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Handout: King, for "Sensing and Thinking Complexity and Process." 11 October 2015 -- talk website: http://sympomed.blogspot.com
International Association for Environmental Philosophy (IAEP), Atlanta, GA
A sympoiesis of media: speaking with things
Katie King, Women's Studies, University of Maryland, College Park / Email: katking@umd.edu
Home Page: http://katiekin.weebly.com/ ; follow on twitter @katkingumd ; pinterest talksite: http://pinterest.com/katkingumd/talksites/
Star 2010: 610: As I delved deeper into the relations between developers and users, it
became clear that a kind of communicative tangle was occurring. I used the work of Gregory
Bateson, who had studied these sorts of communicative mishaps under the heading of double
binds. As with Batesons work on schizophrenics, and what he called the trans-contextual
syndrome, the messages that were coming at level one from the systems developers were not
being heard on that level by the users and vice versa. What was obvious to one was a mystery
to another. What was trivial to one was a barrier to another. Yet, clarifying this was never
easy. I began to see this as a problem of infrastructureand its relative nature.
People often cannot see what they take for granted until they encounter someone who does not take it for granted. (Bowker and
Star 1999: 305)
How do you entangle design, science, fact and fiction in order to create this practice called design fiction that, hopefully,
provides different, undisciplined ways of envisioning new kinds of environments, artifacts and practices.... Design Fiction is
making things that tell stories. Its like science-fiction in that the stories bring into focus certain matters-of-concern, such as how
life is lived, questioning how technology is used and its implications, speculating bout the course of events; all of the unique
abilities of science-fiction to incite imagination-filling conversations about alternative futures. ...Its meant to encourage truly
undisciplined approaches to making and circulating culture by ignoring disciplines that have invested so much in erecting
boundaries between pragmatics and imagination. (Bleecker 2005+)
SF scientifiction, science fiction, speculative fiction, speculative feminisms, science communication and fabulation, wormholes
& the plasticities of embedded realities ecological across systems and multiplicities, amid emergent self-organizing agencies
TRANSCONTEXTUAL PRACTICES:
phrases quoted from Bateson: "genesis of tangles," "the weave of contextual structure," and "transcontextual syndrome More
Bateson: It seems that both those whose life is enriched by transcontextual gifts and those who are impoverished by transcontextual
confusions are alike in one respect: for them there is always or often a double take. A falling leaf [or] the greeting of a friendis not
just that and nothing more. (Star & Ruhleder 1996:127 quote Bateson 1972:276; Bateson: 272; Star 2010:610)
A DOUBLE BIND IS
intense: needing fine discriminations between kinds of messages for urgent appropriate response as survival appears to be at stake
contradictory: and this at two different orders of message, each of which denies the other
unvoiced: not permitting the meta-communicative statements that check ones choice of what kind of message is appropriate for
response, or otherwise making such checks of context impossible, inappropriate or meaningless. (See Bateson 1972)
VIBRANTLY MATTERING
How to be an agent among the complex worldly processes humans are not the controllers of, but bits within; studies of emergence and
self-organization. EMBEDDED REALITIES across transmedia storytelling. "Academic practices of all kinds are now also enlisted
as kinds of transmedia storytelling. I call these Queer Transdisciplinarities, but not in a move to enlist them in identity politics,
although sometimes they very explicitly and quite properly are, inside my own feminist fields of interest and attention. Rather,
my point in naming them thus is to watch them queer the pitch: they require us to attend to, to learn to be affected by, the
political economies of knowledge worlds, to how interlinked now are the economies of entertainment, knowledge laborings,
globally restructured academies, governmentalities, and infrastructures of communication." (King 2011, Queering the Pitch.)
THE FUTURE IS NOW: sustainable, commercial, ecological, double bind innovation, restructuring, queering the pitch
"technological advocates who construct diegetic prototypes have a vested interest in conveying to audiences that these fictional
technologies can and should exist in the real world. In essence, they are creating pre-product placements for technologies that do not
yet exist. Film-makers and science consultants craft diegetic prototypes and enhance their realism by creating a full elaboration of the
technological diegesis which includes any part of the fictional world concerning the technology. Through their actions they construct a
filmic realism that implies self-consistency in both the real world and the story world. The creation of diegetic prototypes involves the
inclusion of scenes that provide opportunities to demonstrate this realism as well as positing a real world need for the technology and
the avoidance of scenes that would undermine the technology or cast it as risky." (Kirby 2010: 46)
"Near Future Laboratory is a thinking, making, design, development and research practice based in California and Europe. Our goal
is to understand how imaginations and hypothesis become materialized to swerve the present into new, more habitable near future
worlds." Online at: http://nearfuturelaboratory.com/ (See also Julian Bleeckers work).
Bateson, G. 1972. "Double Bind, 1969. In Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chandler, 276, 272.
-- 1979. Mind and Nature. Dutton
Bennett, J. 2010. Vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. Duke.
Bleecker, J. 2005+. Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction. http://nearfuturelaboratory.com/2009/03/17/design-fiction-a-shortessay-on-design-science-fact-and-fiction/
Bowker, G.C., & Star, S.L. 1999. Sorting things out: classification and its consequences. MIT.
Dunne & Raby. 2012. [Critical Design]. About Us. http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk/content/biography
Gomez, J. (2009). "The Power of Transmedia." Online video from Starlight Runner Entertainment. http://starlightrunner.com/
Haran, J. 2010. Redefining Hope as Praxis. Journal for Cultural Research 14(4):393-408.
Jenkins, H. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where old and new media collide. New York: NYU.
King, K. 2011. Networked Reenactments: stories transdisciplinary knowledges tell. Duke.
-- 2011. "Transdisciplinarities: queering the pitch." Paper for panel Tracing Technoscientific Imaginaries Through Contemporary Culture at the Annual Meeting
of the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S), Cleveland OH, November 5, 2011. Online at: http://queertransd.blogspot.com/p/presentation.html
Kirby, D. 2010. The Future is Now: Diegetic Prototypes and the Role of Popular Films in Generating Real-world Technological Development. Social Studies of
Science, 40(1), 41-70.
-- 2011. Lab coats in Hollywood: Science, scientists, and cinema. MIT.
Star, S.L. 2010. This is Not a Boundary Object. Science, Technology & Human Values, 35/5: 601-617.
Star, S.L. & Ruhleder, K. 1996. Steps toward an ecology of infrastructure. Information Systems Research 7(1), 127.
Star, S.L., ed. 1995. Ecologies of Knowledge: Work and politics in science and technology. SUNY.