There, but invisible

Swell by Anthony McCall. Commissioned by AV Festival 2006.

In physics, the darkness is the most illuminating place to look, if you want to understand the Universe right now. This year, Planck told us that 26.8% of all matter is dark. Thanks to the earlier work of Brian Schmidt, Saul Perlmutter and Eric Riess, cosmologists also have to deal with the fact that the Universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate, and that the energy responsible for that - dark energy - accounts for 68.3% of all energy.

So we now know that nearly 96% of the Universe is dark. It is there; but invisible.

But what this means is that we live in some of the most exciting times imaginable.
Because we live in a Universe that is to a large extent unknown to science, and therefore the systems that govern all but 4% of the Universe are yet to be discovered.

"And, everything is possible again."

I'll be taking that thought into 2014.

Honor Harger
31 December 2013

Storifying Critical Citizen Science

MadLab Scientists investigating food products. Image (cc) MadLabUK, 2013.

Alice Bell recently drew my attention to a fascinating piece of writing by the Goldsmiths academic, Dan McQuillan. The piece entitled, What is Critical Citizen Science? (A Dialogue), is a meditation on the emerging field of citizen science. It takes the form of a fictional dialogue between 'nomad', the apotheosis of a free-thinking scientist-cum-hacker, and 'royalist', a caricature of an antediluvian traditionalist academic. Through the voices of these archetypes, McQuillan sets out what he refers to as 'critical citizen science', a bottom-up, participative scientific movement.

The piece is published on Storify, the social media service that lets users create stories using elements from other platforms such as Twitter, YouTube or Instagram.  Users build a story from video, images, and quotations from various places, using their own words to formulate a narrative.

Through a combination of well-chosen references, polemics and poetry, a sense of what 'critical citizen science' might be, gradually emerges from McQuillan's text. The dialogic format inevitably calls to mind the conversations between Achilles and the tortoise in Zeno, Carroll, and perhaps most fittingly, Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach. In McQuillan's work too, the medium of dialogue lends itself well to an inquiry into the complex ethics, aesthetics and politics that 'critical citizen science' might be engaged with.

Intriguingly, over the course of the dialogue, McQuillan correlates emerging community science and technology practices, exemplified by crowdmapping initiatives like Harassmap, hackerspaces such as MadLab, and open hardware projects such as Safecast and Water Hack, with an analysis of radical media art practice of the late 20th century, particularly the Electronic Disturbance Theater.

Ricardo Dominguez, Electronic Disturbance Theater

As someone very much engaged with the wider context of tactical media as a cultural strategy in the 1990s, and now equally fascinated by emerging forms of participatory science, I found McQuillan's juxtaposition of these two discrete areas, deeply compelling.

Here's a short extract, where we listen in on nomad and royalist, discussing new sites of scientific learning:

nomad: there is already an emerging set of learning spaces for critical citizen science; hackerspaces, makerspaces and fablabs...

royalist: what nonsense. these aren't labs, they're garages; and it's not science, merely an obsessive meddling with hardware.

nomad: popularly known as hacking. i refer you to early hacktivists the Electronic Disturbance Theater and their 'science of the oppressed" - "...alternative social forms of life and art that fall between the known and unknown, between fiction and the real, between clean science and dirty science - each a part of a long history of an epistemology of social production which privileges the standpoint of the proletariat, the multitude, the open hacks of the DIY moments, and of autonomous investigators who stage test zones of cognitive styles... concrete practices as speculation and speculation as concrete practices - at the speed of dreams."

This is not a manifesto for 'critical citizen science' (or perhaps just as accurately, 'tactical citizen science'?). It's more of a persuasive suggestion.  But one can't help but recall another grass-roots movement which argues for a similarly critically engaged approach to science and technology. In October 2011, Julian Oliver, Gordan Savicic and Danja Vasiliev published the Critical Engineering Manifesto.  It begins by stating:

"The Critical Engineer considers Engineering to be the most transformative language of our time, shaping the way we move, communicate and think. It is the work of the Critical Engineer to study and exploit this language, exposing its influence."

As co-author, Oliver noted in an interview in 2012, "as thinkers with technical abilities in several areas, we want to take on our built and increasingly automated environment by the terms in which it's given, opening it up for post-utilitarian conversation, for play and interrogation. If there's ever a time to be doing that, it's now, especially with opaque and hidden infrastructure in the telecommunications space deeply impacting diplomatic relations and civil liberties world wide."

The manifesto provides an analytical framework for artistic practice which exposes the technological and scientific systems which unpin much of society. By making these infrastructures and systems visible, the 'critical engineer' reveals the political and power structures at play, instigates critical discussion, and questions who has agency within these systems.

Transparency Grenade (2011) by Julian Oliver

Projects such as Oliver's Transparency Grenade (2011) and Oliver and Vasiliev's Newstweek (2011) are designed as both functional tools, which both reveal and disrupt the invisible information and communication networks that surround us, and conversation-starters about our unquestioning reliance on technological systems we often don't understand.  Their intention is to expose the deep reach that science and technology have in our lives, and to try and encourage more active forms of intervention and agency.  As Oliver (2012) has noted, we all "think through tools both before and while we use them and the more we depend upon a tool the more we are changed by it."

McQuillan's speculations on critical citizen science seem to originate from a similar desire to question the power structures and politics of scientific practice. He insinuates an anxiety about popular citizen-science efforts such as Galaxy Zoo and LHC@Home, which harness the labour of users, without deeply engaging them in the scientific process.  To frame that concern, he cites Tiziana Terranova's critique of user-generated content outlined in her text, Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy (2000).

His text also conveys an unease with the exponential hype surrounding 'big data' and 'open data':

royalist: [...]  The networks you rely on for your delocalised tinkering have already given birth to a new science; and it's name is Data Science; and its Data shall be Big.

nomad: [...] As our data is always ambiguous, we shall Glitch; becoming the discontinuities and unexpected artefacts in the big data you crave.

Later, McQuillan points to the value of critical citizen scientists in bearing witness to events which governments and bureaucracies would prefer citizens not to see, let alone intervene into:

nomad: [....] Why not look to the example of white coated citizens weapons inspectors for responsible empiricism. In a horsemeat crisis, the critical citizen scientist packs their DIY bio and flashmobs the nearest Lidl. This isn't an idle fantasy; only recently, Madlab testers set up shop as the Deptford Market DNA FoodLab.

Elsewhere the piece, McQuillan muses whether 'critical citizen science' could be the site at which the Internet of Things becomes the "Parliament of Things" as described by Bruno Latour in his 1991 book, We Have Never Been Modern. By this, Latour was referring to a kind of symmetry between people and what he calls "non-human entities" (or "things"). He argues that our society is comprised of people assembled around "things". Latour dismantles the barrier between culture and nature, between subject and object, proposing more subtle relations between humans and "things", in which the latter are granted the same amount of agency as we are. McQuillan spiritedly picks this up, in the voice of nomad, contending:

"Through citizen science, the Parliament of Things will become the Occupy of Objects."

Whilst I was originally drawn to the subject of the piece - its evocation of radical tactical art media practices, entwined with new community science efforts, and echoing (perhaps inadvertently) the philosophy of the critical engineering movement - the methodology of the story construction is also worthy of note.  When I first read the piece and started thinking about it, I opined to the science policy researcher, Justin Pickard, that such evocative material deserved to be written up in a more formal manner.  He responded by saying:

"This *is* it written up properly. Storify-native STS. Look how reliant it is on the video clips, images, and hyperlinks."

So, tools like Storify enable writers and makers to build layered, interwoven narratives around science and technology research and ideas. These tools provide us with a different vector to be able to express heterogeneous, emerging and often conflicting ideas.  As such, they have the potential to develop into an intriguing and valuable alternative platforms for science communication, and the analysis of scientific research.

Source:

http://storify.com/danmcquillan/what-is-critical-citizen-science-a-dialogue/

The rise of the algorithms

The Knife - a financial trading algorithm

This week Tarleton Gillespie was the latest critical commentator to analyse the role that algorithms play in contemporary life. His detailed insightful and urgent essay, The Relevance of Algorithms was published on the Culture Digitally blog this week, ahead of it's forthcoming publication in the MIT book, "Media Technologies".



Picking up where Kevin Slavin's excoriating Lift talk, "Those algorithms that govern our lives" (later reprised for TED) left off, Gillespie conducts a thorough investigation into how algorithms provide the basis for a great deal of our individual and societal choices. That we understand their impact on our daily lives so poorly is cause for great concern, Gillespie argues. He notes a particular anxiety with the way that algorithms are starting to influence how we find and interpret information, and points to the obvious impact this will have on politics:

"Algorithms not only help us find information, they provide a means to know what there is to know and how to know it, to participate in social and political discourse."

This has strong and relevant echoes back to the set of concerns raised by both designers and artists working with technology, as alluded to in a previous post. Artists Julian Oliver, Danja Vasiliev and Gordan Savicic have developed a discourse they refer to as "critical engineering", which aims to expose the systems, mechanisms, languages and logics which make up our engineered world. This is urgent, political work, they argue, as the encroachment of engineering into our lives, is matched only by its increasing invisibility. If we lose our ability to perceive this technological infrastructure, we lose agency.

As Oliver wrote recently:
"As thinkers with technical abilities in several areas, we want to take on our built and increasingly automated environment [...] If there's ever a time to be doing that, it's now, especially with opaque and hidden infrastructure in the telecommunications space deeply impacting diplomatic relations and civil liberties world wide. [...] Our inability to describe and understand technological infrastructure reduces our critical reach, leaving us both disempowered and, quite often, vulnerable." - Julian Oliver (September 2012)

These thoughts are echoed almost precisely by designer, writer and publisher, James Bridle (who's work in this area was referenced here recently), who notes:
"By legibility I mean our own ability to read these systems, how much they can affect the way we see and act in the world, and the differing positions of power we have in the world based on how legible those systems are. [...] Programmers have a huge amount of agency in the world, because they can deconstruct, reverse engineer and write and construct and create these systems. People who can't, don't, and they have less power in the world because of it." - James Bridle (September 2012). He later wrote:
"Those who cannot perceive the network cannot act effectively within it, and are powerless. The job, then, is to make such things visible."

Gillespie's essay operates very much within this spirit, insisting on the need to be able to perceive and understand the way that algorithms are becoming part of our lived environment. He writes:
"What we need is an interrogation of algorithms as a key feature of our information ecosystem, and of the cultural forms emerging in their shadows, with a close attention to where and in what ways the introduction of algorithms into human knowledge practices may have political ramifications."

His essay then seeks to do just that, providing an excellent map for this emerging terrain.  His perspective is not technological, but rather sociological, an analysis which he insists "must not conceive of algorithms as abstract, technical achievements, but must unpack the warm human and institutional choices that lie behind these cold mechanisms."

His essay is a vital insight into these choices.  Resonating with the worlds of both Oliver and Bridle, he concludes:
"In many ways, algorithms remain outside our grasp, and they are designed to be. This is not to say that we should not aspire to illuminate their workings and impact. We should. But we may also need to prepare ourselves for more and more encounters with the unexpected and ineffable associations they will sometimes draw for us, the fundamental uncertainty about who we are speaking to or hearing, and the palpable but opaque undercurrents that move quietly beneath knowledge when it is managed by algorithms.

Sources:
http://culturedigitally.org/2012/11/the-relevance-of-algorithms/
http://www.tarletongillespie.org/

Information Physics - The New Frontier?

As classical reductionist physics collides with the quantum brick wall, an information systems model of our universe seems to be emerging. A recent abstract published on arXiv by Professor Kevin Knuth, from the Information Physics Laboratory at the University at Albany in Albany in New York, articulates ways that "Information Physics" may be a new technique to derive new physical laws.

In this seemingly controversial abstract, Knuth writes:

"At this point in time, two major areas of physics, statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics, rest on the foundations of probability and entropy. The last century saw several significant fundamental advances in our understanding of the process of inference, which make it clear that these are inferential theories. That is, rather than being a description of the behavior of the universe, these theories describe how observers can make optimal predictions about the universe. In such a picture, information plays a critical role. What is more is that little clues, such as the fact that black holes have entropy, continue to suggest that information is fundamental to physics in general.

In the last decade, our fundamental understanding of probability theory has led to a Bayesian revolution. ...I will introduce [a] new way of thinking by demonstrating how one can quantify partially-ordered sets and, in the process, derive physical laws. The implication is that physical law does not reflect the order in the universe, instead it is derived from the order imposed by our description of the universe. Information physics, which is based on understanding the ways in which we both quantify and process information about the world around us, is a fundamentally new approach to science."

Source: http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.5161

Proofiness: numbers don't lie, but people do

The always fascinating - but sadly increasingly less-prolific - Seed magazine, reports on the phenomena of "proofiness".

It's the art of using bogus mathematical arguments to prove what you know in your heart is true-even when it's not. As Seed says, [proofiness is] "a particularly powerful form of propaganda, because we're primed to believe anything that's couched in quantitative form. After all, there's very little in this world that has the cold, hard certainty of mathematical proof. Yet people can torture numbers, imbuing lies with an aura of certainty. Politicians and pundits are the modern masters of the dark art. Almost any major political speech or document will be liberally larded with proofiness."

Source: http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/numbers_dont_liebut_people_do/

Shape-shifting antennas

Scientists have created antennas using an alloy that "can be bent, stretched, cut and twisted -- and will return to its original shape". The antenna consists of liquid metal injected into elastomeric microchannels.

ScienceDaily reports that research from North Carolina State University is revolutionizing the field of antenna design -- creating shape-shifting antennas that open the door to a host of new uses in fields. Antennas aren't just for listening to the radio anymore. They're used in everything from cell phones to GPS devices, from public safety to military deployment.

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091201100545.htm

The Rise of the Trickster

This weeks the tweets are all about tricksters.  It is interesting to see the trope re-emerging in uncertain times. Lewis Hyde's seminal book on this topic is well worth re-discovering:

"The trickster is anybody who's a bit of an outsider. They're the ones who make change. They're not thinking about making change; they're almost doing it in a selfish way. But because they're working outside the rules, they change the rules. Everything around them is always new, everything is an opportunity. It's important to honor mischief-making, in a constructive and creative way, because that's how we effect change. And it's so important that we figure out our inner mischief maker. That's the creative part of us. And everybody's capable of it." .

There's a lovely TED talk from a self-proclaimed trickster, Emily Levine, well worth checking out.

Source: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/emily_levine_s_theory_of_everything.html