Course Outline
Depending on participants' interests, the default syllabus below will be substituted by or adapted to include material from the Alternate Ecologies and Economies Offerings.
1. Representation, Data, and Algorithm: AI, Games, and Voting
Critiques of representations of quantitative data, of people’s psychology and norms, of collective political will, and of categories, schema
2. Language | Languaging. From Technologies of Representation to Performative Enacting
Critiques of theories of language. Shifting perspective on technology from representation to enacting.
For Discussion
What experience or knowledge cannot be well represented in data vs. algorithm vs. diagram vs. words ? Use your own examples, but refer to readings. What about intentional action?
3. Experience, Radical Empiricism
Experience without an a priori subject? Ontological Principle.
William James, from Essays on Radical Empiricism. (samizdat badly typset and paginated)
For Discussion:
Try explaining in your own terms how learning happens, without relying on the notions of cognition or consciousness. (Supplementary exercise: Refer to readings or related references in the "radical pragmatism" literature -- Williams James, John Dewey on Education, CS Peirce on signs and interpretents.)
4. Embodiment
Unbifurcated, neither mechanistic nor idealist, understanding of experience.
Supplemental readings:
For Discussion:
How does the way you relate bodily to the world and to other beings inflect your experience?
What are some essential differences between experiencing a dinner | story | sport | concert in viewing a recording | virtual reality | participating in the live event?
What are significant differences in between software simulations like A-Life, versus living beings?
5. Tools, Instruments, Craft, Technical Ensembles
Using notions from the readings, what is a tool vs. instrument, in practice?
How can you apply that distinction to what Simondon calls technical ensembles? Use your own examples.
6. More-than-human, Ecological Experience
Non-Anthropocentric experience of living beings and ecologies.
For Discussion:
Give a example of a complex system that is autopoietic, and one that is not. In each case, DIAGRAM its components and and how those elements related to one another. Explain how the system evolves over time in response to its varying relation to its milieu (von Uexkhull).
7. Performance As Experiential Experiment and Experimental Experience
Experimental performance vs. spectacle. Art as vehicle. Everyday, unmarked vs marked gesture.
For Enacting:
• Create a recipe for a dish or drink that avoids using words or numerals. The result must be something safely edible or potable.
• Test it by having other people try it out. Report on what happened.
8. Politics and Generative Assemblies
Readings:
Term Project
Present final projects in class as a 15' conference talk (last week of class)
8 pages (excluding images, including references), on some topic drawing on readings. Due end of exam week.
ALTERNATIVE: MEAL-EXAM
Depending on participants' interests, the default syllabus below will be substituted by or adapted to include material from the Alternate Ecologies and Economies Offerings.
1. Representation, Data, and Algorithm: AI, Games, and Voting
Critiques of representations of quantitative data, of people’s psychology and norms, of collective political will, and of categories, schema
- Sander van der Leeuw and Gary Dirks, "Illusion of Control."
- Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, Ara Norenzayan, "The Weirdest People in the World," 2009, p 61-83.
- David Donoho, 50 Years of Data Science: science about data science, p 28-32.
- Amartya Sen, "Arrow and the Impossibility Theorem."
- Xiaolin Wu, and Xi Zhang, "Automated Inference on Criminality using Face Images," 2016. With responses to critiques. (2017)
- Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West, Case Study: Criminal machine learning, 2017.
2. Language | Languaging. From Technologies of Representation to Performative Enacting
Critiques of theories of language. Shifting perspective on technology from representation to enacting.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (G.E.M. Anscombe Third edition)
- § 0 - 110 Language: Explanations based on rules, naming, pointing, paradigm, predicates, correspondence…Primitives.
- § 143 - 151 Number series games
- § 272-279 Private experience, colour
- § 283-293 Feeling, pain, beetle in a box
- xi (pages 193-209) Seeing as, figures, duck rabbit
- David Morris, "Magical thinking and the test of humanity: we have seen the danger of AI and it is us,” AI & Society.
- Miguel Sicart, Against Procedurality, Game Studies.
- Sha, Poesis and Enchantment in Topological Matter
- Chapter 1 (on making experience, and making concepts)
- Chapter 2 "From Technologies of Representation to Technologies of Performance", p.19-39, 48-62
For Discussion
What experience or knowledge cannot be well represented in data vs. algorithm vs. diagram vs. words ? Use your own examples, but refer to readings. What about intentional action?
3. Experience, Radical Empiricism
Experience without an a priori subject? Ontological Principle.
William James, from Essays on Radical Empiricism. (samizdat badly typset and paginated)
- "Chapter I : Does Consciousness Exist?",
- "Chapter II : A World of Pure Experience",
- "Chapter III : The Thing and Its Relations",
- "Chapter IV : How Two Minds Can Know One Thing",
For Discussion:
Try explaining in your own terms how learning happens, without relying on the notions of cognition or consciousness. (Supplementary exercise: Refer to readings or related references in the "radical pragmatism" literature -- Williams James, John Dewey on Education, CS Peirce on signs and interpretents.)
4. Embodiment
Unbifurcated, neither mechanistic nor idealist, understanding of experience.
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, tr. D. Landes, Routledge 2012, Part I The Body:.
- I. Introduction: Experience and objective thought, the problem of the body (69-74);
- III. The spatiality of one's own body and motricity (a-c: 100-109);
- The intentionality of the body, The body is not in space -- it inhabits space, Habit as the motor acquisition of a new signification (k-m, 139-148);
- IV. The Synthesis of One's Own Body (149-155).
- Robert Epstein, "Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer"
Supplemental readings:
- Claude Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.”
- Alan Turing: general model of digital computer
- Church-Turing: Computationally undecidable problems
- Kurt Gødel, Incompleteness Theorems
For Discussion:
How does the way you relate bodily to the world and to other beings inflect your experience?
What are some essential differences between experiencing a dinner | story | sport | concert in viewing a recording | virtual reality | participating in the live event?
What are significant differences in between software simulations like A-Life, versus living beings?
5. Tools, Instruments, Craft, Technical Ensembles
- Pye, D. The Nature and Art of Workmanship. Cambridge UP, 1968, pp. 17-29.
- Thor Magnusson, “Of Epistemic Tools: musical instruments as cognitive extensions,” Organised Sound, 14 (2009), pp 168-176.
- Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of the Technical Object, Univocal 2017
- Note, Introduction, Prospectus, p. ix-xvii
- Introduction, p. 15-21
- Chap 1, Genesis of the Technical Object: the Process of Concretization, p. 25-32, 38-40, 49-51
- Chap 2, Evolution of Technical Reality; Element, Individual, Ensemble, p. 53-81
Using notions from the readings, what is a tool vs. instrument, in practice?
How can you apply that distinction to what Simondon calls technical ensembles? Use your own examples.
6. More-than-human, Ecological Experience
Non-Anthropocentric experience of living beings and ecologies.
- Emmanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, section I, chaps 1-4, pp 1-35.
- Michael Marder, "Vegetal anti-metaphysics: Learning from plants"
- Jakob von Uexküll, A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men, p. 0-56.
- Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Autopoiesis, The Organization of the Living, p. 59 to 143.
- Chapters 1-3 ( notes)
- Chapters 4 - 5
- Appendix: On Time
For Discussion:
Give a example of a complex system that is autopoietic, and one that is not. In each case, DIAGRAM its components and and how those elements related to one another. Explain how the system evolves over time in response to its varying relation to its milieu (von Uexkhull).
7. Performance As Experiential Experiment and Experimental Experience
Experimental performance vs. spectacle. Art as vehicle. Everyday, unmarked vs marked gesture.
- Peter Brook, The Empty Space, Chapter 2- The Holy Theatre
- Peter Brook, The Open Door, Chapter 1, The Slyness of Boredom
- Antonin Artaud
- Grotowski: Physical Action
- Sha X. W., on the experimental variation of thick experience.
- Sha X. W.: Poiesis, Enchantment and Topological Matter, Refrain.
- Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, Senselab Anarchive
- Synthesis, Process Germ Bank
For Enacting:
• Create a recipe for a dish or drink that avoids using words or numerals. The result must be something safely edible or potable.
• Test it by having other people try it out. Report on what happened.
8. Politics and Generative Assemblies
Readings:
- Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus:A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Trans. Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum, 2004
- Rhizomes, Becoming-Animal,
- Chapter 14: "1440: The Smooth and The Striated”
- Isabelle Stengers
- "Beyond Conversation, The Risks of Peace".
- Making Sense in Common (pages TBD)
- Michael Marder, "Resist like a plant! On the Vegetal Life of Political Movements." Peace Studies 5.1 (2012).
- Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, “The Final Foucault: Government of Others and Government of Oneself”.
Term Project
Present final projects in class as a 15' conference talk (last week of class)
8 pages (excluding images, including references), on some topic drawing on readings. Due end of exam week.
ALTERNATIVE: MEAL-EXAM