The p.l.a.c.e. project How Transpiring Ways of Situation Affect Agency

David Wilson & Brent DellThe University of Texas at Dallas

introduction

The p.l.a.c.e project started in 2017 as a collaboration between myself and a fellow UT Dallas PhD student, Brent Dell, around considering ways to design and deploy infrastructure to support the UTD Smart Campus initiative.

introduction

Using the third floor of the Arts Technology and Emerging Communication building on the UTD campus as a testbed, we began prototyping ways to enable indoor wayfinding while conceptualizing the development of a mobile application.

introduction

Dell’s Geospatial Information Science research focuses on wayfinding and map making that includes three dimensional models of buildings on campus, where my research focuses on Public Interactives that investigate digitally mediated communication experiences in public spaces.

introduction

To prototype indoor navigation and wayfinding strategies we began experimenting with different open source home automation server software coupled with test mobile devices and BLE beacons. While considering different types of server deployments and other potentials the p.l.a.c.e project began to conceptually take shape as a concurrent effort to those those that support wayfinding and navigation. Each project informs the other.

p.l.a.c.e.

p.l.a.c.e. stands for Publicly Located Accessible Computation Entity. Essentially, it is a digitally networked system of a server, BLE beacons, test mobile devices, and humans.

p.l.a.c.e.

To describe how p.l.a.c.e. works, an HTML Requests server residing on a Raspberry Pi is connected to the University internet. That server is accessed by test Android mobile devices with the Beacon Scanner application installed. The Beacon Scanner application detects BLE beacons that are within range and sends information to the server. Another server, for instance, a mapping server can take this same information, transpose it into a map application. Data collected by p.l.a.c.e. can be used for different things.

p.l.a.c.e.

Thinking about potentials of the p.l.a.c.e. system is informed by the work of several thinkers and artists. Weiser’s notions of ubiquitous computing, Balsamo’s techno-cultural Public Interactives, MacDonald-Crane-Minneman-Winet’s experiments in situated-networked-reactive-technological art, and Gold’s technological expressive opportunities, all help to bound definitions of server, serving, application, and humans. Categorizing the p.l.a.c.e project in this manner is an opportunity to circumscribe thinking about the system, as well as a means to frame research questions about network, server, service, human visitor, public, and hardware.

Agency

Attempting to locate a means to describe agency in the context of this research has proven to be generatively polysemic. There already have been opportunities to observe differing understandings of agency as situated in physical and virtual worlds. From the GIS perspective, Agent Based Modeling, a practice essential to the field, involves the testing of algorithmically driven models of human agents through a three dimensional virtual model of designed space. These tests can be used to determine patterns of human movement. For instance, how would an agent in a specific room make their way to another based on the situation of hallways, staircases, elevators, and other rooms. In this case, agency is centered on the computational model of the human being doing within constraints as established by an environment.

Agency

Viewed through the lens of Public Interactives research, agency strikes a complimentary but different tone. As the bounding of public and interactives would indicate, the building, infrastructures, humans, technologies involved, and digitally situated media form a complex and dynamically unfolding system with several vantage points from which to observe and investigate.

Agency

Where Agent Based Modeling may focus specifically on humans and their traversal, Public Interactives agency may reflect the unfolding of different agents on the human being, and the human beings relationship and traversal amongst a complex set of agents, including themselves.

Agency

An exciting prospect of the p.l.a.c.e. and navigation/wayfinding projects will be opportunities to examine more closely humans and their place-space relationships as influenced by different digital media modes.

Situation

Considering and bounding situation in the context of the p.l.a.c.e project has afforded the generation of several key questions or problems to investigate. Beginning with the fundamental Geospatial Information Systems problem as informed by Tobler’s First Law of Geography, which states that everything is related to everything else but near things are more related than distant things, the project can consider how digital mediation may situate a human being to create this relationship between near and far.

Situation

The project may also afford the opportunity to investigate humans in their doing that lends to their comfort, relaxation, concentration, playfulness, and curiosity, all assets worth cultivating for successful university students. Put differently, in what ways may finding a way in a space translate into modes of comfort, relaxation, concentration, playfulness, or, curiosity.

Situation

Situational investigation from the Public Interactives lens may seek to observe the environmental factors that influence these human states. This may include considering place based media situations that take advantage of built space in partnership with other natural or human generated environmental factors such as light, shadow, temperature, sound, and smells.

Agent Situations

Barad posits an agential ontology that involves the inter-intra action of material, or matter, a dynamic that leads to material reconfigurings of the world. This scaffolding gives p.l.a.c.e. research some clues into investigating public, interactivity, networking, and environment while considering how each of these agents form other agents in a system of intra-interactions and doings.

Agent Situations

Performativity, in the agential ontological sense, is understood as matters of doings, practices, and actions that utilize apparati as boundary making, as an essential extension of human knowledge construction. The p.l.a.c.e. project is posed from a vantage point to make observations into agential ontology and relationships that inform human-doing-being-thinking.

Agent Situations

Human Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, a cartographer and thinker involved in the investigation of how human beings differentiate between familiar or unfamiliar place and space would argue that humans with their sensorial faculties acclimate to specific areas where they find themselves situated, that humans and their senses are the primary instrument in their situation.

Agent Situations

From the standpoint of exploration into embodied cognition, Bruineberg, Chemero, and Rietveld’s investigations explores how agents, humans, couple with their complex and dynamic sociomaterial environments given specific normative surroundings, that these environments through their lawful regularity communicate affordances leading to agent-based anticipation and imagination, or, extended cognition.

Agent Situations

The thinking behind Winner’s The Whale and the Reactor, Turkle’s Evocative Objects Things We Think With, Haraway’s Staying With The Trouble, and McLuhan/Fiore’s The Medium is the Massage have also inspired and will inform further p.l.a.c.e. project based investigations.

Agent Situations

Aligning these thinkings calls into question influential Heideggerian claims on situation and technology, or, “where” the human being ends and where (properly, purely) technology begins.

What are the limits in actually and fully being able to measure boundaries between humans, technology, and environment?

Smart p.l.a.c.e.

A component of the p.l.a.c.e project research is to create transpirings that question the meaning, affordances, opportunities, and consequences of smart technologies as situated in public spaces. Several human-technological performative aspects of the p.l.a.c.e. project are in the process of, or being, identified that draw out these questions. I’d like to highlight a few of those questions.

Serving Smart p.l.a.c.e.

In terms of SERVING

What does it mean for technology to be in service?

In what manner may a technological service serve the non-human as well as the human?

Way-finding Smart p.l.a.c.e.

Relating to WAYFINDINGSuch that, in what ways can wayfinding be regenerative to humans, technology, data, and the environment?

Private Smart p.l.a.c.e.

With respect to PRIVACY because Data is now currency.

How could we consider humans as a natural resource?

How would this hold in the case of an active shooter situation on a college campus?

Literate Smart p.l.a.c.e.

In terms of LITERACY

How may a visitors access to personal data from the p.l.a.c.e. network assist in their developing literacies with respect to the material and intellectual worth of personal data?

place as Configured by Global Events

Design of contemporary experiments on transpiring ways of situation and their affects on agency depend on previous socio-material-agential transpirings.

place as Configured by Global Events

Choosing a technological configuration and deployment that currently exists in the world that is NOT the p.l.a.c.e. project, which embodies certain specific values as figured by the Cold War, tells us more about current transpirings. I would suggest an examination of Number Stations.

To briefly describe them, Number Stations broadcast shortwave radio transmissions from clandestine sites built around the world by various state sponsored entities. It is understood that the function of these stations is in support of covert intelligence operations. While covert in nature, anyone on the planet with appropriate receiving technology, namely, radio units able to tune in to shortwave radio signals can listen to the broadcasts.

Afforded by the nature of the traversal of short radio waves, the intended recipient of the broadcast could be thousands of miles away from the original transmission. Their reception and comprehension of the broadcasted message depends on their possession of a capable radio and of a one time key to decode the ciphered message.

place as Configured by Near and Far Events

For me, information shared via the p.l.a.c.e. server functions in a similar way. Each situation are deeply configured by instruments of collection. Each deploy technological automation in the broadcast, collection, retrieval, and, analysis process. Humans in each system feed the necessary automated procedures. Each procedure requires the cycling of technology coupled with humans.

A Numbers Station functions as a server, a data server functions as a Numbers Station.

place re-Configured by Near and Far Events

For me this relationship raises important questions. Among them

have the multi-faceted transpirings since the Cold War embedded within all communicative technologies an inseparable obfuscation, an inseparable command and control?

What socio-technological-environmental reconfigurations and new couplings are possible?

Are they possible given current configurations of technology, as configured in decades past, in response to socio-material conditions?

place re-Configured by Near and Far Events

My call to action is that we desperately need more openly situated investigations, by a more varied human, to begin to address the possibilities of new configurations.

david.wilson2@utdallas.edu

Acknowledgementsthank you to:

Brent DellDr. May Yuan

ATEC Dean Dr. Anne BalsamoATEC Associate Dean Dale MacDonald

UT Dallas EPPS GAIA LabUT Dallas ATEC Emerging Gizmology Lab

UT Dallas ATEC Public Interactives Research Lab

EPPS GAIA Lab

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