News Archive

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)

Naomi Waltham-Smith is giving an invited lecture entitled “Whispered Secrets, Encrypted Lives” at a two-day conference hosted by the Universität Zürich on “The Everyday Life of Deconstruction: On the Anecdotal in Jacques Derrida und Hélène Cixous.” 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’s exchanges about reading, listening, and secrets.

The latest issue of Sociologica 14, no. 2 (2020) contains a special feature on “Listening in a Time of Pandemic” co-edited by CIM scholar Dr Naomi Waltham-Smith and a collaborator and fellow sound-studies scholar at the American University in Paris, Dr Jessica Feldman.

During the pandemic, listening habits around the world have been undergoing significant transformation in response to various public health measures imposing physical distancing and stay-at-home isolation. This situation has prompted new experiments with digital mediations, transformations in modalities of protest and autonomy, and impulses towards anecdotal accounts in a bid to share experiences of isolation. The essays in this special feature, powerful and evocative by turns, range across a variety of socio-political and disciplinary concerns and point towards a crucial issue facing societies today: how to design new forms and practices of listening to foster the forms of sociality and collectivity urgently needed in a changed world.

As part of MD4SG '20 4th Workshop on Mechanism Design for Social Good (August 17-19, 2020), CIM doctoral student Helena Suárez Val will be participating in the presentation of a work-in-progress paper: ‘Feminicide & Machine Learning: Detecting Gender-based Violence to Strengthen Civil Sector Activism’, co-authored with Catherine D'Ignazio, Silvana Fumega, Harini Suresh, Isadora Cruxên, Wonyoung So, María De Los Angeles Martínez and Mariel García-Montes.

Abstract: Gender-related violence against women and its lethal outcome, feminicide, are a serious problem in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), as they are in the rest of the world. Although governments have passed legislation criminalizing feminicide, these laws have not been accompanied by relevant policy nor by robust data collection that measures the scope and scale of the problem. Drawing from Data Feminism, we situate feminicide data as "missing data" and describe the work of activists and civil society organizations who attempt to fill in the gaps by compiling incidents of feminicide from news reports. Activists doing this work face challenges: lack of time and financial resources, difficulties in accessing official data, and the mental health burden of reading about violent deaths of women. The paper describes ongoing progress on a participatory action research project designed to help sustain activist efforts to collect feminicide data by partially automating detection using machine learning.

Full details of the programme and registration for the event here: http://www.md4sg.com/workshop/MD4SG20/program.html