Term Research Review Fall 2011 (for BH)

Duke Work Fall 2011

Network Ecology and the Emergence of Human-Machine Spaces

Grant Project: FHI GDSI. Ongoing

We propose to explore modes of emergence for networks and assemblages as these formations represent the mobile and shifting vitality of human identities and habitations. Drawing on diverse perspectives ranging from Guattari's rich theorization of machinic assemblages to EO Wilson's sociobiological propositions on Consilience to Wendy Chun’s recent work on software and systems, we are thinking about the ways knowledge is transferred, exchanged, and shared through human/machine networks and how this knowledge becomes socially transformed and transformative through its circulation across wide and often non-contiguous ethical, biological, bio-political, governmental, and built spaces. If networks create new surfaces of contact between individuals–both human and machine–how do these networks and their interfaces re-generate themselves in conjunction with the new knowledge they produce? As autopoietic machines, networks manifest themselves variously in the physical materialities and in the phenomenological experience of global cities, virtual worlds, and social games. To understand these machinic assemblages requires us to calibrate our own scholarship to the emergent flows of the network. Because networks have their own particular ways of knowing, we intend to study them within their own vernacular. We will not only use interdisciplinary transliterary methods of interrogation in our research but will then map our researches and their varied disciplinary nodes into an interactive digital universe of living scholarship that will allow scholars to learn from, interact with, and contribute to the information environment. To reflect the interdisciplinary nature of our interrogation, we feel interactive transmedia/transliterary publishing methods are integral not only to our research but also to the dissemination/curation of our materials and to the establishment of a self-sustaining dynamic site for continued–and continuing–critical inquiry.

Technicity & Humanity:  A Networked and Annotated Bibliography, Les philosophes francais, from Bergson to Rancière

Project Complete

How do Bergson, Benjamin, Bachelard, Heidegger, Ellul, Simondon, Leroi-Gourhan, Canguilhem, Debord, Deleuze, Virilio, Stiegler, Gorz, and Ranciere, overlap, diverge, and intertwine vis-a-vis their considerations of la technologie? By exploring the main questions, methods, and positions of each, I create an annotated interdisciplinary bibliography and a networked 'map' intralinking the ideas of each and then interlinking them to relevant critical ideas within the contemporary philosophies (loosely defined) of technicity + humanity.


GreaterThanGames Lab, co-directed by Tim Lenoir, Kate Hayles, and Victoria Szabo
Can we manipulate literary, artistic, and video game architectures to design a game capable of intervening into non-gaming space?
 

s-1: Speculative Sensation Lab, directed by Mark B N Hansen: 

Can we engage literary texts using only our subperceptual sensory directors?