NZ On Screen is the online showcase of New Zealand television, film and music video. It’s fully funded by NZ On Air. There are over 1700 titles on the site, including iconic TV episodes, classic music videos, and landmark documentaries. All titles are free to watch.

I believe that when you place cultural artefacts online, you help democraticse access to it. You highlight heritage, encourage identity-making and engender creativity. Today’s most viewed title, This Way of Life, epitomises my view.

From Today’s Levitation.

Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It’s a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best. And yet, it’s the star player in every Vision Of The Future.

Achilles and the Tortoise

The Grandfather Paradox

The Chinese Room

Hilbert’s Infinite Hotel

The Twin Paradox

Schrödinger’s Cat

Translation is central to Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Actors have diverse interests. The creation of a network rests on the ability to appropriate other’s interests to one’s own. Callon uses four “moments” to describe the process of translation. These four moments are comparable to Latour’s five elements. They are (a) problematisation: how to define the problem; (b) interessement: how to get other actors interested in the problem; (c) enrolment: how to get other actors to accept their roles; and (d) mobilization: how to get the public to accept actors as their representatives.

Enrolment, when an actor accepts the interests defined by the prime actor, is a crucial part of translation. In Callon’s study, three researchers who witnessed the successful cultivation of scallops in Japan, must enroll the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay, France (where scallop stocks have dangerously dwindled due to predation, bad weather and overfishing) to participate in a research programme of restocking the Bay. With much more difficulty, the scallops of St Brieuc Bay must also be enrolled: Larvae must anchor where researchers have placed Japanese-designed collectors.

Currents and parasites plagued the researchers, and two years later, the larvae remained unwilling to anchor at collectors. The fishermen mutinied and harvested all the scallops hatched from the few cooperative larvae one Christmas Eve. The researchers were unable to enroll and ultimately to translate the scallops and fisherman of St Brieuc Bay and the research programme catastrophically failed.

I’ll be asking if enrolment and translation was successful in my research projects The Case of the Midnight Note and Torokiki. The users of Midnight Note and Torokiki in particular reminded me of the scallops of St Brieuc Bay. We struggled to understand, to enroll, and therefore to translate users. We knew they were out there but they were just as shy of Midnight Note and Torokiki, as the scallops were of the collectors. So what went wrong?

Perhaps the answer lies with inscription, an ANT concept from Madeleine Akrich (1992). Akrich suggests that designers anticipate who future users may be and inscribe this idea into the things they create.

Designers thus define actors with specific tastes, competencies, motives, aspirations, political prejudices, and the rest, and they assume that morality, technology, science, and economy will evolve in particular ways. A large part of the work of innovators is that of “inscribing” this vision of (or prediction about) the world in the technical content of the new object…The technical realization of the innovator’s beliefs about the relationship between an object and its surrounding actors is thus an attempt to predetermine the settings that users are asked to imagine…(Akrich, 1992, p. 208).

Going back to my research question, “How can we assist the developer to become self-visible in the interactive process of creating a user script?”, the projected users “like me and my friends” were written into the user scripts for Midnight Note and Torokiki and the outcome was that only those users engaged with the games.

References

Akrich, M. (1992). The de-scription of technical artifacts. In W. E. Bijker & J. Law, (Eds.), Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Callon, M. (1986). Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay. In J. Law (Ed.), Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge. Retrieved from http://ionesco.sciences-po.fr/com/moodledata/3/Callon_SociologyTranslation.pdf

Two concepts from actor network theory are of particular relevance: inscription (Akrich 1992; Akrich and Latour 1992) and translation (Callon 1991, 1994; Latour 1987). The notion of inscription refers to the way technical artefacts embody patterns of use: “Technical objects thus simultaneously embody and measure a set of relations between heterogeneous elements” (Akrich 1992, p. 205). The term inscription might sound somewhat deterministic by suggesting that action is inscribed, grafted or hard-wired into an artefact. This, however, is a misinterpretation. Balancing the tight-rope between, on the one hand, an objectivistic stance where artefacts determine the use and, on the other hand, a subjectivistic stance holding that an artefact is always interpreted and appropriated flexibly, the notion of an inscription may be used to describe how concrete anticipations and restrictions of future patterns of use are involved in the development and use of a technology. Akrich (1992, p. 208, emphasis added) explains the notion of inscription in the following way:

Designers thus define actors with specific tastes, competencies, motives, aspirations, political prejudices, and the rest, and they assume that morality, technology, science, and economy will evolve in particular ways. A large part of the work of innovators is that of “inscribing” this vision of (or prediction about) the world in the technical content of the new object. (…) The technical realization of the innovator’s beliefs about the relationship between an object and its surrounding actors is thus an attempt to predetermine the settings that users are asked to imagine (…).

Stability and social order, according to actor-network theory, are continually negotiated as a social process of aligning interests. This takes place in “the process that is called translation which generates ordering effects such as devices, agents, institutions, or organizations” (Law 1992, p. 366). As actors from the outset have a diverse set of interests, stability rests crucially on the ability to translate, that is, re-interpret, re-present or appropriate, others’ interests to one’s own. In other words, with a translation one and the same interest or anticipation may be presented in different ways thereby mobilising broader support. A translation presupposes a medium or a “material into which it is inscribed”, that is, translations are “embodied in texts, machines, bodily skills [which] become their support, their more or less faithful executive” (Callon 1991, p. 143).

In ANT terms, design is translation: “users’” and others’ interests may, according to typical ideal models, be translated into specific “needs,” the specific needs are further translated into more general and unified needs so that these needs might translated into one and the same solution. When the solution (system) is running, it will be adopted by the users by translating the system into the context of their specific work tasks and situations.

In such a translation, or design, process, the designer works out a scenario for how the system will be used. This scenario is inscribed into the system. The inscription includes programs of action for the users, and it defines roles to be played by users and the system. In doing this she is also making implicit or explicit assumptions about what competencies are required by the users as well as the system. In ANT terminology, she delegates roles and competencies to the components of the socio-technical network, including users as well as the components of the system (Latour 1991). By inscribing programs of actions into a piece of technology, the technology becomes an actor imposing its inscribed program of action on its users.

The inscribed patterns of use may not succeed because the actual use deviates from it. Rather than following its assigned program of action, a user may use the system in an unanticipated way; she may follow an anti-program (Latour 1991). When studying the use of technical artefacts one necessarily shifts back and forth “between the designer’s projected user and the real user” in order to describe this dynamic negotiation process of design (Akrich 1992, p. 209).

Some technologies inscribe weak/flexible programs of action while others inscribe strong/inflexible programs. Examples of the former are tools, the hammer being a classic example and the assembly line of Chaplin’s “Modern times” a standard illustration of the latter.

Inscriptions are given a concrete content because they represent interests inscribed into a material. As Law (1992, p. 387) points out:

“Thus a good ordering strategy is to embody a set of relations in durable materials. Consequently, a relatively stable network is one embodied in and performed by a range of durable materials”.

The flexibility of inscriptions vary, some structure the pattern of use strongly, others weakly. The strength of inscriptions, whether they must be followed or can be avoided, depends on the irreversibility of the actor-network they are inscribed into. It is never possible to know before hand, but by studying the sequence of attempted inscriptions we learn more about exactly how and which inscriptions were needed to achieve a given aim. To exemplify, consider what it takes to establish a specific work routine. One could, for instance, try to inscribe the routine into required skills through training. Or, if this inscription was too weak, one could inscribe the routine into a textual description in the form of manuals. Or, if this still is too weak, one could inscribe the work routines by supporting them by an information system. Hence, through a process of translation, one and the same work routine may be attempted inscribed into components of different materials, components being linked together into a socio-technical network. By adding and superimposing these inscriptions they accumulate strength.

Dogs are culturised, subservient, autonomous devices, almost robot-like in a sense; feline devices, on the other hand, would stand outside of this – they would continue to account for themselves, and their interests and actions would merely converge with human interests at various points in time. (Snurb’s blog, 2011)

…three sessions on the relationships between society, space and nature, and how they are currently being transformed both theoretically and by technological and environmental changes in the world. (Tate Channel, 2004)

Manuel DeLanda

http://channel.tate.org.uk/media/26608082001

N Katherine Hayles

http://channel.tate.org.uk/media/26608063001

Bruno Latour

http://channel.tate.org.uk/media/27686262001

Part 2 – Honours

Part 3 – Curiosity

]]> http://clarionjulie.info/2011/10/27/the-feynman-series/feed/ 0 Cj http://clarionjulie.info/2011/08/25/the-little-wild-urbanisations/ http://clarionjulie.info/2011/08/25/the-little-wild-urbanisations/#comments Wed, 24 Aug 2011 20:24:30 +0000 clarionjulie http://clarionjulie.info/?p=568 ]]> I travelled to Andalusia especially to do an art course with Simon Beckmann at Cortijada Los Gázquez. Little did I imagine, all those months ago when I first contacted him, that I would have so much fun or learn so much from the experience. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

The following information about our art project, Las urbanizacioncitas salvajes (The little wild urbanisations), is taken from Simon’s blog and Facebook.

Big thanks to Joya intern, Gonzaga Gómez-Cortázar Romero, for his photography and translation skills.

Las urbanizacioncitas salvajes

Las urbanizacioncitas salvajes (The little wild urbanisations) is a collaborative open-ended fine art media project between Simon Beckmann and Clarion Wells.

The initial project is to make an installation of miniature housing developments that seek to exploit the natural habitat of fauna that live in and around Cortijada Los Gázquez in the Parque Natural Sierra María-Los Vélez. The installations will be ephemeral and synthetic, utilising only naturally occurring material that in no manner impacts on real habitats.

One urbanisation will be created a day over a period of five days. Each “new town” will have a name and be located on Google Maps, utilising alternate systems of navigation such as memory; the transient nature of dry fluvial systems; and the sound carried by the thermal winds. The project will be shared online through the Cortijada Los Gázquez blog, the Joya: arte + ecología Flickr and Facebook pages, and a smartphone application.

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Las urbanizacioncitas salvajes es un proyecto artístico con final abierto realizado por Simon Beckmann y Clarion Wells.

El proyecto consiste en realizar una instalación de miniaturas de casas que pretende aprovechar el hábitat natural de la fauna que vive en el entorno de Cortijada Los Gázquez en el Parque Natural de Sierra María-Los Vélez. Las instalaciones serán efímeras y sintéticas, y serán fabricadas sólo con materiales naturales que no tienen ningún impacto en el medio.

Se creará una urbanización al día durante un periodo de cinco días. Cada “nueva ciudad” tendrá un nombre y será ubicada en Google Maps. Todas ellas serán accesibles por medios poco frecuentes, como la memoria, la cambiante naturaleza de los ríos secos, y el sonido que transporta el cálido viento. El proyecto se podrá seguir por Internet a través del blog de Cortijada Los Gázquez, la páginas de Flickr y Facebook de Joya: arte + ecología, y una aplicación de Smartphone.

“New towns” on Google Maps

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