Marbre, Nivôse, 228: How do you know if you produced knowledge?

Sometimes it’s hard to think big when your weekly ambition is just to read all your emails. I tweaked the design of this thing again. Blogger's current favourite thing is not saving HTML changes so I have to edit offline then 'restore' the HTML. It’s been a few weeks since the last post and now we’re in a glorious new Gregorian decade so this is a long one, sorry.

There’s still a lot of these 'decade/year in review' things going out on the social networks where folks list what they consider to be achievements over the period. I won't be doing one, I feel pretty divided about them. It feels vainglorious, boastful and my internal logic suggests that getting things done is in and of itself the validation rather than having other people acknowledge that you did it. On the other hand, it’s been really nice reading all the incredible things that people have been up to in the face of what to many has been years of adversity and struggle. I don’t know. If you know me well you know that I feel ‘sticky’ about talking about my own work. I don’t like it because a) if it was any good it would speak for itself b) if it’s not good then it’s not worth talking about and I’m just taking up airspace from people doing good work which is why (barring one attempt) I never do these year/decade in review things. Anyway, moving on from thoughts that will inevitably land me in trouble on twitter dot com forward slash replies…

Upcoming: Reciprocal Studio - What if Our World is Their Heaven?


Today Natalie and I are starting teaching one of the Reciprocal Studios for MA Graphic Media Design at LCC as Haunted Machines. These are small, short and directed specialist briefs run by creative practitioners that the students can sign up to. We’ve decided to run it about automated image production and the imagination, inspired heavily by the work of Joel McKim but using Carl Di Salvo’s strategies for designerly responses. We’ll do our best to document outcomes and process as we go on the Irish microblog and Instagram (there’s no Haunted Machines Instagram, you just have to follow us as individuals).

How do you know if you produced knowledge?

I’m putting together the ‘methodology’ bit of my PhD. 'Methodology' is such a vague word but I’m summoning the courage to look at the work I’ve been doing the last three years and ask why I did it that way. At some point I decided that speculative and critical design wasn’t doing what I wanted intellectually as far as furthering discourse goes. But I’m forced to consider why I chose to switch into a more artistic approach as in Augury, Finite State Fantasia and Charismatic Megapigment. I’m pretty comfortable describing and arguing about how it’s still ‘designerly;’ I’m always considering legibility of communication, the audience’s needs and experiences and using technical strategies to steer thoughts and behaviours. And in terms of 'research for design' I subscribe to the idea that we learn from doing and I can talk more authoritatively about, for example, machine learning, by actually making something that plays around with machine learning than speculating on it at some intellectual and technical distance.

But then why is this artistic, installation-style approach of Augury, Charismatic Megapigment and Finite State Fantasia effective at engaging audiences. Some of the speculative design work I’ve done is quite measurable – it went into policy papers, was presented at the Hour of Commons etc. So why does weird-tech-art feel better. I put it out on Irish microblog Twitter dot com and got some nice responses when I asked if anyone knew of ways of measuring the impact of critical practice. A couple of folks got back in touch saying that it’s about how things influence the zeitgeist, enter the canon or start to steer conversation. I think this is perhaps the right lead so Ill head down that rabbit hole for a while. I got some good links to things as well which I’ve listed here:
I also figure I should chuck in Matt Malpass' Critical Design in Context and Carl Di Salvo's Design and the Construction of Publics as brilliant sources. Steph suggested that impact/change assumes a testable hypothesis which I can see a problem with when it comes to critical creative practice, but these projects are in some way hypothesised. For instance, to take Augury, a hypothesis might be; 'Can we have a different type of conversation about machine learning if we talk about it as a semi-occult thing in the context of thousands of years of occult practice?' How then, can I test that hypothesis; of course standing in the gallery led to conversations, and it got a little traction in articles and blogs, but does that change the cultural assimilation of machine learning?

It's much easier to blog about this stuff than write it up academically, that's for sure.

Voyager

I made some slow progress on Voyager over the break. Now that the Arduino knows where Voyager is relative to its position on Earth, the next stage is getting the Arduino to know where north is so it can make sure it’s pointing the right way. To do this I’m going to attach a BNO055 to the arm of the sign so that it will know what way it’s facing and at what angle it is. This is most important for when it first turns on and perhaps running occasional checks for drift.

Of course there’s always a little problem. In the image you can see the BNO055 using pins A4 and A5 for I2C communication with the Arduino Uno. I’d assumed that it would be the same pins on the Rev 2 (which I thought was just an Uno with a WiFi chip) but no, it actually has two special pins near the top of the digital pins for I2C stuff. So that was a few wasted hours trying to figure that out. The second problem is calibration. This takes a long time and requires moving the board around every time it turns on. Luckily Bohle Bots is a library that actually stores the calibration to the Arduino’s memory once done. Now that's all done I need to actually start making the thing so I can figure out where all the components will go and begin working on the motors. That's probably a little way off though, there's a lot of other things to do first. 

Things I learned this week:

  • I’m at the bit of the philosophy podcast about Jewish Andalusian ethics which is really good. I just heard all about Bahya Ibn Paquda (1050-112) who wrote the ‘Duties of The Heart’ which was a curiously accessible book on Aristotelean ethics in the context of the revealed Jewish texts. 
  • My commuter bike has a Sturmey-Archer coaster brake hub on it which hasn’t been shifting properly for the last few months. I finally decided to give it a look over and discovered that the cable just wasn’t moving in the housing. Easy enough to replace but along the way I learned that brake and gear cables are teflon-coated. So that was new. Not important, but new.
  • I went out for the first ride of the year at the weekend, intending to do the 80 mile loop from my place to Box Hill and back. What i learned was it was very cold. Which was fine once I got going. However, for some reason, the bolts holding the cleats on my right shoe protrude a little too far into the shoe and were literally conducting cold into my toes so they were numb for 41.9 miles. Again, not super interesting but true. I need to put some spacers on that little guy. 

Channel Game Recommendation

Amazingly, I haven't been on the YouTubes much over Christmas so don't have a new channel recommendation. I finished up playing This War of Mine and I don’t think I’ll go back for a second game. The game focuses on a group of survivors in a war-torn city and involves a mix of scavenging, crafting and occasionally fighting. It was really good at the beginning but a bit like with other resource management games, the middle-end is pretty repetitive. Once you’ve got your shelter set up and have all your crafting gear it’s mostly just a rinse and repeat job to manufacture and trade stuff. Also, the game is quite long for that amount of repetitiveness. So, on the recommendation of the Internet and Wes I went in to buy Disco Elysium for my Christmas game and HOLY SHIT what. a. game. 

I genuinely struggle to think of an indie story-driven RPG I’ve been so engaged with. It’s a small but super-rich world, everything appears to have meaning and connection, the writing is wonderful, the gameplay is tense and the world is weird af. You play an alcoholic, amnesiac detective in a surreal China Mieville-esque fictional city where you’re trying to figure out who killed a man who’s been hanged behind your hotel and also who the hell you are any why you tried to drink yourself to death. The character development works on different parts of your ‘self.’ Things like logic, rhetoric, drama, composure, electro-chemistry, empathy, reaction speed etc. What’s more, these different parts are also characters in the story, intervening in conversations to talk with you or bicker with each other, meaning that you most often fail to trust your self in the way that you make decisions. It’s a bleak, funny, horrifying, surreal and wonderful game which I can’t recommend enough. It's probably about 30 hours all in to get the full experience, so if you've got a couple of evenings, get on it. Amazing.


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Érable á Sucre, Frimaire, 228: Project PROBE 2, All the Fun of the Fair

I redesigned the blog a little. I'm not super happy with it. Blogger is pretty pernickety but I've never really found a platform that isn't. One of the major issues is it just doens't do responsive design and paradoxically is really reluctant to be just simple. It's all about embedding images, drop shadows and widgets. Also, because it's from another era, it thinks 720px is 'extra wide' so I have to go through and manually resize each image in the HTML for 2019. Think about that as you're reading. A straight column of text with well-placed images is almost impossible.  Also, sorry but most of this is about Project PROBE. If you’re bored by maths and technical processes, turn away or scroll down to the bottom.

Project PROBE Voyager

I was writing this while trying to keep the nature of the project secret and realised that it was basically impossible. So, this is the project I’ve been working on; Voyager. It’s basically a two-axis sign using stepper motors that will point to Voyager I and display its distance.


Last week  I introduced the first bit of this which was testing out the Arduino Rev 2 that the whole thing is going to run off. As I wrote, it needs to be able to connect to the Internet and get its own orientation. So that it can point to where Voyager I relative to where it is. The second part which occupied a lot of the week has been working out the mathematics and geometry that will allow it to work. The process will be:
  1. During the setup, when booting, the Arduino will grab its location from the Unwired Labs Geolocation API. It only needs to do this once when turned on. 
  2. Then during setup it needs to calibrate the magnetometer and find magnetic north. 
  3. Then it's into the loop. First, grab the coordinates (right ascension and declination) and distance of Voyager 1 from here. via a simplified API. Luckily I already set one up for decline.online that I can probably piggy-back on. This only needs to be done every hour or so; the celestial coordinates of Voyager are pretty stable. 
  4. Run through the calculations that will use the right ascension and declination of Voyager with longitude, and latitude of the Arduino to work out an azimuth (heading) and altitude for Voyager from where it is.
  5. Using the magnetometer’s reading, turn the motors to point the right way.  

Astronomy Maths

This flow reads very simple but I can already see there’s a bunch of things to think about: The Arduino needs to know its datetime in order to work out the heading and altitude of Voyager and Arduinos have no internal clock. Though the speed is obviously consistent, it changes relative to Earth as we move in our orbit (and Earth rotation) towards it, and away. You can see this on the visualisation of decline.online. Anyway, I decided to run the whole thing through Excel to check the maths and inputs before finding a way to implement on Arduino. I’ll share all of these materials this once the project’s all wrapped up but I found this a useful way of checking how the numbers would work:

The two crucial numbers I need are the azimuth (or heading) and altitude of Voyager for the point of view of the Arduino’s longitude and latitude. I found these really useful guide to converting those coordinate systems through what reads as relatively simple trigonometry.

The first thing you need to do is calculate your Local Sidereal Time (LST). This is the time at your location relative to the movement of the celestial sphere rather than the sun. You can check out your sidereal time here but I wanted a way to calculated it on the Arduino without it storing an enormous lookup table. I used a mix of guides to help but this one was the most helpful since it has worked examples and uses a formula that gives accuracy to within 0.001 seconds over 100 years.

The first stage in calculating local sidereal time is to calculate the number of days (including fractions of a day) since a date called ‘J2000’ - this is midday on 1 January 2000 at Greenwich. From this you count the time that’s elapsed and then perform a function on it to get the sidereal time at your coordinates. Once you have Local Sidereal Time, you subtract the right ascension of Voyager to get an hour angle. Hold on to this idea because this is almost entirely where everything went wrong.

sin(altitude) = sin(δ) sin(φ) + cos(δ) cos(φ) cos(H)
cos(azimuth) = { sin(δ) - sin(φ) sin(a) } / cos(φ) cos(a)

You then take these two formula above, one for altitude and one for azimuth. With the hour angle (H), latitude (φ) and declination (δ) you can now calculate the altitude and once you have the altitude you can calculate the azimuth and (in theory), huzzah! (As below):


However, throughout this process I kept checking both the live ‘tracking’ planetarium and this calculator (which also has helpful documentation) using the same formulae and found they were getting totally different results every time.  If you talked to me at the tail end of last week then it would have been the only ting I was talking about. I spent hours tweaking the formulae and getting no closer.

Eventually I clocked that the problem in implementing these formulae all arose in the converting between the different coordinate conventions. Americans tend to use hours, minutes and seconds or degrees, minutes and seconds while Europeans tend to just use degrees. Because Europeans are sensible. Anyway, the whole time I had right ascension down as 17.whatever degrees when in fact it was 17.whatever hours! (eg. roughly around 250 degrees). Once that was multiplied by 15 (34 hours = 360 degrees) everything fell into place. 

A new API

So assuming this all works, the next stage was to build an API that would stream the distance, right ascension and declination to the Arduino. Luckily I can hack together the one I made for decline.online together. This uses Python’s Beautiful Soup to scrape HTML contents from URLs. This was a pretty straightforward presence, made significantly easier by the fact that, unlike decline.online, it doesn’t need continuous data and it’s getting everything from one source. (I'll post it up with the project when done as well.)

Crunching the numbers on Arduino. 

To recap, the idea is: when the Arduino is first turned on it grabs location data from Unwired Labs (you can only do this up to 100 times a day.) Once it has that it enters the loop where every minute or so it is calling time and date and celestial coordinates for Voyager. With these it can constantly calculate an adjusting heading and azimuth as the Earth and Voyager move. 

This is the version I started building here. Here you can see where the Arduino code grabs the time and date data from the API and begins calculating the Sidereal Time. ‘d’ is the total amount of time since J2000 which is the first number you need in the run of calculations. However, immediately, the project quickly ran up against the Arduino’s limited memory and ability to calculate big numbers. The serial monitor shows the numbers are rounded and inaccurate. Arduino does strange things to big numbers that I can’t fully grasp. I spent some time reading around different ways of encoding long numbers in the Arduino's memory but it seemed like it was going to be a lot more work than I really needed. Instead I decided to move the heavier calculations over to the python API on the server which would then give the Arduino a lot of the key components of what it needs to calculate the heading and azimuth.



Once I put the exact same calculations in Python and ran them from the server and found it was delivering results exactly the same as the Excel model with no loss of accuracy. However, the problem here is that the calculations require the longitude quite early on. But these can only be gathered from Unwired Labs 100 times a day and depends on the location. Essentially, there's no simple way of getting both Arduino's location and Voyager's location from the same source. However, playing around with the maths you can actually allow for the longitude and latitude at the very end of the process by adding it on to greenwich sidereal time once it’s been reduced to the range of 0-360 degrees rather than before reducing and get the same outcomes. This means we’re not sending numbers with dozens of digits to the Arduino which is where it struggles.

So in this version, a lot of the harder calculations are done-server side with the final numbers delivered to the Arduino so it’s not crunching the big numbers at the beginning of the process when you have to calculate sidereal time. Now the API sends the current sidereal time at Greenwich to which I simply add the longitude from Unwired Labs. Since in this model the maths the Arduino will be doing occur after the bigger numbers are crunched it means that the results are much more accurate without Arduino's memory issues. 


Then was then quite a lot of fiddling around to get the maths to run properly on the Arduino which actually turned out to be easier than I was expecting and finally I had the Arduino spitting out accurate and updating altitude and azimuth figures for Voyager! As you can see in the screenshot, the altitude and azimuth are not only accurate but adjusting minute-to-minute.

All The Fun of The Fair

Turns out that further down Alice Rawsthorne's Design as an Attitude that the author addresses some of the concerns I had about the way that design is popularly represented and consumed. Addressing the question of 'why make a chair about e-waste?' isn't quite achieved but there's a wonderful quote from Reyner Banham in 1967 writing for New Society: 
The area worst blighted by furniturization lies right under the human arse... Check the area under yours at this moment. That chances are that it is occupied by an object too pompous for the function performed, over-elaborate for the performance actually delivered, and uncomfortable anyhow.
She's quite scathing of the role of the commoditisation of design exemplified by the Salone and the cycnical appropriation of it by 'super-capitalists.' However, there's little work done to re-address the formation of an aesthetic sensibility based on what works at Salone at the cost of critical power. She mentions the role of other up and coming fairs; Eindhoven and Istanbul as counterpoints to the dry commercialism of Milan but it would be useful to see suggestions of how we might push back against Milan's creeping homogeny rather than run away from it.

Things I learned this week

  1. I learnt a good joke about a drowning man who asks God for help. (Ask me when you see me and I'll tell you.)
  2. I learnt a breathing exercise that reduces flight or fight response. I don't really suffer from this but I found it useful in controlling my body when tired. You have to imagine  cat on your belly and breathe in for four and out for eight. 
  3. I'm currently listening to the bit of the podcast about Avicenna. It's funny that I did some training this week where they were saying how in British culture, extolling what you're good at is seen as arrogance and you're expecting to constantly put yourself down. It was normal in the Islamic tradition for philosophers and thinkers to go on about how great, gifted and close to god they were so though in his writings he comes across as very arrogant; for instance, dismissing his learning of medicine as trivial and easy, it was pretty normal to do.

Channel Recommendation. 

An oldie but a goldie. The boys of Prepare to Try reformed about a year ago as RKG (Rory, Krupa, Gavin) As I spent my weekend coding I had their Dark Souls II series on in the background like a sort of deep background sound.


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Cédre, Frimaire, 228; Project PROBE, Knowledge Capture in Design Part 3

If I put the titles to what these posts are about, they might be easier to find, though I do tag liberally to help.

Project PROBE

Last week I wrote that I’d started a new little vanity project. I find myself very happy learning new technical stuff and this project gives me the chance to combine some of the things I learnt about servos from Charismatic Megapigment with some of the other projects that have used geolocation maths like Augury. I'm not going to give much away on what it's about, just show process as I go.

I’m trying to get all the inputs to talk to each other this week. Without giving away spoilers; it needs to know exactly where it is in relationship to where something else is. So I need a WiFi module and IMU (inertia measurement unit), ideally with a magnetometer so it can figure out where north is. This way it can use WiFi beacons and the magnetometer to figure it's exact position on the Earth and it's orientation to the poles. Rather than plugging in a bunch of different components, the Rev2 pictured has a WiFi module and IMU built in so that’ll save on space and complexity (although I'm not sure the IMU has a magnetometer built-in.) However, the first challenge was getting it to talk. It wouldn’t talk to any Macs but when I hook it in to a Window’s PC; no problem.

The solution was a creeping reinstall (there's probably a technical name): I had to do a complete manual reinstall of Arduino IDE and all the drivers, starting with oldest to newest until I got one that worked. This meant going through the preferences menu to find Arduino’s cache and wiping it. This is risky if you’re dependent on Arduino projects but I don’t use it everyday so I think I’ll survive.

The second issue was getting it to connect to a WiFi network. Luckily there is a secret one at work that has only WPA encryption (no username, just a password) so I managed to sneak it on. Currently the standard Arduino wifi library – WiFiNINA – has no support for WPA Enterprise without a lot of jiggery-pokery.

The next step is finding a way to get its location in longitude and latitude. Google now charges for its geolocation API which is a pain on a vanity project and not something I wanted to go through the hassle of setting up. Unwired Labs LocationAPI which I found through this helpful tutorial allows you to track up to five devices free for 100 calls every twenty-four hours. I only need to track one device and since it should only need to call the API when it's first turned on this would easily suit my purposes.

The idea here is to ask the Arduino to compile a list of nearby WiFi routers and their signal strength, send them to Unwired Labs and then receive a longitude and latitude, same as the Google Geolocation API. The code in the tutorial is pretty useful but there’s always a bunch of problems to be un-kinked when building a system from different components. The version of the Arduino WiFi scanner library being used in the tutorial had a handy ‘BSSIDstr’ function that converts the byte arrays of BSSID (the mac addresses of nearby routers) to strings so you can feed them into a JSON string. Essentially, the format that the mac addresses are scraped in are in the wrong format to send to the API and you get mangled gobbledy gook if you try. However, BSSIDstr no longer exists so I had to mangle in a ‘sprintf’ bit to do that for me. Sprintf is one of those things I've never properly understood so it was useful to learn how it and byte arrays work. FYI, just for fun, the order of the bytes is backwards so you need to lace the string backwards to get the BSSID in the right order. Then there just some tweaking around with the URL for the API request since it’s all changed since and it was good to go. Et Voila, my Arduino knows exactly where it is on the surface of the world as pictured to a remarkable degree of accuracy.

I already have a magnetometer working from an earlier test so I'm not hugely bothered by the amount of work there so once that's integrated the Arduino will be able to know it's position and orientation when it turns on easily. Most of the stuff that seems to happen in the early stages of these projects is versioning; tutorials use out of date firmware, terms have changed or been removed etc. etc. So most of what you end up doing is chasing around dates and versions to get everything to talk to each other.

If I get any more time I will be looking in to what turns out to be some exceptionally complicated geometry problems which I hitherto had considered child's play. Who knew there are different versions of time?

Knowledge in design part 3; cognitive dissonance and sympathy,

This is more of a short addendum than an entire new line of thinking. A lot of activities last week kept me from reading as much as I’d like but I met up with Yosuke Ushigome of Takram fame on Monday night and we discussed some of this stuff since he at least apparently reads this. We were reflecting briefly on the history and state of speculative and/or critical design with regard to our peers from MA Design Interactions: Why did the canon there struggle to respond to issues that were beyond a limited temporal window and individual scale?

The easiest answer to me is in design’s aesthetic history of tackling human problems on Maslow’s hierarchy; where to live, how to eat and sleep, how to communicate and share information etc. All of these things can be interfaced or encountered within the human sensorium and consequently design’s aesthetic sensibility is drawn from the human body and it’s scale. It’s only in recent years that design has attempted to address ‘systems’ and even these are human-oriented with solutions and products largely being aimed at the interface of the human and the system; different information flows and architectures, levels of access or responsiveness. This is as opposed to the approach of an activist or artist who might address the system in total as an artefact rather than as an inevitability.

Take for example, Suzanne Triester’s work; Hexen 2.0 (left) which examines the history of computation through a quasi-occult, quasi-conspiratorial lens. The goal here is not to improve the system or design it in a different way but to give us a pan-historical reading of it that challenges our comprehensive model and presents alternate narratives.

This is opposed to any number of brilliant design projects on computation that address the way we interface with the very notion of computation through the interface. For example, the amazing work of IF and their catalogue of data patterns almost all of which feature a hand, a phone, a laptop. They address the system at the point of interface where design is most appropriate and comfortable. This is how cognitive understanding is built between the audience of the design and the idea of the design. We all have hands, phones and laptops, we can project ourselves into the alternatives that IF propose for data patterns. To a degree, Triester exploits the same sympathies by drawing on an aesthetic sensibility of diagrams and visualisations with which we might be familiar and so are equipped to interpret the work and put it in a certain frame of reference.


If I was to think about Augury as a project about computation then I’d say it is further abstract than Triester’s work. It draws on some familiar aesthetics; the audience having to look up indicates it’s about something above us, there are flight numbers and names of airline companies to conclude it has something to do with planes. Though it draws on a popular ancient practice of divination, this was less familiar to the audience which was perhaps a failing. Connecting this ancient divination technique with a contemporary technological equivalent – planes’ instead of birds’ flight patterns used to predict the future – was a knowing cognitive leap rather than one meant to create cognitive sympathy. The project exploited the idea that the audience might question why these things are together as way of teasing them towards the absurdity of computational prediction without having to reduce it to human terms (phones, laptops hands) that would make it more comfortable. From the perspective of my practice I find the only way to deal with things maybe beyond the human scale is to exploit cognitive dissonance as it's impossible to make these things sympathetic to human understanding in their entirety.

While a design project might draw on a more familiar aesthetic sensibility to provoke the idea of the absurdity of computational prediction by exploring alternative device interfaces or human interactions, in Augury Wes and I were keen to highlight the supra-human qualities of computation by placing it in the world of the supernatural. It’s hard to then draw on design aesthetics and logics for this kind of framing, there aren’t really (arguably) tenants, principles or methodologies for designing the supernatural. There are certainly designed aesthetics; colours, shapes, styles but not many functional models.

Let’s put this back into the question; ‘Why did Formafantasma design a chair about e-waste?’ which seems to have become the locus for this thinking. Ore Streams draws entirely on a comfortable and sympathetic design aesthetic – the chair – to engage with a bigger-than-human (I’ve been trying out various words here, you may have noticed) idea/issue. But, they draw on elements of sympathy and dissonance; it’s a chair with which we can all connect experientially but it is also provoking a discussion about e-waste with a particular audience. Consequently the audience might ask ‘why is the chair made that way?’  I am going to stop banging on Formafantasma now, I really do love their work and I’m sorry they’ve become a lynch pin that seems to be unduly criticised here. I do think Ore Streams is great, I’m just using it as an exemplar project for design projects that don’t give me a good sense of why did they do it that way? The follow on from which is what is the best way of doing this? Which is basically a PhD right.

Restoring some regular features - things I learned this week. 

A while back I said I liked reflecting on what I've learnt. Obviously it's a bit of a cheat this week because:
  1. I learnt a lot more Arduino stuff, particularly what is and how exactly 'sprintf' works and loads of other stuff about using Arduino with online stuff. 
  2. I've been listening intently to my Arabic philosophy podcast and have learnt a lot about Al-Razi who spent a lot of time refuting Galen and was mostly known as a heretic so most of his writings are only known by how they're refuted by later Islamic scholars. He dared to suggest that four things preceded God - soul, matter, the universe and time. 
  3. The folks at Wikimedia are super cool and have a lot of really interesting stuff going on. (Bit of a cop-out this one, I'll own it.)

And – Channel recommendation

I've loved Girlfriend Reviews since they first started. Witty and irreverent reviews of games which are becoming increasingly more critically engaged in discussion of the industry. The latest one on the new Star Wars game which received lavish praise is brilliant as a piece of media criticism on how games reuse and reconstruct tropes but also now hilarious for my new catch phrase; 'Have y'all lost your minds cos I'll help ya find 'em!'



I've already started notes for next week's blog and it's currently Tuesday so I guess it's going well. I hope you enjoy something and it's not too tiresome. 
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Chou-fleur, Frimaire, 228

Hi, I'm doing well in carving out time to think, work and make things. I started a little vanity project yestertoday which is in embryonic stages but should give me an opportunity to learn some new stuff. I'll try and blog it up and put it on Instagram stories. It's not particularly conceptually clever but I just happen to have the bits lying around at the moment. In the picture you see a 9-axis accelerometer/gyro/manetomoeter (I forget the acronym for these things). This project needs to know exactly where it is on the Earth's surface to work. Today a Wi-Fi shield is arriving. I leave it up to you to guess.

Formafantasma again, this time about knowledge

Following on from my diatribe on Formafantasma last week, which might be best summarised as ‘why make a chair about e-waste?’ It was useful to crack the spine on The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts at the weekend. In the second chapter ‘ Pleading for Plurality’ by Norwegian academic Søren Kjørup there is a careful, though somewhat dated analysis of the different ways in which ‘artistic’ research (broadly defined so as to include other forms of creative practice) creates and disseminates knowledge. Here he discusses the work of embroider Hans Hamid Rasmussen who produces textiles that examine ‘intercultural experiences.’ Kjørup points out that the knowledge created in this process is two-fold; first a communication of those experiences and secondly the development of those methods of communication or as he puts it; ‘[Rasmussen’s] works not only claim that ‘intercultural experiences are like this’, but also that ‘intercultural experiences may be expressed like this’.’

This conforms well to Christopher Frayling’s 1993 categorisation of research through, for and about art. Rasmussen uses his art to talk about intercultural experience (through) but also developed new means of communication (for). These are categorisations that we are relatively used to. That the process of creative production uncovers new knowledge on the subject but can also push the whole field forward by demonstrating ways in which that knowledge is produced. However, though Kjørup takes about Rasmussen’s contribution to the field of embroidery in regard to talking about issues like ‘intercultural experiences’ doesn’t follow up with why this is a good way of communication. Suggesting ways in which an abstract notion like intercultural experiences may be expressed could be rather simple since they could be expressed in any number of ways across media and form but the value of this research is surely in discovering and sharing what media or forms are most appropriate and effective.

It is perhaps telling for this critique that Kjørup refers to the word ‘expression’ while I use ‘communication.’ Perhaps this is another separation of a designerly approach from an artistic one; consideration of audience. I might express an idea in any number of ways if the comprehension of the audience is secondary to finding a means of expression based on other criteria, for instance, dynamism, critical craft or tradition. However, where the audience’s comprehension is the primary aim then I need to think about appropriateness and accessibility and evaluate why ‘expressing [communicating] something this way’ is most effective for my objective.

This is where Formafantasma’s Ore Streams chair again becomes another useful example. If I, with a designerly mindset and sure in my understanding of my role as a designer, were to embark on a project aiming to engage an audience in discussion of issues of e-waste, I would not make a concept chair. I might consider making a viral video since these travel well and can be viewed by millions. I might consider using design-led policy development methods to affect local and national change through lobbying and appropriate use of data. I might even conduct an investigative project and find interesting and clear ways of visualising it for use by others in similar enterprises. Fortuitously, this approach was validated at the weekend when Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s were awarded Design of the Year for ‘Anatomy of an AI’ - an investigative visualisation of Amazon’s entire AI ecosystem.

However, I could reevaluate my critique of Ore Streams with the question ‘who was the audience?’ It’s quite possible that Formafantasma were not interested in a piece of mass communication so much as using their significant platform within the boutique design world to engage a specific audience of other designers, design critics and journalists. The earlier iterations of critical design [image] were for this purpose too after all. The idea of engaging practitioners and theorists in critical practice was to help them think better about their own practice as an educational and research tool. (Tangentially, this is why I’ve never had a good response to the ‘isn’t it just design for designers?’ question because, well, yes, it is. That was always the idea.)

Kjørup returns to Rasmussen’s work with the regrettable conclusion that the knowledge that Rasmussen produces and shares is ultimately read by others in the write-ups of the project he does that accompanies his work. The embroideries themselves are read by the research community as part of the process of uncovering knowledge that is ultimately validated only once written down. This tension between the formalism of the natural sciences and the plurality of creative subjects is the thrust of Kjørup’s chapter which he examines by demonstrating the value of the plurality of ways in which knowledge is generated through creative practice.

In doing so he introduces the taxonomy of Willhelm Windelband’s new terms of ‘nomothetic’ and ‘idiographic’ sciences. ‘Nomothetic sciences are the ones that search for general laws… as most of the natural sciences [but] even a humanistic discipline like history.’ While ‘…idiogrpahic disciplines are the ones that study these subjects in their specificity.’ Here there is another way of examining Ore Streams; it does not seek to establish general laws or frameworks like a policy design piece or a stunning work of infographics, but for Formafantasma to explore their own (and those of their immediate peers’) practice in the context of the general knowledge/laws/frameworks of e-waste.

Kjørup neatly summarises the value of these debates in his notion that artistic (etc.) research is ‘pre-pardigmatic.’ We do not have a Newtonian or Aristotelian framework for artistic research that is ‘sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity’ and is ‘sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve.’ (Quoting Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1970, p.10) Interestingly, while summarising how paradigms bring ‘values’ to science he reiterates Thomas Kuhn in his note that ‘science should or (need not be) social useful.’ This is an interesting formulation of the idea that science should be socially useful or not at all with the implication being that it should not be socially destructive. By the scientific values that dominate conversations o knowledge creation, Ore Streams is certainly not socially destructive, so my critique of it could also be flawed by assuming that all creative endeavours have to be socially useful to have had their knowledge made valuable.

The pre-paradigmatic nature of research in arts and design (although I would argue that Frayling’s work is pretty paradigmatic) makes considerations of how knowledge is generated, for who and by what means it is evaluated still worthwhile and contentious in a positive way as the paradigm might be formed at a time when social issues of inequality, accessibility and privilege feature prominently in discussions of knowledge.
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