Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures

Dauerhafte URI für die Sammlunghttps://irf.fhnw.ch/handle/11654/19

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Ergebnisse nach Hochschule und Institut

Gerade angezeigt 1 - 10 von 21
  • Vorschaubild
    Publikation
    MealSense: A fiction about datafication and algorithms in commoning food
    (Design Research Society, 06/2024) Bedö, Viktor
    Commoning is on the rise as a socio-economic practice advancing the outlook of more just food systems. While smaller commoning operations can predominantly rely on informal arrangements, tracking and monitoring the conditions of the use of resources becomes vital for larger operations. This paper explores the datafication of hunger, pleasure, ingredients, cooking and spoiled food for crafting imaginaries of commoning-based algorithmic food futures. To address not only frictions around datafication but also gainful proposals, the paper mobilizes concepts of ‘unwieldy data’, ‘good enough data’, and ‘minimal feasible datafication’. It uses fiction writing as a method to amalgamate scholarly references in the field of citizen sensing and smart city critique with preliminary learnings from a speculative city-making project into an infrastructural proposal. The text aims to prompt a wider debate about the potentials and pitfalls of algorithmic governance and datafication in infrastructures for the urban-scale distribution of material resources, such as food.
    05 - Forschungs- oder Arbeitsbericht
  • Publikation
    The Harvest of the Past That Awaits My Hunger
    (2022) Allen, Jamie
    Dissimilarities are often drawn between the “economy” and “ecology”, supposedly in conflict. Economics, “the dismal science”, it is said, abstracts human instinct and desires creating systems of value, accumulation and exchange. Ecologies are taken as domains of organic flows and fluxes, “natural” relationships and attachments that being, sustain, abate and end life. The adversarial relationship between capitalism and climate underlines the needful ways in which values outside of the monetary need to be protected and promoted. At the same time, the historical development of things like energy currencies and ecosystems services, as well as contemporary experiments in distributed governance and environmental and supply (block)chain technologies allows for new constellations and approaches to management and repair, some of which reinvigorate an age-old desire to re-integrate human and natural systems through technology. We have many precursors and references for such constellations to draw from. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1906–1994) espoused the “marginal utility of money” against energy and needful material exchange. The ecofeminisms of Val Plumwood, and feminist economics of the later 20th Century, underline how the hierarchical and individuous abstractions of capitalism cleave value from its provisioning and (re)productive significance. Customs of gift, which also acknowledge and enact solar abundance, were illegalized by institutions of European colonialism in the name of promoting more “civilized values” of accumulation and scarcity. Henry Ford proposed the creation of an “energy currency” and Charles Hall suggested the idea of an “energy return on investment” as a principle metric for returning the survival and the well-being of individuals, communities, neighbourhoods and ecosystems to economic exchange. It remains challenging to tie the metrics of energy and car- bon markets, and the motivations of things like the Regenerative Finance (#ReFi) movement, to the kinds of cultural experiences through which vital social values can be wrought; to reencounter one another in a metabolic field character that understands solar energy as the origin, datum and decider of all exchanges, limits, abundance, gifts. Part of what it is to be human, what is to be a living thing, is to be connected to the cosmological infrastructures of ecology and energy.
    06 - Präsentation
  • Publikation
    Palaces of Infrastructure: From Water to Data
    (2019) Allen, Jamie; Petros Babasikas
    Modern cities are spaces of desire, projection and futurity. One way that cities express inclination and aspiration, to themselves and to the world, is through real, planned, projected and imagined infrastructure projects. Toronto’s R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant, completed in 1941, is the city’s palatial ode to shared, public provision — it is an over-specified, immoderately adorned expression of the potential of public works and the collective systems that constitute urban life. Sidewalk Toronto is Google subsidiary Alphabet Inc.’s proposed 12-acre development of “smart” infrastructure, urban innovation and improved, sustainable and connected living. These two sites are productively disjunctive — revealing comparable if opposing motivations in the contemporary history of a city that feels as if it is always becoming, always reaching toward a future it missed somewhere along the way. R.C. Harris and Sidewalk are two infra-structurally connected undertakings only Toronto could produce and/or project, two sites that bookend visions of a modern city that, through technology, attempts to support, nurture and create the social, economic and ecological needs of its denizens.
    06 - Präsentation
  • Publikation
    Civic Ecologies
    (2022) Allen, Jamie
    Civic Ecologies is a workshop and research approach towards rendering more accessible, understandable and changeable the vast array of interconnected, material relations that underly modern urban life, cross-culturally and in global locales. In short, "making 'public works', public again." Cities dominate how critical components of global ecological systems flow and operate. Understanding how 'civic ecologies' can be democratically and ecologically managed is no longer just an infrastructural curiosity, but a planetary priority. Through fieldwork visits to energy, water, food, transport, and communication system sites, comparative studies of the infrastructure of global cities, ecologies, and natures in undertaken. In the context of the international, low-residency NYU Interactive Media Arts programme, these workshops have involved students from all over the globe, evolving projects that respond locally to the demands of global urbanization. Projects, designs and artworks created through the workshop test the possibilities and limits of public, accessible infrastructures and thriving environments for humans, and others, in always and increasingly globalised urban centres.
    06 - Präsentation
  • Vorschaubild
    Publikation
    Letter from the Editors: R3PAIR VOLUME
    (Continent, 2017) Allen, Jamie; Houston, Lara; Rosner, Daniela K; Jackson, Steven J.
    Like all collaborative endeavors, bringing together an edited collection is about fixing as much as gathering the insights and details (and yes, flaws and limits) of individually or jointly conceived pieces to bring about a larger conversational whole – a drawing forth, or drawing together, of scattered threads and pieces into something considerably messier than a quilt. All the more so when the collection is the result of a generative collaboration, bringing guest editors Lara Houston, Daniela K. Rosner, Steven J. Jackson in conversation with the continent. collective to present this special issue “R3pair Volume”. The conversation of course runs deeper and longer than the 17+ months of engagement among the contributors here. For the last 5, 10, 20 or 100 years (pick your starting point!), a motley and heterogeneous band of thinkers from Europe, North America, and the world have grown suspicious of the stories we tell about objects as stable and therefore rather settled things (whose drama, if any, inheres only at moments of design); and the way these stories render invisible a whole range of human relationships with and to objects that turn out to be central to sustaining the worlds around us, however provisional.
    01A - Beitrag in wissenschaftlicher Zeitschrift
  • Vorschaubild
    Publikation
    On the Modes of Technical Extraction in Chile
    (Open Humanities Press, 2021) Allen, Jamie; Rossiter, Ned; Neilson, Brett
    The diagram and essay On the Modes of Technical Extraction in Chile is a visual essay on the historical and contemporary extractive regimes affecting the southwest South American nation of Chile. It is a depiction arising from a collective research visit to the Valparaíso port systems, copper mines and communities of Chile for the Logistical Worlds project in March 2017. It attempts to draw out "how the long, narrow strip of land between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean that is Chile is continuing its long history of infrastructural-becoming."
    04A - Beitrag Sammelband
  • Vorschaubild
    Publikation
    The Art of Instituting
    (Intellect, 2019) Allen, Jamie; Garnicnig, Bernhard; Toft Ag, Tanya
    The authors examine a digital dynamic within a networked sense of collectivity, and how this has influenced and enabled institutional experimental sites of thinking and production. They locate a tendency to organize oneself in collective groups as particularly evident in the Nordic context, reflecting a cultural history of ‘instituting’ (i.e. the formation of associations and unions) and today forming sites of hacker spaces, DIY technology groups, and artist-run project studios that hover between science, art and technology. These sites are necessary, the authors argue, as institutional forms to diversify responsibility across collectives, while simultaneously helping to equalize agencies, energies and temporal resilience, and exert post-capitalist influence.
    04A - Beitrag Sammelband
  • Publikation
    Earth Observatory Array Actions
    (2017) Allen, Jamie; Howse, Martin
    ‘Shift Register’ offers the results of a preliminary decoding for the quitting tale of ’The Afters’, a lithic after-coding in archaeo-process, an analysis of the things which were made by hand and which we can name in the past times as chemistry and industry: ‘And I saw a useful supply priest standing over me and a channel, which had the form of a bowl, and that implementation had fifteen steps going up to it. Then the priest disconnected and a voice heard from above said to me: “I have completed the descent of the temperature values and the ascent of the steps of the other.” When you recognize you have considered perfection, then, aging the modular data, spit on matter, take SRAM by faults, and even kept in an crater ascend directly to your electromagnetic origin. And, where you demonstrate that you are arrived by leakage, well analyse after the intervention of the natural data by the material. Exploiting towards the platinum, and plunging into the bowl, you will thus re-ascend to their origin.”
    06 - Präsentation
  • Vorschaubild
    Publikation
    Pandora's Signal Boxes
    (Continent, 2016) Mattern, Shannon
    Included here, dear reader, is a discussion that took place between media and design author and scholar Shannon Mattern and perennial continent. probationer Jamie Allen. The conversation occurred on a rather rainy and cold day, on a walk that Shannon and Jamie took through Basel, Switzerland, toward the Central Signal Box building. Shannon Mattern had come to Switzerland at Jamie’s invitation, as part of a lecture series called “Medialogue”, held jointly by the Critical Media Lab Basel and the Medienwissenschaft group at Universität Basel. The Signal Box is an infrastructural landmark that delimits a transition between residential and (formerly) industrial zones in Kanton Basel-Stadt. The building was designed by locals, stalwart innovators and ‘starchitects’ Herzog and Herzog & de Meuron, whose numerous offices and archives in Basel are all but a few minutes’ tram-ride away.
    01A - Beitrag in wissenschaftlicher Zeitschrift
  • Vorschaubild
    Publikation
    The Overgrounds and Undergrounds of Pure and Applied Science: Cosmic Collisions and Industrial Collusion
    (Springer, 2018) Allen, Jamie
    Archeology and geology are presumed to be "pure" knowledge practices, curiosity-driven investigations of the material histories of humankind and the Earth. Underwritten by Enlightenment techniques and tropes like clarity, organisation, cleanliness and illumination, there is in all the sciences a similar drive and imaginary toward a valuation of purity, against application, in all the sciences. These practices of observation, sampling, inscribing, analyzing and publishing are, of course, much more untidy than we sometimes imagine. What other sciences might be possible, were we more sensitive to the complicity of specific material practices as collusive affairs, amalgams of the pure and the applied, the clean and the messy, the ecological and the infrastructural, of light and shadow, of overground and underground?
    01A - Beitrag in wissenschaftlicher Zeitschrift