronology to the history of the earth, to trace its origin or deny that there is any evidence that it has origin
2- time: process --> attempt to pick out certain types of changes that are invariably associated with the history of the earth at any age [--> RAM] and are thus in a sense a feature of time itself


Bowker reading consistant patterning in Lyell's writing, finds that in his work in each disparate quotes that Bowker cites:
•the part: (is take as) varying, liable to be created or destroyed
•(=/=) the whole: immutable and eternal (just like Buchez's society)
}--> fable of ‘nature as a whole’
[==asserting==> that no hybrid had ever achieved a permanent niche on earth]**
that nature keeps a check on the whole process by organizing flora and fauna into “nations”
[==asserting==> nothing can survive long outside its nation]** (=/= cyborg)

“cycle” of years <--> a region
a climatic great year <--> earth over time
“revolutions” of the earth's surface <--> species change

industrial revolution, reaching its peak as Lyell was writing
--> the stillness, the ***ineluctable equilibrium between creation and destruction*** (=/= other facts available to Lyell's contemporaries)

(fable, a powerful myth still stalking our collective discourse today:) that human time was going faster now than it ever had in the past --to--> give humanity a privileged position within the geological record
(a different time for geology)


**[clockwork mechanism]

how geology in the 19th century shaped our contemporary ideas of database
-(earth is an archivist, but a bad one, it is up to the geologist to pull together information -->{ earth creates false records --> humands create false records through mudging the earth's annals with mules, hybrids, and monsters --✕--> geologist can read between the lines ==> true record of stasis)
the earth's archival technology + efficient use of information technology

astronomy was in the 19th century the science of regularity : all the apparent perturbations in the earth's orbit were reckoned to be embedded in cycles of varying duration --> universe = effectively clockwork mechanism

(for an archivist [~ Lyell]:) earth = special kind of clock, an *hourglass*

(astronomy + geology -->) (a contemplation of) the regular clockwork mechanism that seemed to govern both the heavens and the earth [+ Babbage: judged that human history was in its underlying tendency equally regular] ==> ***first and second nature converge onto a timeless present and an anisotropic flow of time***

*anisotropic: having a physical property which has a different value when measured in different directions. (wood is stronger along the grain than across it, or anisotropic filtering in computer graphic rendering at oblique viewing angles)
-varying in magnitude according to the direction of measurement. (electron scattering is anisotropic) ~-> palindromic time

*isotropic: having a physical property which has the same value when measured in different directions. not varying in magnitude according to the direction of measurement


(my project:) **picture of earth sciences**
(--> stories of macrocosm in Olearius)

picture of earth in 1830s:
earth itself as a kind of large information storage device not a very efficient one, but still remarkable -->> the inefficiencies of the storage device could be mitigated (as Beaumont and Lyell pointed out) by redundencies in the recording process -->> these redundencies could be perceived through efficient use of the new transport infrastructure (steamboat, train, etc.) -->> then geology would converge with astronomy in calling forth a historical time as regular and perfect as that of the clockwork solar system (hymned as an accurate clock)
}-->
“archival process ~= a natural technology” --> from natural to ideal: archive being mediated by technology marked by clockwork regularity
==> “earth = clock” (associated with the triumph of industrial society, because it ran like clockwork [---> go to german pünktlich punctuality]) --> industrial time writen into Lyell's geology: two methods of factory production *the division of labor* and the *parceling up of time into regular units* are both writen into time that Lyell created for the new discipline of geology
--> factory & geology were the precisely the same problem: *organization of time*


census
statistical record-keeping, a central technology for a modern state

statistical thinking


(this is Lyell in Bowker's research on memory practices in sciences:)
through a linguistic metaphor, Lyell endeavored to explain the apparent asymmetry between past and present. this metaphor brings out the peculiar centrality of humanity in Lyell's geology and thus the centrality of human society to his problematic


idea of the ‘book of nature’

(Lyell's logic) --> we humans have access only to a limited and random grammar of the ‘book of nature’ ==> *burden of proof* lies with those with thier set of *past causes* to explain the past
[!!]

Lyell's geology is a kind of bookkeeping device that allows the storage of vast amounts of information by sorting them into a kind of filing cabinet of different kinds of events (=/= ajayeb)
(his work revolving around an understanding of archives)

Lyell's “economy of nature”
principle of division of labor into the profession of geology + into the economy of nature }==> cumulative reports in a stateless present (=/= situated knowledges) ==> calculus of regularity out of apparent chaos and old time


true language of geology

(from a) groundwork --> contemplation of more general questions --> complicated results -->{ indefinite lapse of ages --> the existing causes of change


(?Marialena contributing to) earth's archive

scriptural authority (=/= rigor)


halcyon future
ایام خوب گذشته ayam-e khub-e gozashte/ayande


when the center of calculation is in place, there is no need to move

past --> knowledge developed catastrophically, and analysis were framed in terms of catastrophes
present --> knowledge develops uniformly and analysis are framed in terms of continual steady change


Buchez --> science would be the agent that converged both human and natural history onto isomorphic time*** [fantasy of Star Trek]

symmetry between the past of the geological discipline and of the earth


[title]
Freud's penis

inscription of records onto skin


the changes humanity has brought are (not of physical but of a) moral nature

strange tale! --> it is the bestial part of humanity fitting into the economy of nature, whereas civilized humanity operates in a different dimension to nature ==> creating the temporary appearance of an anomaly in “nature's book”


[title]
*the time of the good record keeper*

time of God


sybarites (an urbanite addicted to luxury and pleasures of the senses)
sycophants (=/= a public informer)


incalculable, irrational past seems to Lyell full of noise and cacophony irregularity


memory ensconced in books (~ filtered memory, rational memory, part of the archive with its very clear point of origin in printing) freed us from instict and brutality [---> go to TED talk ‘big history’ by David Christian, fable of printed record and progress of humanity tale]
(Bowker > Babbage:) until the invention of printing, “the mass of mankind were in many respects almost the creatures of instict” --> “flood of light over the darkened intellects of their thankless countrymen”
(the spirit of 19th century embodied in Babbage) making the ***act of making information*** such a key variable:
(print rational/archival memory ==>) new space and time ==> (need for) regular working of the machines of nature and the world : *regularization of time and the distribution of tasks* [--> a mythological operation]<== infrastructural work:
•developement of computing (+ machineries)
•division of labor

Buckland + Babbage ==> complete knowability of the Book of Nature


information and database theory (in genomics --> a core science of our time)
archive ==(is central to ‘thinking about’ & ‘writing down’ of)==> objects being studied


information explosion of the early 19th century + new ways of describing the past


“locality of each geologist will be the terrestrial globe” (--> locality of Olearius)

heroic age --> everyone constructed complete systems (that are thrown up and down in cataclysmic succession [!]) [--> question of artistic research]


...relics of the animate creation of former ages [--> science special effects, museum of continuity,]
[title]


indifinite space as filled with worlds...


colossi

earthquakes
floods
storms

tranquil variations


“second nature”:
•(from) past
•analytical constructs of extended present


[title]
***an irregular past and a totalizing memory***
(‘chaos’ characterized of/for archive ==> human nature)

moral duty as humans [!!**] --> to recognize stasis at the heart of disorder **** (--> an ancient fable, archetype) *apperceive[~ perceive in terms of a past experience, accumulative perception] synchrony in the midst of diachrony[~ look for historical changes/roots in languages]* + to sync ([*]synchronization: to bring social and natural time into a unified form <--through-- production and storage of records)
@Marialena

the metronomic story
the mnemonic story


***spatializing time***
(for humanity) going out in space, to India, to the Orient, or within France to Brittany or the Pyrennees, was going backward in time (~ mapping technique ==> position of “humanity” out there nowhere --> anomalous, moral, short term [--> “impact” of Star Trek crew(~ a cult of people who have unlocked the secret of life and the universe) on the worlds they visit])
==> faceless scientist working in a vast and effective machine (--> Haraway talks about the same)


new memory practices
•***lie at the heart of our ways of knowing (both ourselves and the world)***
•they skew our available ontological space

it seems our contemporary memory practice is highly prosaic [~ german?] (=/= baroque)


[***mythological dimensions of new memory practices:] (*there is a compelling connection between the information revolution as an economic fact and as a statement about the nature of universe:)
19th century rationalization + bureaucracy (==> dramatic new information-processing and communication technologies) ==> today's institutions = **to oppose entropy** @apass
DNA ~= global economy --> nature of existence & new technology synchronized
(--> a history of science as successive decentralization of human) ==> ***eschatological (base of) information revolution*** : every material structure or energy flow (@Ali's pot carrier) could be used/seen to carry information
--> (mediated in 19th century:)
nature of the universe --to--> nature of humanity --to--> organization of economy

information mythology [~ “information” can travel anywhere and be made up of anything ~ “everything is information"] = interface between the social and natural worlds
}==> ‘a general statement about the nature of information' = 'a general statement about the nature of the universe’
(Bowker:) the new memory modality was at root an economic process of ordering social and natural space and time so that “objective” information can circulate freely [==> democracy, science]
==> package the world + make it deterministic
--✕--> (we must) make information historical (again)*

...................................

Avital's work has concerned itself [...] with the fact that technology is irremissible. Mary Shelley projected this view of technology with her massive, monumental, commemorative work on the technobody, which was the nameless monster. The problem with (or opening for) technology is that no one is or can stay behind the wheel, finally, and no one is in charge. And the way she has tried to route and circuit the thinking of technology--indeed, in a posthumanist frame--exposes the extent to which it belongs to the domain of testing.

the contiguous neighborhoods of broken experience and rerouted memory

the myths of liveness

[my] problem with television[/news] is that it exists in trauma
-trauma undermines experience and yet acts as its tremendous retainer
*trauma: a memory that one cannot integrate into one's own experience, and as a catastrophic knowledge that one cannot communicate to others

the black-box of talking survival

Robocop: highly complex cyborg (who came equipped with memory traces, superego, id, and--ever displacing the ego--a crypt)

court's frame-by-frame analysis of video --> recording and human memory @Ali

...................................

which ‘well-defined terms,’ *qualities of persistence*, object repository, and identifier resolvers am i using in ajayeb.net?
the performance of digital objects (and identifiers) (not treated as a simple binary property)
*(to retrieve) human- and machine-readable information*

persistence of cited objects (in ajayeb.net)

[*]persistence: a prediction about an archive's commitment and capacity to provide some specific kind of long-term functionality

which objects in ajayeb.net are:
•strictly unchanging
•subject to correction
•subject to significant update


[Calvert naming strategy]--> an approach: to invent a term (a portmanteau word واژه مرکب از دو واژه) or choose an existing word that is unusual enough (rare, archaic) to make the reader hesitate to jump to a conclusion about its meaning *** [i used a farsi word in english: zolmat, pir, tarof,]
nothing is permanent --> we call some things/objects/identifiers naively nuanced “persistent” or “not persistant”
(important -->) ** of course, it is not a thing that resists change, it is the provider of a thing that resists or, more precisely, controls change **

“reproducible science needs citations” <-- what is my ajayeb relation to this?

(i am modifying some of Calvert's term:)
[*]identifier: an (always breakable) association
[*]actionable identifier: an identifier that can be acted upon by widely available interpretive systems --?--> [*]queryable: effectively leading to a story
[*]content: abstract substance ‘usually’ found in strings
[*]history: a list of (not always all the) versions, (a human-readable document that describes the change?)

(ajayeb.net must always help users) guage the persistence commitments and abilities of repositories and archives <-- element names, values, and precise semantics are in flux

*content variance* in ajayeb.net
(how did i or didn't perform/stage setting user expectations in my apass representations of ajayeb.net)
--> (question of) *objects that grow*, identifier assignment policy, content moves away (varies) from its original state
(any) content change ==triggers==> generation of new object identifier

finite, indefinite, lifetime, subinfinite

content in the presence of versions
(Calvert's defining “content” without using the term “meaning”:)
[*]content: abstract substance, found in such strings as writing, speech, images, and music, (=/= form, =/= style)
content that includes an actionalbe id string:
•extraversuioned, offering no direct actionalbe access
•introversioned, version is opaque, shyness?, good for longevity, bad for inferring provenance منشاء


found in the wild

found in ajayeb.net:
•constructed content reference
•scholarly web
•standardized query strings
•the question of landing page --with--> typed links navigable by software

how ajayeb.net performs analysis and prioritization of its own service definition?
how ajayeb.net translates its politics into metadata[~= machine-readable persistence statements]?
which “well-intentioned but untested” set of terms are used and addressed in ajayeb.not?

...................................

[(gendered, racialized, politicized, colonial,,,) narratives of innovation]

(i tended to this field with ajayeb [عجایب المخلوقات: a context of pedagogy and librarianship] -->) library and information science : technologically intensive profession (<-- also many other professions)
علوم بايگانی <--> علوم  کتابداری
(my performance and literary interest:) *librarianship and teaching are both professions that resist commodification because they rely on embodied labor and personal interaction*

*people-centric work* (like library science and education)

quantitative =/= qualitative
measurable =/= descriptive
(objective concepts)
--> (Calvert reading) the ostensibly qualitative, measurable, and hence objective concepts of competition and competitiveness stand in contrast with qualitative, descriptive concepts of both “culture and collaboration”


to open up some of the ‘literature of’


(Calvert working on) the implicit notion that competition and innovation are a natural fit --> the “measure, controlm and automatic” rationality of US-style economic competition

difficult to commodify
difficult to describe

not taking apparent differences (between men and women, human and animal,,) to be timeless, necessary, or inevitable --> descriptive =/= prescriptive (descriptions not intended to be prescriptive) --> *to historicize and denaturalize concepts (of competition, innovation,,)*

Bowker + Leigh Star > Calvert: *things perceived as real are real in their consequences*

market competitiveness has a plethora[~ excess, افراط ,ازدياد] of measures --✕--> profit: the seller-centric proxy measure of consumer interest

“our idealized notion of competition as a generator of innovation black-boxes a host of processes for competition, including unfair practices, externalizing costs, marketing, deception, and deskilling.”

(our idealized notion of:){ competition ==> innovation }--black-boxes--> (a host of) processes for competition:
•unfair practices
•externalizing costs
•marketing
•deception
•deskilling
•

individualistic and social Darwinist overtones

[*]inovation: a form of wishful thinking that aims to bring about the desired transformations without the associated costs in time and human effort (Suchman & Bishop)
(‘labor-intensive artistic work’: noninovative creative work; deepen the density of curiosity;)

capitalism continuously applies new technology designed to fragment and deskill labor, so that labor becomes cheaper and subject to greater control (Wajcman)

(sometimes) obsolescence is created through minor redesigns of consumer commodities

“let's sell more” ~-> undesirable consequences for human rights, global trade in rare metals, and toxic waste disposal

[*]technological determinism and optimism: the belief that the present social arrangements and technologies were the inevitable byproducts of historical developement, and that any problems entailed in our technologies and their production processes can be eliminated with further technological innovations

competetiveness and the technological *savvy* implicit in innovation are themselves markers of contemporary masculinity --> “the enduring force of the identification between technology and manliness is not an inherent biological sex difference. it is instead the result of the historical and cultural construction of gender” (Wajcman)

a big part of the problem is that women's technological labor (=/= ghost busters) is culturally invisible --(Katie King in her research on writing technologies argues)--> (a metonymy:) when technologies are reduced to singular, stable, self-contained devices [~ Star Wars] =/= assemblages
[dichotomy of “enforcement =/= destruction” Star Wars either or: if you are not destroying it you are enforcing it]

problems that cannot be conceptualized in terms of measures and endpoints, or which involve holistic, qualitative solutions, will be at a disadvantage for selection

(Cowan shows) the developement of new household tachnologies did not free women from the domestic shpere. rather, it allowed women to enter the paid labor force while leaving the gendered division of labor in the home untouched.


(makes me throw up -->) large literature of self-determination theory (~ showing people are more creative and happy when their work allows them to be autonomous, related, and competent) + reward systems cultivating competitive environments
[*]autonomy: self-willing, volitional, being an agent in the action =/= being a “pawn”

spheres where processes and outcomes have been the name of the game (in feminized fields of education and librarianship)

labs (such as laser developement) that require collaboration with other labs

trading zones: a metaphor for understanding how cooperation between researchers enables new scientific paradigms --> Galison

*the development of this or that research looks like a continuous trajectory, but the trajectory was actually discontinuous and ruptured. that fact that we have invented or discovered something makes that developement seem inevitable, but things could always have turned out some other way* --> Cowan > Calvert

competition is not a guarantor of innovation, our cultural belief in it can obscure other explanations for innovation --> for example (Wylie showing:) (archaeology's enshrined belief that) male-centered hunting activities dominated prehistoric caloric intakes ==✕==> other hypotheses for the transition to agriculture --✕--> women's leading role in the development of agriculture--arguably the most significant innovation in human history--could finally be detected


[bids for status by denying the feminized and second class aspects of library work] --> ***the labor of care is at the core of library work*** --> *teaching, like technology, is always a relationship, and that relationship is undergrided by the labor of care* (--> affective labor is literally vital to the successful delivery of other kinds of services)***
the ways women are called on to manage their and other's feelings <--✕--> technology is positioned in out culture as rational and precise and therefore (masculine and) unemotional [--> look at the film Lucy]

successful education and mentorship depend on this skill, which, like household labor, is difficult to account for in “competitive” economic analysis


**articulation work**
the labor necessary to make technologies fit together seamlessly --> Leigh Star
(my work begins in) information systems may leave gaps in work processes that require real-time adjustments, or ‘articulation work,’ to complete the processes
(my research: through ajayeb i have been busy with learning to “make friends” with both technologies and theories)

every system is an assemblage --> Calvert applying Haraway's insight and think of technologies as significant prostheses ==> [*]librarianship: a work that (primarily) hooks up people with their technologies

librarians articulate technologies --> they help people adapt technologies

librarian's articulation work is both technological and affective =/= competitive


(in techno-capital) supressing labor costs ==> deskilling

deskilling and de-professionalization under the intertwined guises of competitiveness and innovation

an example of deskilling:
-Haraway: “to be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labor force, seen less as workers than as servers; subjected to time arrangements on and off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited work day; leading to an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex. deskilling is an old strategy newly applicable to formerly privileged workers.”

education has been difficult to comodify, and remains labor intensive =/= innovations in online education ==> creating inroads in the deskilling and commodification of teaching labor:
•course curriculum --> course content
•teaching --> delivery
*video technologies + internet ==> face-to-face interpersonal relating to be captured and reused --> new depths of commodification
*internet technologies can be used to provide rigorous, asynchronous learning and mentorship, or they can be used to decrease labor costs, but they cannot do much of both simultaneously(? --> question @apass)


Calvert: [...however,] for competition--[or any good/bad object we are working on] to be a useful strategy, it has to happen in a larger context of cooperation and collaboration
(for example the notion of “future” has to happen in a larger context in which different futurities for diverse communities is thinkable)


method <=={
+ sensitivity to the historical moment (multiculturalism, extreme changes in the meaning of ‘global,’ etc.)
+ an assemblage of tools that are ready to hand (theoretically driven, are pleasant and effective to use, etc.)
+ embody an ethical commitment to -->
◦emic: the values and meanings of those who are being studied
◦etic: within a way to explore the conventions, standards and infrastructures that both constrain and enable their experiences


Leigh Star
•qualitative methods
•lateral thinking
•poetics of infrastructure
•[*]boundary objects: examines assemblages of humans and things, and how things that exist in more than one community of practice are used in performing cooperative work


the role of practical knowledge in organizational life

sensitivity of an ethnomethodological orientation

(apass's) intellectual capital (is not centered in their official document repositories and databases, rather is in the largely undocumented ideas, insights, and know-how of its members: Lilia, Pierre, Nicolas, Joke, Steven, Michele,)

exigencies of work

****much of knowledge often remains embodied in the practice
commonly shared through conversations and stories among small circles of colleagues and work groups --> local vernacular --convert--> other forms ==> other members of the organization can understand & *act upon* together

Sina --> richer comprehension of socially organised work practice into the process of engineering technological systems

Calvert --> her work is about the enduring qualities of the book and how its resistance to commodification enables this thing we call a public library.
she is interested in developing library-appropriate research methods for thinking critically about old and new technologies
-we naturalize the way technological infrastructures make ethical decisions for us =/= producing methods/ethic that allows librarians to mandate characteristics in developing technologies which both preserve librarians’ prerogatives to make (necessary visible) ethical judgment calls <-- Calvert
جعبه--"containers” continue to dictate the name of the game (for the immensely diverse patronage of the public library)

...................................

bilingualism
different languages (farsi and arabic in ajayeb) refers to different value systems and to different lived experience

...................................

[Ahmed]

(complaint ~=) diversity-work = data-collection

we learn about the damage we cause, of how causes are understood as damage

...................................

my old background (in computer sciences):
•www.joelonsoftware.com (Joel Spolsky runs a company which sells bug databases, “FogBugz”)
•wiki.c2.com
•“Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs”


computational process

abstract beings (processes*) manipulate other abstract things (data*)
--> a pattern of rules (program*)

programming: *metalinguistic abstraction* [--> engineering design] : building a mini-language to express a problem, using a fixed computer programming language (on a given hardware) to construct a new language that enables describing (and hence to think) the problem --> using:
•primitives means of combination
•primitives means of abstraction
--> representation of data and control (<~~ individual bits of storage and primitive machine instructions)
+ using the given hardware to erect systems/utilities for the efficient implementation of resource-limited computations


distinction between “passive” data and “active” processes =/= Lisp
(procedures and data are just abstractions, they are not really distinct) --> programming language should have methods for combining and abstracting procedures and data

means of abstraction: by which compound elements can be named and manipulated as units


modularity --> localized part of the system
<== perception of the system
•objective: viewing a large system as a collection of distinct objects --> concerned with how a computational object can change and yet maintain its identity
•streamous: information that flow in the system --> delayed evaluation

(for example) a bank account: has state in that the answer to the question “Can I withdraw $100?” depends upon the history of deposit and withdrawal transactions

object decomposed into computational objects (each with their own time-varying local state variables) --> model

object programming: model real-world objects with local state by computational objects with local variables --> identify time variation in the real world with time variation in the computer --> implement the time variation of the states of the model objects in the computer with assignments to the local variables of the model objects
--✕--> (how?) model a time function

stream: delayed (infinite) list

stream programming:
•different abstractions such as: map, filter, accumulate,
•transformations of lists
•sequence manipulations without incurring the costs of manipulating sequences as lists
•tadriji incremental computation


random: statistical properties of uniform distribution


object-orientation: polymorphic abstract data types =/= relational data model



Building Abstractions with Data

how to use:
•primitive data (numbers)
•primitive operations (arithmetic operations)

building abstractions by combining data objects to form compound data <==> *to increase the modularity* of (our) designs ==> to increase/enhance the expressive power of our language

data abstraction:
*technique of isolating* (the parts of a program that deal with) how data objects are ‘represented’ from (the parts of a program that deal with) how data objects are ‘used’


versioning
garbage collection

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the question of “what [✕] can learn from [Y]?”


Calvert on Mestiza consciousness
library and information scientists
consciousness of the borderlands [~ in between categories, creative/annihilating forces a person living borderlands must struggle against]

***contradictory impulse for *hording* & *sharing*

categorizing, naming, describing --> power-laden practices we cannot do without

each *schema* reveals its priorities, legitimizes/delegitimizes, renders visible/invisible the knowledge it contains/excludes

(Foucault:) library: (places that preserve) discourses that one wishes to remember and keep in circulation [--✕--> Anand's jinn temporality and genealogy of human memory]

mestiza --> hybrid way of knowing/acting/living, as “none of the above”
what is hybrid and impure may be monstrous (in the epistemologies of power) and may experience *hightened visibility* (~= scrutiny, study, problematization, pity)

“orphans of infrastructure” (Leigh Star)

locked in a duel with the oppressor
lived experiences of marked classes
(in each duality pair, one is called “the consitutive outside” [subject/object, male/female, etc.]) --?--> switching polarity ==> valorizing feminine over masculine, black over white, nurture over nature, emotion over reason

crossing of cultures

*which collectivity does the daughter of the darkskinned mother listen to?*

(while i was in apass i had a shift of attention to) the *labor of knowledge work* (in collective digital flesh life)

media ~= knwoledge form

in media arts studies i learn to ask which cruicual material limitations have been radically eased in a digital era --> impulse to hoard/share + constant tension with the epistemological work of categorization and classification (--> database) + (ongoing) feminization of the field

the library and information science knowledge --> intense expertise required to enact it =/=!? art expertise (a category of works that are expertise-free)

(gift of Marx, Foucault, Lorde, Haraway, Leigh Star in) *understanding subjugated epistemologies*

(Lorde) master's tool dismantle the master's house? = can the technologies and epistemologies that have been used to organize thinking about the world in one way succesfully uproot that way?

“recovering multivocality”

رسوب
*enact residuality
*residual (of transformations [--> sometimes wiping away previous techniques for dividing and describing, and substituting another set of categories that don't easily map to the first ==> eliminating the residuum of the old order --> case of ajayeb? --> can we make overlaps and hybridities of old/new categories? ~ *residual categories*: affective-epistemic content that often go unclassified. Calvert: *affect* is too thin, too subjective to calcify into a category. it abundantly uses its categories in a way that offers a kaleidoscopic shuffling and reshuffling of the items***)])
*residuum

categories overlapping, non-hierarchical (“animal” + “livestock”, etc.)

truthiness
melting pot
actions (filled with verbs)
nouns (both living and nonliving entities)

*score of recognizable historical era*

using:
•filmic techniques (animation, montage, time lapse)
•affective techniques (sarcasm, intimacy)


how can we address aspects of apass's exceptionalism?
(with its things: characters, colors, doings, values)
*historical/cultural specificities of apass*


enlightenment inheritances:
•quest for universality
•


apparent seamlessness and universality with the veneer روکش of helpfulness ==> purity, deny multivocality, hide the residuum produced, and exclude hybridity
--> (pulling the carpet of familiarity out from under users:)
to replace ‘familiar generic conventions’ (~ universal) --replace-with--> a “universal of local application” (~= residuum)

(we rely on) [*]words: value-laden components of language that also serve as categories and moor لنگر us in the symbolic, to effect the transformations of the collections

labels ~-/==> power and oppression epistemologies <== *organizing logics* (that remain invisible when when we change the words or subsitute new sets of categories)--> that is why i am reluctant with only changing the metadata @Pierre: using metadata to manipulate the organizing apparatus ==> versions of residuality (?)

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[working on apass milieu data model, summer2018]

c.r.i. (“collective research interface”)
--?--> a pathological collage

discrete object (of problem [who, when, how,]) interface
--> refering to something outside c.r.i. (outside the digital model)

face (slider) --> object monster

(?what is lost at) linking the symbolic space of data-model to the qualities of the researches of participants [which are relational, procedural, and emotional]

s.s.s. (scroller, slider, still-life)

discourse =/= valorizing information

Pierre's fables:
•“nonviolent way”
•“not by chance ...”

*Apologue*

research --> data flow
sieve --> nodes in/of residual


internal categories:
•stickiness
•zoom
•cheat
•persistence
•repetition
•(vulgar)
•
}==> topology:
1. ramp
2. nest
3. skew

ramp: sequential, one dimensional, ‘sliders’
nest: fractal quality, JSON, hierarchical tree, ‘comments’
skew: verb act, streching, ‘2D field picker’

(slider: marking everything)

semantic in flux + persistence
object repository + identifiers


feedback --> quasi object --> structured knower --> data


#workshop in apass 2018 Summer
...a series of data models that was produced during a three days work session in a.pass May 2018.
The aim was to create a “filter" for the artistic research projects of each participants, in order to train in making meta-linguistic abstractions (on a given computer hardware) to construct a “thing” that enables describing the problem of Building Abstractions with Data, to increase/enhance the expressive/descriptive power of the languages we use. It addresses the question of machine/human readability in the digital imperative of computational world we are inhabiting, with the particular case of a.pass artistic research environments for advanced performance studies.
•interested in computational literacy (including data-collection, librarianship) as part of our *diversity-work* and our *articulation-work*
•interested in different languages (english, computer, non-sign languages, etc.) refers to different value systems and to different lived experience
•interested in the *labor of knowledge-work* (in collective digital flesh life)
•interested in shifts in topology (the ongoing reworking of bodily boundaries of each of our research practices)
•


TERMINOLOGY:

*articulation-work: the labor necessary to make technologies fit together seamlessly

*diversity-work: a kind of work in which we learn about the damage we cause, and of how “causes” are understood as “damage”

*librarianship: a work that hooks up people with their technologies

*data abstraction: a *technique of isolating* (the parts of your mini-language that deal with) how data/info objects are ‘represented’ from (the parts of your mini-language that deal with) how data/info objects are ‘used’ (---> i addressed this in my fable workshop in a totally different epistemology)

*model: your object decomposed into *computational compound objects* (each with their own time-varying local state variables)

(representation of data and control over data:)
*modular: localized part of the system that are produced by the perception of the system
*objective: viewing a large system as a collection of distinct objects. concerned with how a computational object can change and yet maintain its identity
*streamous: information that flow in the system. its evaluation is delayed. infinite list

*metadata: machine-readable persistence statements

*digital interface: discrete object of your “research problem” that refers to something outside the cri (outside the digital model)

*topology: a (proposed) body-plan to investigate questions of *connectivity* and *boundaries*, in order to find out what remains invariant as a result of transformation. this will direct us to propose (well-intended but not tested) *transversal objects*.
to be able to propose: in the culture of each pad+participant+research what connects and joins, what delinks and disconnects.


PRACTICAL:

we want to find out how cri's “filter” translates its politics into metadata
and
what happens in linking the symbolic space of data-model to the (relational, procedural, emotional) qualities of the researches of participants

we will work on the block's opening week feedbacks and process them in this diagram:
feedback --> quasi object --> structured knower --> data
(or technically:)
semantic in flux --> persistence statements --> object repository --> identifiers

(Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are spent on the creation of “quasi objects”)

i propose some (well-intended but not tested) internal categories:
•stickiness
•zoom
•cheat
•persistence
•repetition
•vulgar

(i will describe them later)

and these categories produce three topologies:
1. ramp
2. nest
3. skew

(this is a maneuver to replace the question of ‘strategy’ to ‘topology’, the first act of making quasi-objects)

ramp: sequential, one dimensional, ‘sliders’
nest: fractal, serializable, arborescent, ‘comments’
skew: verb-active, streching, ‘2D field color picker pointer’

each is “queryable” in different ways and propose different difficulties
each of them addapted from an existing technologies (range sliders, commenting, color pickers)
each embeds one of: colors, doings, values

slider: marking everything with decimals
comments: hypertextualizing
field picker: spreading
}--> they are all milieu-makers

ramp --> arc of necessity
nest --> mosaic divisions
skew --> chromatic/luminous effect (of mixture)


and also:
•to address (in a longer term) how apass performs analysis and prioritization of its own service definition?
•to address (in a longer term) historical/cultural specificities of apass
•to address aspects of apass's exceptionalism (its characters, colors, doings, values)



REPORT:

Geert
zoom / biger picture
perform a zoom
Geert and Michael knowledge zoom-level
Geert's strech-work
which cheats
vulgar: direct, =/= suffisticated, =/= nice(in a classical sense), =/= institutional code [--> a cheat], everyday, good taste, context?!!
suggested topology: skew --changed--> nest (tow branches answering yes and no to: “is he cheating?”)

Leo
stickiness ~ residual (left overs of impression), we couldn't find little objects, litte stickies
zoom is tooooo wide, megacategories, “fermentation” is a different zoom level
cheat --> perception/intention, value of non-doing ?, ‘order is cheat’, ritual ==> heal/cope
vulgar: ritual of popular knowledge, =/= social acceptence, communicating emotional needs, guilt on behalf of the vulgars,
suggested topology: skew (with 4 axioms: negativity, positivity, passivity, ritual)

Caterina
sticky: difiicult to remove categories, dirty, quality of trape, almost negative, like honey as an intermediary sticky for other objects to become sticky
zoom: Latina candition macro, ass rincles micro, herself, change of lens is what matters not the zoom level, the macro of the term culture itself
cheat: against the rule of community/aggreement, always cheating the system, against the game, bad relation to the game, lazy relation, faking?
vulgar: ordinary, insultive, perjurative, of the “people”, (Geert:) a marking always coming from above, what television does: non-actual + spectacle, (Elen:) immoral, not original, not elegant, thinking in terms of the ‘same’, group forming, non-individual, twards mass formation,
suggested topology: nest

Eszter
polarized lense
confusion / being confused is ‘cheating’
stickiness absent
suggested topology: nest (with two branches: naive & political leader)

Goda
nothing sticks anymore therefor we go to swamp to stick to relevant objects
swamp as archive (refuge from the capitalist) =/=? cheat
constructing ‘bad example’ (?) --> role model
zooming in losers of capitalism
X-ray kind of lens into the opacity of swamp
(her) treasures in the swamp [--> epistemological buried objects]
criticizing how capitalism zooms for her irrelevant objects
buffoon --> vulgar
suggested topology: skew (the skew is a plain around the edges, gets deeper in the middle, and a narrow way up in the center: the exit)

Elen
presence of the working of subconscious ==provokes==> etymology
very sticki “hell yea!"s
affirmative, sometimes technical knowledge
something sold (“self”) with something morphic on it (“apparition” or ‘surat’ in farsi)
suggested topology: ramp

Hoda
cheat: sharp radical formation, playing ambiguity
totalizing vision lense (“if then all...”)
“because i asked i could feel”
anti-psychological
suggested topology: ramp

Katinka
makeover slider
vulgar: makeover show, e-bay
statements not touching her, something else is sticki object: sympathy?
slider: stack
suggested topology: ramp (makeover)

Nassia
stick: something bodily, heat, sweat, property of objects
zoom is the opposit of body
gaze inside + anatomy
cheating: on people negative / on systems positive
suggested topology: ramp

Laura
osmotic = french kiss
administered (by machine) body
the good example
beauty is invested in...
the (unchanging) core of the cuttle-fish
popular = vulgar
suggested topology: skew (regimented floor plan)

Maurice
cheat --> joker, fool
cute: getting off the leash of institution
bear blurs what...
“but I am just...”
bribe economy --> honest and human
suggested topology: nest

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[title]
archives of open desire

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#drawing exercises in built environment (with Sizek + Mathews https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1542-methods-for-many-anthropocenes-with-andrew-s-mathews)
1. pick a charismatic building/statue/object on your built environment, and draw a form of it, inviting to identify details of the object that reveal aspects of its history or use today
2. compare drawings and use the drawings to tell stories about the object and its use or importance to life in that environment
3. invite to reflect on the ways that drawing infrastructure can reveal processes at multiple temporal and spatial scales

discussion questions/writing response questions:
•Which features of the structure stood out, and what do these suggest about the processes of its creation and use?
•How has its infrastructure changed over time, and how are these changes evidenced in the built form itself?
•How does your structure relate to others in its immediate vicinity, and in what ways do relationships between structures help reveal social relations?
•What traces of past events are embedded in infrastructure or its memories, and how can we render these traces present?

drawings has to do with the incompleteness of knowing and representing
indeterminacy at ‘the same time’

(?in which locations you can get a good) human response to:
•slow processes (soil, geology, plant form)
•fast processes (plant seasonal behavior, weather, human responses to all of these things)

*drawing as structured wondering/wandering*

use of the *dramatic* as method --> to entertain multiple worldviews
to maintain irreducible complexity and to recenter historical processes as central to understanding contemporary politics
(history and drama)
-facts as enacted and performed before audiences (--> tradition in science and technology)

**knowledge is always performed, staged, and enacted** <== my work on ajayeb

how to tell the dramatic stories

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notes from Sofia's seminar on documentation

the questions i brought home with Kobe:

the ontological relationships between law and art, who protects who? what protects protection? --> which material discursive practices make the ontological boundaries of “protection”? (specially today investigating this term is more urgent in a world saturated with toxic vocabularies of security.) the figure of protection transforms the subjects of knowledge and knowability --> look at how the judge was talking about art

(question of) the production of subjectivity (of the judge himself as an active knowing agent and the dead-master as the phantasmatic place-holder of meaning)
this is related to: (question of) responsibility and individuality --> influences and efforts of the work. two interesting moments of genesis occurred:
1- in the court “his work” (Beuys) was mysteriously created
2- also when Olga got a phone call from the ministry of culture, “her work” was mysteriously created
--> both the court and the phone call are mystic producers of the subjectivity of the artist dead or alive [#this needs more investigation]

(question of) the production of significance and difference
look at the speech-acts of the judge in the case of Beuys. which nuances of difference are generated, estated, established, and propagated? we can study every syllable of the judge's speech-act. the judge goes from one fable to another: fables of significance, fables of influence, fables of impression, etc.

boundary-making practices in our shared struggling world
the idea that art “starts” and “stops” somewhere
zeroing the artworks ecosystem

when is the moment (or how the moment can be marked) that the judge becomes able to say “OK, I don't know.” or “I am opinionated about this art. Let's bring an expert.”
and beyond th[...]