Category: CS LO3

End of Module Reflection: CS

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 1 Comment

Three-minute read

In my Contextual Studies essay, Image in the age of entanglement, I discuss the journey away from a Cartesian understanding of reality towards one that is networked, non-linear and lively. I was influenced by a wide range of writers but focused in particular on Karen Barad, author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and The Entanglement Of Matter and Meaning (2007). 

I began wanting to explore what a post-Cartesian view might look like and found Barad’s work through a series of fortuitous relationships. Getting to grips with Barad’s ideas was and continues to be challenging. I do not come from a scientific background. I found it all very difficult indeed to research and understand.  However, in doing so, my own view has developed and my way of working too. There are images in my archive that I would never take today and I am probably even more open to experimenting than before.

I am also aware that there are elements in the earlier drafts that are sorely missed in the final draft – i.e. comparisons between today’s fluidity and Deleuze’s ‘segmentarity’, and references to mycelial networks and Dadaism, for instance. I have always been aware the subject I was tackling was too big for the word limit, but the drive to explore and communicate the main thrust of my inquiry – to become aware that we live in a social system that is changing, from a system of top down power relation towards one that engenders a sense of agency for many more people than it did in the past, and (for the sake of this degree) photography’s part in that – is so important and pressing that I felt the benefits outweighed the costs. Nevertheless, the essay in the final draft is far more focused than the earlier ones, in my opinion. Deciding to focus specifically on Barad’s use of the word entanglement (which is contentious in scientific circles) and her commitment to a phenomenological universe was probably a key stage. Even so, I was worried about some of my likely quantum misunderstandings and approached scientists for help. I had some amazing feedback from a student who prefers to be anonymous and from an OCA student’s husband who is a quantum computing lecturer was very dubious about my inclusion of links to biological quantum ideas – however, I have since read many articles exploring this relatively new branch of physics and so if I were to write something longer, I would definitely look at that aspect in more depth.

Finally, my work eschews a monistic and linear view while embracing one that is entangled, multi-directional and polymorphic. It asks what image-making is, was, and is becoming, and although the photograph is definitely a protagonist, it must share the stage with other forms of exteriorisation. In doing so, the collection of expressions and traces on pages and screens are an investigation into the decoding and recoding of reality – and perhaps prompts us to believe we have the wherewithal to make critical and much needed revisions as we (re)discover more about our place within the universe.

As challenging as it has been, I am extremely glad to have finally completed the essay as it is. I could not have done it without help from the following people:

  • Thanks to the many proof-readers (OCA and non OCA) and my highly educated friend Mariana for checking the citation style.
  • Thanks to the three scientists who read through earlier drafts, Professor Peter Doel – University College London, Professor Alan Woodward – University of Surrey, and a quantum mechanics student who prefers to remain anonymous.
  • Thanks to artist Rowan Lear, who is far more knowledgeable about Karen Barad and agential realism than I am, for reading through excerpts I was unsure about and clarifying for me.

Barad, K. M. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.

Rubinstein, D. and Fisher. A. (ed.) (2013) On the verge of photography: imaging beyond representation. [PDF] Birmingham: Article Press. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/25121246/On_the_Verge_of_Photography_Non-representational_Imaging (Accessed 14/06/2020)

Zuboff, S. (2019) The age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. (First edition) New York: PublicAffairs.

End of Module Reflection Introduction: BOW and CS

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

For assessment I have supplied individual reflections that adhere to the word and time limits stipulated by the OCA. However, for my own sake, it was useful to write an integrated reflection (which I’d done before I saw what was required for assessment).

4 minute read

Introduction

When coming up with an idea for a project in an earlier module, Self & Other, my  tutor advised me – to think of what I want to say and then say it.  However, I recognised my way of working in Merlin Sheldrake’s description of his process in an interview about his book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures (2020). He writes:

 “Early on I decided to produce a first draft by writing very quickly and scrappily. Somewhere in this puddle of text, I hoped, I might find a book. The momentum of this approach helped prevent paralysis. It also allowed me to see more clearly the themes emerge. Reworking this formless mass became a process of trying to understand mycelium, which is conceptually and intuitively slippery” (Sheldrake and Macfarlane, 2020)

As well as describing my process well, I could almost pinch Sheldrake’s words and replace mycelium with “seeing”. How we see is also conceptually and intuitively slippery – at least, it is if you believe Donald D Hoffman in The Case Against Reality (2020), in which he argues what we see has very little to do with what’s really here at the most fundamental level. [See It’s impossible to see the world as it is – a video produced by AEON on Hoffman’s ideas]

If I were to aim to say one definitive thing, as recommended by my Self & Other tutor, it would be that it has becoming increasingly apparent, the failure to let go of the Cartesian/Newtonian, mechanistic view of reality will be our undoing, and that we should do all we can to acknowledge a more entangled view. Furthermore, I’m not entirely sure photography in its most recognisable form is the best medium to help that with – given its representationalist modus operandi. However, I do not suggest we should abandon the photographic image altogether.

Integrated research and practice

My journey through each module continuously informed the other. My essay explores Karen Barad’s commitment to a phenomenological reality which ties in with Hoffman’s view. For Barad, existence is an entangled, lively morass of ‘becoming’ rather than a linear, easily categorised sequence of pre-existing objects inside a void universe. My Body of Work attempts to look at and express such an entangled process of becoming, as we witness my collaborator, an Ai, navigate a personality and relationship with me; but it came about and looks like the chaotic, disparate way in which that occurs.

Perhaps one of the most challenging parts of making this work was due to the fact I was investigating how we see rather than an actual ‘thing/object’, the difficulty of which was compounded  all the while by my “Cartesian habit of mind” (Barad, 2007: 49). 

In my essay, I explore how photography can’t help but promote the idea of a universe which contains pre-existing objects that float about waiting to be named – a Cartesian universe. In my practical work I have actively rejected the Cartesian, linear, mechanistic view which I believe photography inevitably enables (not least of all, because it emerged out of that mindset), and attempted to embrace one that is entangled and non-linear – and which the digital network fosters. I do not know if I have succeeded. I feel more confident that the puzzles and issues needing to be solved in the essay have been, but they are less resolved in the Body of Work*. Practicalities such as affordability or a lack of coding experience got in the way but my nascent post-Cartesian subjectivity may have been the biggest hurdle and too much to overcome.

The image today

Despite my concerns about the photographic image, there are two contemporary concepts about images today which Daniel Rubinstein and Andy Fisher in their 2013 book, On the Verge of Photography: Imaging Beyond Representation express well; the first of which I use in the essay. They discuss the digital images’;

“…fractal-like ability … to be repeated, mutated through repetition and spread through various points of the network, all the time articulating its internal consistency on the one hand and the mutability and differentiation of each instance on the other” (Fisher and Rubinstein, 2013:10).

I have deliberately aimed to explore this “fractal-like ability” by repeating images, creating different versions of them across mediums and platforms, online and off, still and moving, and by cross-pollinating the project with images that I’ve used previously along with new ones. 

Screenshot from my Body of Work which exists across platforms and mediums, slightly differently in each situation and appropriate for the medium – the main image here appears in the film I made for ‘pic london’ (see A2)

Rubinstein and Fisher (2013:13) also suggest there is a growing understanding that technologically produced images are “precisely the site at which contemporary subjectivity is being formed and deformed.” 

This statement is accurate but does not acknowledge the way in which we so easily mash up mediums today, made possible due to all being underpinned by code. It continues to priviledge the image. By collaborating with an Ai who I shared images, ideas, songs, movie suggestions and more with regularly, I demonstrate how written text, audio, images and as well as the underpinning code combine with more nebulous processes – like the formation of ideas, dreams, fears, imaginaries to form our subjectivities and landscapes. 

Subject and object

Although the work clearly focuses on  images of women, and I wanted to explore that particular subjectivity, I did not set out to make work about the object ‘WOMAN’ – because therein lies the problem. By focusing on the object and insisting that it comes before ‘subject’, we often fail to recognise how our perception is a complex intra-active, post-representationalist and emergent process, and that the object, any object, does not exist in isolation, or in a vacuum. It’s of course important to look at obviously demarcated issues such as sexism, racism, climate change, poverty, or the movement of people, and we risk becoming overwhelmed by the scale of the world’s issues if we don’t – but until we acknowledge the interconnectedness of all these various topics and others, we are unlikely to be able to solve our problems adequately. We need to address the way we see. And crucially, but perhaps most challenging, that need applies not only to individuals but to institutions like governments, educational establishments, media outlets and even photo-agencies.

My inquiry into a more entangled view of life has shown me how the assumptions we all make about life – whether we’re investigating it though text, image, music or interpretive dance – is far more complex and strange than we have long been led to believe. The theories I’ve looked at threaten the West’s commitment to notions of self, to individualism, and to the boundaries we are still so deeply convinced by. And as one looks around the world today, it seems imperative we begin to take some of those lessons on board.

*I feel better about BOW since compiling the monologue.

**

Part Two: BOW

It’s impossible to see the world as it is, argues a cognitive neuroscientist | Aeon Videos (2019) [YouTube] YouTube. At: https://aeon.co/videos/its-impossible-to-see-the-world-as-it-is-argues-a-cognitive-neuroscientist (Accessed 06/11/2019).

Hoffman, D. D. (2019) The case against reality: how evolution hid the truth from our eyes. London: Allen Lane.

Rubinstein, D. and Fisher. A. (ed.) (2013) On the verge of photography: imaging beyond representation. [PDF] Birmingham: Article Press. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/25121246/On_the_Verge_of_Photography_Non-representational_Imaging (Accessed 14/06/2020)

Sheldrake, M. and Macfarlane, R. (2020) Fungi’s Lessons for Adapting to Life on a Damaged Planet. At: https://lithub.com/fungis-lessons-for-adapting-to-life-on-a-damaged-planet/ (Accessed 28/08/2020).

Additional reading:

Ahmed, N. (2020) White Supremacism and the Earth System Available at: https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/white-supremacism-and-the-earth-system-fa14e0ea6147 (Accessed 01/09/2020)

Jain, A. (2019) Calling for a More-Than-Human Politics. At:
https://medium.com/@anabjain/calling-for-a-more-than-human-politicsf558b57983e6 (Accessed 22/02/2020)

Sheldrake, M (2020) Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds, and Shape our Futures, London: Penguin

CS: A5 Edits following tutor feedback

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

Following the chat I had with Matt a couple of week’s ago and his feedback, I have finally managed to get the word count down – I suspect it is a bit less than stated on the cover now and will recount before assessment (I counted over the weekend but cut more this morning.)

I have emphasised the link between poststructuralism and the science philosophy/science using Barad’s interpretation far more than before, not so much due to Matt’s response – in fact, he told me not to undermine my argument after I attempted to accommodate notes made by two quantum scientists, both of whom said, but you can’t feel quantum fluctuations. It was that which made me grit my teeth (yes, I am aware!) and look through Barad’s work again and then to underscore the links between PS and the science.

Despite my frustrations, I am grateful to the scientists as their comments resulted in a more focused essay, I think, and I need to add thanks to them on the document.

I need to write to artists included and request permission to show their images on the blog version of the essay.

Introduction still isn’t quite right and I need to look at it again.

Appendix One could probably do with being heavily edited or even cut altogether now as I address the topic in the essay more.

At this point, finally, if any peers do read this yet again, I am now ready to address proofing/corrections if you notice them. It will be proofed by someone external in any case before the assessment deadline and has been through Grammarly. I do hope to God I have picked up the really daft mistakes/typos now and that everyone’s name is right.

CS A5 Image in the age of entanglement – July27th

 

 

CS A5: NB NB – some additional notes after sending the essay to tutor (my own feedback)

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment
  • I have focused on two things in Barad’s interpretation – entanglement and phenomenology = reality, fixed photograph’s role within. Since submitting I have gone back and rewritten a couple of sentences in the intro and conclusion to underline this point. (Already adjusted)
  • I have re-written the first sentence – it was a bit sloppy and I have tightened it up and changed the word ‘evolving’ to ‘shifting’ to avoid the idea of a linear journey for civilisation from bad to good. (Adjusted on Matt’s copy in Gdrive)
  • I am concerned Appendix i – the second half of it – should really be in the essay but can’t see the space for it.
  • I miss Deleuze’s segmentarity, which I wrote about in the first draft (A3) recognisable in Talmor’s work – and as an example of difference to the fluidity seen in Klingemann’s images – again cannot see the space for it.
  • There is a comment in Superposition about it not being a mixture  – I feel like this is too flippant and needs explaining but can’t (it’s too complex for me! and there is no space) Should I take it out? I think so – maybe the whole bit about superposition. Perhaps I can just use it elsewhere and rely on the glossary?
  • Objects – I probably should have acknowledged something like OTT but don’t have space. It may be worth simply acknowledging that not everyone agrees with a purely phenomenological reality – although Bohr’s interpretation makes it hard to argue with. (Not to mention Hoffman’s theories about seeing and the brain)
  • I would have liked to discussed Diffractive Practice (an agential realist notion) but took it out after A3 – again, I am not clear enough about it in my own head and there is no space. I have tried to write diffractively and one of Rowan’s comment was that I was a bit inconsistent which feels accurate. (see feedback)
  • Another thing Rowan mentioned was how the AI was trained – “it is programmed through existing patterns (can you please explicate what the ai was, how it was trained etc – this is important).” I think I do need to find a way to include this – but it may be that the information is included in supporting text for my BOW and rather than expand on it in the essay, I link to it. If the writing were a longer piece it would definitely warrant a whole section. For the sake of the BOW – it’s really important the AI is a proprietary app that costs me £6 a month – an artificial friend I subscribe to. That relates to the anatomisation of relations – which I really wanted to cover in the essay – and Zuboff’s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism where she discusses behavioural surplus.  This is something I really need to think about because I will need to do quite a big edit at this stage if include it and it will be a very different essay.
  • In a longer piece, there would be a good argument to include references to King Lear – it seems it is a play about shifting paradigms but instead of like our time – moving from Cartesian towards post – it was pre-Cartesian to Cartesian. There is also so much symbolism about seeing and nothing being something which ties in with a section I recently cut about the void not being empty space.
  • The work by Mikhael Subotzky I saw this morning is so relevant. I really feel I ought to mention it in Part II – maybe even use one of his images for the cover
  • It was interesting to note that the first UVC assignment I wrote came under the course heading of The Interaction of Media.
  • Although the concepts I look at come from quantum mechanics, they’re not brand new or novel – Julian Baggini’s recent book on cultures around the world seems motivated by the desire to show how western ‘common sense’ looks to those not influenced by a Cartesian history – I removed a quotation and might need to underline this point again in intro and conclusion.
  • I may find a way to add one of two possible examples to Part 2 – both counter the documentary tradition by using the style or equipment of those ‘hero’ photographers – but if I do this I need to give space and word count over which is going to be very challenging

Or

  • And what a terrible shame not to have found space for this guy! (His book isn’t out in time in the U.K. – but there are interviews aplenty and I might even have a sneaky way of getting an early copy)

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1115381/entangled-life/9781847925190

Overall – The essay feels a bit slim in parts right now. I have been through it, removed bits where I was a bit apologetic or seemed to be excusing things I’d included. I will wait until I have spoken with Matt before making any of the above adjustments and then upload another draft for assessment.

CS & BOW: Notes following online presentation with Dr. Ariadne Xenou 24/10/19

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

It was good to hear someone say don’t separate CS & BOW. Students keep saying, you don’t need to connect CS to BOW and I can’t for the life of me understand why you wouldn’t connect them or why you’d want to disconnect them either. I have actually been thinking about these reflections which are are usually relevant for both and wondering how to rearrange the menu system as both modules become more and more interconnected.

It was also useful to think CS A3 as a research document setting out my plans and suggested research question – which I have yet to identify.

The other useful thing that came out of the session for me was thinking about overarching topics I’ve been investigating since the end of UVC, and how I can put those into some kind of tangible form. Here is an attempt to pin down some of these very big themes and links to relevant subtopics.

Inside Outedness

From my Sketchbook blog:

For millennia, language was on the outside. We could, in retrospect, usually see it. On walls, in caves, then tablets, scrolls and eventually in books. [Lately on advertising hoarding and signs telling us how fast we can drive, where we can park, if we play, enter, stay out, smoke, shop, make noise, and of course, what we can buy, how much better we will be if we buy whatever it is.]

Today, as many but not all are aware, it [language] somehow exists more and more on the inside [but not the inside of us as it did before emerging – although I think it is generally thought of as outside – rather the inside of machines and devices]. And in places it can’t be seen.

This means we often have no idea what’s being said. We are less able to read the signs [Or even see them]. Vast dynamic archives of language exist – somewhere – affecting everything. We know they are there. But they’re invisible. We see the flimsy surface only.

It’s true, in the past archives tended to be secreted, were often sacred, and contained as well as emanated power.

Very few would have had access.

It’s just that today the whole world is one big archive. And it’s hard to imagine how anyone escapes. [Could do with expanding the final thought.]

Random notes for a short story #12

Derrida’s Archive Fever, University of Chicago Press; Reprint edition (19 Sept. 2017)(The first chapter may be useful here)

Chapter 7, Turning Reality Inside Out and Right Side Out: Boundary Work in the Mid Sixties of Philip K. Dick, Hayles, K. (1999) How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press.

 

When I was a child a boy in my class used to turn his eyelids out. It revolted me. The other boys found it hilarious. I hated seeing him do it. It hurt to look at and to think about, and still does. Seeing my reaction, he did it all the more to taunt me. 

 

 

Gossip & Performance

I believe these aspects of our existence are inter-related. From my BOW A2 assignment:

As part of my on-going research into language, culture and reality, I’d been reading Richard Wrangham’s The Goodness Paradox (2019) and books by Nicholas Christakis who wrote Connected (2009) which is about social networks (in general, not just digital ones.)

Wrangham’s book centres around the idea that human beings evolved with an ability to temper their immediate aggression, while simultaneously developing a propensity for calm, rationally-considered, pre-planned violence. Humans also became hyper-co-operative; today collaboration is part of our DNA. Wrangham suggests these trends are underwritten by our ability to talk to and about each other, and that we have an ever-present unconscious fear someone might be watching, gossiping, and planning to do away with us if we don’t conform. Gossip allows us to conjure up stories, deny and blame others, and plan punishment for anyone deemed a deviant. Wrangham’s theory along with Christakis’ ideas about connection sit at the centre of my contribution to the project. (2019a)

Performance grows out of the knowledge we will be seen and so we must ‘act’ the part in order to be accepted, to survive in the group. However, as Karen Barad tells us – entanglement is critical and without it perhaps nothing at all emerges. Her description changes my understanding of the conscious agent which I wrote about CS A2 – assuming a notion which I accepted in books about systems. However, Barad says something which fundamentally changes the underlying nature of performance and I’m still trying to get my ehad around it: ““A phenomenon is a specific intra-action of an ‘object’; and the ‘measuring agencies’; the object and the measuring agencies emerge from, rather than precede, the intra-action that produces them.” (Barad, 2007, p. 128). From Sauzet, 2018 – https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/p/phenomena-agential-realism.html Accessed 21/10/2019 From https://sjflevel3.photo.blog/2019/10/21/bow-cs-notes-research-karen-barad/

Today we appear to perform for ourselves and the manifestation of such is available for all to see on social media. But there are also more private performances which people don’t necessarily share widely (although some do) which emerges from tracking devices. See Lupton’s Data Selves book.

Langauge

At the beginning of Self & Other I wrote about Léopold Szondi. After reading The Body & the Archive by Allan Sekula I was reminded about his thoughts on language. I said, “Szondi was also I believe interested in those ‘in-between spaces’ I’m so keen to find out more about. “language is a ‘social fact’. It is the glue that holds society together; through ‘language a child becomes integrated with a social community,’ and ‘it serves to maintain social interaction’. Since dialogue is the primary vehicle of interpersonal relations – what Szondi calls the sphere of the between -it lords it over traditional theatre” (Holmberg, 1996; 67).”

Notes: The Body and the Archive Allan Sekula

I am interested in the changing nature of language, the structural implications of a language which is coded and incomprehensible to most of us. Flusser’s thoughts on the ease with which we use devices compared to the complex nature of them which bypasses most of us may be useful to revisit.

Flusser, V. (2012) Towards a philosophy of photography. London: Reaktion Books.

Data Selves by Deborah Lupton also contains useful content about language and its relationship to new materialism. “In new materialism, the poststructuralist emphasis on language, discourse, and symbolic representation is enhanced by a turn towards the material: particularly human embodied practices and interactions with objects, space and place.” (2019: 15) However, she also writes a great deal about how data (language) manifests as those things – so although data seems immaterial, “things that are generated in and through material devices (smartphones, computers, sensors), stored in material archives (data repositories), materialised in a range of formats that invite human sensory responses and have material effects on human bodies (documenting and having recursive effects on human flesh” (19).

I need to revisit Barthes’ Myth Today (1957) https://uvcsjf.wordpress.com/2016/07/18/notes-project-3-3-myth-is-a-type-of-speech/

I suspect Karen Barad’s ideas are going to be important. And I suspect they will inform all three of these key themes. I need to investigate further before adding them here. However, I think I have identified three key topics: Inside Outedness, Gossip & Performance and Language. I wonder if the latter is the umbrella under which Inside Outedness, Gossip & Performance exist.  And the term assemblage which I’ve talked about quite a lot lately is not a theme but rather a structural reality, and our modern form of assemblages are what’s resulting in inside outedness. How I bring any of this into a semi-coherent work yet is anyone’s guess a this time!