Our colleague René Westerholt (Assistant Professor at CIM) was awarded the Dissertation Prize Geoinformatics 2019 last Thursday. This prize is awarded by the Runder Tisch GIS e.V. at the Technical University of Munich and is endowed with 2500€ prize money. Part of the award regulations was also an audience voting for the corresponding talk at the GI-Runde 2019, a conference for GIS experts from academia, business and public administration. The aim of the Runder Tisch GIS e.V. is to promote and link different actors in the GIS sector in Germany. The prize committee consisted of five leading German GIS professors: Prof. Thomas Kolbe (TU Munich), Prof. Ralf Bill (University of Rostock), Prof. Jörg Blankenbach(RWTH Aachen University), Prof. Jukka Krisp (University of Augsburg), and Prof. Patrick Ole Noack (Weihenstephan-Triesdorf University of Applied Sciences).

Abstract:

In what sense is the world audible after human extinction? And what does it mean to suggest that an increasing lapse of attunement to our environment and its survival is symptomatic of a certain self-extinguishing character of human aurality which lives on only by destroying itself? If the Anthropocene, as geological strata, will be readable long after geologists and human reading will have become extinct, this paper presents a similar thought-experiment to speculate about listening after human listening. The anthropogenic destruction of the planet and of other species can be tracked by ear, and yet it is typically far more audible to technological or animal ears—through ocean tomography, for example, or in the traces of animal perceptions of noise left in changing patterns of migration. I look back in the opposite direction along history’s unfolding to the evolution of the mammalian ear and specifically the role of epigenetic changes so as to explore possibilities for non-human modes of listening at once beastly and prosthetic.

On International Women’s Day Naomi Waltham-Smith is giving a paper at the American Comparative Literature Association annual conference in Washington DC on Anne Dufourmantelle’s notion of gentle listening and hospitality to women’s voices in the thought of Jacques Derrida.

 Link to programme: https://www.acla.org/program-guide#/search/seminar/22062

 Abstract:

Language is never safely in my possession but is always the language of the other, always at risk of its becoming unheimlich, at risk of descending into madness. Such is Derrida’s thinking of the oikos and of the oikonomia of hospitality, which is no less threatened by perversion. Derrida’s thought of hospitality demands a respect for singularity—for the kind of singularity that distinguishes, for example, “the promise of an as yet unheard language” of the other, “inaudible yesterday” from the language of the other as colonizing master. And yet that unconditional hospitality—the categorical imperative to respect the otherness of the other—is in danger of becoming appropriative, colonizing, exploitative. For refugees and migrants, the possibility of making a new home has perhaps never been more urgent or more in jeopardy as hospitality, weaponized, teeters towards “a gateway to barbarism” in Dufourmantelle’s phrase. But it is not Derrida’s appeal for “cities of refuge” that detains me here, rather Dufourmantelle’s “invitation” and its offer to shelter his thought within. In particular, I examine the weight she gives in her reading to listening to spoken words, connecting this with her reflections elsewhere on listening and gentleness. I focus on the constellation into which she inserts listening alongside the nocturnal, exiled side of speech and the maternal madness that inhabits language, threatening the promise of homeliness.

This article makes a contribution to interface criticism through the notion of chrono-design: the deliberate shaping of experiences of temporality and time through contemporary software techniques and digital technologies. This notion is articulated through discussions of network optimisation, user experience design, behavioural tracking, Hansen’s work on 21st-century media and Hayles’ framework of cognitive assemblages. In particular, the argument considers how contemporary user interfaces complicate conventional notions of the rational, self-reflexive subject by operating beyond consciousness at vast environmental dimensions and accelerated micro-temporal speeds. These conditions, we argue, provide opportunities for new forms of behavioural suspense and captivation best exemplified through the figure of the trap. The politics and aesthetics of captivation, accordingly, should be considered as central to any expanded ecology of cognition. The article then concludes with a short demonstration of experimental uses of chrono-design methods applied critically to political economies of user tracking and data capture as a prompt for further interdisciplinary applied research in this domain.

‘In a sense we are unique moist packages of animated soil’. These are the alluring words of Francis D. Hole, a professor of soil science renowned for encouraging love for the soil and understanding of its vital importance. Affirming humans as being soil entangles them in substantial commonness. This article explores how altering the imaginaries of soils as inert matter subjected to human use and re-animating the life within them is transforming contemporary human–soil affections by developing a sense of shared aliveness. Presenting research on current practices and stories emerging from scientific accounts, community involvements and artistic manifestations, I propose five emerging motifs of renewed imaginaries of soil’s aliveness that feed into each other to affirm intimate entanglements of human–soil matter. I argue that while a vision of anthropocenic soils invokes yet another objectified natural resource brought to exhaustion by a deadly human-centred productionist ethos, as soils are re-animated and enlivened, a sense of human–soil entangled and intimate interdependency is intensified. These new involvements with soil’s aliveness open up a sense of earthy connectedness that animates and re-affects material worlds and foster sense of more than human community.

The air is, in many urban contexts, polluted. Governments and institutions monitor particles and gas concentrations to better understand how they perform in light of air quality guidance and legislation, and to make predictions in terms of future environmental health targets. The visibility of this data is considered crucial for citizens to manage their own health, and a proliferation of new informational forms and apps have been created to achieve this. And yet, beyond everyday decisions (when to use a mask or when to do sports outdoors), it is not clear whether current methods of engaging citizens produce behavioural change or stronger citizen engagement with air pollution. Drawing on the design, construction and ethnography of an urban infrastructure to measure, make visible and remediate particulate matter (PM2.5) through a water vapour cloud that we installed at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2017, we examine the effects and affects of producing a public space that allows for physical interaction with data. In Yellow Dust (YD), data of PM2.5 are translated into mist, the density of the mist responsive to the number of particles suspended in the air. Data are made sense/ible in the changing conditions of the air surrounding the infrastructure, which can be experienced in embodied, collective and relational ways, what we call ‘molecular intimacies’. By reflecting on how the infrastructure facilitated new modes of sensing data, we consider how ‘data intimacies’ can re-specify action by producing different forms of engagement with air pollution.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0038026119830575

CIM will contribute to the fifth Databeers event in the West Midlands! Our colleague Dr René Westerholt will speak about "Plac(e)ing Social Media: Why spatial analysis may not be the best choice for geographic social media analysis". We kindly invite you to join us for this and other interesting talks at the WBS Teaching Centre, room M.1 on **Thursday 7th March at 18:30** to listen to, and share, data stories.

The event is very informal, and getting to know other data enthusiasts is the main goal. There will be 4 interesting talks and lots of free beers and networking time. Please see the webpage for more information: https://databeerswrik.tumblr.com/post/183073634411/fifth-meetup-thursday-7th-march-2019.

The event is free, of course, but we it is required to register as space is limited:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/databeers-warwick-fifth-meetup-registration-57528219453

Seeing you there!

Routledge Editorial published for pre-order a book entitled Non-Violent Political Economy where PhD Candidate of CIM, Nathalie Mezza-Garcia has a book chapter called Self-Organized Collective Action in the Floating Island Project

Last autumn, CIM was transformed into a film set to produce a video describing our MSc Urban Analytics and Visualisation. We are pleased to present the final result, which you can find below and on YouTube. The video briefly talks about Urban Analytics as a subject and describes the innovative, interdisciplinary structure of the course here at CIM. In addition, possible future career paths are highlighted. If you are interested in studying our MSc and looking for a brief, concise overview of our programme, the video is definitely the right place to start!

Naomi Waltham-Smith is giving a paper entitled “Rhythm in Deconstruction” at the College Art Association annual conference in NYC as part of a panel on “Rhythm, Race and Aesthetics of Being Together” with Kris Cohen, Aria Dean, Christian Nyampeta, and John Ricco.

Abstract

In Mendi and Keith Obadike’s Numbers Station 1 [Furtive Movements], the artists take turns to read a series of numbers excerpted from the logs of self-reported stop-and-frisk data in New York with a dispassionate tone and a machinelike rhythm, the numbers punctuating the electronically generated tones that sonify the data in another way. Connecting this piece with Eric Garner’s pleas of “I can’t breathe,” Soyoung Yoon has suggested that, as it becomes increasingly difficult to recall the difference between the numbers, “difference becomes a matter of spacing, of taking a breath.” I take the Obadike’s installation and Yoon’s reading as an occasion to tease out the significance of rhythm to deconstruction and its central notion of difference as spacing.

Specifically, I trace two intertwined conceptions of rhythm that operate in the thought of Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe and whose proximity the sound installation makes audible. The first is the idea of listening as auscultation, as a rhythmic percussion attuned to the cadence and resonance of breathing. Derrida evokes this figure in a number of places, especially in the essay “Tympan” and his introduction to Lacoue-Larbarthe’s Typography, to capture the subject’s condition of (im)possibility as pulsation. But this beat, as Nancy reminds us, is always syncopated. Reading Derrida’s meditations on rhythm in Glas alongside Numbers Station 1, I show how the pulse tends to become arrhythmic—how the auscultation of black lives tends towards the chokehold and the irregular gasps and splutterings Derrida opposes to the harmonious resonance of a struck bell.