More unnecessarily detailed notes! You know I don't remember *anything* unless I write it down.
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reconfiguration
- cultural imaginaries ("the resources we have to think about the possibilities of the world") and material practices
- starts with the figural, as we think metaphorically, so what are the concepts that are available to us
- haraway: technologies materialize imaginaries: "materialized figurations"
- how persons and things are *con*figured
- so what possible *re*configurations might there be?
- shows slide: "guns don't kill people" image of Lee Harvey Oswald assassination "people kill people" & reads from Pandora's Hope? "You are different with a gun in your hand. The gun is different because you hold it."
- so what is the unit of analysis? when we think about people and things, instead of thinking of either as having intrinsic attributes, what happens when they get joined together? What new capacities for action happen when they are joined together? we should be thinking of configurations: of assemblages between people and technology
- some more examples from STS
-- Dawn Goodwin, Acting in Anesthesia: a 3 stage process of redistribution of agency from a person to the machines to the person again - in the middle, the person is still active, but that information is effective only as it is read through the machines.
-- Rachel Prentice, The Anatomy of a Surgical Simulation: surgeons operating through robot arms - how is proximity and distance articulated through digital mediation?
-- Natasha Schull, Machine Life, Design, and Dependency in Las Vegas: the design of gambling into addiction - looks at industry to design of casinos to talking to gamblers: articulating what they call "being in the zone" - the idea is not to win but to be in an incredibly intimate relationship with the machine.
- image from work practice study of civil engineers
-- Susana Bodker, Through the Interface -- we become aware of the interface when it is broken or down -- when it's working we work through it, as if we are directly manipulating the objects.
-- So, CAD as an example. It seems abstract -- but it is tied to many forms of knowing the object
- Gell: "Since the onset of the discipline, anthropology has been signally preoccupied with a series of problems to do with ostensibly peculiar relations between persons and 'things' which somehow 'appear as', or do duty as, persons." Art and Agency, p 9.
- Stelarc's prosthetic head, installed in a gallery in Toronto 2003
-- plays an interaction with Stelarc's head, with Stelarc coaching her
-- ex: Sha Xin Wei, TGarden
--- respecting the capacity for action in the technologies he is working with -- rather than trying to create "human-like" responses, he lets humans and machines each do what they are best at, but makes new capabilities possible through combination
expanding frames and accountable cuts
- we recognize our own participating in constituting in any given moment the relevant units of analysis, in recognizing the boundaries we have to draw, and our accountability in doing so
- we think about our analyses in terms of understanding both our frames and understanding what happens when we look outside them.
current project
- warfare and healthcare: action at a distance and bodies in contact
-- the co-existence of development of technologies that enable projection of action at a distance and the continued salience of embodied co-presence
-- Dutch documentary: robot love (!)
"Agency is not an attribute but the ongoing reconfigurings of the world" Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p 141
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