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Short abstract:

Interactive social game and discussion.

Abstract:

In the era of surveillance capitalism, few locations are as thoroughly surveilled as the university campus. While they explore their personal, political, and intellectual identities, undergraduate students’ behaviors are documented and monitored at an increasingly intensive scale. What is the effect of surveillance systems on the American undergraduate student? Informed by an ongoing qualitative study researching the manifold effects of data surveillance on college campuses, this workshop aims to replicate hierarchies of need and visibility through an interactive game. Players designated “students” will move between stations to collect tokens representing the daily requirements of student life, while other players regulate how many tokens are distributed, or confiscate them if students are caught breaking the rules. Players will find that students’ needs are not uniform, and students will need to collaborate in order to achieve a collective win. Trading tokens and convincing station managers to dispense limited extra resources are the only ways to ensure each student receives all the tokens they need to win the game, but the agents of the university will be watching to prevent those very things… This workshop will include games that last for about thirty minutes, with a fifteen minute discussion afterward based on the observations of the players. Curious and creative minds wishing to learn through experience are welcome, and dropping in/out will be facilitated by the organizers. “Discipline makes individuals,” wrote Foucault (1979: 185). What individual does a college make of you?

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This will be a station with several chairs at which people may write letters or notes. Supplies will be provided.

Abstract:

Earlier this year, the eminent STS scholar, sociologist, and methodologist Adele E. Clarke passed away. In addition to authoring or co-authoring several books and scores of articles, she trained several generations of STS scholars. Her writing and editing frequently involved the use of fountain pen, usually in purple ink. Using this tool, she maintained, helped slow down the process of writing and deepen one’s thinking about what goes on the page. In this Making and Doing session, we will offer people an opportunity to use her preferred writing tool to write a letter, a note, memorial, or tribute to Adele E Clarke. We will supply stationery and pens. Participants may choose to keep their notes or include then in what will become a material compilation of letters commemorating Adele E. Clarke’s legacy and effect on the field. Please join us in this session to write slowly and think deeply with and about Adele E. Clarke.

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Short abstract:

Interactive table installation with print materials, medium-size posters, and projected web exhibition.

Abstract:

Access in the Making (AIM) Lab is an anti-ableist, anti-colonialist, and feminist research lab based in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). Making and doing remains central to AIM’s ethos and activities that engage questions of disability, access, environment, and world-making through ongoing creative experimentation that refuses technosolutionism. We invite participants to engage with AIM Lab's members and diverse projects including: 1) Designing with access – from its physical lab space construction to its logo and website design, AIM is radically rethinking design by positioning access as methodology and core element of the creative progress, rather than a retrofit. 2) Protocols, values, and manifesto – a co-authored series of guiding documents for working together including: our horizontal governance, how to make our events, websites, and communication accessible, etc. 3) Air, River, Sea, Soil: A History of an Exploited Land – an online exhibition produced by AIM where six artists from the SWANA region were paired with AIM members to develop a new mode of audio-description that we call “paired description”. 4) Mobilizing Disability Survival Skills for the Urgencies of the Anthropocene - a series of research-creation projects exploring how disability knowledges can inform the rebuilding of societies amidst rapid environmental decline and the shrinking of habitable worlds. 5) Citational politics - From our “#CiteYourGrannies” stickers to “AIM reads” sessions, we challenge extractivist academic citational trends with a curated citational politic that values multiple knowledges (including those that have historically been undervalued in academia, and those produced outside of it) and modes of knowledge-making that subvert academic ableism.

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This is an interactive workshop hosted by the CREATE/STS Editorial Collective: Emily York, Marisa Brandt, Shannon N. Conley, Megan Halpern, Nicole Mogul, Elizabeth Reddy, Marie Stettler Kleine, David Tomblin

Abstract:

In this Making and Doing session, members of the CREATE/STS Editorial Collective (associated with the NSF-funded project “Collaborative Research and Education Architecture for Transformative Engagement With STS”) invite STSers to craft learning activity and assessment “recipes.” We want visitors to our session to share and connect with the diversity of approaches to critical, feminist, and/or alternative experiential teaching & learning practices that STSers have tried and loved. We see ourselves as part of a growing field that values approaching STS undergraduate education through multiple modalities beyond the standard lecture and discussion method that dominates undergraduate education. With template starters, recipe cards, and posting boards to help us collectively make visible the kinds of learning objectives, activities, and joys and sorrows that we experience and encounter, we imagine a making and doing session that revels in the challenges and occasional successes of STS education that invites learners to do STS. While participants are not required to submit these for possible inclusion in an edited collection, the CREATE/STS Editorial Collective will share its call for an edited collection, An STS Teachbook: Recipes from our Science and Technology Studies Communities for Critical Pedagogies in Undergraduate Education. This Making and Doing session will also be complemented by a workshop. Participants of this session will have an opportunity to work intimately with members of the Editorial Collective on crafting recipes for the book and/or their personal course revisions and development.

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Short abstract:

Based on a conversation piece, 3 to 4 participants will engage in a game format to experience creating a creative process that communicates the science they intend to and will be asked for feedback on how it could be implemented in their fields of research.

Abstract:

Embark on a creative journey as we explore a conceptual prototype for a museum exhibit(ion), harvesting narratives as data to tackle the complexities of wicked problems. This proposal concerns a game to test how the elements within the exhibit proof of concept can be used to outline a creative process of building a narrative harvesting exhibit(ion).

This piece was developed for the research project ‘Soy Stories’: an NWO-funded project, which uses transdisciplinary narrative research approaches to engage with sustainability challenges in Brazil and the Netherlands that are geographically dispersed yet intertwined through soy (van der Vleuten & de Hoop, 2022). This prototype aims to engage audiences in conversation, allowing for both public deliberation and data collection thereon at the same time (drawing on the notion of situated intervention cf. Zuiderent-Jerak, 2015). As such, it seeks to explore possibilities for museums to relate to current societal concerns by acting as creative and participatory platforms fostering collaboration, deliberation and research (Gorman, 2020). The exhibit prototype will not be designed for one specific museum or place but will include possibilities that allow for embedding it in different museological and socio-cultural contexts. By building on that, the exhibit seeks to stretch and break paradigms and become a novel approach to bridging science, technology and society (Steward, 2006; Raelin, 2012). The goal of this collective effort - both the prototype and the workshop - is to stimulate continuous change based on how visitors in diverse museums engage with it.

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Short abstract:

Interactive workshop followed by discussion and the creation of a microbial sound repository.

Abstract:

Our imaginaries of the microbial world have tended towards the visual since Leeuwenhoek used glass lenses to see ‘animalcules’. The metaphors we use to talk about microbes have become increasingly adversarial since the advent of the germ theory of disease. Recent computational methods associated with laboratory environments have allowed us new ways to imagine microbes as bioinformatic data. However, our awareness of and relationship to the microbial world predates these innovations, and has historically been understood as relational, spiritual and sensory. In this workshop, we want to create the time and space for exploring human-microbial relations through sound. Sensory methods are an emerging area of study in STS: hygiene and social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic, the observation of fermentation practices, or the management of resistant infections in low-resource settings are some examples. The session invites participants to a process that shifts away from the cultural and pedagogical dominance of the visual, giving primacy to sound as a way into a state of being attentive-otherwise. Microbes, like sounds, require particular effort and tools to be isolated from their environments. Through this exercise, we embrace the messiness of sound as a method for a different kind of exploring the microbial and our entanglements with it.Workshop participants will engage in an exercise of attentive listening and recording, followed by a reflective discussion on the potential of sensory methods to research microbes. Recordings from this session will be uploaded to a newly created sound repository– an open archive of everyday microbial encounters.

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Short abstract:

We offer an interactive installation in stages for participants to “move through”, consisting of stations for self-reflection and expression, interaction with audiovisuals, and synthesis through multiple media.

Abstract:

How can we seriously contend with the futures that will result from the polycrises we forecast, from climate change, biodiversity loss, global pandemic, and economic collapse? What challenges do we experience as we begin to think through deep adaptation to climate change? How does the task of reimagining a socio-ecological context feel for us as researchers? Despite studying these phenomena in depth, academic disciplines fail to encourage researchers to "deeply adapt" beyond surface-level mitigation efforts (Bendell, 2018; Selwyn, 2021). We aim to disrupt the vision of future-as-continuation-of-present and push researchers to contemplate how they could adapt their work in the context of alternative futures (Dator, 2019) through an interactive installation. Participants will first document a project they are working on, what motivates their research and their desired outcomes. Next, we will introduce an audio-visual experience that prompts participants to think through alternative visions of the future if current socio-ecological threats are realized, inviting participants to contribute to our perspectives of what changes the future may bring. Finally, we hope to delve into what emotions reimagining the future evokes in participants and encourage them to contribute to a collaborative collage (see image for submission). In particular, we aim to hold space for participants' feelings of ecological and anticipatory grief (Cunsolo, 2017; Barnett, 2022). We choose to focus on an emotional outcome to problematize dominant research evaluations which elevate productivity. We also aim to create a collaborative experience through asynchronous collaging to acknowledge the centrality of relationships to imagining change (Finn & Wylie, 2021).

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Short abstract:

A speculative fictional parody device that claims extra-sensory perception (ESP) capabilities, reading thoughts from cognitive radiation. The MindReader ESP32 reflects on surveillance systems that are based on capturing background radiation emitted from devices, such as Bluetooth space occupancy systems, which can surveil without notice or consent.

Abstract:

The MindReader ESP32® by NeuralChain AI™ is a speculative fictional parody of an AI-enabled device that claims to have extra-sensory perception (ESP) capabilities. It purports to read minds based on inferring patterns in electromagnetic radiation emitted from the brain during specific cognitive acts. This physical prototype is built on an ESP32 microcontroller, a widely-used low-cost wireless microcontroller. It is equipped with a small screen that scrolls randomly generated descriptions of fictional EASST/4S attendees' presumed thoughts and emotions. The device queries Mistral's Mixtral, an open-source large language model (LLM) hosted on a private server, to generate humorous and self-referential descriptions of attendees' mindsets. The MindReader ESP32 serves as a commentary on the increasing use of surveillance systems that are based on capturing background radiation emitted from devices, such as Bluetooth beacon space occupancy systems, which can surveil without notice or consent. The MindReader ESP32 displays scrolling ‘live’ fictional data based on attendees' emotions, interests, and thoughts, such as: {Excitement: high; Curiosity: moderate; Nostalgia: low; Thoughtfulness: high; Contemplation on the blend of technology and society; Awareness of diverse perspectives in the room; Anxiety about interactive poster session; Anticipation for engaging conversations; Hunger: medium;"} While the data is entirely fictional, it invites participants to consider the implications of real-world systems that collect and analyze personal information. This hands-on demonstration aims to spark discussions on the implications of such ways of knowing on privacy, consent, transparency, regulation, and design principles. This references earlier work such as the CHI 2014 Quantified Toilets performance art.

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Short abstract:

The presentation will require visitors to interact with ChatGPT 4.0 one by one to generate a picture of AI collectively.

Abstract:

In this project, participants would engage in one-on-one interactions with ChatGPT 4.0, contributing to the collaborative creation of a portrait of AI. The goal is to investigate how AI is shaped by the collective intelligence of various users, the users' perceptions of AI and AI's perception of itself. When creating this portrait, users would be free to create as they want. We would also be able to discover how previous interactions between users and AI influence the interaction between the following users and AI. This project invites individuals to partake in an interactive exploration of AI, highlighting the power of collective intelligence in shaping the narrative around this transformative technology. The resulting composite portrait reflects not only the capabilities of ChatGPT but also the diverse perspectives of the human participants, offering a glimpse into the symbiotic relationship between humans and AI.

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Posters

Abstract:

Through different techniques of sociotechnical analysis, the artifact of cable cars is explored as a new modality of metropolitan public transportation, highlighting sociotechnical alliances, dynamics, and relevant social groups, in the case of Mexico.

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Short abstract:

It is a short activity that's a cross between an interactive presentation and an installation.

Abstract:

As regulation to hold AI accountable picks up steam with the advent of the EU AI Act, we reimagine policy construction as a community learning process rather than a top-down prescription from authorities. This activity invites conference attendees to assemble their idealAI accountability policy by combining snippets from a pool of potential printed options. Participants will select a regulatory scenario among domains of finance, medicine, or recommender-systems and put together text that aligns with the values they want to prioritize for policy. They will physically organize their policy by rearranging fabric pieces with individual requirements onto a corkboard. The policy text samples are drawn from a collaborative research exercise in which a sociology and computer science undergraduates simultaneously designed AI systems and policies governing explanations for inscrutable AI systems. This exercise invites conference attendees to confront some of the same tradeoffs that we found in our research on explainability for AI systems, like the balance between comprehensiveness and user understandability, and extend our research into further possibilities. We will pin together each attendee-generated policy on a corkboard and take a photograph. These policies will subsequently be uploaded to a website that will feature a digital version of the activity to gather input from the general public. Additionally, users will be able to view and comment on the configurations of other AI policies.

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Short abstract:

Interactive exhibition and 10-15 min test-playing of Serious Games, followed by discussions on turning research into templatic games.

Abstract:

As the name suggests, Serious Games are played not for entertainment but for other purposes, e.g. awareness raising, education, or collaboration. They offer alternative ways of engaging with audiences in an interactive manner. Usually, developing a Serious Game is complex and time-intensive. However, in a templatic game the materials, rules and choreography have already been tested, and new games can easily be created: just swap new content into the game template and adjust the rules.

Two examples of templatic games are introduced:

1. Transition Games are board games where players take on the roles of stakeholders and walk a token through a sustainability transition parcours. Scenarios come up that either help or hinder the transition.

2. Regen-D Games ("regenerative design") use wooden disks with QR-codes linked to multimedia materials that describe different aspects of a research project or initiative. Chance selection with a spinning wheel prompts players to uncover the initiative step-by-step, and to deploy LINK, EVALUATE or JOKER tokens. Regen-D is useful for dissemination and for onboarding new project members.

A selection of published games is available for flexible test-playing (10-15mins): "Pollinators" (Transition Game), "Water management in an Indian eco-village" (Regen-D), and "Collaborative finance" (Regen-D). After test-playing, participants can discuss how to turn their own research into templatic games and how to use them, e.g. playing through research findings with non-academic audiences, developing games with students, or induction for new team members.

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Short abstract:

workshop and demo

Abstract:

We will explore the use AI agents based on GPT4 in Theatrical Technology Assessment (TTA) methodology, focusing on co-designing the agents with participants to simulate stakeholder interactions. On the technology side, the format leverages on the LangChain framework and draws inspiration from models like AutoGPT to create a sandbox for stakeholders-to-AI agents interactions. The co-design process allows for the exploration of stakeholder negotiations on STS issues, such as AI regulations, through simulations that capture diverse perspectives and outcomes. TTA, embedded within the Constructive Technology Assessment framework, facilitates proactive learning among stakeholders at the nascent stages of technology development, highlighting the importance of stakeholder engagement in steering technology. The workshop will employ an iterative design process for AI agents, balancing the views of technology promoters and critics, and experimenting with how simulated outcomes are presented to the public. This approach is informed by new materialist philosophies (and discussion of post-qualitative research), particularly Karen Barad's agential realism, emphasizing the entangled nature of material and discursive elements in societal outcomes. By simulating technoscientific negotiations, such as those around AI governance, we aim to produce insights into the ethical, social, and political dimensions of technology, fostering a participatory public discourse reminiscent of the 18th century's public demonstrations of science and technology. This workshop sets the stage for a rethinking of public engagement in science and technology, proposing AI-simulated negotiations as a method for integrating societal considerations into science and technology debates and regulation.

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workshop/game

Abstract:

"My documents, check them out" is a collaborative, role-playing game simulating the bureaucratic mechanisms shaping migration control. Its main goal is to interest players in the problematization and re-design of the semantic categories and values used in databases for migration management. During the game, players impersonate a fictional character, and they are told that a “document” is needed to legally remain in Italy. To obtain the document, players must fill in and submit an application form containing information about their characters and their migration journey. At the beginning of their turn, players pick up a card from the deck. “Wait” and “Accelerated procedure” cards mimic the temporal dynamics shaping migration management. “Design cards” allow players to choose and introduce a new category, to capture what they consider salient elements of their characters’ migration trajectory. Players are also invited to share stories in order to receive comments and suggestions. Lastly, “Agency cards” provide the possibility to add new elements to the characters’ stories and identities. Applications are then uploaded into a software which takes a decision by producing a negative, long-term positive or short-term positive outcome. The game constitutes a tool for reflection which, according to the differently situated gazes of the players, discloses their competences, assumptions and biases about the dynamics of migration management. My documents, check them out was developed in the context of the Processing Citizenship ERC project (#714463) and was co-designed with asylum seekers, lawyers, students, civil servants.

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Short abstract:

Demo

Abstract:

This demo is part of the pipeline that comprises my ASTS project that leverages biosensors that capture intricate neurophysiological imprints, data and signal processing, and artistic practice through sound design and performance making. It allows participants to observe their biosignals on a computer screen while listening to different streams of sensor data sonified in real-time using headphones. The goal is to externalize the operation of biosensors, devices known to capture wearer's stress response, and for participants to engage with materializations of their biosignals. The demo is phase one of a real-time particpatory performance where the relationship between bio-data, sound, and visuals are complexified to create affective intensities around my experience as a migrant in exile. This performance entitled "Curves & Reverbs: Human-Machine Sensory Performativity" takes place on Friday afternoon as part of panel P163.

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Short abstract:

A physical installation with some technical setup.

Abstract:

Artificial Intelligence is being used more and more in the human resource management for selecting, training or evaluating workers. In this making and doing session we will explore questions on fairness of the recruitment process and how AI can mitigate the human bias or exacerbate discrimination. With this installation, we invite participants to experience an initial screening process in hiring activities from the side of artificial intelligence, and their own human side. Participants will firstly read a job description and indicate the ranking criteria that they deem important for the job, for example previous experience, education, language, or other. Secondly, the recruiter AI will make an assessment based on the human input, while the humans go into the black box to make their own selection and ranking of the given job candidates. Thirdly, as they exit the black box, participants compare their human choices with the AI’s choices to see if and how it differed. We finally invite participants to provide feedback on the activity to map how the STS community can help our project, BIAS, to rethink AI-enhanced hiring processes.

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Short abstract:

Installation consisting of Moving Image, Sound, Computer code.

Abstract:

The Minor Ai series consists of experiments in producing small-scale machine learning practices that explore possibilities for alternative frameworks of artificial intelligence. Emerging from the idea of small and slow Ai, these intelligent assemblages refuse the narratives and structures of Big Tech and instead foreground alternatives proposed by data humanism, ancestral knowledges, mystical encounters and feminist practices. Consisting of a series of different experiments, the works propose an exploration of the ways in which feminist diy methods can reveal new ways of doing and thinking with Ai that are esoteric, sensuous, communal and even subversive. The series aims to question the cultural logic of techno-capitalism as it is currently embedded within large-scale Ai systems and to reflect on the ways in which small Ai can become crystallized as a practice through the refiguration of existing ML structures into a “minor language” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983) for intelligent assemblages. The artifacts consist of experimental software (custom code and small-scale datasets) that takes input in the form of an interactive object and outputs moving image sequences and text.There are currently two nearly-completed experiments (esoteric Ai, which produces algorithmic images through an intelligent software based on numerology and Subversive Ai, which works against its own software structure, seeking to produce glitches in its existing order). Two more experiments are planned to be developed between Feb 2024 - June 2024 (ancestral and feminine) and can feature in the exhibition. The attached file presents the outcomes of the Esoteric project.

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An interactive workshop co-created and organised by Marieke Meesters, Maya Lane, Clemens Driessen, Sandra Calkins, Jae Fisher and Rebeca Ibáñez Martín.

Abstract:

Multispecies gezelligheid’ is an interactive workshop that encourages participants to speculate on diverse ways to do multispecies (ethnographic) research, as ethical STS scholars thematizing the mundane, but also as environmentally engaged scholars interested in fostering more expansive forms of conviviality.‘Gezellig’ (adjective) or ‘gezelligheid’ (noun) in Dutch refer to a cozy, homely and convivial atmosphere- imagine a comfy sociable situation, sharing conversations over snacks with loved ones under soft lighting. In the Netherlands, people care a great deal about their relationships, lives and everyday situations being gezellig. However, ‘gezelligheid’ can also have a dark side – an expectation of conformity and the imperative of blending into Dutch society that can marginalize and exclude forms of otherness. This workshop unpacks what it means to orient sociality towards multispecies gezelligheid, questioning how we can create a ‘gezellig’ space for a range of critters, whilst interrogating the normative horizons of gezellig. What does it imply to extrapolate a normative category derived from human sociality into multispecies ethnographies? Can this specifically Dutch notion be generative for STS research? How may this form of sociomaterial atmospheric relationality resonate with prominent cultural notions that gained theoretical impetus, such as buen vivir? Thinking regeneratively, the workshop focuses on creating gezelligheid for critters crucial for decomposing plant and animal materials, like earthworms and springtails. In creating multispecies gezelligheid, we intend to spark conversation on our positionality as scholars in relation to critters, share spaces of gezelligheid, and explore how various forms of multispecies gezelligheid are perhaps not always compatible.

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Short abstract:

Interactive exhibit, featuring poster pin-up space and flexible table-space, and seating arrangements for participants to add their own contributions to the display

Abstract:

Extant paradigms for platform governance, particularly those advanced by platform companies, configure the front-end user interface as the sphere for governance, while simultaneously occluding the back-end operations central to the economic value of the platform. Building on STS research on how this stage management of data relations configures platform governance (Huang & Krafft, in press), as well as research on hacking metaphors for the regulation of emerging technologies (Jones & Millar, 2017), this interactive exhibit animates, through experimental modalities of boundary-drawing, how what is made visible goes hand-in-hand with what is actionable for governance. As designers and STS scholars, we propose an interactive exhibit of critical and speculative drawing, inviting participants to destabilize the boundaries drawn by platform companies, and to reclaim collective power in determining what is actionable for governance. Rooted in architectural approaches to drawing and diagramming, which map spatial relationships in the built environment, this exhibit provides material and discursive tools for interrogating and re-imagining platforms. In the first act, we will utilize the metaphor of stage management to reformulate transparency as a regulatory ideal. Through a series of critical drawing exercises, participants will experiment with visualizing the back-stage operations (e.g., sketching optimization metrics central to a platform’s business model), and with re-drawing the lines of visibility demarcating front- vs. back-stage operations. In the second act, participants will shift from critique to speculation. Discarding “platform” as the metaphorical grounds for sense-making, participants will collectively re-imagine alternative metaphors by which to understand, visualize, design, and govern these sociotechnical systems.

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Short abstract:

Installation, interactive art, computational art

Abstract:

'elegies for oil spills' asks the following questions:

- can a machine mourn for the climate?

- if a oil spill could speak, what would it say?

- what can machine mimicry tell us about narratives of oil (and its spillage)?

using data about world’s largest oil spills, ‘elegies for oil spills’ generates speculative artifacts about environmental disaster – printed in the form of a (recycled) receipt.

every image and poem both here and on your receipt has been generated by AI (specifically, ChatGPT – one of the largest language models in the world).

‘elegies for oil spills’ is part of the series ‘poetic tactics to counter extraction (and other ways to train attention), hosted at the school of commons’ the Zurich University of the Arts and online.

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Short abstract:

Interactive presentation using silkscreen print-making as a means of practical reflection on the non-productive labor performed by plants, soils and others in large scale remediation projects. This is the solar-punk energy revolution – grab a rag and join the ecological labor force!

Abstract:

Who, or what, mediates pollution? In Bitterfeld-Wolfen, industrial heritage is a fundamental part of the cultural fabric of the city. However, processes of bioremediation have masked ongoing environmental violence through the lush spectacle of reconstructed (urban-industrial) nature, so as to erase the former fly ash from collective consciousness. “Sky inside the Soil” is a multi-phase, co-authored research-creation project that explores the roles of plants and trees as mediators between soil and sky in more-than-human communities of extreme toxicity. Following the seasonal cycle of ruderal plants growing around the notoriously polluted Silbersee (Silver Lake), we imagine through them the historical trajectories of labor and repair on a former mining pit once used for wastewater from the Agfa film factory and chemical textiles plant in Bitterfeld-Wolfen. We use archival photographs and pigments derived from plant biomass to reflect on the social, economic, and aesthetic dimensions of pollution through the medium of silkscreen – a tightly woven nylon mesh, not unlike the synthetic nylon products once manufactured in Wolfen. We consider changes in viscosity over time and invite an embodied understanding of such changes though the repetitive process of silkscreen printing: prepare, place, pour, pull, lift, sweep, repeat. Using these motions to structure our reflections, we work-with and think-with vegetal mediators to re(con)textualize ideas about the long-term, more-than-human ecological labor of remediation.

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Short abstract:

Workshop. Performative Material Science. Get together with a stack of printed photographs. Related to the method of photo elicitation, associative and wild speculating on dark matter knowledge generation through photographs.

Abstract:

It is not surprising that current physics struggles with arguments regarding the (non-)detection of dark matter. On the one hand, physicists have been theoretically puzzling for nearly 100 years over the composition of said matter, which is supposed to constitute 85% of the total mass of the universe. On the other hand, it remains to be seen which experimental strategies will lead to possible detections in the foreseeable future. However, so far the own observation, current efforts to detect dark matter rely significantly on procedures that are situated far from elaborate wave- or particle-like models and well-established experimental practices. The session, under the scrutiny of STS-informed perspectives, invites following the hypothesis that dark matter exhibits more complex material characteristics than is generally recognized by physics; therefore the question is asked where and how knowledge generation in the field takes on a barely controllable momentum of its own and risks escaping future reproducibility. The workshop negotiates dark matter in the tension between formal physical constitution and collective imagination. After a brief introduction, a common dive into the topic is made by negotiating with/through photographs to re-configures the body of knowledge predominantly governed and disciplined by physics.

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Short abstract:

Interactive demo of a card deck alongside templates for activities/formats participants can easily follow.

Abstract:

This making and doing session presents a brainstorming card deck co-created in dialogue with environmental educators, community organizers, digital democracy advocates, and other community experts. Designed to collectively generate ideas for resilience-forward curriculum activities and environmentally responsive media and infrastructure, the deck offers a dynamic opportunity for collaborative design and transformative learning experiences. In this era of deep uncertainty, the card deck provides a structured yet flexible framework for navigating uncertain terrain. Through collaborative brainstorming and ideation, participants can explore a range of potential futures and strategies for addressing environmental challenges with creativity and resilience. The card deck fosters active participation and engagement from community members, emphasizing the importance of community-driven approaches to environmental education and media infrastructure development. At its core, the card deck is about envisioning and co-creating sustainable futures. By sparking conversations and generating ideas for resilient curriculum design and environmentally responsive media infrastructure, it encourages participants to think critically about the intersections between science, technology, and society in shaping a more sustainable world. Through its dynamic and interactive nature, the card deck offers conference attendees the opportunity to engage in collaborative curriculum design and infrastructure futuring, while exploring new perspectives, and co-creating innovative approaches to planetary limits. Overall, the card deck hopes to serve as a practical and symbolic tool for advancing the goals of 4S & EASST communities, embodying the spirit of collaboration, innovation, and public engagement in addressing the complex issues facing our world today.

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Short abstract:

This is a participatory troubleshooting session that invites people to bring stories, artifacts (within reason), or documentation about ferments that have gone awry. What happens when undesirable growth or unintended circumstances get the best of us and our ferments? What constitutes failure in these settings?

Abstract:

This is a participatory troubleshooting session that invites people to bring stories, artifacts (within reason), or documentation about ferments that have gone awry. What happens when undesirable growth or unintended circumstances get the best of us and our ferments? What constitutes failure in these settings? Failure, in this context, becomes fruitful for rupturing ideas of human dominion and offers inroads for better understanding the vitality and agency of nonhuman forces (e.g., microbes, environmental preconditions). By interrogating these ‘failures,’ the session will invite participants to reframe/rethink how biology cannot be predicted or contained. This making/doing session invites participants to reflexively analyze their ferments, while also crowdsourcing ways to recuperate, restart, or repurpose a ferment. Depending on the participants’ interests, potential topics for discussion would build on existing research in multispecies STS, citizen science, and feminist technoscience. The session is intended for people who self-identify as beginners as well as experts in fermentation. It also welcomes those engaged in other lines of microbial inquiry (e.g., composting, marine microbes) or the generally curious. The goal will be to create an environment for sharing by putting into practice academic discussions about knowledge hierarchies, ways of knowing, and situated/embodied knowledges. Participants will be encouraged to bring their experiments, or pictures/stories of them, along with all matters pertaining to “I don't know who to ask this.” This will become a chance to bare all and (in some instances, literally) air out our darkest hindrances.

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Short abstract:

installation/ workshop

Abstract:

The deliberation about recycling water for direct human consumption activates a range of intimate expert engagements with their object(s) of knowledge, as well as different types of expertise, sometimes in the same body. On the one hand sit technocratic experts; On the other hand, sit a different kind of expert/expertise, that of a culturally-informed, perhaps biologically innate disgust at the diverse contaminants present in wastewater. Research demonstrates that as people begin to understand the technological processes behind water recycling, their acceptance of, and trust in, the process increases. That trust, however, is uneven—while people may decide the technology itself is efficacious, they may remain suspicious of other infrastructural aspects (trust in policy makers) or environmental impacts the technology interacts with. How might researchers and stakeholders move the conversation beyond yuck to explore other issues? This making and doing project explores how using community-designed flavor profiles to tell stories engaged stakeholders across the decision-making spectrum in conversations about what futures advanced water treatment technologies might bring about. By “making taste public” (Voss & Guggenheim 2019) through a family friendly product, a gourmet popsicle, this making and doing project highlights new possibilities in expanding public deliberation around sustainability transitions while also revealing new challenges in the process of moving conversations beyond the subjective stage of the “yuck” factor into the realm of concerns about systems.

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Short abstract:

Presentation with projected images and printed art objects; activity with prepared cyanotype materials for participants. Attached image is from Moon Trees; images in the workshop will be much smaller.

Abstract:

Space Shadows is an practice of capturing extraterran travelers in cyanotype prints, solidifying their shadows in chemically hardened sunlight. It began with the series Untitled (Moon Trees #1-7) in 2022, and continues now with Untitled (Rocket Parts) in 2024. For each iteration of Space Shadows, I make a series of cyanotype prints by using objects that have traveled through the atmosphere as the image matrix, and then exposing the image using sunlight. In this way, I am able to capture the “shadow” of extraterran travelers. Such a collaboration between earthling, solar energy, and space-artifact materializes a relationship of wonderment, finitude, and release that opposes the extractive national and corporate imaginations that dominate the current space age. It also enacts an immediate relationship of earthlings as creatures already engaged in cosmic encounters, without the mediation of industry. Moon Trees used leaves, twigs, and other detritus collected from the Moon Tree in Sewanee, TN, USA. This is one of several Moon Trees scattered across the USA, all of whom are grown from seeds sent into orbit around the moon on Apollo 14 in 1971 and planted on their return.Rocket Parts will be created by capturing impressions of a small rocket built and launched by Space Society Twente, a student organization at the University of Twente, NL, that seeks to find ways to make space a space for all. In this workshop, I will first present my work and then offer precoated papers for the participants to make their own prints.