Katharine S. Willis wrote: I would like to follow up on some of the topics raised in the discussion a while ago centred around the Situated Technologies symposium, so my thanks to Trebor for the invitation to contribute to the list.

My interests lie in how we can understand and act in the spatial world when we experience it through mobile and wireless technologies. From my viewpoint it seems that the way in which we occupy space is becoming more and more defined in a global sense. Local, ambiguous ideas of place are categorised into specific, homogenous and non-negotiable knowledge (e.g. a location on a GPS device, proximity of an RFID tag, traces of our movements on mobile phone records). We are becoming used to being overloaded with abstract information about the space around us, and this means it is increasingly challenging for us to find ways of slipping through the boundaries in order to trace our own meanings and memories on the spatial world.

One of the reasons for thinking about this is a workshop entitled Shared Encounters I co-organised back in April this year at CHI. We looked at how social interaction in public space is shaped both by the physical setting, but more importantly by the way people interact with others in the space. Interestingly one of the questions that came out of the workshop was pretty basic - what makes a shared encounter? At what point can we say we have interacted with someone else and how can we quantify this experience, especially if it is mediated through technology? More importantly does the other person need to occupy the same space and time for an encounter to be valid?

By way to introduce to the discussion please find below a copy of an interview with David Turnbull (author of ‘Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers‘ among others) where he highlights the importance of integrating a more relational quality into the way we approach digital technologies. But perhaps one of the key points that he doesn’t explicitly mention is how storytelling is an inherently shared experience - it involves the teller and the listener, and the story comes into being in the space in-between”

Richard Aedy: David, when did we invent string?

David Turnbull: Well the precise point in time of course is impossible to identify but the most secure dates for the earliest evidence of it is 26,000BC in impressions on baked balls of clay found in central Europe roughly where Czechoslovakia is now.

Richard Aedy: It seems like a very kind of mundane idea string but it actually turned out to be quite important didn’t it?

David Turnbull: I think it was more than quite important and apart from mundane I think it was revolutionary. A woman called Elizabeth Barber, wrote a book five years ago called Women’s Work in which she had a throw away line, the string revolution. From my perspective, humble though string may be, it actually provided the possibility of everything that now constitutes the basis of civilisation. It’s humble in the sense that it’s merely fibre but it’s revolutionary in two senses. In the sense that it overthrows the orthodox understanding of the history of technology which is based on the 5% of the remains we’ve found to date, all of which are made of stone, hence the use of the term lithic as in Neolithic, Paleolithic and so on.

We organise our understanding of the history of technology in terms of how big a stone, how cleverly shaped and formed they were. Whereas no stone was all that useful unless you had the capacity to join things together. And this is what string does for you, string makes baskets, it makes nets, it makes cordage, it enables you to haft things, join things, weave things, make things and in fact 95% of all our original technology was made either of plant fibre or wood. Nearly all of which has entirely evaporated, just gone to dust in the record.

Richard Aedy: So string was the first joining technology basically and from that profound implications?

David Turnbull: From that we were able to make cloth, textiles, from that we were able to make nets, from that we were able to make baskets. And the fundamental characteristic of such technologies is that enables you to move, it enables you to feed yourself, enables you to trap small birds. And the whole history of the origins of technology now needs to be rewritten in the light of what you might call ‘soft technology’ as opposed to what we’re stuck with at the moment which is basically ‘hard technology’ which has also shaped our understandings of how technology works today.

Richard Aedy: And story telling is the thing that provides the information or did in the past, is that what you’re saying?

David Turnbull: Story telling is how a particular piece of technology becomes seamlessly integrated into our cultural practices.

Richard Aedy: So if we tell stories about a piece of technology then we understand it, and we’re comfortable with it, and we can use it?

David Turnbull: That’s right?

Richard Aedy: And if we don’t tell stories about that piece of technology it’s going to bewilder us.

David Turnbull: And it’s also the case it’s how be bring technologies into existence we, as it were, dream them into existence, we tell ourselves stories about how things could be, should be. Much of modern high tech is a form of narrating into existence in a sense – tell a story to see who catches it.

Richard Aedy: So you think this is still happening now David?

David Turnbull: Oh absolutely.

Richard Aedy: We didn’t abandon this along the way?

David Turnbull: No, no, it’s an essential component of all human culture throughout time.

Richard Aedy: Storytelling.

David Turnbull: Storytelling.

Richard Aedy: And a big part of it was because of technology.

David Turnbull: Storytelling and technology go together I think.

- interview from The Buzz, Monday 27 May, 2002.

So, my question to others would be: how can we create the sense of shared narrative that stories offer through situated technologies?

Thanks…

Katharine S. Willis
MEDIACITY Project
Bauhaus University of Weimar
www.mediacityproject.com/shared-encounters

Mark Shepard wrote:

Your call for us to consider how Situated Technologies might serve to help us “find ways of slipping through the boundaries in order to trace our own meanings and memories on the spatial world” would seem to reflect Brian Holmes’ post on his blog of an abstract for an essay on Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies: although knowing Brian (at least though his posts here and elsewhere) I’m sure he’ll have issues with this correlation (which I look forward to reading). What’s your take on this?

This condition of being betwixt and between - “the story comes into being in the space in-between” - is something I think anyone migrating from one place to the another is of course familiar with, and their stories are probably a good place to start in thinking through this. “Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America” is a book by Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan that presents a kaleidoscopic view of new immigrants and refugees living in Queens, New York - the most ethnically diverse locality in the United States. Excerpts are available here.

Also, your question “how long is a piece of string?” poses interesting problems vis-a-vis ANT theory, at least as far as Latour articulates it. What are the limits by which we need to trace what is “strung together” or assembled by contemporary story-telling technologies and techniques?

Finally, what “kind” of narrative are we talking about here? Surely we’re not thinking of the master narratives and grand schemes of orthodox modernism. But at what point does this “shared experience” become enmeshed in larger aspirations toward empowerment vis-a-vis networked technologies?

Below is an exerpt from a conversation with Gilles Deleuze on the television broadcast of Jean Luc Godard’s “Six fois deux”; Cahiers du Cinema 271 (November 1976).

Best,
Mark

AND is of course diversity, multiplicity, the destruction of identities. It’s not the same factory gate when I go in, and when I come out, and then when I go past unemployed. A convicted man’s wife isn’t the same before and after the conviction. But diversity and multiplicity have nothing to do with aesthetic wholes (in the sense of ‘one more,’ ‘one more woman’. . . ) or dialectical schemas (in the sense of ‘one produces two, which then produces three’). Because in those cases it’s still Unity, and thus being, that’s primary, and that supposedly becomes multiple.

When Godard says everything has two parts, that in a day there’s morning and evening, he’s not saying it’s one or the other, or that one becomes the other, becomes two. Because multiplicity is never in the terms, however many, nor in all the terms together, the whole. Multiplicity is precisely in the ‘and’ which is different in nature from elementary components and collections of them.

Neither a component nor a collection, what is this AND? I think Godard’s force lies in living and thinking and presenting this AND in a very novel way, and in making it work actively. AND is neither one thing nor the other, it’s always in-between, between two things; it’s the borderline, there’s always a border, a line of flight or flow, only we don’t see it, because it’s the least perceptible of things. And yet it’s along this line of flight that things come to pass, becomings evolve, revolutions take shape.

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