CS & BOW: Research Critique of Barad

November 15, 2019September 4, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

Looking for a critique of Barad’s work I have come across this which confirms some of my concerns and questions, although rather more acerbically than I might have done. It begins with the following which made me laugh – humour in an academic paper, good! I do wonder if there is an element of peevishness in the article – will wait and see:

‘In Artful, her collection of critical essays, Smith (2013: 41) reminds us of a childhood game designed to break the boredom of long car journeys – ‘Ten points to the person who can see the Forth Road bridge’ – and points to its direct suitability to the situation of the academic conference: ‘Ten points to the first person who hears someone say the words Walter Benjamin.’ In recent years, it has been possible to play a version of this game substituting ‘Karen Barad’ for ‘Walter Benjamin’. If we add in bonus points for a cluster of terms taken from her book Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007) – especially ‘entanglement’, ‘diffraction’, ‘intra-action’ and ‘agential realism’ – then a fine game of ‘Barad Bingo’ can be had far and wide across the humanities and social sciences: from conferences on ruins, animal ethics and informational infrastructures to journal articles on lifelong learning (Edwards, 2010), bullying in schools (S ̄ndergaarda, 2012) and feminist theories of fashion (Parkins, 2008).’ (Hollins, et al, 2017)

Hollin, G, Forysth, I, Giraud, G et al. (1 more author) (2017) (Dis)entangling Barad: Materialisms and ethics. Social Studies of Science, 47 (6). pp. 918-941. ISSN 0306-3127

Click to access Disentangling%20Barad%20-%20version%20for%20repositories.pdf

Will report back with further notes – but good to see some counterpoints

What is it about Barad’s work that appeals to ‘now’ – which the authors admit is pressing today. “What is more, and as evidenced below (Figure 1), the influence of Barad’s work continues to grow, with the above outputs receiving significant year-on-year increases in citation counts. And this brings us to an important point: While Barad’s project spans twenty years, it is evidently of this moment.” (3)

‘Questions are raised, however, about the applicability of concepts originating in the quantum realm and what is lost when they ‘jump scales’ and are used in order to grasp macro-sociological concerns.’ Barad herself actually warns against this kind of simplistic scaling up and claims to avoid analogy (5)Re second-mentioned concern is scaleability – again dealt with by Barad – rather than scaling up, it seems to me she is suggesting implications at micro-level affect out thinking and even though the macro world is govenred by different rules, knowledge about more flexibity and possibility can nevertheless affect us, so not sure about this but I have only read first two chapters so will wait and see: “It does, however, mean that the issue of scale is particularly pertinent for those seeking to draw upon Barad’s work, and worth dwelling on.” (8)
‘Making matter matter, or, in search of lost realness‘ compare section heading to Foster Return fo the Real (6)
‘We conclude the article by arguing that in much of the literature drawing upon Barad there is a focus upon diffraction and entanglement and that this has come at the expense of considerations of complementarity and necessary exclusion. We suggest, however, that it is the radical potential of an ethics of exclusion which is perhaps most vital to those continuing to use Barad’s work.’ (5)

‘Re my own comments on peevishness: ‘Does the process by which ‘matter comes to matter’ in Barad’s thesis matter? When we call upon Barad to help secure an argument, how can we be sure that we are not suffering from a new case of physics envy – of the quantum variety?” (6)

‘There are two entirely concordant consequences to this continuity between physics and social theory. First, Barad’s realism promises to firm up the ‘beneath’, to put it in Foucauldian terms, of knowledge (Lather, 2010) by offering ‘the weight of realism’ as ‘ballast’ against too much postmodernism (Barad, 2007: 43).”Objects, entities and phenomena are demonstrably instantiated in and by material practices, produced performatively in concrete situations and thus – crucially – can anchor political actions. This approach carries distinct ethical implications, on which we focus shortly.’ (8)
‘Despite the obvious utility of diffraction, the section concludes with some thoughts on the possible merits of rescuing reflection.’ (11) see rest of section
I like this criticism:
‘In a recent article, Paxson and Helmreich (2013: 169) argued that:
‘[New materialism] is productive because it can shake thinking away from the certainties of social determinism, as exampled, canonically, in the Strong Programme in the Sociology of Knowledge – and because it can show that phenomena emerge in practice. But it is also risky, because new materialist tactics often veer towards universalizing metaphysical claims about the nature of ‘matter’ as such and also, at times, take scientific truth claims about the world at face value – a move that we consider a step backwards for STS.’ (13)
‘The key terms within this passage – intra-action, agential separability, exteriority-within – all indicate that for Barad the separations between words, things, and knowers are real enough but these separations are effects of particular engagements with the world (p. 138). This is the crux of Barad’s agential realism.’ (16) Key for me too – and can be applied to cameras and visual recording systems (some of which do not rely on sight or emulation of sight)
Barad’s understanding of the apparatus, then, is more expansive than in a ‘typical’ methods section, more-than-human in its composition, and emergent through practice. There are clear affinities here with actor-network theory (e.g. Latour, 1987: 162) Something for me to investigate further (17)
‘Perhaps, we might speculate, for theorists whose bread and butter it is to consider the nonhuman and their relations with humans and other nonhumans, Barad’s considerations are neither seismic nor entirely novel.’ (17)
re tools – and thinking about cameras/visualising tools: ‘The stick cannot usefully serve as an instrument of observation if one is intent on observing it. The line between subject and object is not fixed, but once a cut is made (i.e., a particular practice is being enacted), the identification is not arbitrary but in fact materially specified and determined (Barad, 2007: 154-155). (18)
NBNBNB: Not only is cutting a boundary-making practice (p. 148), it is a process over which there is a degree of control. Thus, for Barad, boundaries are not only real but there is a degree of responsibility for their creation, the worlds that are made, and those that are excluded (p. 243). (18)
This emphasis on separability, exteriority and constitutive exclusion is a significant part of what makes Barad’s work distinct and important. It is also the part of Barad’s scholarship that is most frequently lost in the re-telling. (18)
‘The concept of complementarity makes clear that, for Barad, when one apparatus instantiates a particular world another is necessarily excluded.’ (18) (At the risk of sounding slightly belittling and not meaning to, in popular culture, this is explored by Phillip Pullman – pulverized and aneathetised by the BBC)
‘We argue that the ways with which Barad’s approach has been engaged have resulted in an over-emphasis on questions of entanglement. In contrast, we suggest that the ‘radical potential’ of agential realism is in drawing attention to what is excluded from particular entanglements.’ (19)
A useful list of more-than-human writers: ‘Barad’s intra-active conception of the world offers a specific understanding of relationality that goes beyond earlier conceptualizations of hybridity (Haraway, 1992; Latour, 1993), a term which suggests relations shape pre-existing entities (Lorimer, 2015: 24). Yet, aside from offering a neat neologism that makes its difference from interaction explicit, on a superficial level, intra-active conceptions of the world do not appear to be wholly novel. Approaches that have considered the ‘mangle of practice’ (Pickering, 2010) such as posthumanism (Castree and Nash, 2004; Hayles, 1999; Wolfe, 2010), actor-network theory (Latour, 2005; Mol, 2003), non- representational theory (Anderson and Harrison, 2010), vital-materialist approaches (Bennett, 2009), engagements with cosmopolitics (Stengers, 1997, 2010, 2011; also Hinchcliffe et al., 2003), or object-oriented ontology (Bogost, 2011; Harman, 2012), all stress the agency of more-than- human entities and make clear that the human is shaped through encounters with other agencies.’ And add Deborah Lupton to this re Data Selves (2019)
The clearest description of performative for me yet – ‘Barad’s understanding of reality as enacted rather than pre-given similarly troubles pre-defined ethical hierarchies such as human/animal, subject/object, and nature/culture, as a way of thinking about the world.’ (19)
‘Barad could thus be situated as part of a longer lineage of work that has collapsed the ontological and epistemological and turned attention to the performative composition of reality (e.g. Mol, 2002; Star, 1992).’ (I thinkI still need to figure out why this is not constructivist – see the sentence about performative being not entirely or much at all re volition-) (20)

‘We question the ease with which Barad’s work has ‘jumped’ between diverse scales and urged that attention be paid to frictions between scales, and what may be lost precisely because it is not scalable’ (23) Hayles (1999) seems to answer this when she describes the way we instantiate our movements and actions while we use computers – the technology for these computers often emerge from a range of inte-related sciences and technologies where quantum mechanics plays a significant part – See loc 698 and then Chapter 3 on how information became so important to theorists and scientists via the Macy conferences – how this conversation which informed military and computer sciences and ‘infected’ reality

Hard not to disagree with the following or any other form of information which becomes a holy grail and therefore dogma spouted by dogmatic, excluding followers. ‘Despite seeing a number of potentials in agential realism, however, it is important to caution against uncritically extolling the value of this approach. As Willey (2016: 993) powerfully argues, it is dangerous to position new materialism as a radical break from feminist, postcolonial STS (see also Sundberg, 2014), and uncritically valorizing agential realism can lend strength to this trap.’

BOW & CS Notes: Meeting the Universe Halfway, K.Barad, 2007 (Intro & Chpt. 1)

November 15, 2019September 2, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

This book is vast and complex so I think I might try to make notes as I go. Although there is a risk in reading it that I will be carried away in unhelpful albeit exciting directions, I think it is worth taking because as I move through it I am beginning to have specific ideas about what I’m aiming to explore – and it’s very much linked to ‘seeing’. In DI&C A3 (2019) I began to explore the tendency for photography (both academic and more popular forms) to engage in hierarchical thinking, despite the fact that individuals within it often make great claims about using photography to interrogate society. This results in photography reinforcing rather than dismantling segregation of various forms.

Equipment and output are (perhaps catastrophically?) ‘entangled’ with the history and uses that engendered photography’s invention. I quoted Ariella Azoulay’s blog posts Unlearning the Origins of Photography (2018) which I now see are influenced by the same undoing of a Cartesian mindset that exists in Barad’s writing. I will also need to revisit Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography (2012) as the ‘apparatus’ – i.e. the social and economic machine in which the camera exists seems relevant.

So here are some bullet points notes for now:

Begins with an analysis of Frayn’s play Copenhagen (first performance 1998) (rave reviews and repeated runs across the globe) which she says is beautifully written but flawed – then goes on to say why, effectively lumping it alongside a ‘plethora of popular accounts that have sacrificed rigor (sic) for the sake of accessibility, entertainment, and if one is honest, the chance to garner the authority of science to underwrite one’s favourite view’ (6) I can imagine Frayne taking umbrage with this as it potentially says films such as Marvel’s Into the Spiderverse (2018) for instance which also uses a backdrop of multiple universes and fluid realities for its well-worn but nevertheless entertaining narrative structure are no different to his intellectual production. (I’ve not seen the play but really love Into the Spiderverse, incidentally…)
re the play, ‘we are left wandering aimlessly […with] only an empty feeling that quantum theory is somehow at once a manifestation of the mystery that keeps us alive and a cruel joke that deprives us of life’s meaning’ (17)
However, Neils Bohr, in particular, has called into question ‘an entire tradition in the history of Western metaphysics: the belief that the world is populated with individual things with their own set of determinate properties. The lesson that Bohr takes from quantum physics is very deep and profound: there aren’t little things wandering aimlessly in the void that possess the complete set of properties Newtonian physics assumes’ […] “Which properties become determinate is not governed by the desires or the will of the experimenter but rather by the specificity of the experimental apparatus.”
‘the very nature of intentionality needs to be rethought’ (22) i.e. we can assume nothing in isolation and the network/schema/surrounding landscape in which an intention emerges is always intra-dependent. (I will get to the use of intra-rather than inter shortly)
‘intentions are not pre-existing determinate mental states of individual human beings’ & intentionality “might better be understood as attributable to a complex network of human and nonhuman [cameras for instance and the companies that make them] agents, including historically specific sets of material conditions that exceed the traditional notion of the individual’. (23)
‘an entangled state of agencies’ (23)
She avoids analogies – especially between people and particles and I will do well to heed her warning against doing so – reductive and simplistic
is interested in ‘conditions for the possibility of objectivity, the nature of measurement, the nature of nature and meaning making, and the relationship between discursive practices and the material world’ (24) This is where I am having some issues. First of all, because I had to get my head around ‘discursive practices’ as opposed to discursive writing – the latter is a description of a type of writing that flits from one subject to another and is a pejorative term (my writing!) The former is a complex Foucaldian term which is very difficult to comprehend… discourse-related performative actions in human behaviour in which power-relations are played out. The most useful description is as follows:

‘The discursive practice approach is grounded in four insights concerning discourse. One is the affirmation that social realities are linguistically/discursively constructed. The second is the appreciation of the context-bound nature of discourse. The third is the idea of discourse as social action. The fourth is the understanding that meaning is negotiated in interaction, rather than being present once-and-for-all in our utterances.’ From http://voidnetwork.gr/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Discursive-practice.pdf

My problem – and this runs throughout the Barad and New Materialism material I’ve read (still reading, still trying to understand and a way to go) is that, while I appreciate that language has been given more attention than material/matter as Barad argues in debates about power – language and verbal action are in my understanding material and that distinction between the two is what prevents people up from valuing digital language (code, digital photography) which they see as non-material and therefore less worthy (in art especially). (See Lupton, 2019, How data came to matter (79)) The other thing is, assemblages and intra-actions which include discursive practices, as well as matter, don’t exist in isolation which is the base of her world view (which also tallies with systemic theories as far as I can see – again, based on very basic knowledge). I am aware I have not yet got the gist of Barad’s arguments about matter so – watch this space – I might get it eventually.

diffractive approach – this suits my way of thinking and I wholeheartedly agree. One of the issues with photography writing in some instances is that it seems to have tunnel vision and excludes all else at times leading to phrases such as ‘photography changes everything’ which I briefly dismantled in DI&CA3. Photography then ends up being seen as a holy grail in some people’s minds when in fact it is one mechanism amongst many that contribute to meaning – and the flat, still, decisive moment kind might just be the most irrelevant and in Elkin’s terms ‘boring’ example of reality out there nowadays. (2011) Again, Lupton’s explanation of a diffractive approach, which refers to Barad, is useful. (29)
‘a diffractive methodology is respectful of the entanglement of ideas and other materials [ideas = materials] in ways that reflexive methodologies are not (29)
agential realism – recognises agents both human and non-human that exists in and acknowledge the real but eschew both anti-realism/constructivism as well as realist insisters “a philosophical framework that […] entails a rethinking of fundamental concepts that support such binary thinking, including the notions of matter, discourse, causality, agency, power, identity, embodiment, objectivity, space, and time’ (26) – See page 48 for more inc. ‘representationalism is so deeply entrenched in Western culture that has taken on a common-sense appeal’ (48) What’s the alternative? Describe/how does photography reinforce this and can it help to critique it, if so how? – performative approaches
central – ‘matter as a dynamic and shifting entanglement of relations rather than a property of things’ (35)
Bohr: ‘we are part of that nature that we seek to understand’. ‘part of the phenomena we describe’ (26)
NBNBNBNB ‘Performative approaches call into question the basic premises of representationalism’ (28)
‘representationalism in the belief in the ontological distinction between representation and that which they purport to represent’ (46) [I think revisit Rubenstein’s crit of Freid – Failure to Engage for more on this]
‘ther are assumed to be two distinct and independent kinds of entities – representations and entities to be represented’ (46)
‘Performative approaches call into question representationalism’s claim that there are representations, on the one hand, and ontologically separate entities awaiting representation on the other, and focus inquiry on the practices or performances of representing’ (49) Knowledge comes from ‘direct material engagement’ (49)
See page 50 for Realism without Representation – where does all this tally with Hoffman’s theory in which our only access to the world is via representation alone. His representation is wholly constructed, it does not accurately describe the real but fulfills our needs for existing within it – therefore it is our real because its the only one we have.
‘Theorists who adopt a performative approach are often quick to point out performativity is not the same as performance, and to merely talk of performance does not make an approach performative’ (60)
Intraction – 33. ‘The neologism signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies’ – a good deal of photography-related critical theory seems not to recognise this mutuality. ‘the primary ontological unit is not independent objects with independently determinate boundaries and properties but rather what Bohr terms phenomena. ‘The shift from the metaphysics of things to phenomena makes an enormous difference in understanding the nature of science and ontological, epistemological and ethical issues more generally’. (33)
‘realism is often saddled with essentialism’ (55)
‘theorising and experimenting are not about intervening (from outside) but about intra-acting from within, and as part of the phenomena produced’ (56)
builds on ‘Foucault’s critique of representationalism and Bulter’s gender performativity’ – ‘gender is not an attribute of individuals’ (57) This would apply to poverty, class distinction, ‘race’, sexuality – all emerge as ‘a doing’ – performing
‘what is at stake in this dynamic conception of matter is an unsettling of natures presumed fixity and hence an opening up of the possibilities for change’ (64)

See Fred Ritchin’s final chapter After Photography (2010) as a possible intro into finding ways to use digital photography to bring these quantum influenced ideas into the discourse beyond scientific circles.

Think Zizek has critiqued Barad and will need to find it and see what he has to say… Been comparing what I recall of A Systemic View of Life

Azoulay, A. (2018) Ariella Azoulay – Unlearning Decisive Moments of Photography. [online blog/forum] At: http://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/authors/10605_ariella_azoulay (Accessed 15/11/2019).

Capra, F. and Luisi, P. L. (2014) The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision. (1 edition) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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

Field, S. (2019) The Democratisation of Form, OCA Digital Image and Culture A3. [Essay]: WordPress. At: https://sjfdiculture.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/assignment-3-democratisation-of-form-submission-1.pdf (Accessed 15/11/2019).

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) Directed by Persichetti, B. et al. Sony.

Frayn, M. (1998) Copenhagen. London: Methuen Drama.

Ritchin, F. (2010) After Photography. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.

BOW/CS A3: Research/Sketches, Reality Evolution, perception

November 10, 2019September 2, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

According to Donald Hoffman’s theory which I have discussed several times (Literature review ), we did not evolve to see reality as it truly is, as has been argued. Rather, we evolved to see the sort of reality we need to see to for ‘optimal fitness’. We perceive far less than there actually is because to see it all would be unhelpful. What’s more, according to Hoffman, the objects we see, including space and time are like desktop icons – constructed objects that represent the goal we are either after or trying to avoid. As hard as this is to understand, and Hoffman admits he may very well be wrong but that his theory makes the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness approachable, his idea sits well with many of the other theories I have been reading about since I picked up The Ego Trip by Julian Baggini (2011) (when I began UVC) followed by a raft of other books exploring similar themes.

I have been trying to express and understand these subjects in my writing, and looking at and photographing objects and phenomena in the world. The photoshopped images below are attempts to explore these ways of thinking about the world.

Fred Ritchin’s After Photography (2009) has some good sentences which I will introduce into my Lit Review and no doubt take forward into the essay.

“…some quantum theorists, foremost amongst them, Neils Bhor and Heisenberg himself, argued that fundamental reality is essentially indeterminate, that there is no clear fixed, underlying ‘something’ to our daily existence that can ever be known. Everything about reality is and remains a matter of probabilities […] We have tried to use the photograph to concretize the probabilities (isn’t that what the “decisive moment” is all about?), reassuring us that reality is more solid than what our theories tell us.” (180)

In Data Selves (2019) Deborah Lupton quotes Kember and Zylinska (2012) to describe how photography is an “agential cut” aimed at imposing “meaning and order” and “delimiting choices” (29). As Ritchin says an alternative “may be too disconcerting, if not terrifying.” (ibid) As he describes, digital technology and photography in particular “can begin to be receptive to the oddities described by newer theories” [quantum and consciousness related]. (177) Superpositions, endless possibilities, entanglement, for instance, can all be alluded to using malleable data either as a process or a representation (which if one takes Hoffman’s idea on board are completely intra-related in any case).

Some sketches – I wonder if these would benefit from more contemporary mixes (a bit like Flowers for Donald). Still a bit Guardian headline pics for my liking :

IMG_9765iiilow- — Isle of White – windswept hilltop

Landscape with Bridge - The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Similar to above but layered with an anonymous 17th-century pencil landscape downloaded from Google Art and supplied by the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Windswept tree – shaped by the elements – differentiation reduced by processing decisions.

(See Orpheus story – trees to this day in shape of dance to his music)

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

Lupton, D. (2019) Data selves: more-than-human perspectives. Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA: Polity.
Landscape with Bridge – Anonymous, Italian, 17th century (s.d.) At: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/landscape-with-bridge-anonymous-italian-17th-century/EwHp9J9QWhanmw (Accessed 10/11/2019).

Baggini, J. (2011) The Ego Trick. [Kindle edition] London: Granta Books.

BOW: Assemblage

October 2, 2019September 2, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

Since sending out various versions of work and receiving the feedback I have developed the overall concept and presentation further – seeing what could be ditched but also how I would bring some of the various elements I had created together into an ‘assemblage‘.

I do not much like the word assemblage but after reading it used (a great deal) in a blog by Deborah Lupton, the author of Data Selves: More-than-Human Perspectives, it seems like the correct word for the collection of images, sounds and materials I’ve gathered together. She writes:

I examine the interplay of human and nonhuman affordances associated with digital technologies – devices, software and the digital data they generate – and the agential capacities that are opened up or closed off as these things assemble. I ponder the questions of who benefits from these agential capacities, and in whose interests they operate. Here again, affective forces are central to the engagements of humans with these nonhuman things and the capacities that are generated by their gatherings. I address how human-data assemblages can generate agential capacities that empower and vitalise actors in the assemblage; but can also expose them to vulnerabilities and harms.

This approach recognises the entanglements of personal digital data assemblages with human action, reaction and understanding of the world. Personal digital data assemblages are partly comprised of information about human action, but their materialisations are also the products of human action, and these materialisations can influence future human action. While digital data assemblages are often conceptualised as immaterial, invisible and intangible, I contend that they are 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). (2019)

I am therefore creating an assemblage although I have not used this word.

The assemblage consists of:

A video – itself a collage, a type of assemblage. While not a still collage like Höch’s were, it was made to emulate that trope, cutting up and pasting material that exists in the world. It includes audiovisual material that is available on the internet but contains signifiers of earlier technology. It will be shown on a Kindle – a handheld device.
The film will also be available on my website but it will be a different version. Mostly the same apart from one or two tiny sections, but with an alternative audio track. The instruction to visit the website is printed on newsprint and is part of the assemblage.
Still frames from the film which have been ‘captured’ and frozen – in more or less the same way a photograph of life is captured and rendered a still image, using a slightly different tech/method – and printed on newsprint. These will be placed on the platform or hung from sticks.
The poem printed on a tabloid page, orientated portrait. I hope this will hang above and slightly behind the kindle, perhaps alongside printed newsprints but I will need to see how this pans out when we set up. I was very influenced a long time ago by Louise Bourgious’ He Disappeared into Complete Silence. This is a book with several plates each of which consists of text and a drawing. The drawing is not an illustration. And sometimes it is hard to make the connection. But they are made to be seen together. I feel the poem and the video work this way too. Each can stand on its own but the point of the work is only brought to the fore when they are placed beside each other: A moving image piece alongside text, working with it but not illustrating. I might have read/performed the text in a video or even live. But this did not feel the right place (collaboration) for that – perhaps I might have reached a way of doing this if we’d had longer or were working in a smaller group -and it is something to consider for the longer-term, BOW-wise.

DO02148-007_0 — Image Louise Bourgeois *He Disappeared into Complete Silence* 1947 From: https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/collection/artwork/he-disappeared-complete-silence-6

The work will exist in a ‘village’ (the platform) alongside other work made by my collaborators. The contents were influenced by their interests and the interactions I had with them. It is a reflection of them and my time with them. So my work is part of a greater assemblage, a network of creators which itself exists within a further larger assemblage – i.e. the three groups organised/curated by Pic London. That too is an assemblage which is again part of something greater. And so on = the fractal nature of existence.

Looking back, this is the pattern of my work. And now I know why. I am not focusing on one tiny aspect. I am recreating the chaos and interaction of conscious experience (not an individual, not an isolated and alienated concept, not one thing).

When I submit the assignment I will include critical information I sent to Pic London – but here since it is relevant, I will just add a quotation I used which I have inserted into my work previously, and put at the front of my Self & Other blog:

“There is no such thing as a single human being, pure and simple unmixed with other human beings … [the self] is a composite structure … formed out of countless never-ending influences and exchanges… we are members of one another.” (Joan Riviere, 1927) It seems the assemblage whether it’s made up of flesh or tech or both and all sorts of other stuff is a description of Riviere’s statement.

Ref:

Lupton D. (2019) Excerpt from Introduction of Data Selves [online] WordPress Available from: https://simplysociology.wordpress.com/2019/09/01/excerpt-from-introduction-of-data-selves/ [Accessed 2/10/2019]

The Museo Reina Sofía (2019) He Disappeared into Complete Silence [online] User-generated content. Available from: https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/collection/artwork/he-disappeared-complete-silence-6 [Accessed 2/10/19]