Suchergebnisse

1. Introduction : stigma, sexuality, and industry dynamics -- 2. An institutional history of pornography -- 3. Identities, opportunities, and white-color jobs -- 4. Constructing the mainstream, leveraging deviance -- 5. Trade shows, trust, and sense-making -- 6. Technologies, services, and infrastructures -- 7. The global market -- 8. A core-stigmatized industry?

Ground Resistance was a multisite installation which examined the presence, absence and temporality through the developing 'smart city' of Milton Keynes. *** A unit in the centre.mk shopping mall was converted to house a large floor-projected map of Milton Keynes, displaying a constantly updating view of geo-located data related to the 'hard' infrastructures of the city, such as energy utilities, public services, and transport. The data is being drawn from the Open University's MK:Smart data hub, a citywide project of data collection, drawn from multiple industry and governmental sources. As with many such 'smart city' systems, many of these datasets update at wildly varying rates, making any one view of the city through the data a momentary one, rather than omniscient. In Ground Resistance, this friction of time in the 'always on' smart city is the lens through which the data is seen. Each data set constantly fades in and out of view, with its rate of disappearance matching the rate at which it updates; a data set which updates every one minute will appear and then slowly fade away over one minute. A speaker installation above the map correlates ringing bells to the locations on the map below. These sounds are also synchronised to the update rate of each dataset, their volume fading as the data ages, and rising again when a new update occurs. With each data set functioning at a different set of 'real time', this creates a generative sonic environment in the space which is defined by the often-overlooked temporal element of a data-oriented view of a city. Objects suspended above head height between the projector and the floor cast shadows which match the areas of Milton Keynes that the system has no data for, drawing audience attention to this absence. The shadows appear like voids, disrupting the usual seamlessness often seen in data visualisations. Through this installation, we highlight the non-unitary and often fragmentary view of cities when seen by the data they generate, which exists in conflict with the 'data solutionism' of popular dialog surrounding smart cities. *** At a satellite installation in the nearby National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, an intimate watching station uses low cost and mass-produced hardware alongside open-source software to examine how the people of the city can detect and monitor data embedded in radio signals to watch the logistical infrastructure which underpins smart city technologies. The installation is presented in the gallery dedicated to the demonstration and examination of the Colossus supercomputer, which is kept operating every day. *** Finally, an online component to the work views the open data around Milton Keynes as an overlaid map, allowing viewers to plan a public transport route across the city which negotiates the density of the data in the town as if it were a topological feature of it.

San Francisco has its military history written across its bones. Its motto Gold In Peace, Iron in War sites the materials of warfare within civic prosperity. Situated Systems, a sprawling, multifaceted art, journalism and research project explored this industrial and military history, and its role in shaping the region's contemporary technology industries' culture and practices. Located in Donna Haraway's notion of situated knowledges, this work interrogated land use, environmental impact, and re-appropriated use of heavy machinery in military innovation. Drawing and reflecting on the practices and affordances of digital fabrication and additive manufacturing, we created a complex collection of objects, publications, tools, and installations as artworks, exhibitions, journalism, and learning resources. These included: Mare Island Extension Kit: Models of heavy industrial machinery original used in military shipyards, now repurposed for civilian use; and their new operators. Captured through photogrammetry and created with additive manufacturing. This work was created through the inaugeral residency at Experimental Research Lab at Autodesk's Pier 9, San Francisco; and was a collaboration between myself, Ingrid Burrington, Deb Chachra, and Sherri Wasserman.

This longform essay explores the processes and politics of artistic residences in scientific institutions. Featuring interviews with Bill Fontana, Semiconductor, Ariana Koek, Charles Lindsay, and Anna Dumitriu, this piece examines the different types of artistic practice which emerge in these spaces; and the conflicts around what artists are permitted to produce under the power dynamics of such systems.

Commissioned by Haunted Machines at Future Everything. This piece located the sociology of expectations around militarised and gendered technologies in the use of magic in the film, The Craft. Ethnographer and writer Georgina Voss's talk centres on the ways that technology creators summon visions and expectations into the world. Who gets to define what our technology is, or will become, and what dark magic arises? A mini-conference inside FutureEverything 2015, hosted and guest curated by artist and designer Tobias Revell, and FutureEverything's Natalie Kane, Haunted Machines reflected on the narratives of magic and hauntings pervading our relationship with technology and began to analyse why these narratives exist, what they mean and what they do.

A performance lecture given at Improving Reality, 2013, placing the the politics of Silicon Valley innovation systems against Fighting Fantasy novels.

By 2050, half the world's population will live in cities — Ancient Proverb You have, surely, seen or heard the above statement before—in newspaper articles, possibly, or government documents; perhaps as wall-text at an art exhibition; perhaps whispered into your ear by an anonymous commuter. Words summon action. Describing a near-future in which half of the global populace will inevitably—definitely!—live in cities is not a value-neutral offering but an invocation to act. This proverb drives policy development for the United Nations, forms the opening gambit of a great many foresight reports and acts as the backbone of the property development industry. It is a compelling pitch for businesses and govern- ments looking to shore up certainty in an age of instability and volatility, framing half the world's population as a captive audience for policy, surveillance and sales. Positioning the city as the nexus of mass human experience for the foreseeable future sets up a land-grab for who gets to define what these cities will look like. And what is being imagined often seems to be terribly similar, both in terms of what these cities look like, how they are controlled and what forms of technological systems will thread through them. It is these apparently inescapable future-metropolitan visions that critical approaches to design, architecture and urbanism seek to challenge.

What a difference a month makes. Like Brexit before it, the shock victory of Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election has not only upended the political order in the short term, but it has also re-routed the types of technological futures that America might now get. Long-form journalism exploring how ideas and political strategies concerning futurity around technologies shift under populist regimes.

As Above Not Below is a data visualisation and sonification installation which exposes the impalpable infrastructure of international airspace, and the limits of our access to the sky above us. A large floor-projected map of Belgium displays the visual boundaries and structures of alternating air regulations – civil, military, prohibited – to expose how the country's form is radically re-shaped through this regulatory infrastructure. Data collected via ADSB radio transmissions from nearby aircraft allows their movements to be projected onto the map to expose how these regulations interact with our everyday experiences of air travel. The sounds of the air traffic control communications move through the installation space alongside the vessels, exposing how these regulatory conditions also determine linguistic modes of communication. When we were not granted access to these communications, they are replaced by the external sounds of planes, exposing how frequently our access to this system is blocked by the regulations themselves.

This essay, 'Internet of Bombs' acts as response to and contextualising tool for the MA projects. In it, we take the long view, considering the use of the autonomous weapons of war animals in Ancient Greece; and considering how, as in WWII 'area bombing' the efficacy of a weapon (re)defines a target. We trace precision tracking, sensing, and control from Cold War era computerisation of military strategy, into modern day offerings and operations around the Internet of Things, the 'smart city', and the networked world. A long-form essay which takes the long view around autonomised weaponry, considering the use of the autonomous weapons of war animals in Ancient Greece; and considering how, as in WWII 'area bombing' the efficacy of a weapon (re)defines a target. We trace precision tracking, sensing, and control from Cold War era computerisation of military strategy, into modern day offerings and operations around the Internet of Things, the 'smart city', and the networked world.

The past 15 years have seen dramatic changes in social norms around sex and sexuality in the UK and worldwide. In 2011, the London Natural History Museum (NHM) contributed to these debates by opening the temporary exhibition Sexual Nature, which aimed to provide 'a candid exploration of sex in the natural world' whilst also drawing in an under-represented audience of young adults. Sexual Nature provides an opportunity to explore MacDonald's 'politics of display' in the mutual construction of (public) scientific knowledge, society and sexuality, at a time of intense contestation over sexual norms. Whilst Sexual Nature both reflected and contributed to major reframings of sexuality and what science can say about it, the assumption that it would be possible to present this topic as morally neutral, reliable and uncontested, in line with traditions of public science, proved to be problematic. The language of the exhibition moved back and forth between human/animal similarity and difference, and between scientific and cultural tropes as the NHM tried to maintain epistemic authority whilst also negotiating the moral boundaries of acceptable sexual behaviour. The topic of sex pushed the museum far beyond its usual expertise in the natural sciences towards the unfamiliar territory of the social and human, resulting in an ad hoc search for, and negotiation with, alternative sources of expertise. Boon et al's co-curation approach to exhibition building has the potential to extend the NHM's audience driven strategy, whilst also producing a more coherent and nuanced exhibition about the science of sex.

Industrial robotics and the hardware and software of automation have been at the center of the discourse on computational design and digital fabrication for more than a decade. Initially developed for the execution of repetitive tasks in the context of serialized production and manufacturing, robots and industrial machines have been repurposed, reprogrammed, and rethought for an array of new tasks, as well as new approaches to what they can do and what they can represent. However, the meaning, histories, and array of metaphors surrounding robots inform design and creative practice. This keynote conversation brought together five designers, scholars, artists, and practitioners whose work engages with robotics and automation, specifically focusing on their implications in design and creative practice, and their complex cultural and political histories.