[...]abic 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

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

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 (?)

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

[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

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

[title]
archives of open desire

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

#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

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

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 that, I am wondering, like that judge, when myself standing in front of an artwork (or any work) how i am able to say “I have an opinion, or, I don't know”, “i need expertise in order to look at this”?

questions of: essence (in art), subjectivity production, protection,



with Vincent

(?what was the) notion of “everything is kept here” in his work

(?why and how) his storytelling was all about design --> his stories of responsibility and factuality
how and why in our artistic practices, production of responsibility and factuality is hold in the terms and services of design and designer that is busy with building enhanced and efficient communication networks historically rooted in the geometries of modernist project?

(?what is the artist's) busy-ness with design --> related to the fathers of correction (?) and proper address

who (and why) wants to look at which past with lenses and geometries of the violent grids of the forefathers of modernist design?
--> ontology of document: an artifact with a specific layout and design

design has to do with the proper address (?) which is (always) about the proper witness (?)
(in the case of Vincent) do you agree with the amerindian know-how that “a good designer is a dead designer”?

(?what was the) proper affect of history (that his work was creating)
through the aesthetic of old and antique video projectors his colonialism belonged properly to the past --> (question of) the production of the proper witness

the architecture and flag of BOZAR plus his notion of design, are they interesting and necessary ways of forming kinship and properly distanced history?

Vincent “knew” his distance to the past (--> do you smell a problem?)
in which clock he is looking at time? which time machine he is handed to or placed in? who/what is making his time model?
also, which segment of your practice is temporalized? this means also which part of your practice stands out of time?



with Olga

regards of the question “what are an artwork's boundaries?” and it's intersections with documents, lists, and reports

for Olga:
document = evidence
research = mourning
(mourning as the passionate and demonstrative activity of expressing the state of loss or deprivation of a certain object for a certain subject, and demand for its revival or memorialization)

what is the feeling of the document?

*document is a story that (usually) silences other stories*
where our powers to provoke care (could/should) come from (if not from document/evidence)?
is document (in its form and feeling) the best way we have at our disposal to provoke the care of the generations? ...to mark each other with the mark of the care?

putting the narrative into proper sleep
casting the names

-artist has turned herself into a mnemonic device --> suggesting “amnesia” as her context
-artist has become a reminder and (therefore) her audiences have become memorizers

(question of) memory and remembering --> the idea of ‘literal remembrance’ in her performance, re-membering, literally bringing back the “members” of the Kurt Jooss company into the present of her audiences
-the problem with her remembrance is that “there is something that is important to remember” regardless of the person/subject who remembers

indisputability of the Green Table for Olga
the artist has chosen to protect The Green Table's meaning and message (due to her political and ethical commitments [for world peace?]) in a sense her subject of research remains unresearched, her values unevaluated, her moral settlements settled

how can she become interested in decomposing her research-bodies of The Green Table?
can we remain critically ethically responsible in thinking about the “meaning and message” of our subject of study and still be able to decompose it in interesting serious ways? (yes yes)

questions of: thinking, reminding, remaining,



Sofia's documentation
she asks “what is document today?”
-what was document yesterday (that is not anymore today)?
-how the agency and meaning of docu is (or is not) mutating in time?*
-what is beyond the question of documentation and preservation? --> *durational aesthetics*
-is document a limited way of asking questions about what we do and our relationship with time and duration? [you never know what the present brings into the future.]

what art cannot say that document can? “truth”?
when truth was invented where was document standing?

is document today a mere effect of technologies of inscribing?

why we are not talking about “file”?
(---> go to the ontology of evidence and files in X-Files TV series)

is ‘file’ the bedrock of reading today?

document assumes, constructs and promises its own labor of reading
? document is that which reads as referent, truthful, evident, economic value, , ,



Femke, with multiple understanders of the blended, blending world

the question of the metaphors of the body

manuality
manual understanders

for her “the point of origin” is at stake? --> the “ground” is at once desired and disarticulated for the sake of an idea of situatedness --> politics of positioning

placement, world, Dasein, fall

in CG bodies are articulated in differential vectors, not “grounds” --> does she want to ground the body?

she was mobilizing the metaphors of: body, ground, falling
how is she falling? in which historically contingent practices of grounding is she grounded, building her discourse?

ontology of the variable --> (question of the) figure of variation
her work with the partners of crime, getting in the front line and frontiers of CG working and practical metaphors

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

Sofia's textual machine, switching between binary values of faire contract --> staying with the polar syntax of ‘you’ and ‘them’
-how the rotating axis of her machine is able of creating breaks in the syntax of the contract?
-(for her machine: “understanding = an act of application”) --> how new forms of *understanding* could change the ways we might achieve fair societies? and not merely changing the order of sentence to visualize and objectification of unfairness and precariousness of the employment economy, in the exegesis of the writen contract. what would it mean to install an understander (taking a risk), for Sofia, and not a reversal syntaxer (making aware)?
-employer and the employee as different “species” with their different “natural” tendencies to fuck with one another? --> zero-sum game
-the question of symbiotic relatedness (--> psychoanalysis) =/=? contractual relatedness


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

to emphasis on the contingent and the contextual

the process of becoming researcher (of science and technology studies : inquiry into the politics and practices of knowledge-making)

vignette (sketch, a brief literary description, narrate scenes from familiar activities)

the question is not ‘how can we care more?’ (as predetermined set of affective practices) rather: **what happens to our work when we pay attention to moments where the question of ‘how to care?’ is insistent but not easily answerable** (‘care’ as an analytic or provocation)
-Kenney


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

Manoto TV station program “sher yadet nare” شعر یادت نره respond to the questions of translation (from the UK produced program “Don't Forget the Lyrics” into an Iranian contemporary popular media culture) and memory practices (archival memory act performance pop quiz show mixed with consumer culture TV broadcasting)

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

*cognitive companions* (--> coordinating multiple agencies characteristically)
-tiny clay token sheep were enclosed in clay envelopes with markings indicating what was inside (*molding and inscribing clay* was the favored sensory technology for making in Mesopotamia 5000 years ago)
•maybe your makings involves “true writing” that companions preferentially with language
•maybe your makings involves spinning plant and animal fiber and feeling, tying, and untying knots
•processual affirmative re-writings
•systeming meditations
•context-sensitive pushback
•operational closure (of a system)
•fluctuation, entrainment, blocked synchrony
•
[Katie King use of a term, how she shifts it from mechanism to affect:] [*]stigmergy: feeling of being in among and as the self-organizing bits that are system-ing (=/= a method of communication in emergent systems, mechanically defined as “indirect coordination” self-organizing termites and ants or flash mobs or political action)
@apass: how do you provide different *undisciplined ways of envisioning* new kinds of environments, artifacts and practices? (entangle design, science, fact and fiction, boundary objects, system-ing, [*]design: ***making things that tell stories*** [=/= telling stories])
(my encounters with) ajayeb's vibrating particularism
[*]website, talksite: play, trial and error, permutation and mistakes (none of it innocent or exemplary @ERG's website) ==> *cognitive reassembly*
-->{relations between developers and users to create and work out a technical interface ==> communicative tangle}
transmedia story (with its origins commercial and suspect, often entangled with social critique and social panic ~= conditions of making knowledge today; we knowingly or without reflection, gather and pin together such stories across media...)
-you can't take *citation pools* for granted
-how we will take what each other says
companion gatherings (do not exactly cohere or consort well) ==sometimes==> violation of standardization (that some believe is more equal)
(companions need to) [*]learn: emergently sensitize and attune among new cognitive and political circumstances (in and as their very moments of unknowing, when ethical and moral sortings are properly in flux)
(with) Bateson's negative sensitivities to systems, and with Katies King, I keep discovering just how literal is our many being-ness in multiply embedded sorts of biomic sympoiesis

{[*]lecture: feeling-in-the-mouth system, (the word-as-world inhabited by) alternate and overlapping peoples, memories, attunements, citation pools, histories, communities of practice, knowledges, ocean and freshwater “edges"}
{?can i propose (Katie King and Sandoval's) “oppositional consciousness” instead of (Mouffe's) “agonistic pluralism"}

responses, abilities, infrastructures, distributed embodiments,

[*]traumas: intensities crowded with affiliations, loyalties, essential truths

(Bateson > Leigh Star > Katie King) *transcontextual* (transcontextual circumstances: moving from one context to another, one world to another, one set of knowledges to another) ==> [*]boundary objects: workaround things, concepts, processes, even routines that permit coordination, sometimes collaboration, without consensus (non-conscious and conscious)--local, supralocaling, and global in material topologies in which spacetimenatureculture may be mixed, developmental yet transtemporal, (they don't create boundaries) *they work to keep boundaries from getting in the way of collaboration* [~=? sleep-walking: ignore or even miss that there are boundaries about, or honor boundaries = differences that should be honored without being stuck there]
---[can i suggest ‘enfolding’ instead of ‘sympoiesis’ for artists?]

****ajayeb: my transcontextual habitat**** [--(Katie King)--> sites where people, objects, animals, ecological processes, academic restructurings, and scales of injustice unfold, enfold]

‘to feel family and parent memories as our own’ --> a skill that intertwines historical and personal biography (sometimes trauma) as a feature of *memory encoding*

[*]autopoiesis: a notion, a theory of cellular organization, that makes a fold in history --> reformulating an orientation into an ‘experimental epistemology’

*memoir animated word-worlds worm-holed* (~= my lecture-performances, Katie King's talksites --> speculations gathering with stigmergy, recursive paradox, and a sympoiesis of boundary objects)

#my project: redesigning ajayeb's “writings” among dispersed, diffracted, and emergent methods of attention
-to redesign “aboutness” (as nonrepresentational : recursive relational agency of/about reciprocities in worldly processes)
-to redesign fiction of writing (khipu)
-to redesign @apass archive --> records of how things have happened, with whom, when, with what informational needs (instead of abstractions layered up), sometimes as agencies, sometimes as (in Sandoval's terms) oppositional and differential consciousness, (boundary objects) storing and performing our details and affects and memories

punitive parsimonies of explanation:
•over-simplications of complex systems
•pressures for social critique
•to travel as social panic
•retreat to political loyalties (<== confusion overwhelm cognitive schema)
•retreat to political belonging in search of trust
•

(more boundary objects:) many sorting apparatus reframings at varying grains of detail each savoring textures of disciplinary and other precisions amid noncoherent and materializing logics
(constitutive, agential) **cuts are connections**
-to minimize damage and maximize flourishing

differential details --in--> “us” --in--> Bateson's living patterns --in--> starfish's invertebrate radial symmetry --in--> redwood cloning timelines --in--> recursive epigenesis --in--> mechanism and structure in a segmenting egg --in--> human affiliations of power and state and love...



[*]differential consciousness: systems justice sensitive to multiple contexts, *politics of attachment*
@apass's environment (mix of communities of justice and of practice):
belief and disbelief, memberships and belongings, triggered and assembled
****to commit to a well-defined structure of identity for one hour, day, week, month, year**** (=/= Manning)
+ transform that identity according to the requisites of another oppositional ideological tactic (if reading of power's formation require it --> that's how i became more iranian in Europe)
•differential: instantaneous change of one quantity relative to another, a quality that differentiates between similar things (==> derivatives) =/= different

اخرت eschatology
study of end-times [--now--> climate change, global restructuring, ]
-humans are often precariously enduring on the planet
(Cuban Missile Crisis...)
-when urgencies (become too predictive) ==> less sensitivity to the unanticipated --> (Seba's “save the world” =) all too human desires for control or for moral prescriptions

with Katie King --> *systems justice* requires something much more complicated
•we have to work with our extended being
•find out new things about it

-how can we go beyond human intention and systems of control?
-we need, and there are, many ways to minimize damage and maximize flourishing
(*systems humans participate in and do not control*)

(? am i part of this) “we” and “us” gathers sympoietically these boundary objects storing details and affects

the fable of “if it's about everything it is about nothing” --> no!
sharpening focus =/= narrowing focus

workshop for thinking
•with objects
◦moved around
◾in visual play

to take your imaginations along other things
•so their worlds layer and enfold and map out and crochet together
◦so that can be sensed and worked on

(?what are) our helpers in apass:
•companion imaginations = our collective animalities
◦such imaginations have worlds that layer and enfold and map out and crochet together (--> systems humans participate in and do not control)
•our complex personhood
•our distributed being
•objects we take as cognitive companions
•our significant otherness honored in on-going attentions
•new learnings
•new materialities
•

(?what are our) methodology of companioning with things

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

what is happening to me: attention to knowledge making practices (in the context of a literary pleasure)
*sharing = making*
*communicating = making*
clues --for--> contexts --shapes--> how we will take what each other says

(Katie King > Anzaldua:) who and what facilitates such movement among worlds?

home = domination + domestication + love


Katie King:
•why science fiction matters?
•how cultural studies helps us make SF meaningful?
interactive possibilities of media art, commercial production, mass culture

SF = effect of defamiliarization
(problem with Star Trek is that it is over familiar)

Janet, from a lesbian utopian future (death by disease of all the men)
Jeannine, from an alternate present (US never entered WWII)
Jael, where “War Between the Sexes” has become deadly literal
Joanna, the author of the book, Joanna Russ (in a shimmering joking literalization has enfolded into her own story)


my ajayeb studies --> *cultural studies: how cultural products are part of cultural processes* (=/= what makes an art work good) --> getting around the term “art”
-mysteries, romance novels, movies, (bestiaries,) all of them deeply commercial forms of entertainment and often produced in complicated technical collaborations [--> and that's what makes them interesting (=/= simple single authorships)]
-genre, formula, (style, fashion,) are intrinsic to the ways these products are produced and the ways they are enjoyed
genre --> subtle shifts possible across many repetitions (=/= something that happens only one time)
premodern literary forms (bestiary) --> structural variations + their pleasurable effects

fandom (collectivities of fans): venues in which high intensities of engagement and collaboration occur --> social and collaborative, (writing) reengineered with various apparatus, [pre-internet Trekkers:]
•...audio tape each episode and listen to the voices over and over in my bed at night, until I had the dialog memorized
•wrote long letters about each episode several times a week, coast to coast, analyzing each in great detail, and writing out particularly memorable bits of repartee
•
--> SF media fandoms (=/= SF literary fandoms), first really organized around Star Trek in the late 60s, early 70s and increasingly international, have tended to be dominated by female fans
[*]poaching: how fans and fandoms appropriate commercial products for their own informal uses

*commercial exuberance* <== media franchises (<-- take advantage of the structure of multinational corporations [film and tv production, book, music and video publishing and distribution, theme parks, theaters, book stores, and so on. tie-in novels and coffee table, graphic novels, toys and games, other paraphernalia such as telephones, t-shirts and porcelain plates, music, commercial internet sites and catalog buying, and even scholarly works] + xeroxed fanfic, fiction written and self-published by fans,)

Star Trek = commercial media art =/= “art for art's sake”
-commercial media art is pleasurable precisely because *one instance of it is always insufficient in a very palpable way*
‘not enough’ ==> interactive & an on-going --> multiply collaborative process (across media)
= processes: people engage in varying degrees and forms of intensity and with varying collaborative possibilities -->{fandom: an interactive engagement that is culturally ambiguous =/= ‘society that values property,’ or ‘unique creations by single artists'}
(such media is) inspirational exactly because *so much is left out*, so much invites elaboration
•gossipy pleasures
•extratextual information
•many layered joke
•alerting the refrain of male friendship
•

like other kinds of SF Star Trek also often does replicate the very aspects of culture and society we find at the root of a range of social injustices, racism, sexism, homophobia, and others

Star Trek, understood by cultural studies, is complexly contradictory, full of progressive possibilities + structures that shut down such possibility
--study--> cultural sites of struggles for power and for competing visions of justice

Kirk speaks Spock's funeral address and movingly says: “his soul was the most human.” --> “human” simultaneously creates unities across races and nationalities (as a universal term for courage or compassion), just as it also valorizes and makes superior the species “human” ==> new inequality between humans and nonhumans

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

wmst601fall10.blogspot.com Katie King

zoo spelled backwards

http://www.ediblegeography.com/cross-species-dining-an-interview-with-natalie-jeremijenko-and-mihir-desai/
Jeremijenko @Sarah
edible lures
bio-amplification that happens through the food web

the New York of...
the Brussels of...
(there is always) the Tehran of X [trees, dogs, rats, moms, thugs, etc.] (=/= the X of The Tehran)


approach: targeted drug delivery --> doing focused interventions =/= treating the whole system

links of how *shared interdependent transsex* [shared rearrangement of sex and re/production] is unfolding
-responding to this rearrangement not through fear of the eco-catastrophic assumptions

*shared interdependent* =/= dependence, independence

prefix -sphere =/= -scape
bioscape --> life and energies (not necessarily “alive”) in relation to an imperfect spherical earth, but also its relations to multiple other possible planes, elements, assemblages, and processes (beyond the biosphere)
(jetscapes, oilscapes, foodscapes, microwavescapes, surveillancescapes, mountainscapes, sunscapes, waterscapes, etc.) -Kier


you could love in a goose's world ==> you are *goosomorphous* (~ producing a goose body & being produced yourself by a new identity --> a not-attributing anthropomorphic love)--> *anthropomorphic: to add new definitions to what it is to be a human being*
[*]anthropo-zoo-genetic practice: practice of domestication, by adding new meanings to X, and new identities that provide these new meanings
“Lorenz is articulated by the setting he created. The setting is articulating new ways of talking, new ways of being human with nonhuman, human with goose, goose with human...” -Despret

de-passion knowledge ==> a world ‘without us’ ==> a world without ‘them’

*impoverished: a world of minds without bodies, of bodies without minds, bodies without hearts, expectations, interests, a world of enthusiastic automata observing strange and mute creatures --Despret--> **a poorly articulated (and poorly articulating) world**


•autological subject: discourses, practices, and fantasies about self-making, self-sovereignty, and the value of individual freedom associated with the Enlightenment project of contractual constitutional democracies
Sven, Maarten,
Isabel for whom sex is disseminated
•genealogical society: discourses, practices, and fantasies about various social constraints and psychic assaults on the autological subject by various kinds of inheritances


“liberation denied, liberation achieved” -->
•both visions dependent upon an all-or-nothing approach to social change
•both visions dependent on vision and an unexamined allegiance to the concept of change
...at the self-proclaimed centers of freedom
--Katie--> *how do we know social change when we see it?*

when ‘eye candy’ begins to describe a range of visually induced consumer pleasures

theoretical apparatus:
space-plus-time (space + time) =/= spacetime
-the additive understanding of “+” pictures time and space as two geometric planes that intersect =/= ‘spacetime’ there is no need to explain how they come together, because nothing stands between them

“a woman's survival depends upon calling people into classification”
“...hair-trigger judgments about gender lead to romance as well as lethal exchange.”

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

Verran in her work with Yoruba (West African) and Yolngu (Aboriginal Australian)

=/= thinking of numbers used in enumerating the real world as helping us to work relation ==> numbers (and mathematical objects) as cognitive tools
elements of schooling --> learning to use mathematical tools

*can number be considered as an inventive frontier in social, cultural, political and moral life?* --Verran--> *number = materialized relations*, enumerated materiality

people having kin relations
people are relations (in an embodied sense + semiotic in the sense of expressing a formal relation [for example wife/husband])

example:
•in river water --> taking numbers as semiotic = to identify numbers as the formal relation unity/plurality
•in working markets --> numbers enact generalizing iconically in the whole/parts mode

--**--> numbers as particulars, in place and time, in situ, realized in specific practical ways

Platonist account of number
intuitionist account of number
instrumentalist account of number
Iranian accounr of number

(Verran's rhetoric --> the term) semiotic (an opaque term, both vague and highly technical) + material modifies

(Verran not refering to) [*]semiotic: the summoning up the baroque complexity of French structuralist and post-structuralist thought, and alternatively the specific categorical proposals of Peirce's philosophy and its offspring, american pragmatism.

the paradox of worlds as already/always meaningful, recognizing that doing worlds as knowable (whether by science or by trading) or for that matter through Yoruba, or Yolngu knowledge traditions --involves--> engaging with the world as it is here and now --accepts--> *studying ‘forms of life’ and ‘language games’ as complex clots of signs and collective actions*

--Peirce--> numbers can be:
•iconic (icons are deeply coconstitutive with clots of collective actions that generate entities)
•indexical
•symbolic (symbols and their objects enact a relation of supervenience امر غير مترقبه, objects are accepted as affecting and effecting their signs but not vice-versa)
--> degrees of reciprocal co-constitution of signs and collective embodied and embedded actions in which objects come to life
--Verran--> ethnographically found forms of the workings of signs

(depending on) how one understands ethnography ==> names work as icons, indexes, or symbols

removing the stigma of Yoruba number as primitive

numbers as working indexically or symbolically --> for examine: are being used to represent the ecological health of Australia's creeks and rivers, lakes and billabongs


difference between these relational forms:
the first thing we need to know about a number is whether:
•it takes the one/many form (potentially containing unity within the plurality of a many) [cardinal number --> conserve value]
•the whole/parts form (having plurality contained within a unity) [ordinal number --> conserve order]

(in) shape-shifting between:
one/many form
whole/parts form
symbolic/indexical mode of semiosis
indexical/iconic mode of semiosis
}--> number works in inventive ways


thousands of Australians regularly attending their streams with bottles, thermometers, and pH meters, peering at tiny creatures they have scooped up with a net, trying to identify what they are and count their numbers

(the slogan) “you can't sustain what you haven't measured”

numbers so enthusiastically generated by volunteers --also--> contribute to constituting water as commodity, expanding possibilities for ‘doing business with water’


cordon sanitaire --> consistency must be quantifiable
two databases, separate institutions and websites, is counter-productive in a project assembling and disseminating information on the state of the nation's water resources?
@apass

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

patterns of behavior
forms of style
--emerge--> ?

(Rai researching the materiality of the ecology of sensation of mobile phones in India helps me to think about Iran telegram media)
new ecology of sensation ==> patterns

perspectivalism: (history of) the dominance of representationalism in the engagement with a living multiplicity at stake

each image has:
•a certain duration
•at different scales of perception
•a non-coinciding resonant unity (a unity-in-multiplicity)
•*mutating affect =/= representation*
•potential occasions for a perceptual event (that exceed their actualization) =/= mise en abime
•pointing the capacities of perception in multiple direction
•strike you as potential events in gradients of textual vision, haptic and mutating accross senses
•excessive information that calls for another diagram of bodily capacities
•where a machinic phylum becomes sensitive to certain forces
•

an ecology of sensation meeting its cliche:
•Bollywood meets graphic novels at the back of a rickshaw
•Agra's Mughal-era oriental(ized) stone work turning topological and dimensional (less or more racist? --Rai--> to what extent is the question relevant to what it does?**)
•Ferris wheel on Juhu beach
•the weighting machine at the local station


(Rai + Keenan --> give me) new resources for imagining justice and democracy

all habits are preindividual : where the subject and population meets

photographs (photoshopped life) ==enable==> a hauntology to emerge in the viewing subject


a priori conceptualism =/= a practice of perception that is involved in the emergence of ecologies


like Rai's photos, the image assemblages that i am making are experiments in perception given the ecology of sensation that i am working through
--> attempts to produce an affect that resonants with a conceptual and bodily reasoning =/= philosophy

my telegram collection <== (Stengers) we do not know a priori the difference between what we must take into account and what we can ignore

(for you, X is deterministic, as are the questions that describe it)

[*]emergence: the appearance of the unanalyzable totality of a new entity that renders irrelevant the intelligibility of that which produced it

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

Ticineto Clough

media technological developements ==> (often and perhaps necessarily) put the transformation of being and the transformation of knowing out of sync with one another

why Hollywood concerns me:
•reconceptualization of labor from the cinematic mode of production to the affective mode
•the colossal projection of cinema as a guarantor of a culturally uniform memory

relevant for artists too (they cannot ignore this) --> to rethink the ontological grounds of knowing [and representation] (in the wake of) deprivileging or decentering human perception and cognition (and reconcider these artistic tools and episteme:) sensation, affect, matter, energy

*digital media technology is being redefined in terms of a subtraction of human perception as the presumed center of being and feeling* @apass

(media understood in terms of) *nonanthropocentric affect* --> affect = transition, gateway, passages between dimensions ==> ‘everything = media’ (~ entities can feel or whose vibrations can be felt by other entities)
affect --> [*]media: contractions of forces of the world into specific resonating milieus

**mediation = modulation = (vibration =) intensifying or deintensifying rhythmicities and forces, below and above human perception**

[*]human perception: assemblage of measuring that is irreducible to human agency or human agency alone ==> “non-conscious phenomena”
-this is Barad pointing the way to an epistemology put in terms of measuring that affects as it renders effects
(i need to work on such specific epistemology for ajayeb)

(ajayeb's speculative reals --> speculative grasp of what exists outside human knowing =/=) correlationism: impossibility of a world without human knowing

(one of our obligation today is) [nonapocalyptic] ***recognizing a world without us*** (<-- this is what we must imagine and not “our future” @Pierre)
[by] making use of poetic, affective, rhythmic processes of resonance (--> Sarah's fermentation concert, Sina's popup book)

}==rethink==> *media technologies = technologies of measure*


sensual mathematics
rethink the digital in terms of the “numerical dimension of the virtual”
the potential for mutation immanent to the numerical code itself
(indeterminacies understood in terms of) new processes of quantification that recognize the “full densely packed zones of information that are the intensive surrounds of zero and ones
Clough - Goodman - Parisi


*question of knowing = a politics of capacities* (that crosses every scale of matter/energy)
=/= interpellation and determination of the subject
=/= identity politics (politics of difference)

control society = collection of dynamic quasi-subjects (constituted by a grear number of variables) =/= collection of subjects of right (constituted by the partial alienation of their natural rights to the sovereign)

[*]population only reveals probabilistic regularities once considered at the mass level (=/= collection of controlable subjects)
(in both terms of capital and governance) *modulation and mutation are operative in relations of power* (---> go to Campbell)

[*]publics: addresses of communicated affective states (=/= subjects of discourse about and argumentation over narrative knowledge with truth claims)****
--> matters of vitalizing information
*digital technologies have been fundamental to the deterritorialization of the relationship between individual and collectivity* --Terranova--> (digital technologies through provisional capture and dissemination of affect ==>) constitution of publics

[*]biopolitics: a matter of distributing affective capacities unevenly across population (--> is volatile)
***distribution of affect reshapes society*** --requires--> to restore discursive argumentation (over narrative and its truth claims --> *narrative = a form of truth claim*)

(#telegram with Rai, we need more analysis of... in terms) *ecologies of sensation*: media assemblages with emergent properties that impel new tendencies, new forms of attention, new forms of intention, new forms of distraction, new forms of habit, new forms of practice
*politics of intervention: a matter of entering in the middle in order to *modulate* ~= (Rai's) counter-actualization (~= criticism): moving down from the extended, back to the intensive or potentiality (not merely a deconstructive practice, but) an ontologically oriented practice, a performative intervention brining a change of speed, rhythm, vibration --> politics of vibration (Pia's method)

media technological developement ==deploy==> (which?) ontological and epistemological implications

to give criticism more specificity and width

measure and media technologies

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

(Rai) [hacking jugaad practices] they operate within and against the plasticity (both neural and spatial) of India's “smart cities”
-feedbacked assemblages of affect, matter, policy, culture, biology, perception, value, force, sensibilities, practices, and discourses
-sensorial, algorithmic, material, and territorial makeshift infrastructures enabling digital cultures in India today

cultures of pirated workarounds (jugaad) in digital technologies
emergent digital cultures

stratified data

*hacking empiricism: a self-reflective practice of linking a problem to both its ecology of sense and sensation and to its processes and dimensions of change*
•empiricism --> pragmatic experimentations in becoming other
•[*]hacking: (informalized workaround practices) inchoate unvollständig movement of workaround, informal (disorganized), extralegal, democratic, subaltern, collective repurposing of found materials shifting ecologies from relative stasis to absolute flux, at times and usually in the interests of narrow class segments, in innovative and “game-changing” ways

ecologies of workaround practices

...subaltern and autonomous sensibility imprisoned and controlled by forms of monopoly and habituation

...nodes of algorithmic capital

traverse and exceed

islamophobic co-branding of Israel and India

marketing and hacking of digital cultures


social practice / hacking
pragmatic, ad hoc, networked approach (to an obstacle)
sufficient reason proceeding through intuition as much as probability

**what workaround repurposes our relation to technology and technique itself? <--Rai-- collective experiment in pragmatizing in mobile ecologies

heterodox political economy of contemporary digital capitalist control + its parasitical and autonomous pirate kingdoms (Sundaram > Rai)

Foucault --> ****knowledge was not made for understanding, it was made for cutting****

entrepreneurial capture of digital cultures and their hacking (in India)

-what is the force, sense, and value of the habituation (of CG hacking, of pragmatic experimentation habits)? --Sina--> (question of) passage between affective states
-(how can we?) better diagram through connecting relations and functions of force, value, and sense in (pirated & corporate) contemporary digital media infrastructures

(how to understand effectively the knots of) ***technoperceptual*** (becoming, relations, assemblages, habituation)

negotiating the digital (irreducible to capitalist strategies of value capture ~ resistance form)

the ecology of sense and sensation that jugaad events [technical animation CG] operate through (and happen in) *requires specific pirate infrastructures*

Rai's jugaad --affirm--> becoming through a counteractualization of the infrastructures of postdigital cultures

strategic narratives of acts of consumption --> sources of new productivity

(Ris's notion of) ecological: process-oriented historical materialism

interpretation by thinking --through--> assemblages of action --through--> assemblages of thought

collective practices of habituation

([Rai's] methodology of) *affect-as-capacity* --shift--> the focus of attention away from language (discourse and representation) toward habituated and emergent sensations in historically specific media assemblages

transformation of telecommunications in colonial and postcolonial South Asia

(Guattari's) assemblage: a prepersonal practice, a kind of style, a creative mutation that binds an individual or a group consciously or unconsciously

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

*traveling the bibliographic among knowledge worlds*

(Katie making a) multimedia bibliographic essay *with an argument* --> working out a practice of *transdisciplinary inspection*
(@apass, a few index of evaluation for such practice:)
•*how well it learns and models how to be affected or moved*
•*how well it opens up unexpected elements of one's own embodiments in lively and re-sensitizing world*
•(what are) *its possibilities for immersive play among sensations and platforms amid media technologies*
•(what are) *its ways of participating in multispecies learning or self-organization across ecologies
•(what are its capacities for) *mattering without owning the action* [--> play]

transdisciplinary connections have been made on the basis of *play*--between: psychiatry, mathematical, logic, linguistic, histories and evolution of communication, ethology, biophysics, cybernetics, natural history + game industry, fine arts design, education, semiotics, animation, new media, children television, system collaborations
--play--> restructure and intermesh, are recruited in nationalisms, economies, political life
}--Katie--> ***what sorts of politics might allow us to scope and scale among these, to “play” with our own consciousness?***

culture industries


questions
-what does it take to be an intellectual actor across knowledge worlds & a trustworthy member of only some? @Jassem
-[what is] to practice knowledge beyond your control? @Lili
-[what is] to sift among forms of evidence requiring tools you do not have? @Lilia
-[what is] to be required to rank, evaluate, assess results of rules you have not played out (yet)? @Sana


Katie > Bateson's *double bind*
--clue--> meanings and causes of schizophrenia (--> may speak to various conditions of biosocial systems today)
(questions at using the word schizophrenia:)
-what of the sexism of those laying blame on the “schizophrenogenic mother”?
-what of the possiblity of gathering evidence for the effects of expressed emotion in family systems of those with possibly linked to bipolar disorder? (--> that is my problem with Eleanor's stuttering as aesthetics)

double bind: (super confusining) transactions, entire system of layered contradictions mobilized over a range of communication channels
•somthing is prohibited, punished (at one level of meaning or abstraction *within a particular communicating channel*)
•something else is required (at another level) that is impossible to effect if the prohibition is honored
}--> [this] happens over and over again ==until==> such *double bind patterning = (becomes experienced as) “reality”*

***they all deal with (some edges of) double bind:
•religious practices
•entertainment
•game design
•learning
•

intolerable conditions ==> creativities

(when crucial context markers distinguishing [one from another] become unrecognizable, contradictory, or fraudulant ==>) “abusive practices ~= challenging practices”
--> (terror & possibility are on the edge in double bind experience =) ***transcontextual confusion*** (<-- requres transcontextual gifts one may or may not have...) @apass #feedback: urgent appropriate response
--Bateson--> double bind patterning = intense:
•contradictory (two order of messages each of which denies the other)
•unvoiced (making explicit checks of context impossible, inappropriate, meaningless)

“(there is nothing to determine) whether a give individual shall become a clown, a poet, a schizophrenic, or a combination of these” --> we deal with a genus of syndromes (most of which are not conventionally regarded as pathological) [~= art work]#feedback
•those life is enriched by transcontextual gifts (--> Elen)
•those who are impoverished by transcontextual confusions (--> Ali)
}--> for both there is a “double take”
a falling leaf or the greeting of a friend is not “just that and nothing more”


(taking from Bateson, Katie -->) play with this range of terror and possibility --(with + through)--> (individual & biosocial) *consciousness: reflection + recursion* (at the edge of apprehension) = environments of being : context, pattern, layers of abstraction, storytelling all have material effects and provide *materials for agency*


[*]play: metacommunicative media*, a double consciousness (in which the player is well aware of the artificiality of the play situation) [=/= immersive fallacy: the idea that games get better and better as they become whatever that thing “more real” is ==> implications for the meaning of: rigor, representation, evidence, method, assessment]
(animal and children learn to play --learn-->) there are some ways *play self =/= everyday self* & [they learn] to perform this separation in interactive cognitive and social communication *forms of not* : they amuse themselves by performing the communication “this is not it”:
•the puppy nips, but not hard enough to injure --> violence? not. --> the nip actually hurts a bit
•the teen kisses in spin the bottle, but not the person they like the most --> sex? not. --> the kissing blush and stammer
•my body is reacting as if i am in danger, but really i am in front of a computer --> reality? not.
•
}--> double consciousness
(Katie > Bateson) *play creates its own commentary in itself about itself as an intense and pleasurable interactive dynamism* = metacommunication: communicative + neurological + hormonal

***good signaling skills make nonabusive play on the edge of double bind possible***

(skills of) transcontextual movement without falling apart
finding out:
•which bits are active
•which bits are context
•which bits can be made explicit
•which rules are perceptible
•which distributed embodiments, cognitions, and infrastructures are in play
(these are the skills needed for the kind of game we play in apass)

playing/gaming (now covers): gambling, economic game theory, game art, design, learning, role playing, system theory --> *playing with our distributed being* [Katie's accounting for digital]

-what the hell are my hormonal plays? (not always including another person)


(for Haraway [*]wording:) game of cat's cradle (across a range of transmedia) pictured, described, metacommunicated, performed, extended, *relayed*
(my image assemblages: writing:) techno-organic polyglot polymorphic wiring diagrams
to pattern
to relay (passing something along, relaying =/= sharing)
to perceive multiform
rewarded by dopamine
triggered by pleasure, anticipation, yawning fields for memory [--> my ajayeb study], learning and unlearning, tenacious addictive repetitions

tools: drawing, role playing, gaming, writing, critiquing, reviewing, costuming, songwriting, singing, webby community building, techy arts, fans advocating their interests in films
--> shaping environments and contexts for imagination and cognition

*wording: a practice of displaying + crafting worlds, of sharing + enjoying expertise, of noticing tiny details of connection and similarity amid the tweaks and frissons of alternative shadings across many intertextualities of association, history, genre, care*

in interface
what was obvious to one was mystery to another
what was trivial to one was a barrier to another
how do you reply in terms that are alien to you?

@apass
*actual materialities of distributed thinking* <--among-- infrastructures of:
•publication
•media
•conferences
•scholarly communication
•research results and processes
•

elegant parsimonies of explanation
clever bodies at the edge of apprehension (Despret's Clever Hans Effect)

an interative agency (Katie calls) *learning to be affected* =/= “mearly the effect of...” ...ولی اون فقط داره

odor kit
a device organized in a careful pallete of small differences
learning to be affected --entails--> a dynamic trajectory by which we learn to register and become sensitive to what the world is made of

body parts are progressively acquired --> world counter-parts are being registered in a new way (= my ajayeb studies)
*acquiring a body: a progressive enterprise that produces at once a sensory medium and a sensitive world [---> go to Captain Marvel 2019 film]


what sort of project of multiplicity is transdisciplinarity?
what sort of double consciousness might it array in which political economies?

(Bateson's) distributed being = we don't end at our skin

***what does it mean to say to any particular group of people that we do not end at our skin?!***
what sort of boundary object is this “skin”?

(Keeling > Katie) a book is a wormhole --into--> transdisciplinary universe
*lyricism of surplus*
“the end of the world... work with me”

agencies of valorization (of pricing, of valuing, of mobilizing labor) : political economy of acquiring body parts from the skin's edge

*agencies of capital: worldly processes of economic systems articulating and distributed among, but not reproducing the powers of the state, or of community, family, or nation*

+ other agencies:
•sensory-motor apparatus and affectivities
•thinkings and memory-images distributed across people and media

(sometimes) layered double-bind systems ==> numbing out

queerly valorized --Keeling-->
if Pam Grier is a locus of desire for both heterosexual males and for lesbians such as Lesbian Avengers’ lesbian prtygoers, then her presence on The L Word [TV series] is another way the series seeks to bring these populations together in a shared project of value production


phenomena: topological reconfigurings/entanglements/relationalities/(re)articulations
ongoing reconfis of world ==> = agency =/= attribute

national agendas for innovation and economic positioning

which surplus populations will be enrolled into which kinds of institutions for knowledge work becomes an element of global academic restructuring
restructuring: politicizing funding + ...

intellectual double bind of having:
1. to address many diverging audiences simultaneously under the threat of survival
2. to author knowledges as merely one of multiple agencies with very limited control
==> *posthumanities*

(partial and highly distributed) authorial and receptive agencies --require--> affective labors -->
•sifting among authoritative and alternative knowledges
•clarifying affiliations
•inspiring trust

(Ahmed's material feminism) @apass
whose material was this?
which generations of feminisms were implicated?
which details were necessary to name others carefully?
what contexts were backdrops for which founding gestures?
affective labor (in apass): frustration, forgetting, unfairness, intensity, ethics, hope, carring attention to detail

[let's not] be quite so willing to deposit our hope in the category of “the new”


objects become sticky
objects become full of affective value

critique
(in apass i have been experimenting with the) effects of reducing complexity
(i am aware of both) the hard work of elegance in explanation & of essentialism in critique
-strategic openings and closings of “black-boxes” (full of memory)

wir
(Katie --> one must wonder) who is being evoked by this ‘we’
to what extent this ‘we’ functions to interpellate the reader into a community that shares a common horizon? (@Sven and Chloe bookshop)
which side, which knowledge world, in what spacetime are ‘we’ on, inside and outside of, bonding and othering?

*tacit forgetting* =/= resolution
**what sorts of boundary objects value irritation?** @Leo
(my irritation in apass with tacit knowledge, spiritualism, Vivero, Manning, process philosophy,,,)

Katie accounts for Ahmed worries that Barad's mattering and some othe black-boxing speech acts are only caricatures of whole arguments, of whole (disciplinizing?) archives, and that they are not conducted at the proper grain of detail, “not attributed to somebody”


attention (in time) -->
•narrow the range of possibility of -ism(s)
•alter the grain of detail ==> *differential focus*


ajayeb.net: an intellectual infrastructure assemblaged and stacked (extensively scaled, intensely scoped) =/= disciplinized archives of references (a knowing that linkages exist and can be assumed and must be consciously made explicit as “new”)
•my “=/=” set the focus of lens unsed in examining --> alter the grain of detail (deliberately and dismissingly) --> a “we” is needed --to--> pull back --to--> include alternate knowledge worlds
ajayeb.net/bibli: bird's-eye view of the bibliographic growth

mobility and detachability of “nots” provoking frission

@ERG's new website: what if the worlding here needs to scope and scale along ranges of detail, indications of shifts from one knowledge world to another assemblaged through boundary objects?
-who gets to say in which knowledge world?

routinized rhetoric about feminism

apparatus: open-ended practices

****(ok yes) “we honestly believe that there are no positions that are epistemologically superior to any other” --but--> at the same time [Katie and i totally] argue with and try to overthrow those i don't agree with****

neutrality (<-- moral commitment) =/= relativism: forswearing claims to absolute epistemological authority

(learning from Katie) my technique in ajayeb study --> i brazenly detach words from their original context and mobilize then all together for my own irritating purposes [...] i both reduce and add to the complexity (of globals and locals)
**(my play:) double or multiple consciousness ==> [*]ajayeb: growing boundary objects
**(my project in apass:) to be curious and value how claims to epistemological authority operate and how comparative relativism can be accountable + can i irritatingly passionately disagree with


democratization of oppression (?)

reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates more consumption
...the economic logic of a horizontally integrated entertainment industry

#telegram iran (commercial world of entertainment)
material examples of *stacked realities* cascading over various media and technological platforms with differing degrees of interoperability and standardization --Katie--> *transmedia stories* (inevitably commercialized)



integrationism
revolutionary action
supermacism
separatism
anarchism
political defense
redefinition of the human
to intervene in and democratically refocus social and psychic powers --> place-based ecological activism: self-consciously identifying and producing invigorating political and cultural planetary geographies

ethically augmented and affected cognitive sensorium

variable and sensitized tactics and ethics of “democratics” --Sandoval--> meta-ideologizing: functions both within and against ideology
@Leo?


(my work on ajayeb is aimed at:) old and new media collide ==Jenkins==> *convergence culture* --inhabited-by--> those who learn how to play with media, information, visualization, and who live among and produce hypertexted or relational and relative materialities

preemptive
proleptic
prophetic

(the way i am using the term) queer: to learn to be affected by the political economies of knowledge worlds


(my art in lecture and performances:) *to play with our own consciousness* --Katie--> to curiosly work at the edge of “this is not it”, [bits that are] some activated and activating across the tacit and the explicit

(no to) idealization
(no to) disillusionment

(Katie asks) *****which “we” gathers, locating inside of worlding processes, as elements in reorganizations that “we” matter in, but do not control?*****

(the game we play in artistic research:) *transcontextual movement witout falling apart*
[in apass people do] sensitized transmedia knowledge practices

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

origin of computing goes back to 19th century insurance industry: modern elimination of risks
social theory of data science
1820s (Babbage’s) difference engine
right at the industrial revolution: division of labor (for Babbage was the highest human achievement)
==> welfare state
the state protects and promotes the economic and social well-being of the citizens
we are living by the rationality of insurance industry (==> operating our lives by technologies of information and computing)
[we can live with it differently]
logic of progress is not the issue, logic of acceleration is the problem
(idea of) frictionless economy ==> must go faster and faster
discourse of stasis =/= how to explore change?
not preserving endangered species, but preserving the possibility of change

desks are information technologies

Bowker > Sina: every critical work (today) must include the centrality of data (and calculation) in our lives

(from premodern) *describe the world* [bestiaries] --to--> (modern necessity to) *calculate the world* [recognizing a calculated world --> my interest in Olearius]

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

(Cameron's image of) Terminator: relentless unidirectional progress [that you can't negotiate with] (~= modernity) ==> destruction of cultures and communities --> destroy ourselves

how to live with Terminator = how to live with modernity --> postmodernity
(in the film the Terminator is finally terminated by a determined woman using rather old-fashioned technology)

absolutely will not stop
inside: hyperalloy combat chassis, microprocessor controlled, fully armoured, very tough
outside: living human tissue, flesh, skin, hair, blood --> controlled by a clinical logic: *it cannot be reasoned with*, it cannot be bargained with

its metal skeleton rises from the ashes and carries on with its mission. the skeleton too is chopped to bits, the individual bits come to life and continue with their goal

(for Sardar) modernity is the conceptual equivalent of the Terminator (incepted in European Enlightenment: modernize traditional cultures and relentlessly lead mankind, screaming and protesting, by the nose towards a progressive utopia)

modernity ~=> (witnessed, if not caused:)
•death and elimination of numerous cultures
•destruction of countless communities and histories
•disappearance of hundreds of valuable animal and plant species
•transformed arable land into wastelands and deserts

modernity: the official culture of the world
(Nietzsche, Heidegger -->) it is not possible to think our way out of modernity with the philosophical system of thought and language supplied by modernity

--> Vattimo's (bad) philosophy of crisis:
•history
what was traditionally referred to as “history” is now perceived as having broken down into an infinity of “histories” that can no longer be (re)combined into a single narrative governed by a central theme
(today:) history = a kind of writing
•progress: *something qualitatively different from what precedes it* (a forward movement in history) --✕--> [now:] welf established technique (of such masters as Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard and Baudrillard:) to deconstruct rational metaphysics in order to open it, to rewrite it and thus to lay the foundation, in terms of a Marxian-inspired historicism, of new truths for a postmodernist thought
•(Vattimo's use of) nihilism as weapon to attack notions of ‘truth’ and ‘reason’ (in western metaphysics) ==>
◦‘logic = (just another kind of) rhetoric’
◦‘truth = will to power (by those who claim to be seeking truth over those who are being addressed by them)’
◦‘science and technology = dominating metaphysical systems’
--✕--> (eliminated any) possibility of a dialogue with cultures that are truly other as the rational metaphysics of science and technology


(the idea of) plurality of cultures and discourses must become a basic premise of postmodernist thought ==> widespread and widely pluralistic religious revival [+ excessive indulgence in relativism]

(the meaning of) morality and principles of justice in a postmodern world: [democracy's western ethos:]
•recognition of human needs
•courage
•solidarity
•justice
•prudence
•(virtue of) participating in rational discourse


(Sardar's reading:)
•stating the obvious with a sense of grand discovery is an essential postmodern disease
•what modern science and technology, free market economy and multinational corporations are doing in the name of freedom, justice and fairness

--> despite wonderful sentiments, and all the arguments for justice and equify, we end up with more of the same

(problem of the East with) modernity: a European cultural construct based on specific historical legacy and condition, and its basic goal has always been to shape science, politics, arts, morality and the world according to its own image and inner logic
+
much of postmodernist thought is a sitnilar European construct and continues the old programme in a renewed attempt to justify neomarxism or new brands of liberal humanism

-what is a a genuine, radical departure from postmodernism?

religiosity: that which transcends the world (can be expressed in Fascism, Communism, Nationalism, Scientism, Aestheticism, Nuclearism, or in several other secular religions)

[*]secularism: a dishonest kind of religiosity***

(mark of out time:) *necessity of recovering our sense of oneness with nature* <-- our total alienation
[?my artistic research is the very expression of] (Griffin's) postmodernism : a new relationship with the past (and the future) <-- postmodernism acknowledges, appreciates and wants to learn from the wisdom of traditional societies ~= neoconservative religious fundamentalism =/= constructive nihilism

[the strive for a new ‘enchanted science’ (=/= sacred science) that] overcomes the separation between truth and virtue, value and fact, ethics and practical necessity

(Falk's) Disney[...]