Twenty years of artificial life art

This essay begins with discussion of four relatively recent works which are representative of major themes and preoccupations in Artificial Life Art: ‘Propagaciones’ by Leo Nuñez; ‘Sniff’ by Karolina Sobecka and Jim George; ‘Universal Whistling Machine’ by Marc Boehlen; and ‘Performative Ecologies’ by Ruari Glynn. This essay is an attempt to contextualise these works by providing an overview of the history and forms of Artificial Life Art as it has developed over two decades, along with some background in the ideas of the Artificial Life movement of the late 1980s and 1990s.1 A more extensive study of the theoretical history of Artificial Life can be found in my paper ‘Artificial Life Art—A Primer’, in the Proceedings of DAC09 and also at http://www.ace.uci.edu/Penny. Excerpts from that essay are included here.      

Combining remote sensing and anthropology to trace historical land-use changes and facilitate better landscape management in a sub-watershed in North Thailand

A research project intended to extract the history of land-use in a sub-watershed in Thailand by combining remote sensing and anthropology ended up providing local villagers with a useful tool for developing a more sustainable landscape management. In three villages people were interviewed in-depth about historical land-use changes and they helped to make land-use maps approximately covering the years 1973, 1980, 1989, and 1999. These maps were digitized and compared to satellite images from the same years. Trends and discrepancies between the two sets of maps were then analysed and discussed with the villagers in order to establish the local land-use history. The involvement of local groups in the mapping process was instrumental in overcoming long-standing inter-village conflicts, mainly by creating a common knowledge platform on which co-management could be based. The research helped set in motion a process of inter-village forest management cooperation, which was subsequently enhanced by the involvement of CARE Thailand and the local sub-district administration.     

Confronting bureaucracies and assessing value in the co-production of social design research

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the issue of assessing the value of social design research. It locates the emergence of social design practice and research against a background in which public and social organisations are increasingly bureaucratised as a result of New Public Management and shifts to New Public Governance. Within universities, too, organisational processes and structures require research to demonstrate impact within an audit culture. Through the study presented in this paper, we claim that the bureaucracies found in contemporary academia are ill-equipped to adequately assess generative, impactful, and multi-sited research in which value is co-produced with diverse participants. This presents challenges when attempting to understand the value of social design research. Building on social research and studies of innovation policy, sustainable human-computer interaction and evaluation, we define social design research as inventive, contingent, and political. To address the issue of its evaluation, we propose two-stage social design research. In the first stage, research issues, questions, methods, data, and ‘proto-publics’ are assembled, which reveal the conflicting framings and ways that value is assessed. These are re-assembled in a second stage during which the research is stabilised. The findings have implications for research managers, academics and their partners, and university administrators.     

Terminology between chemistry and philology: A Polish interdisciplinary debate in 1900?

During the summer of 1900, the Chemical Section of the Society for the Promotion of Russian Industry and Commerce in Warsaw published a very special booklet in which prominent philologists debated proposals concerning adjustments to chemical nomenclature. Several issues were discussed, including systems of classification of chemical compounds, new specialist terms, and which element names to select among the many then in use. Chemists translated and modified these proposals while strongly disagreeing with using philological expertise. But both the booklet and the debate were novelties within discussions on chemical terminology, which provides an opportunity to examine the peculiarities of such endeavors. This article examines this special moment in the history of chemistry when chemists ceded (partially) their authority over their subject to philologists. I discuss how this episode was shaped by the low grade of academic professionalization in the Polish‐language scholarly community and the practical needs of industry, which engendered different habitus among scholars debating chemical issues. This paper asks what language was for chemists and philologists and which epistemic ideals were linked with it. I argue that this episode was a form of interdisciplinary interrogation in which philologists and their arguments were instrumentalized for the needs of chemists.     

Cultivating the critical imagination: post-disciplinary pedagogy in a computational design laboratory

ABSTRACT

This article documents and reflects upon a pedagogical project aimed at fostering critical engagements with technology in the context of a graduate research and learning laboratory at the nexus of computer science, design, engineering, and architecture. With the notions of critical technical practice and reflective practice as touchstones, the project links a specific tradition of twentieth century design pedagogy to critical sensibilities drawn from the field of science and technology studies (STS) in a space we call the ‘research studio.’ The methods and examples presented illustrate how this hybrid pedagogical model can cultivate the critical imagination of learners – their ability to place critical and sociohistorical reflection at the centre of creative technology design – and show that the fields of design and STS offer distinct but mutually enriching traditions of learning and research. The article offers insight to educators and researchers across STEM and humanities fields interested in engaging with technologies not merely as subjects but also as vehicles of scholarly and creative inquiry.     

Bridging Work Practice and System Design: Integrating Systemic Analysis, Appreciative Intervention and Practitioner Participation

This article discusses the integration of work practice and system design. By scrutinising the unfolding discourse of workshop participants the co-construction of work practice issues as relevant design considerations is described. Through a mutual exploration of ethnography and participatory design the contributing constituents to the co-construction process are identified and put forward as elements in the integration of `systemic analysis' and `appreciative intervention'. The systemic analysis proposes collaboratively grounding the emergent understandings on an inductive and iterative analysis of actual technologically mediated work practice. The appreciative intervention, in turn, calls for envisioning images of future system and context through a recognition of presence and change intertwined in the existing ways of working. The identified elements are joined into three dimensions of interplay, namely the analytic distance, the horizon of work practice transformations and the situated generalisations, which reformulate new conceptualisations of what the integration of work practice and participatory system design is all about. It is suggested that these dimensions together with practitioner participation call into question some of the taken-for-granted assumptions and commonly forwarded intractable disciplinary dichotomies and contribute more generally to bridging work practice and participatory design.     

Surveying the literature on technoscience art: from pioneer stories to collaborations between artists,scientists and engineers as the object of study

The aim of this article is to describe, analyse and categorize the literature on technoscience art in general and technoscience art collaborations in particular. I argue that the literature could be characterized by three thematic traditions: pioneer stories, writing aiming at mapping and categorizing, as well as those problematizing and contextualizing the field. Given that earlier research on technoscience art collaborations primarily consists of art historical and anthropological and ethnographic studies, I further discuss the relation between these approaches and intend to provide a connection between them. Whereas art historical studies are more concerned with issues concerning art history as a discipline, ethnographic studies tend to be more concerned with challenges faced by interdisciplinarity. Finally, I discuss the role of artistic research and art practice in future studies on the topic and emphasize the diversity of the literature on technoscience art, as well as the understanding of technoscience art collaborations as an interdisciplinary effort.