The social worth of art without value

3 minute read

Today’s topic is participation in art. The texts behind this article make a particularly convincing case that we’re in dire need of dismantling of surface-level tropes around artistic participation, if we’re to save art as a socialised and social action.

Thoughts on climate change sensing and environmental citizenship

4 minute read

Before you read on, refresh your Whitehead and process philosophy. If we are to reimagine how environmental sensing is being conducted — under which premises, or assumptions, is the methodology constructed, how are sensors constructed, positioned, calibrated, and operated, etc, we should be mindful of not losing track of the root cause issue: are we measuring the right thing, or can that thing be seen as an effect of another...

Subverting techno-colonialism

13 minute read

The international aid sector today struggles to shed vestiges of Western colonialist worldviews and tendencies — and, arguably, actively perpetuates the same imperialist power dynamics that were in part or in sum responsible for creating the problems it aims to solve…

Machine-mediated humanitarianism

3 minute read

Computer vision — the process by which a machine learns to assign humanly recognisable meaning to concepts that are utterly alien to it, such as arrays of RGB values — is unsurprisingly the holy grail of machine learning in 2018. There is an unforgiving optimism in the belief that computer vision will “make the world a better place,” from unmanned vehicles to AI-generated smart vacation albums on your smartphone. And,...

Empathy’s Uncanny Valley: Ubiquitous Computing

2 minute read

Humanity’s affinity with the human-like follows a particular growth curve: while affinity grows steadily as the observed entity becomes more human-like, there is a pronounced dip and a rejection of affinity when that entity comes close enough to be mistaken for human only some of the time, intermixed with distinct non-human-like aspects. This is what philosophers and researchers call the uncanny valley: inspired largely by Freud’s concept of Unheimlich, it...

And now, for something completely different: the Non-human Turn

3 minute read

I am fascinated by the non-human turn’s perspective of relinquishing human creative primacy, and removing humanity from the fictitious focus of attention. In my reading, the non-human turn is a stream of thought that accepts reality as a complex, messy, system of interrelated actors and affects, operating in overlapping mixed systems — to analyse the human means accepting humanity’s place in a larger picture. The “non-human” part of this turn...

The Otherness of Execution

3 minute read

Pattern matching and recognition, the “gut feeling” of almost-understanding or, at least, knowing to differentiate the is from the is not is a human evolutionary trait that saved our skin by recognising the slightly darker, possibly tiger-shaped shadow in the middle of a dark forest of shapes.

On Mimicry and Aliens - Figuring the Human in AI

4 minute read

Suchman touches upon a crucial aspect of what it means for an AI to be human: how is being human figured, according to which perspective, and how does our transposition of this figuration onto machines influence our understanding of the human in artificial intelligence? The opening paragraph touches upon mimicry — which implies a notion that a human-like AI will necessarily involve the creation of AI that replicates human-like behavior,...

Computational Aesthetics and Informational Antimemetics

4 minute read

McLuhan exposes the fact that a new medium is like a virus for which humanity hasn’t yet developed antibodies. The superstimulation comes from both the amount of information, and from delivery methods of new media: the inability to filter signal from noise.

Statements, Logic, and Control: A summary and critique of Andrew Goffey’s “Algorithm”

2 minute read

Goffey’s paper focuses on teasing out the connection between algorithmic abstraction and the discursive power that the same abstraction represents, if seen as statement rather than just syntax. By opposing a reductionist and functional view of algorithms as descriptive entities, Goffey advocates for embracing abstraction by making the point that, while the push against abstraction is a valid direction when philosophically tackling other scientific spheres such as mathematics — in...

Take back control

8 minute read

On how algorithms make us angrier, and what we can do about it. Earlier this year, I published a paper on the role of algorithms in digital media. It explains how letting algorithms decide what is news (rather than journalists) changes the information we see. There is no way to avoid automated filtering: there is simply too much information in the pipes for humans to manage by themselves. The problem...

Hackathons and refugees: we can do better.

10 minute read

Are hackathons helping the refugee crisis? Is the social change community too techno-solutionist? How about we try to radically change hackathons in a way that’s not sexy but might provide actual results?

On male privilege and networks

5 minute read

A friend of mine asked me to share this story with you. And by “you” I mean “people that look like me”, or “men”. Specifically, men who don’t recognize that male privilege is an issue that needs to be actively fought against, and that men need to make and leave space for women because of how incredibly much the deck is stacked in favor of the Y chromosome.

Oh it’s a heat map. I get it.

1 minute read

I was just reading an article on the neuroscience of creativity in the Atlantic and came upon an image comparison of two brains.

The Case of the Snapping Macaque

1 minute read

There’s a story doing the summer internet rounds that’s tickling so many brain receptors I need to vent it out. And it’s all about this girl:

Ground control to major IP violation

2 minute read

A couple of days ago, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield — pictured here while winning “happiest man alive” contest — had to remove his cover of David Bowies’ “Space Oddity” from the Youtubes. It seems that “Bowies’ people” (and here I’m imagining a rugby team of slick, black-haired, business-attired white males in their forties on bluetooths or those big GSM phones from before you were even born) only gave Hadfield permission...