The Internet and digital technologies have been accompanied by expectations portraying visions of a future of social transformation for the last decades. My presentation draws on and ethnography of a group of passionate bloggers; people who get intensively involved on the Internet elaborating blogs and expecting to transform mass media and politics through their practice. I discuss how hope emerges in their everyday engagement with Internet technologies, trying to shed light on the material dimension of their orientation to the future. Fieldwork was developed in Spain during 2006 and 2007.

Describing bloggers material daily practices I show how bloggers’ expectations are based on the production of present facts that are preserved on the Internet and provide the materials for imagining new futures. In this dual work or preserving the past and imagining a different future hope emerges as a relational effect, an assemblage of heterogeneous entities that displaces traditional conceptions of hope from inside individuals to the material arrangements in which they are engaged.

Sociology of expectations (a domain in the field of Science and Technologies Studies) tells us that future expectations of technology are part of what an entity is in the present. Taking this assumption and drawing on an ontological vocabulary I further describe hope assemblages as particular material arrangement that provides the conditions of possibility for imagining different futures that destabilize the ontology of the present.

On 15 May 2011 a group of people gathered at Puerta del Sol in Madrid (Spain), the city’s central and most famous square, after attending a large public demonstration. Some people then made a decision to spend the night in the open air at the square. The gathering quickly developed into an established encampment that would initiate a new form of political and urban innovation: the ‘assembly movement’ (movimiento asambleario) widely known as 15M and which in time would inspire the global Occupy movement. Six months later there were over one hundred established assemblies in plazas and open spaces across Madrid. The voices vecino and barrio (neighbour and neighbourhood) have over this time acquired new political and social valence in Spain, and Madrid in particular. The social form of the assembly is inscribing the political landscape of the city with a revitalised practice of neighbourly politics. In this context the assembly prefigures or prototypes a social method and an infrastructure for dealing with, even reinventing classical urban topos, such as negotiations over stranger-relationality, the making of public spaces, or the very apprehension of the urban condition as a de/territorialised form. We want to explore in this presentation the rise of ‘popular assemblies’ as a political technology of neighbourly life. The political purchase of this assemblage / assembly is its status as urban open hardware. An object invested in the fuzziness of the urban condition. Our account is based on an ethnography of Madrid’s mobilizations, and in particular on intensive fieldwork across a number of assemblies. The ethnography is ongoing.

PROGRAMA

Miércoles 25 Mayo – Medialab

16:00 Bienvenida

16:30 Mesa redonda distintas miradas sobre los Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia y la Tecnología

18:30 Conclusión

Jueves 26 Mayo – Medialab

10:00-10:30 Recepción

10:30 -12:00 Conferencia plenaria, Brian Wynne (U. Lancaster)

12:00-12:30 Café

12:30-14:00 Comunicaciones, sección 1

14:00-15:30 Comida

15:30-17:00 Comunicaciones, sección 2

17:00-17:30 Café

17:30-19:00 Taller de doctorandos: Escribir una Tesis sobre Estudios Sociales en Tecnociencia

21:00 Cena

Viernes 27 Mayo – Medialab

10:00-11:30 Comunicaciones, sección 3

11:30-12:00 Café

12:00-13:30 Presentación de grupos y proyectos en curso del ámbito

13:30-14:15 Discusión, propuestas de futuro sobre la Red eSCTS

Mesa redonda distintas miradas sobre los Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia y la Tecnología.

Participan: Marta I. González García (IFS-CCHS-CSIC); Miquel Domenech (UAB); Javier Lezaun (Oxford University); Agustí Nieto (UAB); Ana Delgado (Universidad de Bergen); Antonio Lafuente (IH-CCHS-CSIC).
Coordina: Rebeca Ibáñez Martín (IFS-CSIC/UVA)

Comunicaciones 1

Nueva oncología, nueva ontología: el cáncer como objeto potencial, Jorge Castillo y Francisco Tirado (Universitat Aautònoma de Barcelona)

Etnografía de la enfermedad. O cómo conocer un mundo desordenado, Lorena Ruiz Marcos (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)

¿Qué nos dice la secuenciación de proteínas de la historia de la biomedicina contemporánea? Prácticas, técnicas y su circulación en el contexto español (1968-1998), Miguel García-Sancho (IFS-CCHS-CSIC)

Visibilizando la invención, María Prieto (Manchester Architecture Research Centre, University of Manchester)

Comunicaciones 2

Estudios CTS y nanotecnología. Haciendo visible lo invisible, José Manuel de Cózar Escalante (Universidad de La Laguna)

Identity and otherness in defining the boundaries of scientific collaboration, Catherine Heeney (IFS-CCHS – CSIC)

El papel del Código Fuente en la construcción de la comunidad: una aproximación al Proyecto Debian, Fernando González de Requena (UNED)

Expectativas de futuro, jerarquías del pasado. La invisible ausencia de las mujeres bloggers en la Blogosfera Hispana, Adolfo Estalella (UOC /CCHS- CSIC)

Comunicaciones 3

La naturaleza controvertida de la ciencia como objetivo y práctica educativa, José M. Cabo Hernández, Carmen Enrique Mirón, Jorge Núñez Jover (F. de Educación, U. Granada)

Haciendo visible lo invisible: El papel de las emociones en los estudios sociales de la ciencia y de la tecnología, Simone Belli (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)

La patología del discurso tecno-científico en los Medios de Comunicación, Marisol Romo (Dirdira Comunicación SL.)

Diálogo de saberes en el contexto de la educación Ciencia-Tecnología-Sociedad, Carmen Enrique Mirón, José M. Cabo Hernández, Marianela Morales Calatayud, Fernando Carlos Agüero Contreras (F. de Educación, U. Granada)

Taller Doctorandos “Escribir una Tesis sobre Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia y Tecnología”

Xaq Frohlich, (Massachusets Institute of Technology)
Ál Cano Santana, (Universidad Politécnica de Catalunya)
Elvira Santiago Gómez, (Universidad de A Coruña)
Coordina: Ana Delgado (U. Bergen)

Presentación de líneas de investigación

Cartografías del cuerpo, María González Aguado, Carmen Romero y Rubén Blanco (UCM).

Enseñanza y aprendizaje sobre la naturaleza de la ciencia y la tecnología: una innovación CTS de la educación, Ángel Vázquez Alonso (Universidad de las Islas Baleares).

Cultura digital y movimientos sociales, Cibesomosaguas, Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociología (UCM), Igor Sádaba (UCM).

Grupo de Investigación de Estudios Sociales en Ciencia y Tecnología (GESCIT), Juan Carlos Aceros (UAB).

Department of Science and Innovation Dynamics, Koen Jonkers (CSIC).

Eä Journal, revista de Humanidades médicas y estudios sociales de la ciencia y la tecnología (Argentina), Gabriela Mijal Bortz (directora editorial).

Revista Sociología y tecnociencia, Juan R. Coca (director).

Máster de Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia y Tecnología (USAL), Miguel Ángel Quintanilla.

Technolife: imaginarios de la sociedad digital, Kjetil Rommetveit (University of Bergen, Noruega).

Contactos:

Adolfo Estalella (UOC) – adolfoestalella@gmail.com
Rebeca Ibáñez Martín (IFS-CSIC/ UVA) – rebecaibanezm@gmail.com
Vincenzo Pavone (IPP-CCHS-CSIC) – vincenzo.pavone@cchs.csic.es

Invitamos a que envíen sus propuestas de participación los investigadores (doctorandos/as, jóvenes doctoras/es y profesores) del área de los estudios sociales de la ciencia y la tecnología, en cualquiera de las múltiples disciplinas en que estos se ubiquen: historia, sociología, historia de la ciencia, filosofía de la ciencia, medicina, feminismos, ingeniería, antropología, psicología, estudios ambientales, derecho, género, etc.

Normas de envío

Plazo de recepción de propuestas: 30 de enero de 2011.
Extensión máxima: 150 palabras.
Incluid datos de contacto: nombre y apellidos, email, centro o universidad a la que pertenece.
La propuesta debe ser enviada a: es.cts.es@gmail.com
Fecha de comunicación de la aceptación: 15 de febrero de 2011

Sobre la Red de Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia y la Tecnología del Estado Español (eSCTS)

La eSCTS es una red de profesionales sin ánimo de lucro, recientemente constituida (en el invierno de 2010) cuyo objetivo es poner en contacto y propiciar la comunicación de todas y todos aquellos que trabajamos en el área de los estudios sociales de la ciencia y la tecnología (CTS ). Nuestra intención es consolidar los estudios CTS en el Estado español y habilitar un espacio de participación, comunicación y reflexión para los investigadores ya establecidos y para aquellos más jóvenes que comienzan sus carreras (doctorandos/as y recién graduadas/os), un espacio de discusión y encuentro que dé cuenta de la diversidad académica, cultural y política del Estado español.

Prototypes have acquired certain prominence and visibility in recent times. Software development is perhaps the case in point, where the release of non-stable versions of programmes has become commonplace, as is famously the case in free and open source software. Developers are here known for releasing beta or work-in-progress versions of their programmes, as an invitation or call for others to contribute their own developments and closures.

Prototyping has also become an important currency of explanation and description in art-technology contexts, where the emphasis is on the productive and processual aspects of experimentation. Medialabs, hacklabs, community and social art collectives or open collaborative websites are further spaces and sites where prototyping and experimentation have taken hold as both modes of knowledge-production and cultural and sociological styles of exchange and interaction. Common to many such endeavours are: user-centred innovation, where users are incorporated into the artefact’s industrial design process; ICT mediated forms of collaboration (email distribution lists, wikispaces, peer-to-peer digital channels), or; decentralised organisational structures. Experimentation has also been at the centre of recent reassessments of the organisation of laboratory, expert and more generally epistemic cultures in the construction of science. An interesting development is the shift in emphasis from the experimental as a knowledge-site to the experimental as a social process. These are only a few examples of what we mean by prototyping cultures. The conference aim to consider different works in light of some of these developments and tensions.

You can download the program of the conference (PDF) and the abstracts (PDF). Although attendance to the conference is free, we have limited space (specially the first day at the CCHS) so we are asking people to register for the conference (image from the project interactibus. Credits: Medialab-Prado).

Thursday, 4 November

9:45. Welcome. Eduardo Manzano, Director, CCHS (CSIC); Alberto Corsín Jiménez & Adolfo Estalella, conference organizers.

10:00. Introduction: Prototyping and social experimentation, Alberto Corsín Jiménez.
10:15. The end of innovation (as we knew it), Lucy Suchman.
10.45. A Countercultural Prototype for Cold War Social Engineering: Revisiting the Pepsi Pavilion, Fred Turner.

11:15. Questions and discussion.
11:45. Coffee break.

12:15. Infra(proto)types, Nerea Calvillo.
12:45. Re:farm the city. Connecting food to people, Hernani Dias.

13:15. Questions and discussion.
13:45 – 15:00. Lunch break

15:00. Prototyping and the prospects of obesity, Alex Wilkie.
15:30. Ethnography of and as prototyping culture, George Marcus.

16:00. Questions and discussion.
16:30-17:00. Final discussion.
17:00-17.30. Coffee break.

[Note: The presentation of Professor Georgina Born scheduled for 17.00 has been canceled.]

Venue: Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, C/ Albasanz 26-28, Madrid 28037. Room: Sala Gómez Moreno, 2C24

Friday, 5 November

10:00. Prototyping as legal techne. A historical case study, Alain Pottage
10:30. Prototypes of engagement: trust, transaction, and digital partnership, James Leach

11:00.11.30. Questions and discussion.
11:30-12.00. Coffee break.

12:00. From Prototyping to Allotyping: The Invention of Change of Use and the Crisis of Building Types, Michael Guggenheim.
12:30. Establishing the reality of politics: Revisiting Kurt Lewin’s experiments in ‘democratic atmospheres’, Javier Lezaun.

13:00-13.30. Questions and discussion.
13:30 – 15:15. Lunch break.

15:15. The hospitable prototype: a techno-polis in construction, Adolfo Estalella & Alberto Corsín Jiménez.
15:45pm. Prototyping prototyping, Chris Kelty.

16:15-16.45. Questions and discussion.
16:45. Closing remarks.

Venue: Medialab-Prado, Plaza de las Letras, C/ Alameda 15, 28014 Madrid

Information.

Program of the conference (PDF).
Prototyping Conference Abstracts (PDF).
Contact: info@prototyping.es

Attendance to the conference is free. However, we have limited space in both venues, so we are asking people to register for the conference.

Image from the project interactibus. Credits: Medialab-Prado.

The End of Innovation (As We Knew It)

Lucy Suchman
Centre for Science Studies
Lancaster University, UK

With thanks to J.K. Gibson-Graham (The End of Capitalism (As we knew it) 1996), this paper explores the question of what new possibilities might be opened through some undoing of prevailing discourses of innovation and ‘the new’.  So there are some contradictions built into the project from the start.  That is, on one had I want to engage with questions of how things could be otherwise, of alternative directions, transformations.  But a central thing that I am interested in transforming is, you might say, change itself – at least change as it is figured in contemporary discourses of management, design, innovation and the like.  Drawing on experiences gained in a particular site of research and development, I offer some critical reflections on the prototype as a medium of transformative change.  The aim is to respecify innovation as a strategic category, and as a gloss for more deeply ambivalent and contested forms of future making.

A Countercultural Prototype for Cold War Social Engineering: Revisiting the Pepsi Pavilion

Fred Turner
Department of Communication
Stanford University

To date, many historians have accepted the notion that the American counterculture stood in complete opposition to the values of mainstream, cold-war America. This presentation challenges that view. It returns to Osaka, Japan, and Expo ’70 in order to revisit the Pepsi Pavilion – an immersive computational and artistic environment – and explores the ways it brought together military planners, corporate executives, hippie artists and Bell Labs engineers. By doing so, the talk shows how the process of prototyping can serve multiple cultures simultaneously. It reveals that within the Pavilion, the ideals and technologies of the cold war military-industrial research world served as resources for countercultural artists. Those artists in turn gave form and legitimacy to a new mode of American political power. The talk concludes by arguing that the Pepsi Pavilion became a three-dimensional prototype of the sort of world that the cold war American state – and large portions of the counterculture – hoped to bring into being.

Infra(proto)types

Nerea Calvillo
C+arquitectos, Profesora Asociada UE y EPS

?In the air? is a collaborative research project focused on visualizing, understanding and contextualizing some components of the air, such as gases or particles. It is a work in process which has been developed through different stages and teams, producing a variety of digital and physical devices. By identifying it´s different levels of ?prototype-ness? , some aspects referred to prototypes related to success, time and performance will be questioned.

The objective is to amplify the concept´s transformative potential, shifting from the necessity of having a superior goal to be achieved (or ?final product?) to having an entity and power on itself that facilitates other things to happen. Could they then become infrastructural? What would be an infra(proto)type?

Re:farm the city. Connecting food to people

Hernani Dias
Re_farm the city

refarmthecity.org is a project with the aim to provide people with tools to easily create, manage and visualize there urban farms. bringing back the rhythms of nature, her diversity, richness and complexity to citizens. by creating social networks, software and hardware we want to promote the production and consumption of products produced locally, technics and methods that respect the environment, science, biology, maths, biodiversity, the local cuisine recipes and retrieving the forgotten rural wisdom to the contemporary city. we want a more balanced society, educated, richer, healthier and ultimately more sustainable. re:farm the city has developed various remote controlled urban farms prototypes in institutions of artistic, media and science production in different locations on the planet. medialab_prado – madrid, hangar.org – bracelona, wannas foundation -knislinge, intermediae – madrid, straddle3 – barcelona, architecture university of donostia – donostia, el forn de la calç – calders, cceba – buenos aires, mal au pixel – paris, eyebeam.org – new york, andes sprout society – andes, new york city resistor – brooklyn, farm city – brooklyn and llull – barcelona

Prototyping and the prospects of obesity

Alex Wilkie
Interaction Research Studio
Goldsmiths College

The view that the ‘user’ is constructed, configured or scripted, as a sociotechnical assemblage can be read as a key insight of STS accounts of the design of technological prototypes, most notably computer and information systems. Moving away from such instrumental and singular accounts of users, in this paper I explore the figuring of multiple ‘users’ as part of the development of a mobile health technology. Drawing on a six-month ethnographic study of designers working for a multinational ICT manufacturer who deploy the principles and practices of user-centered design (UCD), I discuss how multiple users resource the design and development of a mobile phone based daily exercise prototype (DEP) to promote everyday health and fitness routines and thereby address the international threat of obesity. Analytically I treat the health prototype as a changing arrangement of users, technologies and discourses that variously served to resource the design team, individual designers as well as management. To better grasp the relations between the prototype and its users I divide my analysis into two broad temporal categories. Here, I make the distinction between distal-users and proximal-users to differentiate between users that operate in the present but serve to occupy different temporal moments in relation to the prototype. I define distal-users as prospective figures deployed in the present in order to envision particular future health-related populations. I describe how the designers deployed an inventive risk discourse with which to figure distal-users in the form of statistically predicted health publics. Proximal-users, on the other hand, count as users who directly participated in the making of the prototype in the present. The term proximal users includes the representatives of end-users that the designers enrolled to construct and evaluate the prototype as well as the designers themselves, where the prototype served to mediate their professional interests and agendas. In conclusion, I argue that the practice of prototyping in user-centered and participatory design practices can be understood as a formal and material method for managing multiple futures in the present.

Ethnography Of and As Prototyping  Culture

George Marcus
University of California
Irvine

Ethnography, as conventionally understood, could be appreciated as a means for providing sympathetic understandings of  and critical insights into prototyping cultures that seem to characterize mainly engineering, design, and art projects/disciplines.  But ethnography itself as a form of inquiry, at least in its anthropological tradition for which it is central,  is undergoing transitions for  which practitioners  do not  have  terms or an articulation. The Center for Ethnography at the  University of  California, Irvine (www.socsci.uci.edu/~ethnog/) has been trying to come to such terms since its founding in 2004.   As a process, ethnography seems to have become much like  what has been described for our conference as a prototyping culture.  In my presentation, I want to  overlay key issues that have been raised for  prototyping cultures(e.g., their viability as a space for  promoting and sustaining the production of  non-stable forms of ideas)  onto certain predicaments and ambitions that  characterize contemporary ethnography, and to see how this operation affects  the virtues, authority, and viability  of this  venerable, and technologically simple  hand-eye-ear and enclosed (as in the solitude of the  “fieldnote”) craft of  thinking.

Music, art, prototype?

Georgina Born
Oxford University

Under the term ‘prototype’ in the statements presaging this conference several properties are rolled together: a stress on experimentation as a social process; on instability and the negotiation of openness and closure; on non-expert participation in production; on improvisation and remixing; and on novel forms of social organisation and of propertisation. In this light my paper has two related aims. First, with reference to three forms of music and art – modernist computer music from the 1980s and 1990s, art-science collaborations and digital popular musics from the present – and drawing on ethnographic research and scholarship from art and music history, I explore the variable concern with and consciousness of prototypicality. All three forms exist in an interdisciplinary space between the arts, sciences and technology; but they differ markedly in their orientation both to interdisciplinarity, and in particular to what Barry, Born and Weszkalnys have called the logic of ontology, and to prototypicality. To understand each of the three forms is necessarily to engage with the specific genealogy of those practices, and with the ontology manifest in them. Second, with reference to this ethnographic material, I express scepticism about the prototype as an encompassing term, and disassemble what has been rolled together in discussion of the term.

Prototyping as legal techne. A historical case study

Alain Pottage
London School of Economics and Political Science

Intellectual property law is a discursive machine for prototyping. A work or invention is characterized in terms of its role as a prototype for the making of successive additions to a legal-industrial phylum. This characterization is far from straightforward. It involves the second-order observation of diverse prototyping cultures, which, since the mid to late 18th century, have generated the phenomenological horizons and semantic resources for intellectual property law’s mode of prototyping. It is interesting to consider the engagements between law’s sense of prototyping and the cultures into which law’s sense of the prototype are, in turn, taken up. In this paper I explore these engagements by way of a study of the legal theory of reduction to practice – the theory of when an invention has reached the point at which it can be taken as a prototype for the making of further instantiations of an invention. This is a crucial point at which legal prototyping engages with technical and scientific practices and representations of prototyping. Classically, what is in question is the role of drawings, models, communications and demonstrations in turning the process of ‘conception’ into an artifact with the futurity of a prototype. What emerges from this study is the sense that patent law is better understood not in terms of its product (the invention as prototype) but in terms of the ongoing process of prototyping. And this in turn informs our understanding of how the forms of intellectual property law might engage with new modes of collaborative or recursive design and production.

Prototypes of Engagement:  Trust, Transaction, and Digital Partnership

James Leach¹  & Wendy Seltzer²
¹ Anthropology (University of Aberdeen)
²Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy

The traditional legal device to encourage creativity is intellectual property, but propertization can devalue knowledge by taking it out of context.  Copyright or patent are blunt instruments of exclusion, while many sharing practice and understanding would prefer entanglement. An ethnographic study of prototype ‘choreographic objects’ provides an example of value dependent on negotiating and maintaining trust relationships between artists and audience. This value, located between public and private, gift and commodity, differs from the scarcity-value lost when fans fileshare and copy music, yet it too has boundaries and limits.  Exploring trust and transaction on-line and off-, we see a variety of arrangements for creating and sharing value that can be supported by law but not defined by it.

While intellectual property has shown us the power of law in structuring our relation to ‘knowledge’, we also see that ‘property’ is not the appropriate framework for all knowledge relations, particularly transacting across cultures. In response, we prototype a new legal framework for supporting collaboration and exchange: the cross-cultural partnership template. The template offers a legal form designed to help potential collaborators to reach understanding and agreement on the terms of their collaboration. We propose the partnership as membrane for social interaction, using legal elements to focus the parties on what expectations could be defined, at the boundary, to enable engagement.

From Prototyping to Allotyping: The Invention of Change of Use and the Crisis of Building Types

Michael Guggenheim
University of Zürich/Goldsmiths

In my talk I am going to analyse the invention and the form of the discourse on building conversion as one particular instance of redefining what a technology is and how it operates. I describe a shift from expert defined closure to lay-based openness and tinkering as a shift from prototyping to allotyping: Since the early nineteen seventies change of use and building conversion have become a central and fashionable discourse among architects and architectural theorists. Before the nineteen seventies buildings were understood as technologies, as “society made durable”. The notion of building type was central to link a building to a given use. A bank was a bank, because architects applied existing templates, prototypes, to turn a building into a bank. In the 1970ies, suddenly buildings became – discursively, since building conversion always existed – quasi-technologies, or “buildings made flexible through society”: “Building type” no longer was a meaningful link between a building and its use. A bank should not stay a bank, but become a hotel, a theatre, or a flat, in short: an allotype. The definition of a building shifted on the level of both the actors and time: it switched from the architect and his ideas before the building was built to the user and her ideas after the building was built. The user was no more a thing to be measured or a model on which a building should be fitted, but a creative actor who defines the building. But, at the same time, this new allotyping became re-technisized again and architects claimed power back from buildings and users: conversion supposedly was cheaper, more ecological, and even aesthetically more pleasing than newly purposed buildings. In my talk I will elucidate this central shift in thinking about buildings and reflect on the special case of allotyping buildings as quasi-technologies and how it continues to vex thinking about buildings.

Establishing the reality of politics: Revisiting Kurt Lewin’s experiments in ‘democratic atmospheres’

Javier Lezaun
Said Business School
Oxford University

In the late 1930s, the German psychologist Kurt Lewin – by then working in Iowa after fleeing Germany in 1933 – established ‘the reality of democracy’ in a series of groundbreaking experiments with children. Making manifest the striking difference between children working in democratic and authoritarian ‘atmospheres’ (or ‘social climates’, another term coined by Lewin and his collaborators) involved a series of revolutionary experimental techniques, including, prominently, the use of film in an attempt to render political orders visible. Lewin’s work lies at the center of a series of traditions – the conversion of ‘groups’ into experimental objects, the miniaturization of democracy (and its transformation into an object of social scientific intervention) – that have shaped our contemporary understanding of the artificiality of political forms. This paper will revisit Lewin’s 1937 and 1938 experiments to probe the notion that democracy, or, rather, a ‘democratic atmosphere’, can be proto-typed within the confines of the laboratory, and to examine the forms of vision and editing that were so successfully pioneered in this peculiar experimental setting.

The hospitable prototype: a techno-polis in construction

Alberto Corsín & Adolfo Estalella
CCHS – Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)

Experimentation has been pointed out as a salient dimension of present societies. This paper discusses the particular modes of experimentation in the cultural public centre Medialab-Prado (MP) based in Madrid. Drawing heavily on free software as a source of inspiration, MP organizes its activities (internally and externally) around the collaborative, horizontal and open production of prototypes in two different ways. MP conceives itself as a prototype of cultural centre that experiments with modes of cultural production and the public; and at the same time, it organizes its activity around the production of prototypes. Foregrounding how openness is conceptualized and put into practice in MP we discuss how prototypes are not technologies under way of black-boxing but processes that open political spaces in which cultural production, the public and the city are under debate; and in so doing we relate our discussion with debates in STS that have insisted on the role of objects and human-object engagement as spaces for democracy.

Prototyping prototyping

Chris Kelty
Center for Society and Genetics
University of California (Los Angeles)

[no abstract available]

I attended my first EASA conference, it was great! many friend and new interesting people I met. This is the abstract of my presentation at the Digital Anthropology workshop: Based on 18 months of fieldwork focused on the study of intensive bloggers in Spain this paper discusses how expectations are enacted in the everyday material practices of a group of individuals that expect to transform society (mass media, science and politics) through their blogging practice. Drawing on the concept of inscription (Latour, 1999) I describe how blogs and bloggers interactions are materially inscribed (in the form of statistics of visitors, for instance) in a massive way by blog technological infrastructures. I highlight how present facts are materialized in graphics of visitors and lists of incoming links and expectations of the future are materially enacted when exceptional facts take place (an unusual wave of visitors, v.g.). I then argue that the inscription of the present is the condition of possibility for the performance of future expectations through an infrastructure that take part in the everyday enacting of hope among bloggers. (photo by Édgar Gómez)

Se celebró el primer encuentro estatal de ANT, y presenté una comunicación titulada: ‘Presente inscrito, esperanzas de revolución. Dinámica material de la esperanza en el bloguear apasionado’; parte del material en el que estoy trabajando actualmente. Hay una reseña del encuentro a cargo de Francisco Tirado, y más abajo el resumen de mi intervención.

‘Presente inscrito, esperanzas de revolución. Dinámica material de la esperanza en el bloguear apasionado’

La esperanza es una categoría por la cual tanto la antropología como los STS han intensificado su interés en los últimos años (Brown, 2003; Miyazaki, 2006). Pese a que hay una permanente expectativa de novedad y cambio en torno a Internet y las tecnologías digitales; los análisis que se han ocupado de este asunto raras veces han abordado específicamente la cuestión de la esperanza. Esta es, sin embargo, un aspecto fundamental de la práctica apasionada del colectivo de bloggers que constituye el objeto de la etnografía que realicé durante 18 meses entre los años 2006 y 2007. Ese bloguear apasionado se caracteriza por una intensa relación, en términos temporales, entre los individuos y la infraestructura material blogger, por una alta reflexividad con respecto a la propia práctica tecnológica, por la asistencia a eventos dedicados a los blogs y la organización de estos, y por el uso intensivo de otras tecnologías digitales y el sostenimiento durante un largo periodo de tiempo (varios años) de estas prácticas.

El objetivo en esta presentación es discutir cómo la esperanza toma parte en la práctica cotidiana de estos bloggers; argumentaré que la esperanza es traída a la existencia (enacted) (Mol, 2002) a través de la inscripción masiva del presente por la infraestructura blogger en instancias en las cuales las expectativas de influencia de los blogs son puestas de facto (enacting) y nuevos expectativas de futuro son formuladas.

Desarrollados a finales de 1999 los blogs han sido entendidos por algunos de sus practicantes como una herramienta que va a revolucionar, o que está revolucionando, nuestras sociedades a través de la democratización del periodismo y la política en la medida en que cualquier individuo puede convertirse en periodista o involucrarse políticamente a través del bloguear, desafiando a los grandes medios de comunicación o a los partidos políticos establecidos. Un elemento fundamental de esta narrativa revolucionaria lo constituye la noción de influencia de los blogs y de la Blogosfera.

A lo largo de mi trabajo de campo he encontrado toda una serie de relatos ejemplares con los cuales los bloggers argumentan la influencia de los blogs y de la Blogosfera. La influencia se entiende en estos casos como la capacidad de los blogs para traducir los interés de otros (políticos, medios de comunicación, empresas, etc.), y se trae a la existencia a través de la inscripción de la acción colectiva, en momentos en los cuales se produce, por ejemplo, una vista masiva a un blog, o un posicionamiento excepcional en un buscador. Estos momentos excepcionales permiten indagar en el proceso por el cual ciertas expectativas de influencia en los blogs y la Blogosfera son puestas de facto en hechos que después circulan, y  al mismo tiempo nuevas expectativas de influencia son depositadas en los blogs y en su capacidad de transformación social.

Esta relación entre hechos y expectativas ha sido señalada por la sociología de las expectativas, un ámbito de indagación desde el cual se insistido en cómo las expectativas tecnológicas y la esperanza depositada en una tecnología constituyen parte de lo que una tecnología es en el presente. Específicamente Tiago Moreira y Paolo Palladino (2005) han discutido la tensión entre el presente y el futuro, entre los hechos y la esperanza, distinguiendo entre lo que denominan régimen de verdad y régimen de esperanza; los cuales permiten entender la articulación de formas diferente de orden en  el desarrollo de las tecnologías.

A partir de esta distinción entre el régimen de verdad y el régimen de esperanza es posible atender a la manera como un proceso fundamental de Internet, la inscripción, es articulada por los bloggers de manera diferenciada en (i) la producción de hechos presentes con los cuales argumentan las expectativas de influencia de los blogs y (ii) en la producción de nuevas expectativas de influencia.

La inscripción es un proceso fundamental de Internet. Toda práctica mediada por las tecnologías de Internet produce inscripciones (Latour, 1999); un ejemplo paradigmático de inscripción es un hiperenlace, lo mismo que el registro en un servidor web o una estadística. En mi discusión me centro específicamente al hablar de inscripción en los sistemas de estadísticas de visitas de los blogs; un mecanismo incluido de manera artesanal por los bloggers años atrás que fue sin embargo incorporado a la infraestructura blog como parte constitutiva.

A través de las estadísticas de visitas del blog los bloggers visualizan un colectivo que se congrega en torno al blog; de manera que las estadísticas traen a la existencia el presente como una línea continua y sin sobresaltos, pero al mismo tiempo, son la condición de posibilidad para performar lo excepcional, que tiene la forma de una línea abrupta cuando hay una entrada masiva de visitantes. Es precisamente en la inscripción de esos acontecimientos excepcionales como los bloggers traen a la existencia las expectativas de influencia de blogs y la Blogosfera, traduciéndolas en hechos, y al mismo tiempo producen nuevas expectativas de influencia. Es en ese proceso a través del cual ciertas expectativas presentes se ponen de facto y otras nuevas se producen como se sostiene la esperanza de revolución blogger. De manera que los hechos y las expectativas, el presente y el futuro aparecen imbricados a través la inscripción masiva del presente por la infraestructura blogger, que constituye la condición de posibilidad través de la cual se pone de facto la esperanza en la práctica cotidiana blogger.

This paper discusses the material dynamic of expectations among a collective of intensive bloggers in Spain and how they are enacted in the everyday blogging practice with the participation of the blog material infrastructure. I will argue that expectations on the power of blogs for transforming society are based in the massive material inscription of blog/blogger interactions. Empirical data has been produced during 18 months of fieldwork focused on the study of intensive bloggers, a collective defined by recognizing themselves as bloggers, blogging everyday, and being deeply involved in the construction of the Blogosphere in Spain. Empirical data has been obtained in three different contexts: the Internet, face to face events and bloggers meetings and interviews (online and face to face).

Common among intensive bloggers is a reflexive practice focused on the discussion of their own blogging activity;  key element of this reflexive discourse are the expectations posed on what is conceived as the power of blogs for transforming different domains of societies (mass media, science, private companies and education, among other). Analyzing this reflexivity I will first present a set of expectations that circulate on the public discourse of intensive bloggers and drawing on the concept of inscription (Latour, 1999) I will then discuss how these expectations are enacted in the everyday material practices of bloggers with the participation on the blog infrastructure.

Any interaction among blog and bloggers produce material inscriptions like log files, hyperlinks and registries of visitors. A whole set of artefacts have been elaborated in the last years that manipulate these traces for elaborating different types of representations like statistics of visitors or lists of incoming links. Blog infrastructure has progressively integrated all these devices along the years and they have been incorporated by many bloggers into their everyday practice.

I will focus my discussion specifically on the extensive use of statistics of visitors. Drawing on the distinction between regimes of truth and hope (Moreira and Palladino, 20005) I first discuss the dynamic of facts and expectations that takes place when these inscription devices are mobilized in the everyday blogging practice and I problematize the common definition of expectations as predicate of the future; I will argue that expectations are formulated as uncertain predicates of present state of affairs. I will first show how these inscription devices perform materially present facts: number of visitors that are usually represent as a temporal line; but at the same time power of blogs and new expectations are then materially enacted as a deviation of the expected number of visitors when exceptional facts as a sudden deviation from the expected number of visitors are represented. The same inscription device is at the same time an artefact for performing present and routine facts and new expectations of the future. I will then argue that the massive inscription of the present by the blog infrastructure is the condition of possibility for enacting future expectations among intensive bloggers. The material infrastructure that takes place in the inscription process is a infrastructure for hope.

We presented a discussion trying to reflect on the implications that mediation has for fieldworkers. This allow us to draw parallelism between (you know, I don’t really liked the term) virtual ethnography and visual ethnography. The ‘virtual ethnography’ is in this case only a ‘literary’ resource. By it we mean fieldwork mediated by Internet technologies.

Internet and visual methods
Researching the Internet using visual methods & Using the Internet for visual methods research

The Internet is becoming increasingly visual. Videos, photos and all kind of graphic animations with very different qualities (porn, scientific images, everyday snapshots, videos) circulate and are consumed in different contexts. This phenomenon is especially intense for the Web and strongly related to the proliferation of digital photography. We want to focus the discussion of this panel specifically on visual content and related practices on the Web.

This proliferation of visual content is accompanied by a whole set of new visual practices mediated by web technologies of diverse kinds: large specialized databases, multimedia services, personal and institutional sites (web pages, blogs), etc. The close relationships between Web technologies and digital photography transform the practices of both consumption and production of visual content. With the extension of digital photography, any context is now a potential situation for taking photos that are later or immediately uploaded to the Internet. As a consequence, the very nature of digital objects is transformed: images that were usually private (or shared through face-to-face-material encounters) become public and widely available on the Internet. Furthermore, images become increasingly and structurally layered with meta-data that further shapes their circulation. Contemporary visual culture is therefore marked by complex interactions between digital technologies and networked infrastructures.

Internet and digital photographic technologies are reshaping all the domains of visual research practice: the consumption and the production of visual objects, the subject (and content) of photographic practices,  and the nature of the visual object itself open up a new field of study for visual researchers and raises methodological challenges. This panel aims to discuss some of the possibilities and challenges that the Internet invites for visual researchers.

First, the Internet is in itself a meaningful object of study for visual anthropologists that poses particular methodological challenges for visual researchers: how to contextualize the images? How representative are they? What is the value of the experience of the researcher in gathering this data? How might we articulate the ethical issues when gathering data that is publicly accessible? And, what are the implications of these new issues and practices in relation to the new emphasis on multisensoriality that is becoming increasingly important in visual anthropology?. These are some of the issues that are posed. But the Internet can be considered not only as a object of study but as a research tool for visual researchers. Thus the Internet can be used for gathering visual data that was very difficult to access previously, for instance.

Although some visual researchers have started to make of the Internet their object of study in the last years, there is still a limited dialogue between them and the field of Internet research, in spite of the fertile exchange of techniques, methodological strategies and theoretical approaches that could enrich both fields. We want to open a discussion with this panel between both fields.