Stories from Watertown: subjectification in living labs or an auto-ethnographic game for the development of worldviews awareness

Context. En l'època actual, és de vital importància transitar cap a futurs afirmatius i de vida. Hi ha amplis esforços per actualitzar el sistema actual tal que sigui menys perjudicial per al planeta i nosaltres mateixos. Tot i això, les disciplines emergents en transicions de sistemes reconeixen que no n'hi ha prou, i que, de fet, necessitem nous models integrals de pensament i comportament. L'especulació i les arts en són els més grans contribuents, però encara en calen molts més: les transicions s'han de fer al món real, amb diversos agents i en espais on es pugui experimentar, com els living labs. Objectiu de la recerca. Sent conscient que els living labs sovint fallen en comportar-se segons la seva definició i limiten la innovació, la finalitat d'aquest treball és proposar un marc per introduir la necessitat d'innovar a diferents nivells (tecnològicament, socialment, i en mentalitats), amb especial atenció a les visions del món. Això ho presento com a essencial per la confiança entre diversos agents, que és un dels problemes més presents i reconeguts en els living labs. Metodologia. Aquest treball utilitza diversos mètodes: des de síntesi teòrica a pràctiques de recerca auto-etnogràfiques en disciplines com la sociologia, el disseny i la filosofia (occidental i indígena). A través re raonament abductiu i validacions a través de converses, es desenvolupa un model per incentivar diàlegs autoreflexius cap a maneres de ser postantropocèntriques i posthumanes. Proposta clau. Es mostra un joc iteratiu per iniciar converses individuals i col·lectives que permetin guanyar consciència de la visió del món d'un mateix. El joc de reflexió inclou una col·lecció de contes amb diverses visions del món i 16 cartes que animen a la reflexió i a emmirallar-se en les teves pròpies ontologies. A més, també inclou la plantilla d'una cartografia per guiar discussions col·lectives sobre les reflexions personals.Background. In current times, it is of vital importance to transition into new futures of affirmation and life. Broad efforts are in place to come up with upgrades in the current system to become less harmful to the planet and ourselves. But the emerging disciplines of system transitions acknowledge it is not enough and we, in fact, are in need of integral new models of doing and thinking. Speculation and arts are the main contributors, yet more contributions are needed: transitions must be set up in the playing field, in multi-stakeholder and experimental spaces such as living labs (LLs). Research aims. Aware living labs often fail to act by their definition and limit their innovations, the aim is to propose a framework to introduce the need for multilevel innovation (technology, society, and mindsets) with a special focus on worldviews. This is presented and argued as a keystone for trust, which is a broad and acknowledged issue within LLs. Methodology. This work has employed mixed methods, from theoretical synthesis to autoethnography research practices in disciplines such as sociology, design and (western and indigenous) philosophy. Through abductive reasoning and conversation-based validations, a model to arise self-reflection dialogues towards postanthropocentric and posthuman ways of being in living labs is developed. Key proposal. An iterative conversation-starter game for individual and collective worldview awareness is proposed. This reflection game includes a collection of multi-worldview short stories and 16 call-to-reflection question cards that call to mirror to participants' ontologies. Also, a cartography template is included to guide collective discussions about people’s own reflections.Award-winnin

Changing What Infrastructure Means: Instituting critical models for curatorial-infrastructural practice, artefacts and imaginaries

What does infrastructure institute? What can be imagined through and by infrastructure? Can the curatorial figure and reconfigure the relationship between this image and form? This thesis turns to the thoroughgoing reconfiguration of the scope of the curatorial because of, and in response to, shifts in post-global and planetary imaginaries of infrastructure. It considers how infrastructure displaces the institution as both a frame of reference and site for instituting. It tests how curatorial practices can be positioned, patterned, configured and narrated at the meso-scalar intersection of material infrastructural shifts, disinvestment and the legacies, realisation and promises of organisational imaginaries emerging because of and despite those shifts. This thesis is constructed through a series of test cases that both stage and examine the problem as (and potential of) the embodying and embedding of infrastructural meaning-making and staging in the competing alignments of the curatorial in the following infrastructural scenes: cultural infrastructural provision in the Granby Four Streets area in Liverpool by Assemble and Steinbeck Studios (2013–); in tensions implicated in infrastructural patterns of evidence in the work of the research agency Forensic Architecture; in the formal potential in configuring open and closed imaginaries in the infrastructure-critical propositions of EURO-VISION by FRAUD (2021) and Danish curatorial project Primer; and in the capacity for ongoing transformation in scalable and non-scalable infrastructural futurity staged in Alliance of the Southern Triangle’s Protocols for Phase Transition (2021) and Feral Atlas: The-More-Than-Human Anthropocene (Tsing et. al., 2020). Modelling difference staged to produce recursions, frictions and tipping points in the continuity promised by the convergence of infrastructural materialisation, mediation and practice, this thesis develops a sequence of transformative threshold concepts. Concerned with how this requires an ongoing negotiation of infrastructural difference, the thesis presents through these concepts a new vocabulary and set of procedures. Here, dynamic cura-infrastructural artefacts are used to situate the curatorial across the expanded temporal scenes of anticipation, performance and repetition of infrastructure. At stake is the capacity of expanded curatorial and artistic practice to create and meaningfully affect change in the intimate and planetary worlds that infrastructure imagines

The Object of Platform Studies: Relational Materialities and the Social Platform (the case of the Nintendo Wii)

Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System,by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort, inaugurated thePlatform Studies series at MIT Press in 2009.We’ve coauthored a new book in the series, Codename: Revolution: the Nintendo Wii Video Game Console. Platform studies is a quintessentially Digital Humanities approach, since it’s explicitly focused on the interrelationship of computing and cultural expression. According to the series preface, the goal of platform studies is “to consider the lowest level of computing systems and to understand how these systems relate to culture and creativity.”In practice, this involves paying close attentionto specific hardware and software interactions--to the vertical relationships between a platform’s multilayered materialities (Hayles; Kirschenbaum),from transistors to code to cultural reception. Any given act of platform-studies analysis may focus for example on the relationship between the chipset and the OS, or between the graphics processor and display parameters or game developers’ designs.In computing terms, platform is an abstraction(Bogost and Montfort), a pragmatic frame placed around whatever hardware-and-software configuration is required in order to build or run certain specificapplications (including creative works). The object of platform studies is thus a shifting series of possibility spaces, any number of dynamic thresholds between discrete levels of a system

Convergência midiá- tica e cultura participativa: a possibilidade de novas relações entre os agentes sociais no campo da comunicação e as novas tecnologias

Este artículo analiza las ediciones colaborativas de dos portales de internet, G1 y A Tarde/uol, con el objetivo de identificar el cambio en la posición de los agentes sociales en el campo de la comunicación con el advenimiento de las nuevas tecnologías y en el contexto del uso de los dispositivos móviles. Para realizar los análisis, se partió de los conceptos de Castells (1996), Jenkins (2009) y Bourdieu (2004, 2008), y se aplicó la metodología de análisis de contenido (ac), utilizando los métodos cualitativos de análisis del corpus. Los resultados muestran que existe un cambio en la posición de los agentes sociales en el campo de la comunicación, de consumidores a productores, de pasivos a activos, de aislados a conectados.This article analyzes the collaborative publishing of two Internet portals, G1 and A Tarde/uol, in order to identify the change in the position of social agents in the field of communication with the advent of new technologies and in the context of mobile devices usage. In order to perform the analyzes, the concepts of Castells (1996), Jenkins (2009) and Bourdieu (2004, 2008) were used, and the methodology of content analysis (ca) was applied using qualitative methods of corpus analysis. The results show that there is a change in the position of social agents in the communication area, from consumers to producers, from passive to active, from isolated to connected.Este artigo analisa as editorias colaborativas de dois portais da internet, G1 e A Tarde/uol, com o objetivo de identificar a mudança na posição dos agentes sociais no campo da comunicação com o advento das novas tecnologias e no contexto do uso dos dispositivos móveis. Para realizar as análises, partiu-se dos conceitos de Castells (1996), Jenkins (2009) e Bourdieu (2004, 2008), e aplicou-se a metodologia de Análise de Conteúdo (ac), utilizando os métodos qualitativos de análise do corpus. Os resultados mostram que existe uma mudança na posição dos agentes sociais no campo da comunicação, de consumidores a produtores, de passivos a ativos, de isolados a conectados