scholarly journals Interfaces (for) Diffracting Technobodies: A Science-Humanities-Design Perspective for an Algorithmic Somatechnics

Somatechnics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 374-396
Author(s):  
Nanna Verhoeff ◽  
Iris van der Tuin
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Interface Design ◽  
The Body ◽  
Comprehensive Understanding ◽  
Interface Theory ◽  
The Social ◽  
Design Build ◽  
Contact Tracking ◽  
Art Intervention ◽  
Design Perspective

In response to some current examples of experimental interface design in times of the COVID-19 pandemic – corona data dashboards, a contact tracking app, and an art intervention of distance design in public space  – this article brings perspectives and insights from multiple disciplinary fields, several concepts, and a set of arguments together for a ‘more comprehensive understanding’ ( Repko and Szostak 2021 ) of how these cases of design build (on) an algorithmic somatechnics. We argue that this type of understanding perhaps deserves its own naming for which we propose the bracket of the ‘creative humanities’ ( Bleeker, Verhoeff, and Werning 2020 ) – a field that borrows productively from science, humanities, and design. Specifically, we aim to develop such an interdisciplinary perspective to respond to and specify the popular understanding, often reproduced in scholarship, of how technobodies are simultaneously created by and co-creating algorithmic media. We do this by bringing the perspective of diffractive reading to these media with the help of interface theory in order to diagnose that this understanding of the coming-into-being and functioning of technobodies is founded on an interpretation that positions agency on the side of either the social or on the side of the technical, or in their inter-relation. To this interpretation we respond with a diffractive interface approach to traverse this socio-technical constellation and think with the specificity of computation. We focus on the interface as an apparatus within and beyond which the technobody as datum is a locus of an ontological dynamicity that can have un-easy agential effects. Conceptualising the body as a somatechnical datum that may have un-easy effects is particularly relevant in our (post-)pandemic era that requires designs for distance that can afford maximum space for agency, mobility, and presence, yet confronts us with unattainable clarity and security.

scholarly journals Poetic Examination of Spatial Experience: Suprematist Composition No. 1, Black on Grey by Kristina Leko

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-176
Author(s):  
Katarina Rukavina
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Virtual Space ◽  
Spatial Experience ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Sphere ◽  
The Social ◽  
Material Goods ◽  
Art Intervention ◽  
The City

The paper analyses the concept of space in contemporary art on the example of Suprematist Composition No. 1, Black on Grey by Kristina Leko from 2008. Referring to Malevich’s suprematism, in December 2008 Leko initiated a project of art intervention in Ban Jelačić Square in Zagreb, where she intended to cover in black all commercials, advertisements, signs and names of various companies. This poetic intervention, as the artist calls it, was intended to prompt people to relativise material goods in the pre-Christmas period. However, despite the authorisation obtained from the city authorities, the companies concerned refused to remove their respective advertisements, be it for only for 24 hours, so this project has never been realised. The project, however, does exist in the virtual space, which is also public, and continues to act in the form of documentation. The non-feasibility of the intervention, or rather its invisibility on Jelačić Square, makes visible or directly indicates the ordering of the powers and the constellation of values in the social sphere, thus raising new questions. Indeed, in this way it actually enters the public space, sensitising and expanding it at the same time.

scholarly journals The Sonic Intra-Face of a Noisy Feminist Social Kitchen

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (9) ◽  
pp. 245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliana España Keller
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Social Geography ◽  
The Body ◽  
Ethical Practices ◽  
The Social ◽  
A Site

This paper asks what is the value of transforming the kitchen into a sonic performative work and public site for art and social practice. A Public Kitchen is formed by recreating the private and domestic space of a kitchen into a public space through a sonic performance artwork. The kitchen table is a platform for exploring, repositioning and amplifying kitchen tools as material phenomena through electronic and manual manipulation into an immersive sonic performance installation. This platform becomes a collaborative social space, where somatic movement and sensory, sonic power of the repositioned kitchen tools are built on a relational architecture of iterative sound performances that position the art historical and the sociopolitical, transforming disciplinary interpretations of the body and technology as something that is not specifically exclusively human but post-human. A Public Kitchen represents a pedagogical strategy for organizing and responding collectively to the local, operating as an independent nomadic event that speaks through a creative practice that is an unfolding process. (Re)imagining the social in a Public Kitchen produces noisy affects in a sonic intra-face that can contribute to transforming our social imaginations, forming daring dissonant narratives that feed post-human ethical practices and feminist genealogies. This paper reveals what matters—a feminist struggle invaluable in channeling the intra-personal; through the entanglement of the self, where language, meaning and subjectivity are relational to human difference and to what is felt from the social, what informs from a multi-cultural nomadic existence and diffractive perspective. The labored body is entangled with post-human contingencies of food preparation, family and social history, ritual, tradition, social geography, local politics, and women’s oppression; and is resonant and communicates as a site where new sonic techniques of existence are created and experiences shared.

POPULARISATION PRACTICE OF DOCUMENTARY HERITAGE AT THE STATE AGENCY “АРХИВИ” GABROVO DEPARTMENT

2016 ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Rita Burceva ◽  
Tsvetomira Koycheva ◽  
Katia Gecheva
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
The Body ◽  
State Agency ◽  
Visual Aids ◽  
The Public ◽  
Personal Initiative ◽  
Scientific Institutions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Personal Connections ◽  
Wide Circle

The objective of the research is to describe the popularisation experience of documentary heritage at the department of the particular archive in Bulgaria, emphasizing the specific aspects of this practice in order to formulate recommendations for similar activities in Latvia. The methods used in the research: analysis of some individual aspects of popularisation of the documentary heritage based on the normative enactments governing the activity of archives in Bulgaria, case analysis. Popularisation of documents is the body of communication events, which are used to cover a wide circle of persons and institutions. It is directly connected to the social, political, cultural life in the country and region and it is aimed at the reflection of upbringing, educating, cultural, and science matters. Each department of the archive plans and implements the popularisation events of the documentary heritage separately from one another or in cooperation with museums, creative associations, scientific institutions and education establishments, other governmental and public institutions, the mass media, etc. They are initiated in order to introduce or remind the public of any significant events, processes, persons. There are varied forms of exhibition offerings: mobile and stationary, permanent and temporary, taking place in the premises of the archive and in the specifically adopted environment outside of it (in other institutions or outdoors), including in the electronic form. The archive of Gabrovo has substantial experience of work with the student group excursions from the city and the nearby neighbourhood, which require special preparation and ability to communicate with the youth, using understandable and acceptable to them materials and visual aids. Main conclusions: Despite being dully planned, in most cases under the situation of limited resources the popularisation events of the documentary heritage are based on the personal initiative, experience in building contacts and the ability to find some possibilities for improvement of this work through purposeful customer-oriented communication of the employees of the Archive of Gabrovo. It is important to use the personal connections and unforeseen events creatively in the work with the current and potential creators. In the public space the Archive Department of Gabrovo positions itself as an open institution that is ready to cooperate with all organisations and individuals interested for comprehensive and quality satisfaction of all public needs at all levels. 

Mental Health, Public Space, and the City: Questions of Individual and Collective Access

1997 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 435-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hester Parr
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Mental Health Problems ◽  
Political Process ◽  
The Body ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
Critical Geography ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City

In recent revisionings of disablement and geography, conceptions of the body, of devinney, and of the social construction of difference have been interrogated. The author argues that it is important not to neglect a critical geography of mental health in this broader rewriting of disability and ableism. Empirical examples are drawn from research in Nottingham, UK. These examples show how people with mental health problems access the public realm through individual (and often disruptive) use of urban spaces, possibly as strategies of resistance to imposed medical identities. In the second half of the paper the author documents a more collective political process occurring through ‘user movements’ which have facilitated patient power and patient influence in the places of therapy spread across the city.

scholarly journals The Borderline, or the Impossibility of Producing a Negotiable Form in the Social Bond for the Return of the Censored

Konturen ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucie Cantin
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Mental Representations ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Bond ◽  
Acting Out ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject

How do we think the problem of the “Borderline” within psychoanalysis and the structural conception of psychic organization it proposes? As for the notion of a border between neurosis and psychosis that the case of the Borderline would simultaneously raise and call into question, we must rather recognize the failed experience of an internal limit in the subject with regard to the management of the censored that works and disorganizes the body in a jouissance that finds no path for its expression. The Borderline grapples with the work of the unbound drive, which is free and mobilized by unconscious and censored mental representations which fail to find both their mode of expression outside of the body and their meaning for the subject, as well as their negotiable form in the social space. In the absence of this space carved out in the social bond for the expression of the drive and of desire, the symptom and acting out inscribe and stage the censored within the public space, where its dramatization inevitably leads to a breakdown.

scholarly journals Poetic Examination of Spatial Experience: Suprematist Composition No. 1, Black on Grey by Kristina Leko

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-176
Author(s):  
Katarina Rukavina
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Virtual Space ◽  
Spatial Experience ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Sphere ◽  
The Social ◽  
Material Goods ◽  
Art Intervention ◽  
The City

The paper analyses the concept of space in contemporary art on the example of Suprematist Composition No. 1, Black on Grey by Kristina Leko from 2008. Referring to Malevich’s suprematism, in December 2008 Leko initiated a project of art intervention in Ban Jelačić Square in Zagreb, where she intended to cover in black all commercials, advertisements, signs and names of various companies. This poetic intervention, as the artist calls it, was intended to prompt people to relativise material goods in the pre-Christmas period. However, despite the authorisation obtained from the city authorities, the companies concerned refused to remove their respective advertisements, be it for only for 24 hours, so this project has never been realised. The project, however, does exist in the virtual space, which is also public, and continues to act in the form of documentation. The non-feasibility of the intervention, or rather its invisibility on Jelačić Square, makes visible or directly indicates the ordering of the powers and the constellation of values in the social sphere, thus raising new questions. Indeed, in this way it actually enters the public space, sensitising and expanding it at the same time.

Bodies and Spaces: An Exploration of Disabled People's Experiences of Public Space

1997 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 411-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Butler ◽  
Sophia Bowlby
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Social Situation ◽  
The Body ◽  
Disability Rights ◽  
Feminist Literature ◽  
Visually Impaired People ◽  
Depth Interview ◽  
The Social ◽  
Recent Developments

In this paper we consider the ways in which concepts of and attitudes towards ‘disability’ affect disabled people's ability to move freely within public spaces. We first set the paper in context by briefly discussing recent developments in and ongoing debates on the conceptualisation of disability which have accompanied the growing disability rights movement. Next we examine feminist literature relating to the links between biology and the body and the social status of women and draw out parallels for the analysis of disabled people's social situation. We then discuss a possible framework for the analysis of disabled people's experience of public space. Finally, to illustrate the reflexive relationship between bodily and social experience, we draw on in-depth interview material from a case study of visually impaired people in Reading and Leeds, England.

Fictions of the Human Right to Health: Writing Against the Postcolonial Exotic in Western Medicine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary J. Jolly
Keyword(s):  
Health Research ◽  
Western Medicine ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Right To Health ◽  
The Body ◽  
Health And Wellness ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Cultural Specificity ◽  
The Social

The last decade has witnessed far greater attention to the social determinants of health in health research, but literary studies have yet to address, in a sustained way, how narratives addressing issues of health across postcolonial cultural divides depict the meeting – or non-meeting – of radically differing conceptualisations of wellness and disease. This chapter explores representations of illness in which Western narrators and notions of the body are juxtaposed with conceptualisations of health and wellness entirely foreign to them, embedded as the former are in assumptions about Cartesian duality and the superiority of scientific method – itself often conceived of as floating (mysteriously) free from its own processes of enculturation and their attendant limits. In this respect my work joins Volker Scheid’s, in this volume, in using the capacity of critical medical humanities to reassert the cultural specificity of what we have come to know as contemporary biomedicine, often assumed to be

A body without a head

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Chavoshian ◽  
Sophia Park
Keyword(s):  
Liberation Theology ◽  
The Body ◽  
Women's Spirituality ◽  
Passive Condition ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Logical Square ◽  
The Social ◽  
Feminine Sexuality ◽  
Body Shapes ◽  
Body Theory

Along with the recent development of various theories of the body, Lacan’s body theory aligns with postmodern thinkers such as Michael Foucault and Maurice Merlot-Ponti, who consider body social not biological. Lacan emphasizes the body of the Real, the passive condition of the body in terms of formation, identity, and understanding. Then, this condition of body shapes further in the condition of bodies of women and laborers under patriarchy and capitalism, respectively. Lacan’s ‘not all’ position, which comes from the logical square, allows women to question patriarchy’s system and alternatives of sexual identities. Lacan’s approach to feminine sexuality can be applied to women’s spirituality, emphasizing multiple narratives of body and sexual identities, including gender roles. In the social discernment and analysis in the liberation theology, we can employ the capitalist discourse, which provides a tool to understand how people are manipulated by late capitalist society, not knowing it. Lacan’s theory of ‘a body without a head’ reflects the current condition of the human body, which manifests lack, yet including some possibilities for transforming society.

Myriad Aspects of Secular Thinking on Malayali Cuisine

GIS Business ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 202-206
Author(s):  
SAJITHA M
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Social Indicators ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Healthy Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Civilized Society

Food is one of the main requirements of human being. It is flattering for the preservation of wellbeing and nourishment of the body.  The food of a society exposes its custom, prosperity, status, habits as well as it help to develop a culture. Food is one of the most important social indicators of a society. History of food carries a dynamic character in the socio- economic, political, and cultural realm of a society. The food is one of the obligatory components in our daily life. It occupied an obvious atmosphere for the augmentation of healthy life and anticipation against the diseases.  The food also shows a significant character in establishing cultural distinctiveness, and it reflects who we are. Food also reflected as the symbol of individuality, generosity, social status and religious believes etc in a civilized society. Food is not a discriminating aspect. It is the part of a culture, habits, addiction, and identity of a civilization.Food plays a symbolic role in the social activities the world over. It’s a universal sign of hospitality.[1]

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