[iDC] how long is a piece of string?

[katharine.willis at archit.uni-weimar.de]

Dear Mark,

Thanks for your reply. Brian Holme's text is fascinating. From my non- 
expert viewpoint (cyberneticists please feel free to correct me ...)  
cybernetics still considers 'systems' , which to some extent is  
grounded in the underlying assumption that a system in itself has  
some form of boundary and can be studied objectively as an entity-  
which can be limiting as  an approach . Although, having said this,  
related-theories such as those of emergence do seem to be able to at  
least recognise the inherently open nature of changeful processes,  
and can allow for  a process to be an outcome. The question then lies  
in how we can try to understand information flows which do not break  
processes down into components which no longer give us any insight  
into the changeful whole. If I refer back to situated   interaction  
with technology; where computers supposedly respond to real world  
events and places then you still get human and digital systems  
colliding because they work on different paradigms:

'The discrete nature of computation means that both specification and  
implementation of computer systems tend to focus on events that occur  
at specific times. However most mobile applications detect or measure  
status phenomena i.e. they are things which constantly have a value  
that can be sampled. The translation of status phenomena into events  
is problematic and is often done accidentally within systems, with  
the consequent probability of errors [Dix, 2000]. This may contribute  
to the fact that the fundamental infrastructure and services that  
make up ubiquitous and pervasive technology exhibits a great deal of  
spatial, temporal, economic and organizational variation [Chalmers  
2004].

Underlying this is the question  of humans interacting with  
technology , where there often remains the issue of the concept of  
feedback, which is essentially structured around the idea that any  
input of data will create some form of output (even if it is just an  
error message)  - ie it requires in some way a sequential flow of  
activities with the assumption that there is an outcome. So there  
seems to be an inherent problem in that it responds to change in a  
way that may not allow for unexpected outcomes or perhaps the  
scenario where there is no outcome at all.

A narrative is essentially a piece of information undergoing change.  
A story unfolds and ideally the process of unfolding is interactive -  
the storyteller reacts to an audience or weaves in pieces of  
information that tap into people's memories or hopes. So, as you say,  
it responds to the condition of  in-betweenness (for more on this  
topic and how it applies to public spaces see karen martin and  
colleague's workshop on inbetweeness http://www.inbetweeness.org/) .

My only thought is that we need to look away from science for  
solutions; to literature, film, theatre and other such fields to give  
us paradigms for interacting with information and which can deal with  
loose, sticky and ambiguous threads. These fields deal with  
subjective qualities of things rather than objective quantities.

coming back to Deleuze (From Cinema 1)

'if one had to define the whole, it would be defined by the Relation.  
Relation is not a property of objects, it is always external to its  
terms. Relations do not belong to objects, but to the whole, on the  
condition that this is not confused with a closed set of objects...  
Through relations the whole is transformed or changes quantitively'

Your quote from Deleuze on multiplicity also refers to the idea that  
a 'whole' is not a systems but a set of relations; what he calls a  
multiplicity.  '  it's the borderline, there's always a border, a  
line of flight or flow, only we don't see it, because it's the least  
perceptible of things'

Following up on your idea that authors ( you gave the example of  
Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan) have created good precedents for how  
we might approach narratives about place, another example might be  
the work of writer Iain Sinclair. In his book 'London orbital' he  
documented his journey along the M25 motorway which rings London (for  
those not familiar with London, the road is literally a 117mile long  
circular bypass around the city). The story captures some of the in- 
between space which portrays the London that many experience everyday  
in their journeys; as opposed to the dominant the narrative told by  
tourist brochures, estate agent windows or sat-nav systems:

'for the first time since Shenly we didn't need maps.... we trusted  
the ground... we followed our noses. Patches of greenery, dog grass,  
a few trees; they are absorbed into a grander scheme Isolate one  
Lombardy Pine. Stand still and listen. Outsiders are struck by  
effects, shifts, that locals walking their animals, or collecting  
their kids from a fenced-off school, take for granted. There is a  
mystery at the edge of great conurbations; in the light, in places  
travellers have passed through for centuries' (pg. 191-192)

By structuring the text around a motorway, a thoroughly inbetween  
space, the text somehow captures duration of an experience and how  
London is held together by the many flows of people on a road where  
if you keep driving you end up where you started, just at a different  
time.

Another field that seems to offer so many opportunities for a better  
approach to the subject is that of theatre and dance. The methods of  
performance are very much based on systems of response and non-verbal  
communication, so it would be great to know how this might hold some  
clues about another way of thinking about the problem....

But I realise this is all very far away from the reality of a  
software engineer programming a mobile device so that it can respond  
to the change in location of the device and the corresponding  
sophisticated switching of network coverage from one cell to another.  
I just  wonder how  it is possible to start to reveal somehow  both  
the ambiguity and change inherent in such systems as well as the  
actual eventfulness occurring in the flow of information so that we  
can start to weave them more meaningfully into our messy 'real' world.



regards

Katharine



reference

Dix, A., Rodden, T,., Davies, N., Trevor., J, Friday, A., Palfreyman,  
K.: Exploiting Space and Location as a Design Framework for  
Interactive Mobile Systems. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human  
Interaction (TOCHI), v.7 n.3, p.285-321, Sept. (2000)

Chalmers, M., Dieberger, A., Höök, K., Rudström. A.: Social  
Navigation and Seamful Design. Cognitive Studies: Bulletin of the  
Japanese Cognitive Science Society 11(3), pp 171-181, (2004)

Sinclair, I ( 2002). London  Orbital. Granta, UK


On 21 Oct 2007, at 02:37, Mark Shepard wrote:
Hi Katherine,

Your call for us to consider how Situated Technologies might serve to  
help us "find ways of slipping through the boundaries in order to  
trace our own meanings and memories on the spatial world" would seem  
to reflect Brian Holmes' post on his blog of an abstract for an essay  
on Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies: http:// 
brianholmes.wordpress.com/2007/07/20/escape-the-overcode/ - although  
knowing Brian (at least though his posts here and elsewhere) I'm sure  
he'll have issues with this correlation (which I look forward to  
reading). What's your take on this?

This condition of being betwixt and between - "the story comes into  
being in the space in-between" - is something I think anyone  
migrating from one place to the another is of course familiar with,  
and their stories are probably a good place to start in thinking  
through this. "Crossing the BLVD:  strangers, neighbors, aliens in a  
new America" is a book by Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan that  
presents a kaleidoscopic view of new immigrants and refugees living  
in Queens, New York -  the most ethnically diverse locality in the  
United States. Excerpts are available here: http:// 
www.crossingtheblvd.org

Also, your question "how long is a piece of string?" poses  
interesting problems vis-a-vis ANT theory, at least as far as Latour  
articulates it. What are the limits by which we need to trace what is  
"strung together" or assembled by contemporary story-telling  
technologies and techniques?

Finally, what "kind" of narrative are we talking about here? Surely  
we're not thinking of the master narratives and grand schemes of  
orthodox modernism. But at what point does this "shared experience"  
become enmeshed in larger aspirations toward empowerment vis-a-vis  
networked technologies?

Below is an exerpt from a conversation with Gilles Deleuze on the  
television broadcast of Jean Luc Godard's "Six fois deux"; Cahiers du  
Cinema 271 (November 1976).

Best,
Mark

<snip>
AND is of course diversity, multiplicity, the destruction of  
identities. It's not the same factory gate when I go in, and when I  
come out, and then when I go past unemployed. A convicted man's wife  
isn't the same before and after the conviction. But diversity and  
multiplicity have nothing to do with aesthetic wholes (in the sense  
of 'one more,' 'one more woman'. . . ) or dialectical schemas (in the  
sense of 'one produces two, which then produces three'). Because in  
those cases it's still Unity, and thus being, that's primary, and  
that supposedly becomes multiple.

When Godard says everything has two parts, that in a day there's  
morning and evening, he's not saying it's one or the other, or that  
one becomes the other, becomes two. Because multiplicity is never in  
the terms, however many, nor in all the terms together, the whole.  
Multiplicity is precisely in the 'and' which is different in nature  
from elementary components and collections of them.

Neither a component nor a collection, what is this AND? I think  
Godard's force lies in living and thinking and presenting this AND in  
a very novel way, and in making it work actively. AND is neither one  
thing nor the other, it's always in-between, between two things; it's  
the borderline, there's always a border, a line of flight or flow,  
only we don't see it, because it's the least perceptible of things.  
And yet it's along this line of flight that things come to pass,  
becomings evolve, revolutions take shape.
</snip>



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