Hannah Drayson

Plymouth University, Transtechnology Research, Faculty Member

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I am an intermedia artist and researcher based in the School of Art and Media at Plymouth University. I co-convene the Transtechnology Research group, and supervise Doctoral Research within Transtechnology Research and as part of the Marie Curie funded CogNovo ITN. I am an associate editor of Leonardo Reviews, part of Leonardo, Journal of the Arts Sciences, and Technology.

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B. Harun Küçük

University of Pennsylvania

d'Escriván Julio

University of Huddersfield

Dylan Trigg

Central European University

Emilia G . Sanabria

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique / French National Centre for Scientific Research

Evan Smith

Flinders University of South Australia

Marc Champagne

Kwantlen Polytechnic University

David Seamon

Kansas State University

John Krummel

Hobart & William Smith Colleges

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

Sabina Leonelli

University of Exeter

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Papers by Hannah Drayson

Aesthetic Experience of Metabolic Processes

Leonardo, Apr 2, 2024

When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity by Shoshana Amielle Magnet. Duke University Press, Durham, NC, and London, U.K., 2011. 224 pp., illus. Paper. ISBN: 978-0-82-235135-1

Leonardo, Apr 1, 2013

Losh’s “Hacktivism and the Humanities” (pp. 179–180), but there are literally hundreds of others ... more Losh’s “Hacktivism and the Humanities” (pp. 179–180), but there are literally hundreds of others working at U.S. universities and colleges. What lessons can we learn from them and the projects they have undertaken? My final two comments add my own perspective to the digital humanities. Lisa Spiro asserts in “This Is Why We Fight” that the DH needs to “produc[e] a values statement” in order to “provide the foundation for the digital humanities,” listing those associated with the “aesthetics and values” of the humanities (“inquiry, critical thinking, debate, pluralism, balancing innovation and tradition, and exploration and critique,” p. 19). She goes on to propose new ones mentioned previously in this review (“openness,” “collaboration,” “collegiality and connectedness,” “diversity,” and “experimentation”). It seems to me that, with the growing lack of support for the humanities in and outside of the academy, one additional value that may help scholars bridge the gap between academe and the world beyond–-–and, so, demonstrate to our various stakeholders why studying the humanities is so needed–-–is “problemsolving.” Perhaps we need to go beyond questioning and critiquing established norms, authority, policy, theory, approaches, etc., and lead the way in finding answers to those questions and solutions to those critical problems our communities face. Bryan Alexander and Rebecca Frost Davis hint to this concept in their essay, “Should the Liberal Arts Campuses Do Digital Humanities?” when they stress the need for “community engagement” (p. 384). Finally, many of the book’s authors allude to computer technology as a tool. In an age when mobile devices are, for many of us, an extension of our hands and extend our online lives—as Kirschenbaum suggests—to “24-7,” and computer technology is so ubiquitous that communicating, driving, telling time, paying for groceries, etc. are dependent upon them, it is time to rethink our relationship with computers. If we are makers of things such as a digital archive of a literary writer like John Barber’s Brautigan.net project or a mobile app for teaching about a historical site such as Brett Oppegaard’s Fort Vancouver Mobile project, or a 2D animated poem like Thom Swiss’s “Shy Boy,” then computers are not tools that help us do what it is we do, but rather the medium in which we work. It is a fundamental shift in thinking about our relationship with digital technology that can help to delineate the difference between the humanities and the digital humanities.

Players Unleashed! Modding The Sims and the Culture of Gaming by Tanja Sihvonen. Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, Holland, 2011. 224 pp., illus. Paperback. ISBN: 978-90-8964-2011

Leonardo, Oct 1, 2012

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Delete: A Design History of Computer Vapourware by Paul Atkinson (review)

Leonardo, 2016

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The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy by Matthew Hindman. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2018. 256 pp., illus. Trade. ISBN: 978-0691159263

Leonardo, Jun 1, 2019

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Delete: A Design History of Computer Vapourware

Leonardo, Feb 1, 2016

we have collaborated ever since. When I first met Martha she had just completed a project in whic... more we have collaborated ever since. When I first met Martha she had just completed a project in which she interviewed a number of clairvoyants in order to give conscious shape to the concept of an angel—something that for most academics sat between kitsch and fantasy. However, in this work she gave such intellectual substance to the discussions of those who spoke with her that their visions had dignity and authority. In the same way she captured the concept of the technological imaginary at Transtechnology Research at Plymouth University in ways that attracted the minds of researchers who were looking for new paradigms, and through that group worked on dozens of projects, including Leonardo Reviews and L|R|Q. We published joint papers and shared a large research grant that allowed us to work with people that she valued at the EYE Film Institute, the Institute for Sound and Vision and the Angewandte in Vienna. She also worked independently on projects, such as the anthology Light Image and Imagination, in collaboration with Gustave Deutsch and Hannah Schimek. At the time of her death we were working with a large group of researchers from the cognitive sciences, the arts and the humanities on creativity and cognitive innovation. We also set up a small laboratory project to revisit the psychological experiments that were important to media in the late 19th century, and we were working with hospitals and the Dental School at Plymouth to build a new center dealing with health and creativity. We also established a network of researchers from across many disciplines, including Roger Malina, to work on methodological issues—in particular those that involve questions about transdisciplinarity and academic collaboration. It seems today as I write this that the answers to many of our questions about academic collaboration were hidden in plain sight. Martha was a natural collaborator—or perhaps, more precisely, she made it very easy for others to collaborate with her. At this distance it is clear to me that this was not simply a consequence of her intellectual qualities and her natural compassion for the world around her, but rather was the legacy of her refusal to acknowledge the dichotomy between matter and spirit as an irrefutable given. For her this refusal was a gift of personal freedom and intellectual grace; the irrevocable continuity of time, memory and perception In MeMorIaM: Martha BlassnIgg, 08 septeMBer 1969– 27 septeMBer 2015

Gestalt biometrics and their applications : instrumentation, objectivity and poetics

This thesis is about the relationship between human bodies and instrumental technologies that can... more This thesis is about the relationship between human bodies and instrumental technologies that can be use to measure them. It adopts the position that instruments are technological structures that evoke and manifest particular phenomena of embodied Ufe. However, through their history of association and use in the sciences and scientific medicine, instruments tend to be attached to a particular ontology, that of mechanical objectivity. Embarking from research into the artistic uses of physiological sensor technology in creative practices such as performance and installation art, this thesis asks whether it is possible to use instruments in a way that departs from their association with scientific objectivity. Drawing on philosophers who have developed an understanding of the relationship of instrumental technologies and human bodies as co-constructive, it explores how this model of conconstruction might be understood to offer an alternative ontology for understanding the use of instruments in practices outside of science and scientific medicine. The project is therefore suggestive of degrees of freedom and flexibility that are open to exploitation by creative practices in the realm of instrumentation as an alternative to orthodox rationalisations of the value of scientific equipment as authentic, revealing and objective. The major contribution of the thesis is that transfers and synthesises arguments and evidence from the history and philosophy of sciences that serve to demonstrate how the instrumental measurement of human bodies can be considered to be a form of creative practice. It assembles a position based on the work of thinkers from a number of disciplines, particularly philosophy of science, technology, and the medical humanities. These offer examples of ontological frameworks within which the difference between the realm of the instrumental, material, biological, and the objective, and the phenomenal, meaningful and subjective, might be collapsed. Doing this, the thesis sheds light on how physical devices might enter into the interplay of making, mattering and objectifying the immaterial, a realm that it might be considered the role of artists to manifest. Drawing on contemporary, and secondary, accounts of the development of empirical testing in the medical sciences, the thesis agues for the recovery of a romantic account of human physiology, in which the imagination and meaning are active and embodied. It therefore offers to link the bodily and the instrumental through an extended-materialist account in which the physiological, rather than the psychological, is central. Developing a response to constructionist models of the body and instrumentation, the thesis concludes that a model of the poetic may be adopted as a method for understanding the opportunities and imperatives inherent in the avoidance of deterministic approaches to biosignaUing technologies. In doing this, the thesis contributes particularly to the creative arts and technology research practices concerned with the use of body sensor technologies in humanistic applications. It complements the existing works by artists in this area that make use of instruments by assembling a number of theoretical readings and interpretations of how instruments work-among them the thermometer, lie detector, and automatograph-which illustrate the argument that that is possible to operate from a theoretical position within which instruments are both material, performative and symbolic. Contents Acknowledgements Author's declaration and word count Preface At no time during registration for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy has the author been registered for any other University award without prior agreement of the Graduate Committee.

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Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America by Tanya Sheehan. Pennsylvania State University Press, PA, U.S.A., 2012; Thames & Hudson, London, U.K., 2012. 216 pp., illus. Trade, paper. ISBN: 978-0-271-03792-9; 978-0-271-03793-6

Leonardo, Apr 1, 2014

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“I love a party with a happy atmosphere”1; notes on the ontology of interpersonal atmosphere

The common English term ‘party’ is often used to refer to a gathering of people (often assembled ... more The common English term ‘party’ is often used to refer to a gathering of people (often assembled for the purposes of celebration). This short article considers the ontology of parties and gathers some ways to describe the party as a social atmosphere produced by certain kinds of aesthetic work. It suggests that a party as a ‘thing’, an assembly or gathering of objects and people (Latour, 2004), is characterised and perhaps catalysed by affective exchange achieved and maintained through an assemblage of material and interpersonal ingredients and actions. Parties are relational events characterised by and comprised of what goes on in the ‘in-between’ space between individuals, groups, and environment. This porous interface is what we might refer to as ‘atmosphere’. Here I draw on the work of scholars who have thought about atmosphere and it's implications for understanding the subjectivity, bodily presence and meaning in aesthetics as constitutive of the things that they apprehend...

To the Bitter End: Affect, Experience and Chemical Ecology

Vieweg, Apr 1, 2021

Debunking the Self: Jastrow, Münsterberg and the Automatograph

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Planchette, "Despair of Science

TAaCT: Technology, Affect and Clinical Training

TAaCT is a project that examines contemporary medical training by attending to the long history o... more TAaCT is a project that examines contemporary medical training by attending to the long history of devices that have been used to train medical practitioners, which include texts, atlases, models and a range of audio-visual apparatus. The object of TAaCT is to include reflective thinking about how technologies of representation are used to engage directly with human feeling, but which a prevailing focus on technological progress toward realistic simulation has tended to marginalise

The Rhetoric of Instrumentation: Objectivity, Instrumental Rationality and Affect

This paper assembles thoughts on a ‘deep historical’ approach to scientific instrumentation and w... more 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’.

‘Imagine Being Slapped’ Physiological Instrumentation, Ontology and the Placebo Effect

Certain aspects of human experience that might not usually be considered relevant to practices us... more 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 ...

Eating in Theory

Leonardo, Jul 21, 2022

Constructed Bodies: How Can Physiological Instruments Become Tools of Self Perception?

An Interactive Bio-Music Improvisation System

In this paper, we focus on electrical bio-signals of humans as a core musical material. Typically... more 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. 1. INTRODUCTION Bio-music is an experimental music form that is based on sensor data obtained from living organisms. In this paper, we focus on electrical bio-signals of humans; on their acquisition, processing and feature extraction, and particu...

The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy by Matthew Hindman (review)

Leonardo, 2019

as being “trapped by a tautology of human exceptionalism” (p. 118) and thus too narrow. She furth... more as being “trapped by a tautology of human exceptionalism” (p. 118) and thus too narrow. She further discusses a possible “planetary” perspective from the point of view of, among others, comparative literature scholars Masao Miyoshi and Gayatri Spivak, but eventually opts for the necessity of reading on different scales, including that of the animal. Citing several poems, short stories and plays by Tawada and again Ishimure that are told from an animal perspective, Marran concludes that these representational worlds can “imagine a world without us in order to imagine a world anew with us” (p.142). Marran certainly brings an interesting, highly readable perspective, albeit somewhat unbalanced in its references. The major stumbling block in my view remains her elimination of culture. It is an interesting thought experiment, and listening to and including the nonhuman in ecocriticism is a noble and necessary endeavor that will however eventually lead to yet another culture. Today’s turn...

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Exchange & Flow: An anthology