On Wayfaring in Social Machines

In this paper, we concern ourselves with the ways in which humans inhabit social machines: the structures and techniques which allow the enmeshing of multiple life traces within the flow of online interaction. In particular, we explore the distinction between transport and journeying, between networks and meshworks, and the different attitudes and modes of being appropriate to each. By doing this, we hope to capture a part of the sociality of social machines, to build an understanding of the ways in which lived lives relate to digital structures, and the emergence of the communality of shared work. In order to illustrate these ideas, we look at several aspects of existing social machines, and tease apart the qualities which relate to the different modes of being. The distinctions and concepts outlined here provide another element in both the analysis and development of social machines, understanding how people may joyfully and directedly engage with collective activities on the web

Stories from the walking library

From August 17 to September 17, 2012, Deirdre Heddon and Misha Myers created and carried a Walking Library, made for the Sideways Arts Festival. Sideways, a festival ‘in the open' and 'on the go', aimed to connect ecology and culture through using the 'slow ways' or ‘slow paths’ of Flanders. The Walking Library was comprised of more than 90 books suggested as books ‘good to take for a walk’ and functioned as a mobile library for Sideways’ artists and public participants. In addition to carrying a curated stock, the Library offered a peripatetic reading and writing group. Drawing on the Library’s resources and the experience of reading, writing and walking one’s way across Belgium, Heddon and Myers consider how reading in situ affects the experience of the journey and the experience of walking; how journeying affects the experience of reading; how reading affects the experience of writing; and how a walk, as a space of knowledge production, is written and read

Wayfaring thoughts: Life, Movement and Anthropology

In the last few years, several research groups of the Urban Anthropology Nucleus(NAU) approached the array of issues addressed by British anthropologist Timothy Ingold. Those issues are considered to be transversal to different approaches and objects of NAU as well as deeply inspiring to new ways of thinking the relationships between city, ethnology, body and consciousness. This growing interest aroused among other research groups too, within and beyond the University of São Paulo, as well as..

Methodological framework and design process for applying evolutionary simulation to musical interactions

This paper focuses on a methodological framework where the creative design process evolves through iterative cycles. The design process undertakes a complex network of tasks for integrating two domain models: dynamical simulation and musical interaction. The framework accounts for engi-neering technical and compositional affordances to accom-modate evolving behaviors to be expressed in real time per-formance interplay. This is illustrated with a case study of simulated swarms of heterogeneous agents. Highly integrat-ed parallel work streams are elucidated with sub-process elicitation in simulation, system integration and software engineering, composition, and performance. Framework formalization draws upon the established RAD model with significant modification to present the extended version that can be multi-threaded for concurrent creative processes. Two landmarks of 20th century music automation are drawn diachronically to frame the technical discussion in a social context of listening practice, developed by modeling crea-tive process and testing musical assumptions. Revisited cannon is redirected from bygone exemplars to ongoing practice, illuminating three baseline requirements for a methodological framework: interdisciplinary platform archi-tecture, complex systems model of music creation, and agile listening. Concluding theses on second order listening and interdisciplinary architecture summarize the proposed methodological framework addressing contextual listening and technical culture

Re-animating the Mathematical Concept: A Materialist Look at Students Practicing Mathematics with Digital Technology

This paper proposes a philosophical approach to the mathematical engagement involving students and a digital tool. This philosophical proposal aligns with other theories of learning that have been implemented in mathematics education but rearticulates some metaphors so as to promote insight and ideas to further support continued investigations into the learning of mathematics. In particular, this philosophical proposal takes seriously the notion that a priori to activity, there are no objects which in turn challenge the notions of intention, affordance and/or representation. To exemplify this perspective, two episodes of grade nine students using a dynamic geometry software are analysed to elaborate how mathematics can be seen to emerge from working with a tool

Lifeworld Inc. : and what to do about it

Can we detect changes in the way that the world turns up as they turn up? This paper makes such an attempt. The first part of the paper argues that a wide-ranging change is occurring in the ontological preconditions of Euro-American cultures, based in reworking what and how an event is produced. Driven by the security – entertainment complex, the aim is to mass produce phenomenological encounter: Lifeworld Inc as I call it. Swimming in a sea of data, such an aim requires the construction of just enough authenticity over and over again. In the second part of the paper, I go on to argue that this new world requires a different kind of social science, one that is experimental in its orientation—just as Lifeworld Inc is—but with a mission to provoke awareness in untoward ways in order to produce new means of association. Only thus, or so I argue, can social science add to the world we are now beginning to live in

An Anxious Alliance

This essay presents a multi-year autoethnographic perspective on the use of personal fitness and self-tracking technologies to lose weight. In doing so, it examines the rich and contradictory relationships with ourselves and our world that are generated around these systems, and argues that the efforts to gain control and understanding of one's self through them need not be read as a capitulation to rationalizing forces, or the embrace of utopian ideals, but as an ongoing negotiation of the boundaries and meanings of self within an anxious alliance of knowledge, bodies, devices, and data. I discuss how my widening inquiry into these tools and practices took me from a solitary practice and into a community of fellow travellers, and from the pursuit of a single body goal into a continually renewing project of personal possibility

Assembling the archaeology of the global Middle Ages

Responding to recent developments in archaeological theory and growing interest in the ‘global Middle Ages’, an approach to exploring relations between local and global processes in the medieval world is proposed. The World-systems approach, applied by some historians to these kinds of macro-paradigms and questions, can expose significant challenges regarding social and economic development at a global scale. However, here it is suggested that the ‘assemblage thought’ of Deleuze and Guattari, developed by DeLanda, might offer a more productive approach for assessing the multi-scalar interactions that defined the lives of communities in the Middle Ages. Here consideration is given to the character of the Middle Ages and its relation to modernity; the implications of the multi-scalar approach are also exemplified using a brief discussion of the Anglo-Italian wool trade in the Late Middle Ages