Zoekresultaten

How textiles open up data as a material in and on the body

A designerly journey into textiles and HCI leads to thinking about data as a material for a cybernetic future.

The AVAC-COM communication model and taxonomy: results from application to aviation safety events

Communication problems are acknowledged as hazardous eventualities affecting operations negatively. However, a few systematic attempts have been made to understand the pattern of communication issues and their contribution to safety events. In this paper, we present the AVAC-COM communication model and taxonomy based on the cybernetics approach and a literature review. The model elements and taxonomy variables regard the actors, signals, coders, interference, direction and timing, predictability, decoders, and channels. To test the applicability and potential value of the AVAC-COM framework, we analysed 103 safety investigation reports from aviation published between 1997 and 2016 by the respective authorities of Canada, the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. The overall results of the 256 cases of communication flaws detected in the reports suggested that these regarded more frequently Human-Media and Human-Human interactions, verbal and local communications as well as unfamiliarity of the receivers with the messages transmitted. Further statistical tests revealed associations of the region, time period, event severity and operations type with various variables of the AVAC-COM taxonomy. Although the findings are only indicative, they showed the potential of the AVAC-COM model and taxonomy to be used to identify strong and weak communication elements and relationships in documented data such as investigation and hazard reports.

The Politics of Platformization – Amsterdam Dialogues on Platform Theory

What is platformization and why is it a relevant category in the contemporary political landscape? How is it related to cybernetics and the history of computation? This book tries to answer such questions by engaging in multidisciplinary dialogues about the first ten years of the emerging fields of platform studies and platform theory. It deploys a narrative and playful approach that makes use of anecdotes, personal histories, etymologies, and futurable speculations to investigate both the fragmented genealogy that led to platformization and the organizational and economic trends that guide nowadays platform sociotechnical imaginaries. The dialogues cover fields such as media studies, software studies, internet governance, network theory, urban studies, social movement studies, political economy, management, and platform regulation. The interviews are set up to develop a network of internal cross-references that highlight the multi-layered connections from which platform power emerges.

What is the social in social media?

The use of the word “social” in the context of information technology goes back to the very beginnings of cybernetics. It later pops up in the 1980s context of “groupware.” The recent materialist school of Friedrich Kittler and others dismissed the use of the word “social” as irrelevant fluff – what computers do is calculate, they do not interfere in human relations. Holistic hippies, on the other hand, have ignored this cynical machine knowledge and have advanced a positive, humanistic view that emphasizes computers as tools for personal liberation. This individualistic emphasis on interface design, usability, and so on was initially matched with an interest in the community aspect of computer networking. Before the “dot-com” venture capitalist takeover of the field in the second half of the 1990s, progressive computing was primarily seen as a tool for collaboration among people.

Cybernetics for the Twenty-First Century: An Interview with Philosopher Yuk Hui

In his latest book, Recursivity and Contingency (2019), the Hong Kong philosopher Yuk Hui argues that recursivity is not merely mechanical repetition. He is interested in “irregularity deviating from rules.” He develops what could be called a neovitalist position, which goes beyond the view, dominant in popular culture today, that there is life inside the robot (or soon will be). In the “organology” Hui proposes, a system mimics growth and variation inside its own technical realm. “Recursivity is characterised,” he writes, “by the looping movement of returning to itself in order to determine itself, while every movement is open to contingency, which in turn determines its singularity.”Following On the Existence of Digital Objects (2016) and The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (2017), Recursivity and Contingency is Yuk Hui’s third and by far most ambitious book. Divided into five chapters that deal with different eras and thinkers, it starts with Kant’s reflective judgement, which Hui sees as a precursor to recursivity. The book then moves on to Hegel’s reflective logic, which anticipates cybernetics. According to Hui’s organology (and that of Bernard Stiegler), science and technology should be understood as means for returning to life, as paths towards true pluralism, or “multiple cosmotechnics,” to use Hui’s own key concept from his earlier book.Our understanding of computational possibilities should not be limited to the “disruptive” technologies of Silicon Valley, oriented as they are towards short-term profits. Hui looks beyond this myopic view of technology. His foundational project is to dig into the philosophical foundations of today’s digitality, to examine the episteme that presents itself as a new form of totality (or as a “techno-subconsciousness,” as I have described it elsewhere). How can we think individuation in an age when the online self is surrounded by artificial stupidity and algorithmic exclusion in the name of ruthless profit maximization and state control? Is there a liberated self inside cybernetics?

On socialist cybernetics, accelerationist dreams and Tiqqun's nightmares