cliff

It’s always hardest to come up with an idea when you’re under pressure to do so.  So, in the midst of finalising our current project in mobile telecommunication and indoor prostitution, I’m going to sketch out where I will go once this is all done:

Jokes, interface, social change and schiz

Some key questions:

• Is it possible to construct a ‘joke interface’ - i.e. one that exposes the arbitrariness between the a social or design convention and its application, and by doing so create humour.
• Can such interfaces be used to expose power structures and agendas within the systems that employ them?
• What is the practical relationship between humour and social change/innovation?
• What is the relationship between schizoid laughter (e.g. the world as joke) and the confinement of the mentally ill?

Interface is broadly defined, so the project could start with computer interfaces and branch out to the interface between an individual in distress and the mental health system.  The theoretical dissertation would need to cover one element of this broad range, probably humour and social change utilising new media examples.

Title: Testing events
Location: Here
Description: Wonderful event
Start Time: 10:00
Date: 2010-03-24
End Time: 20:00

Following on from our draft proposal, Alex and I had a good talk with Jean, a student from our MA who graduated the previous year.  One issue that came up was that while keeping the end result open was in some senses laudable, it was better to have some idea of what you are looking to achieve before hand - it makes it easier to approach organisations and will give the project shape and direction.  Perhaps a way to achieve both open-endedness and focus is to come up with ideas but avoid any attachment to them, that we should be prepared to ditch a seemingly brilliant idea because it doesn’t end up fitting with the ends of the community we’re working with.

At present, we’re becoming more and more focussed on sex workers, and so decided to start brainstorming a few possible solutions to communications issues.

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Things have gone in a very different direction again.  I’m working with Alexandra, and our new project proposal is here.

This is a diagram by Alex of our working method for the project, which I’ve uploaded here because the wiki is playing tricks!

I am ditching my original idea entirely.  This is the new angle I want to approach:

The politics and experience of “rawness”
I’m interested in the experience of ‘rawness’ - understood as being that which is one level of processing below that which is normally used and experienced - and the forms of social organisation that spring up around it.  Rawness here could refer to code, but also to handicrafts, home electronics and amateur horticulture; it always refers to an experience of material before it becomes mundane or trivial.  Always there’s a further level of rawness below (machine code, raw plant fibres, constructing components etc) but that needn’t be a concern for now.  I want to start by seeking ethnographic studies on this issues, and by making contact with different groups (maybe starting with people at the volunteer run Phoenix Garden in central London) and letting a proposal grow from there.

I thought the below went on a bit, so I’ve distilled it to the following:

The capitalisation and capture of sociality (putting the libido to work)

The notion of capture, as outlined by Philip Agre, describes a sociotechnical apparatus of control, where activities are organised according to derived grammars of action. It allows for the real time capture of the activity in data systems, improvements in efficiency, protection from liability and so on. I am interested in the ways imposed grammars of action become incorporated into everyday sociality (or vica versa), and ways of responding to this. The example which inspired this line of investigation was the incorporation of ’suggestions’ into facebook whereby social actions are suggested to the user in a way closely resembling the suggested purchases on amazon, which in turn was arguably modelled on word of mouth. I would seek to find and explore other examples and find practical methods to research them in-depth as the first stage of the investigation.

or the binding of praxis to poiesis
or putting the libido to work

(the beginnings of a minor project proposal)

The notion of capture, as outlined by Philip Agre, describes a sociotechnical apparatus of control, where activities are organised according to derived grammars of action. This can allow for the real time capture of the activity in data systems, improvements in efficiency, protection from liability and so on. (e.g. the imposition of fixed finance procedures on an office) With industry becoming increasingly orientated towards sociality, and government expected to account for an increasingly wide array of social problems, there are ever more impetuses to use capture techniques on social interactions to maximise profitability, efficiency and control.

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Here’s a slightly belated write-up of how it all went on the day at Chalkwell Park.  Why so late?  Well, I wonder if the emphasise the nonGroup had taken on process and moving beyond the ownership of ideas has meant that, post-project, we’re not all that interested in how it went.  Indeed, looking over the my compatriots, it seems like we’ve got the lowest incidence of final write-ups on our blogs at this point.  Of course, that’s not the only explanation. Our methodology was both pretty exhausting and not the easiest thing to explain (a long-winded attempt can be found here) - not least because it’s unclear whether we should be assessing the entire nonGroup set of projects, or whether we should focus on our own contribution.  Personally I think its important to look at the entirety of what nonGroup achieved.  So what follows is an assessment of the set of mini-interventions, rather than a personal and methodological assessment which I’ll write separately.

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I’m going to produce a full write-up of the project for the library-logic intervention in Chalkwell Park and the other nonGroup interventions soon - but I’d rather wait until I’ve a little more data from the catalogue before I assess and reflect.  The intervention ended up a larger and slightly more elaborate versions of my Telegraph Hill trial, but more on that later.

However, I thought I would make a few observations now about what I did, while its all still fresh, and perhaps I can give them some consideration later:

• I definitely need to get over my protestant work ethic.  I gave myself far too much grunt work to do - data entry, printing out labels, trawling the shops of Southend.  I could have afforded to do less and thus had more time and energy to spend developing the idea conceptually, or implementing other ideas (there’s one idea in particular that I regret not being able to realise, but more on that later) Read the rest of this entry »

Not a sign

I returned to Telegraph Hill Park on Monday morning, to see what had become of my intervention:

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