Territorial Violence and Design, 1950-2010: A Human-Computer Study of Personal Space and Chatbot Interaction

Personal space is a human’s imaginary system of precaution and an important concept for exploring territoriality, but between humans and technology because machinic agencies transfer, relocate, enact and reenact territorially. Literatures of territoriality, violence and affect are uniquely brought together, with chatbots as the research object to argue that their ongoing development as artificial agents, and the ambiguity of violence they can engender, have broader ramifications for a socio-technical research programme. These literatures help to understand the interrelation of virtual and actual spatiality relevant to research involving chatrooms and internet forums, automated systems and processes, as well as human and machine agencies; because all of these spaces, methods and agencies involve the personal sphere. The thesis is an ethical tale of cruel techno-science that is performed through conceptualisations from the creative arts, constituting a PhD by practice. This thesis chronicles four chatbots, taking into account interventions made in fine art, design, fiction and film that are omitted from a history of agent technology. The thesis re-interprets Edward Hall’s work on proxemics, personal space and territoriality, using techniques of the bricoleur and rudiments (an undeveloped and speculative method of practice), to understand chatbot techniques such as the pick-up, their entrapment logics, their repetitions of hateful speech, their nonsense talk (including how they disorientate spatial metaphors), as well as how developers switch on and off their learning functionality. Semi-structured interviews and online forum postings with chatbot developers were used to expand and reflect on the rudimentary method. To urge that this project is timely is itself a statement of anxiety. Chatbots can manipulate, exceed, and exhaust a human understanding of both space and time. Violence between humans and machines in online and offline spaces is explored as an interweaving of agency and spatiality. A series of rudiments were used to probe empirical experiments such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma (Tucker, 1950). The spatial metaphors of confinement as a parable of entrapment, are revealed within that logic and that of chatbots. The ‘Obedience to Authority’ experiments (Milgram, 1961) were used to reflect on the roles played by machines which are then reflected into a discussion of chatbots and the experiments done in and around them. The agency of the experimenter was revealed in the machine as evidenced with chatbots which has ethical ramifications. The argument of personal space is widened to include the ways machinic territoriality and its violence impacts on our ways of living together both in the private spheres of our computers and homes, as well as in state-regulated conditions (Directive-3, 2003). The misanthropic aspects of chatbot design are reflected through the methodology of designing out of fear. I argue that personal spaces create misanthropic design imperatives, methods and ways of living. Furthermore, the technological agencies of personal spaces have a confining impact on the transient spaces of the non-places in a wider discussion of the lift, chatroom and car. The violent origins of the chatbot are linked to various imaginings of impending disaster through visualisations, supported by case studies in fiction to look at the resonance of how anxiety transformed into terror when considering the affects of violence

The dialectic of trauma in Charlotte Salomon\u27s Life? or theatre?

This thesis explores the presence of the dialectic of trauma in Charlotte Salomon’s magnum opus, Life? or Theatre?, a series of more than seven hundred paintings created during her time in exile in France between 1941 and 1942. In this series, modeled on an illustrated operatic libretto, Salomon combined painted images, narrative commentary, dialogue, and musical notation to create a thinly disguised cast of characters – representing herself, family members, and friends – who reenact traumatic events that occurred prior to and throughout Salomon’s life. This visual manifestation of trauma raises questions about the formation and function of traumatic memory, and how those who experience trauma manage these memories. This thesis examines three critical essays on Salomon’s series; art historians Leah White, Ernst van Alphen, and Griselda Pollock each posit that Life? or Theatre? formed a comprehensive example of healing that functioned as a means to integrate traumatic memories into a personal narrative, a process outlined by nineteenth-century psychiatrist Pierre Janet and further elaborated in the last two decades by psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk. Despite Salomon’s attempts to assimilate traumatic events into her life story, this thesis considers the structural and visual evidence present in Life? or Theatre? that indicates that Salomon’s integration was not completed with the conclusion of the series. Rather, following the contributions of psychiatrist Judith Herman to the clinical study of trauma, it submits that Salomon’s series evinces an oscillation between the psychological states of intrusion and constriction: Life? or Theatre? presents a work in progress – a dialectic of trauma that was yet to be resolved

Sexuality and Sovereignty: The Global Limits and Possibilities of Lawrence Symposium: Legal Rights in Historical Perspective: From the Margins to the Mainstream

In the summer of 2003, the Supreme Court handed gay and lesbian activists a stunning victory in the decision of Lawrence v. Texas, which summarily overruled Bowers v. Hardwick. At issue was whether Texas\u27 prohibition of same-sex sexual conduct violated the Due Process Clause of the U.S. Constitution. In a powerful, poetic, and strident opinion, Justice Kennedy, writing for a six-member majority, reversed Bowers, observing that individual decisions regarding physical intimacy between consenting adults, either of the same or opposite sex, are constitutionally protected, and thus fall outside of the reach of state intervention. Volumes can be written about the decision; it represents a culmination of nearly a century\u27s worth of work in dismantling prejudicial views on gays and lesbians in American law and, indeed, the rest of the world. In this article, I explore Lawrence\u27s hidden and unstated implications for the recent globalization of gay civil rights, and contemplate whether Lawrence is yet another symbol of a global wave of change, or whether it represents an ultimately unfulfillable goal worldwide, particularly in places where gay civil rights movements have been met with considerable backlash. I will argue in this paper that a close reading of Lawrence represents a culmination of a historic, and increasingly global, convergence between liberty, privacy, and anti-essentialist theories of sexual identity. Indeed, the ultimate significance of Lawrence lies not in its overt shielding of sexual minorities from criminalization, but rather in its willingness to offer to the American (indeed global) public, a version of sexual autonomy that is filled with both promise and danger, fragility and universality. For, quite unlike Bowers, which largely directed its judicial gaze towards gays and lesbians in particular, the court in Lawrence carried a message of sexual self-determination for everyone, irrespective of sexual orientation. Emerging from this decision is a vision of sexual self-determination, what I call sexual sovereignty, that represents the intersectional convergence of three separate prisms: spatial privacy, expressive liberty, and deliberative autonomy. At the same time, by examining the case law that has flourished in its wake, we see that it has often been correlated with an implicit logic of containment that has relegated the exercise of sexual autonomy to private, rather than public, spaces. In creating a space for the convergence of all three facets, I would argue that Lawrence is a triumph - and a product - of anti-essentialism, but its implicit logic of containment limits its potential to traverse both theoretical and global divisions regarding culture and sexuality. Consequently, ultimately, despite the power of its universalist vision, this Article argues that Lawrence is circumscribed by potential limitations wrought by culture, property, nationality, and citizenship

The Photographer\u27s Wife: Emmet Gowin\u27s Photographs of Edith

Exemplified in the oeuvres of photographers Alfred Stieglitz, Harry Callahan, Lee Friedlander, and Emmet Gowin, the photographer\u27s wife is a distinctive subject in twentieth-century American fine-art photography that fuses the domains of public and private life through the conflation of art and marriage. The transgressive nature of this juncture can be located in a confluence of gazes - the artist\u27s, the subject\u27s, and the viewer\u27s - that are embroiled in constructing subjectivities. The phrase photographer\u27s wife underscores an assumed imbalance of power reflecting a binary of active/passive, artist/model, and husband/wife. It is this study\u27s contention that the complexity of the wife\u27s role in the inspiration and production of her husband\u27s creative output and the fluid nature of this interdependency are significant factors in images of her made by him and that they undermine the efficacy of this binary. A discursive examination of the subject, with an emphasis on Gowin\u27s Edith series, will determine how perceptions of marriage affect the viewing of those images. Since the early 1970s, Gowin has guided the critical reception of his photographs with a distinctly anagogical reading of the works. This study contrasts Gowin\u27s narrative with a discursive reading, allowing the works to be examined suprapersonally as a means of determining the larger dynamic traditions from which they derive. The subject implicates numerous discourses that are examined within the areas of gender and power, portraiture and self-portraiture, representation and identity, and viewer reception. Additionally, images in the Edith series often traverse the genre formations of photography. By defamiliarizing family, snapshot, documentary, and art photography, Gowin\u27s images create intervals between genres allowing them to be viewed intertexturally as contained by the boundaries of genre formation and outside of it. This aspect of the work illustrates how images of the photographer\u27s wife can be viewed at the interstices of the public and private worlds of art and marriage, as well as across photographic genres. Viewed discursively, the photographer\u27s wife can be examined as a dynamic production of knowledge that is shaped and reshaped over time