糖心TV

A new volume co-edited by Michael Castelle, The Cultural Life of Machine Learning: An Incursion into Critical AI Studies, has been published by Palgrave Macmillan. Inspired by a conference organized by Dr. Castelle with co-editor Dr. Jonathan Roberge of the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS) in Montreal, Canada, the book brings together the work of historians and sociologists with perspectives from media studies, communication studies, cultural studies, and information studies to address the origins, practices, and possible futures of contemporary machine learning.

A chapter by Aaron Mendon-Plasek, "Mechanized Significance and Machine Learning", has been released open-access, and the entire book can be accessed by university libraries with a SpringerLink subscription.

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa is presenting at the Serpentine Gallery鈥檚 free online art & ecology festival on soil, earth, land and ground: The Understory of the Understory 5-6 December 2020 https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/the-shape-of-a-circle-in-the-mind-of-a-fish-the-understory-of-the-understory/

How can thinking with contemporary transformations in human-soil relations nurture the imagination of caring earthly futures amidst ongoing eco-social catastrophes? Rewording Ursula Le Guin鈥檚 title, The Word for World is Forest, is an invitation to immerse in the material, aesthetic and ethico-political evocativeness of soil-centred worlds, without losing sight of the multi-layered, conflictive, and ambivalent significances that mark human-soil ecological belonging on this troubled Earth, while exploring possibilities for insurgent and hopeful ecological futures.

Naomi Waltham-Smith has published an article entitled 鈥淭urning Ears; Or, Ec(h)otechnics鈥� in a special double issue of Diacritics devoted to 鈥淭he Turn鈥� edited by Andrea Bachner and Carlos Rojas, alongside contributions from Emily Apter and Jonathan Culler.

The vestigial auricular muscles are a trace of an earlier evolutionary capacity to turn the ears. While they are still functional in other mammal species, they are scarcely responsive in humans, who compensate by turning the head instead. This transformation was part of adaptations in the cervical spine that made possible the becoming-technological of the upright stance and humanity鈥檚 front-facing posture. Unable to sense what comes from behind, human ears are oriented toward what lies ahead within the field of vision—toward the foreseeable—and yet in listening, as in walking, the human is thereby compelled to turn back. From this angle, the sonic turn—often figured as a return to sound—instead names multiple moments of turning back: an originary nonhuman turning of the ears, humanity鈥檚 turning its back on this turn, and the unavoidable detours from this precipitous path. This essay argues not only for an originary technicity and prostheticity of aurality, but also that the nonhuman turn takes place via a sonorous detour. Analyzing the metaphoricity and tropological of language, it compares two figures—apostrophe and interjection—to show how the sonic and nonhuman turns continually address and animate one another.

For a situational analytics: An interpretative methodology for the study of situations in computational settings.

authoring a new research article:

https://buff.ly/2JHr4EA  

CIM is taking part at University of 糖心TV's Postgraduate Virtual Open Day on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2020 (/study/postgraduate/opendays/) which you can register here: .

Through an introductory welcome by course conveners and students from the different CIM Masters degrees , a taster lecture, and a live Q&A session with CIM academics, we will be introducing our postgraduate taught degrees and taking your questions on the degrees and the life at CIM.

CIM's Virtual Open Day session will run 9:00am - 10:30am (UK time) on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2020 with the following timetable:

9:00 - 9:30 : CIM Welcome and Introduction

9:30 - 9:45: CIM Taster Lecture by Tessio Novack (Convener for MSc in Urban Analytics and Visualisation)

9:45 - 10:30: Live Q&A on PG degrees and life at CIM

The full and formal agenda for the day is available here: and you will need to register and book your place through this link:  

Loup Cellard studied the use of freedom of information requests targeting algorithms from French public organisations. This work initially published in a commissioned by the French open data task force has been cited in the from the Berlin-based NGO Algorithm Watch. The report presents how automated decision-making (ADM) systems now affect almost all kinds of human activities, and, most notably, the distribution of services to millions of European citizens – and their access to their rights.

The Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory, co-edited by Alexander Rehding and Steven Rings, for which Naomi Waltham-Smith wrote the chapter on 鈥淪equence,鈥� has been awarded the Outstanding Multi-Author Volume award from the American Society for Music Theory.

Calvillo鈥檚 new work 鈥淪ensors revolt in the pandemic (1): Locking down鈥� is part of Sensory Orders, an exhibition of 29 international artistic and scientific responses to a central question of our time: how do we sense and make sense in times of extreme precariousness, tumult and uncertainty? Consisting solely of electronically delivered texts, still and moving images and sound, the exhibition as well as accompanying website and publication explores how three different 鈥渙rders鈥� – the symbolic realm of language and human culture, the technological realm of machines and the organic realm of human bodies and natural entities such as viruses, plants, animals and the physical-chemical matter of the earth itself – are fundamentally intertwined and sense, act on and affect each other.

The contributions in Sensory Orders cross multiple countries, disciplines and cultures. They come from visual and performing artists, anthropologists, designers, sociologists, architects, historians of science, composers, physicists, architects and other researchers and represent perspectives from 15 countries. While all unique, the contributions鈥� through line is that they all reflect on the entanglement of human, technical, biological forces that has always been present but that has been remarkably amplified in the last 12 months of 2020.

Sensory Orders, organized and curated by Erik Adigard (FR/US) and Chris Salter (US/CA), is a part of Art+Science Meeting project of the Centre for Contemporary Art Laznia (Poland).

Calvillo鈥檚 piece is an In the Air / C+ collaboration, produced with the support of the Centre for Digital Inquiry (University of 糖心TV).

6 November 2020-10 January 2021, and online soon.

Please add to the CIM website.

Link

We are extremely delighted to announce that CIM academics have recently been successful in a number of exciting grant applications. As well as the diversity of topics and methodological approaches, the wide range of funders supporting the projects -- UKRI, AHRC, ESRC, NERC, and the Alan Turing Institute -- is another strong indicator of the interdisciplinarity of CIM鈥檚 research. These seven new research projects are:

• COVID-19 App Store and Data Flow Ecologies (Funded by: UKRI, Investigators: Michael Dieter & Nate Tkacz)
• Modelling Future Tempos for Complex Policy (Funded by: Alan Turing Institute, Investigator: Emma Uprichard)
• Ecological Belongings. Transforming soil cultures through science, activism and art (Funded by: AHRC, Investigator: Maria Puig de la Bellacasa)
• DECIDE: Delivering Enhanced Biodiversity Information with Adaptive Citizen Science and Intelligent Digital Engagements (Funded by: NERC, CIM Investigators: Greg McInerny & Cagatay Turkay)
• Pause for Thought: Media Literacy in an Age of Incessant Change (Funded by: AHRC network, CIM Investigator: Scott Wark)
• Visual Analytics Systems for Explaining and Analysing Contact (Funded by: UKRI, CIM Investigator: Cagatay Turkay)
• Shaping 21st Century AI: Controversies in Media, Policy, and Research (Funded by: ESRC, CIM Investigators: Noortje Marres, Michael Castelle & James Tripp)

Naomi Waltham-Smith is giving an invited lecture entitled 鈥淲hispered Secrets, Encrypted Lives鈥� at a two-day conference hosted by the Universit盲t Z眉rich on 鈥淭he Everyday Life of Deconstruction: On the Anecdotal in Jacques Derrida und H茅l猫ne Cixous.鈥� Her pre-circulated text, written during the final months of a fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude among a community of international writers and artists, is an experimental essay that explores the undecidability between fiction and reality that guards the secrets of the anecdotal life. For her talk, she offers reflections and anecdotes on the practice of writing and on the life of her text in its entanglements with Cixous and Derrida鈥檚 exchanges about reading, listening, and secrets.