Transtechnology Research

At the end of his essay 'Frameworks of Comparison', recently published as an extract of his upcoming memoir Life beyond Boundaries, finished just before his death on 13 December 2015, the scholar of nationalism Benedict Anderson states " The point being that good comparisons often come from the experience of strangeness and absences. " One of the earlier points being " (…) that within the limits of plausible argument, the most instructive comparisons (whether of difference or similarity) are those that surprise. " (Anderson, 2016). His account of his development of comparative studies through nationalism chimes well with the argument that Federica Timeto makes in her Diffractive Technospaces especially in its equal stressing of the importance of being open to strangeness, crossing boundaries and dealing with location. Timeto links this openness explicitly to feminism to discuss mediations of space and representation, as these issues have always been its main concerns. Diffractive Technospaces is both a complex and a straightforward book. It is complex in its use of a dense, intricate language and terminology that often seemingly contradicts the flow it advocates. It certainly calls for re-reading and re-visiting which per se is actually demonstrative of the richness of its material and which a relatively concise review as this one can simply not do justice to. The book is however equally very straightforward in its underlying message about how it is precisely this flow that connects our being in space and time and permeates through it. Using Donna Haraway's concept of diffraction and Karen Barad's interpretation and application of it extensively at the heart of her argument, Timeto's first concern is to move away from any restricting binary visions. She does so in four densely packed chapters discussing respectively space and representation; reconceiving representation; location, mobility, perspectives; and finally diffracting technoscience. An extensive and insightful introduction and a conclusion that is tellingly called 'Opening Conclusions: Performing Represent-Actions', wrap up this rich and intriguing project. The book equally benefits from an elaborate bibliography and index. The main point of Timeto's book that is repeated in various ways and illustrated through extensive case studies from the arts and sciences is that there is no longer a valid argument for an understanding of our being in the world as standing outside of it. Space and place pervade through us, we are an integral part of it and new technologies such as VR and certainly AR are clear demonstrations (or illustrations) of this understanding. As stated Haraway's concept of diffraction and Barad's later application of it permeate throughout the book also thanks to Timeto's helpful repetitive explanation and application in various circumstances. Diffraction is in the first place an optical phenomenon that " (l)iterally (...) describes the interference of waves when they encounter an obstacle, such as when light passes through a slit " (Timeto, 2015, 2). It is thus used by Haraway " (…) to show the entangled

In this paper, we focus on electrical bio-signals of humans as a core musical material. Typically, interaction is under-utilized in bio-music; an improved system can offer alternative design opportunities compared to a collection of instruments controlled by bio-signals in real-time. Our Interactive Bio-music Improvisation System (IBIS) is capable of rendering pre-recorded bio-signals under controlled situations, and allows two performers to interact with the computational representation of a third one in real-time. These capabilities afford a multitude of narratives. Here, we present our bio-signal instrumentation and audiovisual synthesis strategies in detail; we aim to demonstrate the components of the IBIS during the ICMC-08 Conference.

This paper assembles thoughts on a ‘deep historical’ approach to scientific instrumentation and what it might reveal of the occult dimensions of these technologies. It adopts a general focus on the themes of objectivity and ‘instrumental rationality’, particularly as discussed by Massumi (2002), whose work offers a starting point from which to consider the relationship between objectivity, action and bodily affect. Contra Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology (1982), where
technology is seen to exhaust the potential meaning of natural resources, this paper suggests that the dimensions of the body accessed by instrumentation are not fully accounted for; there
is an occult, sublime dimension that instrumentation, and the affect it provokes, might be said to reveal. In J.G. Ballard’s (1966) short stories, this unknown potential signifies a terrible and irresistible force. However, in cases of placebo surgery, or in the use of devices such as thermometers, tractors, hypnotherapy and homeopathy (Drayson, 2011a), instrumental technologies, and the way in which they are perceived, reveal untapped and (ir)rational affects as a therapeutic dimension. Far from simply offering a form of objective  knowledge, instrumental technology contains a dual potential. Instruments, in their apparent machine knowledge, are accompanied by a rhetorical potential to see things that our human, and epistemologically unsuitable, perception cannot detect; they promise to connect to a reality that is obtuse and hidden. At the same time, building upon these promises of objectivity, instruments incorporate an affective dimension, concealing a potential for action seemingly unrelated to their depictions of ‘reality’. These ideas can be used to help construct an account of something that we might call the ‘placebo affect’.

Certain aspects of human experience that might not usually be considered relevant to practices using mechanical sensing – the symbolic, meaningful and subjective – may in fact be central to understanding how experimental set-ups manage the body. If the biological role of meaning, and an understanding of the imagination as an active force are not forgotten, these aspects may be validly reincorporated into an understanding of instrumental measurement that uses physiological sensors. This paper will discuss how lie detector testing uses the placebo effect to precipitate measurable changes in the body of its subject – and bases its findings and claims on a combination of symbolic, performative, as well as scientific and instrumental actions. Rather than think about the use of the placebo effect in lie detection as invalidating it as a practice, a synthesis of critiques and arguments relating to the history and ontology of lie detection and controlled testing will be used to unravel the complexity of these instruments, drawing on medical literature on controlled testing as well as philosophy of science, medical anthropology and history. The resulting description of the polygraph, and the more general understanding of mechanical sensing apparatus that it offers, suggests a bodily and instrumental ontology where symbol, subjectivity, and meaning are integral factors, rather than epiphenomena.

A placebo effect is the measurable beneficial healing effect that results from the context and meaning of a medical treatment rather than its content. Although orthodox biomedicine has sometimes struggled to reconcile the paradox of seemingly inert medicines producing healing effects, in the placebo studies literature, a number of scholars have proposed that alternative paradigms for understanding perception, such as affordance, motor-intentionality, and enaction, can reconcile the apparent paradigm conflict. These models are by no means incompatible with design theory; in fact, they are both embedded in and enriched by a number of design sub-disciplines, such as user experience design. This paper shows that understandings of placebo responsiveness, and the effects of meaning and symbol on the body, can be identified explicitly or implicitly in existing design and allied practices, including industrial design, graphic and information design, marketing and branding, and architecture.
Although the placebo effect is perhaps not a problem in design, the wider cultural influence of the idea of placebo and what it means affect the contexts in which design’s products are encountered. Observing the influence of placebo effects confirms the importance of—and one approach to—articulating and exploring an audience’s expectations and understandings of artifacts of meaning and culture. By talking about some of the ways in which the placebo effect has been mobilized in the context of contemporary mid-Atlantic medical and scientific culture, this paper seeks to give a sense of the entangled ontological and epistemological frames that carry influence between disciplines and practices—in particular, the health sciences and the arts. The placebo effect, as it becomes an increasingly influential concept, seems poised to influence how the meaningful aspects of design– its affects and affordances– come to matter. This paper proposes that the idea of the placebo response might offer a tool that can influence how design products and practices are received and valued.

Abstract—While an extensive palette of sound and visual generation techniques have been developed during the era of digital signal processing, the design of innovative virtual instruments has come to dramatic fruition over the last decade. The use of measured biological signals to drive these instruments proposes some new and powerful tools for clinical, scientific and artistic applications. Over the period of one month-during the eNTERFACE'07 summer workshop in Istanbul, Turkeyresearchers from the fields of ...

Abstract—While an extensive palette of sound and visual generation techniques have been developed during the era of digital signal processing, the design of innovative virtual instruments has come to dramatic fruition over the last decade. The use of measured biological signals to drive these instruments proposes some new and powerful tools for clinical, scientific and artistic applications. Over the period of one month-during the eNTERFACE'07 summer workshop in Istanbul, Turkeyresearchers from the fields of ...

In this paper, we focus on electrical bio-signals of humans as a core musical material. Typically, interaction is under-utilized in bio-music; an improved system can offer alternative design opportunities compared to a collection of instruments controlled by bio-signals in ...