Paper short abstract:

As cinematic apparatuses become obligatory passages for labor-related knowledge mediation, screenscripting assumes a role in the development of physical and cognitive interactions in workplaces. This paper shows how cinematic epistemic templates regulate the self-realization of efficiency.

Paper long abstract:

There are two main contributions of cinematic apparatuses to professional training today:

1) they offer the possibility of a sensorial activity within a figurative space where aesthetic affordances are minutely programmable;

2) they offer the possibility of redistributing in the deliberately arranged space-time of representation a set of scattered/contingent events that characterize actual labor situations, thus enabling the construction of interactional situations by steps of complexity, linking trainees progressively to the signifying entities that characterize their future positions.

Trainees are required to engage in featured environments in order to experience the range of effects of their choices and actions. Algorithms and feedback scenarios are used to emulate environmental reactions, as learning progress is assumed to depend directly on the trainees’ assessment of feedback information generated by their actions. Therefore, cinematic training dispositifs embody a cybernetic principle for building systems of efficient behavior self-production: “effective behavior must be informed by some sort of feedback process, telling it whether it has equalled its goal or fallen short.” (Wiener, 1950) Accordingly, an autopoietic system of efficiency emerges from circuits linking operators to environments of which positive/negative reactions are made readable by the former, which is precisely what digital cinematic figures afford: an accurate readability of their (scripted) metamorphoses.

Such epistemological issues will be illustrated with a study of a dispositif for learning vine pruning, designed to enhance “pruning reasoning” through the simulation of the apprentices’ interaction with a multitude of algorithmically controlled factors (climatic, biological...) considered to influence the plants development.

Paper short abstract:

This paper renders the history and legacy of Biosphere 2 under the lens of the media archaeology leading to and following from such an imaginary of a closed or controllable living world, as well as the role currently played by images themselves in the very architecture of this nature-culture device.

Paper long abstract:

Biosphere2 is an experimental site built to reproduce a closed ecological system in the desert of Arizona. Its inception and legacy can be traced within a wider media archaeology of architectural forms aiming at crafting miniature, closed yet global/total systems in an attempt to exert some form of control over a profuse environment. A first claim for this paper concerns the way in which such a mediatisation directly participate to a cognitive and aesthetic apprehension of systems in a closed and controllable manner. This idea, based on a media archaeology of the architecture of closed worlds, will be further supported by recent ethnographic data on the role played by images in the making of institutional and ordinary life at Biosphere2. Our paper especially focuses on how the mythical imaginary of the 1990s missions that took place in the dome influences current formulation of ecological experiments at Biosphere2. In this sense, it will address both 1) images produced by Biosphere2 in order to function and create living conditions inside the dome (e.g. screens allowing a communication with the outside, and “windows” within the building to foster an internal perspective), and 2) the circulation of images outside of Biosphere2 in the media and visual culture, in particular in relation to planetary scales, with the idea of Earth being the first closed biosphere. Overall, our paper thus addresses the pragmatics of images, how their institutional ecologies, and their historical echoes participate in the making and the apprehension of a cybernetically closed artificial ecosystem.

Paper short abstract:

Our ethnographic study describes the daily life of a robotic dairy farm after the digitisation of its infrastructure. It resulted in the documentary film Routines which addresses how robotics and computer technologies reconfigure interactions and practices of domestication.

Paper long abstract:

Robotic dairy farms constitute a special kind of controlled ecosystem. They form a space where relations between humans and animals combine with the activity of computer systems and robots in what appear to be a complete redistribution of relations in an adapted and a digitalised infrastructure. Do such hybrid systems raise new issues regarding the routines which characterize the activities in the barn? What new socio-technical arrangements are emerging from robotics and computer science practices?

Based on film, our ethnography shows that while robotic milking is a further step in the rationalization of milk production processes, the integration of robots, sensors to acquire data, and computer systems to process them introduces changes in the relation between the farmer and his herd. These systems therefore imply new arrangements between humans, animals and machines, which consist of a new method to achieve an optimized level of performance. Questioning the impact that socio-material organisation can have on activities in a community composed of humans, technical devices and non-humans, our ethnographic study resulted in a documentary film called Routines.

Taking place in a Belgian dairy farm of the Walloon region, Routines describes the daily life of the farm and the reconfigurations linked to its robotisation. By adopting the point of view of human, animal or mechanical actors, the film addresses the way in which robotics and computer technology contribute to transform not only the work activities but also the interactions and practices of domestication.

Paper short abstract:

Ecologists use various techniques that extend perception and render discrete a continuous mix of life. They extrapolate from mini worlds to the world, and increasingly from the world to predicted worlds. Self-representation in counting protocols offers alternate metamorphic relations with the world.

Paper long abstract:

The particular aesthetic of ecological research is to find questions about the living world that can be answered numerically, by counting things. Ecological aesthetics revolve around questions of what to count, how to detect them, what their units are, and how to ensure the comparability of all the counting procedures—the latter for statistical transformations for numerical interpretation. To count, field ecologists use various techniques that extend their perception, and render discrete a continuous mix of life. The quadrat is an obvious example. Sophisticated FACE experiments create what are essentially enclosed in situ greenhouses within natural habitats in order to capture and count carbon cycling. Each such apparatus for counting forms a bud of the world that will be reconstituted and represented through statistics. As remote sensing proliferates, the entire surface of the planet, as detected by satellites with increasingly high pixel resolution, comes to serve as quadrat and enclosure. The purpose of statistics is no longer to generalize to the rest of the unsampled world but to generate alternate worlds—predictions, scenarios, simulations. What is missing is any sense that the counted things themselves have a say in counting. Crossing the ecological aesthetic with methods from anthropology and art offers new practices that engage the world in its own representation, and which anchor counting in an immanent metamorphic relation with the world rather than a control of all possible futures.