Category: Uncategorised

Material Traces – Deitmar Offenhuber

Article from MEDIUM website

Endeavours to see data as something physcial

autographic visualisation is just finding ways to guide INTERPRETATION of a material trace

AUTOGRAPHIC = self-inscribing

anything can be a trace in the right context. its more about framing than mapping…

the interpretation of a traces is still often the result of a particular method of measurement (/methodology?)

Many public controversies — about the nature of climate change, the implications of environmental pollution, or polls in a presidential election — are about how these datasets were collected; whether they are trustworthy and accurately represent the phenomena they describe. While the methods of data visualization excel at revealing patterns in data, they are less useful for addressing methodological debates about the nature and origins of data.

Autographic visualization is a set of techniques for revealing visible traces and guiding their interpretation. Instead of mapping data to visual variables, the designer sets the conditions that allow a trace to emerge. 

  • (as identified on in the article) how does visualisations such as
    • autographic
    • scientific
    • data
  • with semiotic distinctions (as shown in the indexical design talk shown below)
    • symbolic
    • iconic
    • symbolic ???

The symposium explores the physical trace and its role for making sense of the world. We will investigate the different scientific, aesthetic, and rhetoric techniques for making traces “speak.” In Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiology, indexicality refers to the causal connection between an object and its effects in the real world: dyed bacterial cultures in a petri dish, the chemical signatures of pollutants in the environment, the wear on the pages of a book. Indexicality connects the abstract domain of information with bodily experience.

‘geologists consider the geological strata as an archival record whose arrangements express a temporal order.…’

  • feel as though data/scientific visuals have potential to be ‘truthy’ (tim morton) and therefore am curious by integration of trace framing/autographic visualisation (AS A TOOL) with the future or dress.
    • what then would this mean for ‘fashion’? possible new ‘fetishisation’ of gadget-like objects.
    • picturing weird syntho-organic ornaments that unintentionally turned into the contemporary (maybe here find a good word for the port2 modernism?) Apple of today..
  • is autographic visualisations useful when being used on a forum such as ornamentation? In the case of POST CARBON LAB the sequestering microbial textiles indirectly have the potential to be autographical. Observe the existing traces (‘reframe’ via data collection esque lens) – microbial could maybe manipulated to hold a literal code for something in our environment.
  • Dietmar Offenhuber also wrote an article on on autographic visualisations amongst the pandemic.
  • is maybe why I’ve started thinking about permanent pandemic possibilities
  • ESPECIALLY interesting as the vaccine race is because more politicised – not least because its a ‘race’, but also as he information has been released right after the Biden-harris election results.
  • still… hygiene / fear / polarisation (both social and physically ie. vulnerable and the not) / distancing (again, culturally and physically)

An interesting and growing area involves the design of smart materials with autographic properties, with many applications such as 4d printing, micro-fluidic robots, or the use and manipulation of bacteria to visualize environmental properties. !!!!!!!!!!!

Happiness X GDP – Jang Yee

Found as this project is the most recently added to the Autographic Visualisations website (which I found through the Material Traces article by Offenhuber).

Yee looked at sustainable development goals and ‘better’ meant when it appeared so regularly in this linguistically expressed commitment statements.

  • as GDP is typically representative of ‘market success’ and leading to economic stability supposedly..
  • she wanted to look at how this correlated to happiness of populations.
    • this in itself is something to be critiqued
    • the qualitative nature of this measured emotion is curious. How did they find this detail out?

This project made me ponder what it means to speculate via ornamentation and dress.

  • my first issue was; how to avoid the fact dress is so entangled with consumption. Aesthetic representation FOR consumption of sorts.
  • this project made me wonder why she chose earrings. I couldn’t find an explanation and I a bit critical of these objects in the sense they seem like jewellery for the sake of jewellery.
  • I would like to think more academically about why I’m choosing / thinking about dress as the ‘forum’.
  • A late night thought lead me to the fact that we will always need be dressing ourselves, almost as a certainty (maybe fun to think of subversive scenarios of nudists communities OR anti body architecture/anti contact with materiality (due to back lash because of current circumstances/material treatment?!) emerging within this speculation). IF we are certainly wearing things for the future of our non-digital existence, ornamentation has the potential to evolve drastically and become more necessary to not just represent aesthetic culture symbols (maybe undetectable without a code..?) but (what I’m a lot more into) become more tool like. incorporate lost of different mechanisms to aid ‘environmental reformism’.

Craft in the anthropocene – Yesnia Thibault-Picazo

Speculative objects that infer the scarcity of ‘man-made’ materials in the ruin that is our post plastic/petro-chemical/maybe post ‘colonial capitaliscene’ (look up the women that Demos mentions in the e-fliux talk).

Objects have processes done to them that imply similar temporalities of geological artefacts (in its trope-like definition). Newely defined through intentional process and powers of narrative into newly valued sensual qualities (in triple O terms).

  • What counts as a material trace – the kind that get manipulated in indexical design and autographic visualisation?
  • do these objects count as autobiographical.. or just speculative? The traces being observed are natural (what ever natural means…) but altered in order to witness a future.. the effects of time.. the length of time the synthetic materials will be in that new form..
  • maybe the point of a trace is that it already exists or you can watch it existing.. – do these objets count as just existing? is being in ‘our’ temporality necessary?

Self Made – Christina Agapakis Sissel Tolaas

PART OF GOW YOUR OWN EXHIBITION AT SCIENCE GALLERY DUBLIN

Interesting in its personalising and almost cultural cleaning of bacteria.

Project makes bacteria culture, very similar to that of a rind of cheese, from bacteria found in bodily creases such as toes. (a similar form of bacteria is found there)

I think I enjoy this because it seems a creative output positioned in order to make bacteria seem less ‘dangerous’ – Purity and Danger, mary douglas vibes.

I’m Thinking about future scenarios and maybe I am looking into bacteria and microbial ideas/projects because of the likely hood of a never write post-global-pandemic future. Post capitalist, post environmentally ignorant violence, maybe post colonial…

  • experimental test could be take from pater frame and look at various combinations of these above elements
  • giving myself ‘restrictions in order to iterate?

Nature Represents Itself – Susan Schippi

Writer of Material Witnesses. Uses a sort of speculative realist approach to understanding agency of the non-human. It re imagines and ‘re informs’ materialists existence in the ‘dialogue’ of accountability. She also outlines new definitions for information, evidence, matter and ‘event’.

Material witness is, in effect, a Möbius-like concept that continually twists between divulging “evidence of the event” and exposing the “event of evidence.”

It’s a theory of representation (and visualisation?) that is linguistically and terminologically anthropomorphic. It’s linked to other speculative realists so I am interested as to what its links with anthropomorphising is?

For me, Schuppi references the desensitising nature of ‘disaster’ media coverage. This is something referenced by Rob Nixon in his ‘slow violence’ thesis – the relevance of temporalities variation in terms of social media informed human attention span vs. violent acts of ecological damage.

It makes me ask questions of how the visualisations are accessed/location/what forum? Is it the Gallery or is it governmental?

Challenging cinematic visualisation – P. J Demos (E-Flux)

In an E-flux zoom conversation Demos discusses the broad necessities of visualising the current climate and the efficacy of cinematic documentation. Is it really effective to just show beauty in destruction.. what of the slow violence mentioned in the Nixon thesis and the immunised attention spans of the social media generation..

Thinks that OTOLITH group do this interestingly – ‘seismic psyche / popular imagination of disaster prediction’

  •  Kodwo Eshun spoke in the zoom conversation i watched about how people living in the convention that is the anthropocene have turned to finding indexical signs, material traces, to inform them of seismic movements/predictions.
  • ‘living in the anthropocene is to confuse and to complicate the difference between human sciences and so called natural sciences. To confuse the inherited devisions of knowledge of colonial order’
  • he also makes a strange point about a women (Charlotte King) who, when living in this confusion, had taken to thinking her body was able to predict seismic activity, she was especially sensitive to the earth indexes (in this case ones that are more spiritual and physical in my opinion) – and how this links to Bruno Latours call for ‘sensitisation’
    • SO maybe if we didn’t have this subconscious need to different so harshly between nature and science and earth and mind, we would not need to designate a the collecting of indexical signs into delusional/spiritual and scientific/datacolective… if these realms merge (is our perspective of technology vs nature) and we see US and OUR technology AS nature… we could create a space for innovation that nurtures this… objets and tools that mesh together the bodily reactions/visualisations/sensitisations/technology/tools etc….

‘we need to organise social movement activism that can stir the capitalist death spiral from bringing us all to ruin’

‘no more moderationism / reformism’

‘we need a leftist populism’

‘We must challenge the fundamental rule of dominant economic arrangements, that is racial and colonial capitalism as the organising principle of contemporary existence’

someone to further look up is Octavia E. Butler… Her essay : Treasured Strangers: Race, Biopolitics, and the Human in Octavia E. Butler’s XenogenesisTrilogy. The abstract:

  • The Xenogenesis trilogy, written during a period of rapid growth in the neoliberal bioeconomy in the United States, is increasingly relevant today, when our ability to manipulate life has outstripped the ethical and theoretical considerations of reproductive/genetic research and technologies. In this essay I seek to bring the trilogy into conversation with a broader dialogue around reproduction in relation to race, drawing on discussions of scientific racism and medical apartheid. Butler’s work draws on a variety of biopolitical discourses and is deeply concerned with the figure of the black woman as breeder, the history of reproduction as eugenics, and the contemporary “tissue economies” (Waldby and Mitchell) that continue to exploit the reproductive labor of non-white and third-world bodies. The Xenogenesis trilogy illuminates the links between colonialism and biological capital, and uses apocalypse to show how the “human” is constantly being discursively and biologically reconstructed. By contrasting the genetic determinism of the Oankali with humans’ insistence on biological and reproductive independence, Butler enacts a politics of ambivalence that situates reproduction as an ongoing dialectical process within the context of broader ecological systems. Although her work is certainly concerned with genetic engineering, she emphasizes the importance of generation rather than reproduction, articulating a theory of symbiogenesis that sees human evolution as reliant on dynamic relationships with other species and environments.

Synthetic Kingdoms – Alexandra Daisy Ginsburg

Speculating futures of existence where nature and human and technology of natural humans philosophically collide.

Envisioning a 4th dimension to the biological tree of life… 

  • I’m interested in how the body and its extended structural covering may evolve in the future to be ‘toolified’ in new ways. Bacteria, carbon sequestion, autographic tools to identify ecological safety eg…

within this new version of synthetic/natural existence, Ginsburg creates speculative objects formed through synthetic bodily adaption… usually around ideas of the microbial and bacteria evolution with technological changes and CRISPA

Microbial Jewellery – Zhihan Ying

Incorporates living cells into a modular jewellery design as a way to encapsulate an emotion of a moment in time through harnessing the unique BACTERIA.

Ie; a kiss or a whisper

  • interesting idea in our ‘distanced’ world of global pandemic.. how to keep people near whilst keeping them far…
  • how bacteria use of bacteria is harnessed whilst also being shunned in an ultra hygienic world..

Being Material – Lucy McRea

Use of ornamentation / bodily architecture speculation practices to ponder the future of a techno-synthetic-organic experience of human existence.

EG – female reproductive organs being equivalent to a 3D printer.

she advocates absurdity when envisioning futures

“using stories and film making to communicate science (fictions..?), we can reach the fringes of culture and explore the emotional impact of technology how it may redesign our bodies.”

  • A point I can’t help but mention is that McRea explicit speculates the ‘merging’ of body and nature
  • This is interesting to me as it is ignorant of eco-philosophy proposed by Peter Frase in that he states the necessity to understand the non duality of ‘human nature’ – the non dichotomy, advocating a view of human AS nature.

Quotes:

CA: As a scientist, I’ve found working with artists like Lucy to be incredibly powerful for exposing different perspectives on the values and potential futures of science
and technology. Scientists are pressured to project certainty and closure in public, whereas artists create openness and space to question and explore. Art can have a vulnerability that science often can’t, coming with a willingness to take risks for the sake of curiosity without having an ultimate conclusion in mind. 

CA: Lucy’s work explores notions and stereotypes of feminine beauty and how they might intersect with technology, chal- lenging our expectations of what science fiction and what technology can do and what it can look and feel like. By incorpo- rating and reimagining concepts from the wellness and beauty industries, from the spa to perfume and beyond, Lucy’s work has challenged me to rethink some of these “frivolous” products associated with women in the context of technology. Are cosmetics a wearable technology? What about perfume? 

Zhihan Ying’s project Microbiome Jewelry incorporates living cells into a modular jewelry design as a way to encapsulate a memory of an emotion at a moment in time. She designed jewelry that incorporates agar petri dishes that can capture a kiss, a tear, or whis- pered story. When the microbes grow, they become living representations of a memory that can be carried as part of a necklace. 

^ SOSOSOSO ME!!!! bioplastics do this anyway. clothes/body art that grows as we do or the world does….

its autographical in its approach … process is the object. the narrative is the object. the object lives the evidence of both agency and autonomy 

Bacteria engineered as sensors or as therapeutics are being tested in mice and in early clinical trials. This kind of technol- ogy was prophesied by Daisy Ginsberg and James King in their design fiction E. chromi in 2009, imagining a probiotic drink featuring engineered E. coli that sense dis- turbances in the gut and produce an easily detected colored output. 

Biometric Mirror is an immersive installation that blends the act of casually glancing at one’s reflection with modern algorithmic perspectives on facial per- fection. Audiences enter a futuristic sci-fi beauty salon and let an AI scan their bio- metric data to reveal a mathematically per- fect version of their own face. But whose version of perfection is it really? Biometric Mirror embraces flaws in algorithms, either by using crowdsourced AI datasets (thus reflecting societal biases, as a critique of opaque AI today) and models of perfec- tion developed in Western countries (thus reflecting cultural biases, as a critique of the idealized Western individual beauty 

I had recently seen this meme about the uterus being an “onboard 3D printer.” I had a funny thought—is the uterus a wearable technology? I sent over another email saying to Lucy “What will the midwife clinic be like in 10,000 years?” 

^womb as wearable technology 

I like the way the converse with each and spit ball interesting brain farts.