Augmentation and Alienation: Between Emancipation and Control

Report | Mar 2016

Originally presented as a live event at Parson’s School for Design, Augmentation and Alienation: Between Emancipation and Control, attempted to situate and respond to conditions of alienation in complex social conditions. OfAC members Joshua Johnson and Patricia Reed provided lectures on the topic, while Keith Tilford offered a response.

Joshua Johnson’s lecture focused on the informational deficits between environmental and social complexity, and potential methods for orienting and steering within these environments. Patricia Reed proposed new perspectives on the condition of alienation, regarding it as a constructive constraint and site for creative renegotiation. Keith Tilford’s response queried both presenters’ distinct views on alienation, and complicated the recurring motifs of modelization, representation, and augmentation.

Talk

Through the Inverted World

Joshua Johnson

Our world has become increasingly complex, stratified, and not always compatible. We require the means to translate across these perspectival dislocations and grasp hold of points of orientation which allow us to steer a vast array of systems. But how are we to do this when the various models we have of the world seem so alienated from one another?

Talk

Mobile Alienation

Patricia Reed

The simple question at the heart of this talk is how to think and act for a post-catastrophic world? Although no one who I would describe as working in service of such a question would explicitly frame it in such an elementary way, this perhaps naïve question binds all theorists and practitioners who seek to reclaim the future from the constraints of our given reality and the foreseeable non-future awaiting us.

Conversation

Augmentation and Alienation – Response and Q&A

Joshua Johnson

Patricia Reed

Keith Tilford

Related Event

Project Atlas

Application

Since the consequences of attempting to understand any complex system will itself install the inquiry within a complex problem space, the notion of application does not inherently indicate the transposition of complexity science or the rhetoric surrounding complexity into a domain to which it does not belong.

Complexity

It is unclear if complexity has a single straightforward definition, such that even the science of complexity is itself ‘complex’. Complexity is often regarded as relative concept, one that is dependent upon the limits of our existing models and methodologies.

Models/modelization

There is some disagreement within the philosophy of science as to the status and compositional nature of models, which can be seen as fictions comparable to literary fictions (Roman Frigg), as semi-autonomous technologies of investigation which are partially constrained by both a set of abstract theoretical principles and the empirical world (Margaret Morrison)…

Bibliography Resources

Author	Title	Year
Scott Aaronson	Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity	2011
R. Felix Geyer	Individual Alienation and Information Processing: a Systems Theoretical Conceptualization	1975
Donald D. Hoffman	The Interface Theory of Perception: Natural Selection Drives True Perception To Swift Extinction	2015
Edwin Hutchins	Cognition in the Wild	1995
Fredric Jameson	Cognitive Mapping	1990
James Ladyman, James Lambert, Karoline Weisner	What is a Complex System?	2011
Mary Morgan, Margaret Morrison	Models as Mediating Instruments	1999
Lewis Mumford	Technics and Civilization	1934
Reza Negarestani	The Labour of the Inhuman	2014
William C. Wimsatt	Reductionism and it's heuristics: Making methodological reductionism honest	2006
Eric Winsberg	Simulations, Models, and Theories: Complex Physical Systems and Their Representations	2001

Contributor Biographies

Joshua Johnson

Joshua Johnson is a New York based artist and writer. He works across a diverse range of media including sculpture, video, online-media, installation, and research based practices. His art has been shown at Outlet Gallery, Parallel Arts Space, Louis B. James (all NY), amongst others. He has contributed writing to The Third Rail and has presented papers at Parsons School for Design and the Montreal Biennale (2014). In 2015, he founded the ongoing research and resource hub Uberty (http://uberty.org). In 2013, he organized and edited Dark Trajectories: Politics of the Outside ([NAME] Publications), a compilation of recent philosophy. He is engaged in several collaborative projects, including Office for Applied Complexity, and was a 2016 Artist’s Alliance resident artist.

Patricia Reed

Patricia Reed is an artist and writer. Exhibitions have included those at South Kiosk (UK); Home Works 7 (LB); Witte de With (NL); Haus der Kulturen der Welt (DE); Württembergische Kunstverein (DE); Audain Gallery (CA); and 0047 (NO), amongst others. As a writer she has contributed to several books and periodicals including: Dea Ex Machina; Mould Magazine; #ACCELERATE – The Accelerationist Reader; The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Vol. II; Intangible Economies; Cognitive Architecture; and Fillip Journal. Lectures have included those at Goldsmith’s (UK); Ashkal Alwan (LB); Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers (FR); Maerz Musik (DE); Konstfack (SE); Aleppo (BE); Gertrude Contemporary (AU); The Institute of Modern Art (AU); The Future Summit (CA); Tate Britain (UK, Speculative Tate); University of Westminster (UK); Artists Space (US); MIT (US); abc Berlin (DE); Archive Kabinett (DE); and The Winter School Middle East (KW). She sits on the board/teaches at the New Centre for Research & Practice; and is part of the Laboria Cuboniks and the Office for Applied Complexity (OfAC) working groups.

Keith Tilford

Keith Tilford is an artist and writer living in New York. Utilizing drawing, 3D modeling and animation his art explores themes from geology, architecture, science fiction and abstraction. His animations have been included in screenings at Speculative Tate (Tate Britain, UK), and his current research examines the convergences between cognitive engineering, art, the philosophy of scientific models, and the transformation of concepts in modern systems of knowledge. Recent presentations of his research include Judd Foundation, NY, Montreal Biennale (2014), Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz, and Newcastle University, UK. He is a founding member of Fixing the Future and Office for Applied Complexity (OfAC).