Diana's blog

Neal White (Office of Experiments and Media School, Bournemouth University)  works across media, and in no particular medium at all – creating projects with the Office of Experiments that develop collaborative, social and critical spaces using art methods and art materials. His work operates along the fine line between how art thinks and the effect that art has as a social practice. Neal White has been associated with 0+1, formerly APG, Artists' Placement Group, for several years. Maintaining that art has always pushed the boundaries of the possible in terms of models of social collaboration and networking, Neal White's work looks at how these models can engage with other kinds of knowledge producing structure. The Office of Experiments is a structure for experimental cultural practices. Their work is based on the need for new forms of cultural practice, forms of contemporary artistic production that draw on critical lessons of former experimental movements, artists, thinkers and structures - and that seeks to disentangle these modes and systems of approach from the value systems that underline mass media, financial systems and contemporary art markets.

Alan Collins (Psychology, Lancaster University) introduced himself as a historian of psychology and opened his talk with apologies for the lack of originality of his paper, stating that familiarity is his main fear. Collins continued by describing the emergence of the experiments on human consciousness, both in the late 19^th century Germany and in the USA. He explained that experiment is a badge of modernity and ‘constructing the subject’ (Danziger, 1990) is a common method in psychology.

Rod Dickinson (School of Creative Arts, University of the West of England) opened his presentation arguing that from the artistic perspective the idea of an experiment is interesting precisely because it requires participants rather than viewers. Dickinson explained how engagement was a key to the idea of Milgram experiment as well. He proceeded in explaining that he wants to introduce workshop participants to two examples (looking at some short video clips) of an attempt at reformulation of the idea of an audience.

Bronislaw Szerszynski (Sociology, Lancaster University) opened his presentation stating that he wants to use it as an opportunity to develop some ideas about experimental subjection, the being subjected to an experiment. He proceeded in arguing that the force of experimentality can be used as an analogy to the force of law (Agamben, 1998; 2005).

Linsey McGoey’s  (Science and Technology Studies, Oxford) presentation  can be read below in the original version:

Richard Haley (Physics, Lancaster University) started by thanking the organizers for a chance to talk to a totally different community, emphasizing the experimentality and importance of this interdisciplinary workshop. Furthermore, he invited the participants of the workshop to visit and explore his lab. Haley opened his presentation by explaining that the pursuit of extreme cold is a never-ending quest towards the “infinity” of the absolute zero of temperature at a very chilly -273.15 degrees Centigrade. He argued that the historical development of low temperature physics is a long story of cooling things down to see how they behave, with the hope that new physical discoveries will be made, and recognised. When the experimenters get lucky, Haley pointed out, these new discovered behaviours can be further exploited to create new technologies and tools to cool lower, and the cycle continues.

Nicholas Gebhardt (Lancaster University) opened his presentation by explaining that in it, he intends to provide a few thoughts on jazz improvisation and what it offers us in terms of thinking about the nature of artistic events. Gebhardt argued that perhaps more than any other aspect of music today, improvisation has particular significance for how we explain or account for changes in musical experience, across all the forms of contemporary music: not just jazz, but also within classical, electronic, experimental, modernist, pop, rock, and non-western music as well. He claimed that the reason for this is that as a way of thinking about musical forms, improvisation poses fundamental questions about the process of deciding what to play — that is, what counts for us as music in any given social situation — and how to organise or shape musical events.

Professor of media theories Wolfgang Ernst (Humboldt University) opened his presentation by stating that the subject of this workshop, ‘experimentality as event’, touches a crucial figure of contemporary epistemology, especially when we take epistemology in its processual, time-based meaning as defines by cybernetics which is – taken by its original self-definition – the insight into ‘Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms’ (Heinz  von Foerster, 1949). Consequently, Ernst proposed that we investigate the processuality and eventuality of media-enhanced experimentation.

Jonathan Bird (Pervasive Interaction Lab, Open University) gave an overview of three projects which involved rapid prototyping novel technologies and testing them ‘in the wild’, rather than in a laboratory: a wearable tactile vision sensory substitution (TVSS) system; a participatory curation system for a film festival; and an interactive art installation for a music festival. Bird explained that the motivation for developing the TVSS was scientific whereas the two other projects had artistic goals. However, he argued, the development process in all three projects was very similar, suggesting that there is some common ground between art and science when they adopt an open-ended experimental approach. Bird consequently referred to the project ‘E-Sense’ (www.esenseproject.org) which promotes speculative, interdisciplinary research, combining HCI, philosophy, computer science and psychology. He explained goals of the ‘E-Sense’ project in terms of building useful sensory augmentation devices and generating novel insights into sensory, bodily and cognitive extension.

Jussi Parikka (ArcDigital, Anglia Ruskin University) opened his presentation with a reference to Whitehead, positioning speculative thought as a specific discipline. Parikka then proceeded in presenting two initiatives: Harwood, Wright and Yokokoji’s Eco Media ‘‘Cross Talk’’ and Garnet Hertz’s ‘Dead Media lab’. He explained how, the “Cross Talk” project tries to find processes in the natural world (“natural technics”) that could function as carriers of signals or messages. The title of ‘‘Cross Talk’’ corresponds to the prospect of these processes (in the form of materials or forces that were common to the habitats of animals) being accessible to the non-human realms as messages. Jussi Parikka argued that Garnet Hertz’s Dead Media-initiative (2009) aims towards very similar issues at the crossroads of media archaeology and ecology. Parikka positioned his presentation around the intriguing rhetorical question concerning non-human media: “Can ‘natural media’ with its different agencies and sensorium help to rethink human media, revealing opportunities for action or areas of mutual interest?“