Käte Hamburger Kolleg: Cultures of Research

NATHALIA LAVIGNE

AFTER MEMORY: An introduction about the long-term project co-developed by KHK c:o/re Junior Fellow Nathalia Lavigne, followed by a brief report about the symposium which took place last October in Karlsruhe, gathering specialists from arts, science and technology discussing the temporal, spatial, and social dimensions of digital memory in current times.

What comes after memory? I came across this question in one of the first drafts of the project AFTER MEMORY, developed together with the researchers Lisa Deml and Víctor Fancelli, while writing the opening remarks for the symposium AFTER MEMORY: Recalling and Foretelling across Time, Space, and Networks. The event took place in October (between 23rd and the 26th) at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media and at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG), in Karlsruhe. During three and a half days, we had the chance to speculate about the temporal, spatial, and social dimensions of digital memory in an intense and vivid program – the first stage of this long-term project, which will continue in the following years with an exhibition and other formats.

Nathalia Lavigne

Nathalia Lavigne [she/her] works as an art researcher, writer and curator. Her research interests involve topics such as social documentation and circulation of images on social networks, cultural criticism, museum and media studies and art and technology.

This initial question still resonates, even if it’s hard to figure out any answer. Maybe it should be asked in a different way. It’s hard to imagine what is coming after memory since afterness is what has been lacking in recent times. Trapped, as we are, in an endless present, experiencing time perception obliterated by information overload, it is hard to find any sort of escape room that allows us to imagine what is about to come.

If modernism was marked by the ‘present future’ and many futuristic utopias, the end of the Cold War changed this perspective, when focus shifted to a ‘present past’ (Huyssen 2000). From autobiographies to the creation of different kinds of museums, from the emergence of new historiographical narratives to the reinvention of traditions, memory has become a trivial word, counted in the form of increasingly unlimited bytes. More recently, with the instantaneous mediation of reality and new archiving formats created by anyone, the goal of ‘total remembrance’, as Andreas Huyssen defined, has become unquestionable – although increasingly unattainable.

Different from other historical moments, we seem to be stuck in the present now. In a way, it shouldn’t be so bad: this is, after all, the only temporal condition that we can know. It’s in the present when memories are constantly updated; when we conceive in our imagination what is about to come. There are probably positive effects of changing the focus of the so-evoked future or past, as we did other times, and which have diverted our attention from what is happening now. But this is not what we can say based on our experience of being constantly “stuck on the platform”, to borrow the title of Geert Lovink’s recent book. If we have reached the end of “an era of possibilities and speculation”, as he affirms, what is the emergency exit for this reality in which platforms have closed any chance of collective imagination (p.42)?

If temporal fragmentation is far from a new thing, it is hard to deny that the internet complex (Crary, 2022) has made this feeling stronger. While our lives are displayed to us as thematic galleries assembled by automated digital systems whose rules we are unaware of, what happens in the present remains indecipherable and imperceptible. And especially under the circumstances imposed by the Covid-19, when the immersive experience of screens became the default perception, this effect was even stronger.

Needless to say that many of the ideas behind After Memory have their roots in what we lived during the pandemic, when most of us have experienced some episode of memory blur or digital amnesia. Although the impact of Covid-19 in our cognitive system is still unclear, recent studies reveal deficits in the performance of people a year or more after infection. Even the lockdown itself left marks, too, since spatial memory is essential in how we recollect events. And if time perception was especially obliterated during the pandemic, this feeling is inseparable from the well-known time-space compression, which was always related with capitalist expansion (Harvey 2012).But how different is this process nowadays, when the rise of generative AI, for instance, has created a new understanding about memory, making us confront a past that never really existed, as Andrew Hoskins has recently pointed out.

Unmapping Landscapes, Endless Instants and Speculative (off-line) Networks

From some of these ideas, we developed the structure of After Memory’s symposium in three sections, each investigating an essential aspect of the conception and actualisation of memory: space (Unmapping Landscapes), time (Endless Instants), and communication (Speculative Networks). Dedicated to one of these specific programs, each day started with a workshop, which took place in a post-war modernist pavilion with glass walls and surrounded by a garden. Blankets on the floor invited participants to sit in a circle, or eventually to lie down as they saw fit. In some cases, the activities were interspersed with moments of meditation – either guided by sound or followed by a breathing  technique such as Pranayama. In the end, we noticed how these morning sections played an important role in how the participants connected to each other, being more open to elaborate new ideas in a nonjudgmental atmosphere.

When we were first offered this venue for hosting the workshops, the fact that there was no internet available was initially a concern. A wifi connection could be required in some activities, especially considering that networks and the digital sphere were some of the umbrella terms of the program. But we decided to keep the Pavilion in spite of that. On a more individual note, I am tempted to think that this was actually a reason which helped people to build connections that would continue beyond that moment. After this experience, I was more convinced to agree with the bold statement of Johnathan Crary in the opening of Scorched Earth – Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World: “If there is to be a liveable and shared future on our planet it will be a future offline, uncoupled from the world-destroying systems and operations of 24/7 capitalism” (2022, p.1).

In recent decades, social media has interwoven itself into the art system. Although the potential of the visual art field for creating connections has been present before the rise of these platforms, their constant use has made it nearly impossible for artists, cultural institutions, or the audience to avoid them, even as the controversies around how these platforms operate became more evident. In a moment when we have been talking about the end of a fantasy that Web 2.0 would be a democratic environment, especially due the problematic ties between platforms and authoritarian populism, it is crucial to imagine alternative ways of connecting which do not depend exclusively on them.

During my fellowship at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg: Cultures of Research (c:o/re), I am interested in mapping how artists have been developing disruptive and speculative forms of networks from the mid-1990s to the present, but also, as a curator, in helping to implement projects that can contribute to generating new communications systems.

And if it is still not clear what comes after memory, or when, it seems important to experience these enquiries together, enabling memories to be updated more deeply through different understandings about time, space and, especially, communication.

Further reading and references:

Crary, Jonathan. 2022. Scorched earth: Beyond the digital age to a post-capitalist world. Verso Books: New York.

Harvey, David. 2012. “From space to place and back again: Reflections on the condition of postmodernity.” In: Mapping the futures, edited by John Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam and Lisa Tickner. Routledge: London, pp. 2-29.

Hoskins, Andrew. 2024. “AI and memory.” In: Memory, Mind & Media 3: e18.

Huyssen, Andreas. 2000. “En busca del tiempo futuro.” In: revista Puentes 1.2, pp. 12-29.

Lovink, Geert, et al. 2022. Extinction internet: our inconvenient truth moment. Institute of Network Cultures: Amsterdam.

MARCUS CARRIER

On October 9, 2024, KHK c:o/re director Prof. Dr. Stefan Böschen opened the new lecture series “Expanding Science and Technology Studies”. His talk titled “Towards Expanding STS?” was aimed at setting the scene for the lecture series and served as a starting point for further reflections on the topic. The talk was mostly designed around sketching out the problems that, as Prof. Böschen argues, classical Science and Technology Studies (STS) are not equipped to tackle alone. Instead, he argues for an expansion of STS towards other disciplines that investigate Science and Technology, namely History of Science and Philosophy of Science, to better grasp these problems.

Prof. Böschen started his talk with presenting his own personal starting points for thinking about this topic. First, there is the new concept of “Synthetica” or new forms of life that are designed by humans which also played a role in the opening talk by KHK c:o/re director Prof. Gramelsberger for the 2023/2024 lecture series “Lifelikeness”. Prof. Böschen now asked whether these Synthetica are epistemic objects or technical objects and if STS are equipped to describe the practice around them. Second, he talked about sustainable development goals. These are very knowledge intensive, but at the same time the knowledge management has to be done by different countries which also have to take into account different forms of knowledge and have to manage a lot of diversity in the system. Third, Prof. Böschen reflected on different formats he experienced that made him think further on expanding STS: The Temporary University Hambach that was designed around the structural change in the Rhinish Revier and based on the needs of local people, and the STS Hub 2023 in Aachen which was designed to bring together different disciplines doing “science on science.”

After having set the scene with these personal starting points, Prof. Böschen claimed that there are signs for science changing significantly. First, he concentrated on the cluster of topics around digitization and especially the digitization of problem-solving in science. This cluster includes topics like digital models both for scenario building and for reducing the space of options where real-world problems must be transformed to be computable by which models shape the way of thinking in science. But also, the digitization of scientific literature to grasp the ever-growing amount as well as the digitization of experiments which can pose challenges for expectations of reproducibility are part of this cluster.

In the tension of simplification for the sake of problem-solving and complexifying to better understand specific contexts, Prof. Böschen argued that digital tools are steered towards simplification. This, in turn, creates new and specific concerns about the epistemic quality of knowledge produced by these tools and about the way they transform research in practice.

The second cluster of topics that Prof. Böschen argued are a sign of significant change in science is the de-centralization of knowledge production exemplified in projects like living labs which were also part of recent talk by Dr. Darren Sharp at the KHK c:o/re. Programs like living labs, where science encourages society to participate in the making of solutions for local issues, can have two forms. On the one hand side, they can in collaborative ways explore the status quo and define what should be understood as the “problem” before bringing together local experiences and knowledge as well as scientific knowledge to solve it. On the other hand, living labs can start out with a technological innovation and can then locally look for applications and use-cases for this innovation. The technology can then be optimized towards local needs.

In both forms of living labs, the important new criterion for knowledge is relevance which entails the question for whom it should be relevant and who defines that. Also, these local solutions and optimizations face problems of scaling. How can they be scaled up and are the “problems” on all scaling level still the same? Lastly, how does it impact knowledge production on a deeper level?

Both, the digitization of science and the de-centralization of knowledge production show that science is in the midst of a transformation according to Prof. Böschen. There is a need for a relational analysis of epistemic quality and epistemic authority. He shares his intuition to preserve the ideal of reliable scientific knowledge and that knowledge production for decision making processes has an epistemic as well as an institutional side. This, Prof. Böschen argues, can not be done by any discipline alone but needs collaboration between the sociologically and ethnographically centered STS and more philosophically and historically oriented research on science. Expanded STS as Prof. Böschen envisions it should tailor new concepts for analyzing research during transformation.

With this call to action, Prof. Böschen leaves not with a set program but with a description of problems that call for future interdisciplinary discussions.

On October 30, 2024, the next talk of the Lecture Series titled “An IAEA for AI? The Regulation of Artificial Intelligence and Governance Models from the Nuclear Age” will be by our fellow Elisabeth Röhrlich. We look forward to continuing the conversation!

The Käte Hamburger Kolleg on Cultures of Research hosted a philosophical Workshop on May 16^th and 17^th May. It was organized by Markus Pantsar and Gabriele Gramelsberger for good reasons: Gabriele Gramelsberger received as the first German philosopher the K. Jon Barwise Prize, while Markus Pantsar’s book “From Numerical Cognition to the Epistemology of Arithmetic” had been recently published by Cambridge University Press as the first book publication by a fellow at the KHK Aachen.

Photo credits: Phillip Roth

Photo credits: Heike Lachmann

Markus Pantsar: “From Numerical Cognition to the Epistemology of Arithmetic”

The workshop kicked off with a presentation by Markus Pantsar (RWTH Aachen University) on how his book came to be. The leading question is: how can we use empirical knowledge about numerical cognition to gain a better understanding of arithmetical knowledge? His goal is to combine philosophy of mathematics with the cognitive sciences to gain a deeper understanding of how we develop and acquire number concepts and their arithmetic. It’s fascinating how these concepts develop differently across cultures, even though they are based on universal proto-arithmetical numerical abilities. Indeed, even animals have proto-arithmetical abilities, evidenced by their ability to differentiate on collections based on numerosities. This leads to an intriguing question: how do we come to develop and acquire number concepts? From an anthropological perspective, numbers are a fundamental aspect of human life in many cultures, yet there are also cultures without numbers. Hence, aside from the evolutionarily developed proto-arithmetical abilities, we also need to focus on the cultural foundations of arithmetic. All this, Pantsar argued, is relevant for the epistemology of arithmetic.

Dirk Schlimm: “Where do mathematical symbols come from?”

Dirk Schlimm from McGill University in Montreal was the next to present. He talked about his recent research project on mathematical notations. Grounding on the question of what notations are (according to Peirce), Schlimm introduced his newest findings that mathematical notations are sometimes arbitrary, but this is not the case generally. Mathematical symbols may resemble or draw from shapes in the real world, or have other characteristics that connect to our cognitive capacities. The issue is, however, very complex. Mathematical symbols, in particular, carry many purposes and their use needs to be studied with this in mind. In addition to purely scientific purposes, we should consider how academic practices and political dimensions influence the acceptance and use of notations.

Richard Menary: “The multiple routes of enculturation”

Richard Menary (Macquarie University, Sydney) then gave us insights into his research on enculturation, arguing that there are multiple cultural pathways to developing and acquiring number concepts and arithmetic. Menary calls this the multiple routes model of enculturation. He discussed aspects of Pantsar’s book, especially the developmental path from proto-arithmetical cognition to arithmetical cognition. Menary showed a variety of factors in how this transition can take place, like finger counting, writing and forming numbers on paper. Enculturation through cultural practices has a significant influence on the development of arithmetical abilities, but we should not be fooled into thinking that such enculturation is a uniform phenomenon that always follows similar paths.

Regina Fabry: “Enculturation gone bad: The Case of math anxiety”

Regina Fabry (Macquarie University) showed in her presentation on math anxiety how the relationship between cognition and affectivity needs to be included in accounts of arithmetical knowledge. While accounts of enculturation, like those of Menary and Pantsar, focus on the successful side of things, it is important to acknowledge that processes of enculturation can also go bad. Socio-cultural factors associated with mathematics education can lead to anxiety, which hinders the learning process with long-standing consequences. Empirical studies can contribute to a better understanding of where epistemic injustice may be present, and where there is a strong link to math anxiety. Accounts of arithmetical knowledge drawing from enculturation should be sensitive to such problems, but we can also use research on math anxiety to understand better the role of affectivity in enculturation in general.

Catarina Dutilh Novaes: “Dialogical pragmatism and the justification of deduction”

On Friday, Catarina Dutilh Novaes from Vrije University of Amsterdam discussed her ongoing investigation on the dialogical roots of deduction and posed the question what, if anything, can justify deductive reasoning. While her book The Dialogical Roots of Deduction offers an analysis of deduction as it is present in cultural practices, the question of its justification is left open. In her talk, she discussed whether pragmatist approaches could fill the gap to ground deduction. She argued that the justification for deduction comes from nothing beyond the pragmatics of the dialogical development of deduction.  She supported this claim by a discussion on pragmatist theories of truth and recent discussion on anti-exceptionalism in logic.

Frederik Stjernfelt: “Peirce’s Philosophy of Notations and the Trade-offs in Comparing Numeral Symbol Systems”

The former KHK Fellow Frederik Stjernfelt (Aalborg University Copenhagen) talked about his recent studies on Charles S. Peirce’s work on notations, co-conducted with Pantsar. Although better known for his work on logical notation, Peirce was deeply interested also in mathematical notation, including numeral symbol systems. He was eager to find a fitting notation for numbers which is easy to learn and allows easy calculations. Peirce focused in particular on the binary and heximal systems, the latter of which he considered superior to our decimal system. Stjernfelt presented Peirce-inspired criteria for different aims of numeral symbol systems, like iconicity, simplicity, and ease of calculation, arguing that the choice of a symbol system comes with trade-offs between them.

Stefan Buijsman: “Getting to numerical content from proto-arithmetic”

Stefan Buijsman (TU Delft) discussed Pantsar’s account of how humans arrive from proto-arithmetical abilities to proper arithmetical abilities. Studies of young children suggest that the core cognitive object-tracking system (OTS) and approximate number system (ANS) can both play a role in this process, but a key stage is acquiring the successor principle (that for every number n, also n + 1 is a number). Buijsman emphasized the role of acquiring the number concept one and its importance in grasping the successor principle, noting that Pantsar’s account could benefit from more focus on the special character of acquiring the first number concept.

Alexandre Hocquet: “Reproducibility, Photoshop, Pubpeer, and Collective Disciplining”

With Alexandre Hocquet’s (Université de Lorraine/ Laboratory Archives Henri-Poincaré) talk, the workshop moved from the philosophy of arithmetic to digital and computational approaches to philosophy of science. Hocquet discussed Photoshopping scientific digital images and using them for fraud in academic research, focusing on the Voinnet affair. On this basis, he discussed the topics of trust, reproducibility and change of scientific methods. With the use of digital images as evidence, new considerations of transparency are needed to ensure trust in scientific practice.

Gabriele Gramelsberger and Andreas Kaminski: “From Calculation to Computation. Philosophy of Computational Sciences in the Making”

In the final talk of the workshop, Gabriele Gramelsberger (RWTH Aachen University) and Andreas Kaminski (TU Darmstadt) focused on the computational turn in science. While mathematics has been an indispensable part of science for centuries, the increasing use of computer simulations has replaced arithmetical calculations by Boolean computations. Gramelsberger discussed the cognitive limitations of interpreting non-linear computing systems. Kaminski then considered questions of epistemic, pragmatic, and ethical opacity that arise from these limitations.