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Searching on London College of Communications found this disturbing news. Some departments are being closed down and my guess is that this may relate to academic cred. Print and Publishing has gone as a unit, now part of Design or Media. So the words are getting more abstract, not sure what the difference is in practice.

http://lccoppose.blogspot.com/2009/12/external-examiner-sends-out-messag...

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.

link

http://www.flickr.com/photos/animx/sets/72157622760478339/

Move the IAS to George Fox, could be just for the day. Start at InfoLab, let the tech claims mount up. Critique at IAS, then visit Learning Zone to observe what survives. Bowland deli coffee bar for reflection.

Henning Schmidgen (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin) opened his paper with a brief introduction of his position and field of expertise. Schmidgen, as a Berlin-based historian of science with a background in psychiatry and Deleuzian philosophy, voiced a special interest in the history of the experimental life sciences of the 19th and early 20th century. He explained how he is currently finalizing a larger project concerning the history of short time measurements in physiological and psychological laboratories, roughly between 1850 and 1930. Schmidgen described how the corresponding time experiments are well-known under the name of ‘reaction time measurements,’ and they have a routine existence in contemporary neurophysiology, brain research, psychology, and more broadly the cognitive sciences. He followed in arguing that the emergence and evolution of physiological and psychological short time measurements is intrinsically connected with the advent of social and cultural modernity.