Savic, Selena

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Savic
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Selena
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Savic, Selena

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2020 - 20228
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Typ: 06 - Präsentation ×

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Gerade angezeigt 1 - 8 von 8
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    Publikation
    Making Arguments with Data
    (09.06.2022) 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.
    06 - Präsentation
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    CAD optimism. How Architects Interested in Media and Computation Talk about Design
    (09.10.2021) 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.
    06 - Präsentation
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    Publikation
    Modulating Matters of Computation, Modelling and Hyper-Separations
    (15.09.2021) Savic, Selena; Miyazaki, Shintaro
    We engage in a conversation with critical ecofeminism, which proposes to transform the colonialism-racism-capitalism-patriarchalism induced environmental crisis by a non-essentialist countering of oppressions and hyper-separations produced by human/nature dualism. We modulate the critical ecofeminist approach by countering a similar dualism, namely that of nature/technology. Furthermore, our theoretical balance-act has a praxis-oriented side: we believe that computation can be included in ecofeminist action. By providing alternative forms of engagement to instrumentalization, we trace pathways to different futures, countering the binary narratives of technology but also its moralizing of socio-cultural mediation. We take an intersectional approach to outcomes of computational modelling (simulations, visualisations, forecasts) and discuss the ecofeminist method of synthesis as a way to include different perspectives into computational processes. We work with two ‘modulated models’ that pay attention to assumptions, observations and thinking about urban commoning initiatives, and amateur knowledge of radio telecommunications. We aspire to provoke discussions about different modes of inclusion in communities and archives that are centred on shared, environment-friendly, solidarity oriented life-style and mutual care. Our approach engages with feminist arguments and inquires into ways patriarchalism is embedded in our relationship to technoscience and engineering. We explore modes of resistance through proposing skilled and alternative uses of these techniques.
    06 - Präsentation
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    Radio Explorations: Data Observatories of Environmental Radio Tranismissions
    (25.03.2021) Savic, Selena
    The way we order things informs the way we understand and interact with the world, or attempt to design it. A data-driven approach promises to treat the world with computational objectivity. Taken at face value, it rationalizes fairness and adequacy in ways inaccessible to humans; it also implies a certain loss of agency in deciding what matters and how. I propose to invert these concerns and engage with a data-driven approach to providing avenues for recognition of the entanglement of nature and culture, of order and disorder, of energy and matter. In the SNF-funded project Radio Explorations, I examine the capacity of machine learning techniques to support characterizing and identifying environmental radio transmissions. I work with a digital archive (Radio Signal Identification Guide Wiki, maintained by radio enthusiasts) reorganized as a 'digital observatory' that orders data on radio signals based on computable similarity. Through artificial neural networks (ANN) of the self-organising map (SOM), I expose ambient milieus of data as clusters that are found in the dataset. I use the observatory as a way finding tool, to navigate the vast landscape of radio signals, difficult to differentiate and identify even to signal processing experts. By rendering signals commensurable in this way, I articulate ways to study similarity between them, the implications of their discretization as digital audio recordings, and the difference between naturally occurring (atmospheric lightning discharges) and culturally encoded (telecommunications) signals. 'Data observatory' activates interests, reorganizes the archive so that we can decide where to go. While it remains clear that SOM is always only sorting high dimensional data in the space of possibilities that are always/already encoded, I am interested in identifying and characterizing radio signals as technical, cultural and natural phenomena all at once. With this project I hope to contribute to contemporary efforts in promoting digital literacy and seizing more democratic control over digital tools, while acknowledging their political implications.
    06 - Präsentation
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    Radio Explorations: Computing Identities of Transmissions
    (25.03.2021) Savic, Selena
    The SNSF-funded Radio Explorations project engages with a digital archive of radio signals (SIGID Wiki) collected by radio enthusiasts. Radio Explorations operate within the continuum of societal and technological concerns, addressing the onto-epistemologies of radio signals: the process of their categorization and identification. Radio transmissions are hard to characterize because most signals do not have a static representation: especially when transmitting data, signals have different modes, phases, and other temporal variations. Starting from an unordered collection of recordings of different transmissions and their meta-data (frequency, bandwidth, mode, location), the aim of this project is to articulate signals' identities in terms of their own characteristics (rather than pre-existing ontologies). To this end, I examine the capacity of machine learning techniques to support identification of environmental radio transmissions. With artificial neural networks (ANN) of the self-organising map (SOM), I articulate a 'data observatory' that orders data on radio signals based on computable similarity. The 'data observatory' is a digital tool, a navigation apparatus which can be used to orient oneself in the vast landscape of data on radio transmissions. I do not propose to understand these identification processes as world making but, on the contrary, as arbitrary renderings of reality in the eyes of a machine, affirming inherent instability and flexibility of a signal's identity. By rendering signals commensurable in this way, I propose to take an active stance with regards to machine learning algorithms and expose a research interest from which we can learn and tell stories about signals.
    06 - Präsentation
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    Telling Stories on Commoning with Design of Models and Simulations
    (11.03.2021) Savic, Selena
    This talk focuses on commoning as practice, or rather the research project Thinking Toys for Commoning as a practice in understanding commoning, and its complicated relationship with technology. We explored this relationship through making of agent-based models, workshops on tech and commoning, and documenting the relationship between commoning, degrowth, technology, hegemony and making of (computational) toys. We focus on searching for a commoning way to think about technology and the digital in the context of housing cooperatives. I present here in detail two stories that we explore with the computational toys - agent-based models built from the information we gathered from workshops with the coopeartives. The stories are attuned at exploring the entanglements of labour with value extraction in commoning activities and demonstrating the power of convergence of actors around shared interests.
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    Architectonic Studies of Radio Signals: Reorganizing Archives of Data/Natures In Their Own Terms
    (18.08.2020) Savic, Selena
    As we slowly accustom to thinking about planetary issues through the notion of ‘assemblage’ rather than that of the ‘system’, we get better at acknowledging complex entanglements between living and inert, between social and technical. This paper presents a critical reflection on the use of machine learning techniques to support reasoning about natural phenomena. It engages data/natures by focusing on data radio signals: a phenomenon that pertains to both culture (telecommunications) and nature (atmospheric lightning discharges). Signal Identification Guide Wiki, a rich archive of signals observed and documented by a community of radio enthusiasts is the starting point of this study. In order to articulate alternative ways to study and engage with radio signals, I develop 'digital observatories': new methods for organizing and navigating abundant digital information based on critical use of self-organising map algorithm. I present a study of distribution patterns and clustering of signal qualities, when signals are reduced to spectrograms (visual representation of signal frequency composition). This 'digital observatory' aims to facilitate speculation on the connection between signal representation and technical communication protocols, by enabling the observer to identify criteria of similarity, and intervene in this organised space by adding new (real or imaginary) data. The project contributes to the fields of STS and experimental design research with an interest in the digital, unsettling the dichotomies previously described and providing avenues for recognition of the entangled nature of matter and information, of human and other-than-human, beyond simple ontological distinctions.
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    Articulating Politics with Design and Technology: Public Space, Computation and Commoning
    (2020) Savic, Selena; Miyazaki, Shintaro
    If artefacts can have politics (Winner, 1980), and scientific hypotheses can be shaped by political forces (Prigogine and Stengers, 1984) where does this politics come from? Whether we are in autocratic politics or in horizontal decision making based on consensus, design and technology reproduce the principles of the socio-political systems in which they emerged. How does, in turn, design of space and technological artefacts shape the decision making processes in a community? While every kind of social order results in some form of hegemony, Chantal Mouffe (2005) reminds us, agonism reveals the very limit of any rational consensus. In this text, we contrast two extreme hegemonic positions: autocratic design of hostile architectures (unpleasant design) and the (quasi)participative data-driven city management (i.e. smart city); we then discuss an alternative to both, which is driven by a desire for self-organisation, independence and sustainability. In this scope, we discuss an ongoing research project that uses technological artefacts (computational modelling) to probe the agency of these tools in addressing complex topics related to decision making and self-organisation. Touching upon the different hegemonic positions as a starting points for articulating alternatives, we will discuss the connection between sustainable ways of living and technology developed with an emancipatory sensitivity. Working directly with three Swiss housing cooperatives, the research project poses the question of the measure and manner in which new technologies can be not only of use to community efforts but at the heart of their discussions and decision-making.
    06 - Präsentation