Tag: infrastructure

Newcastle APL Talk

Posted on by Alex Taylor
Talk­ing to the good peo­ple at New­castle’s School of Archi­tec­ture, Plan­ning & Land­scape (APL), I got the chance yes­ter­day to devel­op and share my slow­ly evolv­ing thoughts on bike jour­neys, bod­ies and fabulations.

Liv­ing Fruit­ful­ly in/with the con­di­tions of (im-) possibilty

ABSTRACT

In this talk, I want to revis­it a piece I wrote in 2016. The piece, a chap­ter in Dawn Nafus’ book Quan­ti­fied (2016), was intend­ed as a sto­ry of promise, a fab­u­la­tion about London’s bike rental scheme and how it might be used to re-imag­ine new fig­ur­ings of human-machine rela­tions. Think­ing across, askew, or “athwart” (Hus­tak & Myers 2013), my exper­i­ment­ing with the rela­tion­al capac­i­ties of bicy­cles, a city, (bio)sensing and the pro­lif­er­a­tion of data-every­where, aimed to resist the “agen­cies of homog­e­niza­tion” (Scott 1998) to explore the con­di­tions of pos­si­bil­i­ty for oth­er world­ings (Har­away 2016).

Reflect­ing on this work, I’ve felt a dis­sat­is­fac­tion with my efforts to throw togeth­er mix­tures of data at all scales, with the attempts at thick­en­ing and enliven­ing the rela­tions. It all felt too flat, too lack­ing in vital­i­ty. So, at the risk of appear­ing self indul­gent, this talk will present some ear­ly ideas for a dif­fer­ent sto­ry woven in and through the thick­et of rela­tions. Strug­gling to weave myself into London’s lega­cy with slav­ery and the vio­lent era­sures of bod­ies and agency (Hart­man 2008), I’ll be try­ing to place myself at a much more frag­ile and ten­u­ous junc­ture of space-time, but at the same time still seek­ing to work fruit­ful­ly in/with the con­di­tions of (im-)possibility.

On Simone’s ‘people as infrastructure’

Posted on by Alex Taylor

People as Infrastructure
 
A few of us work­ing at the inter­sec­tion of data, civic­me­dia and cit­i­zen­ship are tak­ing a look at this arti­cle by AbdouMaliq Simone. Some ram­bling com­ments follow:
First, just a short point about style: I’m delight­ed to see Simone’s unapolo­getic use of rich descrip­tions of Jo’berg’s streets. They are in strik­ing con­trast to what I see to be the stan­dard ethno­graph­ic account in HCI papers. What I find tedious is the usu­al pre­am­ble in HCI works—explaining method—and then the use of par­tic­i­pants’ quotes as a kind of ‘proof’ of par­tic­u­lar points. Also, both point to a curi­ous idea of what it means to demon­strate evi­dence or proof. Simone both­ers with none of this. He gets straight to the sto­ries, to the rich descrip­tions of inner city Jo’berg and its under­bel­ly. (more…)