Obstacles to wearable computing

In the year 2021, wearable technology could look beautiful and feel magical, but instead is exemplified by a plain wristband that looks suspiciously like a prison monitor. How can we make wearable technology that respects our privacy, enhances our daily lives, integrates with our other connected devices without leashing us to a smartphone, and visually expresses who we are? This study uses a novel method of participatory design fiction (PDFi) to understand potential users of everyday wearable technology through storytelling. I recruited participants from the general public and gave them a five-point prompt to create a design fiction (DF), which inspired the user-centred design of an everyday connected wearable device. The participants each received a technology probe to wear in the wild for a year. They then updated their DFs as a way to reflect on the implications of the technology. For the purposes of privacy, augmenting device functionality through interoperability, and integration into an Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, I used the Hub-of-All-Things personal data store to provide the software infrastructure. By listening to their stories, we can elicit design concepts directly from the users, to help us create wearable IoT devices that put the wearer at the centre of the design process, and are satisfying both functionally and emotionally.The Alan Turing Institute Doctoral Scheme, University of Cambridge Department of Computer Science and Technology, The Kenneth Hayter Memorial Fun

The Irresistible Animacy of Lively Artefacts

This thesis explores the perception of ‘liveliness’, or ‘animacy’, in robotically driven artefacts. This perception is irresistible, pervasive, aesthetically potent and poorly understood. I argue that the Cartesian rationalist tendencies of robotic and artificial intelligence research cultures, and associated cognitivist theories of mind, fail to acknowledge the perceptual and instinctual emotional affects that lively artefacts elicit. The thesis examines how we see artefacts with particular qualities of motion to be alive, and asks what notions of cognition can explain these perceptions. ‘Irresistible Animacy’ is our human tendency to be drawn to the primitive and strangely thrilling nature of experiencing lively artefacts. I have two research methodologies; one is interdisciplinary scholarship and the other is my artistic practice of building lively artefacts. I have developed an approach that draws on first-order cybernetics’ central animating principle of feedback-control, and second-order cybernetics’ concerns with cognition. The foundations of this approach are based upon practices of machine making to embody and perform animate behaviour, both as scientific and artistic pursuits. These have inspired embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended notions of cognition. I have developed an understanding using a theoretical framework, drawing upon literature on visual perception, behavioural and social psychology, puppetry, animation, cybernetics, robotics, interaction and aesthetics. I take as a starting point, the understanding that the visual cortex of the vertebrate eye includes active feature-detection for animate agents in our environment, and actively constructs the causal and social structure of this environment. I suggest perceptual ambiguity is at the centre of all animated art forms. Ambiguity encourages natural curiosity and interactive participation. It also elicits complex visceral qualities of presence and the uncanny. In the making of my own Lively Artefacts, I demonstrate a series of different approaches including the use of abstraction, artificial life algorithms, and reactive techniques

Performing the digital: performativity and performance studies in digital cultures

How is performativity shaped by digital technologies - and how do performative practices reflect and alter techno-social formations? "Performing the Digital" explores, maps and theorizes the conditions and effects of performativity in digital cultures. Bringing together scholars from performance studies, media theory, sociology and organization studies as well as practitioners of performance, the contributions engage with the implications of digital media and its networked infrastructures for modulations of affect and the body, for performing cities, protest, organization and markets, and for the performativity of critique. With contributions by Marie-Luise Angerer, Timon Beyes, Scott deLahunta and Florian Jenett, Margarete Jahrmann, Susan Kozel, Ann-Christina Lange, Oliver Leistert, Martina Leeker, Jon McKenzie, Sigrid Merx, Melanie Mohren and Bernhard Herbordt, Imanuel Schipper and Jens Schröter

Project knole: an autocosmic approach to authoring resonant computational characters

Project knole, consisting of this thesis and a mixed reality installation artwork centred around a computational simulation, is a practice-based response to the question of how a character in a work of computational narrative art might maintain their defining quality of dynamic agency within a system (arguably one of the key potentials of the form), while achieving the ‘resonant’ qualities of characters in more materially-static artforms. In all aspects of this project, I explore a new design philosophy for achieving this balance; between the authorship of a procedural computational system, and the ability of that system to ‘resonate’ with the imagination of an audience. This philosophy, which I term the ‘autocosmic’, seeks inspiration for the curation of audience response outside the obvious boundaries of artistic discipline, across the wider spectrum of human imaginative engagement; examples often drawn from mostly non-aesthetic domains. As well as defining the terms ‘resonance’ and ‘autocosmic’, and delineating my methodology more generally, this thesis demonstrates how the ‘autocosmic’ was employed within my creative work. In particular, it shows how some of the perennial problems of computational character development might be mediated by exploring other non-aesthetic examples of imaginative, narrative engagement with personified systems. In the context of this project, such examples come from the historio-cultural relationship between human beings and the environments they inhabit, outside of formal artistic practice. From this ‘autocosmic’ launchpad, I have developed an artwork that starts to explore how this rich cultural and biological lineage of human social engagement with systemic place can be applied fruitfully to the development of a ‘resonant’ computational character

Mind and Matter

Do brains create material reality in thinking processes or is it the other way around, with things shaping the mind? Where is the location of meaning-making? How do neural networks become established by means of multimodal pattern replications, and how are they involved in conceptualization? How are resonance textures within cellular entities extended in the body and the mind by means of mirroring processes? In which ways do they correlate to consciousness and self-consciousness? Is it possible to explain out-of-awareness unconscious processes? What holds together the relationship between experiential reality, bodily processes like memory, reason, or imagination, and sign-systems and simulation structures like metaphor and metonymy visible in human language? This volume attempts to answer some of these questions