Lecture Series Winter 2024/25: Expanding Science and Technology Studies
We are happy to announce that the lecture series of the winter term 2024/25 will revolve around the topic of Expanding Science and Technology Studies.
Over the decades, Science and Technology Studies (STS) have developed many different approaches for investigating the relationship between science and society and to dig deep into the cultures of research, the ways science is conducted. E.g., scholars have investigated the local cultures and politics underlying processes of knowledge production, the biases and gender divisions informing the organization of academic institutions, or the reception of future technological visions in different publics. There is a rich knowledge. However, it seems that science studies are not well prepared for the transformation challenge. Against this background, the purpose of this lecture series is to understand first the transformation challenge and its consequences for science studies and second to explore different pathways of future science studies.
Various speakers, including the sociologist David Kaldewey (University of Bonn) and the philosopher Sabina Leonelli (Technical University of Munich), will be guests at the KHK c:o/re and shed light on “Expanding Science and Technology Studies” from different disciplinary perspectives.
Please find an overview of the dates and speakers in the program.
The lectures will take place from October 9, 2024 to January 22, 2025 every second Wednesday from 5 to 6.30 pm in presence and online.
If you would like to attend, please write a short email to events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.
Theodore von Kármán Fellowship to Darren Sharp
In September, we will welcome Darren Sharp from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, as RWTH Theodore von Kármán Fellow at the KHK c:o/re.
The application for the fellowship was jointly supported by Professor Christine Reicher (Chair of Urban Design and Institute for Urban Design and European Urbanism), Professor Reinhard Madlener (Institute of Future Energy Consumer Needs and Behavior) and KHK c:o/re Director Professor Stefan Böschen. The fellowship contributes to the international profiling and interdisciplinary exchange in the field of sustainability transitions research.
During his stay, Darren Sharp will work on his project “Net Zero Precincts: an interdisciplinary approach to decarbonising cities”, a four-year ARC Linkage project to develop and test a new interdisciplinary approach to help cities reach net zero. The research takes inspiration from the Net Zero Initiative through which Monash University has committed to achieving net zero emissions across its four Australian campuses by 2030. Net Zero Precincts brings together transition management with design anthropology to support the transition to net zero cities in a way that is responsive to the needs of people, politics and place.
In a public university lecture at the KHK c:o/re on September 11, 2024, from 5 to 6.30 pm, Darren Sharp will discuss the interdisciplinary approach being developed through an overview of the envisioning process that took place via a workshop series with participants from the Monash Precinct community. You are cordially invited to come along.
RWTH Kármán-Fellowships are funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the German State of North Rhine Westphalia (MKW) under the Excellence Strategy of the Federal Government and the Länder.
Reports from the field: a very partial view of EASST4S2024 Amsterdam
BART PENDERS
Social studies of science, or science and technology by any other name, may sometimes feel like a small field in which one knows, or knows of, the relevant players on a global level. Attending the combined conference of both the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) and the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) then becomes a humbling experience. With over 4100 attendees over the course of the conference, this year’s edition in Amsterdam may have been the biggest ever. The scale of these events is always impressive and without exception displays the holes in one’s overview of the community.
Bart Penders
Bart Penders investigates moral, social and technical plurality in research integrity, scientific reform and forms of collaboration across a variety of scientific specializations. He currently holds a position as Associate Professor in ‘Biomedicine and Society’ at Maastricht University.
On the upside, that means that there are new worlds in STS to uncover and engage with, without a real upper limit. The absence of these upper limits is overwhelming and daunting though. Consider, for instance, that EASST4S2024 had 10 timeslots for parallel sessions in which each timeslot offers a choice between 50 and 60 parallel sessions. That gives every attendee over 97 quadrillion potential sets of panels to go to and has given rise to the custom of not asking fellow attendees How is the conference so far? but instead How is your conference so far?
Thematically and conceptually, STS is difficult to pin down. EASST4S2024 saw whole collections of sessions on AI and society, participatory approaches to science policy and practice, critical engagement with open science and various panels on psychedelics, music and sound, and so much more. But it never is just talk – experiments with different forms of conferencing have, over the years, created alternative panel forms that included this year, ranging from cooking workshops, to a whole selection of movies.
The diversity of a conference this scale cannot be summarized. Every attempt is destined to fail. However, there are elements that are worth mentioning to me – as the core of my route through the conference and a few that are more plenary, more shared, more collective – snippets of a joint experience.
Let’s start with the shared experience – that of judicious connections between scholars with shared interests; the joy of meeting people you haven’t met in a while but with whom you share academic pasts and those whom you never met but with whom you may share academic futures. Next to the many plural elements of the conference, there is a number of plenary events for all to share. The scale of the conference did make some of that sharing materially difficult: the largest room at the Free University Amsterdam, which hosted the conference, could only seat roughly a quarter of all attendees. Plenaries were streamed to a number of the conference rooms, where plenary sessions became large-screen televised events.
One of the key questions of the first plenary was How does STS translate into policy? One of the speakers was Dr. Alondra Nelson who had served as scientific advisor in the Biden administration and conveyed a twofold message: first, there is a lot STS has to offer policy. The contested themes of our day are where STS excels and we need not be overly afraid of some instrumentalization of science in policy. Second, in contrast though – policy advice does not always leave time for empirical or conceptual labor to underpin it. What we need, Nelson argued, was a certain Science and Technology Intuition, a reservoir of generic tacit skill and knowledge we can tap from. Uncomfortable, imprecise, but powerful. Brice Laurent expanded on this argument by highlighting that we need to transcend a dualist frame in which science is separate from (the issues of) daily life. Our daily lives are penetrated by science to such an extent that we cannot, and should not separate them and any culture war that seeks to achieve this inevitably will come undone.
Massive conferences also come with honors: people who are remembered for their achievements (a plenary dedicated to the work of Adele Clarke) and those who are awarded for their achievements. The list of prizes both societies grant together is very long, but one worth point out in the duo that received the 2024 Bernal Prize: Dutch anthropologist Annemarie Mol and US critical informatics scholar Geoffrey Bowker.
The infrastructure of conferences this scale turns it, in many ways, into an academic festival with the ability to taste and enjoy the various fruits the community has on offer. This analogy was not lost on the conference organizers, who chose to not host a traditional conference dinner but rather organize a genuine “Forest Festival” in the Amsterdamse Bos. Next to the various flavors a global academic community has on offer, we were treated to quite literal global flavors under a pleasant sun.
On a more individual note, I managed to attend a plethora of sessions diving into the credibility of scientific collaboration, the role of replication in science and what perspectives STS has to offer, how reforms in science happen under conditions of uncertainty and how science corrects itself – or not. I organized some of them, spoke in some of them, and engaged with speakers in others. I asked and was asked regularly Have you written about that? and more often than not, the answer was no. In isolation, that no may be disappointing, but on a more structural level it displays the many unexplored and underexplored paths and potential futures STS conferences offer. As every STS mega-conference does, it has left me exhausted but intellectually revigorated. To be overwhelmed is not always a bad thing, but it sure is impressive every time.
Photos by Ana María Guzmán Olmos
Get to know our Fellows: Federica Russo
Get to know our current fellows and gain an impression of their research.
In a new series of short videos, we asked them to introduce themselves, talk about their work at c:o/re, the impact of their research on society and give book recommendations.
In the latest edition of our video series, Federica Russo, Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Technosciences, talks about her research on the key questions of evidence and how the humanities and philosophy can affect socio-political questions and policy making, even if they seem abstract and theoretical:
Check out our media section or our YouTube channel to have a look at the other videos.
New Publication in Nature Computational Science: “Software is Ubiquitous Yet Overlooked”
A group of fourteen scientists, most of whom work or have worked at the KHK c:o/re, have published an article entitled “Software is ubiquitous yet overlooked” in Nature Computational Science about the lack of attention paid to software.
Software is ubiquitous in science, and yet it is overlooked everywhere. At a time when the scientific world (and beyond) is talking about code, algorithms or artificial intelligence, software appears in the discourse as just another semantic quibble. But many facets of software, such as questions about user licenses or file formats, are not part of the definition of code or algorithm.
Interdisciplinarity as the key to understanding
In their paper, the authors argue for bringing together perspectives on software from different academic (e.g. computational sciences, humanities and social sciences) and professional (e.g. development, use, maintenance, etc.) fields to uncover the tensions between the different meanings of software. Case studies in different scientific fields, including older software developments, will help to improve the understanding of software.
A simple example: Excel autocorrection
An example from bioinformatics: In the supplementary materials of bioinformatics publications, the preferred format for long gene lists surprisingly is the Microsoft .xls format. However, Excel automatically converts the designation MARCH1 for the gene “Membrane Associated Ring-CH-type finger 1” into a date. This distorts the listed data. A publication from 2021 reminds us that the problem was recognized (and published) as early as 2004, but never disappeared. A fifth of publications dealing with gene lists contain these errors.
Researchers could use tabulated plain text (.csv files), but they don’t because they are used to spreadsheets. However, these are not designed for this type of processing of large amounts of data. Another reason is that many scientific practices employ the widespread use of the Microsoft software suite. It took twenty years for the researchers to finally rename the genes in question. Only recently has Microsoft Excel, a thirty-year-old software package, been able to de-automate the conversion of a character string into a date.
Research on practices and transformations in science and technology
The authors of the article look at the topic of software in scientific research from the perspectives of computational science, history, philosophy of science, semiotics, science and technology studies (STS) and media studies. They work at various universities around the world. Most of them were fellows at the KHK c:o/re, where the idea for the joint publication was born during the workshop “Engineering Practices Workshop: New Horizons in the Social Study of Science and Software“.
Towards Technological Solutions to Climate Action from Varieties of Science: Insights from the Narrative of floods in Kenya and Germany
FREDRICK OGENGA
INTRODUCTION
Nairobi has been experiencing extreme weather patterns in line with warnings from the weatherman in the past few months. This trend, which is seemingly an annual trend, begun sometime last year with devastating droughts that affected the entire country with arid and semi-arid parts of the country worst hit. The latter created food shortages and insecurity of biblical proportions in general, to the extent that politicians, led be the President, William Ruto (a champion of climate action), were calling for intercession through national prayers. The droughts led to death of vulnerable women and children and contributed to the loss of livestock and crops, negatively affecting Kenya’s economy through consequent high food prices. Then fast forward to this year (2024) another extreme pattern was witnessed this time characterized by heavy and long rainfalls that contributed to floods and mudslides that killed people in cities and villages[1]. It may have appeared like a Kenyan problem, but the problem was witnessed in other parts of the world in places like Dubai and most recently, Germany.
Of course, [2]these things often appear sensationally on media platforms and for the first time, similar media scenes of animals and property being swept away by floods in Kenya, Germany and Dubai were witnessed both in developed and developing economies. Is climate not the great equalizer? Does this then beg the question of what humanity can borrow from this, seemingly, similar patterns of events at least as represented through news media outlets? What kind of agency do this narrative incite and what does it tell us about our culture of doing things and our own ingenuity? Are there possibilities of positive synergy across cultures, geographical spaces and tech/media platforms to find solutions for the future of humanity in a world ravaged by climate induced disasters?
Fredrick Ogenga
Fredrick Ogenga is an Associate Professor of Media and Security Studies at Rongo University and the Founding Director, Center for Media, Democracy, Peace & Security. He also serves as the CEO, The Peacemaker Corps Foundation Kenya. Ogenga is a Letsema Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation and Senior Non-resident Research Fellow, Institute for Global African Affairs, at the University of Johannesburg and the West Indies respectively. He is also an Associate Researcher Africa Studies Center, University of Basel, and Senior Research Associate, Swisspeace. Ogenga is a member of International Panel on the Information Environment’s (IPIE) Scientific Panel on Information Integrity on Climate Science and Chair of IPIE’s AI and Peacebuilding Scientific Panel. He is also a former Sothern Voices Network for Peacebuilding Scholar at the Wilson Center, Washington D.C and Africa Peacebuilding Network fellow. Ogenga is a Co-founder of the Varieties of Science Network (VOSN) and will be Senior Fellow at the KHK c:o/re RWTH Aachen University in 2025.
VARIETIES OF SCIENCE NETWORK
These are the tough questions we are now facing and to address them, a new view on the different forms of how problem-oriented research is performed seems to be decisive. Therefore, the idea towards a Varieties of Science Network at (VOSN) was born in Basel, Switzerland by Prof. Stefan Böschen, the Director the Käte Hamburger Kolleg Cultures of Research, RWTH Aachen University, Germany, and Prof. Fredrick Ogenga, The Director of the Center for Media, Democracy, Peace and Security, Rongo University, and The CEO of the Peacemaker Corps Foundation Kenya that seeks to examine the challenges faced globally, from environmental, political, economic, social to cultural challenges. Subsequently, the most prominent ones being climate change, financial inequalities, political and social upheavals, and pandemics. In this context, humanity continues to display a great level of ingenuity and resilience and have innovated ways of coping and adapting for self-preservation but not without challenges. Nevertheless, what has been lacking is a higher level of cooperation across cultures and geographical spaces to take advantage of the potential benefits of crosspollinating local knowledge and expertise both at the local and global level as demonstrated by the recent floods witnessed from Nairobi to Dubai and the West of Germany, Aachen.
The latter is a reminder to humanity that we are confronted with similar challenges in a seemingly technologically connected world that appear to challenge the common assumption, evidenced in political conversations globally, that have often defined the boundaries between the global North and South in epistemic frameworks where the latter have often plaid catch up. Central to this conversation has been the idea of coloniality, and within that, decoloniality and the emergence of global communication technologies which have been designed and exploited to maintain and sustain unequal power modalities[3].
The latter positionality has sustained a global image of Africa on global media platforms as a continent ravaged by disease and disaster (floods, droughts and pandemics) as seen in recent floods in Kenya inspired by coloniality of technology and knowledge, and within that, the centrality of decoloniality vis-à-vis the emergence of global communication systems. Technological systems that have fallen short of sustaining a colonial discourse amidst changing global environment due to climate change must be resisted at all costs. And so, climate change has disrupted the ideological lenses of Western journalistic frames when it comes to the positive image of the West juxtaposed against that of Africa.
Consequently, news of floods are given equal treatment in Germany as they would otherwise not in comparison to news in ecologies in the global South such as Kenya – The usual sensational narrative of disaster demonstrated by cows and other valuables being swept by ravaging floods is a tired African narrative and it is therefore a paradox to confront such images in emerging narratives of floods in Germany – Is this then not a warning sign and a compelling reason for humanity to forge a united front? (the we are in this together or Harambee (togetherness) spirit of pan-African philosophical epistemic underpinning?)
From this background, the Varieties of Science Network (VOSN) seeks to tap from ‘glocal’ knowledge reservoir (local epistemic framework) in a bid to bring the epistemic gaps in knowledge production and dissemination in climate science and other socio-economic, political and cultural challenges using research and technology to seek a more coordinated approach to finding solutions to common scientific questions and challenges facing mankind today. The network is inspired by what is regarded as one of the central topics of the KHK RWTH Aachen, namely: Varieties of Science. Doing so, this initiative seeks to uncover the diverse cultural-institutional conditions of epistemic freedom and intellectual democracy across geographical and cultural spaces and multiple disciplines.
The idea is to unravel the productive parts of the global North -South conversations to overcome colonial burdens etc. Due to the emerging common threats, for example, brought about by climate change as argued, these traditional global North South conversations, that have often centered on coloniality of power dynamics as witnessed in news representation of disasters, is certainly not going to be the same in future and are becoming more and more unsustainable. Climate change will create, and is beginning to shape, a new world living space for mankind and therefore, we need to find ways to cooperate with each other. So, it’s about knowing and creating a new collective order, a new human rights agenda and creating an economic order that is fair enough for all people. VOSN intends to bring together people and topics that would like to contribute to this network to that end.
It is driven by better engagement between people and the different conditions between ecologies for better understanding in different worlds to form collaboration to, for example, balance in terms of Co2 and energy transitions globally. It also seeks to find better ways of understanding and guard-railing energy transitions and other forms of transitions, be it political, economic, and socio-cultural in different ecologies by examining problem centered cases such as climate change and many other topics and issues in different fields and countries that would animate varieties of science for members to learn from each other. It would seek to understand how to synergize technologically driven emergency responses to natural disasters such as drought, famine, floods and pandemics as recently witnessed in different geographical spaces across cultures. For example, in the question of climate, which is the inaugural theme for VOSN, what are the agencies and emerging different ways of knowing or gnosis and responding? What are the epistemic questions across cultures? and which kind of knowledge is seen as important and prioritized?
APPROACH
The agenda will begin with the more prominent environmental challenge brought about by climate change as both the entry point to the VOSN network and as a point of departure in establishing how a more united approach to difficult scientific questions that act as threat to the self-preservation of mankind (Ubuntu/ humanity) can be approached and co-designed in a manner that respects local cultures (Cultures of Research) with several cross-cutting public problems or themes.
CLIMATE MITIGATION AND ADAPTATION
As a flagship thematic focus, VOSN will focus on the intersection between technology, climate, and peacebuilding across cultures as an entry point to our global collaboration and research agenda which is in line with Käte Hamburger Kolleg Cultures of Research focal area of climate change. This will entail a technical, systematic and meta-analysis of the use of technology in climate mitigation across different ecologies and local Action Research in different ecologies in the global North and South involving local communities to inspire practical interventions by examining how they are adapting to climate change challenges and opportunities, and the kind of resources at their disposal (technological or otherwise)[4]. This evidence would be able to reveal human ingenuity and how tech innovations could be a game-changer in climate adaptation, conflict resilience and peacebuilding for the self-preservation of humanity going forward.
The varieties of science research agenda will also look at how the devastating effects of climate change are inciting new policy interventions that are in turn attracting mitigation efforts (the political economy of interventions) from different actors (local and international, public, and private), particularly carbon credit programs, that are not gender and conflict sensitive[5]. Consequently, how these mitigating efforts are implying on local communities in terms of livelihood, how they are exacerbating conflict pressure points and therein the role of digital technologies/tools in empowering communities into action for climate mitigation and adaptation through alternative livelihoods such as tree planting (greening), for conflict resilience and peacebuilding. The evidence will therefore be used to contribute to the defense of climate science information as opposed to climate misinformation and disinformation on social media spaces and help influence policy change around climate financing and community sensitive carbon credit investments in different ecologies such as Kenya and Germany going forward.
[1] Naidoo, D. and Gulati, M. 2022. Understanding Africa’s Climate and Human Security Risks. Policy Brief 170. October 2022. Institute for Security Studies; Tesfaye, B. 2022. Addressing Climate Security in Fragile Contexts. Center for Strategic and International Studies, https://www.csis.org/analysis/addressing-climate-security-fragile-contexts.
[2] Morley, D. 2007. Media, Modernity and Technology- The Geography of the New. London: New York: Routledge.
[3] Freenberg, A. Democratic Rationalization: Technology, Power and Freedom. In Rober, C. and Dusek, V. (eds.) 2014. Philosophy of Technology –The Technological condition on Anthology 2nd Edition. Malden, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell; Godin, B., Gaglio, G. and Vinck, D. 2021. Handbook on Alternative Theories of Innovation. Cheltenham: Edward Elger Publishing.
[4] Yayboke, E., Nzuki, C. and Strouboulis, A. 2022. Going Green while Building Peace: Technology, Climate and Peacebuilding. Center for International and Strategic Studies. https://www.csis.org/analysis/going-green-while-building-peace-technology-climate-and-peacebuilding.
[5] Greenfield, P. 2023. The New Scramble for Africa: How a UAE Sheikh Quietly Made Carbon Deals for Forests Bigger than UK. The Guardian Thursday 10th November 2013.
On the promises of AI and listening data for music research
NIKITA BRAGUINSKI
As a c:o/re fellow, I had the uniquely advantageous opportunity to develop and test, in an environment dedicated to the study of science, my ideas about how AI and data can influence music research. Members of the Kolleg and its fellows, many of whom are philosophers of science, offered a very rich intellectual circle that inspired me to look at the datafication and technologization of future music research from many new angles. With its intensive and diverse program of talks, lectures, and conferences, the Kolleg also offered ideal opportunities for testing approaches in front of an attentive, thoughtful, critical and friendly audience. Below, I present brief overviews of the main ideas that I discussed during three talks I gave at the Kolleg.
Nikita Braguinski
Nikita Braguinski studies the implications of technology for musicology and music. In his current work, he aims to discuss challenges posed to human musical theory by recent advances in machine learning.
My first presentation, entitled “The Shifting Boundaries of Music-Related Research: Listening Logs, Non-Human-Readable Data, and AI”, took place on January 16, 2024 during an internal meeting of Kolleg fellows and members. I focused on the promises and problems of using data about music streaming behavior for musical research. Starting from the discussion of how changing technologies of sound reproduction enabled differing degrees of observing listener behavior, I discussed the current split between academic and industrial music research, the availability of data, the problems of current industry-provided metrics such as “danceability”, and the special opportunities offered by existing and future multimodal machine learning (like the systems that use the same internal encoding for both music and text). I also offered examples of descriptive statistics and visualizations made possible by the availability of data on listener behavior. These visualizations of large listening datasets, which I was able to create thanks to my access to the RWTH high performance computing cluster, included, among others, an illustration of how users of online streaming services tend to listen to new recordings on the day of their release, and an analysis of the likeliness of different age groups to listen to popular music from different decades (with users from the age group 60-69 having almost the opposite musical preferences of the age group 10-19).
(Own diagram. Vertical axis: number of plays. Dataset: LFM-2b, German audience)
Discussing my talk, c:o/re colleagues drew parallels to other academic disciplines such as digital sociology and research on pharmaceutical companies. The topic of addictiveness of online media that I touched upon was discussed in comparison to data-gathering practices in gambling, including the ethics of using such data for research. The political significance of music listening and its connection to emotions was also discussed in relation to the danger of biases in music recommender systems.
My second presentation, entitled “Imitations of Human Musical Creativity: Process or Product?”, took place during the conference “Politics of the Machines 2024. Lifelikeness and Beyond”, which c:o/re hosted. I focused on the question of what AI-based imitations of music actually model – the final product (such as the notation or the audio recording) or the processes that lead to the creation of this product.
In this presentation, I discussed:
1) The distinction between process and product of artistic creation, which, while especially important for discussions on the output of generative AI, currently receives little scholarly attention;
2) How several theories in the humanities (notably, formalism, psychoanalytic literary theory, and the line of AI skepticism connected to the so-called Chinese room argument) stress the importance of the process in artistic creation and cognition;
3) That current endeavors in generative AI, though impressive from the point of view of the product, do not attempt to imitate the processes of creation, dissemination, and reception of art, literature, or music, nor do they imitate historical, cultural, or economic environments in which these processes take place;
4) Finally, because the data on which generative AI systems operate carries traces of past processes, the product of these systems remains connected to the processes, even if no conscious effort is made by the creators of these systems to imitate the processes themselves.
A conference participant commented that for commercial companies avoiding the imitation of all these processes is a deliberate strategy because their imitation has to be cheaper than the original process-based artifact.
My third presentation at the Kolleg, “Life-Like Artificial Music: Understanding the Impact of AI on Musical Thinking”, took place on June 5, 2024 as a lecture in the c:o/re Lifelikeness lecture series. Here, I addressed the likeliness (or unlikeliness) of major shifts in the musicological terminology to result from the academic use of AI . Starting with an overview of various competing paradigms of musical research, I drew attention to possible upcoming problems of justifying the validity of currently existing musicological terminology. The salient point here is that AI systems based on machine learning are capable of imitating historical musical styles without recourse to explicitly stated rules of musical theory, while humans need the rules to learn to imitate those styles. Moreover, the ability of machine learning systems to learn internal structures of music directly from audio (skipping the notation stage on which most of human music theory operates) has the potential to question the validity and usefulness of musical theory, as currently taught.
Having stated these potential problems, I turned to a current example, a research paper [1] in which notions of Western music theory were compared to the internal representations learned by an AI system from music examples. Using this paper as a starting point for my argument, I asked whether it could be possible in principle to also use such an approach to come up with new, maybe better, musicological terminology. I pointed to the problems of interpreting the structures learned by machine learning systems and of the likely incompatibility of such structures (even if successfully decoded) with the human cognitive apparatus. To illustrate this, I referred to the use, by beginner players of the game of Go, of moves made by AI systems. Casual players are normally discouraged from copying the moves of professional human players because they cannot fully understand these moves’ underlying logic and thus cannot effectively integrate them into their strategy.
In the following discussion, one participant drew attention to the fact that new technologies often lead to a change in what is seen as a valid research contribution, devaluing older types of research outcomes and creating new ones. Another participant argued that a constant process of terminological change takes place in disciplines at all times and independently of a possible influence of a new technology, such as machine learning.
Overall, my c:o/re fellowship offered, and continues to offer, an ideal opportunity to develop and discuss new ideas for my inquiry into the future uses and problems of AI and data in music research, which have resulted, in addition to the three presentations mentioned above, in talks given at the University of Bonn, Maastricht University, and at a music and AI conference at the University of Hong Kong.
[1] N. Cosme-Clifford, J. Symons, K. Kapoor and C. W. White, “Musicological Interpretability in Generative Transformers,” 4th International Symposium on the Internet of Sounds, Pisa, Italy, 2023
Theodore von Kármán Fellowship to Professor Chun-Shik Kim
We are delighted to welcome another RWTH Kármán-Fellow at the KHK c:o/re: Chun-Shik Kim, Professor at the Department of Energy Management and Director of the Institute for Energy Convergence Technology at Dongshin University in Naju (South Korea).
The application for this fellowship was jointly supported by Professor Thomas Gries (Chair of Textile Engineering), Professor Roger Häußling (Chair of Sociology of Technolgy and Organization) and KHK c:o/re Director Professor Stefan Böschen. The fellowship thus strengthens interdisciplinary cooperation in the field of engineering, sociology and artificial intelligence (AI).
The fellowship enables Chun-Shik Kim a short-term stay at the KHK c:o/re at RWTH Aachen University to work on his project “Applications and challenges of artificial intelligence technology in school and training: A comparative study between South Korea and Germany”. The different approaches and attitudes of the two countries offer a unique opportunity to examine in detail the various challenges and approaches to implementing AI in educational institutions. Chun-Shik Kim’s research aims not only to analyze existing differences and challenges, but also to develop solutions to optimize the use of AI worldwide to increase educational attainment and learning success.
To present the outcomes of his fellowship, Chun-Shik Kim will give a public university lecture on July 9, 2024, 5-6.30 pm, at KHK c:o/re, Theaterstr. 75. The lecture will be held in German.
RWTH Kármán-Fellowships are funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the German State of North Rhine Westphalia (MKW) under the Excellence Strategy of the Federal Government and the Länder.
Installations and Art at LOGOI and PACT – PoM Recap #4
It has been more than month since c:o/re hosted the PoM conference “Lifelikeness & beyond”. As this sizeable and, while still new, already renown conference produced many lively discussions in a creative interrogation of the dialog between life sciences and technology studies, we want to share our retrospective reflections on it through a series of focused posts.
Alongside the PoM main program of keynotes, talks, lectures and workshops, the conference was accompanied by art and installations displayed at the LOGOI Institute for Philosophy and Discourse in Aachen. Also part of the conference, the choreographic centre PACT Zollverein in Essen provided the program ‘life.like’, which consisted of six artistic positions in the form of performance, installation, discourse and sound.
These contributions showed in various ways how philosophical, technical and bioscientific topics can be artistically thought and implemented. They enabled critical dialog and reflection on artistic methods and results between artists, scientists from different disciplines and the public.
If you would like to learn more about any of the contributions, take a look at the PoM program and life.like.
LOGOI
‘life.like’ at PACT Zollverein
Unless otherwise indicated, photos by Jana Hambitzer
Algorithms of Late-Capitalism: The Board Game – PoM Recap #3
It has been more than a month since the KHK c:o/re hosted the PoM conference “Lifelikeness & beyond”. As this sizeable and, while still new, already renown conference produced many lively discussions in a creative interrogation of the dialog between life sciences and technology studies, we want to share our retrospective reflections on it through a series of focused posts. In two interviews, the artists shared with us insights into their work and creative process. Here, we reflect on the board game Algorithms of Late Capitalism together with Karla Zavala Barreda and Adriaan Odendaal.
What can we learn from the contingency of the community of the living and the non-living? What insights on contingency may transpire from embedding life and non-life within each other? How are factuality and fiction mediated by the imagination in the pursuit for new forms of collective action and of creating collectivities?
Algorithms of Late-Capitalism: The Board Game
by Karla Zavala Barreda and Adriaan Odendaal
During the PoM conference, Karla Zavala Barreda and Adriaan Odendaal from the research & design studio internet teapot hosted a series of guided play-sessions of their new board game “Algorithms of Late-Capitalism”.
In 2021, they conducted a series of experimental workshops as part of the New New Fellowship that brought diverse groups of international participants together to co-design a board game. The purpose of this project was to use board game co-design as a medium through which participants can collectively explore questions around more pluralistic and desirable technological futures. Over the course of several workshop sessions, participants contributed ideas and reflections to the creation of the game, framed by concepts drawn from pluriversal ontological design, intersectional feminism, and digital materialism.
In Algorithms of Late-Capitalism, players become members of a community of cyborgs, reigned over by the first Sentient Machine Cult. This cult has given rise to a formative new algocracy in which society is governed by the organizational logic of rigid data structures and opaque algorithms. The players-as-cyborgs are confronted with a rule-system that places them in a position of systematic exclusion and increasing marginality.
The board game affords different ways of playing: players can integrate themselves into this society by following the formal rules and competing against each other to conform to the logic of the Sentient Machine Cult’s algocracy; or they can subversively coordinate their efforts and attempt to change the system by introducing new rules and winning conditions. By discovering ways to play collaboratively instead of competitively, players are encouraged to explore alternative, convivial, caring, and inherently pluralistic technological futures – as well as possible pathways towards these futures.
By playing the game, conference attendees were able to explore reflections, questions, and ideas encoded into the game fiction and mechanics by the different cohorts of game co-designers.
How did the idea of developing the game come up?
Karla: We have been exploring the medium of board game design for a couple of years, both designing prototypes and playing them. On the other hand, we have also been hosting and co-creating zines, so when the New New Fellowship opportunity came up, we thought of it as a chance to merge game design with co-creation methodologies. We also believe that design can foster critical reflection and social transformation. So we wanted participants to think about the absurdities of the technology in our present and through this lens imagine better futures. As technology users we all have an expertise to share. We want to open the barriers to technology design, so that everyone can share their experiences and perspectives to help improve things. Through the board game design, we wanted to ask: What can be reimagined to make more inclusive and desirable technological futures?
What is the goal of the game?
Adriaan: The goal is to create an open space for people to contribute to and enrich the process of thinking about technological futures. The game is an exploration of how we can benefit from collaborative processes, instead of following the imperatives of market-driven competition. We want people to explore these critical and conceptual points through low-barrier and playful mediums. Board games are also very social objects, they create social spaces where people can connect and start discussions. By playing, people engage with more inclusive imaginaries of better technological futures. When we think of digital technologies, for example AI, what probably comes to mind is widespread services such as ChatGPT. Big tech companies’ imaginaries dominate the discussions of what technology is and can be. But, through co-creating the board game we explored alternative imaginaries.
Karla: It’s important to empower the broader public to imagine what technology can be and understand that they should have a say in what technologies get deployed in their cities and societies at large. As a society we negotiate culturally how technology works, as such public participation should be fostered. This was the goal of the co-creation workshops that brought this game to life, to give non-technical public the tools to think of important questions around our increasingly digitized and mediatized societies.
What would be the ideal technological future for you?
Adriaan: There should be more diversity in technology. Smaller, weirder, experimental things. I would wish for a future where technology is curious and diverse and not dominated by a few companies that copy each other.
Karla: A future where communities understand how technology works and have a say in the technologies that impact their lives. To me, especially understanding that technology is socially constructed is important, what we think as a community of certain technologies matter. Technology carries values and worldviews, there should be more variety and creative imaginaries around it.
How should things continue with your game?
Karla: We will soon publish it as a print to play version. Our aim is that the game can be used as means to open conversations about technology and its role in our social and intimate lives in diverse settings: from schools to university students and even policy making.
The board game is currently available as a free print-to-play version online. You can also follow Karla’s and Adriaan’s work on Instagram.
Would you like to gain further impressions of the PoM conference in Aachen? Then take a look at our interview with Chris Dupuis as well as our recap of the conference days and the accompanying program of art and performances.
Photos by Jana Hambitzer
