Emma Rae Norton’s research on the computer mouse.

https://doodybrains.github.io/the-mouse-holds-us/

https://complicatingthecomputermouse.net

Rosa Menkman’s disorienting and overwhelming study of “resolution”.

“…resolution studies does not only involve the study of the effects of technological progress or the aesthetization of the scales of resolution. Resolution studies also involves a research on alternative settings that could have been in place, but are not – and the technologies which are, as a result, rendered outside of the discourse of computation.”

https://beyondresolution.info

1. What sort of person will the use of this technology make of me?
2. What habits will the use of this technology instill?
3. How will the use of this technology affect my experience of time?
4. How will the use of this technology affect my experience of place?
5. How will the use of this technology affect how I relate to other people?
6. How will the use of this technology affect how I relate to the world around me?
7. What practices will the use of this technology cultivate?
8. What practices will the use of this technology displace?
9. What will the use of this technology encourage me to notice?
10. What will the use of this technology encourage me to ignore?
11. What was required of other human beings so that I might be able to use this technology?
12. What was required of other creatures so that I might be able to use this technology?
13. What was required of the earth so that I might be able to use this technology?
14. Does the use of this technology bring me joy?
15. Does the use of this technology arouse anxiety?
16. How does this technology empower me? At whose expense?
17. What feelings does the use of this technology generate in me toward others?
18. Can I imagine living without this technology? Why, or why not?
19. How does this technology encourage me to allocate my time?
20. Could the resources used to acquire and use this technology be better deployed?
21. Does this technology automate or outsource labor or responsibilities that are morally essential?
22. What desires does the use of this technology generate?
23. What desires does the use of this technology dissipate?
24. What possibilities for action does this technology present? Is it good that these actions are now possible?
25. What possibilities for action does this technology foreclose? Is it good that these actions are no longer possible?
26. How does the use of this technology shape my vision of a good life?
27. What limits does the use of this technology impose upon me?
28. What limits does my use of this technology impose upon others?
29. What does my use of this technology require of others who would (or must) interact with me?
30. What assumptions about the world does the use of this technology tacitly encourage?
31. What knowledge has the use of this technology disclosed to me about myself?
32. What knowledge has the use of this technology disclosed to me about others? Is it good to have this knowledge?
33. What are the potential harms to myself, others, or the world that might result from my use of this technology?
34. Upon what systems, technical or human, does my use of this technology depend? Are these systems just?
35. Does my use of this technology encourage me to view others as a means to an end?
36. Does using this technology require me to think more or less?
37. What would the world be like if everyone used this technology exactly as I use it?
38. What risks will my use of this technology entail for others? Have they consented?
39. Can the consequences of my use of this technology be undone? Can I live with those consequences?
40. Does my use of this technology make it easier to live as if I had no responsibilities toward my neighbor?
41. Can I be held responsible for the actions which this technology empowers? Would I feel better if I couldn’t?

(Do Artifacts Have Ethics, L.M. Sacasas)

• What is the totality of its effects, its “ecology”?
• How does it affect our perception of our needs?
• How does it affect our way of seeing and experiencing the world?
• Does it foster a diversity of forms of knowledge?
• What does it make?
• What does it allow us to ignore?
• Is it the least imposing technology available for the task?
• Can it be responsive to organic circumstance?
• Does it concentrate or equalize power?
• Does it require a bureaucracy for its perpetuation?
• Does it cause ugliness?
• What noise does it make?
• What pace does it set?
• […]

(From 76 Reasonable Questions to ask about any technology by Jacques Ellul)

1. “What is the problem to which this technology is the solution?”
2. “Whose problem is it?”
3. “Which people and what institutions might be most seriously harmed by a technological solution?”
4. “What new problems might be created because we have solved this problem?”
5. “What sort of people and institutions might acquire special economic and political power because of technological change?”
6. “What changes in language are being enforced by new technologies, and what is being gained and lost by such changes?”

(Neil Postman)

Let’s Enhance / Duncan Robson
Apocryphal enhancement technologies in crime dramas.

No Signal (and other cellular drama) / Rich Juzwiak
Bad cellular reception as plot-device in horror-movies.

The Clock (excerpts) / Christian Marclay
24 hours of movie scenes with and about time in chronological order.

Reach, Grasp, Move, Position, Apply Force / Kajsa Dahlberg
The optimization of movements in labour and the role of film.

“I attempt to become a human version of Amazon Alexa, a smart home intelligence for people in their own homes. The performance lasts several days. It begins with an installation of a series of custom designed networked smart devices (including cameras, microphones, switches, door locks, faucets, and other electronic devices). I then remotely watch over the person 24/7 and control all aspects of their home. I aim to be better than an AI because I can understand them as a person and anticipate their needs. The relationship that emerges falls in the ambiguous space between human-machine and human-human.”

http://lauren-mccarthy.com/
https://get-lauren.com

More projects
http://lauren-mccarthy.com

“Magic UX is a spatial user interface which allows users to virtually “pin” apps to a physical space. Every time you move your device to that space, the same app will open on your screen. … You can physically move content between apps just by dragging it through space. … Also multiple users can share the same virtual space, allowing them to drag and drop content into each others devices seamlessly.”

http://specialprojects.studio/

Mud Tub

Stone Mouse

“AlterEgo puts the power of computing in a user’s self, instead of on her fingertips…”

“…human-computer interaction that is subjectively experienced as completely internal to the human user—like speaking to one’s self.”

“…enabling a discreet, bi-directional interface with a computing device, and providing a seamless form of intelligence augmentation.”

https://www.media.mit.edu/

“‘Open Data Cam’ is a tool that helps to quantify the world. With computer vision ‘Open Data Cam’ understands and quantifies what it sees. The simple DIY setup allows everybody to become an urban data miner.”

https://lab.moovel.com/projects/opendatacam

The Amazon Echo as an anatomical map of human labor, data and planetary resources.

https://anatomyof.ai

Installation of an Amazon’s Alexa asked by Apple’s Siri about its politics.

https://vimeo.com/241915190

Collection of videos of corporate future visions.

https://chriswoebken.com/Back-to-the-Futures
https://chriswoebken.com/Back-to-the-Futures-II

“Anthropological Taxonomy in first photographs taken with a new digital camera.”

https://vimeo.com/122396072

“Chalktalk is a digital presentation and communication language in development. Using a blackboard-like interface, it allows a presenter to create and interact with animated digital sketches in order to demonstrate ideas and concepts in the context of a live presentation or conversation.”

https://github.com/kenperlin/chalktalk
https://vimeo.com/232230096

Keyboard with e-ink keys for customizable contextual key layouts.

https://sonderdesign.com

“The project False Positives is about intelligent surveillance systems. These are camera’s that are said to be able to detect deviant behaviour within public space. False Positives is set around the question of normative behaviour. It aims to raise this question by basing the project on eight different ‘anomalies’. These so called anomalies are sign in body-language and movement that could indicate criminal intent. It is through these anomalies the algorithms are built and cameras are able to detect deviant behaviour.”

https://estherhovers.com/

“With 657 billion digital images per year being captured and pushed to the web, it is likely that at some point in your life you’ve taken a photo that already exists. And you will continue to do so with the help of this app.

CCamera is the first camera app that takes images that have already been uploaded to the internet. It brings your photos to the next level — because they’re not yours.”

http://ccamera.org

“PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES AS EXPERIMENTS, JOKES, AND EXPERIENTIAL ART

esolangs, disruptive codes, weird hc/i, differential thought platforms, the digital ephemeral, null programs and deletions, unstable linguistics, structure as content, machine disobedience, new relationships between programmers and their primary progeny (bugs), useless machines (Shannon/Minksy), synthetic languages, circuitous systems, constraint sets for coders, paraconsistent calculi, and other platforms, systems, and languages that break from the norms of computing”

http://esoteric.codes

“This is an early video piece staring Dan Sandin in which he explains, in general terms, the functionality of the Sandin Analogue Image Processor (IP). This was the instructional video that accompanied the modules for constructing you own Sandin IP.

The video is processed through the IP “live” so that the viewer is able to see the effect on video signals. Initially the video is B&W, at the end Sandin debuts the ‘Color IP’.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qh6jRzjmcY

https://vimeo.com/17445323

And similar “Video-Uhhh!”:
https://vimeo.com/13346270

And other projects:
Sincerity Machine: The Comic Sans typewriter
http://www.jesseengland.net

“The Screenless Office is a system for working with media and networks without using a pixel-based display. It is an artistic operating system.”

http://screenl.es

“Objectifier empowers people to train objects in their daily environment to respond to their unique behaviors. It gives an experience of training an artificial intelligence; a shift from a passive consumer to an active, playful director of domestic technology.”

https://bjoernkarmann.dk/objectifier

http://www.plaatsmaken.nl/

(https://oldcomputers.net/canon-cat.html)

A computer system with text-based interface and some ideosyncratic tweaks developed by Raskin aimed at high efficiency and convenience. He elaborates on his approach in his “Humane Interface” book. Most notably the LEAP function, a way to quickly navigate around documents, that also introduced the dedicated LEAP buttons on the CanonCat’s keyboard.

CanonCat demo video
Promo video for the LEAP technology

“The aim of the “Critical Atlas of Internet” is to use spatial analysis as a key to understanding social, political and economic issues on Internet.”

The website also has an adaptive print layout to scale from booklet to poster in any size.

https://louisedrulhe.fr/internet-atlas/

“… a series of objects presenting a playful interpretation take on the concept of the smart home.”

http://www.ecal.ch/

http://www.wired.com/2010/06/smoothing-square-pixels/
Russell Kirsch talks about the variable shaped pixel

“It utilizes the ability of computers to comprehend semantic meaning via “common-sense networks” to poetically represent the socio-cultural effects of natural language processing.”

http://mfadt.parsons.edu/2015/projects/definitions/
https://bryan.ma

http://www.earlyofficemuseum.com

“A portrait ‘drawing’ machine at a shopping mall is made to create his own portrait by placing a mirror in the portrait booth.”
https://vimeo.com/

And other projects:
http://tarakelton.com

https://www.jetset.nl/archive/lostformats

“Through this project, measuring becomes something without numbers, but with accurate precision; measuring becomes making.”

http://unfold.be/

http://otticamedia.com/

Live Wire (Dangling String)

http://museum.doorsofperception.com/

“The adversaria of Google Books: captured mark of the hand and digitization as rephotography.”

http://theartofgooglebooks.tumblr.com

Nice blog about medieval book culture and reading practices. Especially interesting for example a post about bookmarking techniques.

http://medievalbooks.nl

Wireless sensor stickers for context aware applications. Considering the fundamental messiness of infrastructures and the procedural simplicity of the functional programming I imagine some interesting side effects if these things move around unintentionally, become trash and create a messy hyper-context, where you loose sight of what reacts to what. Maybe a question of context-aware ubiquitous applications in general.

http://estimote.com

“This project investigates the idea of using computation to “use up” a piece of technology, in this case a digital camera. Using custom-written software (and a very long period of time), every possible photograph is generated, one at a time and in numerical order.”

See also his other projects exploring ideas of technical images, algorithms, abstraction, and computational vision.

http://www.jeffreythompson.org/

“A family of household appliances that presents a future scenario in which users are actively involved in producing, repairing, and modifying their own products.”

“… camera and monitor function as a mirror that links the images of the viewers. […] The software, which runs between camera and monitor, attempts to re-construct each face from image fragments of the other. The image of one face cannot be realised without the other and vice versa.

See also other works about materiality, aesthetics and potential of digital technologies:
http://www.rlfbckr.org/

…is comprised of over 2,000 voice recordings collected via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk web service.

http://www.bicyclebuiltfortwothousand.com/

“The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.

This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.”

“The End of Theory”, Chris Anderson in WIRED (+ weitere Kurzartikel zum Thema)

http://www.wired.com/

MIT project to develop a collection (a “hypergraph”) of “Common Sense Knowledge”.

“To improve computers’ understanding of the world that people live in and talk about, we need to provide them with usable knowledge about the basic relationships between things that nearly every person knows.”

The data set is free to download and explorable online.
https://conceptnet.io

The camera produces no image but a textual description of the motive, written by some strange user of Mechanical Turk web service.

http://mattrichardson.com/

Generative compositing technique. Different moments in time composed in a video grid.

http://www.creativeapplications.net/
http://vimeo.com/26938422

Workshop and symposium about alternative structures of order, especially in the context of the unique library in Sitterwerk. The books there are always located by RFID technology. Users have the freedom to create associative orders in the bookshelves while at the same time every item is digitally trackable. How can hidden relations made visible and other interactions with the material be enabled.

http://www.sitterwerk.ch/

Multiplied photographs used as a method to constitute “deviant” social groups in the 19th century. Francis Galton for example tried to construct visual evidence of universal physiognomic characteristics of jewish or criminally accused people to argue for his problematic theory of inheritance. Visual methods are exploited to construct and affirm a social order.

http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/

Technological intervention to “disorder” communication (“Miscommunication Technologies”) to gain more quality of communication. The service randomly connects two registered members of a community by phone to successively spread a message in the group.

http://r15n.net/