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Momentum & Information: Thinking with Simondon about the stress-energy-momentum of information

Panel 16:00 – 17:30 UK time, 1 November 2024

Contested & Erased Energy Knowledges Conference (short program)

Dundee and Edinburgh | 31 October – 2 November 2024

The present panel proposes to sketch out some aspects of a desirable reform of ontology and epistemology aimed at reappraising the relation between form and energy. Taking a lead from Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation, a special emphasis will be placed on his concept of ground: ‘what is determinant and plays an energetic role are not forms but that which carries the forms, which is to say their ground; the ground, while perpetually marginal with respect to attention, is what harbors the dynamisms.’ (Simondon, Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, pp. 60-62) Simondon’s approach indeed enables us to conceive of the participation of forms in a ground that is dynamic and rich in singularities. This notion of ground could not be further removed from the disembodied, neutral backdrop of transcendental notions of space and time, in which geometric points without extension and lines without thickness have ruled the ontology and epistemology of classical physics. (Longo, Le cauchemar de prométhée, Puf, 2023)

Abstracts

1.  Potentials, forces that carve out their path: Simondon’s
concept of ground

Cécile Malaspina

The climate crisis and its interrelation with sociopolitical and economic crises, require that we re-examine our approach to systemic complexity. The notion of ground, as conceived by Simondon, will draw our attention to what remains perpetually marginal with respect to structural analysis, namely the energetic role played by ground. Simondon describes the relation of form and ground as a bestriding of the present that diffuses an influence of the future onto the present, of the virtual onto the actual (Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 61). Clarifying the topo-chronological future anterior of this relation, what emerges is the constitutive role of ground, of its inherent dynamisms, potentials and singularities one that is very different from the neutral, disembodied background of simulations and modellisations of modern science (Longo, Le cauchemar de prométhée, 2023). Simondon enables us to think of the forms we discern, analyse and classify not only as emerging from ground, but as the very unfolding of a ground that is complex in its dynamic, rich in singularities and replete with potentials, forces that carve out their path (Simondon, 61).

2. Stress-energy-momentum tensors as ontogenetic operators

Sha Xin Wei

For Simondon, “information is never relative to a single and homogeneous reality but to two orders in a state of disparation…never deposited in a [given] form…[but] is the tension between two disparate reals.”  The elastic dynamics of his material example, clay, is modeled by what materials scientists call the stress-energy tensor.  I consider this tensor and its general relativistic analogue: the stress-energy-momentum tensor not to reduce phenomena to physics, but to see what insights we may derive from such non-Newtonian figures of thought, for a materialist, haptic, textural (distributed), approach to how “emergent energetic directionalities and/or networks structure human and nonhuman trajectories, behaviour, and affordances.”   I propose to re-earth discussions of energy from dematerializing, transcendental versions of informatics and cybernetics, and orient towards a metabolic understanding of dynamics.

3. Energetics, Magics, and Metaphysics: On the Engineering Metaphorical Devices

Muindi Fanuel Muindi

Since its inception, the science of energy, or “energetics”, has informed the researches of occultists and philosophers, serving as a guiding model and metaphor for the creation of new concepts of the uncanny, the other-worldly, the ontological, and the ethical. Magical and metaphysical thinking have, in turn, informed the science of energetics, serving as forerunners, presaging unexpected findings and paradigm shifts. This presentation investigates the energetic tropes that permeate the varied discourses that characterize magics and metaphysics and, in turn, the forms of magical and metaphysical thinking that permeate the scientific discourse of energetics.

To this end, it will engage with five forms of energetic agency and energetic agents: conduction and the conductors that channel energy; transduction and the transducers that transform energy; resistance and the resistors that dissipate energy; capacitance and the capacitors that intervene between conductors to store-up energy; and lastly, inductance and the inductors that convene (or coil) conductors around them to store-up energy. One particular family of energetic devices will serve as informative anecdote for this investigation: analog radios and their tuned circuits — consisting of a resistor (R), an inductor (L), and a capacitor (C) configured to form a harmonic oscillator.

Following this line of inquiry, the presentation will consider the manner in which Colonial Science tacitly accepts metaphors drawn from the magical and metaphysical languages of “the West” and rejects metaphors drawn from the magical and metaphysical languages of “the Rest”.

4. A relational ontology grounded on constraint

Alicia Juarrero

This panel has challenged itself to consider the possibility of a new logic, one that shifts from a focus on things to a focus on systemic complexity. In particular, it aims to do so by “reappraising the relation between form and energy.” We take our inspiration from the Simondon’s concept of ground: not as forms but as “that which carries forms.”  Not coincidentally, the notion of ground carries with it a different understanding of temporality than that of (Newtonian, efficient) cause and effect.”

This paper takes up that challenge by proposing a relational ontology grounded on the operation of constraints in complex adaptive systems. Constraints exert influence not as efficient cause; they do so by sculpting, shaping and modulating/regulating possibility vectors within a constrained-generated field.  One type of constraint (context-independent constraints) establishes the field’s persistent and ongoing generative potential by laying out its fundamental ontological ground — the field’s primordial topology within which energy flows directionally. CICs thus set up a stress-energy tensor field and energy flows directionally in response to the field’s topology.

Context-dependent constraints, on the other hand, specify and individuate trajectories within that possibility landscape; mass embodies attractors that emerge when multidimensional context-dependent constraints intersect.  Such emergent phenomena in turn reshape and resculpt the fundamental ground – they turn it rugged and individuated, in other words.

From this perspective, the classical notion of Form can be reconceptualized as constraint regimes that govern individual actions such as to preserve the integrity of the systemic complexity.

Biographies

Alicia Juarrero is President and co-founder of VectorAnalytica, Inc., and Visiting Research Scholar at the University of Miami. She is the author of iis the author of Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System (MIT 1999) and co-editor of Reframing Complexity: Perspectives from North and South (ISCE Publishing, 2007), and Emergence, Self-Organization and Complexity: Precursors and Prototypes (ISCE Publishing, 2008). She is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Prince George’s Community College (MD). Among the articles she has published in peer-reviewed journals are “Self-Organization: Kant’s Concept of Teleology and Modern Chemistry,” The Review of Metaphysics39 (1985): 107‑135; “Causality as Constraint,” in G. van de Vijver, S. Salthe and M. Delpos, eds., Evolutionary System: Biological and Epistemological Perspectives on Self-Organization.Dordrecht: Kluwer. 1998 pp. 233-242; “Complex Dynamical Systems and the Concept of Identity,” Emergence (Fall 2002); and “Fail‑Safe versus Safe‑Fail: Suggestions towards A Dynamical Systems Model of Justice,” Texas Law Review69 (June 1991): 1745‑1777. Dr. Juarrero was named the 2002 U.S. Professor of the Year by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; in 2003 she received the Edward T. Foote Alumnus of Distinction Award of the University of Miami; in 1995 the Distinguished Humanities Educator Award of the Community College Humanities Association. In 1992 Dr. Juarrero was appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the U.S. Senate to the Advisory Board of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) where, from 1992-2000 she served as NEH’s Chair of Council Committee on State Programs. In that capacity she was responsible for the oversight of approximately $32 million in NEH funds distributed annually to the States Humanities Councils.

Muindi Fanuel Muindi is a performance artist, philosopher, and poet, with Lacustrine Bantu roots in the Rift Forests of Eastern Congo and the Mara Wetlands in Tanzania. He is the author of six books of experimental poetry and prose. Muindi’s philosophical perspective, his “deconstructive empiricism”, is deeply affected by Bantu philosophies and by Western deconstruction and schizoanalysis, and it is subtly informed by figures, functions, and structures from comparative biology and measure theory. Muindi’s performances, his “philosophical gestures”, deploy dramatic devices to create sensuous experiences that deepen understandings of the metaphysical catastrophe of coloniality and that broaden the prospects of the Black Arts and Decolonial Sciences. Having adopted the motto “more grit, less kit”, Muindi’s performance practice privileges high latency, low fidelity, and seamful designs and the use of TEK (Transformative Ecological Knowledges). Muindi is co-founder of the Fyrthyr Institute for Unsettling Technologies, coordinator of the “Prototyping Social Forms” and “Alter-Eco” research streams at the Synthesis Center, an organizer at the Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines, co-producer and audio engineer for the Forested Niches podcast, and a member of the “After School”, “Technologies of Critical Conscientization”, and “Unwriting Nature” research communities at the Center for Art Design + Social Research.

Cécile Malaspina is the author of An Epistemology of Noise (Bloomsbury, 2018) and the principal translator of Gilbert Simondon’s On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. She is directrice de programme at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris (Ciph) and programmer for Art & Curatorial Practice at the New Centre for Research and Practice. She is based in London, at King’s College, where she is a Visiting Research Fellow. Cécile is a member of the editorial boards of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities; Copy Press; and is a guest editor at Nature: Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.

Sha Xin Wei, Professor at the Schools of Arts, Media + Engineering and Complex Adaptive Systems, directs the Synthesis Atelier for transversal art, philosophy and technology at Arizona State University.  He has been a professor at Concordia University as director of the Topological Media Lab, at the European Graduate School and the New Centre for Research & Practice. Sha’s core research concerns processualist approaches to ontogenesis and poiesis.  Trained in mathematics at Harvard and Stanford University, his art and scholarly work range from gestural media, movement arts, and realtime media installation through experiential design to critical studies and philosophy of technology.  Sha has published in philosophy, media arts and sciences, experimental music and performance, science and technology studies, computer science, and human computer interaction, including the book Poiesis and Enchantment in Topological Matter (MIT).  He is an associate editor for AI & Society, and serves on the Governing Board of Leonardo

Computing Energy “In Materio”: Fluidic Logics, Exergetic Economies and Metabolic Social Forms

Panel 14:00 – 15:30 UK time, 31 October 2024

Contested & Erased Energy Knowledges Conference (short program)

Dundee and Edinburgh | 31 October – 2 November 2024

In The Neglected Pillar of Material Computation, Susan Stepney proposes tapping into matter’s own substrate and its natural computational capacity before trying to comprehend the computational (physical and logical) affordances of biological systems. This panel departs from this provocation and carries matter’s computational capacity to different ends. Fluidics and Materialist Logics will look at the type of logics fluidic computers generate and the subsequent ontologies of turbulence, to suggest a social understanding of negation. Exergy and Ecological Economic posits exergy as a far more crucial concept for bioeconomics, challenging the more commonly used notion of entropy. In the same vein of thought, Metabolism and Capitalist Social Form will further investigate the use of metabolism and metabolic states in Marx’s critique of capitalist social forms.

Abstracts

1. Metabolism as a Material-energetic Computation

Sha Xin Wei

The Turing model of computation (or equivalently, Church’s lambda-calculus) is a purely formal concept. And for some 80 years, electronic machines materially realizing Turing-equivalent computation have been architected to maintain the immaterial illusions of Turing computation: (1) replacing ontology by tokens, in particular binary data; (2) the immateriality and omnitemporality of representation; (3) the conceit that computation takes no physical energy and no space.  On the other hand, the metabolic is conditioned — though not determined — by thermodynamic energetics, friction, analog continuity, and complexity, with the extra features of mortality, natality, dense metastability, anti-entropy (negentropy), indeterminacy and non-prestatability. Is there any way to associate these seemingly antipodal families of notions?  Rather than reduce the metabolic to the formal (as done by machine pattern classification and synthesis, computer games, a-life, assembly theory), I speculate what alternative concept of “computation” might enjoy some of the features or effects of the metabolic. And following a pragmatic approach I propose some performative experiments from Synthesis @ ASU.

2. Metabolism and Capitalist Social Form

Andrés Saenz de Sicilia

A crucial moment in the development of Marx’s materialism was his deployment of the concept of metabolism to theorise the human relationship with nature. The metabolic framework situates human social activity within an energetic rather than conceptual economy, marking a decisive break with idealism. Yet for Marx social life remains unintelligible as a merely energetic transfer, for that transfer always takes place in historically specific forms, bound to historically specific social relations, institutions, technologies, identities, ideologies, etc.. The critical force of Marx’s account of Capital lies precisely in the analysis of the social forms that mediate the human-nature metabolism in the modern epoch. This paper examines this link, between metabolism and capitalist social form in Marx’s thought, in order to clarify the stakes of the present ecological crisis.

3. Exergy and Ecological Economics

Violeta Garrido and Ramón del Buey Cañas

It is well known that, at least since the publication of the report to the Club of Rome in 1971, thinking in depth about the ecological problems of our time means the understanding of the origin and nature of our ways of living and, moreover, seeing that these are coupled to a type of metabolism that is resulting in a severe erosion of the web of life and an accelerated waste of our material and energy resources. This is another way to pose that, in addition to a knowledge of the social, institutional, imaginary and motivational construction that sets in motion the current capitalist orders, an integrated project of ecological economy also needs to address the dynamics of energy and material exchanges that are established at its base. And for this, a solid knowledge of the functioning of these energetic and material dynamics at a fundamental level seems unavoidable. 

This is precisely what the work of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen pointed to, when he claimed the crucial importance of entropy in the study and conceptualization of a truly eco-integrative economic proposal. At this point, however, a crucial question arises: does entropy have the potential to become an integrative concept for ecological economics, and is it possible to construct a mutually intelligible interdisciplinary approach to economic processes that takes entropy as its cornerstone? Our hypothesis, which is supported by the numerous and crucial works of Antonio Valero and Alicia Valero, is that it is not possible. From their point of view, although the economy must undoubtedly be taken into account, and incorporate thermodynamics in its accounting, entropy is a bad indicator for it. Why? Our talk proposes an answer to this question, important also to address some crucial debates around the notions of ‘energy’ and ‘exergy’, which are transversal to the fields of ecological economics, feminist economics, ecofeminism and ecosocialism.

4. Fluidics and materialist logics

Oswaldo Emiddio Vasquez Hadjilyra

As the ongoing “return to matter” trickles down into reinvented glossaries and research methodologies motivated by new materialist thinking, it remains unclear how it challenges our understanding of computation. Even within a resurging field like fluidic computation there is little, if any, theoretical engagement with the material affordances of fluids as a mode of computation.

Developed at first to model post-war national economies (MONIAC) while anticipating the Cold War hysteria as it could operate in an ionized environment, fluidic computation could carry out computations dynamically by solving multiple differential equations simultaneously. In more recent years, scaled down to microfluidics, its operations have been reintroduced in the health sector in lab-on-a-chip (LOC) research.

In this presentation I would like to approach fluidic computation from a theoretical standpoint by re-interpreting some of its key components, and focus on its materially constituted logic, whereby negation is not the result of a posited non-being (NOT) but the outcome of turbulence disturbance. To do so, I will examine Michel Serres’ The Birth of Physics, in which he notes that when a laminar flow of atoms is disturbed by turbulence is what leads to existence. But such turbulence, in fluidic engineering, is what defines the ‘NOT’ operator. From this study case I will conclude by further complexifying the notion of negation through Paolo Virno’s “linguistic anthropology”.

Biographies

Ramón del Buey Cañas is a Spanish researcher, with a formal background in Philosophy (BA, MA, PhD; Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) and Environmental Humanities (MA; Universidad Politécnica de Valencia & Universidad Autónoma de Madrid). He is a member of the research projects “Energy Humanities: Energy and socio-cultural imaginaries between the industrial revolution and the ecosocial crisis”  c(PID2020-113272RA-I00, HUMENERGE) and “Speak4Nature-Interdisciplinary Approaches on Ecological Justice MARIE SKLODOWSKA-CURIE ACTIONS STAFF EXCHANGES (MSCA-SE) MSCA-SE-2021-101086202. He has been a visiting scholar at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (CDMX, Mexico), Universidad Nacional del Litoral (Santa Fe, Argentina) and Duke University (North Carolina, USA). He is a member of the Research Group in Ecological Humanities (GHECO, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)

Violeta Garrido is a researcher in the Department of Philosophy I at the University of Granada (Spain) and a member of the Research Group “Social Philosophy: Critical Analysis of Society and Culture” (HUM-1036) and the Extraordinary Chair in Social Philosophy of Bodily Discrimination (Inmujeres-UGR). Her research interests concern the relationship between political philosophy and aesthetics, with a particular focus on Marxism and the critique of ideology. She has been a visiting scholar at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, at Duke University and at the National University of La Plata, and has published several translations from French and English. She is also interested in the issue of the ecological crisis, on which she is directing a research project funded by the University of Granada’s Research Plan for the academic year 2023-2024, entitled “Techno-optimism and the preservation of the future: science and deliberation on the horizon of the ecological crisis”. Some of her recent publications are “A cultural ecocritique of technological solutionism” (Nuestra Bandera, no. 262, 2024); “Exploitation and reification: Between György Lukács and Juan Carlos Rodríguez” (Izquierdas, no. 54, 2024); “The time of insurrection: past, present and future in Étienne Balibar” (Isegoría, no. 68, 2023) and “Philosophical unconscious and ideological unconscious: on Althusser’s historicity” (Archivos, no. 22, 2023). https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8678-8390

Andrés Saenz de Sicilia is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University London and Associate Lecturer in Theory and Philosophy at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. He is a member of Mexico’s National System of Researchers (SNI) and an editor of The Philosopher, Britain’s longest running public philosophy journal. His publications include Subsumption in Kant, Hegel in Marx: From the Critique of Reason to the Critique of Society (Brill, 2024) and the edited volume Marx & the Critique of Humanism (forthcoming with Bloomsbury). 

Sha Xin Wei, Professor at the Schools of Arts, Media + Engineering and Complex Adaptive Systems, directs the Synthesis Atelier for transversal art, philosophy and technology at Arizona State University.  He has been a professor at Concordia University as director of the Topological Media Lab, at the European Graduate School and the New Centre for Research & Practice.  Sha’s core research concerns processualist approaches to ontogenesis and poiesis.  Trained in mathematics at Harvard and Stanford University, his art and scholarly work range from gestural media, movement arts, and realtime media installation through experiential design to critical studies and philosophy of technology.  Sha has published in philosophy, media arts and sciences, experimental music and performance, science and technology studies, computer science, and human computer interaction, including the book Poiesis and Enchantment in Topological Matter (MIT).  He is an associate editor for AI & Society, and serves on the Governing Board of Leonardo.

Oswaldo Emiddio Vasquez Hadjilyra is a PhD candidate in the transdisciplinary program Media Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University. His research interrogates the philosophical and aesthetic implications of treating digitality and computation within a materialist framework, by looking at alternative histories of computation and enacting them in media technologies. With a formal training in mathematics (BSc) and philosophy (BA, MA), and as an active art practitioner and musician, his work spans and coagulates multiple streams of research. His most recent publication is “Computation and Material Transformations: Dematerialisation, Rematerialisation and Immaterialisation in Time-Based Media”, in Contingency and Plasticity in Everyday Technologies ed.  ed. by N. Lushetich et al., Media Philosophy, Rowman & Littlefield. In his most recent exhibition, he is part of a group representation of the Cyprus Pavilion in the 60th Venice Biennale.

Keynote for  Tacit Engagement in the Digital Age 2024: The Magic Machine, Through the Prism of Art and Science.

19-20 September 2024 | Faculty of Music, Cambridge University

Jointly sponsored by AI & Society Journal and the Center for Music and Science

Abstract:  An LLM’s hallucinations demonstrate the larger fact that any token-based, pattern-classification or pattern-generation algorithm merely makes syntactic arrangements of tokens bearing a strictly indeterminate association with lived occasion, place or experience; in short they are “stochastic parrots.”  More deeply still, any representational scheme cannot but miss what Michel Polanyi has called tacit knowledge, which is *not* represented in any form – language, number, equations, or diagrams.  Dancing, cooking, playing music, athletics, but also laboratory, engineering, and business practices are full of such tacit knowledges.

Nonetheless, we tend to see faces in clouds, and not infrequently, intention in a set of mechanically juxtaposed events.  The former psychologists call apophenia.  The latter we call AI agency.  Now, while magical thinking can lubricate our social lives, we might pause to ask — given that the “A” in “AI” often means automation — who benefits and who suffers when we replace human thinking, gesturing, interpreting by mechanical procedure?

Rather than rest content with a negative critique, however, I will sketch some calibrated, positive uses of technology, alternative to automation, in the equally ancient spirit of augmentation, as ancient as fire and bone flutes.  These alternatives construe technologies as augmenting rather than replacing thought, gesture, life.  They draw from and motivate different ways of making, doing, and sense-making that recognize and in fact rely on relationality, texturality, nuance, multiplicity, indeterminacy, and the open-ended historicity of life.

“Completeness”: From the dream of Laplace to the nightmare of Crick and the New Genomic Technologies. Reconquering the world and our open and playful animality / humanity.

Giuseppe Longo

13th June, 5:00-6:30 pm BST

Registration: http://forms.gle/Vb7K5Gm9i5cSo38bA

Bio

GIUSEPPE LONGO is CNRS Research director at Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris and a former Professor of Mathematical Logic and of Computer Science, University of Pisa. He spent three years in the USA (Berkeley, MIT, Carnegie Mellon) as researcher and Visiting Professor. Longo is founder and director (1990-2015) of Mathematical Structures in Computer Science, a Cambridge University Press journal. He co-authored about 140 papers and five books, between mathematics, computing and biology. In particular, with A. Soto and D. Noble, the volume From the century of the genome to the century of the organism: new theoretical approaches, a special issue of Prog Biophys Mol Biol, 122, 1, 2016, and Le cauchemar de Prométhée, les sciences et leurs limites, PUF, 2023. GL’s current project develops an “epistemology of the new interfaces” focusing on the historical correlations and on alternatives to the new alliance between computational formalisms and the governance of man and nature by algorithms and by supposedly objective “optimality methods.”

CIPh Seminar Series: EXPERIMENT & EXPERIENCE: A POLYPHONIC SEMINAR ON THE DAO OF INDETERMINACY & PLAY

Org. Cécile Malaspina, Directrice de programme, Collège international de philosophie, Paris, Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London and UWE & Sha Xin Wei, Professor in the School of Arts, Media + Engineering (AME) at Arizona State University.  Seminar organised in partnership with Prof. Patrick ffrench, King’s College London, Dr Miguel Prado Casanova, University of the West of England and Prof. Francesco Tava, University of the West of England

Seminar Series Abstract

In An Introduction to Daoist Philosophies Steve Coutinho writes: “Interconnections build and shift as one develops familiarity with the verses, but the meaning never crystallises into a final form.” This seminar responds to the need to enlarge the concerns, vocabulary, and even the modes of articulation of philosophy, so as to address the transformative dynamics of the contemporary world. Because it imbricates local and planetary complexities, this work calls for greater openness towards philosophical legacies muted by the dominance of the Western tradition of philosophy, including alternative attitudes towards indeterminacy, as well as traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). We invite participants to bring plural, distinct personal and cultural genealogies of thought to bear on the theme of indeterminacy and play, as much to create a polyphonic family of generate interpretations of the theme as to showcase the richly disparate modes and concerns that animate these genealogies.

Recordings of previous CIPh Seminar sessions: https://vimeo.com/showcase/11064864

Topological and Metabolic Approaches to Ontogenesis

This series of seminars by Prof. Sha Xin Wei is hosted by the New Centre for Research and Practice.

October 29th, November 5th, 12th, 19th | 2023

Description

If asked what the world is made of, we can say it’s made of objects and categories, or we can say it’s made of stuff. This seminar takes the latter proposition, of stuff, substrate, field. But instead of asking what stuff the world is made of, we ask how stuff changes, how things, relations and sense resonate, emerge, transmute, and condition but do not determine one another. Repurposing Galileo’s legendary observation – Eppur si muove – we will read and discuss theories of dynamic, historicity, process, and temporality. During this Seminar, we will:

Session 1 (Oct 29): Workshop the most salient working notions from topological matter and dynamics so that they provide conceptual grips for subsequent sessions: transformation, process, continuity and field.

Session 2 (Nov 5): Synthesize activating aspects of metabolism — beyond physics and beyond computation — from vegetal biology (Mauseth) and from emerging accounts of organism (Longo, Montevil, Kauffman);

Session 3 (Nov 12): Alloy theories of ontogenesis and individuation (Alexander, Simondon, Sarti & Citti)

Session 4 (Nov 19): Apply these notions to the problem of “making sense in common” (Brender, Deleuze, Morris, Stengers).

Sha Xin Wei

Workshop at CrossLabs | Creativity Unleashed

Part 1, abstract:
After rapidly rehearsing some fundamental mathematical, conceptual, and methodological challenges to present day complexity science, we present possible alternatives for next-gen science of complex adaptive systems, drawing on Shannon, Wiener, Gill; Wittgenstein, James, Deleuze, Whitehead; Barad, Arendt; Stepney; Longo, Calude, Saari, Wolpert, Kauffman, and Montevil.

Part 2, abstract:
How to use computational media technologies as instruments to augment collective creative, enactive sensemaking by hybrid metabolic, social, and symbolic ensembles. Illustrated with examples from Synthesis and the Topological Media Lab.

CrossLabs Navigating Indeterminacy & Experiential Experiment from Synthesis Center on Vimeo.

Anticipation 2022 • ASU • 18 Nov 2022

Muindi Fanuel Muindi, Sha Xin Wei, Dulmini Perera, Vangelis Lympouridis, Desiree Foerster, Mark Balzar, with Nadia Chaney, John MacCallum, Teoma Naccarato, Satinder Gill

“Detourning” the notion of anticipation, the interdisciplinary and international collective Prototyping Social Forms (PSF) offers a series of workshops and a curated panel on enacting alternatives to what is presently the case so as to better imagine, sketch, inhabit and reflect on other ways of living in the world that may be obscured by present narratives.

Inspired by “seed banks” developed and maintained by horticulturalists and ecologists, the PSF Process Germ Bank is an experimental infrastructure for sharing germs of research- creation practices and for developing signature methods for probing and promoting diversity within different knowledge ecologies. Hybridizing metaphors, we offer a “seed ball” of process germs to try out in the terrain of the Anticipation Conference 2022.

The “PSF: Un Altro Mondo È Possibile” stream consists 90-minute techniques workshops followed by one 90-minute curated session for reflections upon the techniques workshops and related work. Each techniques workshop will involve the “sprouting” and tending of two process germs.

10:00-11:30 | Techniques Workshop #1: “Enacting and Sensing Process”
12:30-14:00 | Techniques Workshop #2: “Enacting and Sensing Body”
14:30-16:00 | Curated Panel: “Un Altro Mondo È Possibile”

Walton Center for Planetary Health, Room 409

Propositions about non-waged work, with artists & mathematicians

Panel: How do our beliefs about work affect the future of work?

Anticipation 2022 • ASU • 16 Nov 2022

Sha Xin Wei will ask what sorts of work that is neither wage-labor nor subsistence work would make life worth living?  Considering the work of mathematicians, movement artists and poets, we ask: what is made visible or invisible by neoliberal or economistic concepts of labor, work, and productivity.  Part of this could be explained as a measurement problem, but there is a more primordial matter, that economic activity is a distinct order from the symbolic, poetic, artistic, affective and political orders in our disenchanted age, and that one is not reducible to the other. We speculate about work that would make life worth living under other-worldly conditions.

PSF Curated Panel: Un altro mondo è possibile

Sha Xin Wei, Muindi F Muindi, Desiree Foerster, Teoma Naccarato, John MacCallum, Garrett Laroy Johnson, Dulmini Perera, Zeynep Aksöz-Balzar, Mark Balzar, Galo Patricio Moncayo Asan, Satinder Gill and Vangelis Lympouridis

Part of the Prototyping Social Forms “Un altro mondo è possibile” Stream
(see submissions 82 and 195) for Anticipation Conference @ ASU 18-18 November 2022

“Another world is possible”

“Detourning” the notion of anticipation, the interdisciplinary and international collective Prototyping Social Forms (PSF) offers a series of workshops and a curated panel on enacting alternatives to what is presently the case so as to better imagine, sketch, inhabit and reflect on other ways of living in the world that may be obscured by present narratives. Supplementing techniques like world-building or trend-casting for extrapolating from the present to the future, we develop platforms, techniques, and technologies to make locally-generated skilled practices transportable and transformable, forming such knowledge into “germs” that can “sprout” in disparate learning and research environments. Rather than create recordings of some activity or finished products for exchange, these germs condense living processes that can metabolize into another suite of living processes that may grow quite differently under other conditions. Thus we supplement representation of “know-thats” with ways to disseminate and germinate know-hows, know-whys, and know-whens.
‍
PSF’s work revolves around the practice of prototyping—the generation of models, or rather, germs, that can develop and grow in various ways and within different contexts, without assuming a fixed outcome. By focusing on the practice of prototyping, PSF attends to processes of development and their dynamics, as well as the limiting and enabling constraints of different “knowledge ecologies.”
‍
Inspired by “seed banks” developed and maintained by horticulturalists and ecologists, the PSF Process Germ Bank is an experimental infrastructure for sharing germs of research-creation practices and for developing signature methods for probing and promoting diversity within different knowledge ecologies. Hybridizing metaphors, we offer a “seed ball” of process germs to try out in the terrain of the Anticipation Conference 2022 and stand ready to prepare conditions for embedding these process germs in the event with local organizers.

We propose two 90-minute techniques workshops (submissions 82 and 195) followed by one 90-minute curated session for reflections upon the techniques workshops and related work.

FOREGROUND ACTIVITY

We pass a wireless microphone among curated participants who take turns offering reports on enactive work either from the sister PSF Workshops, or from other projects.

• Participants from the PSF Techniques Workshops (submissions 82 and 195) recount their experiences with the different germs such as: Rhythm, Time Zone, Atmosphere, Sense-making Complexity….. (See PSF workshop submissions for the descriptions of the germs and how they would be enacted.)

• Vibrant Fields (Aksöz, Balzar, Asan) https://www.vibrantfields.net/

• SloMoCo (Johnson) https://moco21.movementcomputing.org

• Synthesis-UNDP Navigating Complexity Alternate Reality Simulation (Sha, Lympouridis) https://synthesiscenter.net/projects/navigating-uncertainty-ars/

BACKGROUND ACTIVITY
Cooking in parallel with the Foreground Activity: Every participant will bring ingredients and instructions for something edible or drinkable, and easy to make in under 30 minutes. The instructions can be in conventional text, but we encourage alternative modalities and forms such as a score, a diagram, a recorded video or song, a knotted string, …. The participants exchange recipes and associate ingredients, enact them in a fixed time, then order the creations into a meal. Duration 2.5 hours including break(s) for palate cleanser walks; kitchen access, indoor / outdoor tables to sit within earshot, local sound reinforcement.

Related research streams: Prototyping Social Forms, Alter-Eco,

PSF Techniques Workshop 2: Enacting and Sensing Process

Dulmini Perera, Muindi F Muindi, Xin Wei Sha, Desiree Foerster, Teoma Naccarato and John MacCallum

Part of the Prototyping Social Forms “Un altro mondo è possibile” Stream
Anticipation Conference @ ASU 16-18 November 2022

“Detourning” the notion of anticipation, we offer a workshop on enacting alternatives to what is the case. Supplementing techniques for extrapolating from the present to the future, the interdisciplinary and international collective Prototyping Social Forms (PSF) develops platforms, tactics, and technologies to make locally generated knowledge transportable and transformable, forming such knowledge into “germs” that can “sprout” in disparate learning and research environments.

For the purposes of this PSF Techniques Workshop, we interpret bodies as energetically bounded entities that can affect and be affected by one another – bodies like microbes, humans, and cities. We introduce and compare techniques for speculatively enacting more-than-human ethical as well as aesthetic ventures.

• Germ 4: Sense-making Complexity (Perera) We introduce structured improvisational tactics for designing urban spaces for change, paradox and play. Techniques include pirated board games and alternate reality propositional play.

Critical Ecologies / Flip-It Game

After Work

• Germ 5: Sense-making Complexity (Sha, Vangelis Lympouridis)
We introduce a structured conversation role-playing simulation for small groups of people to improvise working together in complex scenarios for anticipatory governance, strategic foresight and abductive heuristics. Piloted in 7 countries with the UNDP.

Related research stream: Alter-Eco

PSF Techniques Workshop 1: Enacting and Sensing Body

Muindi F. Muindi, Xin Wei Sha, Desiree Foerster, Nadia Chaney, Teoma Naccarato, John MacCallum, Garrett Laroy Johnson and Dulmini Perera

Part of the Prototyping Social Forms “Un altro mondo è possibile” Stream
Anticipation Conference @ ASU 16-18 November 2022

“Detourning” the notion of anticipation, we offer a workshop on enacting alternatives to what is the case. Supplementing techniques for extrapolating from the present to the future, the interdisciplinary and international collective Prototyping Social Forms (PSF) develops platforms, tactics, and technologies to make locally generated knowledge transportable and transformable, forming such knowledge into “germs” that can “sprout” in disparate learning and research environments.

This 90 minute Techniques Workshop focusses on embodied experience.

Germ #1 – Rhythm: We conduct a sequence of rhythm games that can be played in a hybrid setting with participants in both zoom and in live space: breathing, countups, comings-and-goings, foraging rhythm, …. These etudes are one step toward a multi-scale and multi-valent sensing of the dynamics of hyper-complex biosocial phenomena, like cities or languages. Duration 45 mins: three rounds of progressively more elaborate rhythm games, physical room | outdoors + streaming videoconference or good cell reception. (Rhythmanalysis, Lighting and rhythm).

Germ #2 – Time Zone: Interrupted Reading and the Voice of Time (Nadia Chaney): Attending to “unbidden” thoughts and images while reading aloud together, without eschewing intellectual or critical reflections. As conscious and unconscious (or explicit and tacit?) reflections bloom into the group space, the reading time thickens and a new voice can be heard; neither author nor readers, a surplus vocality. We call this the voice of time. Participants then listen together to this voice of time and record it together as a response to the interrupted reading.

Germ 3: Atmosphere (Muindi (Foerster)) We adapt techniques for preparing selves for sensing non-local, extended qualities of atmosphere and metabolism, interpreted as multivalent fields of distributed matter, energy, affect. In particular we introduce Butoh techniques that can be exercised with people in their own rooms as well as in a comfortable outdoor / indoor common space

Some of these can (should) be played both in-person and via video-conference. We checked Flexible, meaning some of the workshop etudes are designed to be activity co-ordinated between local in-person and telematic remote participants (e.g. Rhythm games), whereas others need to be done in-person (e.g. Recipe meal).

Related research stream: Alter-Eco

RESPECT 2022 PANEL: Co-Design of Wearable Music Curriculum for Transversal Neurodiverse Computational Thinking

Seth Thorn, Timothy Wells, Anani Vasquez, Denise Amiot, Mirka Koro, Sha Xin Wei

We create wearable technology and pedagogy consonant with the relational dynamics that constitute our world, and as an alternative to the identity politics of neurotypicality paired with a normative notion of atomic egos. Neurotypical learning modalities privilege linearity, isolation, and cognitivism over creative, interdependent, and embodied interactions. We report on an initial phase of our research-practice partnership with a cohort of culturally and epistemically diverse teaching fellows of neurodiverse students in which we co-design computational thinking (CT) curriculum using novel “wearable music” techniques. Wearable music is an inclusive, mobile, and mobilizing computing practice that foregrounds embodied relationality in creative activities enlivening CT through interdependent ensemble discovery. Our project leverages creative expression as an embodied form of learning demonstrated in neurodiverse sensemaking.

Building Humanistic and Humane Capacity: Towards an Infrastructure Clinic

Towards an Infrastructure Clinic from Synthesis Center on Vimeo.

Reuters News 23 March 2021 Rina Chandran

World Economic Forum: Global Technology Governance Summit, Japan 06—07 April 2021

BANGKOK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Simulations of events ranging from climate disasters to misinformation campaigns on social media can help cities tackle problems that are both complex and hard to predict as they recover from the coronavirus pandemic, urban experts said.

Alternate Reality Simulations use game-like elements and role-playing, with the United Nations’ development unit (UNDP), public and private sectors, and the Arizona State University (ASU) testing them last week in six major cities.

The simulations in Hanoi, Bangkok, Harare and other cities were set in 2022, with the coronavirus still lurking, and the added threats of fake news about insurgents, the failure of the telecom network, or violence and looting after a flash flood.

“Events of the past year have shown that whilst we can foresee a range of potential crises, it is impossible to predict with any certainty their timing or scale,” said Milica Begovic, an innovation specialist at UNDP in Istanbul.

Alternate reality simulations can include obtaining insights from a range of people – including those often excluded from the decision-making process, said Sha Xin Wei, who directs the Synthesis Center for responsive environments at ASU.

…

Post-COVID-19, policymakers will need to make “sea-changes to how we organise our economies, and how we navigate our mixture of nature and people and infrastructure,” Sha said.

“Magic-bullet solutions to wicked problems may become other wicked problems. If anything, the pandemic showed how important it is to model differently,” he added.

Prof. Sha Xin Wei, and AME MAS PhD Emiddio Vasquez, researchers at Synthesis, will lead a workshop on
Indeterminacy, Ontogenesis and Play
14:30 – 17:00 GMT Nov 6, 2020
as part of the
Indeterminate Futures / The Future of Indeterminacy Conference, in Dundee, Scotland

As opposed to games that have a finite set of roles, rules, objectives, and scoring that are explicitly defined and fixed in advance of the event, playful activity is open-ended in a profound sense that we’ll explore, with as many examples of play as we can, in symbol, action, movement, media, material, relation.   We will also prepare some simple movement and performance exercises that anyone can do in personal or public space, alone or in telematically linked ensemble.   The purpose of this workshop is to make a place for discussing ontogenesis, the creative articulation of media, matter and field in open-ended interrelated processes.

Reference: Synthesis, Ontogenesis, https://synthesiscenter.net/projects/ontogenesis/
Public domain image: Henri Matisse, La Danse (1909-1910), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Matissedance.jpg

New publication of single articles in the special issue of Angelaki on special issue: ontogenesis beyond complexity.

Sha Xin Wei
Keynote : “How to Human?  Non-anthropocentric Design and the Art of Abductive Science”

Humans in the Loop – From End-users to Citizens

Thursday April 23 2020
CREATE: Architecture, Design & Media TechnologyAalborg University Copenhagen,
Copenhagen SV, Denmark

9-11 October 2019
Fort St. Elmo, Malta
In MALTA
https://alternateeconomies.weebly.com/

Convened by The European Graduate School and Synthesis@ASU, this colloquium-seminar proposes an intense, multifaceted examination of contemporary developments in finance and economy.  These developments, we feel, demand the kind of cross-disciplinary philosophical and critical reflection for which the EGS constantly strives in its effort to the think the conditions and possibilities of our being in the contemporary world.  It is the latter orientation that leads us to pursue our questioning of phenomena such as computational finance with an eye to the way in which any thought of alternative economic structures must be accompanied by questions about possible alternative ecologies.   As we develop our thinking on contemporary and future economies in the course of the seminar, we hope to make the latter phrase — alternative ecologies — more meaningful and poignant.

Unfolding over 18 hours, with a team of a half-dozen seminar leaders, experts and students alike will examine the axioms scaffolding contemporary finance and computational capitalism, and explore ethico-aesthetic-practical alternatives with ecological concern.

7 Oct  2019
4:00-6:00 PM EST
Public Event · Hosted by
Building 21, McGill University, Montreal Canada

What’s the state of the art in contemporary computational capitalism and algorithmic finance, unintended consequences, and alternative economies-ecologies

3 Oct 2019
5:30 – 7:00 PM EST
Public Event · Hosted by
Building 21, McGill University, Montreal Canada

Exploiting a fusion of art, science, conceptual and experiential methods, the ateliers will prototype and assess how people experience technologies, products, services in plausible, thick social settings. We will build a knowledge enterprise: ateliers for prototyping at lifescale, the lived, whole experience of social forms, such as places: home, city, street; events: play, meal, learning; or infrastructures: finance, governance, energy. Scaling our techniques for creating augmented experiences, we will prototype homes, streets, parts of buildings, parks and playgrounds to the degree needed to get a sense of what it would be like to actually live with those forms.

We can kick off discussion with two on-going streams of work at Synthesis@ASU
• Food and the theater of objects
• Participatory steering of complex adaptive systems (e.g. weather, urban heatscapes)

https://www.facebook.com/events/399685117414334/

Director, Sha Xin Wei has been invited to the University of Boulder, CO to give a presentation about Prototyping Social Forms.

September 18 & 19, 2019

More Information

Haakon Faste,

HCI / Interaction Design / Robotics

California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA

http://www.haakonfaste.com/

ILYA 2019 workshop at Synthesis@ASU, Tempe, Arizona

Collaborators:

Julian Stein

Todd Ingalls

Pete Weisman

Connor Rawls

Convened by The European Graduate School and Synthesis@ASU, this colloquium-seminar proposes an intense, multifaceted examination of contemporary developments in finance and economy.  These developments, we feel, demand the kind of cross-disciplinary philosophical and critical reflection for which the EGS constantly strives in its effort to the think the conditions and possibilities of our being in the contemporary world.  It is the latter orientation that leads us to pursue our questioning of phenomena such as computational finance with an eye to the way in which any thought of alternative economic structures must be accompanied by questions about possible alternative ecologies.   As we develop our thinking on contemporary and future economies in the course of the seminar, we hope to make the latter phrase — alternative ecologies — more meaningful and poignant.
Unfolding over 18 hours, with a team of a half-dozen seminar leaders, experts and students alike will examine the axioms scaffolding contemporary finance and computational capitalism, and explore ethico-aesthetic-practical alternatives with ecological concern.

We will work in tandem with a public event in Valletta that will attract distinguished participants from around the world with significant expertise in the areas central to the seminar: cryptocurrency, blockchain, and new technologies of finance and governance.  Some individuals participating in that event may join us, and we plan to join the public event in an evening discussion on a day to be determined at the Mediterranean Conference Center, which adjoins our meeting site: the Fort St. Elmo.​

We adopt the format of a condensed EGS credit-bearing seminar: six sessions of three hours over the course of three days.  We envision the order of topics below, with a provisional assignment of discussion leaders who will offer more or less formal presentations, allowing for thorough discussion.   Following seminar format, we will provide background references or materials recommended for review ahead of time.

A potential outcome is discovering ways to prototype, experience, and assess alternative economies and ecologies.

Accommodations

EGS students may check out EGS Malta Accommodation link.   Malta has many options in Valletta near Fort St. Elmo.

Fees

Email EGS Admissions. and mention your status, e.g.: student not in EGS | non-student | EGS student Masters or PhD

Links

Register for seminar | website

Email: admissions@egs.edu | sha.xin.wei@egs.edu | xinwei.sha@asu.edu
asu.academia.edu/xinweisha | synthesis.ame.asu.edu​ | topologicalmedialab.net

Evening Talk: Ensemble Gesture, Responsive Media and Enactive Experience
23 June 2019, 20:30 CET
Sha Xin Wei

Synthesis references and videos:
• https://vimeo.com/synthesiscenter/demo
• https://synthesiscenter.net/projects/rhythmanalysis/

Arts of Time, lecture series
23-29 June 2019
Sha Xin Wei
European Graduate School
Saas-Fee, Switzerland
https://arts-of-time-egs.weebly.com

We explore time, or the sense of time, as an effect of event, dynamic, change, rather than an index.  This philosophical seminar accompanies a workshop on composing responsive environments.

“Exploring Affective Responsive Engagement by Augmenting Multiple Human Sensations”

June 11, 2019

Yanjun Lyu

https://igs2019-boa.egr.uh.edu/schedule

23-26 April 2019

Synthesis Center, Matthews Center 222, ASU

950 Cady Mall, Tempe AZ 85281

MASTER WICKED PROBLEM

How can a group of people with incommensurate epistemic cultures come together to develop a shared, intuitive understanding of a complex bio-social situation by creating, playing, and steering experiential simulations as well as representations? How can a group of people with incommensurate value frameworks decide how to jointly navigate complex bio-social situations?

BACKGROUND

In February, Synthesis presented work on steerable simulations at the workshop on New Participatory Approaches to Steering and Evaluation of Complex Adaptive Systems (PSCAS), hosted by the Centre for the Evaluation of Complexity Across the Nexus (CECAN) at The University of Surrey. Joined by participants from the United Kingdom, Germany, Thailand, Mexico, and Japan, several projects emerged from the workshop, including Steerable Urban Systems, aligning with Synthesis’ work in steerable simulations and evolving Life-scale Prototyping stream.

PARTICIPANTS

This group will be visiting Synthesis from April 21-28 to discuss potential projects and funding moving forward. Visitors from the PSCAS workshop will include:

Prof. Petra Ahrweiler, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, CECAN

Professor of Technology and Innovation Assessment, Institute of Sociology

Modeling component interactions between epistemic/cognitive and social aspects of scientific creativity and technological innovation, sociology, economics, political science, theology, journalism, occidental rationalism and typologies of theory-based sense-making, artificial intelligence, network simulations of scientific theories and innovation projects

Ryuta Aoki, Co-Founder & CEO Alternative Machines, Inc., Founder & CEO VOLOCITEE Inc., Founder & Curator TEDxKids@Chiyoda, Founder & Director Art Hack Day, Co-founder & Director, TAICOLAB, TEA-ROOM, and ALIFE Lab

Engaging in concept design, creative direction, project production, and business development in art, science, and the cultural field. Established ALife Lab in conjunction with Takashi Ikegami in complexity science and artificial life at the University of Tokyo, and Mizuki Oka in web science at Tsukuba University to apply theories of technology of Artificial Life to benefit society.

Concept design, creative direction, project production, and business development in art, science and the cultural field; community design and management; bio-inspired artificial intelligence and robotics

Dr. Beth Cullen, Monsoon Assemblages, University of Westminster

Research Fellow, Monsoon Assemblages: interdisciplinary design-driven inquiry into the impacts of changing monsoon climates and processes of rapid urbanisation in three South Asian cities. Exploring how people conceive of, experience and respond to monsoon weather in the context of three focal cities, Chennai, Dhaka, and Yangon, and the wider region.

Human-environment relations, environmental anthropology, participatory video, collaborative ethnographic research, visual methods for communicating tacit, embodied, and sensory knowledge, participatory methods, permaculture, co-design, more-than-human participatory approaches.

Demian Frank, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Sociology and political science, sociology and sports, legitimisation of technology in competitive sports, media evaluation, virtual and mixed reality in the museum context, agent-based modeling, long-term effects of participatory interventions on social systems, intuition of complex systems

Dr. Alex Penn, CECAN, University of Surrey

Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Evaluation of Complexity Across the Nexus, a collaboration between academics, policy professionals, and the UK government to generate novel, cutting-edge methods for evaluating policy for complex systems.

Participatory complexity science methodologies for decision makers and system stakeholders to explore interdependencies between social, ecological, economic, and political factors in their complex adaptive systems – and to design and evaluate complexity appropriate system interventions. Currently working with UK government applying to rapidly changing complex policy spaces; Agriculture, land management and rural economies and energy security. Also working with stakeholders and communities using methods in water catchment issues and “industrial ecosystems”; in particular looking at the transition to bio-based economy in a region of heavy industry and fossil fuel energy generation in the Humber Estuary, UK.

Physics, cybernetics / complexity science, evolutionary biology, artificial life, philosophy of biology, microbial ecosystems, permaculture, design approaches for synthetic ecology and hybrid living systems, participatory systems mapping, fuzzy cognitive mapping, network theory, policy appraisal and evaluation for complex systems, participatory steering of complex adaptive systems

Dr. Jesus Mario Siqueiros-García, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Researcher at IIMAS and LANCIS, UNAM. Former director Academic Development, National Bioethics Commision of Mexico. Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of Genomic Medicine at the National Institute for Genomic Medicine of Mexico (INMEGEN).

4E: Enactivism and Affordance Theory, Computational social science, social complex systems, sustainability science, ethnology, cultural anthropology, philosophy of biology, transformations to sustainability, relationships between culture and nature, epistemological and ontological bases of sustainability science and anthropology, phenomenological perspectives on complex systems, cognitive maps, complex network analysis, social web mining, ethnography, phenomenological interviews

Dr. Alex Smajgl, Mekong Region Futures Institute (MERFI) & Deakin University

Managing Director, Mekong Region Futures institute, in partnership with government and research agencies in Cambodia, China, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam.

CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems

Developing participatory processes and integrated methodology to assess triple bottom line outcomes in Mekong region, Indonesia, and the Great Barrier Reef region. Multi-scale assessment, using agent-based modeling to simulate disaggregated system behavior. Impacts of energy policy options on poverty and deforestation in Indonesia.

Agent-based modeling, water, food, energy nexus, science-policy interface, hydropower, transboundary water management, forest management, protection of coastal zones, fish stock management, food security, poverty alleviation

Berkeley Institute of Design*, University of California, Berkeley

12pm Friday April 12, 2019

Sha Xin Wei

Professor – Arizona State University

http://schedule.bid-seminar.com/speakers/164

Abstract

Building on the Topological Media Lab’s work on collective, ad hoc gesture and responsive media in enactive, embodied environments, Synthesis has been the home for a new order of responsive environments.

We leverage the state of the art realtime gestural time-based media: sound, audio, video, theatrical / domestic lighting, air, mist, water, or any computationally modulated hybrid material, together with movement-based arts, theater production, computational physics and signal processing. We describe some research streams and applications such as improvisatory environments, place and atmosphere, rhythmanalysis, and the ‘in vivo’ prototyping of social forms.

https://vimeo.com/synthesiscenter/steerableweather

https://vimeo.com/synthesiscenter/slsa

https://vimeo.com/synthesiscenter/openhousefall2018

*The Berkeley Institute of Design (BiD) is a research group that fosters a deeply interdisciplinary approach to design for the 21st century, spanning human-computer interaction, mechanical design, education, architecture and art practice. We are located in the Hearst Memorial Mining Building (photos). http://bid.berkeley.edu/

Sha Xin Wei and Brandon Mechtley will present work at the Living Architecture Systems Group Symposium in Toronto.  

The Living Architecture Systems Group is an interdisciplinary partnership of academics, artists, designers and industry partners dedicated to researching and developing built environments with qualities that come close to life— environments that can move, respond and learn, with metabolisms that can exchange and renew their environments, and which are adaptive and empathic towards their inhabitants. The group works on develop­ing innovative technologies, new critical aesthetics and integrative design working methods in an effort to provide a new generation of designers with critical next-generation skills and critical perspectives for working with complex environments.

Sha Xin Wei, director of the School of Arts, Media and Engineering, and Brandon Mechtley, assistant research professor in the school, were invited to present the work being conducted at Synthesis, which includes creating rich responsive environments. Researchers at Synthesis explore how these environments can be used for shelter, sociality or play and how people experience computer- mediated environments that now include not only virtual reality games and experimental theater, but also classrooms, airports and public spaces.

“Synthesis was invited by the group to present our continuous state-based methods for composing rich behavior of complex media environments to support improvisatory activity,” Sha Xin Wei said.

The symposium, held March 1-3 in Toronto, features researchers and artists from ETH Zurich, Central Saint Martins London, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, University of Michigan, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the School of Architecture at Waterloo, the Ontario College of Art and Design University and University of California, Berkeley, as well as design and architecture firms. This international, multi-year partnership is sponsored by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Participants in immerse themselves in the enchanted environments of iStage, featuring projects such as SERRA and Experiential Models of the Atmospheres.

In recent years I’ve taken to asking students and colleagues, “Why do you do what you do?” Although that question is not the same as “Why do we live?,” it is not unrelated, because how we live would be part of my own response to the question of why we live. It’s a phenomenological question about the experience of life, but I would like to answer it in a poetic way in the context of contemporary and emerging technologies of performance, where performance is construed generously, beyond the domains of performing and performance arts.

One may aspire to do philosophy in the mode of poetry again, a Laozi multiply transposed. But didn’t Plato throw out the poets from the Republic because they operated in the realm of the fictive imitative, thrice removed from the truth, and therefore were not to be trusted with the proper affairs of the polis?  Emboldened by Felix Guattari’s activist ecosophic call, can we create fresh know-hows in the mode of art, where that it matters not only what we say or do, but how we say or do it. I’m wagering that both truth effects and ethico-aesthetic passions can be accommodated in the same breath, the way mathematicians construct truths via imaginative processes that can be regarded as poetic and poietic art.

It is in this spirit that I describe how adventurous artists, engineers, and scholars have engaged over 20 years the experimental study of experience, in transdisciplinary organizational and institutional experiments such as the Topological Media Lab, FoAM,  and Synthesis.   We will see how questions of craft, under inspection and reflection, can become refined into philosophical questions. Under rigorous reflection, questions how become questions why as well. Questions of philosophy in turn can provide heuristics, though never blueprints or methodologies, for craft.

The most compelling reason for refining technical challenges —  political, economic, engineering, health problems — into philosophical questions is to understand how we produce matters of value as well as matters of fact

And, in the face of the “anthropocene”,  a name which seems to substitute species-centrism for ego-centrism, can we invent a techne (art + engineering) and an ethico-aesthetic experiment for our age  that is humane but not anthropocentric?

Vangelis Lympouridis, PhD, VR/AR/MR industry + USC, full-body interaction; guest of Synthesis & AME:

March 16-18

Vangelis got his PhD from the same program in Edinburgh as Lauren I believe, on “Design Strategies for Whole Body Interactive Performance Systems” (see short bio for his world-leading work on full-body interaction and dance + technology)

In the 6 years since his PhD, Dr. Lympouridis taught at USC Cinema, built the first motion lab at USC, started a very successful VR company (ENOSIS VR), knows the scene from Sundance to the emerging tech world for VR, film and movement tracking.  In fact he started the movement-tracking lab out of his PhD in building his own super high end body tracking —> music system.    He’s also got some major deals with medical applications, knowing the entire pipeline from university-based movement-based research-creation though clinical trails to product…

I got to know Vangelis ca 2010, and since then he’s been one of the cool research affiliates who participated in TML and SC workshops.   I respect Vangelis’ artistic, social and design judgment and his technical acumen.  He can be inspiring counsel for Masters and PhD students in AME, FDT and Design, and  is also a well connected friend in LA world between VR/AR/MR,  movement based research and emerging media industries.

It will be great to welcome Vangelis come out for direct talks vis-a-vis AME’s future development in more public  application domains connecting with a large swath of our research from movement-based research to mobile technologies to experiential systems.  Vangelis is not only deeply versed in the basic research in movement arts and medicine, but also is familiar with the most prominent high end, emerging technologies in motion-tracking, gestural control of media, VR/AR/MR etc.

Speaker: Sha Xin Wei

Professor and Director

School of Arts, Media and Engineering + Synthesis

MARCH 25th, 2019

7pm

Abstract:

1984 ushered in the personal computer, 2004 social media.  But our mediated lives are more complicated and brittle than ever.  Can we turn from designing the internet of things to navigating cities and infrastructures that are centuries deep?  Can media conduct value as well as fact?   How will we create environments that are not complicated, but rich?

22-26 April 2019

 Participatory Steering of Complex Adaptive Systems @ ASU Phoenix USA

Workshop Conveners: Brandon Mechtley, Sha Xin Wei, Synthesis@ASU

February 14-16, 2019 @ Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona

“Overcoming the Cybernetic worldview while re-envisioning Post-humanism and Sustainability: Insights from Quantum Physics and finance for alternate economies- ecologies”

Speaker: Dr. Niklas Wild-Damiris

Abstract:

Heidegger was prescient arguing that philosophy in the form of metaphysics has culminated and ended in technology understood as cybernetics. Metaphysics is characterized by its generalizing, universalizing concepts. Cybernetics is distinguished by an equally totalizing move: its notions of communication and control applied systematically to animals, humans and machines. “Post-humanism” is one of the many unintended consequences of cybernetics. It does not overcome the paradigm as it claims, but ironically repeats its gesture: it runs roughshod over subtle differences of subject, object, animate, inanimate, nature, culture treating them as dichotomies, instead of as phases in a process of trans-individuation. “Sustainability” is a related concern that emerged as a response to the growing tension between ‘ecology’ and ‘economy’, which it treats ambivalently, leaving us in the dark as to what is sustainable in a world increasingly ‘out of control’.

As Cybernetics became, starting in the 1930’s, both the dominant ideology and meta-science of industrial capitalism, it found an intellectual rival in the then emerging quantum physics. Alas, the latter’s nascent worldview, was counter-intuitive, allowing cybernetics to coopt the new physics’ insights, by enlisting its practitioners to its causes: first to help build an atom bomb, and more recently to design financial derivatives, which Warren Buffett has aptly described as ‘weapons of mass destruction”!

Now well into the second decade of the 21st century, we still find ourselves to be ‘willing slaves of capital’, as F. Lordon has argued; yet inequality is only getting worse as T. Piketty has documented. And to add insult to injury the promise of social media has been hijacked by the companies who currently control the Internet instituting ‘surveillance capitalism’, as S. Zuboff puts it, rather than a knowledge economy.

Given this rather grim state of affairs, I ask: Could insights from the controversial but gaining in acceptance Quantum Physics Worldview help us change our thinking and attitude toward the world? I will answer this question in the affirmative by arguing that the quantum is not weird; it appears so only because we interpret it through entrenched cybernetic categories like ‘information’, ‘feedback’, ‘observation’ ‘data-base’, which become problematic in a world

characterized by indeterminacy, negative probabilities, non-locality and measurement effects. Furthermore, this world is not confined to the small as is often claimed.

I will conclude my talk by proposing we institute a new ecologically attuned economic practice based on finance approached as a quantum phenomenon! Such an endeavor presupposes that those who will participate in it ‘have skin in the game’ and their aim is not to discount the future, but to enable it by facing courageously its indeterminacy and the freedom it affords.

Short Speaker Bio:

Niklas Wild Damiris is a theoretical physicist turned economic theorist. He lived in Silicon Valley for over 25 years working as consulting research scientist to well known think tanks there: Xerox PARC, Apple ATG, IBM Almaden Research Center. He participated in a few start-ups no longer extant: “Pliant”, “Capitalizing Communities” and “Quantum-ly”. He was for a while in the periphery of the group whose members later became known as the “Paypal Mafia”. He also was a visiting scholar and occasional lecturer at Stanford University for many years.

Recently, he left the Bay Area to return to the East Coast where he went to school, and can be closer to Europe where there is growing interest in his work re-envisioning monetary and financialized economies with the help of insights from quantum field theory.

Director of Synthesis Center discuss with SCIART Magazine about his background and the concept behind Synthesis.

Article can be found here.

From steam to fusion to alchemy

We invite you to the Open Studio of the Serra Vegetal Life project, co-produced by Synthesis Canada Council for the Arts, O Vertigo Dance Company. You are welcome to join us Friday the 16th of November to meet the artists at work on the unique responsive environment. We’re excited to share with you our esteemed friends and colleagues our current work for your feedback.

Building on work with choreographer Laurin, media artist / filmmaker Oana Suteu, media artist-researchers Todd Ingalls and Sha Xin Wei have created an ecosystem intertwining plant and human movement via gestural media evoking multi-rhythms of seasons, days and nights, organisms and visitors. We thank School of Arts, Media + Engineering, and Rümker for essential support in the realization of the work.

Serra invite english

Serra invite francaise

Come join us for our Open House this October 11, 2018 from 12pm – 4pm

We will showcasing a series of projects for ASU’s Herberger Institute. Some of our major themes such as, Experiential Models of Atmosphere and Rhythm Analysis.

About

In this Synthesis Atmospheres Residency (LRR), researchers and students from University of Potsdam, the Topological Media Lab in Montreal and the Schools of Arts, Media + Engineering, Geography, and Architecture at ASU, come together in the Matthews Center iStage @ ASU (Tempe USA campus) to create environmental conditionings of ensemble experience via varying fields of media and material.

Wind, temperature, clouds, mist – these phenomena have in common that they can hardly be objectified. They have no identifiable parts or clear dimensions, no form and are partly or completely invisible. But we do experience their dynamic presence through our bodies: the body’s sensitivity on cellular, organic, and organismic levels, allows for engagement with phenomena that go beyond subject/object dichotomies. Instead of producing an audience as a mere spectator, we provide liminal experiences, in including the full sensorium such through touch, smell, proprioception (senses we share with non-human animals as well) through engagement with normally invisible – or not primarily visual – phenomena.

When & Where

Visitors will be with us from 14th February – 3rd March 2018. While there will be no demonstrations or shows during this time, we encourage all to come visit us in Matthews Center, iStage (222 + 224) to meet our residents.

For more information, please visit our research site here.

Join us on November 10th and 11th as we help out SLSA 2017.

The events are as follows:

Friday November 10, 2017, 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM

Synthesis Responsive Environments / Time Out

Matthews Center iStage (MC 222)

We invite you to come to iStage atelier to immerse yourself in a rich media environment, talk with Synthesis’ researchers and artists, or just relax in our playful, poetic atmospheres.

(Synthesis: synthesiscenter.net,   Serra Montreal: vimeo.com/synthesiscenter/serra, Experiential Atmospheres: vimeo.com/synthesiscenter/clouds )

Friday November 10, 2017, 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM

3G “Game Studies 1: Roundtable with Ian Bogost”

Ian Bogost (GaTech), Alenda Chang (UCSB,  Edmond Y. Chang (Ohio), Heidi Coleman (Chicago), Patrick Jagoda (Chicago), Patrick LeMieux (UC Davis), Timothy Welsh (Loyola)

Friday November 10, 2017, 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM

Synthesis Open Atelier: Serra Vegetal Life and Other Scenarios

Oana Suteu, Todd Ingalls, Sha Xin Wei + Synthesis researchers

Hosted artist-researchers working in open atelier at Synthesis, will be available to talk with visitors in the iStage.  These include media artist and researcher Todd Ingalls, Montreal filmmaker and installation artist Oana Suteu, media artist and theorist Sha Xin Wei, and other experimentalists.  The Synthesis atelier creates instruments for gesturally responsive time-based media, along with techniques for irreal play.  We host streams of inquiry that course transversally across experimental arts, non-theatrical performance, and speculative engineering.  Current streams include: vegetal life (Serra plant movement), experiential climate, irreal acoustic/lighting ecologies, multi-scale rhythmanalysis, and ontogenesis. 

(Synthesis: synthesiscenter.net,   Serra Montreal: vimeo.com/synthesiscenter/serra, Experiential Atmospheres: vimeo.com/synthesiscenter/clouds )

Saturday November 11, 2017, 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM

Synthesis Responsive Environments / Time Out

Matthews Center iStage (MC 222)

We invite you to come to iStage atelier to immerse yourself in a rich media environment, talk with Synthesis’ researchers and artists, or just relax in our playful, poetic atmospheres.

(Synthesis: synthesiscenter.net,   Serra Montreal: vimeo.com/synthesiscenter/serra, Experiential Atmospheres: vimeo.com/synthesiscenter/clouds )

Saturday November 11, 2017, 11:00am-12:30pm

8F “Beyond Plant Blindness: To See the Importance of Plants for a Sustainable World” Chair: Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir

Giovanni Aloi , Dawn Sanders ,  Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir, Mark Wilson

Saturday November 11, 2017, 2:00-3:30 PM

Responsive Environments Roundtable

Sha Xin Wei, Tom Lamarre, Todd Ingalls, Oana Khintirian, Stacey Moran, and guests

How can we “write” or “compose” in a responsive environment, a physical space thickened by media that co-articulates with unscripted activity?   What speculative events can one create and what questions, propositions can be set in play?

(Synthesis: synthesiscenter.net, Serra Montreal: vimeo.com/synthesiscenter/serra , Experiential Atmospheres: vimeo.com/synthesiscenter/clouds )

Join us as Synthesis welcomes a new year with several streams of
research creation:

• Serra Vegetal Movement Responsive Environments

Sept 25 2017, “Urban Action Items: Kitchen Conversations on Urgent Issues,” Institute for Urban Futures, Montreal.

Sep 10-13, “Ateliers for Transdisciplinary Research-creation” AND “Research-creation / Recherche-création: Methods for a Scienza Nuova.” 2017 International Conference on Mobile Brain-Body Imaging (MoBI) and the Neuroscience of Art, Innovation and Creativity (http://yourbrainonart2017.egr.uh.edu), Valencia, Spain.

June 18, EGS Workshop: Practicing Thought with New Horizons: The Challenges Presented by New Scientific Paradigms and Computation, Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought Division, European Graduate School (EGS), Saas-Fee Switzerland

June 14-17, The Topological and Biosocial Beyond Computation, Division of Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought, European Graduate School (EGS), Saas-Fee Switzerland

June 15 – July 19, 2017, Synthesis Workshop: Serra Vegetal Life, supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.  In addition to the research and development of the environment itself, this will be a principal occasion to expose some aspects of Synthesis and AME to former and future partners and potential graduate students / researchers in the most active city for experimental arts, media, film and music in North America.

https://serracreation.weebly.com/

June 14, Gestures that Matter, Plenary Lecture, Art and Society Conference, American University of Paris

June 7-9, New Materialisms (keynote Bruno Latour), University of Paris 7 Diderot,

 June 7-13. American University of Paris: Summer Institute: IxD Design workshop, with Adam Nocek and faculty from UNSW, Sorbonne, AUP, Goldsmiths, CMU.  Paris.

June 2-3, Synthesis research workshop: Serra Vegetal Movement installation / responsive environment, ASU, Phoenix.

https://serracreation.weebly.com/

May 14 & June 12, Sémiomaths seminar on semiotics and philosophy of mathematics, sign and structure, University of Paris 7 Diderot, Paris

May 5-7 2017, Plenary Speaker, The Idea of Place, Space and Culture 20th Anniversary Conference University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.

For more information please visit their website,  https://theideaofplace.com

Ontogenesis, phylogenesis and the formation of “sense” ( Feb 27 – March 3, March 13-17 )

In a series of talks, Prof. Longo will survey the construction of our relation to space and time. Both Greek geometry and the space and time of the Scientific Revolution were grounded on strong metaphysical assumptions. More recently, the fundamental dualism separating space (and time) from the objects in them has been extended to another very effective dualism for the construction of machines, the conceptual and practical distinction between software and hardware. But these mathematical “a priori” and the related forms of dualism seem inadequate for the understanding of biological phenomena given their historicity and radical materiality.  Prof. Longo proposes alternatives, focusing on principles that stress first the autonomy of organismal dynamics and the role of historicity, variability and diversity both in phylogenesis and ontogenesis. In this perspective, the material, bodily presence of organisms produce, a posteriori, the space and time of possible life dynamics.

Biography

Giuseppe Longo is Director of Research at the Centre Cavaillès, République des Savoirs, CNRS, Collège de France and the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris.  He has been Associate Professor of Logic, Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Pisa, and Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon. 

Prof. Longo is founder (1990) of the journal Mathematical Structures in Computer Science, Cambridge U.P.  and (co-)author of more than 100 articles and three books: with A.  Asperti, Categories, Types and Structures (1991); with F.  Bailly, Mathematics and the Natural Sciences: The Physical Singularity of Life  (2011); with M.  Montevil, Perspectives on Organisms: Biological time, Symmetries and Singularities (2013). 

Recently he has extended his interests in the fields of epistemology and theoretical biology.  He directs a project at IEA-Nantes (2014-20) on the concept of “law” in human and natural sciences.   As Adjunct Professor Department of Integrative Physiology and Pathobiology, Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, Prof. Longo is working with on the growth of cancer.   He has written popular and incisive articles on technology and society, ranging from big data and automation to network society.

Prof. Giuseppe Longo and Prof. Teresa Mariano-Longo will be in residence as guests of Synthesis and the School of Arts, Media + Engineering Feb 26 through March 18, excepting Spring Break.    He will give a series of lectures on Time and spaces from physics to biology: Ontogenesis, phylogenesis and the formation of “sense” 

http://www.di.ens.fr/users/longo

http://ame531.weebly.com/syllabus.html

Lectures series can be found here.

In a residency in the Synthesis Center iStage December 12–22 2016, Britta Joy Peterson (choreography and performance, American University), Evan Anderson (lighting, Seattle) and Garrett Johnson (MAS PhD, Synthesis) explored multi-bodied coordination and entrainment through movement scores and responsive media. They also hosted several reading group sessions in the Lab for Critical Technics.

Britta and Evan rejoined Garrett at the iStage from March 12–18, 2017 to workshop a performance for the 2017 Movement and Computing (MOCO) conference at Goldsmiths in London.

For more information on Lanterns and art project ‘+++’, visit the project website.

an exhibition of Time Lenses will be demonstrated in Musée des Art et Métiers on December 3 & 4th in Paris as part of the Corps dessinant performance. Accompanied by Sha Xin Wei, Julian Stein, Todd Ingalls, Oana Suteu Khintirian.

For more information visit the project link and program link.

installation of multiple displays and cameras that are carefully placed in a physical location to refract activity into a suite of rhythmically recomposed movements” Time Lenses has been exhibited in Embodied Encounters at UC Irvine (2016-2017) and will be there until January 21, 2017. Todd Ingalls: time instruments, Julian Stein: installations, Sha Xin Wei: concept

http://rhythmanalysis.weebly.com/time-lenses-apparatus.html

Sha Xin Wei and synthesis associate, Adam Nocek will be teaching a workshop focusing on the problems of immigration and design at the American University in Paris. For more information, visit this website.

Sha Xin Wei will be giving an invited talk at the CyberSalon in London about the progression of artificial intelligence. For more information, visit this website.

Demo of immersive realtime responsive media techniques for Experiential Climate Simulation platform at CCS 2015, Tempe AZ

an installation that approaches movement in an entirely new manner, adapting time and space scales to the activity of plants, and placing the human body within this new dimension. Presented by media artist Oana Suteu Khintirian with mathematician, philosopher and new media specialist Sha Xin Wei, his Synthesis team members and the renowned choreographer and artistic director of O Vertigo Dance, Ginette Laurin.

http://serracreation.weebly.com/

an interactive demo of iMonsoon, a responsive media environment that facilitates embodiment through atmospheric process and scientific modeling. Presented in the Matthews Center on Tempe Campus at Arizona State University.

For more information, visit the website.

workshop that explores how our experiences of atmosphere and place are mediated by using climate models, architecture, and technology, and how those experiences may be moderated or enhanced through the use of responsive media and experiential computing.

For more information, visit the website.

A series of talks discussing sustainability using iStage as a responsive environment to demonstrate different microclimates.

For more information, visit the website.

As a part of a series of reading groups focused on the work and thought of Alan Lightman, Dr. Sha Xin Wei will be leading a discussion of “Einstein’s Dreams” in anticipation of the author’s guest lecture on February 3rd, 2015.