Learning About Metadata and Machines: Teaching Students Using a Novel Structured Database Activity

Machines produce and operate using complex systems of metadata that need to be catalogued, sorted, and processed. Many students lack the experience with metadata and sufficient knowledge about it to understand it as part of their data literacy skills. This paper describes an educational and interactive database activity designed for teaching undergraduate communication students about the creation, value, and logic of structured data. Through a set of virtual instructional videos and interactive visualizations, the paper describes how students can gain experience with structured data and apply that knowledge to successfully find, curate, and classify a digital archive of media artifacts. The pedagogical activity, teaching materials, and archives are facilitated through and housed in an online resource called Fabric of Digital Life (fabricofdigitallife.com). We end by discussing the activity’s relevance for the emerging field of human-machine communication

Hydropoetics in the work of Charles Olson and Kathleen Fraser: Osmosis and Projective Verse for Contemporary Poetic Practice

This practice-based PhD offers an ecological renegotiation of Charles Olson’s 1950 Projective Verse manifesto towards a feminist contemporary poetic practice. David Herd’s 2015 Contemporary Olson necessitates the renewed study of Olson within a 21st century context, the publication simultaneously problematises the act of participating in a projective poetics by calling attention to the intimacies between the language of projectivism and the language of the nuclear sciences. In response I ask, how might a poetic practitioner navigate Charles Olson’s 1950 ‘Projective Verse’ within an era of ecological crisis? The practice-based thesis addresses this question through an exploration of the nuclear contexts of Olson’s initial post- war methodology and turns toward the radical poetics of Kathleen Fraser, who insists that Olson’s manifesto generated the poetic methodologies necessary for an expansion of women’s writing practice in North America and the UK. Fraser’s analogy of ‘osmosis’, which illustrates the community transmission of Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’, is crucial to my development of Olsonian projectivism for a contemporary poetic context. I offer a kinetically viable alternative to the high-energy model of the nuclear reaction informed by the movement of hydraulic cycles. Reconceptualising Olson’s projective interrelation as a ‘hydropoetics’, I draw on the emerging field of the Blue Humanities, Astrida Neimanis’ cultural theory of ‘hydrofeminism’ (2017), alongside the poets Susan Howe and Norma Cole, who are identified by Fraser as making use of Olson’s expanded page for new feminist poetries. This thesis culminates with a range of practice-based models for a hydropoetic writing practice, framed as a series of bookarts and performances

The Value of ArtScience: improving the balance in collaboration practices between artists and scientists can impact knowledge production

In a time in which scientific knowledge is in danger of being discredited, we return to the responsibility of art and science. There is widespread optimism that collaborations between artists and scientists can develop solutions to complex problems, co-create new knowledge and contribute to discovery and understanding. However, art-science pairings are often based on similar subject areas alone, and without structured efforts to enable cooperation. For artists and scientists, the path towards meaning-making is not guided by the same principles. The artist is not bound to scientific goals or facts and there is no obligation to produce truth, which makes art-science collaborations unique within inter- and transdisciplinary research. For scientific institutions or organisations, such collaborations are often perceived as ‘art in the service of science’ where outcomes of art-science collaborations are primarily seen as a means to communicate difficult scientific concepts to the public. It is rare that art becomes an acknowledged, integral ingredient in the production of scientific knowledge. This is surprising given the special psychological relationship of humans with art: experiencing art can lead to new ways of understanding and meaning-making — crucial for solving the complex and ‘wicked’ problems we are facing in the world today. Combining insights from the ongoing academic debate and my personal experience as an astrophysicist — and artist — who has actively worked in art-science collaborations for the past 12 years, this paper argues for a deep familiarity of the history and methodology of the other discipline as well as confronting one’s own prejudice and biases towards the other discipline

The final frontier of fashion: Interdisciplinary approaches to design for microgravity

Interdisciplinary projects for the commercial space age are dominated by collaborations involving engineers and technologists, with a goal to advance digital or mechanical technology. In the emerging field of spacewear design, collaborations with technologists have inevitably led to a focus on wearable technology. There are missed opportunities to explore how designed objects, including clothes, behave in microgravity. This research recognises that not all engagement with space travel is, or should be, high-tech. The condition of weightlessness forces fashion designers to revisit many of the assumptions that have long been fundamental to fashion design, in particular those related to the weight and drape of fabric, and the prioritisation of the silhouette. In order to develop a new field of spacewear design, an understanding of the effects of weightlessness must be sought through collaboration with physics and those with first-hand experience of weightlessness. This article introduces the need for such collaboration, and argues that these collaborations must differ in nature from previous art-science collaborations

Telepathy in contemporary, conceptual and performance art

This thesis investigates the impact of telepathy and psi on conceptual and performance art from 1968. Emerging from the author’s art practice, the thesis argues telepathy is a key leitmotif and creative concern within much post 60s art, and has become central to the practice of a number of contemporary video, performance and new media artists. This thesis is composed of two interrelated parts: an exhibition of the artwork by the author concerning telepathic processes, and a written project which uses the major themes of the exhibition to frame an historical study of a number of key contemporary artists whom, it is argued, work with telepathy. These artists, Jane and Louise Wilson, Suzanne Treister and Susan Hiller are discussed under the themes of ‘twinning and doubling,’ ‘technological mediums’ and ‘telepathy experiments’. These themes also overlap in the authors artwork, are introduced through an overarching analysis of the work of performance artist Marina Abramoviç and philosopher Jacques Derrida who, it is argued, provide a new model of telepathy as an art practice. In addition, the thesis argues that telepathy is an often suppressed thematic in art which may not appear to directly address it, and uses the work on the Wilsons, Treister and Hiller to re-look at other 20th Century artists and artistic themes in the light of the conclusions it draws on telepathy and art. Walter Benjamin greatly admired the Surrealists, but had virtually no time for their interest in telepathy, hypnosis and psi. Together with positive materialist misappropriations of Adorno’s Thesis Against Occultism, artistic and theoretical work with telepathy and psi has been sidelined from other important themes in art and critical theory, all of which telepathy and psi illuminate, energise and empower. The art of the author and other more recognised and established artists can be seen to work with telepathy in ways that flow into and reinforce the grain of progressive leftist practice and aesthetics. Women’s work with telepathy should be considered as important as women’s work with sexuality. Women, sexuality, Otherness, liminality, spirituality, telepathy, trauma, healing, radical politics, and other taboo areas of patriachal codes, were adandoned by macho participants of fluxus and Conceptual art. The recent conceptual and performance tilt in contemporary art sheds new light on the problem of working within and developing an effective and dynamic lineage of telepathy in post 60s art as well as early modern art movements. Contemporary developments in science, engineering, biology, psychoanalysis, warfare, popular culture and sociology show the wider relevance of discourse on telepathy. There is much at stake for visual art, aesthetics and visuality in representing, celebrating and interrogating the theme of psi and telepathy in current practice and art history. Artist's work with telepathy and psi, although not always explicitly psychological, political or aesthetic, is often very psychologically, politically and aesthetically effective

Life, Re-Scaled

This edited volume explores new engagements with the life sciences in contemporary fiction, poetry, comics and performance. The gathered case studies investigate how recent creative work reframes the human within microscopic or macroscopic scales, from cellular biology to systems ecology, and engages with the ethical, philosophical, and political issues raised by the twenty-first century’s shifting views of life. The collection thus examines literature and performance as spaces that shape our contemporary biological imagination. Comprised of thirteen chapters by an international group of academics, Life, Re-Scaled: The Biological Imagination in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Performance engages with four main areas of biological study: ‘Invisible scales: cells, microbes and mycelium’, ‘Neuro-medical imaging and diagnosis’, ‘Pandemic imaginaries’, and ‘Ecological scales’. The authors examine these concepts in emerging forms such as plant theatre, climate change art, ecofiction and pandemic fiction, including the work of Jeff Vandermeer, Jon McGregor, Jeff Lemire, and Extinction Rebellion’s Red Rebel Brigade performances. This valuable resource moves beyond the biological paradigms that were central to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to outline the specificity of a contemporary imagination. Life, Re-Scaled is crucial reading for academics, scholars, and authors alike, as it proposes an unprecedented overview of the relationship between literature, performance and the life sciences in the twenty-first century

Life, Re-Scaled

This edited volume explores new engagements with the life sciences in contemporary fiction, poetry, comics and performance. The gathered case studies investigate how recent creative work reframes the human within microscopic or macroscopic scales, from cellular biology to systems ecology, and engages with the ethical, philosophical, and political issues raised by the twenty-first century’s shifting views of life. The collection thus examines literature and performance as spaces that shape our contemporary biological imagination. Comprised of thirteen chapters by an international group of academics, Life, Re-Scaled: The Biological Imagination in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Performance engages with four main areas of biological study: ‘Invisible scales: cells, microbes and mycelium’, ‘Neuro-medical imaging and diagnosis’, ‘Pandemic imaginaries’, and ‘Ecological scales’. The authors examine these concepts in emerging forms such as plant theatre, climate change art, ecofiction and pandemic fiction, including the work of Jeff Vandermeer, Jon McGregor, Jeff Lemire, and Extinction Rebellion’s Red Rebel Brigade performances. This valuable resource moves beyond the biological paradigms that were central to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to outline the specificity of a contemporary imagination. Life, Re-Scaled is crucial reading for academics, scholars, and authors alike, as it proposes an unprecedented overview of the relationship between literature, performance and the life sciences in the twenty-first century

A critical examination of the methodology and evidence of the first and second generation elite leaders of the Society for Psychical Research with particular reference to the life, work and ideas of Frederic WH Myers and his colleagues and to the assessment of the automatic writings allegedly produced post-mortem by him and others (the cross-correspondences).

This thesis outlines the canons of evidence developed by the elite Cambridge- based and educated leaders of the Society for Psychical Research to assess anomalous phenomena, and second, describes the gradual shift away from that approach, by their successors and the reasons for such a partial weakening of those standards, and the consequences for the general health of the SPR .It argues that, for a variety of reasons, this methodology has not always been fully appreciated or described accurately. Partly this is to do with the complex personality of Myers who provoked a range of contradictory responses from both contemporaries and later scholars who studied his life and work; partly to do with the highly selective criticisms of his and his colleagues’ work by TH Hall (which criticisms have entered general discourse without proper examination and challenge); and partly to a failure fully to appreciate how centrally derived their concepts and approaches were from the general concerns of late-Victorian science and social science. Their early achievements (given the base from which they started) were considerable but the methodology they developed was gradually eroded in some fields by their successors. This was partly because of the nature of the material; partly because of the shared, subjective elite networks of the group; and partly because of the impact of the affair of Gerald Balfour and Winifred Coombe-Tennant on the assessment and interpretation of the cross- correspondence automatic writings. This led to some neglect of experimental work and to an almost cultish atmosphere within the leadership of the SPR itself, particularly damaging in the interwar period

Nerd Ecology: Defending the Earth with Unpopular Culture

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Drawing on a wide range of examples from literature, comics, film, television and digital media, Nerd Ecology is the first substantial ecocritical study of nerd culture’s engagement with environmental issues. Exploring such works as Star Trek, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, the fiction of Thomas Pynchon, The Hunger Games, and superhero comics such as Green Lantern and X-Men, Anthony Lioi maps out the development of nerd culture and its intersections with the most fundamental ecocritical themes. In this way Lioi finds in the narratives of unpopular culture - narratives in which marginalised individuals and communities unite to save the planet - the building blocks of a new environmental politics in tune with the concerns of contemporary ecocritical theory and practice

A Geology of the General Intellect

We can no longer be certain whether the central terms and conceptual matrix that the Italian Autonomist Marxist tradition richly develops and draws on--the common, the general intellect, immaterial labour, psychopolitics, cognitariat--are able to survive unscathed the theoretical problems that the epoch of the Anthropocene poses. In an attempt to push this conceptual matrix to its political and ontological limits, I expose a series of “ecological deficits” at the core of Autonomist thought and make the argument that semiocapitalism is a geological operator just as much it is a cognitive, financial or linguistic one. This has a plethora of paradoxical implications that are constellated throughout the three chapters. The first chapter explores the non-mediatic conditions of possibility behind “mediation”: following Jussi Parikka and Matteo Pasquinelli, the first “ecological deficit” emerges due to conflating the mediasphere with the subjective operations of the “sign” (semiotic flows of labour, knowledge, information) and “desire” (creative flows, libidinal energy, affects) as well as over-valuing the “general intellect” (the productive powers of the social brain) and its exclusive relation to the infosphere (knowledge transmission, big data, linguistic networks of communication), the cognitariat (social subjectivity, value-producing labour) and the technosphere (machines, fixed capital). The second chapter critiques Antonio Negri’s ontological theory of value: following Silvia Federici and Jason W. Moore, the second “ecological deficit” emerges due to Autonomism’s negligence of socially necessary unpaid work, non-human relations of reproduction and cheap nature that make possible value-producing labour; this chapter also, following Bernard Stiegler, critiques an ontology of the sign that privileges expressionism (immaterial semiotic productivity, meaning and epistemics) over impressionism (retentional systems of incarnation, reproduction and energetics). The third chapter develops a critique of representational eco-politics or the spectacular Anthropocene: following Jean Baudrillard and Yves Citton, the final “ecological deficit” emerges due to the hyperplasia of images, data and simulacra of the Anthropocene itself, whereby the referent is spectralized by the luminescent aura of the sign, resulting in complicated forms of irrelevance, boredom and attentional scarcities. Each chapter in its own way develops the speculative leitmotif of a “transcendental geology --i.e. the claim that the earth is a condition of possibility for thought