Savic, Selena

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Selena
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Savic, Selena

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Making Arguments with Data: Resisting Appropriation and Assumption of Access / Reason in Machine Learning Training Processes

2023-10-30, Savic, Selena, Martins, Yann Patrick

This article presents an approach to practicing ethics when working with large datasets and designing data representations. Inspired by feminist critique of technoscience and recent problematizations of digital literacy, we argue that machine learning models can be navigated in a multi-narrative manner when access to training data is well articulated and understood. We programmed and used web-based interfaces to sort, organize, and explore a community-run digital archive of radio signals. An additional perspective on the question of working with datasets is offered from the experience of teaching image synthesis with freely accessible online tools. We hold that the main challenge to social transformations related to digital technologies comes from lingering forms of colonialism and extractive relationships that easily move in and out of the digital domain. To counter both the unfounded narratives of techno-optimismand the universalizing critique of technology, we discuss an approachto data and networks that enables a situated critique of datafication and correlationism from within.

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Pixels and Bandwidth: On Imaginaries of Travel in Data

2022-12, Savic, Selena, Metzner-Szigeth, Andreas

The imaginary of travelling in data traces interdisciplinary concerns for technical artefacts. Focusing on data collection on radio signals gathered by a community of radio amateurs and enthusiasts, informational tools – ‘data observatories’ – render signals commensurable through their different visual representations. What can pixel distribution in a sound spectrogram tell us about a radio signal? Following Haraway’s insistence on the importance and persistence of vision as an embodied gaze enabling a new doctrine of objectivity, this study proceeds by extracting and organizing radio signal qualities using a machine-learning algorithm to expose them again to the visual faculty of subjective observers. Vision and travel constitute methodical tools to unfold disciplinary concerns starting from specific data in a way that favours interactional expertise.

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Making Arguments with Data

2022-06-09, Savic, Selena, Martins, Yann Patrick

Whether we are discussing measures in order to ‘flatten the curve’ in the ongoing pandemic, or what to wear in face of the most recent weather forecast, we make arguments based on patterns and trends observed in data. What makes these patterns observable? Making arguments with data requires critical engagement with datasets, as well as computational processes to gather data, to organize and model their relationships. This article presents an approach to practicing ethics when working with large datasets and designing data representations. The arguments we make are based on the development and use of a computational instrument, and working with digital archives. We programmed and used web-based interfaces to sort, organize and explore a community-ran archive of radio signals. Inspired by feminist critique of technoscience and recent problematizations of digital literacy, we argue that one can navigate machine learning models in a multi-narrative manner, and that knowledge of radio signals or any other technical artefact transgresses domains. We propose visual explorations of complex data structures that enable storytelling and an understanding of datasets that resists extraction of discrete identities from the data. We hold that the main challenge to sovereignty comes from lingering forms of colonialism and extractive relationships that easily move in and out of the digital domain. Countering both the unbased narratives of techno-optimism, and the universalizing critique of technology, we discuss an approach to data and networks that enables a situated critique of datafication and correlationism from within.

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CAD optimism. How Architects Interested in Media and Computation Talk about Design

2021-10-09, Savic, Selena

"Great new design" is a phrase that emerges from simple counting of words in social media discourse among architects and designers working with computation and interactive technologies. With an underlying concern for the narrative of optimism and efficiency that propagates in practice of working with CAD tools, I study the way Media Architecture is discussed within the community of architects, designers, researchers and policy makers. The bi-yearly event, Media Architecture Biennale, organised by the Media Architecture Institute gathers a large community of architects, designers and engineers interested in using and understanding computational tools in the context of design of media architecture (and media facades more specifically). I combine text-mining techniques of Twitter posts with practical knowledge of architectural profession and review of computational concepts in literature (Dalsgaard et al, Tomitsch et al, Brynskov et al but also Easterling, Bratton and Parisi). Using some of the digital humanities techniques, I identify a network of social media profiles that belong to architects, engineers, community managers and policy makers, with a mixed presence of practitioners and academics. I identify important concepts and patterns in this prolific communication stream, which I then critically examine through the way these conversations, literature and practice inform each other. I take social media as a rich, and digitally documented communication channel that relies on a multitude of media and forms. What can we infer from opinions on digital infrastructures, networked places and hybrid public spaces about their implications for practice of architecture, and methods architects use in design? Which occlusions and blind spots can be observed in the discourse? By looking at how contemporary practice is discussed, we can identify and offer a critical perspective on certain social and cultural aspects within the community.

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Techno-optimism and optimization in media architecture practice and theory

2023-04-19, Savic, Selena

Media architecture community systematically explores the potentials of computation and digital media to intervene in form-finding, fabrication of buildings and urban data collection processes. Combining social media topic modelling techniques with the review of media architecture-related literature, I discuss methods to locate the media architecture community in social media, conduct initial discourse analysis and pursue a deeper investigation of the topics addressed by community. In the literature, media architecture is presented as an interactive set of technologies for a participative public life. And yet, while a dynamic facade increases possibilities for participation and creative expression, it also facilitates reframing participation as a technical problem. I position optimization and efficiency in media architecture discourse as a form of optimism and offer insights into its political implications. I propose to rethink the shortcut between optimism and optimization by tracing conceptual and professional relations that inform media architecture.

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Slime Mold and Network Imaginaries: An Experimental Approach to Communication

2022-10-01, Savic, Selena, Grant, Sarah

Physarum polycephalum, or slime mold, is an acellular organism extensively studied in scientific experiments and artistic engagements. Artist and critical engineer Sarah Grant collaborates with architect and researcher Selena Savic on hybrid bio-networking experiments with slime mold as an approximation of a computer network. They study communication as an organic process, rethinking networks’ inherent technicity through encounters with a living organism. They discuss network imaginaries situated in the way slime mold forages for food: at once transmitting and materializing its experiences, constrained and conditioned by the environment. The results of this work are imaginative accounts of adaptive network infrastructure and protocols.

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Pollution topologies. Can extinction have measure?

2022-03-01, Savic, Selena

This text is a parable on extinction and pollution and how they can be measured. In Inanimate Species, Joana Moll expresses extinction and pollution[1] quite literally in terms of analogy: the encroachment of microchips is compared to the extinction of insects. The comparison between these two visually similar[2] groups of beings is a measure of artificiality of pollution, as well as of inherent inconsistencies in methods of measurement. The attempt to taxonomize microchips following the rules of taxonomy for living organisms – an already artificial method applied to nature – suggests a possible way of forging an agreement on shared measures and values.

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Making Arguments with Data

2023-02, Savic, Selena, Martins, Yann Patrick, Herlo. Bianca, Irrgang, Daniel

Whether we are discussing measures in order to "flatten the curve" in a pandemic or what to wear given the most recent weather forecast, we base arguments on patterns observed in data. This article presents an approach to practicing ethics when working with large datasets and designing data representations. We programmed and used web-based interfaces to sort, organize, and explore a community-run archive of radio signals. Inspired by feminist critique of technoscience and recent problematizations of digital literacy, we argue that one can navigate machine learning models in a multi-narrative manner. We hold that the main challenge to sovereignty comes from lingering forms of colonialism and extractive relationships that easily move in and out of the digital domain. Countering both narratives of techno-optimism and the universalizing critique of technology, we discuss an approach to data and networks that enables a situated critique of datafication and correlationism from within.

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Common Objects / Gewöhnliche Objekte

2022-08-27, Savic, Selena, Savicic, Gordan, Miyazaki, Shintaro, Schneider, Birgit, Silvestrin, Daniela

The present intervention is a temporary engagement with the exhibition Curious Communication. Unusual Objects and Stories from the Collection, which stages uncommon objects and rituals pertaining to telecommunication. We seek to complement this perspective with objects that are everyday, yet hidden in the heights of telecommunication masts and towers, such as 4G and 5G antennas, and satellite receptors. Proliferation naturalises them as mundane infrastructure, sometimes even mimicking nature. Antennas are objects that increasingly re-naturalise electromagnetism: engineered to facilitate communication between people, they put to use the disposition of metals to resonate with radio waves, picking up both human-made and natural emissions, and figuring in urban and rural landscapes to secure global interconnectivity.

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Articulating nomadic identities of radio signals

2022-02-25, Savic, Selena

This article presents a new materialist approach to artificial neural networks, based on experimental research in categorization of data on radio signals. Picking up on Rossi Braidotti’s nomadic theory and a number of new materialist perspectives on informatics, the article presents identification of radio signals as a process of articulating identities with data: nomadic identities that are informed by all the others, always established anew. As a resistance to the dominant understanding of data as discreet, the experiments discussed here demonstrate a way to work with a digital archive in a materialist and non-essentialist way. The output of experiments, data observatories, shows the capacity of machine learning techniques to challenge fixed dichotomies, such as human/nature, and their role in the way we think of identities. A data observatory is a navigation apparatus which can be used to orient oneself in the vast landscape of data on radio transmissions based on computable similarity. Nomadic identities render materiality of radio signals as digital information.