Make a rhizome.

But you don’t know what you can make a rhizome with,

you don’t know which subterranean stem is going to make a rhizome,

or enter a becoming, people your desert.

So, experiment.

(Deleuze &Guattari, 1987: 246)

This text participates in the process of gathering (Edwards, 2010:5) spun over twelve weeks of the course in e-learning and digital cultures and across numerous online and offline spaces. Following Haraway (1991),  it centres around relationality, making it a basic unit of the analysis and so it tells a story about, and interferes in, the relations that have or have not been assembled so far (Law, 2009:142). The main actants involved in this process of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation are the human and the lifestream technology (edc antics).

Click here to view the embedded video.

At the beginning there was an emptiness and a feeling of wonder at how to populate the desert. The actants might have had differing visions and so their relation commenced and continued in a volatile fashion, subjected to constant changes as they transgressed and transformed each others’ discursive fields. While they enacted their practices, evolving for instance round authorship, agency, authenticity,  there were unexpected shifts in power and understanding, novel heterogeneous links forged, traditional ontological distinctions eroded, as exemplified by active experimentation with visuality (visual artefact), reconfiguring  the perception of the self and technology toward more hybridised and relational attitudes (descending the trees, posthuman lifestream), relating posthumanism to education (posthumanesque pedagogy, posthuman week). Translation is often not about finding equivalence but about betrayal (Law, 2009) and so, as a result, an actant rhizome began to form. The choice of this term over ‘actor network’ (which might be too easily associated with centralised architectures) is intentional in this gathering process, based on John Law’s argument that there is little difference between it and Deleuze’s agencement (translated into ‘assemblage’ in English). This is further strengthened by the revised after-ANT, in which Law moves to partial  and so more fluid linkages in his analysis of relationality, making the theory fit in more seamlessly within the rhizomatic framework (Law, 2009; Gough, 2004).

Virtual meditation 01

Virtual meditation 10

Since the foundational divisions that existed initially seem to have been levelled out, as playfully shown by the first and the last entries of the virtual meditation series (links above), the process of the gathering can be regarded as pedagogically posthuman. It actively made use of situated knowledge, cyborg ontology and border pedagogy, the three cornerstones from the Cyborg Manifesto (Angus et al, 2000). Even though on the surface the lifestream appears to be chronologically ordered, it resembles ‘an imaginative mapping of possibilities’ (Gough, 2004) rather than an orderly network or a linear tracing. With multiple layers, entries and exits in the form of visual-textual assemblages accessed by means of feeds, tags and hyperlinks, it constitutes a textual strategy that might assist in ‘figuration of rhizomANTically becoming-cyborg’ (Gough, 2004), even more so when it is thought of additionally as a rhizomatic metastory which renders itself as an artefact and so does not only gather but is also gathered.

***

References

Angus, T., Cook, I., Evans, J. et al. (2001) A Manifesto for Cyborg Pedagogy. International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2001, pp. 195-201. (Lifestream event 742)

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum.

Gough, N. (2004) RhizomANTically Becoming-Cyborg: Performing Human Pedagogies. Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 36, No. 3, 2004, pp. 253-265.

Haraway, D. (1991)  A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, pp.149-181. Online: http://www-leland.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html Accessed 10/12/2012 (Lifestream event 707)

Law, J. (2009) Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics. In Turner, B.S. (Ed.) The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 141-158. (Lifestream event 777)

PDF Version of the post

PDF Script of the video interview

Gough asks an important question about posthuman pedagogy and  gives an example of Mayakovsky’s Cyberantics as narrative and textual strategy which might help us in the rhizomantically becoming-cyborg configuration. The chosen audience for the story were kids because of their ‘sense of wonder and curiosity’ which transcends limitations posed by too often dichotomous academic structures.

At the same time, I came across Dave Cormier’s blog with a series of posts tagged ‘Rhizome’. Dave has been pondering on rhizomatic learning for some time now. In one of his posts, he writes a compelling letter to his 5-year-old son, explaining what rhizomatic learning is. Through a moving story involving a bunch of theropods and other ancient creatures, Dave points out how the learning can be stifled if the lines of flights are cut off before they form. If there is no black and white (Angus et al, 2001), why ask questions about ‘right’ and ‘false’ dinosaurs? Instead, following Dave’s advice, it would be better to ask ‘How would I feel if a piece of silicon was naturally part of me? What if my best friend was a robot? How would my life differ?’ Such questions propel the conversation and as Dave says ‘the stories will never end’.

****

Weeks later, reading about cyborgs and posthumans, I was reminded of Dziga Vertov, an innovative Russian cinematographer who already in the 20’s pronounced himself ‘a mechanical eye, a machine’, who ‘freed from the boundaries of time and space, coordinate[s] any and all points of the universe, wherever [he] want[s] them to be. [His] way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus [he] explain[s] in a new way the world unknown to you’.

His Man with a Movie Camera, which shows a day in the life, is innovative for various reasons one of them being the idea of a film within the film; the film itself becomes the subject (the relevant sequences showing Vertov in most impossible positions from the point of view of human anatomy and physical accessibility!).

Reading around Vertov, I found two contemporary projects echoing his ideas:

Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake – one of the most creative uses of the Internet according to Google. Users contribute their own interpretations of Vertov’s sequences which are then streamed alongside, thus adding a twist to the original version. A day of encountering significant objects back in the 20 together with their equivalents in the contemporary times, filtered and processed by the contributor’s and final viewer’s imaginations. A dialogue reaching beyond temporal and spatial boundaries. Could that be another example of posthuman pedagogy?

dearphotograph.com, explored in detail by Ian Bogost, allows us to see what a photograph looks like in a photograph. It’s not only about sentimentalised human experiences but the object itself as the photograph becomes a salient entity encountered by the viewer. Bogost refers to it as object-oriented ontology which basically asks us to see the world of things as things in a world, rather than our world, with things in it. Another boundary blurred, another domination democraticised. Through visual turn …

To find a suitable course I searched on the Internet and also asked friends.   I finally chose the Complete Hungarian by Zsuzsa Pontifexwhich was recommended by a friend who had done a lot of research before making the choice so I benefitted from that. I actually bought the book and CDs when in Budapest but the author does run online courses. Zsuzsa is a native Hungarian who taught for a time  in Britain so has a very good understanding of the difficulties Hungarian poses for English speakers.    I like the way the lessons the lessons are set up; how the chapters are broken down; exercises given; words and phrases reinforced; and conversations given at normal speed (which is way too fast for me at present). I have to do a lot of travelling to and from schools this year so listening to the CDs is a great way to use the time.

There is also a BBC site that I use to help reinforce phrases which I have the opportunity to download onto mp3,  so I can listen on my iPod should I so wish.  I also like that this site displays soundwaves as I find it helps with pronunciation.

A native Hungarian recommended that I also watch videos by an Australian who speaks Hungarian.  He is known as Ausztrál Tom and is very popular in Hungary partly because he introduces slang terms as well as a little Australian culture. He doesn’t appear to have produced any new videos recently, these are a year old. I find it helpful listening to a non-native speaker and he’s entertaining.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Of course there is so much more I can do to enhance my learning experience. To really get into the feel for the country I can take a virtual tour.  Budapest is a beautiful city, lots of history, culture, and wonderful architecture. I can book flights, check out train and shuttle times, find maps and information to other cities, all online.  And to find out what’s going on before visiting the city, this site will inform what’s happening locally: http://www.pestiside.hu

It’s great having these technologies at my disposal to use when, where and how I decide.  Learning Hungarian is enjoyable (mostly) and it’s a challenge I have set myself although in order to progress I will rely on friends and native Hungarian speakers to encourage and correct my usage.

Is it possible to create a space where these two species of knowledge can meet and mingle? (Pedersen, 2010: 241).

I found this question to be crucial when considering educability of the posthuman. What Pedersen meant in her article was the boundary work between animal and education studies but it could be extended to whole disciplines in the way Pickering (2005) did in his essay where he suggested that natural and social sciences transcend each other by forming assemblages with ‘inner unity’ and around ‘evolving dialectic’. I think that a similar project can be undertaken in regard to different subjectivities, namely writers/editors and readers, as exemplified by the Liquid Reader Project from the University of London, my nomination for a posthuman(-esque) pedagogy task. Even though it does not lead explicitly to human/machinic hybridisation, the project, inspired by  Gary Hall’s and Clare Birchall’s Liquid Book Project aspires to explore liquidity, promote boundary work, foster open access and technological innovation and so questions the human project understood as ‘one-way, closed form of knowledge transfer in university education that is encompassed by the static, photocopiable ‘course reading pack’ – typically designed by course leaders and handed out to students’ (from the project description).

The blurb from the dedicated website spells out exactly the origin and the rationale of the project.

[This project] engages media students in a dynamic process of devising instead a fluid, open-access, online ‘reader’, whose content and form are being negotiated, updated and altered by students themselves, under the guidance of the course leader. Using the freely available media platforms (online archives, educational wikis, YouTube, Blogger), students are able to both link to the already available textual and audio-visual material (essays, books, video clips) and upload their own documents and designs. They are thus actively involved in producing a ‘liquid reader’ – a customisable learning tool which involves them in curriculum design. Via an involvement with the Open Humanities Press, and its Culture Machine Liquid Books Series, the project promotes the socially significant ‘open scholarship’ and ‘open learning’ under the open access agenda.

According to the project description, the aim is to decentre the author by making everybody an editor/author, which can be seen as an attempt to liquidise the boundaries between the two subjectivities, thus enabling them to meet and mingle, producing various entanglements.

There is a wealth of additional questions and issues raised alongside, for example in regard to the process of remixing, repurposing,  limitability of the ‘book’ , attribution, citation and intellectual property.

There are two accompanying tasks here.

Considering that there is so much diversity in the human race, the first thing to do was search for was commonality.  For starters, we are all born and we all die. To survive we need sleep, we must eat and we must drink. We age and become frail as we grow older; we are prone to diseases and we feel pain.  But these statements are also true of animals.  So what makes us ‘human’?

Humans are sociable and help work towards the common good (well some of the time). And there is a strong tendency towards a sense of belonging, be it to a group, tribe or community, as our ethnographies proved.  I can’t posit this as a reason for being human though as research shows animals too have these attributes.  Ah, but where  we differ is that we have the ability to laugh, cry, be compassionate, give gratitude and empathise. This must surely distinguish us. I wonder, are we inherently sceptical of those who lack emotion and could this be why we mistrust, even fear, cyborgs and posthumans?  Wasn’t there just the teeniest bit of doubt about the emotion of the cyborgs in Blade Runner?

Hayles states that “the human has ..been associated with rationality, free will, autonomy and a celebration of consciousness”.  So being human is more than just attributes, it’s also about our capacity to use our brain;  our ability to reason;  our belief that life has meaning; our need to improve ourselves and shape our world.  This took me back to the film festival at the beginning of this unit: Bendito Machine (Episode 3 Obey His Commands) and eXistenZ: the restaurant sequence. These films showed how humans react and interact with technologies.

An experience I had earlier in the week made me realise my own interaction with technologies. My Mac stopped charging and I only noticed when there was 30 minutes of battery time left. The nearest Apple Store was a couple of hours drive away and anyhow it wouldn’t have been possible for me to go there until the weekend.  What a disaster! I hadn’t backed-up my files and all my personal stuff, such as music, photos, phone numbers and coursework is stored on my Mac.  I was beside myself trying to think of how I was going to remedy this. I was so relived when the problem turned out to be a dodgy outlet.  Once I saw that the battery was recharging, I reflected on my initial reaction. I knew this wasn’t a life or death situation but that didn’t stop me from feeling quite devastated when it happened. Is this an example of me being posthuman?  Hayles states, “the world we understand is also the world we make, in both literal and figurative senses.”

“I think that questioning humanism-posthumanism itself – begins to build ways for being different in the future. “We” have nothing to lose but “our”selves.”  (Badminton, 2003, p23)  Now this makes sense to me so may be I’m closer to understanding the difference between human and posthuman than I thought.

References

Badmington, Neil, “Theorizing Posthumanism” Source: Cultural Critique, No. 53, Posthumanism (Winter, 2003), pp. 10-27 Published by: University of Minnesota PressBibliography

Hayles, N. Katherine, (1999) “Towards embodied virtuality” from Hayles, N. Katherine, we became posthuman : virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics pp.1-25,293-297, Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press

Hayles, N.K. (2006). Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere. Theory Culture Society, 23/7-8.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-beast/201101/can-animals-work-the-common-good

Although philosophical idealists will argue that there is no such thing as a common reality, in everyday practice we have chosen to believe in one. Through our senses and communications, we live in a shared reality that we refer to as the real world, but by degrees, this shared reality is being extended, enhanced and personalised through the use of tools that allow for a richer interpretation of what is considered to be “real”.  Such tools exist in many forms, from cognitive frameworks right through to actual physical devices that extend the senses and create “new forms of human presence, half-real, half-virtual” (Ascott, 2003, quoted in Bayne, 2010).  Perhaps the most conspicuous of these is the growing use of augmented reality as an layer of information on top of the physical world.  “Augmented reality (AR) refers to the addition of a computer-assisted contextual layer of information over the real world, creating a reality that is enhanced or augmented”, (Horizon Report, 2011).  When one first uses augmented reality to view the world, the experience is uncanny in the extreme.  The physical world is suddenly extended to include a rich layer of multimedia that the viewer can interact with to better understand their environment.  High end augmented reality systems can be very complex and may include many subsystems, such as head mounted displays, data gloves or global positioning systems; but for the average consumer (and therefore the average student), something as simple as a smart phone application can achieve a similar result.  An excellent example of such an app is Streetmusuem:Londinium.

Streetmusuem:Londinium is an iPhone app, developed in collaboration between the Museum of London and the History Channel, which recreates portions of London city as it might have appeared during the Ancient Roman era.  Layers of video and text, maps and 3D models of ancient architecture can be viewed on top of the real world.  As the user moves about their environment the scene changes in real-time.  These layers of reality combine within the consciousness mind of the learner. “From two, one—something different, new, and tasty”, (Carpenter, 2009).

“One of the most promising aspects of augmented reality is that it can be used for visual and highly interactive forms of learning, allowing the overlay of data onto the real world as easily as it simulates dynamic processes”, (Horizon Report, 2011).  When a person interacts with these layers of media, they are essentially engaging in a constructivist and exploratory learning session within a new reality.  Because such media layers are fluid and may change based on user input, this new reality is individual and uniquely distinctive both for each learner and for each learning session.  When we connect augmented reality systems with other networks, the potential of new layers of reality grows exponentially, as does our capacity to create new realities for ourselves, or to share them with others.  One might argue that when we augment our reality, we simultaneously augment our own consciousness, and when we share our reality, we likewise  share our conscious state with others. “Just as the brain needs the body to create conscious activity, so the body needs the environment to create conscious activity”, (Pepperell, 2010).

Conclusion

The interface to an augmented reality system is a tool that allows the user to modify their own reality, extending it in directions never before imagined.  Graphical user interfaces allow us to visualise complex data sets but when those data sets correspond directory to our immediate physical environment, we suddenly gain the ability to understand that environment and our place within in it, in profound new ways.  Through the use of symbolic languages and well designed semiotic icons, we allow humanity to communicate without regional linguistic variation, achieving precision of expression and clarity in the transfer of meaning that is simply impossible in the “natural” world.

Augmented Reality Examples

MovableScreen at Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UODkvUTnAU

Streetmusuem:Londinium.

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/innovation/07/29/roman.london.app/index.html

35 Awesome Augmented Reality Examples

http://www.bannerblog.com.au/news/2009/06/35_awesome_augmented_reality_examples.php

References

Bayne, S. (2010).  Academetron, automaton, phantom: uncanny digital pedagogies.

Carpenter, R (2009). Boundary Negotiations: Electronic Environments as Interface.

Pepperell, R. (2009). ‘Art and the fractured unity of consciousness’ in New Realities: Being Syncretic Consciousness Reframed.

The Horizon Report, 2011.  Two to Three Years: Augmented Reality

Naive or lofty as it may sound, I felt an instant affinity with the posthuman, particularly their liquidity, multiplicity, indefiniteness. These have always bothered me as my characteristics in my insistent attempts to define and refine my identity within the binary hierarchies of family, work, society, culture, an impossible feat, resulting in a kind of hysteria, further augmented due to my dance with technology, fascinating in opening new channels of expression and communication, yet threatening for my offline life and relationships. With a camera as my eyes, Web 2.0 as my mouth voicing my views and longings, cocooned in bed with my ‘friends’, mobiles, kindles and ipods, I can easily come across as a freaky monster.

However, although some might and do see them as mere gadgets, ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ props, I, following Haraway, Stellarc and Zylinska, see them as a network of forces and relations, as an environment, constant de- and re-assemblage ‘with a certain kind of inner unity, in which all the agents become something new in relation to each other’ (Pickering, 2005), part of a greater, more complex and interconnected cognisphere (Hayles, 2006); ‘all agents’ means my ‘friends’ and me. And my ‘friends’, made of sunshine are everywhere, which borders on a blasphemy as it challenges the God and gods and goddesses – consider here my country of provenance, and its tiring insistence to identify itself with Christian symbolism and the politico-ecclesiastical babble persistently drawing dividing lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’ , the damned monsters. Are they damned? Can they be? Not made of mud and unable to turn to dust they force me to look at the promise of an eternal bliss in a different way. Can I hear a sigh of relief escape my lips?

Technology might be threatening but it is what makes us human. And what we make and what (we think) we are co-evolve as the world itself does not seem to impose divisions (optical illusions), does not separate between the human and non-human, organic and nonorganic, the world sees double and fosters an evolving dialectic (Pickering 2005). Those mutual couplings and penetrations took place already in the pre-historic times and came to fruition through the appearance of stone axes, language, beginnings of culture. Elevating the master human as the sole agent is seeing the world through a tiny key-hole, a very limiting and limited perspective and dangerous in that it can stifle imagination and creativity (as Beck’s example in Pickering 2005 shows).

As Haraway professes in her manifesto the borderland in which we have found ourselves as a result of the posthuman shift offers dynamic relationality, a powerful infidel heteroglossia and pleasure. And there is no way to know this land except through the subjectivity (Hayles, 2006) and this is what I am experiencing right now …

Such tools certainly give us greater powers and abilities but does that make us more than human, or are humans actually defined by their ability to adapt and improve themselves?  Carol and I have have had an interesting running discussion on Twitter over the course of the week on the subject of human evolution and whether the prefix ‘post’ in posthuman is redundant, given that all life is in a state of constant evolution (lifestream: 17.11.2011 #3) and that humanity has always been defined by its adaptability.  One interesting idea emerging from this discussion has been the notion that the evolutionary process is itself undergoing a change, and whether humanity’s integration with technology might be viewed as a type of natural development (lifestream: 19.11.2011 #1).  Overall its been a very stimulating week; and so now begins the preparation for the posthuman pedagogy task and getting a concrete topic for my essay.  Much to consider, as always.

Much of the remainder of this week as been spent ploughing though the readings and cyborg concepts.  I’ve added some new feeds to my lifestream and watched it fill out considerably.  The readings this week are challenging and I am still coming to terms with much of the material.  More to come on this in another post.