News Archive

Naomi Waltham-Smith has written the chapter on “Deconstruction” and translated an essay by Jean-Luc Nancy on “Galant Music” for the new Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy, edited by Tomás McAuley, Nanette Nielsen, and Jerrold Levinson.

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’s 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’s 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 “Turning Ears; Or, Ec(h)otechnics” in a special double issue of Diacritics devoted to “The Turn” 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’s 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’s 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.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/774745

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

authoring a new research article:

https://buff.ly/2JHr4EA #STS #platformstudies #AutonomousVehicles #ComputationalSocialScience 

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

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: https://pgopendays.warwick.ac.uk/agenda and you will need to register and book your place through this link: https://pgopendays.warwick.ac.uk/home 

Loup Cellard studied the use of freedom of information requests targeting algorithms from French public organisations. This work initially published in a white-paper commissioned by the French open data task force has been cited in the Automating Society Report 2020 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 “Sequence,” has been awarded the Outstanding Multi-Author Volume award from the American Society for Music Theory.

Link to book on Oxford University Press website

Calvillo’s new work “Sensors revolt in the pandemic (1): Locking down” 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 “orders” – 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’ 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’s piece is an In the Air / C+ collaboration, produced with the support of the Centre for Digital Inquiry (University of Warwick).

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

Please add to the CIM website.

Link

http://www.laznia.pl/wystawy/sensory-orders-373/#

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’s 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)