Interactive Art and the Action of Behavioral Aesthetics in Embodied Philosophy

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Where is cognition? Towards an embodied, situated, and distributed interactionist theory of cognitive activity

In recent years researchers from a variety of cognitive science disciplines have begun to challenge some of the core assumptions of the dominant theoretical framework of cognitivism including the representation-computational view of cognition, the sense-model-plan-act understanding of cognitive architecture, and the use of a formal task description strategy for investigating the organisation of internal mental processes. Challenges to these assumptions are illustrated using empirical findings and theoretical arguments from the fields such as situated robotics, dynamical systems approaches to cognition, situated action and distributed cognition research, and sociohistorical studies of cognitive development. Several shared themes are extracted from the findings in these research programmes including: a focus on agent-environment systems as the primary unit of analysis; an attention to agent-environment interaction dynamics; a vision of the cognizer's internal mechanisms as essentially reactive and decentralised in nature; and a tendency for mutual definitions of agent, environment, and activity. It is argued that, taken together, these themes signal the emergence of a new approach to cognition called embodied, situated, and distributed interactionism. This interactionist alternative has many resonances with the dynamical systems approach to cognition. However, this approach does not provide a theory of the implementing substrate sufficient for an interactionist theoretical framework. It is suggested that such a theory can be found in a view of animals as autonomous systems coupled with a portrayal of the nervous system as a regulatory, coordinative, and integrative bodily subsystem. Although a number of recent simulations show connectionism's promise as a computational technique in simulating the role of the nervous system from an interactionist perspective, this embodied connectionist framework does not lend itself to understanding the advanced 'representation hungry' cognition we witness in much human behaviour. It is argued that this problem can be solved by understanding advanced cognition as the re-use of basic perception-action skills and structures that this feat is enabled by a general education within a social symbol-using environment

Enabling assemblages: a public transport system held together by embodied practices

Transantiago was a promise. Inaugurated in 2007, it was a system supposed to be a ‘world class’ solution to the public transport needs of Santiago de Chile. Order, regularity, and predictability were the core elements of its agenda, aimed at modernising the mobilities landscape of the city. However, Transantiago ended up encountering many issues that turned this pristine idea into a much messier outcome. Among them, the bodily diversity of actual passengers, and the practices with which they produced local orders, did not match Transantiago’s expectations of ‘standard shape’ users who follow a delocalised, abstract rational behaviour. This mismatch affected the experience of the users as well. Pressured by the need to travel using an overcrowded service on the one hand, and being directed by disciplinary devices on the other, the users of Transantiago became a frenetic tide that not all are able to navigate. Some users – those of older, slower, or more fragile bodily configurations – tend to be left behind, implicitly excluded, disabled, and rendered immobile. This thesis describes different instances of disabled and older people navigating the challenging spaces of Transantiago. Ethnographic work and video analysis reveal a complex scenario in which passengers and system encounter each other and actively produce a precarious order that is held together through ordinary practices. I argue that this holding together is achieved through a constant work of everyday mutual adjustment. Just as Transantiago continues to unfold different technologies that would enable the sorting of people, users adjust and repurpose materialities, learning how to make their bodies ‘fit’. In Santiago’s public transport, disabled and older users engage in everyday struggles in order to deal with lack of accessible spaces, coordinate with other passengers, and interact with restrictive, exclusionary devices. Led by modernistic ideals of universality and standardisation, Transantiago was conceived as a system that would provide a ‘one-size-fits-all’ transport service for the inhabitants of Santiago. In practice, however, Transantiago has faced the ‘trouble’ of dealing with differently-abled users, who are varied in shape and size, and who bring their own capacities with them in their encounter with the public transport. Conversely, passengers and staff unfold practices of coordination and adjustment that compensate for Transantiago’s shortcomings, propping it up through everyday interaction

Abstracts on Radio Direction Finding (1899 - 1995)

The files on this record represent the various databases that originally composed the CD-ROM issue of "Abstracts on Radio Direction Finding" database, which is now part of the Dudley Knox Library's Abstracts and Selected Full Text Documents on Radio Direction Finding (1899 - 1995) Collection. (See Calhoun record https://calhoun.nps.edu/handle/10945/57364 for further information on this collection and the bibliography). Due to issues of technological obsolescence preventing current and future audiences from accessing the bibliography, DKL exported and converted into the three files on this record the various databases contained in the CD-ROM. The contents of these files are: 1) RDFA_CompleteBibliography_xls.zip [RDFA_CompleteBibliography.xls: Metadata for the complete bibliography, in Excel 97-2003 Workbook format; RDFA_Glossary.xls: Glossary of terms, in Excel 97-2003 Workbookformat; RDFA_Biographies.xls: Biographies of leading figures, in Excel 97-2003 Workbook format]; 2) RDFA_CompleteBibliography_csv.zip [RDFA_CompleteBibliography.TXT: Metadata for the complete bibliography, in CSV format; RDFA_Glossary.TXT: Glossary of terms, in CSV format; RDFA_Biographies.TXT: Biographies of leading figures, in CSV format]; 3) RDFA_CompleteBibliography.pdf: A human readable display of the bibliographic data, as a means of double-checking any possible deviations due to conversion