Archive for August, 2008
August 21, 2008 at 4:26 PM · Filed under biotechnology, complex systems, events, heterarchy, host-parasite, relational aesthetics
scanner ants
The CEMA homepage is showing an image of scanner that has opportunistically been colonized by ants (anyone know which species?). I was present at the offending attack, and I have this to say. I didn’t see it so much as an attack as it was (more perversely) an underanticipated observation that ants had quietly moved into an (apparently) unused and undisturbed piece of late 20th century technology- that of the document scanner.
While this may have been felt by some as an attack on our morals of human-hood and right-living (ants and scanners shouldn’t mix, right…er…right?), to me this was much more the most delicate and profound expression not of nature but of the social world in which we live. The most amazing thing to me is that a colony of ants could have arrived and decided that a scanner would make a good home. Perhaps there were some legacy muffins adding allure to the crystal glass and step-motor, but maybe the ants were looking for something held up in the ambient waves of electrical heat left over from un-nourished scans of students’ faces, buttocks, book chapters, and collages.
No..I think this is exactly where we want to be…where mixes and happenstances converge out of nothing more than the desire to find place, continence in the “other”, and the cheap thrill of being where you aren’t supposed to.
On checking up on their status, they are gone from the scanner…pupae and all. I’m not sure if they left on their own accord or if they were kicked out. Where did they go? The water cooler perhaps? As for next time, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that discovery doesn’t correlate with disentanglement. I’d like to keep my scanner ants…who knows…they may have figured out something that we haven’t.
August 15, 2008 at 6:33 PM · Filed under complex systems, ecoregionalism, interdisciplinary, making it public
This intelligence assessment on climate change came out a couple of months ago and had a bit of coverage in the press, NPR especially.
National Intelligence Assessment on Climate Change (PDF)
The compelling section of the report was its recognition of its own limitations, and the kinds of tactics that the intelligence community needs to better understand complexity and difficult social, economic, and environmental issues.
Our analysis could be greatly improved if we had a much better understanding and explanation of past and current human behavior. Continued research to model social human dynamics at the individual and society level would support this improved understanding. This would necessitate the ability to integrate social, economic (infrastructure, agriculture, and manufacturing), military, and political models. Continued research in these efforts—while a significant challenge—could have high analytical payoff. In the interim, assessing the future of a society’s evolution will by necessity be a scenario-driven exercise and an imprecise science. The continued use of outside experts is critical to our success.
It’s somewhat comforting to know that at least the intelligence community is starting to learn that it takes diverse groups of people and disciplinary perspectives to solve difficult problems. Who knows, maybe they will even be willing to seek out non-traditional perspectives from the arts and/or oppositional discourses in their futurecasting.
August 14, 2008 at 10:39 AM · Filed under boundary objects, community interaction design, interdisciplinary, making it public, proposals, teaching and learning, Uncategorized
So here is something neat: I was recently appointed a Senior Researcher at the UCLA Art |Sci Center. I’m currently working on a community website for the Leonardo Education Forum, and organization focused on promoting the intersections of art, science and technology– particularly in educational contexts.
Here is a brief for the project:
How do individual perspectives and group identities impact the development of diverse collaborative networks such as those exemplified by the Leonardo Education Forum? The Leonardo Education Forum is composed of educators, artists, scientists, designers, historians and students from many regions of the world and of diverse ages, backgrounds and perspectives. The main objective of the research is to create an online portal for individuals and groups to find common ground through which they can develop interactions and perspectives that will allow them to establish long-term and robust collaborative and interdisciplinary relationships. Diversity refers not only to the disciplinary affiliations that characterize, for example, artists, scientists, historians, sociologists and designers, but also to different age distributions, regional, and language-based perspectives in addition to the opportunities afforded by differences in socio-technical networks.
We endeavor to create a space that shares events and opportunities for individuals to identify and take part in–i.e. to model behavior across time and space. There is a social networking aspect that seeks to make visible that spaces and regions in which these people, events and opportunities are available so as to extend an existing global network of interactions and perspectives on the relationships of art and science. In particular, we are interested in making best-practices in projects and pedagogy visible and available for students and educators that seek to establish methodology for cross-fertilization among disciplines. Of particular concern are areas of technology whose relationship with individuals is complex and where solutions tend to be controversial (e.g. nanotechnology, climate change, genetic engineering, analysis of human behavior, etc). These tend to be spaces where the interactions among diverse domains are both most necessary and less clearly articulated. They are also areas in which the Leonardo Education Forum can provide creative models for these interactions.
August 13, 2008 at 10:56 PM · Filed under art, critical theory, Design, interdisciplinary, metaphors, visual culture
Yesterday I made a point of visiting the exhibition “Design in the Age of Darwin” at the Block Museum of Art on Northwestern University’s campus in Evanston, IL. The title of the exhibition caught my attention when I was flipping through a Chicago guide while visiting with some family there. The terms “design” and “Darwin” are usually brought up in a controversial opposition. However, this exhibition promised to take a deeper look at the relationships present in the fundamental orderings of Darwin’s work on natural selection and decorative design.
The exhibition takes a sort of auteur-like approach, focusing on a few men prominent in the decorative arts at th turn of the century and just before the birth of so-called modernism. The title includes the notables William Morris and Frank Lloyd Wright as well as C.F.A. Voysey, Louis Sullivan, and Christopher Dresser, an English botanist turned industrial designer.
I wrote in the comment book that the exhibition was well-presented, but that it lacked an engagement with the discipline of evolution as well as any other social and cultural field beyond traditional notions of design.
The missed opportunity lies in the ability to untangle well-tread debates of form versus function from ideas about natural and sexual selection, the role of mutation as a creative force, and the cultural and social appropriation of “selection” in the burgeoning onslaught of mass production and “upward mobility”.
I would have liked to see, for instance, a more overt discussion of Frank Lloyd Wright’s spandrel and the famous (at least within evolutionary biology) paper “The Spandrels of San Marcos”. In it Gould and Lewontin take on the adaptationist perspective which basically says that form must have function and needs a explanation. The adaptationists neglected the role of happenstance (technically, genetic drift) and frequently created “just so” stories to explain the unexplained. Gould and Lewontin’s view was that evolution is a side-effect of a true adaptation, where some traits arise from correlations between a networked body (i.e. gene networks), rather than arising from natural selection. Admittedly, I haven’t read the catalog for the exhibition, but here was a golden opportunity to flesh out the role that complex dynamism plays in evolution. As it stands, the exhibition just furthers the paradigm of intention and selection in the interplay of form and function.
I would agree with the curator’s thesis that Darwin’s ideas contributed to the design sensibility of the age, but it was probably only the case insofar as both Darwin and these designers relied on the metaphor of selection.
Another missed opportunity was the role that social Darwinism played in the development of modernism. For an excellent paper on the subject, see Christina Cogdell’s “Products and Bodies: Streamline Design and Eugenics as Applied Biology.”
What was there were some fantastic examples of Arts and Crafts and Prairie-style decorative and architectural renderings from Chicagoland area collections. It seems almost like the curator was constrained in the availability of ideas and objects to articulate the thesis, and while the show is a unified presentation, there isn’t anything novel to suggest that accounts of art history haven’t yet “speciated”. For the discipline’s sake, let’s hope it doesn’t go extinct.
Gould, S. J., & Lewontin, R. C. (1979). The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 205(1161), 581-598. Retrieved August 13, 2008, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/77447
Cogdell, C. (2003). Products or Bodies? Streamline Design and Eugenics as Applied Biology. Design Issues, 19(1), 36-53. Retrieved August 13, 2008, from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/074793603762667683
August 3, 2008 at 9:31 AM · Filed under bioinformatics, host-parasite, maps, public health
HealthMap
A project called HealthMap (http://www.healthmap.org) makes epidemiological information available to all corners of the world via the web. As reported in the July issue of PLoS Medicine, it extracts, categorizes, filters and integrates a variety of Web-based data sources, even analyzing blogs, listservs, chatrooms, and online news reports as sources for monitoring global health.
The idea is that people’s discussion can serve as signals of disease outbreaks which can then be scraped and fed to a map…
Brownstein JS, Freifeld CC, Reis BY, Mandl KD (2008) Surveillance Sans Frontières: Internet-Based Emerging Infectious Disease Intelligence and the HealthMap Project. PLoS Med 5(7): e151 doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0050151
